Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips An old political phrase can be applied to just about any endeavor as a test of how awful bad something is. Once again, we are in the time every four years in America when we have the seemingly endless campaign for President of the United States. This year, more than in the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes the system we really use is not the system we tell people we use. “This system won’t work,” said the person whose job it was to analyze a system. But, the system works, i.e., the group of persons using the system that won’t work seem to get along just fine. In […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Let’s curb our enthusiasm about these chatbots and large language models multiplying productivity and costing jobs. I just saw another article about how ChatGPT and the like are being used in yet another field of endeavor with giant gains in productivity. We won’t need half the people we have in the office […]

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by Dwayne Phillips No one lied, they just omitted some information. There are ways to find the omissions and those things are some of the more important pieces of information we need. No one lied, they just omitted a few bits and pieces of information. And, oh, if we had those bits and pieces of […]

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by Dwayne Phillips When problems occur in complex online presentations, those involved struggle to fix the problems. They are invested in the presentation. That investment inhibits thinking. Always bring along an uninvested assistant. I have participated in countless ZoomerTeamer meetings in the past year. Some were simple—a daily chat with a small team of colleagues. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes we skim the surface to gather an overview. Sometimes we dive in deep to discover the details. I like an overview. I like the nitty gritty details. Which do we like? On which day? For me, the overview is easier. I learn the general idea. I tell people that “all I […]

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by Dwayne Phillips When we say, “Let’s not tell them (this yet)…” We have learned exactly what we should tell “them” first. There are the hushed tones. “In this meeting, we want to get across these things, but let’s all keep in mind that we don’t want to tell them about…” This is one variation […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I know what I’m doing. You don’t. I can have fun. You can’t. As a kid, I used to see wild stunts on television. They always prefaced them with, “Don’t try this at home.” Why not? Why could they do things, but I couldn’t? Of course they had years of this and […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Hushed voices in the workplace and what they tell us about our workplace. It happens around me—too often. Several persons near me in the great cubicle farm are talking in a “normal tone of voice.” Then the tone changes. They voices become hushed—almost whispers. My “colleagues” have something to say and they […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The Sticky Note exemplifies the temporary idea. Nothing is a useful and, at the same time, as benign as a temporary idea. I guess you aren’t supposed to write about Sticky Notes. They are temporary by nature. Hmm, temporary. Temporary things seem to ease the fears of many even though these many […]

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