A number of times before we’ve talked about organizations behaving in ways that seem pathological, and what agilists might do in those circumstances.

This interesting article suggests that a number of headline CEOs (and likely a bunch of high-level executives and corporate climbers) are diagnosable psychopaths:

www.fastcompany.com/magazine/96/open_boss.html

In particular, quoting from the article, they score highly on eight characteristics:

• glibness and superficial charm
• grandiose sense of self-worth
• pathological lying
• conning and manipulativeness
• lack of remorse or guilt
• shallow affect (i.e., a coldness covered up by dramatic emotional displays that are actually playacting)
• callousness and lack of empathy; and
• the failure to accept responsibility for one’s own actions.

For me, this article was an eye-opener. There have been a couple of agile adoption efforts that I have participated in where, in retrospect, I concluded the only thing I could have done was walk away as soon as possible. From my armchair diagnosis, both involved psychopaths in positions of power.

Now it makes sense. These people weren’t just sincere but misguided. They really had no interest in transparency, in long-term sustainability, in producing good work, in steady progress. Indeed, given that they thrive in chaos and confusion, that they enjoy or are indifferent to suffering, their values are fundamentally opposed to the values we here hold.

Nancy Van Schooenderwoert added: Yes, a very fascinating article! I have a book on a related topic. It’s "the Corporation" by Joel Bakan (2004 Free Press). A cover blurb says:

  "The corporation's legally defined mandate is to pursue relentlessly
  and without exception its own economic self-interest, regardless of the
  harmful consequences it might cause to others."

I got the book recently and haven’t read it yet - but this article seemed to point at the same problems on a personal level.

www.rubyist.net/~matz/slides/oscon2005/index.html

 irb --noreadline

Alternatively make sure you check out the graphical frontend to ri.

 fxri

Dear all,

 Euruko 05 will be in Munich, October 15 and 16

 Location
 Room 2.07 of Sulzer GmbH in Munich, Frankfurter Ring 162.

 Audience
 Everybody interested in Ruby is most welcome!

 Fee
 Like last year we will collect a minimal fee of 20 euros.

 Please sign up here, as we will spend last year's income to make some
 T-shirts and to get some drinks for the conference.

 http://www.approximity.com/cgi-bin/europeRuby/tiki.cgi?c=v&p=Euruko05

 Please also sign up if you want to give a talk.

 We thank Sulzer GmbH for letting us use their office space and all
 other support.

 Hope to see many of you,
    -Armin, Sven, Michael and Stefan

 A leader is someone who has followers.

 A manager is the person who is responsible for everything that no-one
 else is responsible for.

 The rest is details.

 Actually, when I was working with Chuck he usually wrote it three times:
 1. "It can't possibly be that complicated."  Very simplistic model that
 captures the essence of the problem but ignores a lot of the requirements.

 2. "But you have to handle these other situations..." Complications get
 added to handle more and more of the requirements, encrusted on the original
 base.

 3. "Ah, now I see what we need."  Starting over from scratch, he can now
 build a clean implementation that accomodates all the requirements from the
 ground up.

 Unfortunately, many projects end up with an extended Stage 2, and never
 progress to Stage 3.  Chuch always had the courage to grasp when it became
 necessary to abandon Stage 2 and start over, even though it often caused
 consternation for the customer!

 Mike wrote:
 > What is a smaller lisp implementation that runs on both
 > gnu/linux and windows?

 Let's see, the user will have to install Linux to run the program, but
 the footprint of that program has to be small. :)

 Have you run a system call trace lately on, oh, the ``ls'' program?
 Tons of shared libraries attached. System calls flying left and right.
 A bazillion nonexisten files searched after.

 Linux is not exactly small and lightweight (any  more).

 Here is a comparison between a directory listing and evaluating a
 single expression with CLISP:

 machine:$ strace clisp -norc -q -x '(+ 2 2)' 2>&1 | wc
    260    1963   19729
    machine:$ strace ls /dev/null 2>&1 | wc
        111     870    8225

 It only takes about 2.5 times as many system calls to start up CLISP to
 evaluate an expression than to fetch a directory listing for a single
 file.

 The size of this Lisp system is less than 3 megabytes: a 1.2 meg
 executable and a memory image that is about 1.4 megs.

 Then we add up the shared libraries:
 machine:$ ldd ~/lib/clisp/base/lisp.run | gawk '{ print $3 }' | xargs
 du --total --dereference
 176     /usr/lib/libreadline.so.4
 852     /usr/lib/libncurses.so.5
 16      /lib/libdl.so.2
 1540    /lib/tls/libc.so.6
 20      /usr/lib/libgpm.so.1
 112     /lib/ld-linux.so.2
 2716    total

 The shared libs are as big as the program.  The kernel on this system
 (the uncompresed vmlinux file, not the compressed vmlinuz!) is about
 3.5 megabytes, whoa! Of course, all these executable images have
 run-time storage requirements as well.

 This particular Lisp system is smaller than the kernel, smaller than
 the total size of the shared libraries attached to it, and cranks out
 only about 2.5 as many system calls to evaluate an expression and quit
 as ``ls /dev/null''.