IV Money

By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race. Alfred North Whitehead, Mathematician and philosopher

22. Real options and venture capital

If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away. Linus Pauling

23. Continuous governance

All organizations need a discipline that makes them face up to reality. They need to recognize that the probability that any activity or program will fail is always greater than the probability that it will turn out successful, let alone that it will accomplish what it was designed to do. Peter Drucker, Age of Discontinuity, 1968

24. Budgeting

A target is what we want to happen. A forecast is what we think will happen. Never combine the two in one number, like a budget does. Bjarte Bogsnes¹

Cost budgets tend to be spent, even when the initial budget assumptions change (which they almost always do). Managers do not behave like this to cheat; they do it because the system encourages them to do so. Managers see budgets as entitlements, as bags of money handed out at the beginning of the year. Nobody gets fired for spending their budget. Spending too much is, of course, bad, but spending too little is not good either. Bjarte Bogsnes²

25. Assets and accounting

Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths. J. K. Galbraith

Software is an asset to the business that owns it but it cannot be a static asset. This book

26. Money trouble

The twin policies of managing for profit and maximizing shareholder value, at the expense of all other goals, are vestigial management traditions. They no longer reflect the imperatives of the world we live in today. They are suboptimal, even destructive – not just to the rest of society, but to the companies which adopt them. Arie de Geus³

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About the author

Allan inspires digital teams to effectively deliver better products through Agile technologies. These approaches shorten lead times, improve predictability, increase value, improve quality and reduce risk. He believes that improving development requires broad view of interconnected activities. Most of his work is with innovative teams, smaller companies - including scale-ups; he specialises in product development and engineering. He uses a mix of experiential training and ongoing consulting. When he is not with clients he writes far too much.

He is the originator of Retrospective Dialogue Sheets, the author of several books including: “Xanpan - team centric Agile Software Development” and “Business Patterns for Software Developers”, and a regular conference speaker.

Contact: allan@allankelly.net

Twitter: @allankellynet

Web: http://www.allankelly.net/ and http://www.allankellyassociates.co.uk/

Blog: https://www.allankellyassociates.co.uk/blog/