Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips We hate to admit it, but we are here and now because of our past actions. “How did we get here?” bemoans a person currently caught in some quicksand of life. The answer is, “Out steps brought us here.” Another answer is, “The system is the way it is because we made […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Is faster or slower better or worse? Or is it simply different timing and rhythm? And are there advantages to changing the timing and rhythm? This past week I was in an office in a different city. Frustration, angst, and generally a lousy week of poor productivity. Just before the week ended, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The most difficult thing about the agile and similar approaches is the zero-th step. “I’m aren’t sure about this.” Let’s take small steps and learn as we go. Let’s not reach too far and make too costly a mistake.This is the agile manifesto stated another way. There is nothing new here; we […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Jumping from one thing to the next may appear to be a lack of focus when it really is a lack of foresight. We’re working on this great thing. It took longer than we thought to build it. As we came close to finishing, rats, we quit because we realized that this […]

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by Dwayne Phillips It is usually my loss when I form a first impression of another person. “You only have one chance to make a first impression.” Blah, blah, blah, and on we go. Most of the cliches about first impressions tend to put the burden of work on the new person trying to make […]

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by Dwayne Phillips In which I consider what happens in a kitchen and ask, “what was it those guys with the manifesto invented?” For years, my wife has managed kitchens in all-volunteer organizations. For years before that, my wife’s mother did the same. Consider the situation: There is unprepared food There is an end-state—prepared food […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We will change and improve the situation to improve our products and services to better satisfy our customers…as long as… Change for the good is good. Hey, it is great. Notice, I am writing about change that IS going to improve our situation and WILL help us better satisfy our customers. I […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Facebook was the end of the old media. Facebook didn’t start the downfall, but it ended it for good. Mark Zuckerburg recently released a new manifesto for Facebook. The mainstream media is dead. Facebook didn’t kill that big, bad, old mainstream media, it just finished it. Of all things, talk radio on […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We are here; we are gone. Sorry, others will forget us. I’m sorry, but it will be forgotten, and I will be forgotten as well. Sure, computer technology can store my life, but someone has to pay attention, and that is where it falls apart. In some library somewhere are copies of […]

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by Dwayne Phillips First you work on a small problem set. Once you learn from that, you expand the problem set. Google recently started hiring speakers with accents to help train its speech recognition software systems. Why didn’t they do this sooner? Why did they only use middle-America, white-bread Americans, or some other Johnny Carson, […]

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