I really wanted to share that sentence with you. I’ve been reading about self-management in a corporate setting and that sentence ended one of the chapters.

I’m not sure whether this rant should talk about the idea of self-management or how bad some ideas and philosophies are presented when a writer decides to do it in story or parable form. I’ll probably talk about both in the future.

I’m just about done with Beyond Empowerment by Doug Kirkpatrick. This is the first book on a list of books and articles I’m reading about self-management. I’m sure I’ll be writing a lot more about this in the future.

The other full books on the self-management docket in case you’re wonder are:

Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux

Start With Why by Simon Sinek

This self-management curriculum comes care of Zappos and their new method of running a company.

One of the requirements to earn something called a Teal 101 self management badge at work is to read and watch a series of books, videos and articles and write about an “Aha” moment for each item on the list. I will write about these “Aha” moments here. First on the list is a book called “Beyond Empowerment” by Doug Kirkpatrick.

ONE SENTENCE SUMMARY:

This book is parable form of a CEO/Owner of a company trying to interject self-management principles berry processing plant and distribution company.

Beyond Empowerment AHA moment:

This is the first book I read on the resource list and the moment that stuck with me were the core principles mentioned most clearly on page 135. They are 1)individuals should honor their commitments to others 2)individuals should not exercise force against other people.

The reason these stuck out was because I’ve always lived by similar principles in my own life and they are also principles I believe would create a better society as whole, let alone a better more efficient and pleasant workplace.

Honoring commitments to others is basically signing contracts, maybe not with a physical signature, but with similar requirements. If two parties agree to provide a good or service for a separate good or service it’s my expectation the both sides will get their parts done.

In society not exercising force against one another is obvious, one can’t beat someone up or threaten it in order to get something done. In the modern workplace this might have a lighter meaning. In the context of self-management force is a boss telling another employee they must do something.

If all parties buy in to this system of self-managing and working towards the good of all the stakeholders then commanding an individual to do something doesn’t make that much sense.

The clearest thing that comes out of considering these two principles is that even in a typical hierarchical system if you have a responsible employee and an open-minded boss that isn’t power driven a company would still get the benefits of self-management.

As I’ve mentioned before, I am reading Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux as part of an in company certification with Zappos. It is the basis behind the self-managed/teal direction Zappos is trying to get to through various means.

I just want to gather some pre-read thoughts and questions. I have actually already read the first chapter and listened to an hour and half long talk by the author so I have some background.

All of the color categories for organizations are all observations, loose observations at that. Teal appears to be a prediction. I wonder how much wiggle room he will give himself when contrasting between the observed management systems (mafia, government, religious org, Wall St corporation) to the one he envisions is coming.

The descriptions of the organizations types throughout human history are described with examples and labeled with colors: Red-Mafia, Orange-Corporation, ect. The author gives a disclaimer at the beginning of the first chapter saying that there is often overlap between eras and colors.

If even observing them as they’re happening is that imprecise then how imprecise will the prediction be?

That’s a very general question and there are 500 pages in the book that might answer them.

It’s not hard. It’s just something you have to do if you really want to do it. Put the time in. Think about it. Work at it. Stop crying and do it.

That something is programming. Except for a professor, I probably can with anyone at the number of times I’ve a first day in class program that returns “hello world”, the typical beginner phrase across all languages and teaching material.

But it’s really time to get some of this under my belt, if for no other reason just to grow and do something new and stretch out the learny thingies in my brain.

I’ve decided to start with python because why not. There’s a pretty good coursera course out there with a goofy professor and a free book. 

It’s time.

There is a whole list of things to do and learn and become. One thing that interests me is philosophy and science and all the current and past interesting things that are happening in those fields.

A problem at general level those fields don’t have anything to do with my career path or make the top 20% cut on my list of goals. Nonetheless I have interest in them. 

On the philosophy subject I can do things that are pretty easy. Since I have a rudimentary knowledge of the study of ideas I can listen to podcasts and read introduction style books to get an understanding and a familiarity with some of the history of thought, rather than actually becoming a “philosopher”. Haha.

Currently I’m enjoying a podcast called “Philosophize This”.  I’m thinking about re-reading some of the Camus works I’ve already (and The Rebel which I haven’t read) but this time with context in Camus’ life and what exactly he was trying to say in books like The Stranger and The Plague.

I’d also like to immerse myself more in the Socratic baseline ideas before going on to other intellectuals and past thinkers I’m interested in.

Baby steps. 

1.19.17

Finished Start With Why. It sort of meanders, was not a big fan although the message was great for a leadership book. Started up some fiction The Throwback Special. We’ll see what happens there seems good so far. I am also reading the novella Gods of Risk in the Expanse series and listening to Railsea a strange train based version of Moby Dick.

Prose total: 690

Comic total: 812

Prose Star With Why 230

Prose Snow Falling on Cedars by David Gutterson 460 pages

Comic Paper Girls Volume 1 by Brian K Vaughan 144 pages

Comic Paper Girls Volume 2 by Brian K Vaughan 128 pages

Comic All You Need is Kill 550 pages

You work in a large company. There are a lot of moving parts in the company. Responsibilities overlap. People are empowered to advance the company with creative ideas.

This is great. The problem is the overlapping part. Not necessarily a problem, you could consider it guard rails, but it could be a problem for your idea. So in any corporate setting your project or idea better have some level of resilience.

How much work are you going to put into the operations side of things when the obnoxious but necessary corporate politics aren’t handled? Who will this idea go up against or scare and have you told them? Have you kept everyone updated? Have you continued to “work the room” throughout the project’s life?

Lots of ideas just become wastes of time because people don’t know how to sell ideas to stakeholders. They don’t know explain what’s going on or how to keep the idea fresh and relevant in colleagues minds.

Those ideas are not resilient.

Those ideas will die.

There is always that guy at the dinner party, charity event or networking function who wants to let you know he’s really good at managing people.

When someone tells me they manage people this is what I hear: 

“I’ve developed no skills but somehow I’ve found myself in this position and I need a cool sounding answer to your question”.

Some people get lucky and some people work hard in the company or position they find themselves in. They climb up the ladder and they do well. The truth is they’ve probably worked hard but they’re also extremely fortunate. There are a lot of smart responsible people that can “manage people”. It’s definitely a skill, but it’s a skill 80% of the workforce has.

Managers I will hire in the future will have documented history of building and developing tangible business skills, not soft skills like: negotiating, delegating and whatever other buzzword social skill re-purposed for a business setting someone writer makes up.

What’s a real skill?

We should all be sharpening these real business skills: analytics, specific programs (eg peachtree, peoplesoft, SAP ect), programming languages, the math and process standards for a specific industry. That’s just off the top of my head.

No more of this: I have 20 years experience “managing people”. 

If you have 20 years experience, of course you’ve managed people. What else did you do?

I don’t know anything about coding. I’m an amateur and I don’t really have a lot of interest in the typically techie type stuff like python and java and whatever. I might in the future though, probably once I realize its power.

In my world coding and learning different syntax  comes directly from an analysis perspective.

Someone like me starts in Excel, finance specifically. Then you find yourself having to debug macros you’ve created even though you don’t know shit about VBA, but you hunker down and do it. 

Then the assholes in the IT department can’t get reports fast enough to you and/or you realize you’re an asshole and requesting a ton of one time use ad-hoc BS, so you start to learn to query with SQL languages.

Then that stat packages on Excel aren’t enough and you have to learn the R language. Big data? You’ll need to get your Hadoop on.

This should really all come before you understand what happens on a balance sheet, or what the throughput rate is in a warehouse, but it never does.

Day 2 maybe Day 1 depends if the pool party is just a prologue. Like I said in the last post I was trying not to take things so serious so I missed  stuff but just relaxed when liberally walked into and watched bands on my schedule.

You’ll see it wasn’t an intense Friday for me. I got their late and I was pretty much front and center for only Weedeater and for some of High on Fire.

TINARWEN

I didn’t come to this day until 6pm to catch Tinarwen’s set and even then I got about four or five songs in. This was one of the cool curveballs along the lines of Dengue Fever at the pool. I have an album from these guys and haven’t really followed them since but being able to see them live was big for me and I’m excited it happened.

WEEDEATER

Hey this was Venom Inc’s spot but Weedeater filled in last minute. They are just a great time and anytime I’m able to watch Dixie Dave and company play I will. I’m glad they filled in for Venom Inc, they probably fit better in the pool setting.

HIGH ON FIRE

In a lot of ways Psycho is the Matt Pike show. Maybe they’ll get a Scum Angel/Kalas reunion or something next year. High On Fire sounded great I admittedly haven’t been a close follower of the band since their first album. There is no good reason for that because I like the band a ton.

INTEGRITY

I stay for about half of Integrity’s set, not because it wasn’t awesome but because I was tired and I was trying not to take all this so seriously.

WHAT I MISSED

Homewrecker was a band I would have liked to see under the right circumstances.

Night Horse played a great set according to all my friends. I wish I got on that but man were they on early. Definitely on my watchlist now that they’re back together

Yakuza, Wolvhammer, Church of Misery

I feel like crap typing this and saying I missed those bands.