WOWhead

I am now an official World of Warcraft head case. Two characters helping each other, lots of time spent online, and some of it is due to the fact I am retired, TV sucks and is expensive in comparison to this online game.

I have also a part time job with the US Census.

I read the NY Times, Seattle Times, Seattle online PI, and many other forms of news and information. MSNBC is on all the time as is the classical station on SiriusXM sattelite radio.

Our friends Bob and Mary Pat have left Seattle and are blogging their way East on US 66. ManageMyPractice.com

Nuff Said

Belltown

The Belltown Association

Sustainable Belltown

Community Help and Sustainability

We must build a community with more partners and fewer adversaries.

A short quote from our governor, Chris Gregoire: “Real solutions for many of our problems will come from partnership with our families, our communities, our faith-based organizations and our service groups. This is our time. A time like no other. … Our time to show courage. … Our time to reach across the aisle … to help people. … Our time for all to light the lamp of generosity.”

Now that all the politicians have endorsed the new TUNNEL we can rest assured our neighborhood will be affected in a positive manner by directing a lot of pollution out of the area. “The TUNNELL project is very expensive and hits taxpayers hard in Seattle and King County, a region becoming more expensive to reside in all the time. But this is a once-in-50-years decision. The forces have aligned and I get the feeling this time it’s a go (Balter, 2009).”

Here is a great blog which is called Network Weaving, http://www.networkweaving.com/blog/ and offers this tidbit for consideration.

Viral Philanthropy Introduction

How can a foundation or charitable endeavor have the greatest impact? I think it is through 4 basic strategies:
1. Funding two-step viral strategies for transformation.
2. Providing support for learning/policy communities among “grantees”.
3. Creating viral strategies to build an expanding donor community.
4. Enabling donor and grantee to engage directly.
The author is not sure that any philanthropic effort currently employs all 4, but is counting on those of you who have implemented one or more to share your experience with us.

A social network blog about the creation of robust & vibrant economic and community networks using network mapping, weaving and leadership development.
This is the blog of Valdis Krebs, June Holley & Jack Ricchiuto.

Citizen Science

“Citizen Science involves the enlistment of large numbers of relatively untrained individuals in the collection of scientific data. To return to our architectural metaphor, if Big Science builds the high-rise yet higher, Citizen Science extends outward the community of villages.”

“An example of Citizen Science is the Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count. Every winter, from mid December to early January, tens of thousands of intrepid hobbyists fan out across North America, and together, they do their best to answer two basic questions: How many birds are there? And what kinds?  

It’s a simple sort of data, to be sure, but it is nonetheless scientifically invaluable. The CBC dataset now covers 109 years, and this remarkable temporal extent, along with geographic range that spans the continent, enables scientists to address questions that would otherwise be as inaccessible as a Higgs boson (physics). Just in the past few years, scientists have used the CBC dataset to track the emergence and impact of West Nile virus, to understand the ecological effects of competition between introduced species and to measure the shift that birds make toward the poles in response to global warming.”

Another example of Citizen Science is the data collected by our speaker Wednesday evening, who catalogued the various locally grown produce by season.

“Perhaps the new administration, which has already proven itself so skilled in using the Internet to coordinate broad networks of volunteers, ought to consider a national initiative in Citizen Science. It would provide us with timely data, and it would make us better citizens (Hirsh, 2009).”

References

Balter, Joni, The Seattle Times, January 15, 2009, http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2008629099_opina15joni.html

Hirsh, Arron E., The New York Times, January 15, 2009, http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/guest-column-a-new-kind-of-big-science/?ref=opinion

Change at WSDOT

Introduction

Over the past twenty years I have introduced change at the Washington State Department of Transportation in Seattle. Almost always they were changes which improved employee production and modified the then current way of doing things. I have noticed the engineers employed at the WSODT are only interested in doing things the “way we have always done it.”

My point is this; engineers are not creatures of change, do not like change, will not suggest change, and when confronted with change quite often reject change. The following biographical sketch of Peter F. Drucker may shed some light on the phenomenon.

Peter F. Drucker–writer, management consultant and university professor– was born in Vienna, Austria in November 1909.  After receiving his doctorate in Public and International Law from Frankfurt University in Frankfurt, Germany, he worked as an economist and journalist in London before moving to the United States in 1937.

Peter Drucker published his first book, The End of Economic Man, in 1939.  He then joined the faculty of New York University’s Graduate Business School as Professor of Management in 1950.  Since 1971, he has been Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management at the Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California.  The university named its management school after him in 1987.

Peter Drucker has written 35 books in all: 15 books deal with management, including the landmark books The Practice of Management and The Effective Executive; 16 cover society, economics, and politics; 2 are novels; and 1 is a collection of autobiographical essays.  His most recent book, Managing in the Next Society, was published in fall 2002.

Peter Drucker also served as a regular columnist for The Wall Street Journal from 1975 to 1995 and has contributed essays and articles to numerous publications, including the Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Economist.  Throughout his career, he has consulted with dozens of organizations – ranging from the world’s largest corporations to entrepreneurial startups and various government and nonprofit agencies.

Experts in the worlds of business and academia regard Peter Drucker as the founding father of the study of management.

For his accomplishments, Peter Drucker was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush on July 9, 2002.  A documentary series about his life and work appeared on CNBC 10 times from December 24, 2002 through January 3, 2003 (Drucker, 2007).

Peter F. Drucker was not an engineer he was a business management consultant and university professor.

Change at the Washington State Department of Transportation

Reinventing government is a mammoth task, much larger than any change efforts at a big corporation. The WSDOT has 2500 employees and dozens of departments. How do you begin to change something so large and bureaucratic?

To begin with, you have to recognize that you’re dealing not with one large organization but with lots and lots of individual bureaucracies, each of which has its own concerns and needs. Each unit must move through the change process in its own particular way. Every department is going to have to approach change on several different levels. The first step in any change—and it doesn’t matter if you’re running a division of GM or the U.S. Department of Education—is to begin to ask the basic questions: What business are we in? What’s our mission? Who are the customers we’re aiming to serve? You must answer those questions carefully.

Then, if you’re truly going to understand the most important problems and begin to look for answers, the second step is to draw on the experience of people from all organizational levels. How do the services you provide look to employees in the field? How does it feel to be a customer of your company?

In government, the answers aren’t necessarily the same as those in business. GM’s customers are the people who buy its cars and trucks. But who are the customers of the Department of Labor and Industries? Who are the customers of the Attorney General? Those questions—and their answers—are important, but they aren’t obvious. After you have defined your mission and your customers and then learned what those customers want, you need to articulate a vision of change and sell that vision to every employee.

Unlike private companies, government departments don’t have the constant pressure of generating profits and building market share. What strategies can public managers use to initiate changes after they’ve taken stock of their mission and customers and involved employees?

Look at change from four thematic perspectives: customers, consequences, control, and culture. First, you need to revamp the relationship between your organization and its customers. You have to ask customers what they want and then restructure your organization to deliver it. Second, you need to create consequences for what people and organizations do. In business, if employees can’t deliver what they were hired to deliver, they leave or are fired. If the business can’t make money and keep customers happy, it doesn’t survive. But most civil servants never face real consequences. If they do a great job, they see little benefit; if they do a poor job, they experience few repercussions. Somehow, managers have to create a feeling that what people do day-to-day to advance the mission of their agency really is important. And public leaders have to create budgeting and other systems that reward success and force weak performers to improve. Government workers are no different than other employees; they want to see their efforts matter and their progress measured.

Third, you need to look at who has control. In government, control is vested at the top much more than in almost any business. If you want an organization to become more entrepreneurial and alert to customers, you must give a lot more control to the people on the front lines who deal with customers and deliver the services. That’s as true of government as it is of business.

Finally, you need to ensure that the culture of each government agency supports the work that people need to do to deliver value to the customer. In the federal bureaucracy, long-standing cultures have taught people to keep their heads down, stay out of trouble, and, unfortunately, they have accomplished little. The key is to craft a different kind of culture.

One way to effect change in how government agencies perform their work is to introduce accountability for consequences. How do you do that without a bottom line? One way is to borrow some practices from business. Assuming you’ve identified your customers’ most critical issue, then find better ways to measure performance and set up systems that reward excellent outcomes and efforts. For instance, use competition, as a few state and local governments have with school choice. Or if you have an office that provides an internal service, such as printing, you can open all or part of the service to competition with private vendors and even other government agencies. Alternatively, you can start to use deregulation as a reward: because your performance is better, we’ll get rid of some of the rules that bind you.

Some of the biggest innovations need to come in the area of human resources. Unlike the manager of a private company, the head of a state agency has almost no ability to move people around or to reward those who are doing well. It still takes more than a year to fire somebody in state government. Now, I know we need protections so that the politicians in power can’t throw the old guard out. However, WSDOT has a system with 15 grade levels and 10 steps within each level and is far too restrictive.

Conversations about the vision of the future and your mission have to start at the very top. The governor has to get out there and talk about that vision again and again. The Secretary of Transportation must do the same, but they need to be more detailed-oriented and talk about specific goals. And so on down to every level. In his first few months on the job, for example, Henry Cisneros, who may be the most charismatic member of the Clinton cabinet, believed he needed to get all 15,000 HUD employees involved in defining the mission of the organization. The first thing he did was to attend a three-day retreat with his top 100 or so people. Then he had retreats with the remaining employees at headquarters. Next he sent people out to the field to lead other retreats. In the end, every employee had spent at least a day talking about the mission.

A crisis helps enormously. Companies like Harley-Davidson and Ford have used crises in a similar manner. If you don’t have an obvious crisis, sometimes you have to try to manufacture one or at least create an overwhelming sense of urgency. You can say, “This is the level of performance we need to attain, and we’re doing a miserable job.” You can talk in quantitative terms about where you are and where you want to be and involve everybody in choosing the strategies to get there. And then, when you reach the point where you hit your goals, you shouldn’t be shy about trumpeting it. Successful results can protect you from the internal and external opposition you’re almost certain to run into.

Back in the 1980s, for instance, the governor of Minnesota introduced a program called “Strive Towards Excellence and Performance” (STEP). He put together a board that he co-chaired with a leading businessperson. The board invited state employees to submit ideas for innovative projects, and it chose the best ones. Then, when employee teams implemented them, the STEP office provided technical help. More important, if somebody got in the way, employees could call the governor’s office to back them up. They had a powerful champion behind them. At the end of the year, the governor held a big awards dinner to honor those who had successfully improved things. Even people who didn’t win an award got a pat on the back and some attention. It may sound hokey, but people at the top need to furnish this kind of support. It energizes employees and helps leaders sustain momentum, which can be easy to lose in bureaucratic settings (Osborne, 1994).

 

Until now, change in business has been an either-or proposition: either quickly create economic value for shareholders or patiently develop an open, trusting corporate culture long term. But new research indicates that combining these “hard” and “soft” approaches can radically transform the way businesses change.

The new economy has ushered in great business opportunities—and great turmoil. Not since the Industrial Revolution have the stakes of dealing with change been so high. Most traditional organizations have accepted, in theory at least, that they must either change or die. And even Internet companies such as eBay, Amazon.com, and America Online recognize that they need to manage the changes associated with rapid entrepreneurial growth. Despite some individual successes, however, change remains difficult to pull off, and few companies manage the process as well as they would like. Most of their initiatives installing new technology, downsizing, restructuring, or trying to change corporate culture has had low success rates. The brutal fact is that about 70% of all change initiatives fail.

In our experience, the reason for most of those failures is that in their rush to change their organizations, managers end up immersing themselves in an alphabet soup of initiatives. They lose focus and become mesmerized by all the advice available in print and on-line about why companies should change, what they should try to accomplish, and how they should do it. This proliferation of recommendations often leads to muddle when change is attempted. The result is that most change efforts exert a heavy toll, both human and economic. To improve the odds of success, and to reduce the human carnage, it is imperative that executives understand the nature and process of corporate change much better. But even that is not enough. Leaders need to crack the code of change.

            For more than 40 years now, we’ve been studying the nature of corporate change. And although every business’s change initiative is unique, our research suggests there are two archetypes, or theories, of change. These archetypes are based on very different and often unconscious assumptions by senior executives—and the consultants and academics who advise them—about why and how changes should be made. Theory E is change based on economic value. Theory O is change based on organizational capability. Both are valid models; each theory of change achieves some of management’s goals, either explicitly or implicitly. But each theory also has its costs—often unexpected ones (Beer and Nohria, 2000).

The goal of this restructure is to eliminate documentation errors, increase accountability, increase productivity, and produce a system which will scale to any size. From the smallest to the largest contract, the goal is to have immediate, current, and correct financial information available to the staff.  As of today, WSDOT has some contracts which are valued near the $400 million level. In the near future WSDOT will have three mega-projects, the SR 520 bridge replacement $5.0 billion, the Alaskan Way Viaduct $3.2 billion, and the widening of I-405 $500 million.

It is my contention that the current form of documentation being used at the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) is inadequate for any contract above $24 million in value. Although we are currently managing a $40 million contact, it is done with a staff that is at times unable to keep up. Since we also have six or seven contracts which still require work, the quality of our work suffers. Our contracts must be documented as a first class business would in order to make efficient use of scarce tax dollars.

So, where do we start? I think we should look at how a bank keeps track of the millions of checks which are processed daily. We should build on their expertise, use their banking system to manage our multi-billion dollar projects, and learn from them. Or, we need to find an outsource company to do the work. Engineers are not accountants, haven’t been trained as accountants, and most don’t have any business sense at all. We need to rethink the documentation portion of construction, the personnel working there, and the software we use to manage the financial portion of the contract.       

            The following two documents represent the majority of the vouchers the WSDOT writes to pay a contractor for an activity, bid item, or material which is a component of the contract. Change orders are also a form of additional payment but they also are a contract in themselves, appended to the original contract and a remittance is required by the WSDOT at times.      Recently our office has created electronic forms for the following two items but they are limited in scope because there is no “backend” to accumulate data from or place data into. A new line of management must be introduced which shall be the necessary employees managing the fiscal needs of the department.

Contract Documentation Staff (Sample)

Manager (FA III),

Head of documentation and materials (FA II),

Data Processors: One staff person per $1 million in payments per month (FA I),

Head of documentation and filing (FA II),

Documentation and filing Processors:  One staff person per $10 million per month (FA I),

Head of documentation (FA II) contract administration (federal requirements), change orders (E2). (Fiscal Analyst = FA)

Materials Documentation Staff (Sample)

            Documentation manager (FA II), data entry, MTP, and filing (FA I) requires one staff person per three active contracts, but never less than three people unless the office is closing. The FA II and FA I also verify, document, and record all material tests besides the standard materials documentation.

            The documentation staff has a parallel organizational representative to the engineering staff, all the way up to Secretary of Transportation, which will hold equal if not greater authority in all things financial. (CFO)    An MBA shall constitute equal pay to the engineering staff at all levels.          The documentation staff must be trained on a continuous basis to ensure there are qualified managers waiting to assume a higher band position in management (GE).

            This may seem like I am introducing a new level of staffing into the WDOT but these financial analysis positions would replace current engineering staff whose activities would be better focused on building bridges, highways, and overpasses than keeping track of dollars.

Conclusion

            While I am not Peter F. Drucker or a Kotter or a Lewin, I have successfully inserted change into the Department of Transportation at the employee level for many years. Some are permanent and some solved a problem at the time. Now more than ever the WSDOT must pull itself up by the bootstraps and institute change. I suggest type O change as described in “Cracking the Code of Change” by Beer and Nohria. Because the WSDOT is not a for profit business the formation of teams would best suit the organization. There is a residual of poorly performing employee problem at WSDOT. These employees should be fairly retired, asked to resign, or just fired (not an option).

            Without the changes being instituted immediately, when the design is done and construction starts on the mega-projects there will be some very nervous executives at WSDOT. The Washington State Ferry System has experienced exactly what I have predicted and their budget has been taken away from them for poor performance on all of their contracts. Edmonds, Anacortes, Friday Harbor, and Bainbridge Island are all suffering under this poor management.

            One final comment, Boston’s “Big Dig” is a prime example of poor business practices and poor management. We do not want this to happen in Washington State.

Epilogue

            This paper was written for the requirements of an MBA degree by James R. Smith in 2007.

References

Retrieved from the Internet, June 2, 2007, http://www.peter-drucker.com/about.html

Beer, Michael and Nohria, Nitin, Cracking the Code of Change, Harvard Business Review, May, 2000.

Osborne, David, Reinventing the Business of Government: An Interview with Change Catalyst David Osborne, Harvard Business Review, May, 1994.

 

 

Music as Torture or Music as Therapy

The soldiers who were ordered to torture inmates in Guantanamo were allowed to pick the music used at high volumes and continuously for many hours and days routinely picked Heavy Metal by groups such as Nine Inch Nails and Metalica among others.

Listening to any sound at extremely high volumes for an extended period of time will cause discomfort and anxiety but just listening to the advertisements on television will cause most individuals to become angry as well.

The staff who selected the Heavy Metal music just picked the medium which caused them the most emotionally charged state of mind. They could have played any type of sound at high volumes to create the same effect.

If one listened to the Igor Stravinsky ballet, The Right of Spring, for days on end at an extreme volume the composer himself would go crazy.

It is not the type of music played but the volume, an ABC television group of commercials would do the same thing.  We now listen to so many drug companies’ commercials it is no wonder the population is on the verge of insanity.

Elevator music is just a small example of torture and on hold phone music is another.

Music’s the cordial of a troubled breast,

The softest remedy that grief can find,

The gentle spell that charms our cares to rest,

And calms the ruffling passions of the mind.

 

Music doth all our joys refine;

‘Tis that gives relish to our wine;

‘Tis that gives rapture to our love.

It wings devotion to a pitch divine;

‘Tis our chief bliss on earth, and half our heav’n above.

 

John Oldham (1653-1683)

So which do we subscribe?

Are we so troubled we cast our spell

On such prisoners who are in hell

Or should we be healers and

Free ourselves from their cell.

Baby boomers and health care

Recently I have visited with several 90 year old members of society. Most of these people are afflicted with some type of infirmity but live in a rather nice home. They have trouble walking, have survived some type of cancer, or have occasional needs which they cannot attend to without help. If they are to the point of being incapable of taking care of themselves, they have to move to a “home” which gives assistance, assisted living.

Now, each one of these people will have to sell their home to afford the $4,500/month fees to continue living within their group of peers. They will be broke in a few years. Their children will get zilch, nothing, and be very angry. Others will move to an assisted living home in which Medicare pays for the stay. They still will have to “cash” out to stay there.

Their children are the “boomers” coming on strong and in the millions. They will take over the government to stay alive, live meaningful lives, and maintain what little wealth they have accumulated.

From a study done in Ontario:

Philosophy on Elderly Care Needs Overhaul: Expert

 

By Chinta Puxley, Canadian Press

 

July 5, 2008

 

Canada

Experts say European countries, particularly in Scandinavia, take a completely different approach – from the architecture on up. Long-term care homes in Sweden, for example, are hard to pick out because they look just like any other residence.

Once inside, 98 per cent of residents have a private room, usually equipped with a kitchen and bathroom, said Marta Szebehely, professor at Stockholm University. The homes generally don’t have more than 30 rooms and residents receive about six hours of care a day – from help dressing and bathing to social activities such as singing or going for walks, she said.

The same small group of residents also eat together and are encouraged to help prepare the meals, regardless of their level of dementia, Szebehely said.

“Often, the social life in a nursing home takes place in the kitchen and the staff and residents usually have coffee together between meals,” she said.

“The ‘family’ rather than the ‘hospital’ is the ideal of residential care,” she added. “The more generous funding and staffing levels make a difference.”

It is really a shame not to have some planning for the men and women who have fought our wars and provided for their children, built our great country and worked for 40 years for some company just to be stripped of any monetary items just to stay alive.

Belltown Condos

Belltown Condos & Lofts

• 2700 4th Ave
• 2nd and Bell (project and timeline uncertain, 101 units)
• 81 Vine (loft)
• Alex (under construction, slated for 2009, 37 units)
• Alexandria (79 units)
• Arbor Place
• Art House (Battery & Elliott, project and time line uncertain, 120 units)
• Austin A. Bell (loft)
• Avenue One
• Bellora
• Belltown Court
• Belltown Lofts (loft)
• Concord
• Continental Place
• Cristalla
• The Ellington
• Gallery (under construction, slated late 2008 completion, 214 units)
• Grandview
• Harbour Heights
• Klee
• The Martin (project and timeline uncertain, 170 units)
• The Matae
• Moda Condos (switched to aparments, 251 units, completion late 2008)
• Montreux
• Mosler Lofts (completed 2008, 150 units)
• The Parc (completed 2008)
• The Pomeroy
• Royal Crest
• Seattle Heights
• Site 17
• Trio (completed 2008)
• The Vine Building
• Western Triangle Building

This is from the following blog:

• http://seattlecondosandlofts.com/list-of-condoslofts

Income and Wages

In the 1950s my father worked as a pipefitter for a company which paid him enough to raise four sons. We had little except for the beautiful home and waterfront property on Hood Canal. We were fortunate for the location and my grandfather built the house while my dad was away fighting in WW II.

Times were tough in the late fiftys but in the 60s after a strike my father started to earn enough money for us to enjoy some more of the opportunities available. My mom was a stay at home mom. We sold oysters to tourists in the summer for extra money. My mother had cancer from 1955 to her death in 1981, my youngest brother conctracted rhumatic fever in 1965 while I was away in Viet Nam. Through all this my family prospered and enjoyed life.

When I went to work after Viet Nam I was able to just barely maintain the lifestyle we enjoyed in the late 1950s but soon it was impossible to purchase a home unless there were two incomes.

Now we have met our limit. Even with two incomes the average family cannot afford the American life. We have been driven to credit. Since we cannot have more than one wife credit is the only option.

We either are finished or our wages have to triple.

A poem

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach,
The Ogre cannot master Speech.
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

–W.H. Auden

Fresh from Arkansas

July was a great month for us as we got married. One of our guests came from Arkansas, we paid the cost, because we wanted them to be with us. With the guest came a friend who could talk a mile a minute about everything and it was interesting to hear their opinion on the topics of politics, economics, and religion. I will have to admit I raised topics which were sure to evoke thier opinion. Some interesting tidbits resulted from this retoric: Obama is a muslum, God will take care of me, and we must be really rich…. HA. I appreciated this interaction as it showed me the lack of knowledge which may be typically present in the society represented. The attitude of this guest was one who would completely accept the type of person Sahah Palin represents and in fact guarantee a vote for her.

Andrew Sullivan

This blog says it all: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/09/mccains-integri.html#more