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June 19, 2006
Planning versus Acting
"We made mistakes, of course. Most of them were omissions we didn't think of when we initially wrote the software. We fixed them by doing it over and over, again and again. We do the same today. While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design perfect, we're already on prototype version No. 5. By the time our rivals are ready with wires and screws, we are on version No. 10. It gets back to planning versus acting: We act from day one; others plan how to plan -- for months."[via Tom Peters]
-- Bloomberg by Bloomberg
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You certainly can't top-down plan innovation. Bottom-up, suck-it-and-see works best.
Small startups do it at instinctive level, corporations loose the ability over time.
He sounds as if he had invented Extreme Programming a la "release often and release early."
Of course, his method does have one disasterous drawback: terrible quality. If your customer is very tolerant of bad quality then you reap the benefits (speed, creative freedom, etc.) but you can also see your projetc spiral out of control if you go beyond extreme, which some product developers do. On the other hand, if your customer is not tolerant of bad quality then you're better off with a staged process.
I don't think he was making a literal statement. I think he was simply claiming "we're better than them" and he used the idea of extreme development as a vehicle for that claim, but it could have been any other vehicle and he would have still found a way to say "we're better than them."
I always see psychology when people see logic.
Marc