The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

I love to play cards. I've spent many hours sitting around a kitchen table playing pinochle, euchre or spades.

But I think my favorite card game is bridge. More specifically, the variant of bridge which fascinates me is called "duplicate". The basic idea of duplicate bridge is that your score is a function of how well you play your cards as compared to how the other teams played the exact same cards.

Just to be clear, let me repeat: In duplicate bridge, you are playing the same cards as your opponents. The luck of the deal is basically eliminated.

You have 13 cards in your hand, so there are 13 "tricks" available to win. If you are dealt excellent cards, there is no particular reason to get excited. Yes, your cards will take lots of tricks, but that's not the point. The issue is whether you take as many tricks as the other people who play those exact same cards. If you take nine tricks but somebody else finds a way to take ten, you lose.

Duplicate bridge is a brutal game. Every small mistake can be very costly. I do like to go to the local bridge club sometimes, but I usually end up in last place. At the end of the evening, I review each hand and figure out what went wrong. Even though I am terribly bad at this game, I still enjoy it because every game is such a learning experience.

I often wonder what other pursuits would be like if they had to operate under the same rules: Resources and context do not change -- the only variable is the ability of the person managing those resources.

These questions become particularly interesting to me when asked in the field of software product management. For a given piece of technology or code, what would happen if somebody else were managing it?

If I were managing the Delphi product instead of Borland, could I do a better job?

If Joel Spolsky were managing Vault instead of me, would the product have more users?