I have discovered something about my brain.  If I work too hard on mentally strenuous tasks for too long my head reaches a point where it will refuse to cooperate with me.  I will sit down to write and it will say back to me, ‘no asshole, put the pen down I have had enough.’  I have actually found myself more productive when I do mundane tasks during the down slopes, and the ‘heavy’ stuff during the upslopes.  One time I started doing odd things when I worked too hard.  For example, making a coffee and putting the sugar straight in the bin or drinking the milk before putting it in.   Or how about waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to go back to sleep, how about that one?

I had pushed through the burn as they say and found that at the end of the road, even if I wrote something, it was crap.  Yes, more crap than usual and I would have to write the whole damn thing again from scratch.

Take it from me… don’t overwork your brain.

Susan Boyle, RATM and other things have made me realise something this morning.  The internet is no longer the realm of backwater geeks or nerds, sure I knew that and so did you, it’s now influencing the mainstream by becoming the mainstream.  You can ignore things like piracy, file sharing, email forwards (well you can ignore those) and the like because we are now seeing it finally become a mainstream thing.  This is exciting and it means I should finally get my finger out and do something with some of my ideas.  It also means that the internet is now crowded with mobs.  Boo.

A final thought for today: Things are what we make them.  Susan Boyle, RATM, Radiohead, Nine inch nails, Corey Smith… it’s up to us.  We live in a unique time where you can reach an audience via electronic means.  Making money is the hard part but people are having a go and that’s great to see.

I am off to the Zoo… it’s my daughter’s birthday!

No.  Why not?  In my limited experience there comes a time when you have to make choices that will benefit the corporation and hurt people.  You can only go so far before you will be required to sell your soul to get ahead.   There might come a time when the organisation is ‘restructuring’ or ‘changing direction’ and guess who they call on as the toe cutter?   Your choice?  To keep your job, you have to tell them who to get rid of.  One person I know once had to sack a group of people, one who was a good friend and dying of cancer, because shareholders didn’t have enough money.   It takes a lack of heart to do things like that, and a small piece of you dies when you do it.

Call it corporate objectives, call it ‘profit’, call it what you like, but the minute you put money and the corporation ahead of human decency you have sold your soul to the corporation and you have become it’s property.  Just wait until the wheel turns and it’s your turn to be crushed into powder.

After suffering at the hands of administrators more than once, as I am sure you have too, I have reached a conclusion.  It’s easy to do what’s right but even harder to do the right thing.  Doing what’s right means following established policy, running through the steps, implementing the actions and patting yourself on the back.  Doing the right thing takes courage, might go against policy and make you unpopular because it’s what’s needed.  It’s the decision that says, ‘my boss won’t like this but it’s what should be gone because it’s right and honest’. Too many managers I know follow the party line without thinking about what’s right.  We live in a society where ethics has become a thing to observer from afar, not the internal clock of conscience.

Next time you are faced with the choice see what you will do, I guarantee you will almost always struggle to make the ‘ethical’ choice.

Here’s a short thought:

Problems can only be practically solved because of the things we take to practically restrict their solving them.  People often blame politics, the environment, marketing, accounting but the biggest issue is what’s feasible or practical to do, given the known constraints.  There is a big difference between assumption and actual barrier, yet the actual barriers can be nothing else but thought in the beginning even though it may actually be a real issue that would hinder the problem solving effort.   Thinking, as someone said (sorry), doesn’t make it so.   The truth may be what happens after we do something, not sure about that; yet there is a level of pragmatism that always drives decision making in business.  We can’t do this because of that and we can’t do that because of this.   We need to think through these barriers carefully to see if they are real or a matter of our discourse.

One example happened to me years ago when I tried my hand at business.  We kept making decisions because ‘we had to’ and over a period of time the direction I blissfully steered the business to failed.  Each decision was thought out, reasoned over, implemented with an eye to improvement.  Yet as complexity unfolded, new ideas emerged which reset my decision parameters and modified my heuristics, I realised I was playing a fools game.  There was no ‘right’ answer, only what was feasible and known to me at the time and with the resources that I had to use.    Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber talked about this years ago, yet in all the work I have done, I have seen little progress in this regard.  Complexity is a bitch. Scholars like the late Herbert Simon called it decision making under ambiguity, what decisions are made that don’t contain that?  Tell me if you know.

The hidden tiger of decision making and complex problem solving is complexity.  It laughs at us when we confront it with our ideas, and changes shape the minute we make a choice.  What’s known becomes unknown and what seemed ‘right’ becomes not right after the action has been taken.  Is the truth something that happens to an idea as William James said?  Maybe.  Perhaps the truth is not just what happens to the idea but the reasons why it didn’t work in the first place.  It is elusive, nevertheless.