Category Archives: linkedin

Explaining the Worldwide Conspiracy for the Preservation of Mediocrity

Posted on October 2, 2014 | 1 comment

(RecoveringFed has been less than robust this past year, in large part because of the push to complete the book by Lois Kelly and me: Rebels at Work: A Handbook for Leading Change from Within. largecoverThe good news is that it’s with the publishers–O’Reilly Media–and we’re expecting it to materialize before the end of the year–with luck perhaps even before Thanksgiving. You can pre-order from O’Reilly here and from Amazon here. And now for some new RecoveringFed content!!)

Because the world is generally inhospitable to Rebels at Work, the Worldwide Conspiracy for the Preservation of Mediocrity continues unabated. You can see the conspiracy in operation every time individuals and organizations settle for less than they should. I think most of the members of the Worldwide Conspiracy are unwitting. Oftentimes they believe they’re doing good. They would hate to be called settlers.

Stories torn from recent headlines illustrate how the Worldwide Conspiracy gains its adherents. Like many malevolent forces, the Worldwide Conspiracy sometimes uses innocuous, even noble words to disguise its true goals. Words like Consensus and Career.

For example, the word Consensus pops up frequently in the recent reporting on former Federal Reserve bank examiner Carmen Segarra’s secret taping of workplace conversations. The tapes indicate that the desire for consensus made it difficult to express contrary opinions. Consensus is one of those noble-sounding concepts that are actually not so attractive when you try to implement them. Consensus, by its very nature, is a way to avoid making decisions–a way of settling.

Career ambition is another dynamic that the Worldwide Conspiracy uses to its advantage. Of course, you want to succeed in your career; you want to be a high performer. And we’re told all the time that success in the workplace is as much about relations and emotions as it is about substance. And that’s how the Worldwide Conspiracy begins to capture you. Your desire to remain on some important person’s good side leads you to hesitate when something difficult needs to be said. Whatever you do, you don’t want to ruffle that particular set of feathers.

Formula is another interesting tool of the Worldwide Conspiracy. For the sake of efficiency, tasks are routinized, parameters are set and formulas are established. Staff are rewarded for applying the formula effectively. But the problem with formulas is that from Day One, their alignment with reality begins to slip. As the divergence grows, organizations delay reconfiguring the formula for fear of all the lost productivity and inefficiencies such a process entails. And so the organization settles.

Finally you get Complacency. Everyone becomes comfortable with doing well enough. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” The Worldwide Conspiracy’s most popular slogan. And thus you end up sincerely believing that mediocrity is the practical solution.

I am reminded of Pogo

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Posted in Change, linkedin, Organizational Dynamics, Rebels/Heretics

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Five Nouns, Five Verbs for Leaders

Posted on May 5, 2014 | 1 comment

When you haven’t posted on your blog in a while, and I haven’t posted since Christmas, it gets harder and harder to return to it, like when you haven’t called a friend in ages. It’s not like I haven’t been writing. I’ve been posting pretty regularly on RebelsatWork.com. You can check out my most recent post here. And if you know me, you know I always have opinions. I always think too much

A favorite topic for me to think about is management and leadership. Actually the more I think about both topics, the less sense they make to me. About a month ago I was at an event, which I will not specify, at which there was a presentation by a rather prominent thinker on leadership, whom I will not name. The ideas were so tired: great men (and all his examples were men) set great visions for their teams who then can singlehandedly conquer the world, or at least next year’s profit and loss statement.

I’ve long suspected the world really doesn’t work that way. Sure some individuals appear to have significant, short-term success, but usually if you wait long enough reality comes whistling along and bites them in the butt. David Petraeus comes to mind. Or an individual, such as Harry S Truman, whom his contemporaries viewed as a poor leader gets reclaimed by history. Will Marissa Mayer be Yahoo’s Savior? Does Elizabeth Warren have gravitas? In the end, how much will their individual contributions matter?

And then there’s the rather inconvenient fact that leadership is a value-free concept. You can exhibit strong leadership traits–i.e. you can influence people and you can point the arrow in a particular direction, and you make decisions quickly, and you rarely change your mind (and I have a few nits to pick with these attributes too)–but none of that necessarily means you will have a net positive impact on your group or society–however we might measure that. Vladimir Putin comes to mind. He’s a strong man on the world stage, say the pundits a little bit too admiringly.

But despite my misgivings, I sometimes get asked to serve on a panel or give a talk about leadership. Grumpy Carmen of course wants to say something along the lines of what I just wrote, but that would be bad and, most important, rather rude to the people who asked me.

The last time this happened I came up with the following list. Ten words. Five Verbs. And Five Nouns. And the more I think about them the more they say all I want to say about being a manager, a leader, an employee, a citizen, and a person.

Conversation sustains.
Empathy connects.
Authenticity reassures.
Optimism lifts.
Purpose commands.

They do not need explanation, but just a few words on the last one. So many significant things are outside of a manager’s or leader’s ability to command. You can’t command people to trust you. You can’t command them to believe in your goals. And you cannot order them to give you their discretionary energy.

But a common purpose can.

 

 

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Posted in Leadership, linkedin, Organizational Dynamics

Merry Humanity to You!!

Posted on December 24, 2013 | 1 comment

Today my mom and I engaged in what is becoming a Christmas Eve ritual for us: noshing on burgers and fries at Gott’s Roadside diner in the Napa wine region of California. We’ve spent Christmas week in Napa for the past four years, gently sipping and eating and wondering what it would be like to spend the other 360 days of the year doing the same. During previous visits I had noticed the custom at Gott’s to use pseudos for your pickup name: “Fang, your order is ready, Fang!” I’d been anticipating all year what I might call myself the next time I visited Gott’s. I settled on a category: Greek philosophers.

I’ll let my tweets record what happens next:

How did Aristotle become Eristonald, I wonder? The person taking my order didn’t flinch when I said Aristotle. Didn’t ask how to spell it; in fact just confidently keyed my chosen name into the computer. Now, as is the case in fast-food jobs, this person was quite young and it is entirely conceivable and understandable that Aristotle had yet to enter her consciousness. But why ERISTONALD?

Does she know an ERISTONALD?

How could she so confidently type in a name she was clearly only guessing at?

There’s something lovely about her phonetics (or quirky about my pronounciation.). The ERIST syllables seem to suggest another language.

Is correct spelling just an eccentricity these days? or  Is correct spelling not a core Gott’s competency?

The poor person who had to announce to the world: “Eristonald, your order is ready, Eristonald” looked at me for an explanation. When I told her it was supposed to be Aristotle, she was relieved but only shrugged.

And then it all struck me as charming. Just another lovely example of sweet human imperfection. And how silly it is for us to get caught up in conceits, however small.

Which gets me to Christmas and religion. This time of year some of us think more about religious and spiritual matters than we normally do. And the pleasure I got from the sweetness of “the mistake” made me think about one of my main problems with most religions–the insistence that the goal of existence is human perfection.

I can’t help but think how silly this idea is. Human perfection seems perfectly pointless. Our charm lies in our clumsiness. Our grace is that we forgive each other our mistakes–or at least we should. And our passion comes from the desire to improve. Without the desire to improve, I just don’t understand how we can be very human.

There’s nothing profound here, I’m sure; it’s just one of the ways that the emotional logic of mainstream religions escapes me.

Like the promise of eternal life. First, I REALLY hate being bribed into religious belief. Sure, just play upon my fears. Second, I can’t think of a worst fate for humanity than eternal life. And if it’s eternal, perfect life, I’m really trying to understand what could possibly be the point of that.

I’m much happier just trying to be a productive member of the human team, making sweet mistakes that in time others may learn from.

Merry Humanity to All.

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Posted in linkedin, Religion, Thinking

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Being Open to the Serendipity of Sharing

Posted on October 20, 2013 | 1 comment

A good friend (almost 40 years younger than I am) asked me last week what I thought of the message in this vide0.

I wrote my friend back yesterday and what I’ve posted below is my response unedited.

“So as someone who has essentially lived by herself her entire adult life–I have absolutely no problem with being alone. At the same time there is nothing I value more than having good conversations with people I know well–and also with new people who bring some interesting new dimension to the way I think.

I have personally found social networks very enriching because I learn so much more about people, both the ones i know in real life–though truth be told most of them hardly use social networks–and the ones I have met NIRL. I don’t think I’m confused about the difference between conversation and connection; that said I think some of my on-line relationships are quite substantial. These individuals appreciate the way I think and I appreciate the way they think and we bring interesting ideas to each others’ attention. If I post something unusually negative for me, they notice and ask me if something is wrong. This is not something that replaces IRL friendship but is an interesting and developing complement to it. (It is very helpful when I’m sitting in an airport waiting for my flights, for example. I always have the best on-line conversations in that hour at the gate.) I’ve often heard the 150 number and while I generally think there is a limit to whom we can know, the 150 number is based I think on experiments done before the advent of these new technologies. I’d like to see research done about the conditions we find ourselves in now.

The video doesn’t talk about what I think is one of the great new phenomena today–how near or complete strangers can delight each other through things they share online. I share a slice of my inner dialogue on-line. I see something interesting that makes me think; now I post many of those in case someone else might find it interesting as well. Some great exchanges happen as a result of being open to the serendipity of sharing.

What I actually think has been much more corrosive to the quality of people’s lives, much more so than sharing and the online life, is the culture of entertainment, which long predates Facebook and Twitter. I’m really troubled when I see people seemingly living their lives through the entertainment they consume. It drives me nuts really. Living your life as if the purpose of it is to be entertained is my definition of hell on earth.

Hope you have a great weekend and thanks for asking me what I thought about the video.

Your IRL friend,

Carmen”

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Posted in Change, Internet, Introverts/Extroverts, linkedin, Social Change, Social Networks, Thinking

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The Glass Edge: First 8 Weeks

Posted on September 8, 2013 | 4 comments

I had meant to do more frequent updates on my experiences with #GoogleGlass, but my plans to download regularly pictures and videos from a vacation to southern Africa in August were compromised when the Chromebook I brought along failed to talk nicely to #GoogleGlass. In fact, the Chromebook and Glass were not on speaking terms at all. Admittedly, my Chromebook is one of the less expensive models but still I was befuddled by the Chrome operating system’s failure to recognize a cousin of sorts. Oh well…

Google definitely has established worldwide buzz for Glass. My favorite encounter was in Kasane, Botswana.Image When I landed at the little-more-than-an-airstrip, a German national approached me cautiously. “Is that Google….Glass?” but his expression said this is the last place in the world I expected to see one. In return for getting his selfie with Glass, I asked him my standard two questions. You can see his answers here.

I asked everyone who tried Glass the same two questions. I always got the same answers. But far from a scientific sample. (Apologies for the poor audio quality.)

My friend in Botswana:

My Israeli friend working in South Africa.

I liked using Glass best to take videos in places where it was otherwise awkward to take a video. Like at Sunday mass in Regina Mundi, the legendary Catholic church in Soweto. We attended the mass where the congregation sang all the prayers…in Zulu. It lasted two and a half hours, at least half of it in song. I don’t know any more details about the special group of women dressed in purple accompanying the Presentation of the Gifts, but they were truly beyond awesome. (The framing of this video leaves much to be desired I know. Some of it is me; some the limitations of #GoogleGlass.)

On my last day in South Africa, my friend Nate took my mom to Alexandra township near Johannesburg, once a hot spot and no-go area of Johannesburg. He’s working there to introduce mobile banking. Many South African blacks spend hours in line just to send money to relatives and pay bills. They can’t use regular banks because of the fee structure.

Here’s a video of us driving through Alexandra.

South Africa remains one of the most complicated countries in the world. But it’s important to see it clearly for what it is. From there we can proceed.

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Posted in GoogleGlass, linkedin, Uncategorized

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The Glass Edge: Lots of Pictures

Posted on July 21, 2013 | 1 comment

My First Week with Glass

Positive Impressions

  • Many serendipitous conversations.

This employee at Bed, Bath, and Beyond who turns out to have a very interesting background. I almost got it on my first guess.

The shoppers at the local HEB in Texas

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Two charming young girls, and their cool Dad, at the local steakhouse in Texas

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A collage of pictures I’ve taken. You can’t zoom with GoogleGlass yet, and that means some people don’t even know they are in the frame. I also like the non-posed quality of some of the shots.

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Overall, there is a more honest quality to many of the pictures.

  • People are comfortable speaking to me when I’m wearing GoogleGlass

Huge surprise here. People of all ages have been very relaxed. We talk for many minutes and it’s clear they’ve forgotten about them or at least processed their presence. Kids of course are no problem. Texans (I’ve been here this weekend) are quite enthusiastic. Even my 78-year-old mom was happy to try GoogleGlass and ended up reading a text on it wishing her a happy birthday yesterday.

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Of course many people pretend not to notice them.

  • Even if you have imperfect vision, you can make them work.

I wasn’t sure how GoogleGlass was going to work for me as I wear glasses and have a particularly weak right eye, and at least as of now the prism screen sits only over your right eye. But I’m happy to report I don’t have any problems using it or reading simple text (which is all you’ll ever see really) and I’m actually hopeful the new exercise for my right eye will finally get it to pull it’s weight.

Downsides

  1. They get warm, perhaps even hot. You tend to forget that GoogleGlass is a small computer and when you ramp it up to do harder things—like recording a video, it heats up. Just a bit uncomfortable but I have thick curly hair so I’m padded.
  2. I really wish they bent in the middle like regular glasses. You can’t easily tuck them in the V of your shirt. As I said I need to wear regular glasses in many situations so I’m constantly trading them with my GoogleGlass. Unless I’m going to put them away in their nifty carrying case (size of a quality paperback), I’m left to put them on the top of my head. Because the right arm of Glass is heavy, the slight pressure on my head tends to give me a little headache. The exact same kind that I would get in my youth when I tried to wear headbands.
  3. Short and mysterious battery life. Not always clear what’s drawing the power or why the power level can drop precipitously at certain moments.
  4. Touchpad and voice controls are both uncertain. I’m much better at it than I was a week ago, but both are still quite buggy. Of course voice controls can’t seem to distinguish nuances among words so there are just some things you can’t make it understand.

Stay tuned for more reports from the Glass Edge.

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Posted in Change, Design, GoogleGlass, Innovation, linkedin

RecoveringFed is a #GlassExplorer

Posted on July 14, 2013 | 6 comments

Friday I was in NYC to pick up my Google Glass at the Glass Basecamp. Google did a good job making it fun; the mimosas helped for sure! I chose the tangerine color. I talked to people who advised choosing a color that blended in, but thinking to myself that “blending in” while wearing Glass was not an option, I opted for “Standing Out”.005

Glass Basecamp is a loft/warehouse space in Chelsea Market. Not too many people were there at one time so it had a comfortable feel. My Glass Guide, Kirsten (sp?) said she handled 2-3 people a day.

She reviewed all the essential starting out and survival skills for Glass, but of course within an hour after leaving I had forgotten most of them. I’m beginning to consolidate my skills now on my third day.

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My impressions in less than 48 hours:

  • Still buggy and/or I’m still on a learning curve. Almost all of the control over the device is through voice commands and swiping across the touchpad (the right spectacle arm) with your finger. Both of these are sensitive and sometimes even crotchety.
  • I think #GoogleGlass has a much broader range of uses than I imagined.
  • Very few people know what the heck you’re wearing so they leave you alone. The ones who do recognize Glass are eager to know what you think about them.

I asked a friend of mine to tell me what it was like to talk to me while I was wearing Glass.

I intend to use RecoveringFed to document my #Glass adventures. My Glass Guide asked me what my tweet had been to qualify and I told her, a little more than slightly embarrassed, that my tweet had been very kumbaya. To which she charmingly said that the world would be a better place if more of us were kumbaya. So here is how I intend to use Glass going forward:

#ifihadglass I would help us see a future full of potential, joy, trust, and the New Wisdom we can find together when we look more clearly.

Kumbaya to the Max!! (As an inveterate editor, I would now change that “look” to see. It is more grammatically correct.)

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(PS: I know I haven’t posted to RecoveringFed in almost 2 months. But I have been posting elsewhere. Check out my essay over on Deloitte University Press on why Decisionmaking is Overrated . If you have a comment, or better yet, disagree with me, please do post a comment. We can really only reach clarity when we embrace disagreement. And of course check out RebelsatWork.com where Lois Kelly and I post pretty frequently.)

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Posted in Change, Innovation, linkedin, Uncategorized

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More on Germany, less on luggage

Posted on May 17, 2013 | 2 comments

Driving hundreds of miles on German autobahns you notice things.  Like, if the highway has three lanes in one direction, the far right lane is for slow-moving traffic, the middle lane requires you to be going at least 80 mph, and the far left lane is only for the BMW’s and Audi’s that cruise comfortably at 100+mph.

But I bet you knew that already. The most interesting thing I noticed, by far, was a truck I passed that had, proudly displayed on its side, a large banner reading:

Young European Truck Driver of the Year 2007

Well that caught my attention. Unfortunately as I was passing him in the middle lane, which meant I was doing at least 80 mph, I couldn’t take a picture. But here’s a link to the story about the 2013 young European truck driver competition.

A quick Google search didn’t reveal anything like that in the US, just this competition that seems centered mostly around a particular trucking company. And there’s no comparison in terms of prizes: a new $100K + truck for the European truck champion; $5K for the US winner.

So the banner and the explicit pride of the person still flying it got me to thinking. (Actually I found out that the 2007 winner was from Poland not Germany, but still the thinking occurred.) Germany, which by US standards must definitely be thought of as a socialist state, seems to have a significantly different attitude toward work than we do in America. From waiters, who don’t expect much of a tip because they are actually paid a real living wage, to truck drivers, who are proud of their work as a profession, not a job, individuals appear to consider the jobs they are holding as important in and of themselves, not just as stepping stones to the day they become rich. Which is the feeling you get in the US. People are doing manual labor or service jobs as a transition to something else or out of some sense of desperation/frustration.

There’s many reasons, I guess, for this difference. There does appear to be a German temperament; and German business and labor unions have more adult relations than labor and business do in the US. The German education system also contributes with a dual system that considers whether individuals are better suited for university or for apprenticeship in a profession.

Whatever the reason, you get the sense Germany is better positioned to weather the secular employment problem that is beginning to hit the West and will vex us for many years, if not decades to come. For Germany, gainful employment of its citizens is a priority and a matter of national policy; it’s a social responsibility.

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Posted in linkedin, Work Design

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Just Another Tale of Lost Luggage

Posted on May 15, 2013 | 1 comment

Dateline: Berlin

Some of you who follow me on Twitter (@milouness) are aware of the recent adventures of two bags belonging to me and my mom. Actually the bags didn’t do that much adventuring, come to think of it. We were doing all the traveling, supposedly chasing our bags across four European cities while they remained snugly indifferent in London. This little adventure reminded me of some of the most interesting traits of the English and the Germans, well really of humans in general.

Warning: Stereotypes Ahead

1. The British are obsessively honest about their shortcomings. Wait till you get to Munich. The Germans are much better at this than we are. Said to me by a competent and honest British Airways gate agent for the BA flite to Manchester who tried to reassure us that our bags would eventually join us. Now our final destination was supposed to be Vienna so you may ask why we were going to Manchester, UK. To connect to a Lufthansa flight to Munich because that was the closest we were going to get to Vienna that day.

The trouble began when our American Airlines flight to Heathrow was about an hour late, due to thunderstorms at JFK. Apparently about half of the missed connections were to Vienna, making it impossible, on a busy travel Saturday, for most passengers to be rebooked on already packed flights.

My mom and I were the fortunate ones, or so we thought. We had lucked into the rare London to Manchester to Munich routing. I figured Munich was close enough to where we wanted to go so I cancelled one hotel and changed my car reservation. Everything was good to go but the bags.Luggage

2. People are too trusting of technology; suitcases only know to go where they are tagged. Throughout our amazing race day we were assured multiple times that our luggage was now tagged to follow us on the London-Manchester-Munich routing. We asked every human we could in London if our luggage was coming with us and they assured us it was. See, we scanned your luggage receipts into the system so your luggage is now linked with your new itinerary. It’s all set. I admit I was more trusting than my mother who warned: “Luggage doesn’t know anything about the computer. It only knows where it was tagged.”

3. People and technology can conspire to tell outright lies. Once in Manchester and with our luggage nowhere in sight, we went to chat with a competent Lufthansa agent. Right in front of us she called some Global Baggage Handling Command Center (that’s what it sounded like to me). No sooner had she mentioned the “Medina case” than the person on the other end seemed to recognize its complexities immediately. Your bags are being sent rush to Munich right now. They will probably be in Munich before you get there.

Given what actually happened, I am left to speculate that

a. She was actually putting on a show for our benefit, there was no person on the other line, and the Global Baggage Handling Command Center is a myth; or

b. The Global Baggage Handling Command Center was lying to her and they never did any of what they said they did; or

c. (and most likely) “Luggage doesn’t know anything about the computer. It only knows where it was tagged.”

4. The Germans know they are more competent than all the other Europeans (combined?) and are quietly cocky about it. Needless to say no bags showed up in Munich. (Eventually we drove to Vienna the next day to pick up the bags, who sure enough had always intended to go exactly to where they had been tagged.) So we approached the Lufthansa service agent, a magnificent woman of a certain age who anchored the lost luggage desk like an Athena. ticketsAs soon as she saw me clutching my wreath of tickets and boarding passes, she observed: I can tell already you have had a horrible day. Just start from the beginning and tell me everything that happened.

She allowed herself only the briefest moment of schadenfreude when I shared the British Airways personnel stated belief that Lufthansa would be able to fix the matter because of their superior skills. She telexed British who told her the bags would be arriving in Vienna the next morning on the same flight we had been booked on the day before. And so they did.

Now that I’m done with the luggage story, a few other observations.

5. The occurrence of Graffiti is a reliable indicator of political mood. The first thing I look for when I’m in a new city is the frequency and nature of graffiti. In Europe, for the last ten years or so, graffiti has been the worse in Spain, by far. No highway structures go untouched and graffiti often mars sides of buildings in quite nice neighborhoods. Germany, at least the part that was once Western, is largely graffiti-free. But as soon as you enter the former East Germany, you see it everywhere.

6. Berlin remains a construction Hot Spot. No matter which way you look on the horizon, you see cranes, never alone, at least pairs, triplets, even quintuplets. The beautiful Unter den Linden, which our hotel overlooks, is torn up for the installation of a new U-bahn stop.

7. Americans as a culture combine British cheekiness and German efficiency. These two heritages account for the largest percentage of the US population, by far. We have always been able to turn seeming contradictions into our national advantage.

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Rules I Try to Live By

Posted on April 6, 2013 | 10 comments

So the idea for this post began last week when a GovLab fellow was telling me that he thought he was finally figuring me out. (GovLab is a leadership development/innovation program I work with at Deloitte Consulting; actually I think of myself as the GovLab Yoda. I was of course interested in anyone willing to talk about me for an extended period of time. Bring it on!) And he said that a phrase he associates with me now is “And another way to look at this is…” This pleased me as I pride myself on being a contrarian thinker–a natural rebel trait. (I was going to edit out the word thinker and just say contrarian but I actually believe there is a difference between a contrarian and a contrarian thinker. A contrarian will say NO to many things; a contrarian thinker just wants to always examine the other side before coming to a conclusion–if indeed a conclusion is appropriate.) (I can tell already this post will contain many parenthetical statements.)

Anyhoo, I said, “Well Yes. I think that’s right. But another thing I’m trying to impart is that…”

1. Nothing is insignificant. My 32-year career as an intelligence analyst taught me, at least, that anything and everything can matter. In the early 1990s I read a book called Complexity by Mitchell Waldrop, which pretty much changed my intellectual life forever. complexity(If indeed it can be said that I have an intellectual life.) The book is an easily-digestible introduction to the principles of Complexity science. What it taught me is that big changes can be started by little things and ever since then I have thought of myself as an Analyst of Little Things.

2. You never run out of bullets. While we’re on lessons drawn from my analyst career, this phrase was told to me by a manager early on in my apprenticeship. He was recounting some work he had done as a young analyst on an insurgent or guerrilla group somewhere in the world. He had figured out, literally, how many bullets this particular group had, how many bullets they used per day, and therefore thought he knew exactly the date when the guerrillas would run out of bullets. My boss’s manager had saved him from this rookie mistake with the sage advice that “You never run out of bullets.” I.E. something will happen, some contingency will occur, that will upend your careful projection. As you can tell I never forgot that piece of advice. A more general and perhaps useful way of rephrasing it is: Linear Projections Ain’t So.

3. Everything stays the same…Until it changes. The last of my analysis-related rules. Change is a slippery rascal. It taunts you with false hope. (Or endless anxiety if you fear the change.) And then, many times when you’re least expecting, it pounces on you like a cat.  (All blog posts benefit from a Cat Gif)

153 cat gif

The world is just chock-full of rulers, practices, conventions, assumptions long past their Best By Dates. (It was even worse 30 years ago I think.) Estimating when the change will occur is pretty much a loser’s game. Even guessing correctly just once will mark you as a genius forever.

This rule also draws upon elements of complexity thinking. Everything looks like it’s staying the same because the change energy is brewing underneath the status quo line. Up until the moment it breaks through, you probably won’t be aware of the change. It’s not unlike how little earthquakes presage huge volcanic eruptions.

Being able to anticipate the imminence of big change is the ultimate test of any analyst, I think. As I said prediction is difficult, but understanding what is brewing below the status quo line should be the goal of every analyst. Always unpack claims that any kind of analysis is right 90% of the time. How much of that number is accounted for by correct predictions of continued stability?

4. The ends never justify the means because rarely do human projects reach their ends. So LIVE your Means. I don’t think this needs much explanation really. Life is what happens to you when you’re making other plans. Live your principles…all..the…time. 

5. The best thing God made is one day after the other. My grandmother used to say this. My grandmother’s name was Obdulia, but she was better known as Doña Yuya. (A friend of mine enjoyed that name so much that she called her car that.) As I write about my abuela I realize I never once heard her boast about herself.abuela

6. Try to see the humor in everything. It is particularly important to see the “funny” in things that are making you mad, like bureaucracy, or people who aren’t thinking, or the Internal Revenue Service, or our current political system.  (Come to think of it the American political system has zoomed way past humor and is now making a strong bid for absurd.)

7. Everything has meaning. It’s your problem if you don’t appreciate it.

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Posted in Learning, linkedin, Rebels/Heretics, Thinking, Uncategorized

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