Just very busy. Since I last posted I have:
- Had a friend visit for 4 days
- Attended a folk festival
- Completely redesigned the policy evaluation code that drives “my” product
- Won an HGPA Hold ‘Em tournament (with the largest pot in association history)
- Taken a sick day
- And many other things…. none of which have left me with blogging time
And I still don’t have much. However, instead of just an excuse post I give you two things.
First, a quote from Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices by Peter F. Drucker
Yet, while the career professional needs a mgr to be effective, the mgr is not his boss. The mgr is his “guide,” his “tool,” and his “marketing arm.” The mgr is the channel through which the career professional, and especially the true specialist, can direct his knowledge, his work, and his capacities toward joint results, and through which in turn, he finds out the needs, the capacities, and the opportunities of the enterprise of which is he a member.
In one way, indeed, the true career professional will and should be the “superior” of his mgr. He must be the “teacher” and the “educator.” It is the career professional’s job to teach mgmt, to raise its vision, to show new opportunities, new horizons, new and more demanding standards. In that sense, every career professional should be expected to be the senior in his relationship to his mgr, and indeed, to mgrs within the organization. If he does not take the responsibility for leadership within his area of expertise and knowledge he is not a true career professional. He is instead a subordinate “technician.”
Second, my favourite panel from Penny Arcade‘s 2001 strips:
That panel is the middle beat in a four–strip extended gag, but I think it stands perfectly well on it’s own. (The large, wallpaper-sized version, is scanned from my copy of Epic Legends Of The Magic Sword Kings, which I bought because I read PA regularly via RSS and it usually makes me laugh–even though I am the opposite of a hard-core gamer–so I figure I owe them something. Also because it was easy since the book was carried by my local comic shop.)
