From the monthly archives:

October 2010

A revolution is coming

October 26, 2010

For years, big business has waged a war against humanity. It has done everything in its power to rid the workplace of the messiness of human souls. Angry at work? You need a stress management hotline. Disagree with your teammates? You need a conflict resolution workshop. Have an idea that challenges the orthodoxies of the […]

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Teach it

October 25, 2010

Sorry, no snappy title today. I recently found myself explaining to a colleague how and why we would approach a certain problem. It was a problem with considerable ambiguity and though I had thought about it prior to this colleague asking me for an explanation, I hadn’t really arrived at a firm point of view. […]

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At what price?

October 19, 2010

Emerson wrote “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.” This is the deal we make in order to get […]

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Sometimes the torpedo wins

October 7, 2010

I must admit that I am inspired by heroic moments in which people commit themselves fully to a course of action, consequences be damned. When Rocky in Rocky IV goes all out to fight Ivan Drago, knowing it could kill him. When Carl Brashear in Men of Honor goes all out to get himself reinstated […]

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Full pay for half a day

October 6, 2010

I have an idea. Tell all of your employees that from now on you will pay them their current salary but they only have to work half a day. You in? Of course not. It’s a dumb idea. But that is exactly what you are doing right now. Sure, you’re making your employees show up […]

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It’s all about soul

October 5, 2010

Say you owned a business that made widgets. In order to produce those widgets you bought a widget-making machine. Pretty smart. Now I’ve got a question for you. Imagine that machine had a knob on it which controlled the quality of your widgets. Turning the knob up or down did not affect your cost. Would […]

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You know it when you know it

October 5, 2010

I was recently involved in a discussion at work about the definition of a certain word. Some folks were resistant to my attempt to define this term. And there were several comments along the lines of “I know it when I see it.” I respectfully disagree. You don’t know it when you see it. I […]

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