Last night marked my first-ever coffee house presentation, but it was a lot of fun. The Refresh Phoenix group was in full swing, I gave a presentation and led a discussion on web application design, gave some copies of the book away, and talked to a lot of people about projects they’re working on.

Thanks very much to the people at Refresh for making it a great experience. Oh - and special thanks to the gentleman who loaned me his laptop for the presentation (I didn’t have the right cable).

Trust the people you’ve hired to know what they’re doing. Trust them to make decisions. Don’t force teams to reach a consensus. Rely on the experts. Use them for what they do best.

This alone will help improve the performance of your company, because decisions will be made more efficiently, and you’ll know decisions are being made by the people most qualified to make them.

Also, employees who feel respected in this way will perform better on a consistent basis. That said, make sure individuals trust other team members to also make changes and decisions.

In other words, hire people that want to be great and then get out of the way and let them do their jobs.

(This tip is from the Kaizen Software Manifesto. Learn more about it here.)

Tumblelogging is a form of blogging whose intent is to keep the posts flowing rather than weigh you down with pesky things like titles, categories, tags, and all that. You simply post links, photos, quotes, or whatever you want to a blog-like page at rapid-fire speed, and you end up with a blog with no search function, no categorization, no tags, nothing. Just a pure stream-of-consciousness blogging.

And it’s actually quite a bit of fun.

My newest Designing the Obvious Clinic article over on InformIT discusses tumbleblogging and a new app, called Tumblr, designed to facilitate your new tumblelogging addiction.

Check it out and have some fun. Tumblelogging is one my recommendations for how to keep people motivated to make changes in the Kaizen Software Manifesto.

Designing the Obvious is now available as an eBook through the InformIT bookstore.

If you’re just too impatient to wait for a copy from Amazon, or your house is too full of books already to order a new one, give the digital version a whirl!