A Win Is A Win... Except When It's A WIN!
It's the sports situation every boy dreams about. You know, full-count in the bottom of the ninth or inbounding the ball down by two with 2.3 seconds left.
Imagine standing at the free-throw line in the last game of the season of your senior year with a chance to put your team up by one. Make the shot and play 3.3 seconds of defense to win the game. Think you can handle the pressure?
What if I told you the win would break a 310-game conference losing streak streching 26 years? How about the pressure now?
Ryan Elmquist is no stranger to accomplishment. Perfect ACT. Landed a job at Google. Helped the CalTech Beavers win a basketball game. In the last game of his career, Elmquist, sank his freethrow with 3.3 seconds left ending a losing streak that started before he was born.
"When you're president of Caltech, you witness scientific breakthroughs, Mars landings, and any number of other memorable events. Storming the court with Nobel laureate Bob Grubbs will certainly rank high on my list of Caltech memories."
--Dr. Jean-Lou Chameau, President, California Institue of Technology.
A win is a win. Unless a Nobel laureate storms the court. Then it's a WIN.
Because We've Always Done It This Way...
The following is an excerpt from an article written by James Bennett. It is a joke that should be in the preface of every LEAN book written. Read why we do things the way we've ALWAYS done things.
There’s an old joke, so old that I don’t even know for certain where it originated, that’s often used to explain why big corporations do things the way they do. It involves some monkeys, a cage, a banana and a fire hose.
You build a nice big room-sized cage, and in one end of it you put five monkeys. In the other end you put the banana. Then you stand by with the fire hose. Sooner or later one of the monkeys is going to go after the banana, and when it does you turn on the fire hose and spray the other monkeys with it. Replace the banana if needed, then repeat the process. Monkeys are pretty smart, so they’ll figure this out pretty quickly: “If anybody goes for the banana, the rest of us get the hose.” Soon they’ll attack any member of their group who tries to go to the banana.
Once this happens, you take one monkey out of the cage and bring in a new one. The new monkey will come in, try to make friends, then probably go for the banana. And the other monkeys, knowing what this means, will attack him to stop you from using the hose on them. Eventually the new monkey will get the message, and will even start joining in on the attack if somebody else goes for the banana. Once this happens, take another of the original monkeys out of the cage and bring in another new monkey.
After repeating this a few times, there will come a moment when none of the monkeys in the cage have ever been sprayed by the fire hose; in fact, they’ll never even have seen the hose. But they’ll attack any monkey who goes to get the banana. If the monkeys could speak English, and if you could ask them why they attack anyone who goes for the banana, their answer would almost certainly be: “Well, I don’t really know, but that’s how we’ve always done things around here.”
This is a startlingly good analogy for the way lots of corporations do things: once a particular process is entrenched (and especially after a couple rounds of employee turnover), there’s nobody left who remembers why the company does things this way. There’s nobody who stops to think about whether this is still a good way to do things, or whether it was even a good idea way back at the beginning. The process continues through nothing more than inertia, and anyone who suggests a change is likely to end up viciously attacked by monkeys.
Programming Cheat Sheets Perfect For Cubical Walls
Web Designer and Developer David Child's playground AddedBytes is informative and beautiful, but there is a particular section of his playground that I love: http://www.addedbytes.com/cheat-sheets/
David makes well laid out cheat sheets for verious programming languages that are both visually appealing and useful posted to any cubicle wall.
While you're there, check out David's blog which often contains useful tidbits of web design, web development, and typography.
About Me
Jason IshibashiBS in Computer Science with focus in Getting Stuff Done, Social Media, Social Networking, Teamwork, Leadership, Personal Finance, Young Business, High School and College Education, Web 2.0. Mentor through Future Business Leaders of America, and program staff for Destination Imagination in Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and Riverside Counties.
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Jason Ishibashi
