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.

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.

Ian Osborne, Director, IntellectUK, hosted the webinar. 

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

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.

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.

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.

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.