How to learn from a nuclear missle
I love stories of management and creative thinking that come from unexpected places. I have short article about the development of the Polaris nuclear missile, over on my Harvard Business. Check it out.
I hope you don’t mind these cross-blog links I’ve been posting. Let me know if you do.
I understand why you want to make cross-blog posts and I think it’s your prerogative to do so.
However, as a reader of both blogs, I’d love it if you could label the cross-blog posts in some way that makes it easy for me to skip over them. For example, maybe you could prepend “Harvard Business:” to the beginning of the title of this type of post?
David: Done! Great idea. Ok with just the abreviation (HB) at the beginning?
Tom and Mary Poppendieck have discussed the Polaris program as part of their book “Implementing Lean Software Development”. Interestingly they contend that the success of the project was down to the following of something very much like lean development. PERT was widely seen as the reason for its success, but was really just a facade to keep the sponsors (US govt) happy and the funding flowing. Check out Mary discuss this on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypEMdjslEOI She discusses Polaris about 25 mins in.
If you’re going to cross-post every Harvard Business post here, then I’ll unsubscribe from HB! The HB: suggestion is also a good one.
This is my first time running two blogs, so I’m not sure what the right policy is, and that’s why I’m asking.
If you have a preference on what you’d like me to do, let me know. For now I’ll mark cross-posts.
With the (HB), and the way you have set it up now it’s fine to me. As long as you don’t post the full length article twice, but one article and one referal, this would be OK, IMHO.
As an example: The other day I started reading a full length article that already appeared on the author’s personal blog last week. This last one did not even contain the author’s name, was posted a week after the other, all without any cross reference.
Even wonder what Google thinks of a duplicate like that, won’t do the juice any good probably…
I was a nuc submarine officer on the USS Stonewall Jackson, one of the “41 for Freedom” that were built back in the 60’s. I served on it in the 90’s when it was ~30 years old and had conducted over 70 deterrent patrols.
Even after being on that thing for a few years I still marveled at the complexity of it as a system. Some days it was just amazing that it all worked (and then, sometimes it didn’t and we’d get doused with high pressure hydraulic fluid, a shower of sparks, or maybe just an exploding toilet!).