Once again, David Maister proves to be a source of wise counsel and advice.

The New Year

Go have a look at Charlie Green’s A Better New Year’s Resolution. You’ll be glad you did.

Just got tagged by Dina in this latest blog game. Seems only just, as we met courtesy of blogging even though we live half a world away from one another. We did manage to have dinner in Cambridge two years ago when our travel schedules meshed.

5 things most people may not know about me? Here goes:

1. I am in the Guinness Book of World Records as part of the world’s longest kickline. On November 16, 1991, in celebration of the Princeton Triangle Club’s 100th anniversary, 535 Triangle alumni formed the world’s longest kickline. The kickline beat the previous record of 516, which had been set to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Minnesota Vikings. The record kickline, which included alumni (the oldest being Whitney Landon ’17) and undergraduate members of the club, took place before the Princeton-Yale football game. Triangulites kicked for nearly a minute to “You May Be In the Hasty Pudding” (from Triangle’s 1934 show, Stags at Bay), played by the Princeton University Band, which was incidentally founded by Triangle members Joseph Hewitt ’07 and Arthur Osborn ’07. I was one of the 535 alumni kicking away.
2. One of the first things I did during my MBA career was to write a version of Turkey Bingo for my section. The program was a simple BASIC program written on the school’s DEC-10 machine to generate a Bingo card with names of members of the section distributed randomly on each Bingo card. You filled in a cell if that particular person made a comment during class. If you got a Bingo, you had to get yourself called on and use the “phrase of the day” in your comment in order to win. Not all of the faculty considered this a good use of my time 🙂
3. I started snowboarding at age 45, although I am on hiatus this season at the orders of my orthopedic surgeon.
4. I was held up at gunpoint in my New York apartment the day before my 30th birthday in 1983
5. I’m a huge fan of the theater and have been involved in amateur and community theater productions for nearly 40 years. I have been an usher, stage carpenter, stage electrician, pin rail grip, follow spot operator, stage hand, props manager, production stage manager, set designer, lighting designer, tour manager, director, and producer. But, most importantly, I met my wife, Charlotte, doing community theater in New York City as part of the Blue Hill Troupe.

I think I will tag:

• Jack Vinson
• Buzz Bruggeman
• Ernie Svenson
• Sheryle Bolton
• Espen Andersen

I guess this blog thing is more than an experiment now, as I reach my fifth blogiversary. When I started this I was teaching information technology and knowledge management topics at the Kellogg School. Today, I’m helping clients deal much the same set of issues. We have powerful technology and new services that promise to make us more effective and productive. Sometimes they actually do.

This space is a place where I try to get my own thinking straight and a way to immerse myself better in the ongoing conversation of others trying to get their thinking straight. Some of them think in like-minded ways, others in very different ways, and all are important to the journey.

What I said last year remains true:

I remain interested in the challenges of making organizations better places for real people to work in and still believe that the effective use of technology makes a difference. I suspect that large organizations are nearing the end of their useful life and that the evolution toward new forms will continue to be painful and noisy. I worry about leaders and executives who choose to ignore facts and who can’t or won’t distinguish between the theory of evolution and the theory of who shot JFK. [McGee’s Musings]

As has become my custom, I want to thank those whose paths I’ve crossed, if only electronically:

Jenny Levine, AKMA, Terry Frazier, Betsy Devine, Buzz Bruggeman, Denham Grey, Marc Orchant, Cameron Reilly, Ernie Svenson, Judith Meskill, Jack Vinson, Ross Mayfield, Lilia Efimova, Jeremy Wagstaff, Matt Mower, Ton Zijlstra, Eric Snowdeal, Rick Klau, Greg Lloyd, Chris Nuzum, Jordan Frank, Halley Suitt, Jon Husband, Dina Mehta, Shannon Clark, Bruce MacEwen, Espen Andersen, Hylton Jolliffe, Stowe Boyd, Francois Gossieaux, Jim Berkowitz, Eric Lunt, Dennis Kennedy, Matt Homann, Jim Ware, Elizabeth Albrycht, Regina Miller, David Gurteen, Rik Reppe, Tom Davenport & Larry Prusak, John Sviokla, Bryan Rieger, Stephanie Rieger, Sheryle Bolton, Lynne Whitehorn-Umphres, Bill Ives, Giovanni Rodriguez, David Maister, Nancy White

I spent the weekend in St.Louis with 17 of my classmates from the Class of 1971 of the St. Louis Priory. Since there were only 29 of us in the class, that was actually an excellent turnout. Lots of laughs and lots of stories from a group of truly excellent storytellers. It was good to reconnect with everyone.

Priory was and still is an all-boy Catholic prep school run by Benedictine monks. The founding group of monks were from Ampleforth Abbey in England and they had no reservations about transplanting English prep school practices and expectations to the Midwest. While the practices back in the 1960s extended to a belief in the efficacy of corporal punishment in focusing the attention of distractable young men, the high expectations of what we were capable of intellectually set us up for college, law school, medical school, business school, and graduate school experiences that were substantially easier than they otherwise might have been.

There is at least one other Priory alum that you know besides me. Kevin Kline, the actor, was a senior the year that I entered the school as a lowly first former (7th grader in American parlance).

Beloit College has been running this list each August to offer some insight into the formative years that characterize the 18-year olds about to enter college. It always makes me feel old. I’ve picked a few that strike home particularly for me. Check out the entire list and previous years’ as well.

Each August since 1998, as faculty prepare for the academic year, Beloit College in Wisconsin has released the Beloit College Mindset List. A creation of Beloit

Michael Levin is a “Friend of Buzz” I met a few years back when I was visiting Buzz when he was still based in Florida. Michael is a Java developer and all round good guy. I thought this was worth passing along to my engineering friends and those who live with them. I found it helpful

Comprehending Engineers

Comprehending Engineers – Part 1:To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist, the glass is half empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

Comprehending Engineers – Part 2:What is the difference between Mechanical Engineers and Civil Engineers?Mechanical Engineers build weapons, Civil Engineers build targets.

Comprehending Engineers – Part 3:Three engineering students were gathered together discussing the possible designers of the human body. One said, “It was a mechanical engineer. Just look at all the joints.” Another said, “No, it was an electrical engineer. The nervous system has many thousands of electrical connections.” The last said, “Actually it was a civil engineer. Who else would run a toxic waste pipeline through a recreational area?”

Comprehending Engineers – Part 4:”Normal people … believe that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain ‘t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet.”

Comprehending Engineers – Part 5:An architect, an artist and an engineer were discussing whether it was better to have a wife or a mistress. The architect said he preferred a wife, as they could build a solid foundation for an enduring relationship.
The artist said he preferred a mistress, because of the passion and mystery he found there.
The engineer said, “I like both.”
“Both?”
Engineer: “Yeah. If you have a wife and a mistress, they will each assume you are spending time with the other woman, and you can go to the lab and get some work done [Michael Levin’s Weblog]

I am continuing to recover from my shoulder injury last month. Although the progress feels slow, both my physical therapist and orthopedic surgeon tell me that things are right on schedule and doing well. When I first posted about the accident I had just met with the surgeon and we had not yet completed all the diagnostic tests. Once the CAT scans were in, together with more detailed x-rays, it was clear that I had done significantly more damage than I initially thought. What I had was, in technical terms, “a closed, comminuted fracture of the right proximal humerus.” In more colloquial terms, what I had was a “head split,” where I had turned the ball of my shoulder into something resembling a jigsaw puzzle. Quite remarkable what you can do to yourself falling off a bike at 0 MPH.

Continue reading An update on my shoulder and recovery progress

I finally got around to finishing the transition from Radio to WordPress for McGee’s Musings. I don’t think there will be an serious breakage, but do let me know otherwise. I’ve elected to simply cut over from Jan 1 forward and leave the old Radio blog archives in place. Someday I might get around to porting them.

With the switch to WordPress, I am re-enabling comments and trackbacks, which will be moderated. Let’s hope that the platform change will also lead to some increase in posting frequency. Not that technology has been the excuse for my recent general level of silence.

I expect I will continue to fiddle with the new design and new platform. Feedback of any kind is welcome.