Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

I finally realize why I can’t watch the news on television: the information flow is relatively slow.

I haven’t watched news on television in years. I stay abreast of the issues of the day via reading from the Internet. I scan probably a dozen major news sites as well as about a hundred blogs every day.

Over the holidays, I spent a week with relatives. They still watch the news on television. I would sit through maybe the first two minutes before I could stand it no longer and would leave the room. Most of the stories were silly (man bites dog); all the stories were poorly reported.

I realized the problem in this situation: the information flows too slowly on television news, at least too slowly for my taste. A person reporting the news can only speak so fast. I can read or scan text news much faster and in the past several years I have grown accustomed to that speed. Listening to someone read the news hurts my head.

Given the slow speed of speech, the news stations can only report a little news in their 22 minutes (8 minutes of commercials per half hour). The big cable networks state a story and then host an “in-depth discussion of four experts.” Each expert has about two minutes to comment on the story. They speak slowly as well. During the ten-minute discussion I can scan half a dozen well written analyses of the story written from as many countries.

Alas, one day television news may switch to a form of speed speaking or something so that they information flow rises to the standard of the Internet.

by Dwayne Phillips

I receive a Fiskars tool for cutting open those annoying plastic packages.

I often find that the best Christmas gifts of my life are (1) unexpected and (2) inexpensive. Such happened this year. The photo here shows such a gift from this year. It is a cutting tools from Fiskars. It cuts open those annoying plastic packages that companies use these days.

My New FIskars Package Cutter

Perhaps one day, the wasteful and unusable plastic packages will disappear. The world will be a better place on that day. Until then, no worries here as I can cut them to shreds.

by Dwayne Phillips

Some tips from William Zinsser that have helped me as a writer. These tips come from his book, “Writing About Your Life.”

Here are some tips from William Zinsser about writing. They come from:

Writing About Your Life

Marlowe and Company, 1979, ISBN 1-56924-468-5

These tips are for writing memoirs, but I find they apply well to just about any type of writing.

Here’s the advice I give:

Go to your desk on Monday morning and think of some event that’s unusually vivid in your memory…

Call that memory back and write it up. Describe what happened and how you felt about it. What you write doesn’t have to be long: one page, two pages, five pages. But the episode should be complete in itself: one story with a beginning and an end. When you finish it, put what you’ve written in a manila folder and get on with your life: go to work, take a walk, pick up the kids.

On Tuesday morning, do it again…Write up Tuesday’s memory and put it in the folder.

Do that every day…

Keep this up for two months, or three months. Don’t fidget. Don’t be impatient to start writing you “memoir”…Then one day, take all your entries out of the folder and spread them out on the floor…

…you’ll notice that the entries you wrote in the second month are warmer than the ones you wrote in the first month…

…You couldn’t have arrived at the confidence of the second month without doing the stretching exercises of the first month.

There you have it.

1. Write everyday.
2. Write for 6o or 90 days in a row.
3. You will be writing better at the end of the exercise.

by Dwayne Phillips

Often, a seemingly illogical action has logic when something else is in play. One way to learn of what else is in play is to ask.

I have a yellow shirt. Someone gave this to me a few years ago. I hate the yellow shirt because I think the color is awful. I wear the yellow shirt almost every weekend.

Let’s look at these two items one after the other:

1. I hate the yellow shirt.
2. I wear it almost every weekend.

How do I reconcile 1. and 2.? Simple, if I wear the shirt often, it will wear out, and I will throw it away. The hated yellow shirt will be gone.

This makes sense if you accept something else:

I don’t throw away clothes until they are worn out.

This last item, my frugality (a.k.a., being cheap), makes sense to me, but may be seen as silly to many.

This entire situation is an example of something that seems to have no explanation having a logical explanation if there is another item in play. Hence,

if a person is cheap, they will wear a hated shirt often.

There is a big danger in this. My wife might think that I love that color yellow and replace the hated shirt soon after it is worn out and discarded. It would be easy for her to misinterpret my actions. I hope to prevent this by telling her often why I wear the hated shirt. She always replies with, “just throw it away. It was a gift, you didn’t spend a penny on it, and you won’t be wasting money by trashing it.”

There is much right in her words. Maybe one day…

by Dwayne Phillips

Sometimes events don’t occur as I planned. They do, however, lead to what I want. To discover the result, I have to listen to unwelcome messages.

I often receive unwelcome messages. I plan something; I invite people who I believe will benefit from the something, and none of them come.

There are several possible reactions from me:

by Dwayne Phillips

The original Sunday School was a charitable effort to educate children of the poor in England in the 1700s. Given the state of government-funded education in America today, perhaps churches should go back to the original.

I attended Sunday School as a child. In a way, I still attend Sunday School today. That is the name given to Bible lessons conducted in churches across America and elsewhere every Sunday morning.

This is not how Sunday School started. (See Wikipedia for the history of Sunday School.)

In the 1700s in England, rich people educated their children privately. Poor people didn’t educate their children at all. Their kids went to the factory with them 12 hours a day six days a week. Churches started schools on Sunday for these poor children. The goal was to teach reading and writing so that the poor would have better lives.

Now for the controversial part:

I believe that taxpayer-funded, government-administered schools in America are failing large segments of our society, especially children of the poor.

Now for the dreamy-eyed idealistic part:

I think churches in America should open their doors to children of the poor to work with them on reading and writing.

Start at 8 am with breakfast. Teach reading and writing from 9 am until noon. End with a lunch and send the children home. There will be no grades as in K through 12; there will only be performance. When a child can read and comprehend a book, move to the next one. (The McGuffey Readers will suffice.) When a child can write answers to a set of questions, move to the next set.

This would be an enormous undertaking. People would devote enormous resources to the children of other people expecting nothing in return.

Who else would do such a thing but churches?

by Dwayne Phillips

A blink-of-an-eye expert can walk into a situation and point to disastrous mistakes in the blink of an eye.

My wife knows kitchens and what happens in kitchens. She can walk in a kitchen full of people cooking something, and if they are doing something wasteful, she can point to it immediately. She can also instruct the more beneficial way to do it.

I have met other people in my life who have similar expertise in other areas of endeavor. These people have

blink-of-an-eye expertise

I heard this term explained in a class once. I cannot remember who said it. If anyone has heard this before, please comment and tell me who said it to you.

Blink-of-an-eye expertise is something we want on our projects. We don’t need it everyday, but we desperately need it at critical times. We need someone who can spend ten seconds in our project room and say either, “Okay, this is fine,” or “stop right now.”

Since this is a wish-for-something blog post, I shouldn’t stop here. What we really need is an blink-of-an-eye expert who can also pass along the expertise to the rest of us. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could become such experts quickly and painlessly?

Perhaps that how these experts become such experts: painful pasts.

by Dwayne Phillips

Some thoughts on Seth Godin’s idea of “pre digital” and how some places can become “formerly pre digital.”

Seth Godin recently posted thoughts on what he calls “pre digital.” I liked his thoughts. I can punch a few security holes in the example he uses of a hospital emergency room, but that is an aside. I like Godin’s statement:

Perhaps the most critical thing you can say of a typical institution: “That place is pre-digital.”

I interpret the phrase “pre digital” as:

Those people aren’t using the computer and communications technologies available.

Hmm. I find it hard to think of places that do use the computer and communications technologies available. Hence, these pre digital places are the norm.

Any place that exchanges goods and services can become formerly pre digital. Let’s consider grocery shopping as an example.

• I walk into the grocery store.
• My iPhone (or whatever) has a record of all the groceries I have purchased in the last year or ten.
• My iPhone displays a map of the store (transmitted to my iPhone by the store when I entered).
• The map includes the location of all items in the store.
• My iPhone displays the location of the items I usually buy.
• When I put an item in my basket, that item communicates with my iPhone as having been purchased.
• I can remove and “un-purchase” any item at any time.
• I don’t “check out” at a cash register because everything has all ready been registered and purchased.

Is this better? It is for some people at some time. Notice that I don’t have to talk to any other person in the store. That is hell for some people at some times. Also, the system depends on the vast majority of the people being honest. Therefore, it may not work.

by Dwayne Phillips

Good thoughts, hard work, a good team – they are great, but don’t guarantee success in projects. I find yet another television show that illustrates the need for thought and planning.

I have found another television show that I love to hate to watch. It is Alaska Gold Rush on the Discovery Channel. From the web site:

In the face of the economic meltdown, determined men risk everything to strike it rich mining for gold in the wilds of the far north. Todd Hoffman of Sandy, Oregon, along with his father, lead a group of greenhorn miners in search of the American dream and a new frontier.

I want these gold “miners” to succeed as they are in terrible economic trouble at home, and this is their last chance. (See NOTE below for other thoughts.) They are in Alaska for the short summer mining season.

It finally hit me as to why I am attracted to this show; it is a remake of Gilligan’s Island. On that old TV comedy, the seven stranded castaways always had another idea of escaping the island and returning to civilization. Nevertheless, at the end of each episode, reality entered and their idea failed.

That is the center of the Alaska Gold Rush. These well-meaning miners are good people, they work hard, they are ethical, and they don’t seem to have any idea of what they are doing. They try this and that and something else, and in the end, reality bites them.

I worked for many years in government acquisition. Countless times I would visit a contractor that was trying to build something. People would tell me things like:

we have a good team

the guys are working hard

I have a hunch that we are going to make it

I have a good feeling about this

What I didn’t hear was:

We analyzed the situation, here are the facts, and here is a step-by-step plan that will take us from here to the end.

I hear the former statements on Alaska Gold Rush; I never seem to hear the latter.

I don’t know how the second season will end (the final financial make-or-break season for these television celebrities). I hope they find enough gold to pay their mortgages and bills until they can find steady, boring, paycheck-bringing jobs. I have my doubts. After all, Gilligan and the castaways never escaped the island.

NOTE: I am not sure if this is really a make-it-or-bust situation. These guys are being paid something to be on television. One of the miners, received enough publicity during season one with his back pains that Johns Hopkins flew him east and gave him expensive treatments at no cost.

by Dwayne Phillips

As a manager, when an employee provides short, pleasing answers sound all the alarms you have. Ask more questions until you pull usable information from the employee.

Manager: How are things going?

Employee: Fine, okay.

Manager: (thinks to herself) Great! I’ve communicated with the employee, and we are good.

Gosh. How many times have you seen this? What does “fine, okay” mean? Train wreck coming, so move the innocent bystanders way back.

Manager: How are things going?

Employee: Fine, okay.

Manager: Glad to hear that. Now,

1. Tell me three things you can measure that indicate things are going well.
2. Tell me three things you cannot measure, but give you a feeling things are going well.
3. Tell me two things you can measure that indicate things might go badly in the future.
4. Tell me two things you cannot measure, but give you a feeling things might go badly in the future.

Gee whiz, the manager is being sort of tough in this second conversation. Why is she prying so much?

This second example is about the manager pulling information from the employee. “Fine, okay” is not an acceptable answer. Hence, the manager asks and asks and asks until she receives information she can use.

One of the major reasons the manager needs to pull information from the employee is placating. The employee wants to be nice. This problem exists particularly in volunteer organizations. I want to help; I want to be positive, so I give nice, positive answers. “Fine, okay” are nice, positive answers.

Placating is when the employee lives by the creed “you are everything while I am nothing.” Hence, I will provide you with the answer you want to hear, i.e., everything is fine.

If you are a manager, expect employees to placate. Expect employees to give you the answer that they think you want to hear. If you hear a pleasing answer, resist the temptation to smile and go on your merry way.

Pleasing answers should cause bright red lights to flash and big horns to blast.

Dig into pleasing answers. Ask, ask, ask, pull, pull, pull. You will probably feel much better later.