Being Professional

It's interesting to see how different people react to the idea of process improvement. Most people fall into one of two camps - I'll term these the Conservatives and the Radicals.

Conservatives don't see any need for change at all: "That's just the way we do things around here, we get the job done, and I've got work to do anyway." They put no effort into process improvement, and therefore realise no improvements. They never make things worse - but they never make them better either.

Saw something interesting at church the other morning, as the speaker was preparing her message.

A set of PowerPoint slides, for display alongside the message itself had been saved on a USB key, and needed to be loaded on to the A/V computer used during the service. However, when the key was inserted, it didn't appear under My Computer, making it kinda difficult to access the files.

The immediate response of the person driving the computer was to dive into the control panel, clicking things at random, looking for something wrong.

It appears there are those who think it's perfectly Ok to steal Roy Osherove's latest book, "The Art of Unit Testing".

Seems a bit rich to me - after three years of hard work, surely Roy deserves the small recompense he gets for each copy sold.

I wonder how many of those who cheerfully stole his work would be just as happy to have three years of their hard work stolen by people too lazy or too cheap to pay.