For the last couple days, I’ve been dealing with project management issues. Training, textbooks and authorities on the topic say that you must have a clearly defined scope, timeline and resource plan. There are even contract writing solutions, all kinds of methodologies, and even books that go into detail on how to arrange the parts and execute to succeed where success is defined as completing the project on-time within budget. From my experience so far, all of this is not sufficient and is ineffective at guaranteeing a truely predictable successful …

I spend most of my time working which for me involves dealing with people and machines all day. The machines are easy, predictable, and obedient creations that do exactly what they are told. People are often quite the opposite. In People, Relationships, and Trust I already wrote about trust which is just as critical in the workplace. Here are a few further thoughts on people that we meet at work.
I have worked with a few hundred people over my working career so far. Over the years, these relationships and actually …

Around eight years ago when we were in St. Thomas on vacation, I wrote down the following values. I had just finished a book about Benjamin Franklin and felt it was important to have my own values down on paper just as he had his. They are as relevant today as they were then. I would add a few more sentences now but we’ll leave that for another post.
Family & Love
Love your family, friends, neighbors, & others. Build trust & spend time with your family. Love thy neighbor. A strong …

We all have wishes and dreams but how does one go from a thought to an accomplishment? I always struggle with achievements because after I accomplish something, I end up feeling an enormous vacuum, a terrible feeling caused from lack of other dreams or goals. To combat this, I always have multiple major projects so completion of one does not create the vacuum I mention. If you struggle to see your dreams come true, here’s the simple formula: complete one task (however minor it may be) every day toward your …

It is impossible to know everything about every topic. The Internet is one representation of our combined global human knowledge and is so vast, dynamic, almost fluid, often controversial, sometimes plain wrong, and even hateful or funny. Yet if for a moment you consider the Internet to be an approximation of all current human knowledge, what percentage of its content do you know? I confess, I know nothing, a drop in the ocean.
Here is another perspective. We come to this world with much genetic programming and yet absolutely no memory …