Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Quick, read the following and agree or disagree:

Smart people are wrong more often than stupid people.

I believe the above is true. It seems that smart people read, study, think, and propose ideas more often than stupid people. Stupid people seem to sit around and choose-your-own-stupid-activity (e.g. watch TV, surf the net, take a nap…).

An example with some numbers.

Smart Person:

• 5% error rate
• 1,000 proposed ideas
• Wrong 50 times

Stupid Person:

• 20% error rate
• 100 proposed ideas
• Wrong 20 times

See, the smart person is wrong more often than the stupid person.

Consider this the next time you wish so-and-so would stop with the wrong ideas.

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 was talking to a customer about their requirements.

Me: What are your requirements?

Customer: I need a new digital camera.

Me: What is it that you are trying to do?

Customer: I need a new digital camera.

Me: What is your desired end state?

Customer: I need a new digital camera.

It didn’t matter what I asked. The customer always answered:

Customer: I need a new digital camera.

by Dwayne Phillips

Analysis paralysis is where I sit and think a long time about what I should do. I recommend against such. Instead, experience has taught my that in most cases the best thing to do is one thing, and then the next, and then the next.

This has happened to me about a thousand times in my life. I walk into a situation with a thousand things to do (fatigue often brings hyperbole).

What do I do next?

I actually studied this situation in college. It was in a class on computer operating systems. One of the biggest jobs of an operating system is to select what task to do next. (Surprised? Yes, this is actually the case despite all the pretty pictures, sounds, videos and other things that companies tell you their operating systems do.)

An operating system can do the next task based on

• size
• time to execute
• priority
• time the task has been waiting

and all other sorts of attributes and combinations of attributes.

That was a great class to have taken. (Note, to have taken not to take. I hated the class at the time.) I learned that there are different ways to schedule tasks. There are different answers to that nagging question

What do I do next?

Outside of the billion-operations-per-second world of computers and back into the real world of my mundane existance, I have learned a good-enough answer to this question:

Just do something.

Hmm. That answer doesn’t appear so impressive, but it has worked for me. In most cases, it isn’t critical that I do the most important thing first. If  just do something now, then the next thing, then the next thing…I am okay.

One short example. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (not hyperbole, believe me) I walked into a storage room. Well, not exactly. I could barely open the door of the room because everything in the room was piled on the floor. The room was lined with storage shelves, and the shelves were empty.

“A few days,” I thought, “and I will have this place in shape.”

• I picked up one item from the floor and placed it on a shelf.
• I picked up the next item from the floor and placed it on the shelf.
• I picked up…

When the floor was empty of items I looked at my day-date watch. I had worked in the storage room for one hour. It was all done in one hour. Just do one thing, and then the next, and then the next.

I could tell many stories just like this one. The outcome was always the same. Just do something, and then the next, and the next, and I will be okay.

by Dwayne Phillips

People accomplish most of the work on projects. People don’t need to know every tiny detail from me. They are good at filling in the gaps themselves. Rounding off the details is fine in all work where people play a large role.

I am not a mathematician – I am an engineer. I recall in college how myself and my engineering friends would drive our mathematician friend crazy. We would round off numbers after a few decimal places. We would drop everything in a series after the second coefficient because the rest weren’t important. I mean, the math guy would really go crazy about that simplification. Those extra points, those extra coefficients – they didn’t matter to us.

Years later, I moved into managing engineering projects. I saw people using spreadsheets and predicting a one-hour task that was to occur five years into the future with five or six digits of precision. At first, I thought they were joking. They weren’t. They actually copied the six-digit number from the spreadsheet to their briefing. And no one in the briefing room laughed. I didn’t and still don’t understand.

Six-digit precision in projects isn’t worth the effort of typing the numbers. People are involved in projects; people fill in the gaps. Smart people are really good at filling in the gaps. I am not advocating just letting things go wherever they might. I advocate allowing good, smart people to do the jobs for which they were hired and are paid. People can do wonderful things if you let them. Tell them the goal; tell them the budget; tell them what you want, but don’t tell them to report their progress to six decimal places.

by Dwayne Phillips

Much has changed in computers in the past 30 years. Something that has not changed is that the input/output part of the computer is paramount. See, for example, the iPhone computer.

It was in the dark ages of computing back in 1978. I was taking a class in assembly language programming for the IBM 360. (For the young, see footnotes at the end of this post.) The textbook had been written by the head of the computer science department (also see footnote). At the start of each chapter, the author placed cute little quotes from people.

At the start of the chapter on input/output statements was something like this:

All that computing power doesn’t mean a thing if you can’t input/output.

You see, back in these dark ages, we were taught over and over that a computer had three basic parts:

1. the processor
2. the memory
3. the input/output

At the time, I knew an engineer working for IBM. I asked him about this input/output stuff. He confirmed the quote. “Anyone,” he assured me, “could make a processor, but no one could make input/output devices like IBM.”

Thirty years later, I still agree with the quote from the textbook. Intel makes the processors these days. Lots of people make the memory devices. Regardless, the input/output is still the most important. It is too bad that IBM is no longer the king of input/output. The new king is Apple.

Look at the iPhone. It is a computer comprising

1. the processor
2. the memory
3. the input/output

I don’t know what kind of processor my iPhone has. I cannot remember how much memory it has (I checked, 16GigaBytes which is 1,000 times more memory than the university’s mainframe computer in 1978). I do know about the input/output of my iPhone. It has

1. touchscreen
2. color graphics
3. camera
4. radio (cell phone)
5. speaker
6. microphone
7. GPS

I am probably missing some things in this list. The newer iPhones also have a compass which enables augmented reality applications – a big deal. These input/output devices have turned the computer from a large metal thing in an air-conditioned room into a powerful appliance I keep in my pocket.

Thirty years later, that statement buried in a lost textbook remains true:

All that computing power doesn’t mean a thing if you can’t input/output.

FOOTNOTES:

Assembly language was something we used before C to do things efficiently on computers. The IBM 360 was a big computer that banks and lots of other big businesses used.

Lo and behold, I found the textbook available from Amazon.com. A used version is available for one cent. A pretty good investment in computing history, “Assembly Language Programming and the IBM 360 and 370 Computers,” by Walter G. Rudd.

by Dwayne Phillips

A quick note about the writing aspects of the movie “Julie and Julia.”

I took my wife to see the movie Julie and Julia this past weekend. My wife is an avid cook, so this movie attracted her (the last movie we saw was the action-packed District 9 – she didn’t like that one).

Julie and Julia is about cooking celebrity Julia Child and blogger Julie Powell. My wife liked the cooking and the relationships. I liked the movie as both central characters were struggling with writing books. Common obstacles that both characters encountered:

• How long is long enough for a book?
• When do you stop writing?
• Are you a “writer” if you are not “published?”
• How do you keep your blog from interfering with your day job?
• What should the title of a book be?
• When do you say “no” to a publisher and start all over looking for another one?
• What do you do when a co-author doesn’t contribute much?
• How do you manage to stay married in all this?

Again, I liked the movie. The food looked good, the couples were funny, and it was about writing – not cooking (at least in my humble opinion).

Now one day we will discuss the merits of District 9.

by Dwayne Phillips

I am working a on process improvement this week. I wish I could state a brilliant insight. Alas, all I have is, “let’s try harder.” That reduces to having good people spend the time necessary to do a task well.

Blogs don’t always announce breakthroughs in any field of endeavor. Let’s downgrade that one:

Blogs rarely announce breakthroughs in any field of endeavor.

This blog post is more in line with, “Of course, everyone knows that.” I have noticed a funny thing about these everyone-knows-that practices:

People rarely practice the everyone-knows-that practices.

Case in point: my organization wants to do a better job at answering requests for proposals with proposals to garner new business. We have done okay at this in the past, but to grow the business we need to do better. I am working on a process improvement project. Trying to learn how we can respond to our customers better.

Guess what?

If we try harder, we do a better job.

I told you this was one of those everyone-knows-this practice. There is a lot that goes into “trying harder.” Some of what comprises trying harder are:

• Read requests as soon as they arrive
• Start working on proposals as soon as the requests arrive
• Have people who understand the customer work on the requests
• Have people who write well and quickly write the proposals
• Make decisions in enough time to allow people to write a good proposal
• Think a lot
• Treat your people well

Most of this comes to a central point:

Trying harder means devoting time.

Time is expensive, but not having any future business is also expensive. We will have to work a lot of overtime or hire good people to work on these things. Unpaid overtime is always an option, but I don’t advocate that.

Conclusion: trying harder is simple, but hard.

by Dwayne Phillips

A recent manager wrote his thoughts in the air with his finger. There was some good, some bad, and some annoyances with this habit. But, as with most things people do, there was plenty to learn.

I worked on a short project recently where the project manager wrote in the air. To emphasize a point, he literally moved his pointer finger through the air like a pencil spelling what he said in the air.

Needless to say, what he wrote in the air disappeared quickly. There is no magic whiteboard in the air; there wasn’t even any fog in the air to provide a lingering view of his writing. It went away as soon as he wrote it.

There is some good to his words disappearing so quickly. Most of his words, frankly, were not worth remembering let alone being recorded for posterity. I was happy to have them go as soon as they were written.

There is also some bad to his words in the air. Sometimes he would start by, “I’ve got it. This is really important.” Then her would state a list of eight or ten things to be done and how to do them. He finished with, “You got it? Okay, now go do it.” My protests of, “Wait, could you write that on paper or something?” fell to the floor as he had bolted from the room no doubt to hypnotize some one else in some other room with his finger dancing through the air.

There was also some annoyance about his writing in the air. After the first half dozen times I was no longer amused. This short project comprised 10 or 13 days of working 10 to 13 hours each day including the weekends. Fatigue has a way of making otherwise eccentric behavior downright irksome.

But there is some good to having temporary thoughts be recorded in a temporary manner. Projects have been ruined by some “thinking out loud” that was scribbled on a white board and then emblazoned with “DO NOT ERASE” next to them. Thinking out loud is fine as a technique to generate ideas, but I have found it to be un-erasable only on rare occasions. Most of the manager’s air writing was recording temporary thoughts, so it was good that it was written in a very temporary manner.

by Dwayne Phillips

There are various techniques to start a piece of writing. One involves copying the words of another writer for a sentence or two until your brain warms and your own words flow. I think of those words as writing seeds.

Staring at the screen with the little cursor bar blinking with a frequency that someone at Microsoft knew was the most irritating Hertz for frustrated writers. Okay, I know the subject matter I am about to describe, but the first sentence or two, what are they? What are they? What are they?

I was writing parts of a proposal at work this last week and I was stuck. Pause. Reflect. Pause again. Reflect some more, but still nothing on the screen. Then it hit me. Writing seeds or page starters or ticklers or some title for what I was about to do. I grabbed a paper I had recently read on the technology concerning the technology we were proposing. Scanning a bit, there it is, that paragraph. I typed the first sentence of the paragraph verbatim. I paraphrased the second sentence of the paragraph. I took off from there and didn’t stop typing words into the document for an hour. Done.

I first learned this technique when in graduate school. Dr. Richard Conners I and were writing an academic paper. We knew the subject matter and basically how we were to describe it, but we were stuck at the first page. I say we, but I was the graduate student and responsible for writing the entire first draft. Dr. Conners. “Wait a minute,” he told me. He then reached into his bookcase and pulled an academic journal, thumbed through the pages, and returned, “Here. Let’s use this one.” He was pointing to a paper that had a similar form to the one we were to write. “Copy this first paragraph and use it as our first paragraph.” I protested mildly about plagiarism and such. “We’ll change it later,” he said, “but copy this to get us started.”

I used the technique several times during the 25 years between that day in graduate school and last week at work. I was re-taught the technique on several other occasions. It was featured in one of my favorite movies “Finding Forrester.” Sean Connery pushed it on Jamal Wallace. Connery, however, didn’t tell him the entire technique about going back and editing to avoid plagiarism. That was one of the major events in the movie. Ooops, a plot spoiler.

I don’t know if there is a name for this technique. I think of it as “writing seeds” or “seeds to help you start writing something that you can’t seem to start on your own.” “Writing seeds” is shorter and easier to remember.

So, if you are stuck at the beginning. One technique, yes there are others, is to type someone else’s words from some other place. Copy a sentence or two or an entire paragraph. Your fingers will be moving, your brain will be warming, and before you know it you are writing on your own. Please remember to go back and edit or attribute the words to the original author. Cheating? I think not. What more tribute can a write give to another writer than to read and use their words?

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 become consumers which spurs producers to hire people who become…and so it goes.

I believed that through my adult life I had been a good consumer. I researched what I was buying and sought the “good deals” like sales and such. Research and comparison shopping only slowed my consuming and increased my savings. I thought those were good things. I have learned that they were “bad for the economy.”

Years ago, I heard a simple formula for “getting rich.” It was,

spend less than you earn for a long period of time.

I am happy to report that formula works. I “am rich” financially in that I have more money saved than I ever believed I would. Over the years our (my wife and my) savings rates have been far above the national average. I have to compliment or convict my wife for being an equally bad consumer. Poor consumerism works much easier if your spouse holds the same skewed belief about consuming and saving.

Here is a link to one article about how saving money instead of spending it is adding to the misery in the economy. People in the article are buying one pair of shoes instead of three. That makes good sense to me as everyone I have met has at most one pair of feet, but such poor consuming is ailing the shoe stores. There is nothing special about this article as it merely appeared near the top of my Google search. From the article:

Government data today showed that the household savings rate rose to 6.9 percent in May (of 2009), the highest since December 1993, as personal spending increased less than incomes. The rate in April 2008 was zero.

Savings rose to 6.9%? That is the highest in 16 years? (Here it comes folks!) My dad used to tell me, “give away ten percent, save ten percent, and live on the rest.” Hence, saving 6.9% isn’t good enough for a bad consumer like me. As an aside – cover your ears those of you in the real estate business – my dad also told me that your home should never cost you more than 25% of your monthly take home pay.

I guess my dad was a bad consumer. There have been times when I thought that my dad’s entire generation comprised bad consumers. Then again, I hear tales of an aunt or uncle here or there who skipped town during the dark of night to avoid the debt collectors, so I can’t stereotype a generation.

Anyways, if at the end of 25 years you want to have more money saved than you ever imagined, my wife and I are one data point that proves these old sayings:

Give 10%, save 10%, never spend more than 25% of take-home pay on housing. Also, drive your cars for eight to ten years as long as they are not costing $1,000 per year in maintenance.

Producers and retailers may disdain you, but there are some personal benefits.