1. You keep people in the dark

Communication is king in distributed teams. Do a half-assed job at it and you have a half-assed team. You need to make sure people talk amongst themselves and that you have a daily talk as well. Or do email if Skype is too much for you. Or at least IM. And you must have an issue tracker if you work in IT. Basecamp and Redmine are awesome.

2. You don't keep your promises

You don't send out promised emails because you've been "busy." You don't do your work because you've been caught up with emails. You don't meet your deadlines because you underbudgeted your time. Don't be like this. An email should take 5 minutes to send out. If you need to write 20 and that eats at your work time... let the others know! Communication is king, dammit!

Also, don't make promises you know you can't keep. "I'll do it over the weekend" or "I'll do it later tonight" are my favorite examples.

3. You insist on doing specific work, but never do

You may be the best person on the team for a specific task, but if you are seldom the only one that could carry it out. If your workload is too high, as it sometimes gets, let go of your ego and make sure that the task gets done. Better it's not done by you and someone else learns how to do it than not having the task completed, eh?

Also, if someone else on your team depends on that task or on some info you're supposed to give out, you have all the more reason to not be stubbord and just get the thing done! Keep your promises!

4. You have no team culture

In some teams I've worked with, quick communication was done via an open Skype chat that all the members of said team were on. You had a problem, you let everybody know. The idea was: when you hit a brick wall, don't just try to get out your jackhammer. Maybe someone can point you to a window, or even a door. We would also share links to interesting articles via email and discuss them like that. Other culutres I've worked in included Fried's "No Talk Tuesday" mentality where there would be live communication downtime and one could only send out emails to engage the other members.

You need to find a mechanism that works for your team and needs and stick to it!

5. You've worked in an office your whole life

And you're used to things beign right around the corner. You're used to talking with your face and hands. You're used to talking about stuff at the water cooler. These all disappear in distributed teams. Be crystal clear in emails, because there's no tone of voice and no wink to denote a joke. Ask a lot of questions, however stupid they might seem. There's nothing worse than having people misinterpret instructions. Replace the water cooler with something else; create a new culture and stick to it.

6. You fail to see you just suck

Not everyone is cut out to work remotely. Crunch time is horrible when there's nobody next to you to share the load. Long hour evenings can get lonely. Maybe you need a boss breathing down your neck to get things done.

Also, you need to know how to keep your team's morale up in harsh times and you need to know how to do that from afar.

 

I've been working remotely and in distributed teams for about five years now, and I've watched'em grow and seen them crumble -- and it's usually because of the same reasons.

 

Image from http://collabo.olihb.com/

This article has nothing to do with my work with Odeon. Our distributed team works because we keep hacking at our shortcomings and learn form mistakes, both our own and those of others. Oh, and we're kick-*ss, too!

-- James Weaver.

Because while I do find it alright for it to send a post to Buzz every time I ask a question, while I can live with it sending a post to Buzz for every answer I give, I cannot, for the life of me, understand why it would make an equally weighted post for evey vote I cast or every question I follow!

I still like Quora, though. It kicks *ss!

I just got Amplifier's new album, The Octopus, in the mail!

I've been waiting for this album for quite some time now. The demo track we, the fans, got in December was really awesome, but each and every track is fabulous in its own right.
Still, the first thing that blew me off my feet was the packaging. The illustrations, the detail, the inlay, the two discs... the million stickers and poster I got along with the album. Wow.

And to think that this album was produced by Amplifier themselves. All of it, from concept to recording to sound mastering to album design.

A+

 

--

One small issue remains, though: I did not buy it myself, and I have no idea who sent it out as a gift -- but thank you!

I think the number of sales per day a month or so after launch with give us all a bit of insight about whether we like the ideas at ted.com or the way they're conveyed. I think the ideas and stories TED has brought me are invaluable and some people I've seen give TED Talks are actually genius, but I don't buy just anyone's book. Then again, they are just $2.99.
I know TED are not in the crapper with money, so this thing might actually be new for the sake of novelty science.

The first three TED Book are up for sale and can be downloaded on any Kindle-app-equiepped device, including iPhones -- you know, like mine.

I think I'll start with The Happiness Manifesto, by Nic Marks, because I remember I loved the talk.

http://www.ted.com/talks/nic_marks_the_happy_planet_index.html

 

I came across an interesting article this morning. It's about software that analyzes social media updates to isolate statuses that are actually sales leads. Or anything else, for that matter. They call it human intent.

If a relatively unknown company, Viralheat, can do this why can't we expect something similar being done at a higher, conspiracy-prone, level? Read the article and give me you two cents.

 -- Scott Adams

And that's the case with most things. See this video, for instance. It's about the jetpack and its inventor, Justin Capră.

Toward the end of the clip, he mentions that an American told him new cars or new energy cannot be implemented, although technology allows, because that would mean millions of people losing their jobs. Tomorrow.
Obviously, that's not such a great idea, but what that actally translates to is:

Some people invested a lot of money in today's -- or, rather, yesterday's -- technologies and they want to maximize on their investment. So change is hard, if not impossible, in this case. I'm sure you know the whole PCI versus PCIe and PCI Express. Even though PCI Express is better than PCI by leaps and bounds, it could not be implemented right away because big players had invested money in PCI -- the legacy system. This is also the case for electric cars. Well, that and the fact that they're damn expensive and have low autonomy.
Still, we could work on their autonomy and find a way to drive manfacturing costs down -- but nobody's interested in doing that because there's still plenty of money in the oil business. Only when that pot boils dry will we have an urge to improve the alternative energy sources.

The coding-world example would be Python 3 versus Python 2.x. No backwards compatibility! A rewrite. Because things got out of hand. The API became a mess. And with great cost, they brought forth a great change. A New Age. And yes, if other new ideas -- in other idustries, I mean -- would get implemented like this it would cost a lot of people a lot of jobs. Jobs that would be replaced by new ones, yet nobody's talking about that. And yes, the filthy rich that invested in the current technology would be a bit less rich. So why don't they invest in the new one side-by-side? Like a pet project. Or like a common fund investment.

To go back to Justin Capră, his merit for inventing the jetpack is finally being awarded to him. And that's good. What I loved most about his discourse, was how he sees automobiles, as shameful devices. They burn 980ml of fuel to move themselves forward, and only 20ml(!) to move the 1 person they bare. That's not a good ratio, by any means.

Screw the MPG fad. Focus on Gallon Per Ton Per Mile for a while, eh?

 

About a year ago, Romanian Railways decided to do something about the massive delays in their train schedule.
They chose to go about it in a unique way: INCLUDE the current delays in the schedule.

And faster than you could say "damn trains are always late" they were now always on time. Sometimes a little early.

I am traveling right now, by train. And talking to Oana, I realized that, since CFR (Romanian Railways) charge by the kilometer + speed supplement, the price of the tickets should have gone down.

Guess what, the price stayed the same. And actually went up a bit. So CFR not only shagged us in the behind with their creative delay strategy, they got us to pay more for train rides that take longer.

I feel retroactively violated!