37Signals: Secrets To Amazons Success

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37Signals has an article on the Signal vs. Noise blog about the Secrets To Amazons Success. Its a good read.

My favorites:

People’s side projects, the one’s they follow because they are interested, are often ones where you get the most value and innovation. Never underestimate the power of wandering where you are most interested.

Innovation can only come from the bottom. Those closest to the problem are in the best position to solve it. any organization that depends on innovation must embrace chaos. Loyalty and obedience are not your tools.

and finally

Everyone must be able to experiment, learn, and iterate. Position, obedience, and tradition should hold no power. For innovation to flourish, measurement must rule.

Check out the full article. There’s a lot there, most of which sounds like it comes straight out of lean books I have read. These three, however, are key for me. People are the greatest asset, and the things that they are passionate enough to “play” with are the key things that foster innovation. You just have to learn to trust them enough to let them play, and release some of the structure that “mature” companies think they require.

Another example of how Amazon gets it.

iPod Power Adapter – Sold Separately

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Photo by rbieber

Kudos to Apple for getting an even larger share of my wallet. When you buy an 80G iPod, the only way you can charge it is through your PC. In order to charge via AC power (say when your getting ready to travel and will not be taking your home machine with you), you have to spend another $40 on a USB Power adapter. These use to come WITH the unit.

Audio Books Completed.

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First day of vacation is today. Last night completed the three audio books that were sitting on my iPod. “How to Win Friends & Influence People” (Dale Carnegie), “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” (Christopher Hitchens), and “Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit” (Daniel Quinn). All great books.

During time off I’m going to try and finish up the rest (or at least a good part) of my remaining list of half read books, including “The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production– Toyota’s Secret Weapon in the Global Car Wars That Is Now Revolutionizing World Industry” (James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, Daniel Roos).

I really have to start a book and finish it and not order another one until its complete. Its called FLOW Ron.

I also have “The Art of Project Management (Theory in Practice (O’Reilly))” (Scott Berkun) that just got here the other day. It will have to sit in line until I finish up the loose ends.

Subversion, MediaWiki, WordPress, and LDAP

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One of the biggest arguments you’ll get in deploying open source software in a corporate environment perception that they are extra, standalone applications. If your corporation uses an LDAP server, you can get some big wins by ensuring that your open source applications can authenticate with your corporate LDAP store, showing integration with the main systems.

I recently went through this exercise with a number of applications in our environment, including:

  • Subversion
  • MediaWiki
  • WordPress

I thought I’d throw up an entry here outlining the tools I used to make this integration possible.

Subversion was a no-brainer, since we host our repositories using mod_dav_svn. Configuring the mod_auth_ldap module in the Apache server and converting all access to SSL made this integration painless, once I figured out how to build Apache to use OpenLDAP and Secure LDAP. For MediaWiki, the Mediawiki LDAP Extension worked flawlessly. The key problem with Mediawiki is that there is no mechanism built in to ensure that logins are performed via SSL. A quick rewrite rule in the Apache server took care of this for me. A complete explanation of this process can be found at Library Web Chic.

For WordPress, I found a great plugin from Kane IT Consulting that was extremely easy to configure. I had the plugin installed and configured in minutes. I highly recommend this one. The Admin-SSL plugin, gave us the security around the login that we needed.

What has been interesting to me is seeing the subtle shift in perception of these applications as we integrated them into the authentication system. They almost seem like legitimate pieces of the system now … even to me.