Vision, Act, Now ! Quotes from the president of IBM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._WatsonI was reading The E-Myth Revisited, a book about managing and running small business to ensure that they succeed. Not that I was about to run a small business. But rather I was reading business books to learn about how business work and management besides the usual tech stuff that I read. (I am also reading Lean development nowadays).

The below was from Thomas Watson, the president of IBM. Below are just the important extracts.

IBM is what it is today for 3 special reasons.

The First reason is that at the very beginning I had a very clear picture of what the company would look like when if was finally done....

The second reason was that one I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company that looked like that would have to act. Then I created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done.

The third reason IBM has been so successful was that once I have a picture of how IBM would look when the dream was in place and how such a company would have to act. I realized that, unless we began to act that day from the very beginning, we would never get there.

If you have a vision for how you team should be and what practices that should do to achieve it, then please do something about it NOW ! I guess most of us are pretty clear about what some of the good practices are (XP, Agile, Lean ... and so on), already, that's why you are reading this. Even practices like Peer Review, TDD that have been proven to produce better quality code, but few project teams seems to implement them. The most common kind of excuse is that "Yeah I know its good but its not gonna work in my place due to ... " substitute that with things like company policy, work culture, then people around you etc.

The way to succeed is to double your error rate.
Thomas Watson

I have some vision of how now I would like my team to be like, the only thing left for me is the hard part, that is to ACT NOW! Even if something don't work out at least i know i tried.

If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work.
Thomas Watson

Even if not every one accepts the practice do it yourself, and prove the value of what you are doing. Sooner or later it will be accepted.