EppsNet

Link: http://creativethink.com/8dv

London’s Evening Standard from 1966: “Three girls, one of them named Twyla Tharp, appeared at the Albert Hall last evening and threatened to do the same tonight.” So what? Thirty-seven years later I’m still here.

— Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit

I was at Borders over the weekend and found the Twyla Tharp book. I wasn’t looking for it. It was on the Software Development shelf. It shouldn’t have been there but it was, so I felt that it was my destiny to buy it and read it.

It was meant to be . . .

It was a sickness: this great interest in a medium that relentlessly and consistently failed to produce anything at all. People became so used to seeing shit on film that they no longer realized it was shit.

— Charles Bukowski, Hollywood

I keep seeing commercials during the NBA Finals for The Incredible Hulk.

Wasn’t there an Incredible Hulk movie out just a few years ago?

Why do we have to keep making Incredible Hulk movies?

Way to reach for the stars, thespians.

Shit . . .

• We increase return on investment by making continuous flow of value our focus.
• We deliver reliable results by engaging customers in frequent interactions and shared ownership.
• We expect uncertainty and manage for it through iterations, anticipation, and adaptation.
• We unleash creativity and innovation by recognizing that individuals are the ultimate source of value, and creating an environment where they can make a difference.
• We boost performance through group accountability for results and shared responsibility for team effectiveness.
• We improve effectiveness and reliability through situationally specific strategies, processes and practices.

— Declaration of Interdependence

• Always pretend to know more than anybody else
• Police your employees by every procedural means
• Have your professionally-trained staff members do technicians’ work for long periods of time
• Erect the highest possible barrier between commercial decision-makers and your technical staff
• Don’t speak to employees on a personal level, except when announcing raises
• Be the exclusive spokesman for everything for which you are responsible
• Say yes to new ideas, but do nothing about them
• Call many meetings
• Put every new idea through channels
• Worry about the budget
• Cultivate the not-invented-here syndrome

— via MIT OpenCourseWare

My primary complaint about scheduling is simple: that people are willing to proceed as if they can look into a crystal ball about the future. They act as if they can plan out the future. As if they can control the future. It’s the control part that really gets to me. It bugs me because it’s a false belief. It’s simply not true. You can not control the future, and the belief you can is just so destructive of creativity, teamwork, spontaneity and interaction among one another. This false belief is just a complete energy zapper, an unwholesome energy sink.

— Michele McCarthy

This transcript of a Jim and Michele McCarthy podcast is the best discussion of scheduling I’ve read today, maybe ever . . .

In 1960, Douglas MacGregor of the MIT Sloan School of Management developed two theories of workplace motivation, Theory X and Theory Y.

Theory X assumptions

• People have an inherent dislike for work and will avoid it whenever possible.
• People must be coerced, controlled, directed, or threatened with punishment in order to get them to achieve the organizational objectives.
• People prefer to be directed, do not want responsibility, and have little or no ambition.
• People seek security above all else.

Theory Y assumptions

• Work is as natural as rest or play.
• People will exercise self-control and self-direction in the pursuit of organizational objectives.
• Commitment to objectives is a function of rewards associated with their achievement.
• People usually accept and often seek responsibility.
• Imagination, ingenuity and creativity are widely, not narrowly, distributed in the population.
• The intellectual potential of the average person is only partly utilized.

I come down strongly in favor of Theory Y. I don’t feel like I’m an inherently unmotivated person, that my boss has to keep coming up with new ways to get my head in the game, and I don’t find that most other people do either. People want to do good work. They want the opportunity to do good work.

The key, really, is not to motivate people, but to avoid demotivating them. A lot of managers haven’t figured that one out yet.

In the old days, greed and covetousness were seen as sinful; now they are encouraged. Jack Welch’s Winning sets the tone. The author grins manically from the cover – despite the silver hair, manicured nails and perfect teeth, he looks like Beelzebub incarnate.

But why is “winning” so great? Because, says Welch, it enables people to make lots of money which . . . erm . . . enables them to “get better healthcare, buy vacation homes, and secure a comfortable retirement”. That’s it. Those are the three goals of our mortal existence, otherwise known as more pills, more mortgages and more burglar alarms. Whatever happened to joy, pleasure, brotherhood? Whatever happened to enjoying life? Whatever happened to creativity? Whatever happened to love?

— Tom Hodgkinson

I was buying movie tickets with my 10-year-old boy when a woman with her 20-something daughter smiled at us and said, “When you get older, your kids will take you to the movies.”

Later, in the snack bar line, I asked him, “So are you going to take me to a movie when I get older?”

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