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How to Win (Almost) Every Internet Argument

I admit it’s a guilty pleasure. I enjoy political discussions on the internet. And, I detest the echo chamber. I would much rather debate someone with whom I disagree than talk to people who share my opinions.

You’d think I get a ton of abuse. Or, maybe you assume that I’m the one dealing out the hurt?

Neither is true.

The fact is it’s not difficult to have interesting, engaging and polite discussions on the internet. There are a few rules you have to follow.

1: Always assume your opponent is intelligent but uninformed

My college writing professor suggested this the very first day of class. She was talking about how to approach technical writing, and referenced a reader rather than an opponent. The concept is the same.

Despite the impossibility of it, I think we all consider ourselves above average. And like me, you’ve probably come to your opinions through a combination of study and experience. Therefore, if someone disagrees with you, it must because they aren’t as smart as you are. If they were, they’d agree with you.

Your opponent thinks the same thing. It’s what makes political discussions so fun. Attempt to educate, not to argue. And of course, be willing to learn as well as teach.

2: Realize that your opponent is neither crazy nor stupid

But, why do those people who disagree with me not see my point? I’ve explained it 4 times. They must not want to see it.

There’s a certain amount of cognitive dissonance, that keeps people from seeing points that disagree with their world view, but it’s not about how smart someone is. And while your explanation makes perfect sense to you. Just because they calmly let you explain it doesn’t mean that they are going to agree.

The internet is an interesting medium. It forces us all to be writers, but it also lets people (generally those other people) to go on and on and on and on. It’s as if they think if they explain their misguided concept enough, I’ll suddenly change my mind.

3: Acknowledge your opponent’s points

The difference between a discussion and an argument is that in a discussion, you get to acknowledge one another’s points. Arguments are simply attempting to outshout the other guy.

To have a discussion, you have to be willing to acknowledge points. That might seem hard to do. After all, his guy is terrible. Everyone knows it. And actually any positive news is probably because my guy was in that job before him and did amazing things and now the new clown gets to claim the credit!

The fact is that no one is all bad. No one is all good. Our politicians are flawed people, just as we are flawed. It actually doesn’t hurt me at all to acknowledge that the other guy did something good. In fact, it strengthens my point.

If I am willing to acknowledge the good things the other guy does, then when I object to something it gives my argument more credence. If I’m willing to give credit, then if I am not giving credit, it’s more likely I have a legitimate concern.

4: Remember that you’re talking to a person. . .just as your opponent is

At the end of the day, unless you are one of the politicians making policy, we are all just blowing off steam with our online arguments.

My best friend in high school was a guy named Kevin. Kevin and I were both interested in politics. But, we disagreed on nearly everything. We supported opposite sides of the aisle. And we’d go at it for hours. Convinced of our rightness as only high school kids could be.

But, here’s a funny thing, at one point one of us would say, “Hey, I’m hungry. Wanna go get some food?”

“Sure, and then let’s go play 8 holes of golf before it gets too dark.”

See, Kevin and I were friends first. We didn’t let political discussions derail our friendship. We are still friends today, 35 years later. And we still disagree on everything political. We don’t get a chance to discuss politics too much anymore.

And the person that you are debating with is a person just like you. They have a favorite movie. They are planning a great vacation. They just bought a boat. They are worried about their kids. Their lives are not defined by their political positions. Don’t let yours be.

I titled this post “How to win an argument.” You might be waiting for the payoff. When am I going to explain how to convince your opponent to switch to your position?

I’m not. The point is that we “win” when we can freely exchange ideas. Maybe learn something about a topic and a person we disagree with. And if not a new friend, at least leave the discussion being better for having engaged in it. That’s how you win an argument on the interent.

Oh, yeah, one more thing before I go. Kevin I would play 8 holes because he lived a half block from the golf course. We’d walk on and play the first 8 holes, but we’d skip the 9th hole because it was right next to the clubhouse and if we played that hole, the course manager would catch us golfing from free.

Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.

Follow him on
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com

(c) 2018 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved

John Lennon, Schlock Mercenary and The Rodeo Grounds

“Let me take you down
‘Cause I’m going to Strawberry Days. . .”
– John Lennon (sorta)

I live in a small town. If you drive through Pleasant Grove, in Northern Utah, you probably wouldn’t notice. You might notice a Pleasant Grove Blvd exit, but that’s really the only indication from the Freeway.

State Street run straight through my town. But, even if you were on State Street, you wouldn’t notice my town. It’s not a “blink and you’ll miss it” situation, it’s just that in Utah county, one town sort of blends into the next. Lehi is pretty recognizable. But, even I’m not sure when you drive from Lehi into American Fork. And AF, as it’s called flows into Pleasant Grove without a break. The only difference is the street signs reset. Continuing down the road, PG flows into Lindon and then Orem and finally Provo.

With the towns so close together you might think that my town is swallowed up into the “Greater Orem” area.

Not so. And the reason is Strawberries.

See, each little town in Utah has their own summer celebration. My city has Strawberry Days. Strawberry Days is the longest running city festival in Utah and possibly the country. I’m sure it relates back to some story about strawberries growing in our area. But, most of our strawberries come from California.

My friend Howard Tayler has a web comic. It’s Schlock Mercenary and it has run every day for the past 18 years. Howard started it as a hobby and about 10 years ago he made the switch to doing it full time.

Like many small businesses, Howard struggled to make Schlock Mercenary into a successful business. One model he used early in the process was volunteer labor. When he had a new book to ship out, he’d send out a casting call for volunteers to come and help pack orders.

It was always amazing to me that Howard was able to get people to show up and work for free. Full discloser, I was one of those helpers. Howard was my friend, but total strangers, fans would show up. Schlock Mercenary has grown a lot in the past 10 years. Today, they have a warehouse and a pretty well oiled distribution and shipping process. I, along with many other friends and fans miss the shipping parties. But, this works better for his business, of course.

Today I went to another shipping party. Not at Howard’s for a new book. No, this time I went to the Pleasant Grove Rodeo grounds to cut the tops off strawberries.

Hundreds of volunteers gathered at the rodeo grounds to prep strawberries

See, Pleasant Grove may not grow a lot of strawberries anymore, but strawberries are a big part of Strawberry Days. And those strawberries have to be prepped to go into strawberries and cream.

The only casualties were the strawberries.

That’s where I, my daughter and about 150 of my friends and neighbors come in. We gathered at the rodeo grounds and cut the tops off of thousands of strawberries. I only got a couple pictures and I have no idea how many there were.

Pretty sure this is a single day’s allotment of the sweet fruit

Why did I spend part of my Friday evening crowded around a table cutting up berries? I think it’s the same reason I used to show up at Howard’s shipping parties. Strawberry Days is one of the things that distinguishes my little town from the towns around it. They have their own city celebrations. Some have happened, some are later this summer.

Volunteering brings a community together, whether it’s a group of comic fans in a game store, or a group of neighbors at the rodeo grounds. These are the things that make the difference between a neighborhood and just a collection of houses.

If you’re in and around Utah, come by Pleasant Grove this weekend. The parade is tomorrow, the rodeo finals are tomorrow night and there will be plenty of Strawberries and Cream.

Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.

Follow him on
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(c) 2018 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved

If You Can’t Work, Maybe You Could Play A Nice Game Of Connect 4?

So, they go into the Launcher tool like normal, but instead of taking them to the authorization page, it brings up a copy of Connect 4.

Excuse me?

Yeah, they are suddenly taken to a Connect 4 game. I’m totally serious.

I work in a large company. Our employees also connect up to a large client’s system. We use a remote desktop program. So, while the agents are sitting in my building, they are logged into servers at the client’s location.

My job is to make sure everything runs properly. The computers, servers, networks, etc. I can’t actually fix it if it breaks, but I know the people who do.

Last month I got a call from our production facility in Rockford. The agents were having trouble using one of the tools. This isn’t unusual and I started to gather the pertinent details so we could start troubleshooting.

Connect 4. . .like the game.

We don’t support any online games. We don’t allow our agents to play games during work. In fact, we block nearly all outside websites and agents can be repremanded or even terminated for playing games.

And now the game was showing up on it’s own.

Despite most science fiction movies, computers and networks are not particularly magical or mysterious. The great thing about working with computers is that they are so predictable. No, they really are.

Even if a computer, or a system breaks, in 99% of the cases we can find a root cause.

The circuit failed because the 2nd memory bank on the 3 card in server Xj712 shorted out.

It’s why many of us got into computers instead of “messy” professions. . .you know, the kind where you have to work with people.

Anyway, computers don’t really do random, or weird things. It might look weird, but there is always a reasonable explanation.

Connect 4 pops up when we get an error. Yeah, not like that’s weird or anything.

I had to inform the client since it appeared the error was in one of their systems. . .the Connect 4 system, apparently.

Hey, David, this is Rodney. Ah. . .do you guys by chance support a Connect 4 game?

Rodney, we’re an accounting firm.

Yeah, I know. Funny thing is. . .

He didn’t believe me either. He’s an IT guy just like me and we could not conceive of why a computer game would randomly pop up in the middle of our business applications.

We spent hours on the call. The client engineers were doing most of the work and David would reach out to me occasionally to give me a status update.

Eventually, it was resolved. The Launcher application was working successfully and all was right in our world again. I called David.

So, what was the deal with the game?

Oh, it was legit.

What do you mean?

I mean that our SharePoint system was set up so that if you could not reach a particular database because of an authentication error, the Connect 4 game would come up.

Seriously?

Yeah. So far no one is fessing up to putting it there.

So, the idea is if you can’t get into the database maybe you want to distract yourself with a game?

I guess so.

The one thing we didn’t try was to see if we maybe it was a test. Maybe the new database security required you to prove you weren’t a robot by engaging in a nice game of Connect 4?

Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.

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(c) 2018 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved

I Should Definitely Have Known That Guy

Rodney, this is Laura.

Hey, it’s been awhile. Are you still over the Accounting Disputes department?

No, I’m with Global now. Working on Process Improvement. Are you going to be around tomorrow?

Sure.

I want to come by and talk to you and some of your agents about process improvement.

Sure, how about 3:00pm?

Great. See you then.

The next day at 3:00pm I got a call from our receptionist.

Rodney, there are some guests here to see you.

I’ll be right down.

And waiting in the lobby was Laura and Lowell. Laura was dressed in business dress. She had a nice blouse, a skirt and high heeled shoes. Lowell was dressed in a t-shirt, jeans and socks with sandals. He had a three day growth of beard that is fairly common in our company.

Our building has it’s own security. I took them to our security officer to get badges. As Terry, our security guard created their “All access” badges, we chilled in the hallway. Laura explained more about her new position.

So, what do you do Lowell?

I’m the Global CIO.

I’m not sure if my mouth actually fell open, or if that was only happening in my head.

I attempted to salvage my position.

Oh, that’s probably why your name sounds familiar but I didn’t attach it to a specific role.

I’m dying here.

Laura tried to smooth over my awkwardness.

Lowell is Darin’s boss.

Sure, Darin that is Jonathan’s boss?

Right.

Jonathan was my boss. So, my boss’s boss’s boss was visiting and I had no idea who he was. Not my finest moment.

We spent about 45 minutes visiting different departments and interviewing people from various roles. Lowell never gave the least indication he was anything except completely relaxed.

I on the other hand printed out the corporate org chart.

Really it was the socks with sandals that threw me off.

Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.

Follow him on
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com

(c) 2018 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved

I’m Insane And My Email Proves It

INSANITY TEST

You are given a bucket and taken to a small pond. Your requirement is to empty the pond.

The insane individual starts bailing out the pond.

The sane person first diverts the stream.

I got a little behind on my email. This morning I had 173 unread emails and 239 unopened emails. Seriously, that’s just a couple of days worth of ignoring my email.

I often track my “progess” at emptying my mailbox. I’ll write

173
239

With the current time. Then, every 30 minutes I’ll update the chart. Today was a good day. I’m sitting at 3 unread/4 total.

I was the email administrator for a large non-profit corporation in Utah. Our datacenter crashed. It went down “hard.” That means someone pulled the plug and everything turned off all at once.

It’s very similar to a scene in Mission Impossible Rogue Nation. The bad guys shoot a nuclear warhead at San Franscisco. They then “turn off” the datacenter that controls the missile. Ethan Hunt and his team have to restore the datacenter in time to stop the warhead exploding. It takes them about 10 minutes.

When our datacenter crashed, it took us 5 hours to get email back up and running. (I want the IMF working on MY datacenter.)

This was several years ago as companies were transitioning from email to instant messaging. I pushed our engineers to get email back up and running first. We needed a way to communicate with our teams other than the phone bridge we were on.

As email came back online, the engineers said,

That’s great, but what we really want is Skype.

(Okay, it was a few years before Skype, but just go with it.)

I started to understand that how we communicate in business was changing. Email, invented in the 1980s was being replaced by instant messaging programs. Email still had a place, but more for storage rather than getting timely answers.

My production floors do not have Skype. They don’t have any chat program. We deemed it too much of a security risk. So, for a whole group of people I work with daily, it’s still email even for the simplest of questions.

What time does Bob come in?

Did you mean Bob Smith, or Bob Sanchez?

Which one is in accounting?

Sanchez. He’s in at 10:00am

Thanks

In addition I get email from our client, whom we don’t share an IM product with. I get Change Notifications. I get Outage notifications. I get a lot of email.

So, when I can get to the day and see single digits for the remaining emails, it’s a good day.

And then I think about the Insanity Test I referenced above.

I’m good with a bucket. Crazy good.

Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.

Follow him on
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com

(c) 2018 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved

Strangely Un-selfaware

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

– Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

I shouldn’t care. Well, I care, but I should be okay with it.

Normally I’m pretty self aware. By that I mean I understand why I do things. I understand why kids leaving my handtools out annoys me. I understand why I’m okay with cleaning the kitchen, but not the stove. I understand why I hate needles.

I never make a decision at work without having thought through the implications. If you try to play office politics with me, you’ll lose. Because, you can’t get me out of my head. I see everything.

It’s why I hate Father’s Day.

Sure, that’s a terrible thing to say. I have 13 children. THIRTEEN. And six grandkids. And Sunday they spoiled me. My daughter invited me to her house on Saturday for smoked BBQ ribs, and gave me a fantastic gift. It’s a new door handle for my front door. The “long” kind that has a lever you push down with your thumb. My old one broke and my door has had a round doorknob on it for the past few months.

Then, Sunday, I had a wonderful meal with my lovely wife’s homemade potato salad. My son came to hang out and we talked until 1:00AM. (So happy, he’s turned into a man I can be friends with.) The kids at home surprised me by landscaping the area around our trees. It was exactly what I wanted.

Perfect day, right?

No. And I’m not entirely sure why.

I have multiple fathers. I have a birth father and I have an adopted father. I actually chose my adopted father when I was 14. He was married to my mother and I decided I wanted to be adopted. I didn’t hate my birth dad. But, I was also a 14 year old kid. I didn’t know anything.

I’m happy I was adopted and for reasons that remain unclear to the 50+ year old version of myself, I kept my birth father from being a part of my life.

You might think that sounds cruel. And for you it would be. Some of you might think that sounds fantastic. For me it was. . .simpler.

My adopted father was never comfortable with Father’s day. I dreaded, we both dreaded the obligatory phone call on Father’s day. While I loved him, Father’s Day was a strain for us both. After he passed away nine years ago last week (yes, he died the week before Father’s Day) things got easier on Father’s Day.

A few months ago, my birth father had cancer. It was serious, and given his age, his odds of not making it were scary. I had to decide what to do?

I finally wrote him a letter. The first one in 40 years. He wrote back. We exchanged multiple letters. Finally last month, I was in Idaho and made the 6 hour round trip to visit him in Central Washington.

We had a great visit. We reconnected. Maybe I was selfish for asking him to stay out of my life for decades. He missed watching me grow up. He missed getting to know grandchildren.

Was I cruel? I don’t think so. I certainly wasn’t intentionally being cruel. Just as going to see him was not designed to be magnanimous. In fact, when it comes to him, I’m not sure why I do what I do. And for someone who prides himself on being self-aware, that scares me.

When I talke to him I feel like I’m 14 years old again. But, it’s not anything he does. It’s me and my psychosis. It’s not right. It’s probably not healthy. It confuses me.

And I even know that it’s not him, it’s me. But, just knowing you have an irrational fear of ladders doesn’t mean you don’t have a fear of ladders. It just means you know it’s irrational. That’s how I feel, or don’t feel about him.

So, Father’s Day was going great until I realized that there was a text to send. . .again.

I don’t even know what it is about the entire situation that throws me off my game. The one thing I do know is that it’s not him or anything he’s said or done. No, I know this is entirely in my head.

Knowing doesn’t help.

Hope your Father’s Day was better than mine.

Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.

Follow him on
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com

(c) 2018 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved

I Quit My Job Today

I quit my job today.

That’s how the guy sitting next to me on the plane from Richmond to Atlanta opened our conversation.

I normally don’t talk to people on planes. I travel a lot and I have a routine. I have a nice neck pillow. And I’ve modified it to allow my noise cancelling headphones to fit easily. I bring my own water bottle and typically set my iPad to my Jazz collection.

Oh, and then I often will go to sleep.

I generally don’t have any interest talking to the people around me. It’s not that I’m not sociable. The problem talking on a plane is you can hear great at the gate. But, once you get into the air, it’s really hard to hear.

But, we were sitting at the gate and the guy in the aisle seat seemed to be looking for some validation.

Oh?

He didn’t seem to need any encouragement to continue.

My wife is going to kill me.

Yeah, that’s not a conversation you should have over the phone.

He explained that he was a stats guy. He’d been working for an insurance company and just got to the point where he couldn’t take it anymore. He was working for a company that didn’t value his role. Well, they valued his contribution, just not him.

When I got there they had processes that would take two hours to run. By the time I was done with them, they were running in less than a minute.

I thought about the times I had struggled with managers or companies. As a Program Manager solely responsible for the technical relationship between my company and our biggest client, I found myself working for a man who was new to being a manager.

Like my seatmate, I was also incredibly good at what I did. Our client paid us over $100M per year. I was a large part of our team keeping them happy. And yet, my manager didn’t want to talk about my success with the client. Despite the fact I was oncall 24×7 and a salaried employee, my manager insisted I be at my desk no later than 7:00am and leave no earlier than 3:00pm. The company didn’t have a comp time policy. If I spent 4 hours working on an outage the night before, I was still expected at my desk at 7:00am. He claimed he needed to be able to contact me.

I don’t understand. Why don’t you just call me if you need something from me?

I don’t feel like I should have to track you down via your cell phone.

Huh?

My seatmate went on to explain that financially he would be fine. His home outside Chicago was paid for. He had plenty of money in the bank. Nice cars that were also paid for.

It was clear that it was more a sense of failure than anything that was distressing him. The economy is booming. He’s highly skilled and won’t have a problem finding another job.

I can afford to be picky.

But, I could see that it was coming to grips with the fact he’d made a mistake and now had to fly home and explain it to his wife. I felt for the guy.

It was at that point that the person for our middle seat showed up. She was a flight attendant on her way to work in Key West. I adjusted my neck pillow and slipped my headphones over my head. As I did, I heard him strike up a conversation with our new row-mate.

I quit my job today. My wife’s going to kill me.

I hope he finds a position that he’ll enjoy.

Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.

Follow him on
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com

(c) 2018 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved

A Long Trip For A Short Meeting

Yesterday I travelled for nearly the entire day. Tomorrow I’ll travel for nearly the entire day. Today, I had about a 5 hour meeting.

I don’t know what the ratio of travel time to meeting time was, but whatever it was, it was worth it.

I’m in Raliegh, North Carolina. We had an audit today. We have them about once a year at all of our sites. This was a security audit. The format of a security audit is pretty straight forward. The client sends out an auditor. Our security person and I come out from Salt Lake City.

We then work with the various departments at our center; operations, HR, Mission Control, local desktops, account management, site management, quality assurance, compliance, senior management, security, facilities, and more.

The auditor sets the pace. He moves from group to group, sometimes agent to agent. He asks questions. He observes. He checks. It sounds confrontational. It’s actually very collaborative.

Some people view an audit like a test. We certainly perpare for it like we would an exam. But, an audit isn’t a test, it’s an evaluation. The purpose of an exam is not to find out if you did right or wrong. The point is to find the areas where you can improve.

Several years ago I worked as the IT manager for the email system of a large non-profit organization. We had a brand new Microsoft Exchange email system. It was a very large system. We had over 30,000 users. We were still in the process of tuning the email system. A process that can take up to a year. We have to figure out how much storage we need. We needed to know how big our servers needed to be. How many users we could put on each database. How many databases per server. There were dozens of metrics we were watching.

My manager called me into his office,

You know the auditors will be here tomorrow, right?

Sure, you’ve told me every day all week.

Well, audits are a big deal. The auditor will be meeting with just you for much of the day. Don’t tell him anything.

Excuse me?

I mean don’t volunteer any information. Don’t give him anything.

My manager viewed an audit like an exam. Instead, I treated like an evaluation. I figured that I could hire a consultant to help me tune my new system, or the auditor could do it for free. I viewed it as an evaluation rather than an examination.

The auditor today wanted to help us make our system better. If there was a weakness, he’d find it. Not because he wanted us to fail, but because he was interested in making us better.

Even though our audits happen once per year, we run our business on a day to day basis as if we are being audited every day. The auditor found a single issue with a security patch. We immediately patched the affected computer.

After five hours we went through our “Finding” meeting. To no one’s surprise we passed with zero issues. I almost wish the auditor had found something. After all, we can always get better.

Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.

Follow him on
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com

(c) 2018 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved

Build Your Tribe

I considered the question,

Do I have a team? Or do I have a tribe?

In my company I don’t have anyone who reports to me. I’m not a team leader, or a team manager. In fact, my role is defined in such a way that I don’t even have any peers. My manager doesn’t hold a weekly team meeting on Mondays where we all share what we did over the weekend and discuss plans for the week.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of teams. A team leader, or team manager is one of the most important positions in any company, ranking right up there with company president, and C-level executives.

But, currently I’m team-less, in the traditional sense. And yet, I do have a team. Sure, it’s a virtual team. But, it’s a team nonetheless. It’s prehaps better described as a tribe.

My tribe is made up of the people that I work with and more importantly, the people who I depend on to do my job. In addition my tribe is people who depend on my in order to do their jobs.

So, Monday morning I get together with a group of people who depend on me and we talk a little about what we did over the weekend and what the plan is for this week. We typically don’t spend a lot of time in chitchat. Even when I was a formal team manager, I tried to remember that just because my story about visiting the Grand Canyon last week was interesting to me, didn’t mean it was interesting to others. At least it’s probably not the most important thing they are doing.

But, how do you build a team? Sure, I can recognize the people I depend on for success. It’s not always the people that the company thinks are my teammates. Prior to our last reorganization, I did have a team. We had a meeting every Monday morning where we talked about our weekend and what we had planned for the week. But, I didn’t share any tasks or goals with the rest of my “team.”

They were not my tribe. I went out to find my tribe.

You build your tribe in three steps.

First: Identify your tribe. Figure out who you need and who needs you. This is the easy part.

Second: Assemble your tribe. The difference between teams and tribes is that teams are brought together by yoru employer. Tribes are assembled on their own. Membership in a tribe requires mutual trust and mutual support. We share a tribe because we can help each other. And we support one another.

Third: Nuture your tribe. Once the tribe is assembled, it has to be nurtured or it will dissolve. You nurture your tribe by doing “triby” things. You invest in each others stories. You buy them ice creatme. You ask about their weekend. You measure each others success and help each other succeed.

I don’t have a team. But, my tribe is strong and doing amazing things.

Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.

Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com

(c) 2018 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved

Have Albert Einstein Run Your Meetings

Did he say, “Everything should be as simple as possible but not simpler”?

Or was it, “Everything must be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler”?

Or, maybe it was, “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”

Whew!

He probably said at least one of them. And while the great physicist was talking about basic elements of the universe, he could have been talking about meetings.

I was once criticized, formally in an annual performance review, for having too few meetings. The quote was, “I’ve reviewed Rodney’s calendar and he has fewer meetings scheduled than his peers.” I got an extremely low review score, for this perceived inadequecy along with others of equally questionable application to my position.

The fact is meetings can be very useful. But, they can also be a drain, a bore, a waste of time. I work very hard to make sure my meetings are none of those.

The first way is that I don’t have a lot. I spent a lot of time on email and Skype talking to my team. Our business runs fast enough that often waiting for a meeting to make a decision is too late.

I have a few standing meetings. They are status meetings with the team that depends on me, and the team that I depend on. Those are two different teams. Still I run both meetings.

The standard length of my meetings is 30 minutes. Especially if it’s a standing meeting. I want people to show up. Almost everyone is dialing in, so I can’t bring doughnuts as a bribe. So, I figure, I’ll use as little time as possible of their day.

Now, mind you, these are not planning meetings, or design meetings. These are standing status meetings. A chance for me to tell the teams what I’m working on and find out where they are with the stuff they are working on.

I wish we started on time. I’m always on time. But, not everyone can be there right at the start. The first two or three minutes is me trying random jokes and light hearted comments on the people who showed up at the start. We get going at two minutes after the start. And we end. . .we always end at the scheduled ending time.

In the middle, I run. Literally I run the meeting and figuratively I run through the status. If I have more than can go into a meeting, I put it in an email.

If you come to one of my meetings, it’s going to be short and to the point. Just like Einstein taught.

I think his statement could be reworded:

Meetings should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

And we are now out of time. Meeting adjourned.

Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.

Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com

(c) 2018 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved