In the past couple of years, I've had the opportunity to observe several managers within a single organization of around 550 people. This is the first time I've worked in a situation with multiple managers whose behavior and success I could compare. I'd like to share what I've learned about management through that observation.

The most important component of any organization is communication. A good manager is an expert at communication. Larger organizations are more likely to  have problems with communication either within the ranks or between the ranks. There will be groups and managers that don't want to talk to each other and there will be management that doesn't want to communicate up or down the chain of command. A good manager will work to bridge those gaps by bringing in people from outside of their group and will ask questions within their chain of command to facilitate missing communication.

I used to have a saying when I made service calls for a living: "If I ask a yes/no question and the person I'm asking doesn't understand what I mean, their answer will be yes." I tried this out on many occasions by asking questions I knew I'd have to clarify later. Every time, the answer was "yes". A good manager can recognize this type of situation and make sure that the answer given by them or to them is an informed, correct answer.

A good manager delegates work that can be delegated and keeps track of what their employees are working on at any given time. Occasional group/team meetings to keep everyone up to date are good, and it never hurts to go for a short walk and talk to people and see what they're doing and how they feel.

When work that has been delegated is not completed satisfactorily, a good manager will take a step back from the situation and ask a few important questions. "Why didn't this work get done?", "Did I clearly state the requirements and, if not, was the work completed as I requested?", "What can be done to avoid this situation in the future?". If the requirements were complete and the work was not, a good manager will help understand where the shortcomings were.

I want to keep this a positive message of what a good manager does rather than what they don't do, but this one is important. A good manager refers to their employees as people, not resources. Resources are mined and drilled and pumped; people are nurtured, trained and worked. Even the best possible use of the term, "renewable resource", suggests that, once the resource in question has been burned out, you can wait a season and another one will grow back.

So, when hiring a manager, or when managing, keep these things in mind and you'll find that things go well for you and your organization.

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I wouldn't feel like a geek if this didn't make me happy. The way that memory manufacturers have been able to make CF and SD cards have such high capacity is by stacking silicon layers on top of each other. The increase in thickness is minute, there's no increase in board real estate and every time you do it, you double capacity. The problem with moving this technology to other areas, like CPUs is heat. IBM has just solved that problem. IBM via Gizmodo.

Everybody knows that email is a huge time-sink in the workplace. It interrupts work and forces a response or a change of priority. In my experience, people walking into my office to ask a question can be just as bad because I have to respond now, rather than on my own time. The obvious corollary is that instant messaging would be worse than email, but not as bad as a personal visit. A recent study shows that may not be the case. - Science Daily via Lifehacker.

More and more this seems to be the case.

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Honestly, I wasn't sure what category to use for this one. Maybe this should have gone in a new "opinion" section but really, this whole blog is full of my opinions...

I saw a bumper sticker on the way to work today that said "Actions Will Be Judged According To Intentions". My first thought was that it made a lot of sense. My second thought was that it made no sense and the owner of the car probably didn't get it.

Here's one of my famous hypothetical situations:

"My intention was to get my buddy to the hospital as quickly as possible so that they could tend his wounds from being hit by a car while crossing the street. Therefore, all the red lights I ran and people I hit with my car are of no consequence."

Here's another, this time ripped from actual headlines:

"My intention was to make a small hole in the wood beam to run a cable through, so it is irrelevant that I shot and killed my wife in the process."

The moral of the story? Think before you stick something on your car.

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I've run across a couple good ones I had to share:

Photoshop Disasters: Pointing out how things can go horribly wrong if you don't pay your graphic designers enough. My guess is that these designers were hired because the responsible parties weren't willing to pay enough to get good ones.

Indexed: A web comic about life and the comedy inherent in graphs and venn diagrams. Her political views are pretty clear, but the comedy is still rich.

Ben Zvan Photography: There's some really good stuff here. I'm hoping to get some pointers this weekend.

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I have no idea how many people from the science fiction convention circuit read this blog. I know I do, so there's at least one and all of them are familiar with Annalee Newitz.

A few months ago Gawker media latched onto this little piece of talent by making her a contributor to lifehacker.com and I just read today about something that the science fiction folks in my audience will be thrilled about. io9.com, the latest entry to the Gawker media juggernaut is a blog entirely about science fiction. I've been a reader of Lifehacker and Gizmodo for quite some time and I make the occasional forays into reading Gridskipper, Consumerist, Jalopnik and even Fleshbot, so I'm not exactly neutral when it comes to their websites, but io9 definitely has a place in my bookmarks bar.

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On my Grandmaster's visit this year, I expected to learn much about Tai-Chi. The cane form and 18 Lohan were top on my list when I thought about the upcoming event. There's one thing I didn't expect to learn though, and I use it every day.

We had our picnic at Crosby Farm Park in St. Paul, along the river. The shelter there has a couple of bathrooms with hand dryers rather than paper towels; I suppose that's to cut down on the amount of material that the maintenance crew has to pull out after events and for general maintenance. Anyway...

I was cooking on the grill, so I spent rather a large time in the bathroom washing my hands to keep cross-contamination between raw food, cooked food and food for vegetarians to a minimum. I was a little frustrated with the speed at which I could dry my hands with the drier in there and I was lucky to run into Grandmaster on one of my forays. He said to me "Not fast! Slow; like Tai-Chi." and explained that the drier would work better if I took my time instead of violently rubbing my hands together.

I've tried this technique in many bathrooms since then and it is reliable; hard to remember to do, but reliable. Try it sometime.

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Watch as I deliver a manifesto for an activity I have not participated in:

I read recently that you Apple Store employees didn't like it when people come in to the stores and jailbreak all the iPhones and start installing applications on them. Apparently, it takes them a few hours to restore all the iPhones to the default, locked state, readying them for the next day's assault.

I can see how this could be a problem. I think this public plea for people to stop doing it is misdirected however. The root of your problem is not the your customers are messing up your demo products by going to a specific, malformed website and hacking into them. It is that a malformed website has the ability to hack your demo products.

So in response to your plea, I give you a plea to complain to Apple about this problem. Tell them that their employees are having their time wasted by the fact that the iPhone platform is closed to development and, more importantly, that the Safari browser on the iPhone has a critical but that allows people to install arbitrary code.

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I know this is getting blogged in higher places than here, but it needs to be seen. So for my reader, if you haven't seen this, take a look. It sucks that there's no Daily Show for the duration of the writer's strike, but that's a little perspective on why there's a writer's strike.

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Last week, I mentioned that upgrading to Leopard caused considerable slowness on my Quicksilver Mac. I also mentioned that I couldn't even successfully install without removing my third-party SCSI card. As it turns out, the two were related.

I got curious yesterday about the slowness and checked to see what my CPU was doing, wondering if it was processor related or I/O related, and found that my CPU was running at 100% solidly. Well that meant there was something taking up a lot of CPU and I was pretty sure I wasn't running it. Top showed me a process named kernel_task that was using anywhere from 80% to 95% of the cpu, basically whatever I wasn't using elsewhere.

A quick google showed some forum entries from when Tiger was released indicating that the kernel_task process could take up CPU time on some PowerBooks with a bad trackpad driver and that replacing the driver with a third-party utility did the trick. Now these folks were complaining about 16% CPU going to kernel_task and that was nothing like what I was seeing, but it made me think about the fact that I hadn't installed any drivers for my SCSI card and hadn't needed to since 10.1 came out.

I don't really use my SCSI card. It's only there for my back catalog of Zip disks, and I can't remember the last time I put one in. My G3 Wallstreet has SCSI built in, so if I ever want to get rid of the old Zips I can copy them off and stick all the contents on a CD some time. One less SCSI card later, and my Quicksilver is running about as well as it was before the upgrade.

I'm still looking at the new Xeons though. 

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Hey, just a quick note to everyone who wants to read my blog on google homepage or feedburner or whatever. I got a full content rss feed going this morning at RSS.

Now to get the permalinks working...

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