Monthly Archives: August 2011

The Inner Fire

Influencial Book List

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The Inner Fire

The Fire Inspires

There’s an abundance of lists with Agile books out there, the Essential Agile Reading List by Pat Kua, InfoQ Recommended Agile Books, there’s even an AgileBooks blog. I even created a book and link list myself a while ago, but didn’t update it for quite a while… Two good ones have recently been published or updated: Jurgen Appelo sorts 100 books by their ratings on the web, and Yves Hanoulle asked people for personal recommendations.

This (and a book review I wrote this week) inspired me to start on something I’d procrastinated for a while, to list recommended books on People, Business, and Everything Agile… Sounds like another trilogy coming up.

In contrast to the lists mentioned above, this is subjective, personal, and commented. It is not numbered as I don’t have a ranking. I tried to group it, and to give you a sense of the impact each book made on me. This list only contains book I’d rate 5 stars.

The first instalment lists books on Inspiration and Values.

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Why I Love the Linchpin Book

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My friend Jurgen Appelo recently wrote a review of Linchpin—Are You Indispensable? by Seth Godin. He says it’s simplistic, “purple crap”, and calls Seth a Single Strategy God. When I started reading that post, I was first a bit put off by the language… But as I’m quite used to Jurgen being blunt (which he attributes to being Dutch), I read on and surprisingly found I agreed with every single bit of criticism he wrote. Yet, I still stand by my Linchpin promotion, I still love the book… Why?

It’s about time I wrote down why I value this book so much. Continue reading →

Balance: Teaching vs. Coaching

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This is the first in a series of posts about finding and keeping your balance as an agile coach or change agent. I introduced the topic as a main theme on this blog a few weeks ago in Spotting the Balance. At the AgileCoachCamp, I committed to writing a post on this every two weeks, and due to holidays in the meantime I’m starting now. My thanks to Gitte Klitgaard Hansen who has been constantly reminding me of that commitment…

I’ll start by roughly defining the “opponents”.

A Teacher

A Teacher - by Tim Ellis


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Rome Rocks! —Day 2

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An Angel.

An Angel.

We closed the second night of our Rome visit listening to the amazing voice and guitar of SandsAcoustic. Before, we had climbed the top of Castel S. Angelo – which currently is open at night – and enjoyed a view of Rome at night. The building itself is quite astonishing too. So my two top sights-to-see did not disappoint me: the Pantheon and the Castle of Angels. Continue reading →

Roaming Rome—Day 1

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Gelato di Roma

Gelato di Roma. The Green Cone works as a Spoon.

After some fourteen years, I today ended up in Italy again, for a four day metro-vacation in beautiful Rome. After a short flight from Berlin (delighted by AirBerlin’s service compared to our trip to Brussels last month with brussels airlines) my wife and I arrived at our venue: Suite Beccaria. It’s much smaller than we thought, a B&B in a flat near Piazza del Popolo with about four rooms… Very cosy though, and the bathroom has a whirlpool:-) The bed is good, and they serve breakfast in your room.

After check-in we immediately went out, looking for lunch. From the cab we’d seen a caffeteria named Bar Carrara round the corner, and that one turned out to be a winner. We got excellent pasta including drinks for two for 16€… Later we added espresso and cappuccino – and a bun, to finish the amazing sauce… And I was really astonished when I had to pay only €2.50… in Rome! It seems to be wise to have lunch outside the tourist area, in a place where business people have their break:-)

Eating outside in the hot sun was a pleasure after all the rain in the past weeks, but we soon realised we were not appropriately dressed for the Italian weather. We changed into something lighter and started into the city centre… Continue reading →