There needs to be a name for the phenomenon where people start executing without instrumenting or thinking, and then turn out to do worse in the long run compared to teams who take the time, up front, to instrument properly.
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Actually the more general phenomenon is "you know doing thing X upfront is good, but it doesn't feel like you're doing anything while you're doing X, so you don't do it, and then you do worse overall."
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From Working Backwards, on Amazon's experience with this phenomenon:
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So there are 2 things going on here. 1) the way I take notes, I want a headnote and a set of excerpts from each chapter, so that I never have to go back to the actual book after reading. I just look at the notes for the chapter.
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2) Working Backwards is a very dense book, and the anecdotes matter because they act as concept instantiations. I’ve talked to the authors, and they told me there were additional stories they had to cut out. Those are gold; implementation detail matters.
I relied on the approach mentioned in (1) to do this summary:
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And I’ve been relying on those notes to implement the PR/FAQ (thread below) as well as the Weekly Business Review.
I’ve found that when putting things to practice, implementation detail really matters. Other books aren’t as densely highlighted.
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1/ Say you want to copy Amazon's PR/FAQ. Well, after 8 months and 3 attempts, I’m comfortable enough with the process to say that it works.
(Caveat: I've never worked in Amazon, so had to figure this out from books and from working with Colin Bryar).
What I've learnt:
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