Gute Kinderstube

Another great German saying. "Good manners from good education by good parents." 3 traits wrapped into two words and one saying. Sums things up doesn't it? This came from a web site where the author had some stuff ripped off by someone else and questioned the 'Gute Kinderstube' of the stealing author.

By the way, the longest word in German 'Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän'. Translates as "Danube steamship company captain". I used to work with a Canadian journalist, and he told me that some of the editors used to play tricks on news readers, and either added hard to pronounce words to in stories/ segments or overused a difficult surname rather than use a pronoun. And this was all live TV and teleprompters, so some poor sod jounro is having to say things like "... when questioned by Police, Mr Szeraszuk declined to answer questions prompting Mrs Szeraszuk to contact the Szeraszuk family lawyer..."

Schadenfreude

The last few weeks at work, there have all sorts of things where I go beyond a sense of relief, to a sense of joy at not being in the seat of one of my colleagues. Schadenfreude is a term that the German's use. Now not when things are a big deal - but when it looks as though they are going to have to eat a soup sandwich.

I used to work for a German organization and they were great by the way. A little formal at times but great people.

Complexity at Work

I have been involved in some projects of late, around organizational change and it amazes me how many tasks are involved and the level of 'drill down'. One project has more than 250 pages of tasks, sub-tasks, sub-sub, sub-sub-sub, etc, etc. Anyway around 17,000 tasks to accomplish the project. so my thoughts are:

A. Overzealous project management consultant
B. Sponsor not actively involved at the start
C. Organization needs detail down to the micro level because they cant be trusted?

Who knows

New Blog

So here I sit in the command arm chair and start my blog. The blog will roam around and touch on issues that I see at work and on the home front. I won't attempt to much of a thread running through the posts, that would be a bit dull and not really in the spirit of the blog.