The Zen of Pool

I play pool competitively in the toughest competition in the country.  It's not a team sport. Each shot is you alone, against the balls and the table. One thing you learn quickly is that the real opponent is yourself.  Everyone who loves what they do and practices and has some natural talent, has a game inside them, the game where you know you have shut up the voices in your head telling you you're going to fail or that you need to rethink the shot again, that somehow this time it's different from the other times you got this shot because this is the shot the whole game hinges on. The game where you let go and play your natural game, where all your talent comes to bear, where win or lose, you did your best and you can be proud.

Like pool, everything is never completely certain OR completely uncertain,  life is a continuous series of approximations and by learning the true nature and extent of those approximations you learn about life itself

Notes on left and right

The left is politics of the individual, the right looks at the bigger picture.  The left row around in boats saving the drowning, the right let a few people drown while they lower the lake level so that in the end no one drowns.  Of course some people will still drown, but only because they refuse to stand up by themselves. When the left get back in power, the first thing they do is fill up the lake, after all they can't save people if nobody's drowning.

Notes on business

If your business isn't doing well and there is far more business out there than you can possibly do, then you can't blame the economy or anything else. Why are other businesses getting work that you could do?  Answer that question, then you will have learnt from the hard times.

Focusing on the metrics in an organization changes little it only serves to quantify something that most people probably already know. In fact the staff not only already know, they also have real experience of the impact as well as suggestions for improvement.  Focus on the processes and listen to those involved and implement change THEN look at the metrics to see how much improvement you've made.

The world is very different now.  Progress is rapid and gets faster every day.  I've seen businesses fail because they didn't look at the bigger picture, they create projects and plan and manage around their current processes then the process they are spending so much time and energy on improving becomes irrelevant because the market has moved on or the opposition have changed the game completely and you missed it.  Bottom line? Innovate or die.

I don't have a lot of respect for most managers, let's be honest, you are there to do your job and make them look good, more importantly not create issues for them.  Most managers don't want your great ideas (unless there's no risk of failure and no work involved for them) or to hear that things aren't right and the shit will hit the fan soon. They just want an easy life and it's your job to give it to them. The last thing they want to hear is that you care about the company's survival and growth and all the people in it who struggle every day, who are worn down by badly designed processes and unreliable systems, they especially don't want to know that you care more about that, than you do about them.

I approached my boss, the CFO, suggesting that he perhaps shouldn't stress so much about the cost of projects but just do a cost benefit analysis and if it stacks up, present it to the management team and get a decision.  His response was to advise me in a deadly serious tone, that he was responsible for the profitability of the company. I tried not to laugh and said concerned, that's a lot to take on, it's not all up to you you know, he then qualified it by saying "apart from sales of course". I gave up at that point. But it did make something clear to me. That whether intended or not sometimes companies palm off responsibility to the CFO that they have no right to.  Every person in the company from the lowest paid worker to the owner or board is responsible for the profit of the company and therefore it's future survival. In fact i would make it part of the employment agreement that employees agree to do whatever they can to make the company profitable and will be rewarded and recognised for it.  The CFOs job is to help the company set targets and track it's financial performance ,  to make sure that the bills are paid with what money is available and that work that has been done is paid for, that the company meets it's tax and financial requirements.  That's it. 

Band aid solutions to problems prevent proper solutions from being implemented and to that extent hold companies back

When you're working for a large corporate and hear a loud rumbling noise get under your desk (or non assigned workspace).  Occasionally the elephants get bored and all decide to change rooms at the same time.

If it aint broke dont cut it off to spite your chickens before they've hatched

Yes it's a mix of euphemisms. Beware of euphemisms, they are quite often wrong.

One I've heard a lot is "doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is a definition of madness"

This euphemism fails dismally as a rule that can be applied generally, it should actually say, "If all conditions or actions other than the one you are performing, that can influence the result, have not changed, then its reasonable to assume you will get the same result if you perform the same action in exactly the same way". This covers scenarios like starting the lawnmower the seventh time you try or investing in gold one year and making a huge profit or investing in a different year and making a huge loss.

Even if circumstances are exactly the same, its still a dubious assertion, after all we are human beings and as is evidenced by my inability to be consistently good at pool, we never do things exactly the same way even twice.

So next time someone trots out some euphemism to justify their world view, think about how reliable it is. It may not be worth the brain cells it's written on, or you can "go with the flow" or "let sleeping dogs lie" or ... well, you get the idea.