I'm currently reading two books, one of which is Selling Without Selling by Carol Super.

Along with all the self-praise you might expect from an American business author, Super mentions how committed she is to what she does:

"I make time every day to read a professional sales magazine such as Selling Power, listen to an audio-tape, or read a business-oriented book on selling. In addition, I read the business section of the New York Times and parts of the Wall Street Journal. On the weekends, I read Newsweek and Time, plus business magazines such as Business Week, Fortune, and Forbes. This commitment to professionalism is essential for success in any field."

Does that sound like overly bragging? It did to me when I read it from the book. However, when I really started thinking about it, that kind of a commitment is not really anything special in the IT world. Many geeks spend hours and hours every day reading technical articles, blogs, and books on their profession. That paragraph sounded like bragging simply because most professionals probably don't do nearly as much, spending their spare time on things not related to their profession.

Beats me, but Amazon.com seems to think they have at least something in common...

(and if you're wondering how the h*** I ended up on that particular page on Amazon, it's all due to Cameron who doesn't get bored talking about portable MP3 equipment)

Jürgen Ahting in the SellingAgile Yahoo! group:

Why should the customer trust the BDUF people to deliver a "changeable" system?
They themselves don't even have trust in the easy changeability of the system during development.

Earlier today, I had a little chat about vocabulary. Business vocabulary. Well, sort of. The whole thing started with me reading the word "salespeople" from a book. I started thinking about which word people use more, "salespeople" or "salesman". You see, in Finnish, we have the word "myyjä", which roughly translates to "seller" -- no reference to gender as the English word "salesman" has, which has relieved us from introducing a politically correct version like "salespeople".

So, what does this have in common with object-oriented design? The connection I made, after a thorough 2-second analysis, was that the powers that be made a bad design decision when crafting the word "salesman". This design decision was to include more information about the object, the salesperson, than was necessary.

Interface over implementation.