A Trip To The “Ewok Village”

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Inlaws CamperYesterday we took a trip up to my inlaws camper to spend some quality time with them. Jonna and I haven’t been up there for over a year, but every time we head up there I am amazed at what I see.

The camper is located in a little campground in Wisconsin. I named it the “Ewok Village” a few years ago because it really is like a miniature town. People buy campers, rent land, and landscape the hell out of it, creating their little “home away from home” where there is constant work to do (deck building, lawn mowing, etc), where golf carts substitute as cars (and everyone has one) and everyone tries to create their unique little space on their little spot of land.

The interesting thing about it to me is how committed people get to it. The inlaws have a new neighbor, which we met yesterday. He had been there since Thursday, getting ready to build a new deck. Interestingly, he said he didn’t even want one when he got the site, but here he was, buying lumber, measuring it out and building one. I guess it just catches on like that. Who wants to be the only guy on the “block” without a deck?

The place is called a campground, but what you do there is the furthest thing one would call camping. The campers have electricity, satellite TV, bathrooms and some even phones (don’t quite get this one – everyone has a cell phone these days). One trailer on the corner actually has an outdoor bar, while another one has a gazebo with a ceiling fan, for those unbearably hot days. Everyone has their little golf cart that they tool around in in lieu of cars, some electric, some gas powered. People build driveways, decks, and complete house fronts to make their camper look unique.

Each time we go up there, I realize that there is some “guy gene” that I am missing. Mine would be the camper with no driveway, no deck, nothing. Just a plain camper with a car parked in the grass – if there was grass – I don’t see myself taking the time to plant and nurture it into a lawn. Sure, I would get me one of those sweet mini-rides and tool around the park, but mine would be the plain golf cart – no ATV wheels, nothing jacked up – just something to get around. After all, who wants to WALK when you’re out camping? We are civilized after all aren’t we?

Here’s the most fascinating thing to me, that I think about every time we go up there. Its almost like the people there are building their own little Utopia. They put everything they really want in real life into these campers. The difference between this place and “real life” is that everyone has a sense of “camaraderie” here. The guy who didn’t want a deck? He had my father in law and his neighbor over there helping him build it. Everyone invites everyone else over to their fire to hang out and talk in the evenings. Everyone waves to one another and everyone knows everyones business. It really is like a little town – a small little miniature village that has all of the things that “real life” doesn’t really have. Its a community – but one in which people actually (shudder) meet face to face and hang out in, as our son calls it, “RL” (real life). For my in-laws, I would call this their version of “Second Life”.

I have to admit, every time we go up there I think about how wonderful it would be to be a part of it. I think the only thing that stops me is when I think about the amount of work it takes. The last thing I want to do on a weekend off is to go up for a “deck raising”. For me, a place like this would be someplace to go to relax, not to work.

And that would be my demise. I can just imagine all of the “neighbors” getting together at their evening fires irritated at the guy without a deck or a lawn. “When is he going to fix that place up? He’s bringing the property value down!”. Pretty soon, people are showing up at the camper late at night trying to scare me away. Or worse, they actually build a deck and plant a lawn FOR me – and now I have to keep them up. Pretty soon, I’m making trips up just to mow the lawn or plant flowers.

In the end, thats probably why I just visit. I don’t think I’d be able to handle the ‘hardcore-ness’ of Ewok Village residency, but it really is a great place to visit.

A Couple More Quotes on Change

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I’m re-reading Persuasion Engineering by Richard Bandler and John LA Valle, after recently taking an “influence and persuasion” training.

I’ve always enjoyed Bandlers work. I saw him speak once and he was entertaining and intense. He is definitely the source of a lot of good quotes on change.

Two of them I hit tonight:

One thing that we learn quickly is a rut.

– Richard Bandler

I really like this one from Virginia Satir:

The will to survive is not the strongest in human beings. The strongest instinct in human beings is to do what is familiar.

– Virginia Satir

I’m on a change kick lately. I think I’m taking a break from everything else, finishing this book, and then hitting “The Art of War by Sun Tzu, which is another book I’ve wanted to reread for a while.

Machiavelli Quote on Change

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I heard this Machiavelli quote on the latest edition of the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leadership Podcast, which was a talk given by Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of HP:

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

– Niccolo Machiavelli

This was an excellent lecture and this quote really stuck with me. Change is hard, people will resist – and in many cases the person who takes the lead in introducing change is seen as an adversary who is trying to “take things away”.

The main thing being taken away, I think, is “comfort”.

The Physics of Startups – Shai Agassi

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One podcast I listen to pretty religiously is the Entrepreneurial Thought Leadership podcast from Stanford University. Recently, Shai Agassi, formerly of SAP gave a talk called The Physics of Startups, which was very interesting.

There were a couple of things that stuck with me out of this talk:

  • Money for a startup is like air. You shouldn’t be concerned with it unless you are in a vaccuum. In other words, money can’t be the reason you are in business.
  • The difference between ‘success’ and ‘failure’ for a startup is microscopic. The difference between a Yahoo or Google and a failed startup could be just a matter of a few days
  • Startups need to use the “gravity” of larger companies to stay alive.
  • If you are working on anything Web 2.0 right now, its not new anymore. He compared it to a surfer catching the back of a wave. They don’t do it because all of the energy is gone by that point. “No one every caught the back of a wave and hit shore”. You need to catch a wave at its start, to utilize all of its energy. So surfers make a “bet” that the coming wave has the energy to get them to shore. The quote he uses is “If its already in WIRED, its already too late”.

It was a very interesting talk. Check it out if you have some time.

My Myers-Briggs Profile

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As part of a training I’m in, I took one of those Myers-Briggs personality tests. I wound up being an INTP. I have to say, I think its pretty damn accurate (and I would add uncannily so). I’d be interested to hear whether this jives with people who actually know and / or work with me. Feel free to comment.

Narrative

Few people are better than INTPs as independent problem solvers who excel at providing a detached, concise analysis of an idea or situation. Their objectivity is often valued by line managers who appreciate the outside view.

Their Introversion gives them a quiet, reflective demeanor, although they can be talkative when discussing topics they know well. The iNtuition helps them see possibilities where others might observe only problems. The Thinking function assists INTPs in focusing on cause and effect, quickly seeing any inconsistencies even in the most complex problems. Their Perceiving gives them a flexible, spontaneous approach which they frequently use in adapting to a quick-changing corporate environment.

INTPs value intelligence and competence and apply their high standards to themselves. They prize precision in communication and dislike redundancy, which makes their progress a pleasure to read. Their love of the new makes them a source of ideas for others, yet they often prefer working on their own. This independence extends to their thinking; they consider taking ideas from inception to a complete theory as an art form.

A few challenges INTPs face include:

  • Like many iNtuitives, INTPs can get lost in the Never-Never Land of ideas. An INTP might think a problem through to a logical conclusion, but then delay excessively in writing the report, a real danger when dealing with action-oriented line managers.
  • Their Introversion may cause them to seem too detached – they come across as aloof or withdrawn.
  • They can become insensitive to the needs of others for information and emotional connection
  • If they feel unappreciated, they may become cynical or negative, or isolate themselves.
  • They may fail to appreciate the need to observe all the rules and regulations, a shortcoming in someone who is expected to keep others on the straight and narrow!
  • They may miss connecting with others in the organization in purely social ways; INTPs enjoy deep meaningful dialog, but are impatient with events that are more relationship focused, such as the annual picnic.

INTPs contribute much to our intellectual basis. They provide the conceptual framework by which manuals, organizational procedures, and even work assignments are put into action. Their strengths in a company will be particularly pronounced in projects with aspects of organizational development.

Organizational Features of a Lean Plant

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I’m reading The Machine That Changed the World : The Story of Lean Production by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos. It is an extremely interesting book.

I ran into this small paragraph yesterday that for some reason stuck in my head as something important:

The truly lean plant has two key organizational features: It transfers the maximum number of tasks and responsibilities to those workers actually adding value to the car on the line, and it has in place a system for detecting defects that quickly traces every problem, once discovered, to its ultimate cause.

I’m telling you, the Poppendeick books are great, but there is nothing like going right to the source for an explanation of lean. I’m about 100 pages into the current book and I am absolutely fascinated at how much of todays current corporate structure (multi-level, many people with very specific task sets or responsibilities) is based on things that Ford and Sloan did with their companies.

In IT, this management style is manifested through all the different groups one hears about all the time from people in the field: Development, Infrastructure, Business Analysts, Quality Assurance. Each its own little silo, with its own responsibilities – and never should one group know how to do, or be privy to, the information in one of the other groups. Handoffs occur between the groups via very large documents.

Sometimes it goes further than that. I was talking to a friend once (who worked at another company, BTW) who told me about how their DBA’s were responsible for uptime and performance of the database and had decided that developers were not allowed to use ORDER BY clauses in their SQL because it effected the performance of the database. These developers were actually forced to sort their results within the application, rather than use the capabilities of the database, adding additional complexity to an already complex application. Worse, management seemed to buy into the decision, as I don’t think I would have been hearing about the situation if it was overruled. Ridiculous.

Another quote from the book, same page:

In old fashioned mass production plants, managers jealously guard information about conditions in the plant, thinking this knowledge is the key to their power.

Again, shocking how much of this mentality you read about in corporations not even connected to automobiles. This sounds like just about every company I’ve talked to people about (or worked at) over the years.

I’ve come to the decision over the years that ultimate transparency is the key to breaking down silos. It only breaks down your silo, but hey – thats a start, and at least you are setting an example.

Its definitely very beneficial, I’m finding, to read about things that are completely outside your profession to give you some distance from what is being taught. The lessons flow in easily this way, because you don’t have the predisposition that you “already know how things work”.

I recommend to anyone in IT to pick this book up. Its absolutely fascinating.

This Weeks Drunk and Retired Podcast, OS X, and Dashboard Widgets

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Dave Fayram sits in with Cote this week on his podcast talking about Rails backends. This was all interesting, but what really caught my ear was the last 11 minutes or so of the podcast, where Cote and Dave start talking about using OS X in businesses, and Dave describes his all Mac office and brings up the use of Bon Jour as “their own personal twitter server” and the use of dashboard widgets to perform work in context, much of what I was thinking about when I wrote Metrics As a Side Effect last week. Its cool to see that other people are thinking about this stuff, and a shame that businesses are so stuck in the “business use” of Windows that we cannot take advantage of some of the ultimately cool things available on the Mac to increase personal productivity, such as the dashboard, Growl, and Rendezvous.

It was interesting to hear Dave talk about how “beautiful” their infrastructure is, because they have been able to focus on things aside from security, VPN, notification frameworks and the like because a lot of the things that infrastructure folks spend most of their time on are taken care of already on a Mac network.

I have to say, I am at least 5x more productive at home on my Mac than I am waiting 15 minutes for my Windows machine to boot and log into the network in the office. I tend to do my most important work off hours now, just to be able to work on a more intuitive and easier to use machine. I feel like I can concentrate more on the problem I am working on than how to do it, which again, tied into the whole Rails conversation for me.

Very interesting discussion. Excellent content. I highly recommend this one.