web wanderer - blog from Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: If you meet Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!

noreply@blogger.com (Henri Hämäläinen) — Sun, 29 Jan 2017 08:22:00 +0000

The highly disturbing title of the book got my attention few years ago. I added the book to my "want to read" books long time ago, but still I wasn't really sure about reading it. When it started to come back as a reference on some books and articles, I just had to go and read: If you meet Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!

Book was written already at 1974 by Sheldon Kopp. Sheldon was a psychotherapist in US and had been working with variety of patients. He reveals quite much about himself in the book and that made the book more human and bit easier to grasp.

Overall the book was strange in a good way. Once in a while Sheldon Kopp tells ages old stories with a learning's and then he jumps back to quite instructive and sometimes disturbing stories about the patients he have met. He does get his message through via all of this.

The whole message of the book is: the solution to most of the problems are within oneself. There are no guides, no people or no ideologies that in itself can guide one to happiness, good life or just out of the troubling things in one's mind.

The book raised lot's of thoughts and ideas. For a long time this was a book I made most notes from. It's not by any means an easy one to read, but it is important. It's not easy and fun like many self-help books, but I believe that's the reason it's so powerful.

I really enjoyed the book and recommend to the people who want to learn to understand themselves better. It's not easy, but well worth the trying.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: How Google Works

noreply@blogger.com (Henri Hämäläinen) — Sun, 29 Jan 2017 07:46:00 +0000

I've been a google fan for a long time. I've read some books earlier about how they work, but when I heard that Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg have been giving their name and content to the book How Google Works, I had to read it.

Book takes a broad view on how the work is been done at Google. In many times it does spent time on talking about values, but ideas of the values are then clarified with concrete examples. Overall the book is comprehensive view to Google as their high management sees it.

Book is structured quite nicely. It starts with culture, goes through strategy, talent handling, decision making, communication, innovation and then finishes with the moonshot ideology. Other that the just the high level themes there are concrete ways of working for each section.

I found the book interesting and important. Everyone in the product development industry would benefit of reading it. Every company can't work like google, they do have special possibilities due to such a strong position in the web, but still there's lot to learn to many companies.

I highly recommend this book to everyone interested on making companies better.

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Kirja-arvostelu: Henkka Hyppönen Pelon hinta

noreply@blogger.com (Henri Hämäläinen) — Mon, 17 Oct 2016 17:17:00 +0000

Sorry for the English speaking readers this review is in Finnish. Reason is that this book hasn't been published in any other languages than in Finnish.

Henkka Hyppösen Pelon hinta tuli minulle lukuun pienen kirjakerhomme kautta. Ollakseni täysin rehellinen, en usko, että olisi kirjaa muuten lukenut. Pidän kyllä Henkka Hyppösestä ja hänen tavastaan esiintyä, mutta oli vaikea nähdä häntä tiedekirjailijana.

Tämä ajatus Henkka Hyppösestä kirjan kirjoittajana, kummitteli mielessäni koko kirjan alkuosan. Olen myös lukenut tosi vähän suomenkielistä kirjallisuutta viimeiseen kymmeneen vuoteen, niin meni pitkään päästä sisälle koko kirjaan.

Aihe sinänsä oli mielenkiintoinen ja siellä oli muutamia tosi hyviä tarinoita pelosta. Lisäksi aihetta käsiteltiin monesta eri näkökulmasta ja tuotiin hyvinkin erilaisia tutkimuksia esiin.

Jossain kirjan puolivälissä alkoi jo tuntua, että Henkka Hyppönen oli halunnut laittaa kaikki hyvät tarinat ja tutkimukset samaan kirjaan ja välillä yhteys pelkoon oli jo aika kaukaa haettua. Tämä vaivasi koko lopputeosta, kaikesta yritettiin tehdä pelkoa ja pelolle koitettiin löytää hintansa. Esimerkkinä laskelma siitä kuinka monta yritystä Suomessa jää perustamatta pelon takia, se laskelma oli jo aika kaukaa haettua.

Sinänsä kirja oli soljuva ja helposti luettava. Tekisi mieli suositella kirjaa monille, mutta toisaalta taas aihepiiristä on varmasti parempiakin kirjoja. Jos Henkka Hyppösestä pitää TV tai radio-ohjelmien perusteella, niin ehkä tähänkin opukseen kannatta tutustua.

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Book Review: Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win

noreply@blogger.com (Henri Hämäläinen) — Sun, 11 Sep 2016 07:43:00 +0000

I didn't book Soccernomics to read, only because of soccer. I wanted to read it to understand the power of data analytics. It turned out to be interesting also from soccer point of view.

Book looked soccer from all the different angles. It explained the economics of soccer, how money does mean a lot in soccer. Also it explained why some team are better on their transfers. But it does talk also quite much about what's happening in the field.

The whole idea of the book is to analyze countries and their enthusiasm towards soccer. Then based on many different data select, which are countries that will in the future dominate soccer.

I liked the book very much. It was just the season of Leicester winning the Premier league, which kind of destroyed some of the thoughts of the book. Most probably Leicester was a one season wonder and can be explained as a statistical bias. Still for the sake of soccer, I wish the thoughts in the book don't happen exactly as they predict.

It was an interesting book and I recommend to read it. Statistics and statistical analysis is field that will grow all the time, when more and more data becomes available. This is a good start to understand it more.

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Book Review: Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

noreply@blogger.com (Henri Hämäläinen) — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 18:59:00 +0000

I can't remember who recommended the book Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design to me, but I'm glad someone did. It's an excellent book about happiness and how our homes, neighborhoods and commuting affect to our lives.

Book introduces really many interesting facts about how other people and the neighborhood affect to our happiness. Happiness have always been interesting topic for me, so I was keen on reading more about the subject. I've always had a hunch about how important your neighbors and the contacts with them are, but this really gave some good statistics about it.

Happy City goes through data and experiments around the world on how cities and streets affect to us. For almost 100 years cities have been build to run by cars and with current population, it has actually made us less free. Many people spend enormous amount of times in cars and are unhappy because of that.

Book also discusses a lot about cars versus other ways to commute. Maybe on that end, book is bit US centric, but many of the things affect to everyone around the world. Commuting affects to us a lot, the way you commute, how long you commute and with whom you commute affect in numerous ways. Book introduces many interesting studies about the subject. One example was a study that said that commuting to work over 45 minutes raises a risk of divorce by 40%. Book is full on nice anecdotes and studies like this.

As with any other book, it's good to have critical eye on the studies and ideas, but those definitely will raise thoughts for everyone. It's an excellent book and quite easy to read. I recommend the book to everyone.

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Book Review: Talk like Ted by Carmine Gallo

noreply@blogger.com (Henri Hämäläinen) — Sun, 12 Jun 2016 10:11:00 +0000

I've recently been more and more involved in public speaking events. Eventhough I've read other books about the subject, I wanted to give Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World's Top Minds a try.

As you could expect, book was made interesting to read. It covered variety of topics related to speaking via TED talks. Some of the TED talks were familiar to in advance, but some I had to watch right away to get more understanding about those.

The book is divided to three main categories: Emotional, Novel and Memorable. Under these topic book goes through all the important parts of creating a great speech. Book backs up the ideas with proper research and still keeps ideas easy and understandable.

Ideas as such were mainly familiar to me, but it still was interesting to read more about those. Storytelling and emotionally appealing to the audience is difficult, but works really well. Keeping audience focused is always difficult and this book introduced some good ideas for myself for that purpose.

As a Finn and European, I have to say that book is quite American. Having some experience on presenting in different countries, all the things don't work as well in different countries as they do in US. That's just a good to keep in mind, still the ideas are great and you need to find ways how to benefit those with your audience.

Overall I really liked the book. It's easy and enjoyable to read. It's full of great ideas and gives good tips for all presenters. I highly recommend to read this book,. Everyone will benefit from it.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

noreply@blogger.com (Henri Hämäläinen) — Sun, 22 May 2016 06:11:00 +0000

I recently read The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson. It'a a book about shipping containers, the big metallic boxes you see everywhere. The book tells the history of the containers and also discusses about how it changed the economical laws of the world.

The topic was really interesting at least to me. I've always been interested about the big economic systems and how those get changed. Shipping containers have seriously changed the world and could be seen as one of the latest industry revolutions before the internet.

The topics in the book vary from unions to ship buildings to urban development to the actual shipping containers. So it covers a lot of topics which belong together via the containers.

Unfortunately the book was bit longish to read, even thought it was interesting. There are quite a few people introduced and it was bit difficult to follow all of those. Also all the different parts covering union wars and strikes were bit boring. I believe the book could have been even 100 pages shorter with good editing.

I still recommend this book to everyone. These kind of books explaining the world and the big economic systems there are, are important. People usually are terrible at understanding these systems and this book explains those in quite an interesting way.

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Book Review: Natural Born Heroes by Christopher McDougall

noreply@blogger.com (Henri Hämäläinen) — Sun, 21 Feb 2016 14:41:00 +0000

I had high expectations to Christopher McDougall's new book Natural Born Heroes. His previous book was really enjoyable journey to endurance athletes and especially to ultrarunning world. I thought this book would be natural continuation to that one.

The book tells stories about human abilities that go beyond our thought of normal human abilities. So it tells stories about heroes. Heroes and especially endurance heroes looked like an interesting topic to read about.

Quite early in the book I noticed that it isn't as easy to read that I would have hoped to. The challenge with the book was that it was filled with so many stories, that it becomes almost impossible to follow all of those.

Main stories were about Greece, but even there the stories jumped from mythologies, to World War II to McDougall's own experience from there. In addition to these Greece stories, book jumped once in a while to stories from former China, UK and US. Many of the stories connected to each other, but there were so many characters in the book that it was laborious to keep track on whom was whom.

As such I liked the book and it thought some good things about humans and endurance overall. In that sense it was enjoyable. With better planning and organization the book would have been excellent. At least for my type of reading, I kept loosing track which story was being told at which time.

It is bit hard to give recommendations about the book. At least if World War II interests, then I recommend to read it. If you want something lighter about endurance once in a while, then it would be good option look into. If you expect clearly structured fact based book about endurance, then maybe there are other choices to consider.

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Book Review: Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux

noreply@blogger.com (Henri Hämäläinen) — Mon, 28 Dec 2015 11:17:00 +0000

Over year ago I saw the presentation from Frederic Laloux about the new kind of organizational models. I've read and listened his thought many times since. The book Reinventing Organizations have been in my book shelf for a year, but now I finally can say that I have read it from cover to cover.

Reinventing Organizations is important book discussing about future of workplaces. It goes through via history and via good examples different kind of organizational models. Most importantly it introduces the Teal organization thinking.

Best part of the book is the case studies and examples from organizations like Buutzorg, FAVI, Morning Star, Sun Hydraulics and some others. Those show that self organization and new kind of management is possible and has been possible for years already. Those are examples that every person interested in developing companies further should read.

Contents and the ideas in the book were really interesting and valuable. The style and structure of the book made it laborious for me to read. It could have been almost 100 pages shorted with better plan on the structure. That is the only criticism that I can say about the book.

It is important book and I really recommend to read it. Teal type of organizations will be something that will be in discussion in the near future in many different industries. This is a book that will help everyone to understand better what future might look like.

The least everyone should do, it to check the video that has been made based on the Laloux model (link to the video). It is no where near as extensive as the book, but it will give the basic idea.

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Book Review: It's Not All About "Me" by Robin Dreeke

noreply@blogger.com (Henri Hämäläinen) — Sat, 03 Oct 2015 10:25:00 +0000

Robin Dreeke is former FBI Agent from the FBI Behavioral Unit. He writes in his It's Not All About "Me": The Top Ten Techniques for Building Rapport - book about how to build trust and connect with people.

The book is written well and it's easy to understand. Techniques as such are not magic, but something that everyone can take in to use if they wish. I've previously read about nonviolent communication and I think there are many similarities to the things Robin is teaching.

As the title already says, the main message is to concentrate to the other person. The key is to get rid of need to answer to other, but to concentrate on what the other one is saying. It sound so easy, but you can easily notice in everyday discussions the need to bring your own views and your ego to the discussions. NVC book already thought me about this skill few years ago, but I still find it very difficult to master.

Of course there are some other things to take in to account. For example there are tricks that help you make the person you want to approach, to feel safe and comfortable to open up. These skills are important for everyone in their personal and work life's.

In top of being interesting and easy to read, the book is also very compact and fast to read. I highly recommend everyone to read this book. I can't think of anyone who wouldn't benefit of the skills presented in this book.

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Book Review: The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True

noreply@blogger.com (Henri Hämäläinen) — Sat, 26 Sep 2015 10:30:00 +0000

Richard Dawkins is world famous evolutionary biologist and author. His book The Magic of Reality tries to explain in understandable ways some of the really complicated phenomenons of physics and science overall.

In the midway of the book, I felt like back in school. Quite many things very familiar, but the way Mr. Dawkins explains those helped to deepen the understanding quite a bit.

The book goes through topics all the way from big bang to evolution to quantum mechanics. So it is really comprehensive overview to the universe as we know it. I give the credit to him on explaining things in very understandable ways.

Mr Dawkins is a know atheist and science believer. It really shows in the book. He dismisses all religions. He does admit that there are many things science can't explain yet, but he sees it only as a shortage of current science, not as a possibility for higher forces. Atheism actually came disturbingly through from all the writing. That's a shame, in science facts should be facts without personal believes.

I have to still recommend to people who want to understand physics and the world better. I felt like getting a fast recap of learning's from physics from many years at school. It's an excellent book, if you can tolerate the pushing of atheism.

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Book Review: Practicing the Power of Now

noreply@blogger.com (Henri Hämäläinen) — Tue, 28 Jul 2015 12:18:00 +0000

Practicing the Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle is a self help book about being present and not letting the past or future create any pain to you. Eckhart Tolle introduces himself as a spiritual teacher without any specific religion or ideology behind him. His message is quite simple: be present at the moment and feel yourself and you will free yourself of pain that your mind is causing.

I both hated and loved the book. I believe, in the being in the moment and accepting what life offers, kind of thinking. Then on the other hand Mr. Tolle takes his toughs sometimes to the levels that are out of my thinking and my ideology. If I understood him right, he says we should forget the past and the future and only live in the moment. In my thinking, your past defines you, relationships with people always have a past, learning is relies to the past and part of our happiness comes from the past.

What I think is really valuable in the book is the idea of feeling yourself and not letting your own history define you too much. You should always be open to people and really feel what you are feeling and not what you think you should feel.

The book as such isn't long, it's quite short to be exact, but still I believe it could have been even shorter. The idea is such a simple that it could have been told even in bit less pages.

I'm glad I read the book, but I think there are better books about being present and mindfulness. If you've already read couple of similar books, this could be good addition to the group, but if you haven't read one of these before, select something else to start with.

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Book Review: #Workout by Jurgen Appelo

noreply@blogger.com (Henri Hämäläinen) — Sun, 26 Jul 2015 08:42:00 +0000

I'm a bit ashamed of myself. I've owned #Workout: Games, Tools & Practices to Engage People, Improve Work, and Delight Clients by Jurgen Appelo for already half a year and now I finally was able to finish the book. Book is a real gem and I will definitely be using it regularly for my work.

I actually had met Jurgen Appelo years ago in Finnish agile event before he had written any books. From those days onward I've been reading his interesting thoughts from his blog and his books. This book I bought directly from him in Dare Festival last fall. So I could say I'm a fan.

I believe he is one the leading management thinkers in the world right now. What I especially like is the realism in his thoughts. There are so many people who are much too idealistic about different practices that they seem to forget the laws of business, that relies behind it all. Jurgen seems to always remember the reality in his thoughts.

The book itself is really valuable from cover to cover. For myself there were quire many things I've either run into in other sources or read from Jurgen himself earlier, but it is always valuable to get good recap on things.

Book is quite long and thick, it is over 500 pages. That made it bit scary to start with. Fortunately it is filled with colorful illustrations and good examples. So it isn't that long to read as it seems to be. And like said earlier, the whole book is full of important topics, so I recommend to give it a try.

There are too many important topics in the book to start raising any special ones tot the actual review. All the subjects concentrate on improving workplaces and organizations. It talks lot about management, but management doesn't mean actually supervisor management, but more managing ourselves, our peers and the full organization.

It is important and enjoyable book and highly recommend everyone to read it. Hearing and understanding these ideas will eventually lead in to better organizations and better work places.

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Book Review: Ghost in the Wires by Kevin Mitnick

noreply@blogger.com (Henri Hämäläinen) — Tue, 30 Jun 2015 12:40:00 +0000

For once I read something else than work, sports or self development books. I wanted to read something entertaining, fact based and hopefully interesting. I got my hands to Ghost in the Wires by Kevin Mitnick.

Kevin Mitnick is a hacker who for a reason or another became one of the most wanted hackers in the world. He claims that he hasn't done many of the things he was accused on, but I guess that's what he has to say to avoid further jail time.

Book definitely was interesting. It starts from the days that calling was actually done by wired telephones. Kevin learned to control the technical environment quite early, but I guess his social hacking skills helped him to raise to the whole new level. It was amazing to read how easy social hacking had been and I believe it might still be in some occasions. People are helpful by nature and that security vulnerability Kevin shamelessly used to exploit to many companies networks. Of course social hacking needs superb technical skills to complete the hackings.

For a trusty person as myself, I still feel bit disturbed by the book. Kevin of course brings himself up as good guy with noble purposes, but I'm not sure how noble he really is (or at least was). As a trusty person again, I would like to believe him, but I haven't heard the story from the other side.

At least how he was handled in the US court system was unbelievable. He was handled similarly as a serial killers, or even worse, almost without decent ways to communicate to outside world. He would have earned a better trial, but hacking was so new on that time, that caused some of the mix-ups.

All in all, I definitely got what I wanted. Book was really interesting and even though it was bit longish, it went really rapidly. I recommend the book to any one interested about hacking, security or history of IT and SW.

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Book Review: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

noreply@blogger.com (Henri Hämäläinen) — Mon, 06 Apr 2015 11:14:00 +0000

I almost feel ashamed that I had missed this book for so long. Peopleware (3rd ed.) from Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister is a book about soft side of product development and creative work overall. It goes through using many studies and examples why it is so important to take good care on people.

Book explains Human Resources, office environment, recruitment, growing productive teams, taking care of people and most importantly having fun at work. It's impossible to highlight all the important things they raise in the book, because there are so many. The main message is that people are the most important asset of many companies and too often people are not given good enough support and office spaces to get all the benefits from them.

I especially liked the office environment part. I've worked and seen so many bad offices where there are too much noise, too little light, too many interruptions and inadequate space and time for getting to the flow state. Most often there are stupid policies that prevent on creating workplaces that would actually suit to the needs of the workers. And then in worst cases there are some guys proud of saving money on small office. That's just sad.

But the book is not only about working environment. It discusses lot about teams and how to form great teams and what are the common ways to ruin good teams. Team development is something I've been interested for a long time, but still they were able to provide good new information and ideas to myself.

I honestly am bit ashamed that I didn't read the book earlier. When reading books, I always mark down parts that I will come back later and this book got most markings ever. It's a great great book and even really easy and fun to read.

This book is a gem and every manager and knowledge worker should read this. It gives lot of ideas and background information for building better teams and workplaces. I highly recommend this book.

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Role of the line management in the future - is there one?

noreply@blogger.com (Henri Hämäläinen) — Tue, 17 Mar 2015 20:33:00 +0000

Line management has a long history and quite often a special place in organizations. Line manager position have been something people are going after. Things have been changing, role of line management has been fading and even in some case going away. Still all organizations have some kind of line management. There's someone in every organization who is the boss.

Role of the line management in the future organizations is a difficult question. In one hand line management has it's role of bringing comfort and safety for the people, but then on the other hand it can slow down work, create competing priorities and even demotivate people. Especially difficult it is when line management has ties with operational responsibilities and company size grows over one team doing it all mentality.

In the past line management have had lot of operational responsibilities. Line manager used to be responsible that his or her people did their jobs properly. Also line managers did have content and operational responsibilities. They had to make sure right things were done and also in the right ways. That still seems quite natural, it's quite hard to guide if they can't also affect on the work their people are doing.

Then line managers started to get more and more responsibilities of the soft side of people. How people are doing? How they are developing themselves? And what worries they have? At that time there started to come more operational and content related guidance from other sources and line management didn't have that much to say about the content their people were working with.

Nowadays line management in many occasions have become almost totally HR function. Line managers arrange the one to one discussions with people, focusing on personal development and in some companies also to set targets.

Future of line management

Do we really need line management in the future organizations? What if we wouldn't have line management at all. No one couldn't tell people what to do and people would need to figure out themselves. I bet this would work in many cases. There are even examples of self guiding organizations, where people just make things happen. No guidance needed.

This sounds like an optimal approach. No one would have boss whom they would need to report to and no one would ever come to say what to do. Even though it feels like an utopia I believe organizations could work without any line management. From content point of view I don't believe people need to be told what to do, they can figure things out themselves.

So is there anything line management is still needed then? I can see two important points. First people need safety. People need to have someone they can count on in case there is something they can't figure out themselves. Things like this can be about company functions as pay or healthcare or then about how people behave. Once in a while there are misconducts and then it is important that there is line manager to help.

Second important point is personal development. It's rare that people would be that good on analyzing their own competences and the improvement needs that they wouldn't benefit from having a good teacher or coach to help them. This is what line management has a proper place in organizations. Line managers can help with competencies and guide and push people to develop their competence to right direction. They can also work as enablers to get training, coaching and peer learning from other people.

Both of these activities, safety and competence development doesn't actually need people to be bosses. The people responsible for these in organizations do need to have certain authority to do these jobs well, but they don't need to be supervisors in the old sense. I believe role of line management can actually be a service in the future. Many aspect of line management already are handled as a service, but maybe all of it could be.

So do people really need just one supervisor to help them. Why they couldn't have a small group of them working as a service guiding and helping people on in all the necessary ways. Somehow I feel this change wouldn't actually be that big to the ways many companies are already working. The change would be mainly mental. Line manager wouldn't mean your boss anymore, it would almost mean that you would be the boss and line manager would be the servant.

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Book Review: Run Less Run Faster

noreply@blogger.com (Henri Hämäläinen) — Sun, 01 Mar 2015 10:52:00 +0000

I try to read couple of sports books every year. I've heard from couple of different sources that Run Less Run Faster is an excellent book for busy runners wanting to develop their run.

Idea in Run Less Run Faster is easy, concentrate on your key runs and make sure you stay healthy. Book advises to get rid of junk miles, meaning the runs without specific purpose. Also it explains that three runs in a week is enough when it's supported with proper supporting training.

I do agree with the thinking in the book. I've run maximum of three runs in past years and I've been able to run much faster than previously. I've also discovered that key to improvement is different kind of runs and pushing yourself to the limits. So I do think book is good and valuable for many people.

Book also gives quite good exercises for runs and strength training. It is a good source for knowing what speeds to use in different exercises and what should be the amount of rest in different intervals. Also for strength and flexibility training it explains the basics.

What I worry with this kind of guidance to training is that it kills the joy of training. When every exercise have specific meaning and you need to watch you clock all the time, you easily lose the joy you can get from exercises. Everyone, including myself, should once in a while remember why they are training, for themselves or for some other reason.

The book in itself is easy and enjoyable. Especially for the runners who don't do enough different kind of exercises, this is a must read. For the people who already have wide range of training in their program, this might not be be worth of reading.

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Why Change Fails - 4 Key Findings

noreply@blogger.com (Henri Hämäläinen) — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 17:54:00 +0000

I've worked with several companies as a consultant helping and leading change projects. Also I've experienced changes from the inside and heard many stories from other companies. Based on that experience, here are the four things that are the main reasons for change to fail.

1. There is a plan for the change, but not a vision for the change

Organizations detect needs for changes easily. All the time there comes ideas from the inside or outside for the change. Once in a while change idea gets to a proper group of people and they have the power to start the Change. Then starts the short planning phase. Budgets or people are confirmed, timelines are created and benefits of the change are communicated. What often is forgotten is the underlying reasoning for the change and especially the vision of how the new model should work.

This becomes a problem when there will become changes to the Change. And this always happens, the Change will never go directly as planned, but there will be needs for re-planning. This is acceptable and normal, because there will always be learning happening during the Change. The problem arises, when the vision why the Change was done in the first place is forgotten and changes to Change project will actually turn the ideas to the wrong direction.

An example of this kind of behavior could be streamlining error handling process to cut time from error reporting to error fixing. During the change process, the team finds out that there is company level KPI of the error severity and the change would mess that measurement. So instead of removing some states of the process they decide to create an automatic ranking and assignment system based on the error location component, reporter and SW version. Then for each person handling the errors they'll advice to make sure the error ranking and assignment is correct. In the end the error process actually got longer due to the automation of one part of the process.

Even though the example is simplified and might sound silly, this kind of things I've seen to happen often. The idea behind the change is slowly modified to something else during the change process. The only way not let this happen, it to have few people to have clear vision of the backgrounds of the change and to empower them to lead the change.

2. People are not actively involved early enough

What I've learned with changes is that people do not that much like to be involved, but they hate if they are not asked to be involved. So it's not that important to get everyone involved to the change early, but it is essential that all relevant people are notified about the change early.

In many occasions I've seen people to come later to say that they would have liked to give their opinions earlier. For that reason, I've tried to involve as much people from the beginning as possible. Most often people actually don't have much to say and are not that interested to participate after all, but they are more friendly towards the Change because they were asked early.

So the learning really is, involve all the relevant people from the beginning. Don't take them in to the core group, but ask for their opinions in one to one interviews or targeted questionnaires when the group is larger. This is essential part of success of the Change. It will cut down the possibilities to be against the change later on.

3. There isn't enough time given for the change

I come from the software world, where everyone nowadays start to know that estimates always fail. Projects rarely get done on planned time frame. Still with Change Projects, these estimates will fail much more. Organizations somehow always forget that they have their daily business to take care on.

This happens always, organizations fail to estimate how much they have time and capabilities to use, to properly drive a Change through. Getting on hold of people and finding time to secondary activities in organizations easily take weeks.

Then in the long run, people will get frustrated about the speed of changes and some of the changes will die because of slow progress. There needs to be realistic schedule for changes and people who selected to drive changes forward need to empowered for the work. These feels like basic stuff, but somehow these seem to fail in many occasions.

4. Change resistance are not handled correctly

There is two types of change resistance: late adopters and the people actually against the change. Late adopters are people who take time to understand the value of the change. They often ask good clarifying questions and are valuable part of making the change better. Then the other group is the people who for a reason or another are not willing to accept the change. In some occasions they have valid arguments, sometimes they have their own personal reasons not to play along with others.

With both groups it is essential to talk with them often. The worst thing to do is to ignore them. This will raise even more resistance and it might cause a movement against the change. Best thing to do is to confront them. You don't need to agree with them, but try to understand what is the good intention they have in mind. This is the essential thing again, people need to be heard, not necessarily agreed with.

My tip is to confront change resistant people one to one. When talking to change resistant people in a group, they will never change their mind and lose their faces in front of the group. Talking with them one to one makes it possible for people to change their view. Still when talking one to one with change resistant person, the goal shouldn't ever be changing ones mind. The goal is to understand why they are against the change. You don't need to change your own mind and they don't need to change their mind, but the goal is that you both mutually agree each others view. After that there are several alternatives forward, but before mutual understanding, there isn't almost any.

Summary of my tips to successful Change Project

Change project are difficult, but not that difficult. The approach for change often is too pragmatic, there's too much planning of communications and steps to take. There should be more focus on discussions with people and having enough time for the change.

Other key thing is to remember why the change is done. Even though it sounds ridiculous, I believe many changes fail because at some point no one remembers what was the actual problem the change was suppose to fix.

Last but not least, people working on change easily forget, that the change isn't the most important thing happening for the others. For many change is just one of the many things ongoing at daily work. Changes need active communication and involvement. It isn't enough to publish information available, there needs to be active feedback loop in making sure that the messages actually gets delivered.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: The Lean Startup

noreply@blogger.com (Henri Hämäläinen) — Sun, 15 Feb 2015 18:17:00 +0000

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries was a book I had heard about so many times that I had to read it myself. I had heard about Lean Startup methodology and read about it in many blog posts, but I hadn't read the book. In a way the topic was familiar even before starting, but still there were learning to gain from the book.

Ideology of Lean Startup is really valuable. I believe there's some truth behind what Eric Ries is talking about. The main idea of Lean Startup is that is valuable to measure the ideas in the market and be willing to learn from the results and pivot the course if needed.

I especially liked what Eric wrote about what actually is an MVP. In my own believes I often seen MVP to be much less than companies are themselves thinking it to be. Also validated learning, innovation accounting and the whole build-measure-learn loop were valuable parts of the book.

What I didn't like was that the book wasn't anywhere close to minimum viable book. It was utterly too long and once in a while even boring. I believe the ideas of the subject could have been delivered in 100 pages. That would have proven the value of the thinking. Now it was as any other ordinary book, lengthened to almost 300 pages in order to seem as a "normal" book. I just hate that approach. When there isn't that much to say, why to waste so many pages on it.

I feel bit bad to criticize the book since, I think that everyone should learn about the Lean Startup methodology. It is valuable and would help many companies and startups to succeed. I believe the book just isn't the best way to learn about the subject.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Story inside Nokia - Creating SW Solution in Enterprise Agile

noreply@blogger.com (Henri Hämäläinen) — Thu, 29 Jan 2015 19:21:00 +0000

Symbian has been long enough dead and Nokia has moved on from smartphone business, so maybe it's time to tell a story from inside. I was there in Symbian Multimedia for 6 years. This is a personal story about how hard it was to create new software using many existing assets of the company.

It was the time teams had been using Agile methodologies for some time. Some teams used Scrum, others Kanban. At that point there was going on a huge transformation towards Enterprise Agile. One of the main concepts was Epic based development. That basically meant that Epics (you can think those as big user stories or projects) where created to describe the customer value regardless of the organization or product limits. So the idea was excellent, to be able to exploit the software and product assets of Nokia for customer benefit, what ever needed.

Story of Epic and 113 people

So I got appointed to be the Epic Owner for one of the first Epics trying this new process out. Epic as such wasn't my idea and the contents of it are irrelevant for this blog post. In short basic idea of the Epic was to combine Entertainment and new social technologies. So it was a perfect example for the Epic thinking. It used existing SW assets, needed bit of code on top those and would create a new kind of value to the customers and new business to Nokia.

There was a small team gathered around this Epic. I can't recall exactly, but I think there was 5 of us in a team. My role was to work similarly as product owner to keep the vision of the Epic in place and make sure our team could actually accomplish the thing.

After the start, first things was to get to see the codes, API documentation and stuff like that from different SW teams. Those would help us creating the solution we were after. That already needed lot of internal selling. I flew around and had quite many online and face to face meetings to convince the involved teams to let us work with their code.

After we had everything in place to start, we were able in less than two weeks to have a well working prototype about the solution. It wasn't in the sales quality, but good enough quality to show around. At that time we started to do more internal selling to be able to actually make the final solution, which wasn't that complicated in the end. That was the point we hit the big organizational wall.

There was tens of people who wanted to have their say what was needed to take in to account before releasing the solution out. Some of the people had valid points, since releasing to basically all the countries in the world was not that easy. And all the others were still doing the job they were hired to do. It was exhausting. We had a solution, but getting it out from the company was near to impossible.

One evening I was flying home from one the internal selling sessions, when I started to count that how many people who haven't contributed anything to code I have had to agree with. The number raised to 113 people! There had been 113 people who I had to talk with, in order to get a solution that took 4 developers less than 2 weeks to prototype, to get approved and released.

It's not an extreme case

Some of you might think this is extreme example of how things can go wrong. I'm sorry to say that's not. I've seen some other product development companies to have this problem too. In many cases creating the software isn't the hard part in creating the solutions. It's all the internal sales that need to happen on top of the solution. There needs to be, even in smaller organizations, tens of people who needs to approve the plan before something can actually happen.

There's a good intention of course behind all of this control. People often mean well. They have their own view to things and they want to control that something that is under their radar get thought properly. But that is exactly the problem, companies shouldn't be build on control, but on trust. But that's a different story.

More and more organizations have extensive SW or Product Portfolio. One of the things I hear discussed in many companies is, how to leverage the existing assets better to create new kind of business in the future. This definitely makes sense, it at least these kind of solutions could and should bring competitive advantage and to be even lot cheaper to create.

Unfortunately organizations rarely are ready for this. For example internal cash flows (meaning budgets) can make cross team work harder or even impossible. Also layer of product managers looking after their own products is a common show stopper for these cross product exercises. But there are lot of other hurdles in the way and this post's purpose wasn't to go in to too many details about that one.

Overall the problem is common. Big organizations should have all the assets to compete against the smaller ones, but most often the only way to compete it to acquire the small ones. For many reasons, big companies can't create innovative product easily. My example is just one from many different barriers.

Final Words

As a final words I have to say Symbian organization in Nokia was at the time really advanced in Scaling Agile to Enterprise level. There was lot of good practices in place and lot of competent people driving those forward. In order for the Epic thinking to actually work, it would have needed years of cultural change. This change was started, but as all of us know, Symbian was left burning and change never got to the end.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: The Sports Gene

noreply@blogger.com (Henri Hämäläinen) — Tue, 20 Jan 2015 07:37:00 +0000

David Epstein's The Sports Gene was exciting read for me. I follow many different sports and I've been intrigued about how much success is about nature (genes) and how much about nurture (training, etc). This was the first time I got some concrete facts about the subject.

David Epstein isn't a scientist, but a sports journalist, who has made a long learning journey to be able to write about so technical subject. I believe this book is better, when it's written by a journalist and not by a scientist. Book goes quite deep into the genes and biology, so it's better when it's written in bit more understandable way.

Book tells stories and facts about athletics, basketball, sprint running, long distance running, cross country skiing, baseball and many others. It really tries to look for patterns behind athletes and their genes. For certain sports there are definitely genetic differences that make some athletes to have a superior change to succeed to others. Still success always needs lots of training.

In one way book is depressing for some sports. As an example, with current conditions in the world Kalenjin Kenyans will rule the marathon and long distance running field for some time. But actually not that long ago, Finnish people used to rule the long distance world (Hannes Kolehmainen, Paavo Nurmi, Lasse Viren) , before we got richer and didn't run that much anymore. So in a way we Finns still might have the genes for it, but our environment and training doesn't support those anymore. The same might happen to the Kenyans at some in the future.

The whole book bounces between nature and nurture. What is certain is that there are no genetically perfect athletes, because no one doesn't have any good ideas what genes actually are needed for which sports. There are some genes found which might prevent success in some sports and some genes that are common with the elite athletes in that sport. Most often still, the genes of elite athletes can be found from thousands of other who still are not elite. So there is no one answer for nature vs nurture debate.

One other thing that interested me was the trainability of people. Different genes actually mean that people develop differently. Populist journalism often tells that training like this and that will only give results. The fact is, people acquire skills differently. The famous 10 000 hour rule, isn't exactly true, but then on the other hand it gives an idea of the ball park people need to train. People need to train the way their body and mind adapts. That's the most important lesson of the book.

I highly recommend this book the everyone interested about sport training or coaching. It felt bit longish at some point, but reading this is time well invested.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Wordle 2014

noreply@blogger.com (Henri Hämäläinen) — Fri, 02 Jan 2015 07:20:00 +0000

I have a tradition to create Word Cloud with Wordle of the blog posts I've written during the year. It visually shows what I have written about. It's a nice easy way to see what this blog is all about.

Wordle of Blog Posts from 2014

It wasn't a surprise to myself or anyone who have read my blog, that word book is the most popular word in my blog. That's how it has been in the previous years and that's how it most probably will be in the future. The next most popular was people. That has been in the second place in the previous years also.

To get more insights of what I have written this year, I removed Book and People from the word cloud to see what were the next most popular words. (note: common words have been removed)

Wordle 2014 without Book and People

After this change the Wordle looks much more interesting. I'm happy that I've written about organizations, work and companies a lot. That's something that has interested me and I'm glad that I've also blogged about those.

Word Clouds from Previous Years

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Best and Most Popular Posts of Web Wanderer Blog in 2014

noreply@blogger.com (Henri Hämäläinen) — Tue, 30 Dec 2014 07:14:00 +0000

Blogging frequency have been going down again from the previous years. One reason has been that I haven't read as many books I would have hoped to. Also I haven't written that many other posts that in previous years. On the other hand, I've written down almost 30 ideas of blog posts that I should write. So blog isn't fading away, I just need to find the time to write it in the future.

Five Most Popular Posts from 2014

Most of the posts come from earlier this year, so maybe that's the reason those got more reads than the newer ones. This year I didn't have any one post that would have been much more popular that any else, but there were many which were quite popular.

For some reason the most read blog posts of the year were from 2011. These three blog posts suddenly raised to be popular this year. Almost no one had read those before, but now these got lot of attention. It is weird, but it also proves that good content will find its way to be read sooner or later. There are the three posts from 2011 that actually were most read this year:

My Own Five Favorite Posts 2014

This time again, only one of the most popular posts are the same from the ones I think that were my best posts. All of these got attention, but I would have wished those would have got even more attention.

Thanks for everyone who has read my blog during this year. It's been good year and let's wish next one will be even better.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: Organize for Complexity

noreply@blogger.com (Henri Hämäläinen) — Mon, 29 Dec 2014 16:06:00 +0000

I got book Organize for Complexity when I was at Dare Festival in Belgium about a month ago. Author Niels Pflaeging did also give a speech at the conference. The contents of the speech and the book (or perhaps booklet) were mainly the same, so this review is a bit about both of those.

Topic of the book interests me a lot. I've recently had many thoughts, writings and discussions about how organizations should be organized in the future, to be able to suit the markets of the future and the needs of next generation workforce.

This short book is a good first step to the new organizational thinking. It gives some initial ideas why the organizations should change and it gives one simple view to the challenge. It is not a book as such, more of a booklet with few paragraphs and illustrative pictures. It gives basic ideas well and raises some thoughts, but it lacks all critical thinking and discussion about the subject.

I liked the ideas what Niels seems to have, but I don't think this book really brings those forward. It's almost as powerpoint slides would have been transferred to book format. It isn't really a proper book, but it has some powerful thoughts.

If you want to have a simple touch on the organizations of the future, this book might be for you. The contents are valuable, the format of the book wasn't just to my taste.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: Today Matters by John C. Maxwell

noreply@blogger.com (Henri Hämäläinen) — Tue, 16 Dec 2014 19:16:00 +0000

Once in a while I like to read self help books. Today Matters by John C. Maxwell was highly recommended book by many. The full name of the book actually adds to the Today Matters a second title, 12 Daily Practices to Guarantee Tomorrow's Success, which actually tells quite much about the book.

Book explains a simple way to succeed tomorrow - make every day count. The whole idea of the book is to understand to concentrate to today. Make the right decisions every day to support your growth to whatever you wish to be in your life.

John C. Maxwell is author of many books, priest and teacher of leadership. He has been given many rewards about leadership and management. He seems to be interesting character, who gives quite easy and straightforward advice.

I've read some self help books about success and in a way there wasn't that much new in the book for me. Still the idea, which is so simple, concentrate to today, is something that easily gets lost in the busy world we live in. Every day counts. You shouldn't care too much about the past and definitely not think too much about future. You need to make the right decisions every day to help you to become who you want to be.

The idea in the book is to concentrate to the 12 Daily Practices. These are basically values or point of views that should be taken in to account every day. I did write my own Mission Statement after reading 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and I think the ideology behind is similar. That's the reason I'm not taking this in to daily use for now. For many people those 12 practices definitely will be valuable.

Once a year it is good to read a classic like this about personal development. If you haven't ever read one or haven't read one for a while, I recommend this book. It's a good book and it did change my behavior a bit already. I enjoyed it and it was quite easy to read. So go ahead and read it.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen