Isn’t that great as I sit here typing this my house is overrun by mice. On the upside at least I have something to blog about. Yes my house has mice in it. I will leave you with a classic line from Flying High (Airplane).
[turns to the camera after being dissed by Elaine]
Ted Striker: What a pisser!
*stolen from imdb.com
I have had my fair share of back stabbings in my short life… more than I would want to count. Given that I am typing… I can’t count and I too overweight to see my toes. It has been my experience that the road to hell is not paved with good intentions… it’s paved with people trying to steal my stuff. People trying to take my job… (get off it’s mine!) and people undermining me at every turn. People murdering other people and so on and so on. Where is the good intention in that I tell you! Sure, this saying has merit. Many a good deed does actually backfire and create hell for the intended. But most of the time my dear friends you find people are, as the great Nick Cave postulates, just no good. The good intentions people may have had usually end up in something that has small consequences even though sometimes it does not.
We live in a world where ambition rules over love, good taste is blinded by mass appeal and people like Ghandi are shot in the street. This world leaves a taste so foul in your mouth at times that you want to surgically remove your tongue so at least it can be clean. Sure, I am ranting and sure it’s late. But you know what I find myself shortchanged more often by people who mean me harm as opposed to people who’s heart is in the right place. I could labour this but you know what I think I made my point.
I am amazed at how many times during the week I am asked if I would like a larger penis. What about a dose of viagra? How about buying some “quality” software? The truth of the matter is the more you see something the more you want it. And let’s face it who would like some quality software :D.
I wonder if there is a spammer code? Do you think they sit around sending these pointless emails just to annoy us? No there’s a dollar in it. I wonder who the GENIUS is behind the business model? Bill Gates? I don’t think so. Although spam infuriates me - you have to admire the persistence of the spammer. They never give up asking or sending or intruding us with their annoying little “grow your thing bigger” emails. I wonder if the world took on the persistence of the spammer what would happen? What if we were MORE persistent in our life goals… as persistent as the spammer? What would happen?
Stop and think about this for a moment. A spammer writes something from the top of their head to get you to read it. Granted most blog spam these days is less about car insurance than it is about large wangs. But I digress. Just how many hurdles does a spammer have to overcome? Email address filters? HEAPS! They never give up. The law changes and they tilt their black hat at it. They don’t care! They persist until they flood your inbox with more and more spam. Here is the text that got through two layers of spam filtering and God knows what else to get to me this morning.
Become a God in your lassie’s bedroom with our new enhancement preparation! You don’t need to take severe measures! It’s all safe and natural! faraway places? His operation had run smoothly since 1988, when henot to cooperate with me on my book.always asked whenever he was about to jump in and make a splash. Is
It’s not Hemmingway is it? It’s bloody jibberish is what it is. Still it got through. I am annoyed that so much filtering doesn’t stop it. I have even seen spam get through the Uni filter and offer me a high paying “job” in Italy. Unfortunately it almost always starts with: “Dear;” or “Hello Prospect”. This is unfortunate because I have never been offered a job I didn’t apply for!
I would urge you all to take a lesson from a spammer. If they weren’t persistent they we would not have medicine bigger “things” viagra insurance lottery so much rubbish in our inbox.
I have a few social networking platforms I use… although I am really only a fan of two. Delicious and Stumbleupon. Why? Delicious because I like to bookmark stuff and stumbleupon because it’s so damned intuitive. I have never in my life had so much fun and learned at the SAME TIME. I have over 1,100 stumbles now so my guess is that it will continue to grow as I find more stuff I like. Every now again I get a rush of traffic from stumble which is also nice. Enough pleasantries… this is my stumblepage…
You can add me as a friend if you like and I will respond in kind:
I am not a prolific digger or a reddit… person but I do enjoy them on occasion. So if you are in the area why not check it out.
A while ago I was set a task. To drive to the Gold Coast every Thursday and try my hand at teaching a subject about information. Hey why not? The Gold Coast is an interesting place and the people there are quite nice. The interesting thing is that in five years of teaching this subject elsewhere I have found that people really don’t like it. We have tried everything from standing on our head to juggling in class. Many years ago a friend of mine even dressed up like a witch and handed out minties to increase student engagement. Alas, it didn’t work.
I remember five years ago turning up to a class and introducing the major assessment to the class. After one hour of reading on a big screen a student came up to me and asked… what was that about? No, I am not joking. I am being serious. I asked her what she meant and she told me she wasn’t watching for the past hour and wanted me to explain what I had just said… again. During my time this experience stands out but is far too common in my courses.
People hate this course. It’s about ‘information’, informatics, information systems and so on. Boring? Students in the class range from my friend above, to mavens, critics, trouble makers and the occasional paradigm shifter. Overall this has been however, a part of my life that has brought me a lot of growth but a quadruple measure of frustration as well.
95% of the people I have taught in any of my courses almost always don’t give a crap about what I have to say. Now, if you are reading this and you were in my course you may be in the 5%. If that’s you then God bless you. If you are reading this and remember me you may have liked me or the course but can’t remember what I said. That’s probably my fault. But what can you do when you are stuck with subjects like knowledge management? For goodness sake, I don’t even know what that is.
Most of the people I meet are on the their way to the sausage factory. By that, I am of course referring to the giant machine that sucks the living creative spirit out from us and makes hamburger patties with it. That machine. The evil corporate beast that brings you the lottery, things like ‘the systems development life cycle’ and so on. Why am I harping on about this? Well … why not?
So how do you cope with students who just want a ‘pass’. Granted I believe a lot of the time in what I teach that it’s A). useful and B) helpful. But I am stuck with this bullcrap idealist mentality I inherited from someone. Can I tell you that most people don’t want to learn about information… even though I want them to? Why should I bother?
When I started teaching I had a concept of what I thought teaching would be like. Sharing ideas, collaboration you know the sort of thing you see on those Lotus advertisements. But who the hell am I kidding? How do you hold your head up? You either forget about being a teacher or you push hard, make them hate you and move on. Neither option is good… there is probably a third when my head pulls itself out of this daze I will remember it.
Of course. I am by nature an optimist. So there have been many people who I helped who were incredibly nice. Overall my assessment is however, that most of time you are simply repeating information for those who ‘want to get through’. Through to what? Through to corporate sausage maker.
A friend of mine put it this way: we are feeding meat to the corporate sausage factory. I think he is right. I have no power to change the way society chooses to run it’s business. You don’t have to run business that way. Read Maverick (Ricardo Semler) if you don’t believe me. Things can be different. Yet, we stick to the Fordian principles of ’scientific’ management which insist we develop ‘plans’ whilst never questioning the underlying motives of our ’superiors’.
If you are like me and you have a heart you simply can’t switch off when it comes to these things. I have heard it said that you the author is separate to the page. I am sorry but that simply is a load of rubbish. You can be diced up into little bits and fed into the sausage grinder unless you want to be. If you care about your teaching and want to help people learn … it will cost you. There’s a price you must pay if ‘learning’ is the aim of any course. No matter if it’s basket weaving at your local school or quantum mechanics… you will have to pay the price. If you put effort or time or energy into what you do then be prepared for the sausage people. They are part of life.
I am the kind of academic who believes in knowledge but I don’t REALLY think the endless streams of meta-information we call ‘journals’ are really going to improve society. After realising during my PhD that most knowledge streams never interact I have become more than a little concerned about problems and society. For example when I was reviewing the problem solving research literature I went to all kinds of disciplines. Education, humanities, science, information systems, information technology and social science to name just a few. Do you know what I found? I found the same argument mentioned at least 30 times. Exactly what was that argument?
We need to find better ways to fix messy problems
They all said the same thing but in different contexts. Yet none of them spoke in the same voice. It’s like being in a room with 30 people from different nationalities while they all speak the same sentence in their own language. How can so many different people have the same conversation with themselves? And anyway could you please tell me how any of that is improving society? People can’t because overall it’s about promotions, journal rankings and impact factors. Is that really improving society? Well you might say, ‘I got into Academy of Management Review but if it isn’t working or improving things who actually cares?
I am not saying that I don’t care. That’s precisely the problem I do care. But why? A theory is only as good as it’s validity or usefulness. But I digress.
I would like to end my rant here on a positive note. I have had many wonderful students. Too many to name actually. These people have enlightened my life with their brilliance, challenges and wit. I have met great teachers, fellow thinkers and carers on the path of knowledge who made my life wonderful… for a while. Most of them wind up in trouble with the sausage machine, sacked or moving on. How sad.
So what’s the positive point? There are people who want to learn and grow. These ones are rare but make the journey worthwhile. Yes, it makes up for all the stupid university politics (hat tip to Peter Checkland), the disciplinary meetings and the endless reams of ‘research’. Why because somebody cares and was bothered enough to look beyond the surface level. These people teach me that sausage maker can’t get to everyone, oh no there are some who for the sake of learning have shunned it’s shiny metal surface. So for these I say it’s all worth it!
I was sitting in my office the other day with my supervisor came running in. We got to talking about Griffith’s new performance metrics when he said something that caught my attention. In not so many words he told me … to shoot for average.
I got an email the other day from a colleague in South Australia who had read a paper of mine… he told me to “shoot for average”.
I am not sure if it’s God or what but maybe, just maybe I need to “shoot for average”. After all, when you are just getting started (at least in cricket terms) you need to get the runs on the board. If you don’t perform consistently at a “respectable” level often enough you may just wind up being left out in the cold. This did get me thinking about how people become extraordinary… how do they do it? What makes this blogger stand out and have more visitors than this blogger (me)? The answer… they are not average. They stand out. As for me I am Mr. Average. In our performace metrics there are four tiers:
1. Tier A*
The super Tier… if you combined Jimi Hendrix, Einstien, Hagel and some other famous person and made them into UBER academics they would publish in these journals.
2. Tier A
Many academics kindly refer to these as Good but not great.
3. Tier B
These are above average but not quite average as average goes… (does that make sense?).
4. Tier C
Average - my goal
Anything else in our metrics is relegated to supreme obscurity. *coughs* So why do I want to shoot for average? Because the bigger tiered journals are out of my league at the moment. Through development and willpower if I could give a crap… I might try. Now this “quitter” attitude may surprise you. But to me if you want to play the game, it’s better to be consistent in the beginning and THEN become remarkable than be instantly remarkable. Now, the only thing to work out is if I want to play the game or not. I am against the corporate sausage maker!
I am on a path of potential development… let’s see if I can discover what I am remarkable at. Sorry, I watched a Seth Godin video recently.
Be free! Be free!
At the time of writing this post I am over committed. So I thought I would share with you 5 signs that I have discovered that let you know you are over committed. In true problem solving blog style… I will also present solutions to get you back on track.
This can be the symptoms of many things… however when you are over committed you simply feel tired all the time. You sleep 10 hours and you are tired… you sleep 24 hours and you are tired. Personally, when this happens to me (as it is now) it’ s time to think about what I am doing. When you have a big commitment you can’t escape (i.e. work) then it’s difficult to bail out as I will discuss later. You can however, wind back over time which will gradually release the pressure.
As you walk to bus (for example) or go to the car you feeling a sinking feeling at the realisation of the day you have ahead of yourself. As the day drags on you find yourself becoming more and more lethargic. No matter what you do, you keep getting more slower and feel less like working than you did before. One of the main reasons you feel this way is because you have too much on your plate. I find that if I have too much to do it overwhelms me and I get almost nothing done. Getting stuff done is important but so is quality of time. You may secretly love your job but hate doing so much of it.
For no apparent reason you find yourself randomly angry. This can be another symptom of working too much and being over committed. There are a billion reasons why you are angry with life and I am in no wise saying that over commitment is the only one. It is however, one of the things that drives us to anger because we have to work so hard to achieve so little. Just thinking about that right now makes me mad!
As pressure and stress take hold of you, you will feel it. The stuff I mentioned above, other things like loss or increased appetite, a desire to ‘break free’ of the corporate sausage maker and more than likely the feeling that you just have to work this hard are symptom of pressure. After all… if you don’t do it who will? I mean they are paying you the big money aren’t they? No!
You might get sudden backaches, rashes, itchiness, headaches, tension pain and so on because of over commitment. This is usually the last thing that happens before you fall over and die. There comes a point where your mind, body and soul start to take over your desire to do a million things at once. We call this burnout. Don’t let it get to the point where this happens. Here are some of the things I do to keep it at bay:
I am spanking myself here as well. There are times when you think you will have the time to do something but in reality you don’t. If you say yes… you will have to trade something off (like family time) in order to get there. Here is the lie that I almost always fall for:
If I do this it will give me more money to spend on my kids
In a word that’s nonsense because if your kids care more about money than they do you… you have a problem. Sure a good education is nice as is a flashly house… but what price are you willing to pay to have those things… your soul? Next time something comes along and you want to do it remember something has to move out of the way so you can do it. That’s life.
Work can be hard and you may be in a position where you can’t change. One thing you can do is begin to think about ways of streamlining your work. Put it this way: What can I do now that I could faster if I had the right tools? This may mean an investment in software, delegation or outsourcing (if you can). The alternative you keep going until you burnout. Once you go there… it’s gets pretty hard to come back.
A non-materialist way of looking at this is to say: I don’t have to own a house, Jaguar or BMW to be happy. I can however have peace and joy from those that love me. Sorry allow me to come back to reality for the moment and address the heading. You can work in jobs where the pressure is reduced and there isn’t as much asked of you. You can find vocations that pay less for less responsibility… you could also win lotto or fly to the moon in a self-propelled raft! There are choices (jokes aside) that you can make on a daily basis to make your life better. You can build a strategy to improve things over time. Decide to leave at 5pm instead 10. If you are asked to do something ‘extra’ for someone and you don’t have the time… don’t do it. Begin to make these kinds of choices on a daily basis… it will make the world of difference to you.
At the end of the day there are really two kinds of variables life throws us. Those which we can control (minimal) and those we can’t (everything else). The key thing is to learn about those you can control and do something and leave everything else up to God. One of these things you can control is the choices you make about your life and the direction it’s going in. If you are over commited can I encourage you today to begin to wind back? Getting up the ladder lickity split is not what life is about. Make the right choices for you and you will find a great deal more peace flowing into your life.
