The methodologies and best practices used to develop software can be applied successfully to any challenge in life.

At Sussex University, I developed a system called WinLocX to help with the process of translating software into foreign languages.

Shakespeare pulls on us and demands the best of us. You never successfully wrestle one of his plays to the ground and say, 'See? That's It!'

As software engineers trained to turn ambiguity into absolutes and fuzzy requirements into ones and zeros, we had a 'eureka' moment when we realized that our training had broader, real-world applications.

If you look at any normal organization, the CEO is the person with the highest E.Q. The person with the highest IQ is often in the back room running the financials or the operations. That's topsy turvy.

Instead of subscribing to a best-practices principle that should be applied to all companies, we look at individual firms and how they performed in making a voting recommendation.