Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Although it is rare that all other things are equal, they can be. This is especially true if there is only one person involved and that one person tries hard. It is difficult to keep all other things equal. The goal is to change just one thing, and observe what happens in […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We have a #1 response of any bureaucracy in the 21st century. Any time a bureaucracy has a flub up (technical term), the response is the same: We will address this item as we change the training. This is the #1 response to any situation in the 21st century. Gosh. At least […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Twitter and the World Cup show that the world changed. Most people, didn’t even notice. The world changed. When I show people, they shrug. “Of course. What’s the big deal?” is the usual response. This web page has a story about how 300 million people tweeted about the FIFA World Cup. So […]

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by Dwayne Phillips A change in the behavior of a system means that someone has changed something. We as people, often love to ignore this. Here is a situation I experienced a few years ago in a digital signal processing laboratory. One day, a piece of software didn’t work. A user ran the software, and […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Any change to a situation will change the situation. It is often difficult to discern which came first. When a new person walks into an existing group of people, that group changes. There is no way around this—at least I know of no way around it. To have a new person without […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes, projects and the people working on them lose their way. This is an expression I heard many times over the years. They’ve lost their way. I didn’t understand the expression. I suppose it was one of those grand mistakes that I never assumed people would make, but time showed me over […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes the key to doing something better is really quite simple. Over the years I have improved various things in my life. People ask me, How did I improve my handwriting from awful to neat? How did I improve my grammar and punctuation? How did I improve my fiction writing? How did […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Automation is replacing human jobs. Sorry. That is bad news for people who want to work, and there is no way around it. Such is the nature of today’s new technologies. In recent centuries, new technology arrives and displaces workers. Those unemployed eventually find jobs in new industries that build and maintain […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I read a classic management text. It is as true today as it was in 1969. When in college in the mid-1970s (yes, I am that old), an English professor spoke about the Peter Principle. This was a relatively new concept about how people rise to their level of incompetence. Work was […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Those people who love you the most, may try hardest to stop you from becoming something you want to become. I recently read a blog post about how your friends and relatives may try to stop you from becoming a writer.  This is not a surprise, and it does not speak badly […]

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