Moving from Misuse to Bricolage

By Michael  |  Posted on February, 25 2013

Checkout our recent article in the Graziadio Business Review Moving from Misuse to Bricolage - Finding Innovation from Customer “Misbehavior” where we discuss how companies can learn from how customers misuse their products.

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Chinese Version of Scalability Rules

By Michael  |  Posted on January, 14 2013

We’re excited to announce that Scalability Rules has been translated into Simplified Chinese.

This version is available here on Amazon.cn.

Checkout the Scalability Rules site.

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New Associate Partners

By Michael  |  Posted on September, 1 2012

We are very excited to announce that Geoff Kershner and Dave Berardi are joining AKF Partners.

For those who have worked with AKF in the past, you might recognize Geoff as he was part of our extended team a couple years ago. He most recently spent time at LiveOps running a Program Management Office in efforts including Agile development and PCI-DSS certification. He also spent 6 years at eBay and PayPal.

Dave is a long time friend and colleague as well who recently spent a number of years helping Progressive with incident and problem management processes. He has led various software development teams and spent 8 years at GE working on data warehousing and six sigma projects.

Check out Dave and Geoff’s full profiles.

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UF College of Engineering Commencement

By Michael  |  Posted on May, 1 2012

AKF Managing Partner Marty Abbott will be the 2012 Commencement Speaker for the University of Florida’s College of Engineering on May 6, 2:00 p.m. He is a distinguished graduate of the Masters of Science in Computer Engineering program from the University of Florida and participates on the Engineering Leadership Institute’s advisory board. You can watch the commencement recorded here, starting at 1:06:25 on the video.

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ICT KTN - The Art of Scalability Presentation

By Michael  |  Posted on August, 23 2011

Marty Abbott and Mike Fisher presented a webinar on September 19, 2011 for the Information and Communication Technologies Knowledge Transfer Network (ICT KTN).  The ICT KTN seeks to create a competitive advantage for the UK by facilitating the exchange of knowledge and seeks to bring a competitive advantage to the UK by facilitating the exchange of knowledge on Information & Communications Technologies and accelerating innovation.

Ian Osborne, Director, IntellectUK, hosted the webinar. 

If you missed the live event you can listen to it here at BrightTalks.

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Code as Craft - Scalability Rules

By Michael  |  Posted on July, 18 2011

We are scheduled to speak at Etsy’s Code as Craft Speaker Series. Our presentation will take place on July 28th at 7pm at the Etsy Labs on the 7th floor at 55 Washington Street in beautiful Brooklyn. If you’re in the neighborhood, sign up here.

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Scalability Rules on InformIT

By Michael  |  Posted on May, 10 2011

Our newest book Scalability Rules is now available on InformIT.  You can purchase the book, the e-book, or the bundle.  It is also available for pre-order at Amazon  and Barnes and Noble. 

Scalability Rules is a collection of 50 rules that will guide developers, architects, managers, and executives on how to build a scalable system.  It takes a direct approach by presenting fundamental principles in an easily read and digestible format for rapid application to almost any technical environment. It will be useful to all readers as a primer, a refresher, and as a reference. Its principles can be used to form the basis of architectural strategy for just about any company dealing with hypergrowth in the Web 2.0 world.

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Research Update

By Michael  |  Posted on April, 1 2011

Marty and Mike will both be presenting their research at the 2011 Academy of Management Conference. Below are abstracts and links to the full text for both papers:

THE CO-PRODUCTION OF SOCIAL CONTAGION - Theories of technology product adoption and diffusion fail to adequately explain social contagion or viral growth. Additionally, the role of product design in users’ propensity to use and recommend products is both understudied and poorly understood. To address a vexing gap in knowledge about what explains viral growth, we conducted ethnographic interviews with technology executives and users of two social networking sites that have experienced dramatically different growth patterns. Our findings reveal that product co-production and user self identity—not product attributes – fuel viral growth. Social networking products co-produced by users and providers, with “meaning” socially constructed by customers, permit users to more effectively establish and maintain their self-identities and are far more likely to result in social contagion than are engineering-centric products. User experiences with Facebook and Friendster and organizational responses to them demonstrate the role of self identity – and in particular five specific selves – on viral growth.  Full text...

TEMPORAL TRIBES: THE ORIGIN AND RESOLUTION OF TENURE BASED AFFECTIVE CONFLICT IN VENTURE BACKED TOP MANAGEMENT TEAMS ABSTRACT - Venture backed firms with both exceptionally high and relatively low growth experience a comparatively fast turnover of executives, often resulting in multiple cohorts within the top management team (TMT). These tenure cohorts often act like warring tribes, generating value destroying affective conflict. While several studies have validated the relationship between tenure diversity and affective conflict, none explain its source. To address this gap in knowledge, we conducted in-depth ethnographic interviews with 34 executives from six U.S. venture backed private companies. Our results move beyond those of previous studies on tenure based affective team conflict by revealing its source to be strongly embedded “new” and “old” social identities within venture backed TMTs. Absent purposeful efforts by top management to forge a shared identity that subordinates the existing “old” and “new” identities, negative effects of affective conflict will likely trump the benefits of cognitive conflict. Full text...

Here is a video of Marty presenting his research.

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Weatherhead Doctoral Program

By Michael  |  Posted on March, 3 2011

Thumbing through the recent copy of Harvard Business Review, you might have noticed Marty and Mike in one of the advertisements. As students in the doctorate program at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management, we were asked to provide a quote about the benefits of the program. While we’re still waiting to get our first article published in HBR, we’re happy to see AKF Partners mentioned.

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The Art of Scalability in Japanese

By Michael  |  Posted on February, 15 2011

We are very pleased to announce that The Art of Scalability has been translated into Japanese.  We’re very excited about this and look forward to hopefully many other translations.  If you haven’t picked up a copy of the English version here are links to a few online stores Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Borders.

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All Posts Index

By Michael  |  Posted on October, 29 2010

With the new redesign we did away with some pages.  One of the most popular pages was the index to all our old blog posts.  We’re adding this page back so click here for the index page.  If you like this index or any other page feel free to post a comment or drop us a note.

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