Intelligence is overrated

Intelligence is overrated as a metric, from the get-go. Being smart doesn't mean anything - accomplishing something, whether that be writing a book, founding a company, making a new scientific discovery, sculpting a masterpiece, etc., is a much better metric. Unfortunately everyone seems to be hung up on the "idea" of being smart, as if having a high IQ somehow constitutes an accomplishment.

- a comment on Hacker News 

Monkey See Monkey Do aka Agile WTF (Way To Fail)

Here's the talk Naresh and me did at Agile Bangaluru 2010.

This was the talk's abstract:

We don't have all the answers. We don't know the best way to build software in the right way. But we do know one thing: the right way doesn't involve mindlessly following practices just because some "expert" says you need to.
In this workshop we'll take a critical look at various "agile" practices and try to highlight the dogma and ceremony that has creeped in. We'll also question if the practices defined a decade ago are still applicable? If yes, have they evolved since? What are some of the original creators of these processes practicing today? And so on..

It's almost 2 hrs, and the first 25 mins of the presentation is a spoof of how agile projects are run. We eventually get around to discussing some agile practices and the tradeoffs they involve:

Here are the slides: