SacredSelf-Helplessness
I spent in the Library of Congress some of my happiest hours in Washington DC, reading hundred year old religious tracts. I’d kind of backed into the literature by studying the Industrial Revolution, which led me into the fascinating world of efficiency. A hundred years ago, the Western World turned efficiency crazy, the literature resembling nothing so much as fervent evangelical pamphlets. What began as a set of engineering principles quite quickly consumed nearly every aspect of American life. It exported into Germany where it spread like dandelions, even eventually infecting the newly-hatching Soviet state, where it emerged as absurdly-detailed and ludicrously-premised Five Year Plans, which brought industrial and agricultural inefficiencies that quite nearly destroyed that fledgling economy.
The insistence that the highest, even the best purpose of every profession involves instructing others in the proper application of the religion of austerity remains a burgeoning industry even today. Slip over here for more ...
Greasy
Great big gobs of greasy, grimy gopher guts resulted. Schmaltz traces its heritage to that latter day variation, too. So does my kitchen. So does yours. Imagine a substance that repels water, the freaking liquid of life. Oh, it also attracts lint and odd bits of cat fur, and dirt, and the odd bug carcass. Clearly, grease ain’t looking for an invite to my table, or should not be. He doesn’t need to beg or plead for an invitation, though, because I voluntarily escort him into my kitchen, shake him up a martini, then let him have his way with me.
Slip over here for more ...
Why Project Community?
The Industrial Revolution brought with it some unintended consequences. We learned to structure work around teams, but alienated our broader communities. We learned to manage work by decomposing objectives into tasks and processes, but trivialized the very craftspeople we need to actually accomplish anything. We learned how to control execution, but at the cost of a deeper sense of discernible value. We could deduce one right, most efficient way, but lost sight of our purpose.
The Industrial Revolution also brought with it what Peter Drucker claimed was the single most profound innovation of the twentieth century, the professional manager. As organizations have flattened, the fiefdoms which justified the manager's role are disappearing, replaced by social networks more agile than formal departments and divisions. Most of the work accomplished by modern organizations is accomplished cross-functionally, by individuals mustered for the duration of an individual effort and endlessly reconfigured until people identify much more strongly with their current assignment's community than with any permanent manager, department, division, or company.
Slip over here for more ...
Pro-Fessional-ism
Professionalism seems more religion than guarantee. The Golden Lie insists “increasing professionalism will improve quality,” but there’s little evidence of that. Twenty years after PMI began its professionalism push, projects succeed and fail at about the same rate they always have and always will. There seems to be little correlation between knowing about how project work is supposed to be done and improving the quality of that work. Slip over here for more ...
Prosperity
Used to be that a company succeeded by producing some product or service which they sold for a ‘price’, generating ‘revenues’, which through careful ‘cost management’ would distill into ‘profits’, thereby attracting ‘investors,’ who’d front cash without any explicit agreement to return even a penny of it. Yes, I admit that this sounds silly nowadays; backward. Byzantine, and perhaps it was. Slip over here for more ...
Expert Tease
Expertise seems to come in at least two flavors: information and definition, savory and sweet, but these apparent flavors might not qualify as flavors at all. Perhaps they arise from completely different classes of experience; one sensual, the other notional; imagined.
None of this perspective rises to even the lowliest threat level unless the novice or the expert mistakes the one for the other: information for definition or definition for information. Each seems easily misplaced.
Slip over here for more ...Carless-Day Two -Recalibrating
I've been reflecting on this ... liberating carless experience. I'm noticing my brain working differently. Amy has noticed hers shifting, too. With a car, we seem to take space and time for granted, as if we were the masters of both simply because we have a few hundred pounds of metal swathed around us. We imagine that we could get anywhere, anytime; we head out deluded with an easy as-if, which rarely turns out as imagined. We are, however, not the master of traffic flows and parking contingencies. We’re really just another encumbrance in an over-full cascade of them. What makes our errand so special? Slip over here for more ...
Small Decencies
Arriving, he finds the only parking lot several blocks from the prospect's building. Once at the building, he takes the elevator to the designated floor, only to find no receptionist and no cue where to go from there.
He sits.
And waits.
Some time after the appointed hour, the prospect appears, running late, and quickly sets about explaining his difficulty, which he hopes Cowan will agree to help resolve.
Cowan feigns regret, but just can’t fit this engagement into his schedule.
He explains to his readers, but not to the faux-prospective client, that this client failed his dedication test; he neglected to attend to the small decencies. Slip over here for more ...
A.C.R.O.N.Y.M.
No project, program, or initiative can be considered real until it’s chosen its acronym, or had one chosen for it. X-TRM effort gets expended creating every proposal, to mint what will seem the perfect coin; pocket change intended to buy everything the effort aspires to be (EEA2B), while avoiding anything inadvertently embarrassing (AAIE); a plugged nickel.
A newcomer to one program noticed that their Master Yearly Program Plan (which she humorously pronounced My Pee Pee) was, in fact, quite a bit larger than other programs’ annual master program plans. No old-timer on that team had noticed their joke until the new kid showed up.
The acronymization of project work is not a new phenomenon. It’s as old as project work itself. I suspect that even the ancient Egyptians, understandably eager to avoid chiseling into stone any more hieroglyphs than absolutely necessary, resorted to abbreviations whenever possible. But our age has taken the practice to new X-TRMZ creating wholly new dialects for every effort.
Slip over here for more ...The Invisible Hum
This was humbling news. My copyright clearly designated ownership, but gave me no protection against unscrupulous operators. So, I called up my ex-partner and told him that I would make a point of telling prospective clients to watch out for him, as he was a pirate. “If you do that, I’ll sue!” he sputtered. “Great,” I thought, then my insurance will cover the cost of litigation, and I will most certainly win.”
Turns out that there’s a ton of law against unscrupulous operators, but exercising the rights granted under those laws gets problematic. Anything I create could be swiped at any time, and I’m unlikely to even know about it, let alone have actual recourse. Now, the monied segment of the content industry lobbies Congress to pass new stricter laws to ‘prevent intellectual property piracy.’ Might as well throw in a rider banning lustful thoughts while they’re at it. Slip over here for more ...
The Pleasing Paradox
I recently worked with a group that was trying hard to make their customers happy. Their customers were, likewise, also focused upon making their customers happy. The whole place felt self-sacrificial, as if the key to success could be found in doing whatever it takes to please others. No one seemed terribly happy with the results.
They were playing into The Pleasing Paradox. Studies have shown that the most satisfied customers have had one or more disappointing experience with their service provider. Recovery creates more satisfied customers than flawless delivery ever does.
The challenge is to be of service without becoming servile. We shouldn’t elevate any customer to the role of superior being, but treat each with human respect.
Human respect does not involve treating others as if they were superior or defining your self through their expectations just because they're paying the bill. Human respect means being responsible, not overly responsible— a curious form of irresponsibility. Don’t cut others' meat for them.
Human respect demands that I respect myself so that I can respect others. Whenever I take that humbling step down and backwards, I can lose my own self respect, and thereby forfeit my ability to really respect—or be of real service—to anyone else. When I can engage with my customer as a peer, we both seem more satisfied with the result.
Slip over here for more ...Speaking of Ethics
The Silver Spring PMI meeting pre-show, Wednesday, 11/9, 5:30pm, Blair Mansion Restaurant at 7711 Eastern Avenue, Silver Spring, MD 20912
Act always so as to increase the number of choices.
The Ethical Imperative, Heintz von Foerster
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that one cannot speak of ethics. They are too personal, too situational, too fuzzy. Yet we are exhorted to perform ethically. What does that mean in practice?
In practice, we might not feel very much like philosophers, yet ethics has for centuries been the meat and potatoes of philosophy.
Ethics might best be thought of as choices that matter. How should one choose? Slip over here for more ...
Going There
Before I'd been there and back again, I'm certain that no explanation, no matter how complicated or complete, could have taken me there. As if I didn't have language yet, only after I'd gone there was the concept of there a meaningful distinction.
But then I catch myself doing what simply does not work. I explain, in varying levels of passion and patience, what I experienced going there. My stories do not fall on deaf ears. They find ears perfectly capable of hearing and comprehending every single, well-chosen word. Even so, they do not seem to understand what I intend.
It might be the case, as I've heard others say, that the difference between understanding going there and not lies in some personally transforming experience. Only this, some claim, can create the proper context for understanding. And, as K.D. Laing said over a generation ago, "Those who don't know what they don't know, think they know." Those who have not been there and back again, probably think they've already been there and back again when they've only read about it or heard about it or seen someone else's there-and-back-again experience in some movie.
Slip over here for more ...Duh-fficiency
[Drawing from the May 14, 1911 New York World, reporting on best-selling author and The Father of Scientific Management, Frederick W. Taylor’s after dinner speech at the American Bookseller’s Association convention.)
A hundred years ago, the world was in the middle of going crazy again. It’s not profound to notice that the world goes crazy sometimes, but this crazy was special. Usually, these insanities disappear quickly. This one did not. It managed to worm its way into our DNA and replicate until today, this crazy has become the accepted benchmark for sane.
What was this insanity? Efficiency. Slip over here for more ...
Projects As Reflexive Systems
University Seminar on Reflexive Systems
Tuesday, January 18, 2011 from 10:00 am-12:00 pm
Funger Hall, Room 620
2201 G Street NW
PROJECTS AS REFLEXIVE SYSTEMS
David A. Schmaltz
What do you do when you don’t know what to do?
In our society and culture, we seem to start projects when we don’t know what else to do. Fewer than half of these ever finish. Of those that do finish, only a small percentage manage to satisfy anyone. Just last month, the OMB recommended that another raft of government-sponsored information technology projects be cancelled after expending tens of millions of dollars while producing nothing of discernible value. In private industry, no one reports just how sorry their project performance is. The truth would certainly panic the investing public.
The last fifty years has seen the greatest expansion in project management techniques in the history of the world, yet project performance is no better, and might well be worse. How could this be? This situation might reflect nothing but human nature; to pose a metaphor, then get trapped within it; to improve by insisting upon even more of the same perspectives that created the difficulty in the first place; to begin even more hopefully again, as if intention or will determined success. This seems to be what we’ve done when we didn’t know what to do. I believe we could we do better.
Small Fraud
Splice of Life
One author reported that most people are more productive when working behind closed doors. Others insist upon pairing, sharing workspaces. Some cube just fine. Others, not. Some counsel focus, fuzzy or clear. The distracted praise procrastination. Heads-down, hands-on people insist that you really should just get 'er done. All exhort the elusive 'flow.' I doubt that we will ever see the end of well-intended, largely useless advice.
I find myself flourishing under each, and sometimes none of these schemes. Fortunately, I rarely have the luxury of getting to choose. When I plan a day in splendid isolation, the danged phone rings. When I'm suffering through an endless day of mind-numbing isolation, not only does the phone refuse to ring, nobody's there when I try to call my usual lifelines.
We work, it seems, in fits and starts. Some days more fit than others.
Slip over here for more ...Spare-Time Successful
This year, though, I'm reflecting on just how much progress the pre-mature profession of project management has managed to make. Today, more projects are managed by non-professional 'project managers' than are managed by professional ones. And I am grateful for this humbling fact. Slip over here for more ...
Taylorism Transcended
His premise insisted that disciplined observation would yield improved understanding, an application of a basic scientific principle. He believed, as any progressive must, in the possibility for a vastly improved future. That he chose to 'drive' his method when he could not convince others (workers and executives) of its goodness, says more about his personal desperation than it does about the utility of his ideas. One could say that the manufacturing miracle Toyota claims arose from a deeper reading of Taylor rather than a shift further away.
Slip over here for more ...Simple Wisdom
Sweet Dreams
Free Advice
Yesterday afternoon, I heard the latest rehash of these classics on NPR's Marketplace program, where Rosabeth Moss Kantor, herself a NY Times Best selling author and Harvard B-School professor, warmly remembered Peter Drucker's legacy. What would Drucker have to say about the current business climate? Same old, same old. Slip over here for more ...
Confessions of a Stunt Peddler
This one was difficult to complete. Like drawing a self portrait from a fun house mirror image. Who IS that character in there? Is he the genuine article?
Like with any work of art, this construction finally forced my hand. I just had to choose. Wittgenstein once proclaimed that what he'd excluded from a manuscript was just as important as what he chose to include, and that to understand the work, both would necessarily need to be considered. And so it is here.
I believe I've identified some important considerations here, but I've doubtless excluded much more than I chose to include. What would you add if it was your hand etching the portrait of a stunt peddler, or a former one?
Paranoia Strikes Deep
I might have never yet touched the face of any God, but I've shaved my share of them; bare blade barely separating achievement from ideal. These experiences were at least as humbling as elating, and no one else, no matter how close the shave, could feel the turbulence this perennial test pilot always feels.
My best work always scares the Hell out of me, and should.
Slip over here for more ...Certified Complete Idiot
According to an official in a company closely related to the organization, the
Project Management Institute will announce next week the creation of a totally new professional certification, CCI™, the Certified Complete Idiot designation. Slip over here for more ...Industrial Scale
What they're finding out there today is really no different than what their great grandfathers found: employers capable of insisting upon unconscionable irony. People struggling to hum along to tunes they do not really believe in.
Slip over here for more ...Jazz
He illustrates innovation by improvising on a piano. He plays the standard transcribed melody to an old standard and relates this to business process. The result sounds wooden and lifeless. Then he improvises around the transcription and the result is transforming.
He plays a random series of notes, explaining that while this 'melody' might well be creative, it's not satisfying. Satisfaction... in both innovation and music ... requires respect for a few basic rules of construction, principles of harmony, rhythm, and tone. The manager's job involves letting go, removing barriers, and helping people believe in the objective.
1595
Unchained Melody
Interesting piece in a recent American Scientist on the critical importance of metaphor to the forward progress of science. While objective observation and rigorous measurement are important to science, narrative and metaphor are no less crucial. It is through translating discoveries into stories that real meaning and real understanding emerge for the author no less than for the reader.
Metaphors paint pictures we can see, and imagine ourselves stepping into. Arguably less real than the science bits, they unchain the door to deeper understanding. Even science depends upon myth-making and story-telling to make real progress.
Mangled Apple Pie
"When I ask a project manager to describe her ethics, I usually get a bit of mumbled motherhood and some mangled apple pie. Sometimes fife and drum music wafts in the distant background. I ask to encourage her mindfulness, not to test her knowledge of what’s wrong and right. I couldn’t possibly know for her, and neither of us are situated, in that moment, to choose exactly what either of us should do. I am genuinely curious, though, how she will go about choosing when that moment comes."The final installment of my series considering The Ethical Responsibilities of Project Work appeared last week in Projects@Work. Slip over here for more ...
Tickle Point
We're all familiar with the concept of Tipping Point, that point in a progression where one trajectory turns into another, cannot help but turn. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a bestseller about it. He spoke of mavens and connectors and social networks and transformation. Where word of mouth transformed unknowns into unforgettables. This posting isn't about Tipping Points. Slip over here for more ...Economies of Snail
TuneSmithing
I mention this duck because I've been deeply considering what it is that I do, and as usual, this reflection leaves me feeling like an odd duck. Slip over here for more ...
In Praise Of Meaningless Work
For much of my working life, I have been a strong advocate for meaningful work. I've claimed that work quality improves whenever personal purpose gets involved. I've helped people imprint on the greater good and encouraged them to find their project within their project assignment. But today, I want to sing the praises of an under-appreciated kind of work, meaningless work.
Slip over here for more ...The Multitasking Myth
Standard-Eyes-ing Agile Practices
An excerpt from a recent posting I made on the AgileProjectManagement Yahoo! Discussion Group, in response to a query about standardizing Agile practices. A perfectly reasonable-seeming thing to do.
Black Swans
Cube Farm
Nullius in Verba (Nobody's Word Is Final)
Physicist Freeman Dyson is writing again. This time about global warming and the secular religion of environmentalism. What I found most interesting about this article, which is actually a review of two books, is the characterization of science and economics, echoing Mark Gray's notion of physics envy—that every social science is jealous of the mathematical precision and replicability of physics.
Play Ball!
The final installment of my Unlearning Project Management series was posted this morning on the
Projects@Work Executive Briefing site. The posting also features links to the first five installments.What did I unlearn in the process of writing this series? Two months ago, when I started writing this series, I was smoking about ten exquisite little cigars every day. Just after I finished the third installment, I stopped smoking. For unlearning, I highly recommend this strategy: First, start smoking. Smoke pretty steadily for five or six years, then decide to stop.
Slip over here for more ...The Lake Wobegone Effect
The problem is that we believe we have a problem.
Slip over here for more ...Breaking the Galilean Spell
Whatever else you're reading, you just gotta read
this. It's gorgeous!!Discovering Your Wisdom
Read that posting before you read this one, to get the contiguous story!
... ...
Finally, we invite people to bring themselves to the workshop. Not the role you play or the title you display, but your shoes-off self. To arrive skeptical if you are skeptical. Optimistic if you are optimistic. Curious if you are curious.
We invite you to bring yourself to the workshop because I noticed, after attending many workshops, that I usually didn’t show up. I sent who I was supposed to be in my stead, and this surrogate postured and posed, and stayed in his head where no situated learning could really penetrate. If managing projects is a continuing act of self discovery, then bringing your self to the effort seems necessary, essential.
Slip over here for more ...What Everyone Should Understand About True North’s Mastering Projects Workshop
To claim uniqueness, however, does not explain much. This description might elicit many different negative comparisons, such as, “it is almost, but not entirely unlike this other workshop.”
How is this workshop unique? Most project workshops focus attention upon transferring explicit how-to skills: how to plan, how to track progress, how to control execution, and how to build a team. They focus upon the transfer and acquisition of explicit knowledge without ever considering how it is that one goes about acquiring and actually using that knowledge. Slip over here for more ...
Mapping Human Relationships2
Mapping Human Relationships
Thanks, again, to each of you who commented on my Relational Work Manifesto. Since posting that, I have been thinking about how one creates maps of these relationships. Of course, trapped in the mechanical mindset, I started looking for physical amendments to the tired, potentially trueish PERT or GANTT representations before recalling that this different order of 'relating' might well demand a different typology for the mapping, too.The challenge might be not to create coherent tacit maps, but to accept that they are creatable. We can and do create these, though not always deliberately and mindfully. Years ago, in a book entitled The Politics of Projects, an explicit mapping was proposed, rather like data mapping. I thought then that the relationship, political side of projects was mutli-faceted, encompassing too many dimensions to display in two or three dimensional space. But our minds are not bound to these few dimensions. How to employ this facility?
In our Mastering Projects Workshop, we've employed several different techniques for side-stepping the usual urge to jump right into task definition and requirements discovery, under the belief that projects are usually better served by understanding their present context first, before they start describing their future or the path there in any detail.
Organizational Insurgency
More often, a better idea confronts an entrenched one. Asking for permission to change typically results in permission being denied. What's a good soldier to do?
I've started gathering stories of Organizational Insurgents and their Insurgencies. Before you start calling me a terrorist or a supporter of terrorists, I'll point you to the dictionary, where insurgency is defined as:
“Insurgency: the quality or state of being insurgent; specifically: a condition of revolt against a government that is less than an organized revolution and that is not recognized as belligerency. Latin insurgent- to rise up, from in- + surgere to rise.” (from Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary)Following is a first story. I'm gathering more. If you have one you'd like to share, please contact me. I think there's a pattern of successful insurgencies. Could be useful to tease it out. Slip over here for more ...Deming Died Disappointed
I'm with you. This idea upsets me greatly and doesn't, on the face of it, seem to describe how we produce output in companies today. Joel, you note that much of this already happens, and I agree with you. And if we closely investigated how Hoover Dam actually WAS built, we might be surprised at how much of what I tried to describe happened even there.
My invitation: Observe what you do for a week. Watch how much of what you do depends upon unplanned and unplannable exchanges.
Here's a little poem to guide the inquiry.
Slip over here for more ...Relational Work - A Manifesto
We live in a time immersed in a culture focused upon processes. I believe this is a fundamental misinterpretation, one which causes many of its own shortcomings.
I warmly appreciate Gregory Howell and his colleagues for pointing out an obvious truth: the metaphor we unselfconsciously use to guide our work is faulty. We see work as a series of disembodied input-process-output processes, though much of the work we engage in these days cannot be effectively characterized in this way. How we think about work influences everything.
How would it be if we characterized work as primarily relational rather than primarily transformational. In this frame, work is the product of interacting relationships, not compliance with disembodied processes. Each is free, within ethical boundaries, to engage in offer-bid-accept trades intended to achieve results. How they engage, when they engage, and to a very large part how they produce results is in the individual trader’s hands, understanding that the future viability of the community depends upon sustaining relationships, not simply fulfilling a current need.
I invite you to join this consideration. I need your help, whether that comes as biting criticsm or encouragement. Consider how this frame of reference might change the work you do and we’ll talk.
Slip over here for more ...
Replies: Monoculture, Corporate Culture, and Cultural Change
When efficiency become the purpose, purpose is gone
When low cost becomes the purpose, purpose is lost.
When conformity, consistency, and sameness become the first measure of goodness,
All goodness is gone.
Mistake the measure for the purpose, the process for the result, the glossy cover for the book,
and you’ll never find meaning in literature again.
Purpose lives beyond tomorrow, over the foreseeable horizon, in a dreamland banned from the bottom line.
Without it, every bottom line is meaningless.
With it, the bottom line today rarely matters.
Monoculture, Corporate Culture, and Cultural Change
So what is corporate culture? According to Randall S. Hansen, Ph.D., “Corporate culture is a broad term used to define the unique personality or character of a particular company or organization, and includes such elements as core values and beliefs, corporate ethics, and rules of behavior.” Corporate culture thus guides how we think, act, and feel in our work environments. So understanding corporate culture is important because it affects us in many ways, such as hours worked per day or week, how you dress, whether you polish your nails or not, training and professional development, how people interact and corporate expectations. Slip over here for more ...
Monoculture
Innovative Minds DON'T Think Alike
Dyslexia - Learning "disability" entrepreneurial ability?
Finally some evidence explaining why those exceptional entrepreneurial project managers, the ones who seem to do everything wrong and still create remarkable results, manage to succeed. Perhaps they don't do it right because they can't follow the schematic or pass the certification test, but they succeed because they develop compensating abilities that, in situations requiring rapid adaptation, more than compensate for their "disabilities."Slip over here for more ...
Letter from Europe
Dutch Masters
We came here because someone read the Dutch translation of The Blind Men and the Elephant, and emailed to ask if we ever did workshops here. (We did conduct a workshop here last year, but not a Mastering Projects Workshop.) We're open to new experiences, and stopped on our way home from our latest presentation at an ISCT Conference in Vienna to see what we could do to start a community of interest here.
We found Dutch Masters, a term our Dutch friends were unfamiliar with, so I wrote a poem to explain what I meant.
Stumbling Forward
Yes, even giving up. We're not nearly as clever as we might hope to be when it comes to designing our roadmaps into the future. Success stories are written ex post facto, after the success has been realized. Of course they might hope to explain what one should do beforehand to engineer success, but they would have to have been written beforehand, then result in success, to be credible testimony. Slip over here for more ...
Plegaria Ediciones (Prayer of the Student)
I'm learning to lean into these experiences.
Falling Back
I defer the act as long as possible. Slip over here for more ...
Think The Big Dig Was A Failure? Think Again!
Some might be under the mistaken impression that the Big Dig was just a large construction project. It wasn't. Sure, it featured a lot of construction work, much of it stuff that had quite literally never been tried before or never tried on such a scale. But as I've been saying for years and years, the greatest danger in projects, whether they be "construction" projects or "software" projects comes in the label we casually assign to the effort.
McMethod
Slip over here for more ...
Informational Cascade
Slip over here for more ...
What Does Not Work
The approaches outlined below sometimes work. The trouble is that they work just enough to keep us hooked into believing that they work unconditionally. We might never conclude that when continually repeated, they not only don’t work, but most often intensify the very behaviors and attitudes we are trying to change. The following lists contain most of the comments you’ve heard frustrated parents pass to their unruly children. Maybe you’ve heard yourself say these, too?
These approaches fail because they just do not work long term, regardless of your presentation skills, your unassailable logic, or the purity of your motivation. It seems to be a law of human nature: Humans cannot cooperate in the face of continual Unsolicited Lectures, Taking The Moral Highly Ground, Self Sacrifice/Denial, and expectations that say, “You really ought to want to!”
Slip over here for more ...A Post-Modern Parable
On the big day, Toyota won by a mile.
GM, very discouraged, decided to investigate the reason for their crushing defeat. A strategic management team, made up of senior management, was formed to investigate and recommend appropriate action. They concluded that Toyota had 8 non-union guest workers rowing on a twelve hour shift and 1 person steering, while the GM team had to include 4 pensioners who couldn’t row, 4 union employees who were restrained from rowing for more than four hours without a break (and had to comply with union rules limiting latitude for individual judgment), and 8 people steering: administering health plans, pension benefits, and compliance with union and government mandates, and maintaining narrowly-focused shareholder relationships.
Slip over here for more ...
Anthropologie
The anthropology team here also played a major role in what the military called Operation Khyber. That was a 15-day drive late this summer in which 500 Afghan and 500 American soldiers tried to clear an estimated 200 to 250 Taliban insurgents out of much of Paktia Province, secure southeastern Afghanistan’s most important road and halt a string of suicide attacks on American troops and local governors.
Slip over here for more ...
Self Organizing Teams
An example: Set up a conference room into rows of chairs with a center aisle. Dim the lights. Place an open book, perhaps a candle, on a small table at the head of the room. Then invite people into that room and watch what they do. Conversation will hush as they enter. Some will fold their hands in front of them. Ask later why people sat where they sat and and you'll learn that quite a few chose a chair positioned where their family sat in church when they were kids. Were they aware that they were doing that? Most weren't until they reflected on it. Slip over here for more ...
Uncertainty and Dread
Later, I was listening to a book called Dark Star, which tells the story of a Pravda journalist during the run-up to WWII. He, too, was surrounded by cynical certainty seeking to justify unthinkable actions. He lived in dread, too.
Slip over here for more ...
Preparation
Writing isn't always 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. For me, it's often 90% milling around trying to maintain some semblance of self esteem while waiting for inspiration, 1/2 of 1 percent inspiration, and the other 9 1/2 percent mildly pleasing exercise. No sweat at all. Other times it's 100% just doing it. Still other times it's 110% not accomplishing anything at all.
Slip over here for more ...
Designing Projects
Slip over here for more ...
Bring Yourself To Work Day!!
See the Bring Yourself To Work blog for more details
Slip over here for more ...
New Dimensions Radio Broadcast
www.newdimensions.org click on Listen to NDIR now!
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Why Project Managers Can't Manage Projects
Slip over here for more ...
Learning How
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The Panhandler's Paradox
Intricate Choreography
The Lake Webegone Syndrome
The Mean Side of "Lean"
Reading through the management journal summaries in the Economist today, I came across mention of this piece, The Darker Side of Lean, written by an American who worked inside one of Toyota's divisions for three years. Smells interesting.
Slip over here for more ...Thinking Like A Computer
What Gnomes Know
During this time, I catalogued gnomes under the heading of “lawn crap”, which includes anything needing moved before mowing the lawn. I naively included gnomes with such vulgarities as lawn butts, those annoying plywood cutouts that, from a distance, are supposed to look like the bending over backside of fat people. But gnomes add a bit of whimsey to a garden. And gardening, being such serious business, needs whimsey. Slip over here for more ...
Creating Currency
http://www.projectsatwork.com/content/Articles/229538.cfm
I finished part four yesterday instead of watching the Superbowl. But then I've never watched a Superbowl. I don't think I've ever actually watched an entire football game. Doesn't hold my attention, doesn't have any currency for me.
WiFi Wars
Link follows:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0601.podesta.html
Postcard From the Wedge - London, England
∆ >br>London, England
We were supposed to have a quick lunch meeting with the CIO, but a man three seats in front of us on the plane from Vienna had what appeared to be a heart attack, so our flight made an emergency landing in Frankfurt. Then we had to reclaim our baggage and rebook onto a later flight out of Dusseldorf, so we made a frantic call. Slip over here for more ...
Postcard From The Wedge ∆ - Frankfurt, Germany
∆ >br>Frankfurt, Germany
I was sick. We’d carefully planned the workshop. I was the lead dog. Amy was playing backup.
So I had a responsibility to deliver on my commitment. But just before noon on the third day, feeling as though I had spent the morning trudging through chest-deep snow, I bailed out. Slip over here for more ...
∆ Postcard From The Wedge - Vienna, Austria
I found my driver waiting for me just outside baggage claim. He held a sign, “Dr. (they call me doctor there) David Schmaltz”, so I approached him and identified myself. The man standing next to him held a similar sign, “Dr. (they call Amy doctor, too) Amy Schwab,” and Amy tried to explain that she didn’t need a separate ride. But her driver spoke little English, clarified that she was, indeed, Amy Schwab, took her rollaway, and headed for the garage. My driver and I followed.
We took separate cabs to the same hotel. Amy felt kidnapped.
Slip over here for more ...
Ready or Not
The Autistic Organization
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