Working Up

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 “Be the Best” is a misguided goal because it is based on other people. A few years ago, I worked for a government agency who proclaimed loudly and often that it was the Best fill-in-the-blank agency in the Federal government. I tried in vain to convince people that was a misguided goal. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips To understand a non-sensical decision, consider the age of the person deciding. It was the early 1990s (yes, I am that old), we were using Cray and other supercomputers (government program, so we had several), and we were interviewing your programmers. They all gasped to learn that we were programming in FORTRAN […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Everyday I select a few teachers. Note, no one else selects them for me. It is all my selection. As with most aspects of life, there are good and bad points here. We all have teachers – people from whom we learn things. Tiny, rural Loranger High School graduated me a few […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Children use excuses. Adults speak candidly. Children love to use convenient excuses. Adults state what is actually happening. Some people call that being “blunt” or “candid.” I tend to like “candid.” Convenient excuses allow us to “be nice” and talk around situations instead of facing them. Candor, however, exposes the real issue […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Some simple life advice: eat, rest, work – in that order. Fatigue is a killer to accomplishing anything; hunger is a killer to accomplishing anything. Trying to accomplish anything while tired and hungry? Not much chance of accomplishing anything positive while a very high chance of accomplishing a mess. When I am tired, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips There are a lot of changes I would like to see in other people. Despite that, the one person I can change is me. I read many blog posts describing how to change people who need to be changed. Of course they need to be changed (not); they are keeping me from […]

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by Dwayne Phillips When you feel something tugging at you on the inside, you have hit a personal rule. Recently, I had three gentlemen riding around with me in my van. We were visiting other office buildings in our area. Our first stop was for lunch at an bagel place. We had sandwiches and soup, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Do people associate your appearance with bad tidings? There is another way. Let’s oversimplify and divide the world of bosses into two categories: 1. those bosses who only visit when something is wrong and 2. those bosses who visit everyday to chat about the weather I have worked for both and prefer […]

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by Dwayne Phillips It seems we still do this old time waster – hurry up and wait. Let’s try to reframe it into something more productive and creative. I am writing this blog while waiting. I had been working feverishly on something and completed the task. Now…well, you know… Hurry up and wait Let’s see […]

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