Last week, we hit almost 315,000 advanced meters deployed. Starting to ramp up to 20,000 per week. The deployment team definitely has it’s work cut out.
Archive for September, 2009
Tell Me Why and So What?
Sep 30
I have three statements / comments on the wall of my office. Task & Purpose, So What?, and Repetitive Stupidity. Often when people come in my office I will just point one out to them. Sometimes they get it and sometimes they don’t.
Task & Purpose. Yes, an army thing. When you give me a task, tell me the purpose. Am I trying to prove something one way or another, good or bad, making a recommendation, just providing information? Tell me before I decide how to do my action. Don’t me go off and spend a lot of time spinning my wheels when you have more info that would help formulate my purpose with the task. In a previous job, this was never given to me and very frequently I had to do and redo the same job over and over again because I was told to “just do it.” Even when I would ask, no additional info was given, because guess what, my boss then would not ask the question: Why?
So What? A great lesson from my old commander BG Red Brown. You know how people will often come up to you and start spouting a bunch of information. Their mouth is running 100 mph and most of what they are saying makes zero to little sense. You have to sometimes say, “Stop, what do you want?” Give me the BLUF (bottom line up front). Why are you here? What are you trying to tell me? What’s the point?
Repetitive Stupidity. Two things here, “Don’t make the same stupid mistake twice” and “Write it down if you have to do the same things over and over.” If you have a task that has some amount of complexity to it or if you need to teach it to others and it needs to be consistent time and time again, “write it down.” One of the hardest things I do these days on a frequent basis is to try and have processes or procedures documented. I work for a fairly large company and many things need to be written down for consistency purposes and they aren’t.
Okay, one more. “The Average Person is a Moron.” This is not meant to be a derogatory comment, though it may sound so. People will do the most unexpected things at any time. Think of that drive into work. You remember that driver that suddenly pulled over in front of you, “moron.” Always think of the contingency plan for if that would happen. They teach you that in defensive driving. “Always expect the unexpected.” The average person, and at times we all can be average, quite often does some stupid things, plan for it because, guess what, it’ll happen…
Wine Tasting
Sep 28
Had a wine tasting at the house on Saturday. I think a good time was had by all. No one wanted to break out the Beatles Rock Band, though. Mary had a great menu and others brought wines to match. Pasta with an heirloom tomato sauce, rosemary shrimp with arugula salad, pork tenderloin with blackberry sauce, prime rib, and dark chocolate with dark chocolate cupcakes. Excellent!
Many years ago, riding back from Fort Hood, TX with my battalion commander, Bill (different Bill), he was discussing wanting to do some winetasting. He suspected whether he would be invited to join, so he had thought about starting his own. I stuck up my hand and said, “We’ll do it.” Now nine plus years later, the group still gets together for some socializing and, of course, some wine. On Saturday, someone estimate that we had perhaps tried around 500 different wines through the years. Wow.
Homework
Sep 25
So what is it with homework these days? My first grader has 45 minutes to an hour a day. Okay, that’s all right I suppose, and it does include reading for 15 minutes. However, my fifth grader has two to three hours a day, not including reading. Last night she was up to 9 pm working on homework and she wasn’t done yet. This morning she still had math corrections to fix. Her “normal” bed time is 8:30 pm. As a kid, I don’t really remember having any homework except for high school and it was only for the sciences. Last year my wife talked to the Dean of Education at TCU and she said that kids should have about 10 minutes of homework per subject. Okay, this should be an hour or so, not two to three hours. It seems that the only break my oldest gets is on the weekend. Is this what it is to be a kid these days?
aponly.what?
Sep 24
Okay, so what is aponly.com? A joke perhaps, my handle online for sure. Bill and I were discussing one day, perhaps we were out somewhere and there was an “Employees Only” door in the corner, or maybe it was “Authorized Personnel Only.” We started thinking, if your name was Employees (or Authorized Personnel) then you could go through that door. Well, Authorized Personnel ONLY was shortened to a p only, and then aponly. There you have it, nonsense.