For some time our household has switched over to glass containers to store any foods that were potentially headed to a microwave. Over time, the glass containers are stored for everything. Here’s a post I read that covers off the impacts of plastics.
It was a great event. The first one I’ve attended. I will attend others. Here are some of my thoughts on the presentations…
Hosted by -
ROGER MARTIN, Dean, Rotman School of Management, U of Toronto and author of 5 books including his latest „The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage‰ (Harvard Business, 2009)
Presentations -
Diaminds: Decoding the Mental Habits of Successful Thinkers. MIHNEA MOLDOVEANU, Professor and Director ˆ Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking, Rotman School of Management, U of Toronto and author of 3 books including his latest Diaminds: Decoding the Mental Habits of Successful Thinkers (Rotman/UofToronto Press, 2009)
Interestingly, I rode up the elevator with Mihnea and a gaggle of others. I did know who he was, although his hair was different than the photos I had seen of him. His talk was the essence of this ‘flipping’ mind things. Simultaneously hold to opposing thought and will yourself to flip between them.
How We Decide. JONAH LEHRER, Editor at Large, Seed magazine; Editor, Mind Matters blog, Scientific American and author of 2 books including his latest How We Decide (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009)
Jonah’s talk was a wonderful story or many stories. Lessons… emotions are the repositories or wisdom… experience is the noun of mistakes…and, the Marshmallow experiment…
Inside the Investor Mind. LISA KRAMER, Canadian Securities Institute Research Foundation Term Professor and Associate Professor of Finance, Rotman School of Management, U of Toronto
Lisa returned to Toronto for this talk from Stanford, where she’s performing science in the name of Decision Neuroscience. This was a very heady chat. Note, that if you are positively aroused, you will have a tendency to take on more risk.
Buyology: Truths and Lies About Why We Buy. GARY SINGER, CEO and Founding Partner, Buyology Inc. Marketing Neuroscience Firm
Gary’s talk was about branding, marketing and how they impact a brand.
- better insights are proactive and proprietary
- market is focused on day to day transaction activities versus transformational growth
- Look for opportunities to fundamentally tranform the organization we serve
- Today’s marketing is like an olympic skiier with one eye covered and one hand tied.
10 inputs as brand owners to strengthen to get Loyalty, Passion, Advocacy.
- Grandeur
- A clear vision
- Rituals
- Symbols
- Sense of belonging
- Sensory appeal
- Evangelism
- Enemy
- Story Telling
- Mythology
Counter Clockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility. ELLEN LANGER, Professor of Psychology, Harvard University and author of 11 books including her latest Counter Clockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility (Ballantine Books 2009)
I really enjoyed Ellen’s talk, and I think the fact that she had to exit the conference quickly to make her plane just added to why I enjoyed her message…be mindful. Some notes…
Be mindful. Notice new things, be sensitive to context and perspective, rules and routine guided, phenomenal experience of engagement.
Noticing novelty reveals uncertainty
Mindlessness. The past over determines the present.
This summer the family has decided to make a big reno push at the cottage. The first of many jobs is to deal with the wet basement.
We have uncovered a large piece of rock in our basement. How do you design to incorporate such a feature?
Muskooka’s icecream. Yummmm
I prefer vanilla when it come to ice cream although I have tried the rainbow of different flavours. If you are passing through Port Carling, I would recommend you stop for a scoop.
It is a new breath, each time I come here. Being so close to the water, to hear, smell, feel it.
We’re renovating this year. Its beautiful to be up here.
A physiotherapist friend once told me that she noted a measurable difference between the recovery time of a patient to if the patient practiced yoga. Imagine that.
I personally enjoy hot yoga. Get a good stretch, sweat like a pig…every time and walk out with a good endorphin rush 
When I feel I need a good stretch I grab my towel, mat and water canister and head to the studio.
Here’s a blog I read that pretty much sums up hot yoga.
I work in the project management space in the finserv industry. I have worked with PMs from US, Canada and various parts of Europe. It strikes me odd at how much indigestion they feel about building and maintaining project schedules. All very smart and capable. All understand and preach the importance of capturing the who and what of tasks and interdependencies, all understand the relevance of being transparent to program leadership. All start out with the best of intentions. And without fail, 3 weeks into a schedule, and there are red flags.
What goes wrong? It’s not the PMP. Let me say, the PMP baselines an understanding of fundamentals in project management. It is a methodology and should be leveraged as a tool. Agilistas will argue that a burn down chart is enough…and I would agree, but I have yet to witness that work on a large scale in FinServ.
Here’s what I know. PM’s are the champions for project teams. In the first 3 weeks, they have worked hard to get the team nice long timelines and a budget to match. They have, of course, consulted with the SME who is a FTE and will be going on vacation next week for about a month. The PM has no committed people to his team, so he place holders them with generic titles.
In week 2, the schedules for all of the PMs in the program are baselined and presented to the ‘program steering committee’. Where every PM begins to discover constraints…environments, people, dependencies. Umm, ok. So, off goes the PM to fix that up, but no problem. We have nice long lead times. Still good, no need to change dates, maybe just raise a risk or two in my own offline risk excel spreadsheet. In week 3, the PMO books a meeting and wants a laundry list of required documentation from the PM for their project of responsibility. Umm, ok…my BA is still waiting for their credentials and laptop but we’ll get that to you as soon as possible. Yea, let me add that milestone to my schedule and let me open a issue on my offline issues spreadsheet not just for the BA but for the FTE that hasn’t been backfilled by his reporting manager.
Week 4 comes and the reporting cycle demands that I present the progress of my project in a pre-determined template, that the PM gets the night before, because the PMO was retrofitting the template to be appropriate for the program. Umm, okay…the PM fills in the template and off it goes.
Week 5, the FTE comes back from vacation and while he was away it dawned on him that there was a key dependency that popped into his head while he was fishing. It should be no big deal, since they do it all the time, but the PM should know. Umm, ok..let me put that in my offline to-verify list.
So, now the PM has at least 3 offline lists and a program reporting template that is presented every week. Why do I need a project schedule? First, its a pain in neck. I set a date and the schedule doesn’t calculate properly. I know we can do work on the weekend but setting the weekend to working days will impact the rest of my plan. As soon as I add a person to the task, my durations get messed up. To print the Gantt view is a waste. I just don’t have time.
As a PM , I’m covered. What’s the big deal? Here’s the rub…at a program level, to find out what the real story becomes a painful exercise of reconciling data. Pulling every PM into many meetings. Just to come out the other side with static data.
Plan management is a useful function. Augment your team.
MS Excel application continues to be the application of choice in the BI space for organizations small to large. There is no denying that its pervasiveness persists because no other app can do what Excel can do. When in doubt, dump to Excel. Run filter, run a pivot, build a graph…presto, a glimpse into the opaque. But blink, and your data is out of date…
With that said, consolidating multiple stream into one workbook to produce a reporting snapshot for a project can be time consuming, cumbersome and likely static. Where did BI go wrong? The majority of business challenges that exist today have been around for a very long time and solutions continue to come up short. Document management systems became ‘searchable’ and this was labeled as a great BI victory. Metatag management is a nightmare and you need a specialized degree to sort what is relevant in the search results.
There is no silver bullet. Large orgs are impacted in people and dollars. Knowledge retention bleeds out of the org at an alarming rate…but who even knows? There’s no ‘rate’.. would mean that you actually could measure something. Maybe we’ll call it angst. Imagine being the Ops lead and not being able to articulate your angst…except to say..if Wang decides to move to the rainforest…we’re done.
Deciding to change careers isn’t a trivial idea. But when the time comes, in your gut you know.
So, I jumped and haven’t regretted a single moment. I switched from the entertainment and hospitality industry to project management. What i took with me was the same thing I brought to the casino. My own self. To beef up my hard skills, I tuned up off hours on core programming, networking and database administration. I nailed a few certifications and started ‘networking’ with people. After a few months of not landing anywhere, I decided to apply to an eight month course on applied e-commerce and project management.
Needless to say, it paid off. Like I said, trust your gut.
