Biker

That'd be my daughter, who this evening took her brand new 26 inch bike out for a spin. We were looking for a reason to give it to her -- her knees would routinely come above the handlebars on her old bike -- and her grades at the end of the school year -- 4 As, 2 Bs -- gave us the reason to do it. She graciously allowed us to come along, and so we had a family bike ride, over to the wetlands, around through the housing area, and back. The weather's perfect for that sort of thing -- low humidity, about 70 degrees -- we had a great time.

Tomorrow I get to arise around 3AM to dial into a system upgrade. I'm contributing very little -- there was one thing I had to do, which I did, and some other things that I should have done, which I did, too -- so I don't expect to be on the call all that long. Its an irritant, and I try to remember that I'm doing it from home, and I will be back in bed in about an hour, whereas many others will be up longer, and have serious problems to resolve. I admit that I'm a little nervous about this -- the preparation for the upgrade was more detailed than what we usually do at the account that I primarily support -- so I am a little worried that I might have forgotten something serious. There is one thing that is changing in our software environment -- a table in the linklist that isn't needed any more in the new environment. We got a bad one, and we ended up just pulling it out entirely. I shouldn't be worried about that, but I am. I'll be happier when this is over. I have another thing to do at noon, for another account that I support, and then I need to be available in the afternoon for the local one, though I doubt they'll call me. It won't be so much a busy day as a day of continual requirements.

I haven't had much new to read lately, so I dipped into a book I've had for several years - Moving Mountains: Lessons in Leadership and Logistics from the Gulf War. It's written by William G. Pagonis, who was the primary logistics officer for the Army in Desert Storm. The writing style is a bit stilted, but the content of the book is good. I went back through it a couple of years ago, highlighting key points. Here's one:

"Organizations must be flexible enough to adjust and conform when their environments change. But flexibility can degenerate into chaos in the absence of well-established goals. In my terminology, a goal is something that is nonquantifiable, purposely broad, and overarching. Once everyone in the organization understands the goals of the organization, then each person sets out several objectives by which to attain those goals at that given time, within his or her own sphere of activity."

I've written about my company's 'Personal Business Committment', which I originally took to mean a methodology that would guide me in furthering the goals of the organization, but which was in practice a series of complex statements listing a series of desirable things, without any guidance or assistance about how to bring them to fruition. I used to beat myself up because I couldn't think of how to help make them happen, but I stopped when I realized that the people running the organization, whose job it was to promulgate those statements, apparently couldn't figure it out, either. I limited myself to saying that I should do what I do as best I could...and hope that that helped the organization.

But I still think about it on occasion.