Category Archives: Books

Re-imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age

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From Tom Peters’ wonderful book, Re-imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age:

* Getting things done ultimately is not about “power” or “rank.” It’s about…PASSION and IMAGINATION and PERSISTENCE.

* The biggest waste of time in the world: trying to sell and idea “up the chain of command.”

* A Cool Idea is by definition a…Direct Frontal Attack…on the Holy Authority of Today’s Bosses.

* The power of the “powerless” lies in “Boss-Free Implementation.”

* You don’t need an Officially Big Project to attack a Very Big Opportunity.

* Volunteer for Crappy Jobs: crappy jobs that let you take independent charge of things quickly—and early in your tenure.

The past we imagined

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“The future is there, looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.”

Almost a year ago, I posted this line from William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. It still bothers me to think that my past (good and bad) is not fixed. Permanent. That today’s past will look different to a future me. On the other hand, I’ll probably feel differently tomorrow.

Death

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One of my first posts was a quote from Lawrence Block’s Everybody Dies:

“When you die, it is said you see your whole life. But you don’t see it minute by minute, like a speeded-up film. It’s like everything you ever did in all your days was a brushstroke, and now you see the whole painting all at once.”

Poet Billy Collins has a different view:

I wonder how it all got started, this business
about seeing your life flash before your eyes
while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle time into such compression, crushing
decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.
From The Art of Drowning

The Cleanest Tastee Freeze in Town

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In 1987, Jeff Salzman co-authored a little book entitled: Real World 101: How to Find a Job, Get Ahead, Do It Now, and Love It! A year or two later, Salzman spoke to a small group of our company managers and told what I think might be the best management story I ever heard.

It’s the story of a Tastee Freeze, the man who cleaned it and his boss. To insure the Tastee Freeze was cleaned properly, the manager made a list of all the necessary cleaning products and tools; drew up a little chart showing where everything in the supply closet went (color coded); and made a numbered list of the proper order for cleaning the Tastee Freeze. He couldn’t understand why the cleaning guy had trouble following his carefully thought out plan.

One day a new manager showed up at the Tastee Freeze and asked the cleaning guy what he did at the Tastee Freeze. The cleaning guy showed him the precisely organized supply closet; the list of approved mops and buckets; and the printed list of steps for cleaning the Tastee Freeze.

The new manager immediately tore up the lists and told the cleaning guy, “Look, I just want the cleanest Tastee Freeze in town. I don’t care how you do it or what supplies you use. If you run into a snag, let me know and I’ll try to help.”

I must confess that I was too often the first type of manager during the 25 years I “managed” others. All I really wanted was a clean Tastee Freeze but it was so much fun to pick out the mops and make the lists. Alas.

Death by Hollywood

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As a long-time fan of NYPD Blue, I had to give Steven Bochco’s first novel a read. The publisher had to do the usual margin and leading tricks to get this up to hard-back page count (what would have been wrong with a 150 page novel?). But Death by Hollywood is a tasty little snack.

By and large, we’re nothing more than well-paid pimps who represent our poched-out clients as if they’re beautiful young virgins, offereing them up to a bunch of jaded johns who know better, but these are the only whores in town. As the saying goes, denial is not a river in Egypt. It’s a river in Hollywood, and it runs deep, and brown.

On deck: Deception Point by Dan Brown; and Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. Volume one of three. Each in the 1,000 page range.

Acquaintance or friend

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“The dividing line is communication, I think. A friend is someone to whom you can say any jackass thing that enters your mind. With acquaintances, you are forever aware of their slightly unreal image of you, and to keep them content, you edit yourself to fit. Many marriages are between acquaintances. You can be with a person for three hours of your life and have a friend. Another one will remain an acquaintance for thirty years.”

— Bright Orange for the Shroud, John D. MacDonald (page 15)

The Hanged Man’s Song

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Counting the days till John Sandford‘s next novel (Kidd, not Lucas Davenport), due in November (for which I am thankful). From Amazon:

“In The Hanged Man’s Song, a super-hacker friend of Kidd’s named Bobby suddenly disappears from cyberspace, and Kidd knows that isn’t a good sign. Going over to his house, he finds him dead on the floor, his head bashed in and his laptop missing  and Kidd knows that really isn’t a good sign. The secrets on that laptop are potent enough to hang Kidd and everybody else in Bobby’s circle  just to start with  so there’s no question that Kidd and LuEllen have to try to track it down, not to mention that Kidd would dearly love to get his hands on the man who killed Bobby. “