Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Projects to reduce work, production, or consumption should reduce costs. This corresponding reduction in costs, however, rarely occurs. Instead, an increase in cost often happens. Please be attentive to what you are doing and watch for this contrary behavior. There are many things than many people want to reduce. Consider body weight. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The familiar is comfortable. The comfort, however, sometimes hides risk and impending doom. Take care. I have been on the road for two weeks walking mostly through rural Alabama. This weekend I am in Tuscaloosa. This is a university town, so it differs from most of the places I have been. I […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Customers don’t always act like responsible customers. Managers don’t always act like responsible managers. This is the real world, and often less-than-adult behavior exists. Sometimes you soothe people by giving them something they really want, even if it isn’t good for them. Here is a true story. I was the engineer. I […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Some musings about personal spending and saving. I’ve never been a good consumer. By that I mean that I have never consumed enough. It seems that the American economy in the past half-dozen decades has been driven by consumers. The more people consume, the more jobs there are for producers who then […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Managers often start things that they cannot sustain. Great endeavors begin with gusto, but fade away quietly. I dislike these. There are ways around the continual disappointment of the unsustainable. I’ll never forget the evening. My dad had pulled out his slide projector (in case your are too young to recall these […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Handwriting is not dead. It lives on despite the computer age. Cursive, however, is on the way out, and I for one am happy to see it go. (Start writing comments about how bad a person I am) Time magazine mourns the death of handwriting. That is a nice headline, but I […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Most organizations have “magic words.” Utter these words and things happen. If you don’t know the words, work slows and frustration rises. None of this makes any sense, but nonsense continues to exist and often thrives. Years ago, a colleague who lived in a nearby rural area wanted to construct a building […]

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by Dwayne Phillips It is easy to draw incorrect conclusions on cause and affect in organizations. One of the major reasons for these bad conclusions is time. Good organizations will succeed and bad ones will fail in time. I have yet to find a way to predict how much time that is. Google is in […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Shortcuts have always led to more work for me, not less. The past two weeks have emphasized that to me. They have also taught my a new definition to “shortcut.” Sorry, there is no magic here. Wiktionary.org: A path between two points that is faster than the commonly used paths; A method […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The computer has become the learning appliance. Don’t believe me? Just ask my six-year-old niece. So what do schools do now? “What are you searching?” That was a simple question. Last weekend I was in Chattanooga, Tennessee visiting with relatives. I was sitting in front of my portable computer studying and modifying […]

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