The cases presented in this article are contrived.
1) There are room for both boring and cutting edge technology in any business. Albert didn't drop the ball by choosing cutting edge tech. Albert exhibited poor risk management skills. Alice wouldn't be complaining if Albert took a controlled risk and installed a next generation flash fryer that gave a clear competitive advantage over Zola in terms of personnel and order-to-delivery time.
2) Good ideas require both Albert and Zip. Zip keeps the lights on and the costs down for all the mundane BS required to run a business. Albert is the disrupter. He is the reason starting the business was a good idea. He is an iconoclast that looks at the state of the world and said "I can do this better".
The title of this article should be Boring Systems Build Benign Businesses
Albert doesn't start the business. He is the plumber on payroll and should behave as such. Alice and Zola start the business and innovate in the realm of cooking, not plumbing.
I didn't say Albert started the business. I said that Albert was the reason starting the business was a good idea. What I did say is that either Alice or Zola would be better served by having elements of both Albert and Zip.
I would consider hard to find a decent software engineer that would introduce 20 unproven tools to for something allegorically related to "plumbing" like say your web server.
Additionally, a lot of this is based on perspective. If I suggested standing up a web infrastructure on "nginx" am I an Albert or a Zip. I mean "Apache" has a much longer track record...right? By this article's logic we should write everything in FORTRAN and use single-tasking operating systems. Those have been around since the 50's ... rock solid.
Net out is "proven track records" and "best practices" are convenient stop gaps for ignorance. They are a way for people that don't know any better to manage risk. "I don't get it ... but it worked for her". Being competent and knowledgable, having good risk management skills, and understanding the problem will serve an organization much better than being conservative in your choice of tools.
1) There are room for both boring and cutting edge technology in any business. Albert didn't drop the ball by choosing cutting edge tech. Albert exhibited poor risk management skills. Alice wouldn't be complaining if Albert took a controlled risk and installed a next generation flash fryer that gave a clear competitive advantage over Zola in terms of personnel and order-to-delivery time.
2) Good ideas require both Albert and Zip. Zip keeps the lights on and the costs down for all the mundane BS required to run a business. Albert is the disrupter. He is the reason starting the business was a good idea. He is an iconoclast that looks at the state of the world and said "I can do this better".
The title of this article should be Boring Systems Build Benign Businesses