I’ve always found it hard not to infer causality when pondering the immense productivity of Shakespeare (or Dickens, or Aristotle, or … insert your favourite productive person) and the fact that they didn’t have email. At very least it’s hard to deny that those guys show that email is not necessary for productivity. Continue reading
Sweat the small stuff
I recently had to get some air-conditioning work done at home. The first time that was necessary (years ago, after moving to the US from Scotland where a/c means opening the window), we opted for a relatively cheap and local guy. After that was disappointing we moved up to a less cheap but still local company. Most recently though, after further disappointment, we went to one of the the better big firms and that’s who we called this time. A few observations then, applicable to Professional Services as a whole. Continue reading
Othismos and the fine structure of mastery
As usual I’m tussling with the question: Why are some engineers just so much more effective than everyone else?; my current line of thinking being provoked by a series of books by Steven Pressfield.
First, let’s take with a pinch of salt the current flavor-of-day idea that “10,000 hours of deliberate practice” is both necessary and sufficient to achieve “world class performance”. Even K. Anders Ericsson, one of the academics involved in the research upon which that idea tries to sit, has gone to the length of writing a rebuttal article (MS Word), to try to tone down some of the hype. But let’s at least consider, for argument’s sake, the following as unobjectionable.
An antidote to passion
Call me a cynical old git, but the whole “find your passion” thing has worn very thin on me over the past few years. It’s not that I think loving what you do and doing it with energy is inherently bad, but it seems to me that once you start focusing on that — on “my passion” — you have to take your focus off the thing you are doing and, just as (if not more) problematic, off the person for whom you are doing it. Seeking your passion seems reminiscent of “the pursuit of happiness”; a pretty sure way of *not* finding it (or, at least, of discovering that when you do find it, it wasn’t really what you were looking for). Continue reading
Movie Recommendation
I watched this the other night at a philosophy group I attend. An investigation of human interaction with the world through things: covers mastery in music, cooking, carpentry and so on, along with a sprinkling of AI and some (not too heavy) Heidegger. Very good.
Organizational Habituation
There’s a bit of a habit bandwagon on the move at the moment, with a rash of books, software apps, and so forth all helping us to understand the Trigger->Action->Reward structure of habitual behaviours, and how to use that understanding to build our own positive habits. In Verilab’s client work, and beyond that to other SMEs with whom I work, however, I’ve noticed what appears to be, in the group environment and even overall organization, a strong analog of habits in the individual person. I dislike gratuitous creation of neologisms, so I’ve looked for a phrase to denote this phenomenon, but haven’t been able to find one. So I’m naming it now. I’m calling it “Organizational Habituation”. Continue reading
On Genius, and Sitting Still
Continuing with the theme of the need for sustained focus in achieving mastery, Freeman Dyson’s recent review[1] of Ray Monk’s new biography of Oppenheimer contains an interesting and somewhat sad snippet about the influential Los Alamos lab leader’s relative achievements in science versus bomb-making administration: Continue reading
How High Rate Professional Services Can Save Your Clients Money
How much does effectiveness cost? For example, how much per hour should one pay for a good accountant, or lawyer. My field is programming and engineering, so I’m going to talk in those terms. But it applies to almost all billable hour professionals. Continue reading
Are Engineers Creative?
Are we creative, we engineers and programmers? I think fewer of us are than we think, but more of us need to be than are (although it’s not essential that we all are).
It’s probably useful to define creativity, because it could be argued that engineers — people who “engineer” things — are creative by definition. I don’t think so. Creativity is the ability to make something, change something, or do something that creates positive surprise in one’s peers. It goes above and beyond just “the new”. It must elicit, from those who appreciate and understand your field, an appreciative “Huh!?”
Code Class as Soul Craft
We look for “proxies for greatness” in potential new members of the Verilab team. It can take some time to find out if someone is good, because in the end “good” in this context means something like “consistently delivering desired results”, and you can only see that over time. But there are clues early on that a person may be, or may become, good. Those are the P’s for G.
One is mentioned by philosopher-turned-mechanic, Matthew Crawford in his “Shop Class as Soulcraft“. In chapter eight, “The Further Education of a Gearhead: From Amateur to Professional” he tells the story “Of Madness, a Magna, and Metaphysics” in which he takes on the task of bringing back to life an old and neglected-by-underuse 1983 Honda Magna V45. A key part of the repair was fixing the clutch hydraulics. Continue reading
