Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips The success of many endeavors should lead to dissolving the endeavor. It is unfortunate, however, that the result is often bureaucracy. I have seen it many times. Let’s start an association: to improve the performance of X, to increase the awareness of Y, to teach the practice of Z, or some such […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Go to the optimum, then back off a quarter turn on the knob. There you are. One principle of technology and systems in general is not to operate at the extreme. Go to the extreme, but move back just a bit towards the ordinary. Odd things occur at the extremes. This behavior […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Before doing anything else—think. Yes, this is old advice, but it still works. Process, process, process. The world uses Agile processes now. (At least those people whose job it is to tell everyone else what their organization does tells the world that they are Agile. I tend to doubt that they actually […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Hyperventilation and hysteria are shows of emotion, not commitment. A recent post from Seth Godin reminded me of the above. I have been the victim of the “why aren’t you going berserk?” syndrome over the years. I was once reprimanded for concentrating on performing the work instead of yelling and screaming at […]

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by Dwayne Phillips For many of us, being close shows us the details, and those details make us sick. I give to several non-profit organizations. One of them is based ten thousand miles away. Another is based five miles away. I see many details of the one that is five miles away. I don’t like […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We often create systems and then complain how persons act in our systems. Many years ago, I attended college. I often heard professors complain, You aren’t interested in learning, all you are only in search of the almighty grade! I found that us students were guilty. We did worry about our grades. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips It is difficult to measure things from a distance. That distance can by in space and it can be in time. We often attempt to measure things from a distance. We take photos of the ground from 10,000 feet up in the air. We then run through geometric calculations to determine the […]

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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 Accepting something that is false leads us all into all sorts of trouble. There is a property in logic that states if you accept something that is false, you can prove anything. For example, if you accept that one equals zero, you can prove anything in math (try it). Recently, I stumbled […]

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