My email signature comments have made blogosphere news in the past. For the record, my current signature quotation at Corbis reads "Perfect is the Enemy of Good Enough" and it was chosen for a very specific reason. There was a tendency to seek perfect information before making decisions. I needed to change that mindset and encourage decision making and progress with less than perfect information. But this post isn't about that...

In the final months before I left Microsoft, I changed my email signature from the one Clarke Ching highlighted to read, "Recipe for Success: Focus on Quality, Reduce Work-in-Progress, Balance Capacity against Demand, Prioritize" These four statements really boil down all my management teaching in to four actionable directives that will deliver significant improvement.

I have to thank Don Reinertsen for really helping me to distill my work down to these four bullets. I had the pleasure of conversing with Don over a couple of meals in the past two years and his advice helped form my thoughts around what I originally called the "low hanging fruit." In other words, the four simple things that any new manager can do to produce improvement and lead a change initiative with minimal impact on the organization. I need to thank Julie Chickering for encouraging me to come up with a more positive way of framing those thoughts. "Recipe for Success" is so much better than "Low Hanging Fruit."

This message of four actionable directives is so simple and powerful that I found on my arrival at Corbis that our process engineer Rick Garber had printed them out full page and laminated the copies. Many of my staff had them pinned up in their cubes. On my first day, I walked in to my office and discovered that my white board contained the same message written in red erasable marker. 4 months later it is still there - a constant reminder to me and visitors to my office. Each bullet point acts as a guide in framing all the decisions we make about software engineering and all the processes we put in place.

Recipe for Success: Focus on Quality, Reduce Work-in-Progress, Balance Capacity against Demand, Prioritize Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Software+Engineering, Management