commentary

Vital Integrities

I have worked at 11 different companies over 22 years. Rarely have I decided to leave a company. In fact, I've returned to some companies aagain.

I've always said that when I leave, I'm leaving a job. More specifically, my job — the job I was hired to do and once enjoyed doing — is usually long gone, summarily deleted or drastically modified at some point in the preceding months.

In his book, Vital Integrities, George Brymer says something very similar, yet enticingly different:

People join an organization.
They leave a manager.

When I think back, I have to agree. My jobs don't morph on their own. They're changed from the outside. Invariably, they're changed by my manager.

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Strengths Finder

[ This is part 2 of a 2-part entry on the Clifton StrengthsFinder and the book, Now, Discover Your Strengths. Part 1 is entitled, Discover Your Strengths. ]

Marcus Buckingham (co-author of First, Break All the Rules, and The One Thing You Need to Know) and Donald O. Clifton, Chair of the Gallup International Research & Education Center, have created StrengthsFinder, a "revolutionary program to help readers identify their talents, build them into strengths, and enjoy consistent, near-perfect performance."

The program is described in the book, Now, Discover Your Strengths. But there's more to the book than a simple explanation of the 34 themes in Gallup's "taxonomy of strengths".

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Discover Your Strengths

"Most Americans do not know what their strengths are. When you ask them, they look at you with a blank stare, or they respond in terms of subject knowledge, which is the wrong answer."

--Peter Drucker

If you ask them about their weaknesses, most people will probably respond quickly. They've had plenty of practice with this question.

One of the most common (and most dreaded) questions in job interviews is "What are your weaknesses?" The question is so common that "How to Interview" books devote pages to ideas for how best to answer the question (hint: honesty is not the best policy).

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Sustained Individual Success

Many years ago, in my first term of grad school, I reached a sudden and dreadful conclusion. I did not want to be there. I had no interest whatsoever in completing the program. I did not want to enter the career it offered. I needed to find something else.

I dreaded telling my advisor (also our lab manager and department head). He was, and is, a remarkable person with an infectious passion for his chosen field. I hesitated to tell him that I didn't share that passion.

That's when I received some of the best advice I have ever been given. When I got up the courage to tell him, he was neither disappointed in me nor particularly upset. Instead, he told me:

If you don't love what you're doing, you should be doing what you love.

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Has Your Manager Read This Book?

I'm reading The One Thing You Need to Know, by Marcus Buckingham. I'm beginning to understand why so many tech-industry managers are... mediocre at best.

As a general rule, managers are created through advancement and promotion. Management is usually a step on a particular career ladder, not a chosen career in itself. There aren't a lot of colleges and universities offering a B.S. in management. An MBA is something you get later, after working for a number of years in your chosen field.

Also as a rule, managers tend to be promoted from within the same field in which they once labored as "individual contributors". Thus, software developers, hardware engineers, scientists, and drugstore clerks become software managers, hardware managers, lab managers, and store managers. It might not be unthinkable for a software development team to hire a manager who was never a software developer, but it would be unusual.

Continue reading "Great Managing"

Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog

This slim volume, by Rebecca Blood, is well-written, informative, and engaging. One of the early website creators and one of the first to use what is now considered to be the "weblog" format, Rebecca has a unique perspective on weblogs, online culture, and communication. Although I have had a weblog since 2003 (and have done a lot of reading on the subject) I learned new things from this book.

One of the most interesting things I learned is how much the idea of a "weblog" has changed since the word was coined in 1999. The earliest weblogs were information filters, "Links with commentary, with the new stuff on top".

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GTD - Q&A

I've been recommending Getting Things Done—The Art of Stress-Free Productivity to friends, co-workers, and techie mailing lists [see my review]. The following are some of the conversations my recommendation engendered.

Same Old?

My reaction to Vicki's quick overview of the book - it sounded like a typical time management system.

Interesting comment.

Interesting to me, because, from the time-management systems I've seen before, the Time Management class I attended a decade ago, and David Allen's comments on other TM systems (scattered through the book) it's really quite different. Perhaps subtly different :-) but different nonetheless.

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Getting Things Done

There are four basic ways an idea can affect your Worldview:

It just Is

These are the ideas you grew up with. You don't remember learning them; they just are. These are also some of the beliefs that new perspectives may challenge and change over the course of your life.

Initial Resistance

Some new ideas are difficult to swallow. On first encounter, you resist. Yet slowly, over time, they infiltrate your thoughts until they become part of your Way.

Epiphany

Sometimes a new idea rocks your world. It comes at just the right moment and resonates with your entire being. It's perhaps a good thing these mind-altering moments aren't all that common.

It Just Makes Sense

Then there are the ideas that already contain bits and pieces you recognize. Those bits and pieces make you more open to the new parts. After all, if the person presenting the idea already agrees with you about A, B, and C, perhaps you should try X, Y, and Z.

For me, Getting Things Done—The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, by David Allen, just makes sense. The ideas are simple, yet profound. They're also very well presented. Before I had finished Chapter 2, I ordered five extra copies to lend to friends and co-workers.

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On Intelligence - take-away lessons

Some take-away lessons from On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins...

The book concentrates on the neocortext (aka the cortex), a cauliflower-like sheet of tissue on the outer surface of the brain. "Almost everything we think of as intelligence — perception, language, mathematics, art, music, and planning — occurs here. your neocortex is reading this weblog entry.

The average human neocortex, spread out, would be about the size of an unfolded dinner napkin, built of 6 layers, in total about the thickness of a 6 business cards. Anatomists estimate the typical human neocortex to contain around 30 billion neurons (perhaps less, perhaps more). These cells contain all of your memories, knowledge, skills, and life experience. They are "you".

The hippocampus is the "uppermost" level of the neocortex. That's pretty neat. The hippocampus creates longterm memories (which are then stored in the neocortext).

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On Intelligence

Why hasn't Artificial Intelligence taken off? Why don't we have robots? How "smart" is your car? What is "intelligence" after all? Where does creativity enter the equation? Is the brain just a computer without the silicon?

Jeff Hawkins' book On Intelligence (written with co-author Sandra Blakeslee) addresses these questions and does an admirable job. Hawkins is the original architect of the Palm computer; Blakeslee is a 30-year veteran science writer for the NY Times.

The gist of the book is Hawkins' personal theory of intelligence and why AI has never gone anywhere, and will continue to go nowhere, until we change our way of thinking about Intelligence. He says this isn't a completely new theory but apparently the bits and pieces haven't been presented in a coherent and persuasive whole before.

The book is written very clearly in a nice, readable, conversational style. Although I suspect that much of the wordsmithing is Ms. Blakeslees, the ideas are all from Jeff Hawkins, representing thoughts and theories he's been formulating since 1979.

Jeff's theory is that AI hasn't worked (and won't work) because computer scientists dismiss the brain and how it works, deciding that "we can do better". Many AI "experts" insist that AI is just around the corner -- AI will be great "just as soon as we have faster more powerful computers".

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