Being data driven

I picked up an issue of Foreign Affairs while flying back to NYC from SFO. It features this long interview with U.S. General Stanley McChrystal and I thought it was pretty interesting how striking some of the similarities are between fighting in a war and developing software.

On cycle time and how it's important to learn and integrate quickly:

In 2003, in many cases we'd go after someone, we might locate them and capture or kill them, and it would be weeks until we took the intelligence we learned from that and were able to turn it into another operation. Within about two years, we could turn that cycle three times in a night. We could capture someone, gain intelligence from the experience, go after someone else, and do three of those in a row, the second two involving people we didn't even know existed at the beginning of the night.