I don’t claim to be a management guru, but I do spend time watching people, and I’ve seen true masters out there, and I’ve seen apparent narcissists who blithely leave a trail of destruction in their wake.
These are posts related to management, management of process, management of people and leadership. I bunch leadership here, though admittedly perhaps that should be a different category by itself.
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Sub Stories come from my six years in the US Navy and in particular the four years I served as a nuclear qualified sub mariner. The Navy arguably gave me much in terms of technical training, experience and self confidence. But as I discovered recently when I volunteered to assist as a tour guide for the USS Blueback, now a floating museum, there are skeletons in my closet.
These are stories, both the good and not so good from that time, and the meaning I make from them.
The “Thomas Question” is a term others have given for something I apparently have a propensity to do, namely ask questions which while kind, tend to probe into layers that sometimes make people feel uncomfortable.
Since I probably reference the Thomas Question, in other areas of this blog, I figure I should probably give some context and examples.
I like wearing a tie. I know, this seems like blasphemy in light of the current trend to dress-down in our culture. Who could possibly ‘like’ to wear a tie after all?
It has admittedly been an acquired taste.
In my youth I viewed the necktie as an anachronistic contrivance intended to enforce submission to petty minds groping for power. But over time I discovered that people treated me differently when I wore a tie, and I learned to take advantage of this phenomenon to my benefit. I didn’t come like to wear this peculiar embellishment of the male dress costume however, until I came to understand its history and function.
This post is an exploration into the symbolism of the necktie and the almost mythic nature of that symbolism. The necktie and the response to it is an example of a stimulus response behavior which is well acknowledged, but for which an understanding is curiously hard to elicit.
The symbolism embedded in the necktie suggests the existence of a collective non-conscious, and raises the question: What other cultural artifacts are there burred in that collective non-conscious? This question is especially important when contemplating change.
5S is one of the key practices of the Toyota Production System. The 5 “S’s” derive from five Japanese words which when romanized, begin with the letter ‘S’: Seiri, Seiton, Seiso, Seiketsu, and Shitsuke.
The Japanese word Seiso translates to cleanliness. There is no doubt that cleanliness of a workspace can contribute to efficiency, safety and a positive work environment (see the broken window theory). But substituting “shine” for Seiso because it is an English word which begins with the letter ‘S’, risks a literal interpretation which results in none of those outcomes. A good example of taking “shine” too literally comes from my Navy experience and in particular, the use of Epoxy-Polyamide paint.
