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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These are posts related to process, specifically, the process of people working together, as compared to say what a process engineer might consider a process. These generally include posts on Lean, Agile, Scrum, Crystal, Visual Planning etc.
There is overlap with management posts here, because a lot of management has to do with managing process.
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.
Books or other reading that has stimulated or influenced my thinking, or maybe that I just find rather enjoyable.
Beginning in the fall of 1999, I had the privileged opportunity to spend two years as an engineer-on-load from Hewlett-Packard Company to a local school district. This allowed a unique opportunity for an outsider to view a school system from inside of the system, without having gone through an acculturation process. These are my observations and thoughts from that and subsequent school engagements.
Very few of the ideas I talk about here are my own. Sometimes they are verbatim ideas from others, more often they are a mashup, a synthesis of thoughts and ideas.
Because most of these ideas originate from others, I believe it correct and appropriate to give those others appropriate credit. In this category you will find mentions of people, books, papers or other bibliographic references, or mentions of people who have significantly effected my thinking. The idea is to give credit where credit is due.
In the spring of 2003, at the Intel Northwest Science Expo in Portland Oregon, I had the honor of meeting a rather remarkable young fourth grader. She was remarkable because, while most middle and high school students, and arguably most adults, have difficulty internalizing and creating meaning from numerical data, this bright-eyed fourth grader in the white cotton print dress knew exactly what her data was telling her.
When I asked what she had concluded from her experiments, she stood up straight, looked me directly in the eye, and made a sweeping hand gesture to her hand-plotted charts, declaring “Well, as you can clearly see from my data, my hypothesis was completely wrong.”
Teachers often complain about the need to spend sometimes as much as the first three months of the school year bringing their students up to the level required to begin introducing new grade level appropriate content.
The paradox is that often those same teachers cannot agree on what the content of that prior coursework should be. If they cannot agree on the content of prior coursework, how can they NOT expect their to have to spend three months the next year bringing their students up to where they ‘think’ they should be?
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.
