Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

For some reason, some social media pioneers are apologizing for reaching their dreams.

Well, the Russians have done it. They are the smartest persons in the history of the world. They sat back and let others do all the work to create platforms that they, the Russians, could use to control the world. At least that is what I read on the Internet.

And the Russians have some social media pioneers apologizing for their success. Facebook is the most famous one, but Twitter and Google and now Reddit are in on the apologies.

At least Wikimedia seems to understand the situation. They candidly tell everyone, “Of course people edit the content. This is a wiki. People are supposed to edit and add content.”

Why don’t Facebook and the others say the same? Why are they embarrassed for reaching their dreams of creating places where people can add content that is viewable by everyone?

And, by the way, just because someone can write stuff everyone can view does not mean that everyone will view it and anyone will believe it. There are, believe it or not, adults still inhabiting the world.

by Dwayne Phillips

A tough one to define, but we usually know it when we see it. And then we ask, “Why?” Look to the eyes.

I spent a few days in airports recently. I found myself discouraged. The word “sloth” kept coming to mind. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far, away I found a newspaper headline exhorting a people to a campaign against sloth and slovenliness. (The second is actually a word, I found the definition online.)

I suppose the word we use today is “sloppy.” Lots of people wandering, and that is how I describe their gait—wandering, through the airport were just plain sloppy. They were the photo you would see next to the adjective form of sloth in the dictionary.

That definition is: a habitual disinclination to exertion.

Hey, comb your hair. Tuck you shirt in your pants. Tie you shoe laces. Stand up straight.

Wait, did my mother write this blog post? No, but I can see her nodding in agreement.

Let’s step past adornment and go to the crux of the matter. I saw sloth in the eyes. Perhaps it was the expression surrounding the eyes. There were people who needed to change their attire, but they were sharp minded and focused. There were people in three-piece suits (yes, some people still wear these at the airport) who displayed slovenliness.

Perhaps the eyes are the light of the body. Perhaps the eyes either shine with the activity of the mind or blur when a mind is … don’t know what to write here, “dull” comes to the keyboard.

by Dwayne Phillips

We are usually happy to have outsiders walk in and help us. Help, however, comes with our conditions.

We have so much work to do here, we will never catch up. Help? Of course we will accept help. What kind of help? Well, you know, someone like me, just like me, and who agrees with me and how I have been doing things.

I have heard the above dozens of times in my working life. Someone desperately needs help and will eagerly accepts it. There are, of course, a few conditions.

But, what kind of help? Do you need a carpenter, plumber, programmer?

Simple, just send some competent people here. I will let them know what to do when they arrive.

When the helpers arrive, they are given one simple task: the other person’s job for them so the other person can do something else, something they would rather be doing instead of their job.

And how does this I-don’t-want-to-do-my-job so you-do-my-job-for-me person manage this work management? Simple, the helper cannot talk to anyone about what happens here. You know, it is, well, uh, proprietary, trade secrets, that kind of thing. Can’t let it out what happens here.

Need help? Really need help? Or do we just want someone else to do our job for us?

by Dwayne Phillips

Sometimes I wonder what smart people are doing. They must have something happening behind the scenes because smart people can’t be this stupid.

I recently sat in an airliner for about 20 hours during a couple days time. In my past, I did this frequently, but not so much lately. A couple of things I noticed:

1. The seats are smaller
2. The people are bigger

Hmmmm, this doesn’t work. I had the misfortune of sitting next to large people. They spill over into “my space.” Uncomfortable? Yes. Excuse my greed for wanting to keep the space designated to me.

(1) People who design airplanes are pretty smart. I mean, airplanes are not falling out of the sky on an hourly basis. They seem to fly pretty well. Good, smart people are designing and building these things.

(2) People who design airplanes are making the seats smaller and seeing that larger people are boarding the planes. They know what they are designing. They notice the seats are smaller. A N D they notice the people who are boarding the planes and sitting in those smaller seats.

What gives? This is just plain stupid, and smart people don’t often engage in just plain stupid. Some possibilities:

• Market surveys show low price trumps all.
• Market surveys indicate that people will endure anything just to reach a destination quickly.
• No one complains about large people on airplanes.
• Short-term profits over-rule everything.

Perhaps there are more guesses. I don’t know. Please help.

by Dwayne Phillips

Question: Why don’t we address this situation? And I suggest one solution.

Note the clever use of the summary as question and the title as answer. Maybe that isn’t so clever, but I find the actual question and accompanying answer common.

I was recently reading about how engineers and computer programmers might be fungible, i.e., interchangeable. One is just like the other, so if a less-expensive person comes along, fire the more-expensive person and replace the other. Why not? Well, persons are not interchangeable. They have unique qualities that better suit one person for a specific job. So, we know this, why don’t we act like we know it? See title of post.

Our organization has many problems. The root cause of most problems is that persons won’t leave their cubicle, walk 50 feet across the cubicle farm, and talk to another person. Why not? They don’t know how to address situations well. We know the problem, we know the solution…train they so they do know how. Why don’t we train them? See title of post.

I suppose I could continue here with examples of problems for which we don’t implement the known solution. The title of the post explains why we don’t.

Here is one solution: bring in an outsider who does these difficult things for a living. As an outsider, they don’t care if persons don’t like them. That is an overstatement. More accurate is that they don’t have the emotional investment in the persons across the cubicle farm and don’t have the accompanying risk. Low-risk persons are more apt to tackle difficult situations.

by Dwayne Phillips

Often, perceptions and other ghosts cause us to believe things. Go back to a fundamental question.

• The world is coming to an end.
• Nothing is right.
• Everyone is against this.

What else have I told myself? What else did I “know?” All were hunches, perceptions, gut feel, and such. Sigh. All is lost.

Please, stop, breathe, calm, and ask a fundamental question:

What have you seen or heard that leads me to believe this?

Try to move away from the hunch and towards some sort of fact. Yes, there is a place for hunches and gut feelings. Yes, there is a place to discard those and go for facts. Ask the above question. Ask it repeatedly. Ask others the same question. Sometimes the answers confirm the hunch. Sometimes they point the opposite way. Sometimes there are infinite combinations of the two opposites.

Please, ask.

by Dwayne Phillips

Sometimes digging down into the hidden history of a project helps the project crawl out of a hole. And, of course, sometimes not.

I used to do this frequently. I was given a project that had “lost its way” or “fallen out of favor” or simply been left to rot in the file cabinet of life. It became my job to learn what was happening and what to do next.

I called these “project archeological digs.” I would come into the office on a Saturday. I pulled all the files out of the file cabinet (we used paper, file folders, file cabinets, etc. in the last century) and lay them flat on the floor so I could see all of them. This is why I did this on Saturday as no one would walk through and literally step on the project. Next, I would arrange the folders in some logical order—sometimes chronologically, sometimes alphabetically, sometimes by the thickness of the pen strokes on the folder labels (strong, bold, thick pen strokes often indicated importance). Basically,

Disassemble the project so I can reassemble it.

The basic reason for the digging was to learn a few things:

• Why was this project started?
• Who worked the project?
• When did it fall into the dirt?
• Why did it fall into the dirt?
• Who is still sort of working on this project?

Sometimes—I emphasize sometimes as this didn’t always work—knowing how a project fell away helped to find how to bring the project back. Sometimes, all this digging revealed a good reason to terminate the project and stop spending money on it. Projects that linger still consume precious resources.

It is at this point that I write some grand reason for all this. Maybe this won’t be grand, but…

Every organization has projects that are still going, but most persons don’t realize that. These projects are buried, but not terminated. They consume resources. Dig into the history. Find the persons who still care. Use the information of the past to decide the course of the future. This is a difficult and often thankless task. Still, I always found it worth the Saturday morning.

by Dwayne Phillips

Does expertise mean you are focused on a narrow area or that you have become narrow minded?

I recently met with a few persons who all had PhDs. Perons with a PhD tend to know a lot about a little. That is the state of us. We study something in great detail so we can add to the body of knowledge in that little area. Some of us move on to work in fields that are wide and shallow. Some of us continue a deep dive into a confined pool.

Enough of the cliches. It is easy to become narrow minded. It is easy to consider a few things paramount to everything else. It is easy to extend the last sentence to excluding almost everyONE else in life.

Sigh. Focus on topics does not necessarily mean exclusion of persons. Let’s take care with that one. Inclusion of persons often brings breakthroughs in narrow fields.

What is more important is that inclusion of persons is the right thing to do.

by Dwayne Phillips

Instead of trying the magnificent, perhaps we should try something we can accomplish.

Many problems confront us everyday. These are all opportunities to excel. Really, not just for those silly posters, but these are actually opportunities for us to accomplish something and do some good for us and someone else.

It seems that I have worked in large organizations all my adult life. “If we could just gather all these important people in the room, why we could fill-in-the-blank-with-something-magnificent.” Trouble is, we can’t gather all those important people. They are busy elsewhere doing things of import as important people tend to do.

So, what do we do? How about something we can do? Something we can accomplish?

We can gather ourselves, discuss the situation, and find something that moves us in a desired direction. Maybe we won’t move far, but we will move far enough to show someone. Maybe that little movement will satisfy someone, make their job easier. We gain some fans who will support us. We gain some friends.

And—let’s not underestimate the value of this one—we will make the life of someone a little better. That’s pretty good, and we can accomplish that.

by Dwayne Phillips

How to write a computer program when you have no idea how to do it in a new language.

I wrote a computer program this week at work. (oooops, I am supposed to write that I was developing because that is what the job recruiters call it nowadays.) This shouldn’t sound remarkable, but I’m not supposed to write computer programs AND I’m supposed to be so old that I forgot how to do that years ago…so let’s keep that part of the story quiet.

Anyways, how do you write a computer program in the 21st century when you’ve never used the only language available to you? Simple, you Google it.

Yes, that’s it. Go to Google and type something like, “powershell csv read write.” Try to read the answers shown (they were written in blurbs by programmers—ooops slipped again, developers not programmers—developers who had other things to develop), copy, paste, run, and that’s it.

I guess having some background developing helps, but really. Just ask a question and copy the answer. The profession has devolved a bit.