Year: 2015 Page 4 of 15

Silos

On August 13, 2015

There are bottlenecks in your communication and it’s slowing your team down. Working in a large organization, there are two ways to share information collaboratively.

First, there is an open flow of information. For instance, a wiki. When I worked for the National Cancer Institute, we had a giant wiki all the technical staff used, updated and relied upon for information. It was a fantastic way to share information across teams and locations. Everyone was able to contribute to the knowledge of the group. Everyone was accountable for their changes.

Second, there is a collection of silos. This is Sharepoint. These are network drives. The silos prohibit the free-flow of information and limit it to pre-approved groups of people. Gatekeepers for those groups hold the reigns of their information tightly and in order for new people to access the information, they must be granted access.

Silos are slow.

When information is locked away inside a silo, it can take hours, or days for the information to be available to those who need it. When information is open, it can be accessed immediately and work can continue.

How many times has this happened to you? You’re at work and you need to do something for the first time. For me, that’s fairly often. When I had access to a well-manicured wiki, it was a matter of searching and finding the information I needed.

Now, I asked for where the information lived. It could be on the Intranet. It could be on Sharepoint. It could be locked away on a network drive somewhere.

I got a quick answer over email.

There are some user guides located at https://sharepointURL

Great. I clicked the link and read the guide. Now I am ready to complete the work!

Wrong.

Sharepoint Denied Access

I’m denied access because I am not on the pre-approved list of people who can access this how-to guide.

I replied to the email that I did not have access. I then clicked the Request access link and found this helpful page.

Sharepoint Request Access form

An anonymous form where I can Send Request. Where does it go? Who manages this access? Can I call them? Email them? No.

I completed the form with the information I needed to get access to and why. And I wait.

That was yesterday. Today, there is no answer. Nor is there any access.

I am not expecting it any time soon. There is no accountability with this system. There is no way to see where my request is or if it went anywhere.

Lip Service

Many organizations say things like we want to foster more communication and collaboration. And then they roll out tools which do precisely the opposite.

I’ve seen where a culture has grown around the open sharing of ideas and information and it’s a magical thing. But too many times information is stuck in silos.

Silos will always stifle communication and collaboration and put up unneeded road blocks. In order to foster communication and collaboration information must flow between teams seamlessly. If a person on another team needs a document, it shouldn’t involve a level of approval to make that document available.

I was popular in high school for two days

By Carl

On August 12, 2015

In Introspection

I’ve often wished I could tell my younger self it will be OK. I grew up in a small town of 2,000 people in a county of about 12,000. My high school was 525 kids and my graduating class was 168.

I knew everyone and everyone knew me. If not personally, at least by name or reputation. Or both. I was a big kid and a freak to boot. The rumors that circulated about me were hilarious.

This open letter to a younger you hit home with me.

An Open Letter to My 15-Year-Old Self Just Before the Start of High School

Get a shitty job. Work in a grocery store, steering shrink-wrapped pallets of cola through cramped warehouses. Spend hours daintily arranging shelves that you will later see customers destroy in minutes. This will pay for your food court lunches and headphones, and also impress on you the nihilistic reality of most of the work out there. Get a good, long, nasty look at how impersonal and irrelevant your role on this earth can be if you’re not careful. Get your face right into it, right into the filthy shelves and bins of expired yogurt and the empty eyes of your manager and make a vow that whatever you do with your life you will always be moving away from all of that.

In High School I worked as:
– A desk clerk in a rec center
– A lifeguard
– A bagger at a Food Lion
– In my father’s print shop doing bindery work

All of these jobs taught me I needed to go to college, get a degree and learn to do something more interesting and valuable.

I still partly regret going to college. I don’t have loan debt hanging over my head. But I feel like I was a different person after college. And not a better person than when I started.

It got me a BS in Communications. Which may not have opened doors. It hasn’t closed any on HR checklists.

Get over any desire to be normal. The desire to be normal is its own perversion. Some people do achieve the appearance of normalness, which means they have successfully hidden or beaten down everything about them that is interesting or memorable in the hopes that they become impervious to criticism. Go the other way. The great joke here is that nobody has ever been normal.

There’s a reason I colored my tennis shoes with sharpies in high school. There’s a reason I worked on a literary magazine and hosted open mic nights. I knew there was no hope for me.

I was 6’5″ 250 lbs. The football coach salivated at my dimensions. But I have the aggression of a kitten and didn’t want to be a human tackling dummy.

I did almost play football once. As a kick and punter. Until I had to choose between soccer and football.

I was popular and cool in high school for about two days.

Then I chose soccer and left the football team behind. Same thing happened when I had a choice to quiet the basketball team and attend my very last open mic night as the Literary Magazine’s editor. Or ride the bench in a meaningless game for a coach that never much liked me.

I quit the team.

Be your own person. You’re much more interesting as you than you trying to be something you think someone else wants you to be.

Adblock is good for more than blocking ads

By Carl

On August 5, 2015

In Observations

Adblock works by removing parts of web sites. It has a built-in list of ad companies it can block. But it can also block defined parts of web pages.

I decided to put it to good use this morning. I don’t like trending topics. I don’t need them and I do my best to avoid them. Their either vapid Celebrity Y said X about Celebrity Z nonsense or Clickbaity Headline.

I avoid them on Twitter easily enough but on Facebook their ever-present.

Until today.

I used adblock to remove part of the page where Facebook puts the Trending Topics, suggested friends and other ads. It worked after a reload of the site. Hopefully it will stick until they change the page design next time.

Here’s what the filter looks like in Adblock.

The filter is: www.facebook.com##[id=”u_0_0″]

This has made using Facebook on the web more pleasant for me. Hopefully it will help you too.

It Just Works (for someone)!

By Carl

On July 22, 2015

In Observations

Apple Music confounds me.

I just figured out how to rate songs in it tonight. You click the artist/title and it swaps to ratings. There’s nothing to give a hint that it’s there. There’s no way for me to find it unless I click random things in the interface. Which I did tonight out of frustration.

Rate a song

My wife asked me, “How can I play all the songs by a certain artist?” You used to be able to select an artist, and play everything you had by them. Now, the best we came up with is to add all the songs to up next. But it still doesn’t pay anything. You have to select a song, then Music will ask if you want to add X number of songs to your Up Next list. Which I already asked it to do.

Play entire artist?

Her solution was to go out and buy Cesium, a third-party music app just to regain a function she lost in the upgrade. It’s how she listens to music and Apple Music broke how she listened to it before. My solution was to continue using Groove.

Apple Music was clearly built for people who stream music. We are not those people.

But this got me to thinking about Apple. I stopped reading Apple blogs last year. Much of this coincided with moving to a job where I support a single application and no longer service computers for a living. So I didn’t need to be up on every latest move by the company.

Now, I don’t read anything regularly by Apple bloggers. I will dip a toe into the Apple stream periodically but I’ve found that if any of the heavy hitters writes something particularly good, I’ll find out about it another way.

I’ve crowd-sourced my Apple news.

This accomplished my goal of not seeing every news story about Apple blogged 15 times. Someone pointed out in a Slack room I hang out in today it was Apple Earnings Day. I had no idea. And I consider that a win.

Since I went on my Apple diet, I no longer read all the explanations of Apple’s new software. It’s been over a year and I no longer read through the long pieces on every change and tweak in the new versions of Apple’s software. So many of the little tips, tricks and hidden parts are lost on me.

The things I used to be able to answer without a second thought now lead me to Google. Did Apple’s software “Just Work” or did it only work if you were part of the club?

I honestly don’t know. But looking at it from outsider’s eyes, Apple Music is a convoluted mess of an application.

Who sponsors you?

By Carl

On July 20, 2015

In Observations

Everyone working for themselves is sponsored by someone else.

That person could be a spouse or a parent. That person could be thousands of people who give their money (mostly gotten from working 9-5 jobs). It could be investors with more money than they could ever spend in a lifetime. It could be credit cards, a loan from their future selves to the present.

Back in January, I read this post. “Sponsored” by my husband: Why it’s a problem that writers never talk about where their money comes from

Here’s my life. My husband and I get up each morning at 7 o’clock and he showers while I make coffee. By the time he’s dressed I’m already sitting at my desk writing. He kisses me goodbye then leaves for the job where he makes good money, draws excellent benefits and gets many perks, such as travel, catered lunches and full reimbursement for the gym where I attend yoga midday. His career has allowed me to work only sporadically, as a consultant, in a field I enjoy.
…
Today, I am essentially “sponsored” by this very loving man who shows up at the end of the day, asks me how the writing went, pours me a glass of wine, then takes me out to eat. He accompanies me when I travel 500 miles to do a 75-minute reading, manages my finances, and never complains that my dark, heady little books have resulted in low advances and rather modest sales.

I nodded along with the article because it’s how my wife can afford to leave her job and work for herself. She is working as an Art Therapist for herself now. No longer under the yoke of another company doing something she doesn’t want to do.

I get up early, walk to the metro station and ride a train 45 minutes into the city. There, I work for 8 hours and take a train home again. This is on a good day. I’m usually out of the house for 11.5-13 hours everyday for work.

I am the stability that makes her endeavor work. I trade my time for money and insurance while she builds her business.

Jumping man by Joshua Earle from Unsplash.com

I was reminded of this article recently when I saw a related story published this week in Quartz. Entrepreneurs don’t have a special gene for risk—they come from families with money.

For creative professions, starting a new venture is the ultimate privilege. Many startup founders do not take a salary for some time. The average cost to launch a startup is around $30,000, according to the Kauffman Foundation. Data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor show that more than 80% of funding for new businesses comes from personal savings and friends and family.

Not everyone can leave their job and run out to follow their dreams tomorrow. It’s a risky proposition in the best of times. And most people don’t live in the best of times.

I applaud people who go out and make it work. But it’s not something everyone can, or should do. If you can start a company and be successful, that’s great for you. But don’t pretend like you did it all on your own. You had help along the way.

Photo by Joshua Earle