Contents

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Introduction

1 Adrenaline Junkies

2 Rattle Yer Dags

3 Dead Fish

4 Happy Clappy Meetings

5 Nanny

6 Referred Pain

7 Mañana

8 Eye Contact

9 Management By Mood Ring

10 True Believer

11 Lease Your Soul

12 System Development Lemming Cycle

13 No Bench

14 Face Time

15 I Gave You a Chisel. Why Aren’t You Michelangelo?

16 Dashboards

17 Endless Huddle

18 Young Pups and Old Dogs

19 Film Critics

20 One Throat to Choke

Interlude: Project-Speak

21 Soviet Style

22 Natural Authority

23 The Too-Quiet Office

24 The White Line

25 Silence Gives Consent

26 Straw Man

27 Counterfeit Urgency

28 Time Removes Cards from Your Hand

29 Lewis & Clark

30 Short Pencil

31 Rhythm

32 The Overtime Predictor

33 Poker Night

34 False Quality Gates

35 Testing Before Testing

36 Cider House Rules

37 Talk Then Write

38 Project Sluts

39 Atlas

40 Everyone Wears Clothes for a Reason

41 Peer Preview

42 Snorkeling and Scuba Diving

43 It’s Always the Goddamned Interfaces

44 The Blue Zone

45 News Improvement

46 Telling the Truth Slowly

47 Practicing Endgame

48 The Music Makers

49 Journalists

50 The Empty Chair

51 My Cousin Vinny

52 Feature Soup

53 Data Qualty

54 Ben

55 Miss Manners

56 Undivided Attention

57 “There’s No Crying in Baseball!”

58 Cool Hand Luke

59 Shipping On-Time, Every Time

60 Food++

61 Orphaned Deliverables

62 Hidden Beauty

63 I Don’t Know

64 Children of Lake Wobegon

65 Co-Education

66 Seelenverwandtschaft

67 Phillips Head

68 Predicting Innovation

69 Marilyn Munster

Interlude: The Cutting Room Floor

70 Brownie in Motion

71 Loud and Clear

72 Safety Valve

73 Babel

74 Surprise!

75 Fridge Door

76 The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow

77 Piling On

78 Seasons for Change

79 Paper Mill

80 Offshore Follies

81 War Rooms

82 What Smell?

83 Lessons Unlearned

84 Sanctity of the Half-Baked Idea

85 Leakage

86 Template Zombies

Photo Credits

Pattern Index

About the Guild