Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes we should assign one person. We already know that, so why don’t we do it? There is some old cliche about too many cooks in the kitchen or too many cooks stirring the pot or something. There is a a current cliche about too many people in the room I head […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips The meeting is over. Hereafter, we are having a friendly chat.

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips We all say that we are people of integrity. But are we? I hate to write this blog post. I know I hate to do it because I have been meaning to write it for seven or eight years, but still haven’t done it. Well, here goes. We like to say that […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Contrary to management theory, meetings are not about (1) information or (2) decision. They are about nice people in a nice setting. I had always been taught that there are two types of meetings: ones in which the group decided something ones in which information was provided to the group Hearing those […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips I’ve heard people in meetings tell me stuff that was just pure bologna. Then I had to ask myself why I created an environment where people told me bologna instead of the truth. I once managed a project where an engineer stood in a meeting and explained that a hardware part had […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips I build my own little LibraryBox2. I stumbled across this project recently and, since I am fascinated by libraries and distributing content, decided to try to build one. I am not good at this sort of thing, but why not try it? It worked! I have my own LibraryBox2 (see photo). LibraryBox […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips That one person won’t be attending today. Everyone sighs in relief. What does that tell us? I’ve attended more meetings than most people. I have 28 years of government work to thank for that. There was almost always one or a few people scheduled to attend the meeting that I was happier […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes a fiasco provides an excellent learning opportunity as we can study the group dynamics that led smart people to a stupid place. Then again, the fiasco may just be yet another example of stupidity. “That’s fascinating!” That may be a nice way of saying, “How could a group of such smart […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips I was once told that “silence is agreement” and that “everyone who has a brain knows that.” I disagree. Silence is silence. If you want to know what is behind silence, ask. It was 20 years ago. I had sat through some meeting on some forgotten topic where I rolled my eyes […]

[Read more →]

Sometimes it just isn’t worth being on the leading edge. It was 1981 and an attempt to purchase an office computer turned into a monster. 1981 – the Apple II was fun and the TRS-80 was, well it was something you could buy at Radio Shack. These little computer things could store data on floppy disks. […]

[Read more →]