While I don't consider myself an economic genius, I like to think that I have an understanding of base principles*. I understand that - like almost anyone else - my resources are measurably finite. I have a bank account that tends to go down more often than it goes up and I have a clock that ticks away the seconds and minutes. It's because of all of this that a lack of basic logic drives me nuts.... like the Broken Window Fallacy.

To put it simply (my paraphrasing):

If a branch breaks my window, numerous things happen. I spend more money at Home Depot buying a new window. I spend more money on gas to get the window. I probably pay someone to install the window. And all of those people have more money to spend. Therefore, it is a net good for the economy.

Bzzt. Wrong. And here's the problem:

Ah, one of the joys of the new year is that everyone makes commitments that they're going to keep this year. It doesn't matter that they failed last year or the year before at the exact same thing going about it the exact same way... this year they're going to do it.

Well, this year in addition to the goals for CaseySoftware, I've set a trio of major goals for myself... one professional and the other two personal. Each one is a daily task that I've already been doing for a while. About a year ago, I adopted a simple practice of marking my calendar when the task got done.

I didn't really think of the implications of it until the New Year started this week... and read Quadzilla's post on How to Keep Your New Years Resolutions & Achieve all Your Goals:

You see, it’s easy to do things one day at a time or one moment at a time. That’s the secret of maintained willpower. As long as you don’t break the chain today, you’ll be fine (because tomorrow you can tell yourself the same thing).

Don’t break the chain.

Two months ago, when I wrote on using LinkedIn to gain information on your competitors - titled "Open Source Intelligence: LinkedIn" - I expected no response. It's been an interesting and useful exercise of mine that I thought a few would get a kick out of... nothing more. Publicly, yes, that's exactly what has happened... but off the record, there's been quite a bit more going on. If you've contacted me so far, thanks. What I hope to share here are a few further tips on gathering useful information.

To make this clear, you're not going to find detailed information like system documentation or internal corporate policies. If you do manage to get that information, you may be in violation of laws or working with people who are violating them, so just forget about it. It's not worth the effort or the potential trouble.

Instead, find are the patterns between and among people.

How is it useful knowing that firm X has six Java developers and three bizdev guys? That in itself isn't. The useful information comes from the other key thing about LinkedIn... the recommendations. It all comes down to this:

No matter what kind of organization you run, two of the most important things are getting and keeping a Focus. When I went digging for a good definition to share with you, I didn't find anything that fit exactly what I was trying to say... until I looked into the defintion from Wikipedia:

I recently had a discussion with a potential customer. They love the whole concept of dotProject. They see it as a way of finally getting a handle on their operations, general work load, and their customer relationships. I've spent quite a bit of time laying out the individual strengths and weaknesses of dotProject and even identified other tools that cover some of those weaknesses better. Throughout this discussion, they've had a firm idea of the tools/functionality they need to get things under control. What they don't have are the specific processes in place.

Previously in Part 4 of Business for Geeks, I mentioned two key points in the idea generation process:

Establish your vision and Evaluation against your goals

Lots of people seem to have trouble coming up with what their goals are and I suspect this reason is due to one of two reasons: either a) they've recently finished their education and now that major goal is out of their lives or b) they've been working for a while and their paycheck has been their goal. I'm not going to go into what this says or doesn't say about a person, but I am going to go into finding your business goals.

I have to say that I've been following the Java vs Ruby war for quite a while. Initially it started as a passing interest due to Nola Stowe's evangelism and heckling. I had a completely wrong idea of what it was and demonstrated that ignorance in this space but once I went to a presentation by Dave Thomas last year, I was convinced:

Ruby - especially because of Rails - is amazing and here to stay.

Therefore, in the past 10 months or so, I've watched technology with great interest. While the hype has been huge, there's been an even bigger warning sign for me. The sheer number of incredibly smart Java people who are picking up Rails. I don't mean that they've said "Hey, this is nifty". I mean people who have essentially dropped Java like a bad habit. There are
people like Jason Hunter (author of Java Servlet Programming), James Duncan Davidson (credited with inventing both Ant and Tomcat), Erik Hatcher (creator of Lucene and a coworker of a longtime friend), and probably more than I care to consider or admit. I've lived and breathed most of these projects since 2002 and can't help but notice that these gentlemen have been guiding lights in the community. When they make such an abrupt turn, you *must* take notice.