BP, I don’t understand

Now that BP’s most recent attempt to stop the oil in the Gulf of Mexico has failed, they have decided to revert to a revised version of their doomed “top hat” idea from several weeks ago.  They indicate that the “top hat” will be ready in four to seven days.

I don’t understand.  BP is facing tremendous cost every day that the spill continues.  They started trying the current technique four days ago, and for weeks they must have been trying to figure out which trick is really going to work.  Given that the cost of readying multiple techniques at once pales when compared to the cost of the spill, wouldn’t it have made sense for BP to start working on the “top hat” weeks ago?  For part of this project, they need to cut the riser pipe, which I’m sure will take time.  Once again, though, couldn’t they have started trimming the pipe weeks ago?

Momentous

Be all you can be

There used to be this advertisement the Armed Forces. I think it was the Army. It went something like be all you can be. I think about that a lot. To me being all that I can be is not so much about raw achievement as it was in the advertisement as much as being as human as I can be. It's about humanity.

Being good at a lot of things is pretty easy. For example riding a bike or walking or even running are all pretty easy skills to learn. Even more complicated skills are relatively easy to learn. Things like mathematics or accounting. Sure, it's a lot of work but they're still easy to learn.

I'm not sure why I struggle with humanity.Perhaps learning humanity is a struggle because it's a personally challenging endeavor. In learning most skills we build ourselves up. In learning humanity we have to understand that we aren't great at what we do. We must stop and reflect on the fact that we might be bad people in some regards. Each of us has probably done a bad thing from time to time. It's personally challenging to believe that we don't need to be competitive. It's okay not to be the best at something. It's okay if somebody else has great ideas and does great things.

Conventional wisdom is similar to the Army commercial that I mentioned earlier. We believe that in order to be all we can be we must push ourselves to accomplish as much as we possibly can. Being good people is a challenge because in some regards it requires unlearning so many of those things that we spend so much time learning throughout our entire lives. Sometimes being a good person means letting someone else come in first place.

For Sale…

I came across this on a trip to the grocery store the other day.

Does the author realize that if Sarge’s testicles were removed instead of his ovaries, he might stop peeing in the house the other 20% of the time?

A champion’s offspring with no papers?  Really!  What on earth did the papers get used for, “medicinal purposes”?  Is he part Min-Pin, part Maui Wowy?  Perhaps they only had enough newspaper to potty train him for 11 months and they were forced to use his pedigree when they ran out?

If you give a moose a muffin…

By the time we got to Lansing this evening, Aimee was barely able to contain herself.  Finally, she blurted out “If they offer you a Citi card, are you gonna take that too?” 

Citi is one of my least favorite companies.  Let me tell you, I can hold a grudge against a company for a long, long time.  For the past fourteen years I have gone out of my way to avoid Quality Dairy.  In fact, I bet that I have only visited a Quality Dairy store an average of once per year for the past fourteen years.

Anyway, the source of my wife’s mirth began a couple months ago when I was smitten with Bluetooth.  First it was Bluetooth headphones, then mice, then an adapter for our home stereo system, and of course I eventually bought a used Bluetooth keyboard on E-bay.  $25 shipped.  It’s really slick, but once I tried it, I wanted to push the envelope.

Couchtop computing.  Sure, it’s much hyped (ever heard of a media center PC?) but is anyone really into it?  I tried it out, but I couldn’t see my monitor well enough to actually do anything.  That got my wheels turning.  I needed a larger monitor.  Something large enough that I could sit on the couch and compose Word documents in comfort.

While I was simmering on this idea, the Olympic games began.  I’m not into the Olympics, but I am into hockey.  The game last Sunday was not to be missed: The USA versus Canada.  The two super powers of hockey duking it out.  In my ignorance I thought I could probably pay someone on the Internet to let me watch the game on my computer.

I was wrong.  NBC kept redirecting me to Comcast.  Finally, I realized that if I wanted to ever see hockey on TV again, I’d have to bite the bullet and upgrade our analog cable.  It was such a frustrating realization that I nearly threw my computer.  Instead, I called Comcast and sullenly ordered the entry level digital package.

If you give a moose a muffin, he’ll want some jam to go with it.

My logic went like this.  If I ordered the cable upgrade quickly, I could still watch the final game on TV without getting smoked out at a bar.  If I was going to swallow my pride and buy cable TV, I might as well watch the game on a reasonably good TV.  If I was going to buy a reasonably good TV, it better be one that I could compose Word documents on while lying down on my couch.

Citi is one of my least favorite companies.  It’s right up there with Dodge.  And, ironically, Comcast.  By the way, I don’t care for television (hockey games excepted) either.  But there we were, driving a borrowed Dodge to purchase a super-size me television in time for a Comcast installation.

In case you’re wondering, they did not offer a discount if I put the purchase on a Citi credit card.

Pick-up sticks

Cleaning up a tangled mess is probably not uncommon.  Partially collapsed buildings must be carefully deconstructed in order to avoid damage to their neighbors.  Failing companies are routinely broken down and sold in as profitable a fashion as possible.

Maintaining the status quo in terms of performance while making corporate changes can be difficult.  It’s easy to overlook the value of unwritten knowledge.  Even if processes are properly documented it can be difficult to understand the relationships between processes without having experienced them first hand.

Many service workers are unable to fully document what they do because much of they do is dictated by intuition.  While recently reviewing a process which was performed by another employee in the past, I puzzled over why her results were so different from my own.  Why did customers seem so responsive in the past, yet so lackluster today? 

The answer is simple, straightforward.  Her experience indicated that unless she prodded customers, customer response would be low.  Her process included an unwritten step during which she would contact customers who did not respond in a timely fashion and offer to help them along in the process.

Another situation recently occurred which came from a similar cause: a missing, non-intuitive piece of information which made the difference between a successful project and a disastrous one.  What is the role of this intuited knowledge in an evolving company?  How can companies avoid faltering amidst the redevelopment of internal processes?

When employees will not or cannot become parties to process improvement, they may become liabilities; their mere presence will increase the cost of doing business.  Replacing them will also certainly cause a temporary increase in the cost of doing business, and will create a short term lack of corporate improvement as corporate knowledge is reacquired through accelerated experience.

Improvement is cumulative.  Without a solid foundation, future improvement is jeopardized.  Broken processes were almost certainly created in shortsighted haste, and avoiding the same mistake in the future can only take place by refusing to take the easy way out.

2010 in Photos

Yesterday I came across an article on LifeHacker that suggested creating a project for 2010. One of the suggestions was "365 Days of Photos". Normally I might think "Argh. Too much work!"

Is it really too much work? No, I'm just lazy. After a bit of thought, I realized that since my new phone can take reasonably good pictures AND it can upload directly to Flickr, there isn't a good excuse not to give this project a shot. The only missing piece of the puzzle was that I really dislike the idea of "double entry". Thanks to Flickr's embedded album and Blogger's feed reader plugin, the entire operation is completely seamless.

Each day I need only snap a photo on my phone, write a caption, and you can find it right here from my blog page! Just take a look at the right side of the screen for a slideshow, or click on the links under the slideshow.