I run two companies. I often get stuck in the process of improving my product at the expense of improving the business. This morning, while enjoying my coffee outside on a late-summer day, I came across an à propos blog post.

Alistair Croll writes in his blog Lean Analytics Book about the myriad ways a new shop owner can attract customers.

In addition to a slew of great marketing ideas he reminded me that when you run a company you have to think about ‘the business’ just as much as ‘the product’.

As to the title of this post; I can hear the code monkeys screaming at their screens and see the normal folk staring at the screen, heads slightly tilted with a “Huh?” face. Roughly translated it means that Success happens when the effort you spend on ‘the business’ is equal to what you expend on the ‘the product’.

For the code monkeys that are screaming at the inefficiency of the code I offer this explanation:

• I am emphasising the fact that neither is greater than the other.
• Although I have written code, in many languages, for a rather long time, I do not consider myself a software engineer. I write sometimes sloppy code that makes sense to me and get’s the job done.
• Pragmatism beats Purity most every time. 😉