25 february 2006

witch of fierce love

attempting to apply chaordic/synergistic ideas to human (esp. romantic) relationships:

what if, instead of waiting for true love as we might await a lighting strike (leaving it largely to chance, and, while knowing they're both exciting, also knowing that excitement to be mostly fear??) - we begin to foster love environments that encourage synergy?

I may be goin' to hell in a bucket, baby, but at least I'm enjoyin' the ride

~ Grateful Dead

Sexually awakened women, affirmed and recognized as such, would mean the complete collapse of the authoritarian ideology.

~ Wilhelm Reich

"The feminine is the most formidable of the forces of matter."

The correct view is that human sexual-spiritual development must follow the path of the feminine and that is why Teilhard de Chardin stated: "Woman is, for man, the symbol and personification of all the fulfillments we look for from the universe... The feminine is the most formidable of the forces of matter." (The Evolution of Chastity.)

Regret for things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.

~ Sydney J. Harris

I have learned to regard fame as a will-o-the-wisp, which when caught, is not worth the possession; but to please a child is a sweet and lovely thing that warms one's heart and brings its own reward.

~ Frank Baum

Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it.

~ Lily Tomlin

A true paradigm shift changes everything, because once your perception of a situation changes, how you approach that situation changes as well. What once appeared to be useful ways of interacting with something or doing business now seem ill-advised and counterproductive. Reality hasn't changed, but a new paradigm makes people act as if it had.

The foolish reject what they see and not what they think; the wise reject what they think and not what they see.

~ Huang Po

A true friend is one who sees you as you wish you were, while accepting you as you really are.

~ author unknown

http://www.joelgetz.com/reference-model.htm

The Power to Create

The reference model assumes that we begin with individuals who have the inherent right and responsibility to make decisions for themselves. Therefore, the system does not grant decision-making authority to participants, but rather it is the participants that cede some fraction of their inherent decision-making authority to the system. Otherwise the system would have no authority whatsoever over the participants. Fundamentally, the participants remain in authority over themselves at all times.

Similarly, the power to create parts of the system originates with the individual participants. This characteristic turns out to be very significant, and is exceedingly rare in most corporate structures.

In short, the system is created by participants (individuals or groups) voluntarily agreeing to be bound by a joint decision-making process, which itself was entered into voluntarily.

The three laws of thermodynamics have been summarized as:

You can't win

You can't break even, and

You can't get out of the game

Faith is believing what you know ain't so.

~ Mark Twain

http://willcodeforfood.livejournal.com/

Complex systems are — unsurprisingly — complex so it is difficult or impossible to predict when and how synergy will come into being. The best you can do, according to Hock, is to remove the things known to prevent synergy and hope for the best. This, he says, is the real task of a manager.

How should a manager go about fostering synergy? Well, the big secret seems to be to let folks do their work and let them gel as a team, with as little outside interference as possible. This means reducing the number of phone calls, emails and other urgent interruptions that disrupt folks ability to concentrate on the task at hand.

In his book The Psychology of Computer Programming, Gerald Weinberg says that the best way to measure office productivity is to compute the number of uninterupted hours per week an employee has in order to work. These are solid hours in which the phone does not ring, they do not have to talk to anyone, and nothing happens to interupt their train of thought. The ideal is to have something between half and seventy percent of the total week's work hours be uninterrupted ones. Many employees would be happy to get any at all.There were probably a number of mistakes made, but the biggest was asking for the patently impossible. Now, the average person will look at a number like 110% and think of it as a metaphor for hard effort. A technologically trained individual will look at 110% and think of it as 10% more than is possible. That is a major difference.

One of the problems that I often see in the IT industry is that managers often don't understand their staff, and are often baffled when they try to do something to motivate them and it backfires. One of the classic mistakes is to get the IT staff into a meeting room, tell them how important the next deadline is, and ask them all to promise 110% performance in order to meet it.

This usually results in a dead silence, angry retorts, or even a mass exodus of affronted people from the room. Even when the manager finds a way to coerce folks into giving such an assurance, the result is inevitably a drop in morale and a concomitant falling off of productivity. The motivational attempt has had the exact opposite effect than what was intended. So, what went wrong?

There were probably a number of mistakes made, but the biggest was asking for the patently impossible. Now, the average person will look at a number like 110% and think of it as a metaphor for hard effort. A technologically trained individual will look at 110% and think of it as 10% more than is possible. That is a major difference.

This comes from the different worlds they live in. IT people tend to be literalists as a result of living and working with computers and electronic circuits that don't have a concept of metaphor. If you put 110% of the rated voltage through a chip, you just might fry it and the circuit it's attached to. When you ask a technologist to put out 110%, he's thinking that you've just asked him to destroy his health in a misguided attempt to get something for nothing. Is resentment of such a request surprising?