Can’t be Contained

Some things have bad timing.  A critical decision, an important meeting, a message that must be sent, a mission that must be clarified.  Rarely is there a good time for such things.

But we do not get to choose the timing of when we must do that which is our responsibility.  That which is the right thing, at that moment.  We do not get to choose when we need to be firm or decisive.  We do not get to choose when we need to be that person, that messenger, that leader.

What we can choose is whether to actually rise to meet that need and be that person.  Or whether we choose to slide down the slippery slope to mediocrity and ineffectiveness.

This rather grandiose start springs forth from recent thoughts I’ve had about being a manager and, I hope, a leader.  It is indeed a very steep and well-greased slope that a manager faces every day, every week, and certainly from month to month when the easy way is so close, so present, and so, so tantalizing.  That meeting can wait.  We should do this or that only when all the right indicators (and one always chooses one too many indicators) are in alignment.  So many excuses.  But being a good manager means, among many, many other things, riding the edge of that slippery slope, seeing it for what it is, being able to measure its grade…and steering clear of it.

A manager is always a manager.  A leader – and managers are not the same as leaders, and while I am in fact a manager, I can only claim to be a leader if I also claim to have motivated followers, and I’m not sure I’m there yet – must always be visible and sending that message that is clear, concise, and stirs others to attention.  They are very different roles, but management and leadership are both needed.  And once taken, cannot be relinquished, taken for granted, or handled lightly.

I am a manager.  And timing is not my friend lately.  But timing is irrelevant.   I do not get to choose when to deal with HR issues vs. spend time innovating vs. having weekly staff meetings vs. making presentations to hundreds of people on ground-breaking ideas.  I do not get to choose when to be visionary, and when to simply keep my goals in sight and my team in play.  The practical and the idealistic must always be within my domain, yet I do not always have the luxury to choose when I the former will overwhelm the latter.

This balancing act, and avoiding the slippery slope, is perhaps the hardest part of any manager that has broad ambitions of moving up and perhaps attaining leadership roles.  If you are on the slope, then you will always be losing some followers.  At some level, you just decide which followers you are willing to lose, because the reality is that there are multiple slopes, and any decision one makes is going to at least put one’s foot onto that decline.  But until that point, the slope is all danger, and no gain.

Right now, I’m lucky because the slope is obvious.  But it is steep, and even the path around it is indeed very slick and littered with poor decisions, many of which do not in fact lead from each other.  One can get onto that slope via 10 small bad decisions or a single moment of cowardice.

And so timing is irrelevant.  Management and commitment are not.  Management doesn’t listen to the clock.

I just came back from a concert.  Where someone committed suicide.  He leapt from the building that serves as the backdrop to the stage, landing just feet away from the lead of The Swell Season.

I thought i should spend time thinking about this before posting.  Before writing.  But this post is about my reactions, my thoughts, what I saw.  It’s about the here and right now (which is about 2 hours after the actual suicide, as we were instructed to stay in the venue for a while to let the ambulance through, then got stuck in parking lot traffic, then got a flat tire).

I found myself laughing and singing along with Glen Hansard as he made fun of one of his bandmates just when a quick flutter of darkness slammed into the stage.

I listened to the gasp, then the slight screams.  I could almost feel the sense of general terrified confusion.

I watched people crying, hugged by their significant others.  I watched others just sit and smoke.  I watched yet others chit chat on the side.  I listened to an usher gather random theories from people that weren’t any closer to the stage than I was (and I wasn’t close) and turn them into “the facts as she knew them.”

I watched them do CPR on a man that just fell about 40 feet down and at least 20 feet out (meaning it was a jump, not a fall).  I knew that he was nearly if not definitely dead.  I saw the body seconds after they had stopped and pulled a blanket over.

I noticed that I didn’t really feel anything in particular.

I don’t know.

litl :: webbook.

This seems like a great alternative to a netbook, laptop, and the iPad.  Bigger screen than a netbook or iPad, smaller footprint than a laptop, and it does crazy flip-over-backwards action, with HDMI out for a TV, and runs on linux.  For less than the basic iPad (but no, it does not have touch-based interaction).

However…it has a really stupid return policy.  ”Full refund” within 21 days “less applicable restocking fees.”  And by applicable, they mean if it’s not defective, we’re gonna charge you 15%.

Just lost yourself at least 1 customer until you change that policy.  And I was seriously considering recommending this to the school in general, too…

So the university at which I work uses Novell’s suite of applications for e-mail, calendaring, systems management, and storage.  For a while now, I have been contemplating how to stop using the GroupWise (e-mail and calendar) client, which is terrible on a Mac, and move to a different set of tools.  At the same time, I have been seeking a bit more freedom with my choice of phones…

GroupWise is not very integration friendly.  Yes, I can IMAP into the mail server, but that’s just mail.  If I want calendars, the ability to propose meetings, etc, then the best solution on campus is to use a blackberry connected via the Blackberry Enterprise Server IT has hooked into GroupWise.  This is a very nice integration – e-mails come very fast, calendar changes are pretty smooth (though sometimes I run into problems with recurring meetings) and the address book synchronization is great.

However, I won’t lie and say that I wouldn’t mind a phone that gave me a big touch screen rather than the traditional thumb-punching keyboard (and no, I am not interested in a Storm).  So I have been looking at Android smart phones (ATT coverage is very bad here, so I have not seriously considered the iPhone).

So, how do I get GroupWise e-mail, calendar, tasks, and contacts all into an Android phone?  Well, that’s why this is called the “GroupWise to Google Experiment.”

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Giant iceberg heading towards Australia – CNN.com.

This is pretty bonkers.  Not only is the satellite photo that shows the iceberg…kind of boggling, but check out these quotes:

“We pulled out the binoculars that we use for work on the seals and, sure enough, it was a huge floating island of ice

So…they could see it with plain binoculars.  I’m trying to imagine something big enough that I could see that way, that was an iceberg, and not an oil tanker or some other giant ship.  This thing is bigger than Manhattan.

Three years earlier, another family of icebergs led to a small tourist boom when they drifted along the east coast of New Zealands South Island.

Of all the reasons to go to New Zealand…

Honestly, does anyone have any clue as to what google is doing, or what its priorities are in terms of products and services?

There, I got to the point.  So now allow me to preface…I know that Google is working on a ton of things at once and that none of them are easy.  It’s not easy to make something like Google docs.  So I know it takes time, and that there are going to be lags that make it seem like Google is disjointed when in fact each product team is working diligently on their little areas or features or whatever.  But I still can’t figure out why they have their heads so far up their butts.

Also, please note that I don’t think of myself as either a Google hater or a fanboy.  Google has some good stuff, and they are pretty darn creative.  But they also have their flaws.  My issue, here and now, is that they clearly have resources of amount X, and that they have shown at least a few times when they have not spread that amount effectively.  I’ll give examples of both great and terrible allocation of resources.

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After thinking a great deal about the way in which I write, and the sequence of ideas that precede the manner in which I put words to “paper,” I have come to the conclusion that I need to work harder on how I write.  I think that I need to focus on getting to the point right off the bat, rather than leading up with a whole bunch of qualifying statements.

In other words, I need to get to the darn point faster.

I have noticed a really bad tendency in my e-mails of late.  I start off with all of these qualifying comments – considering that I don’t know this, having look at various options, etc.  What I need to do is just start off with the point of my message, and then add in the reasons why I’m writing later.

This is my “almost done with the year” resolution.  To get to the point.

I wish I were “blogfamous.”  Where I wrote stuff on here and people would comment on it, put it up on digg, etc.  I wish I stirred people’s imaginations or whipped them into a frenzy or whatever.  I wish I were more interesting, maybe.

This is more, I think, than just wanting to be famous or being a hero or having my 15 minutes of fame.  Of course, I would love it if I did something, preferably more like a career than a flash-in-the-pan kind of moment, that made me pop up on the radar of others.  It’s more that I want to write things that are meaningful to others, that resonates with them and makes them think, or laugh, or motivates them to do something (comment, yell at me, get upset, whatever).

I’ve always thought of myself as a good writer – someone who can string a few interesting sentences together and generally uses proper grammar.  I have no illusions of currently or ever being a notable satirist or anything extraordinary like that, but perhaps good enough in general.

What worries me is that maybe I’m simply…boring.  And more than a little bit lazy.  The former is just rather sad.  Maybe I don’t have that many interesting thoughts to share with others, or that those that I do aren’t fodder for conversation (I do post now and then, after all, but the issue is whether the infrequency of my posts is due to a lack of interesting ideas).

The laziness has to do with how often I make myself get up and post something when I’m struck by a bit of news or some commentary by others.  There are lots of really interesting people out there that really do make me think, for good and bad (the myth of the Death Panel gets me riled up a lot), but I don’t get up out of bed, away from the work computer when I’m in the middle of some administrivia e-mail, or jump on the computer in general when I read something that whips up a thought or two of my own.  For some reason I just don’t.  But I should.

So..anyway.  I wish I weren’t so full of self-pity, either .  I blog because I need an outlet for commentary when I feel I have something to say.  I know a few people follow what I write.  I know that that number is not large.  I don’t blog to be famous, but I think all of us wish we were the kind of writers, bloggers, commentators and thinkers that make others stop and want to blog about us.

Hm.  This was rather random.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Norway tests laptop exam scheme.

This is kind of interesting.  Many, many Law Schools use a variety of different exam software packages that do far more than what the Norway system does.  It actually reboots one’s computer into a secure state, where one cannot access the internet or any files on the computer.  After the exam is finished, the student then has to reboot again to upload the encrypted file.

A compound growth problem is an exponential one. Instead of things just doubling or going up by, say, 5% over time, where if you mapped it out you’d get a nice straight line that just goes up and up, exponential growth curves upward at a steeper and steeper rate. So instead of it growing at 2x (2, 4, 8, 16, 32), it grows at x^2 (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64).

Right now, I’m dealing with the usual apnea baseline. I keep my CPAP mask on for maybe 2 hours a night (though I have managed 4 hours 3 out of the last 7 nights, which isn’t bad). Throw in allergies, and I have congestion problems during the night, which makes it even harder to breath in general.

Then, during the day, allergies make me fuzzy, which adds to my existing sleepiness that I have everyday.

So my sleepiness curve is compound.

And it really, really stinks.

It’s amazing how something as “simple” as sleep deprivation, little by little, day after day, year after year (and decade upon decade now) just wears a person down.