Test Driven site, Blogger Security, Corporate Cultures

(Originally posted 2003.May.19 Mon; links may have expired.)

Dave Astels points out another TDD resource: http://www.testdriven.com/.

James Robertson points out a security issue with the blogger API: "This is why my posting API uses encryption, and why I don't support the blogger api on this blog - that pathetic excuse for an API passes usernames and passwords in the clear." My blogger friends need to make sure they change their passwords frequently.

Interesting article by Art Kleiner about multiple corporate cultures here: http://www.well.com/user/art/s%2Bb32001.html. He describes three cultures that live within single companies:

• The first, the operational culture, is the culture of day-to-day line managers - the people who get products and services out, procure supplies, process bills, and make delivery trucks run on time. Operations people appreciate teams; they understand, as nobody else does, how to get a bunch of disparate individuals to pull together.

• If you want to find facility with deals, leverage, and capital flow, you have to look to the second corporate culture, the executive culture. Members of this culture typically include the CEO, the board, the business-unit leaders, and the finance-oriented staff.... their jobs and passions lie in shepherding the cash flow that keeps the organization alive.

• The third corporate culture, the engineering culture, is personified by engineers and technical specialists, particularly in information technology and process engineering. They are stimulated by puzzles and problems, and by the design challenge of creating an ideal world of elegant machines that operate in harmony.

He also describes briefly how corporate cultures at the CEO level have changed over time. The most successful companies were "monopolist" until anti-trust laws were passed; "manufacturing" after that—that is vertically integrated "operations" cultures; "marketing-oriented" after the Great Depression and up to the "golden age of advertising in the 1960's"; and "finance-oriented" oriented after inflation hit in the 1970's.

Now that we are living in what seems to be deflationary times, what CEO-level culture will become successful?