Yearly Archives: 2006

Reviews

Making Change Stick: Twelve Principles for Transforming Organizations by Richard C. Reale

Making Change Stick: Twelve Principles for Transforming OrganizationsTwo figures stand out when reading this book: twelve and twenty. What do they have in common? The same man, Richard C. Reale. For twenty years, he’s studied why change fails and why it succeeds. Then he boiled down his knowledge base into twelve principles that are absolutely necessary if change is to happen correctly and last in an organization. The amazing thing is that these principles will not only ensure the success of a transformation, but will pay dividends in the long run, by having made an organization more change-capable.

So what’s missing? What’s causing organizations to fail when implementing change? The most common reason is the “failure to consider the human side of change.” It’s easy enough to draw the roadmap. The hardest part is the execution, the fulfillment of that plan. If you don’t believe it, just look at the last time you resolved to do something. What was harder: making the decision and putting some thought into how to best achieve it, or actually doing what you planned?

The twelve principles outlined in this book allow organizational leaders to focus on the people, and to empower them to bring change to fruition. It’s about setting down the right process for change, and following along closely, making sure change is proceeding as planned. It’s about walking the talk, and encouraging people to do the same by praising their efforts to change, and setting them up for success. It’s about monitoring the right metrics, the ones that will tell you how you’re really doing. In theory, it doesn’t sound hard, but in practice, it’s another story. Fortunately, the author explains every one of the twelve principles in detail, and the examples he gives clearly illustrate the point. Inspirational quotes from notable personalities are also provided, to help drive home the point.

This book is a wonderful resource. Twenty years of “on-the-job” experience can’t be wrong. The author’s expertise shows, and will help guide the book’s readers toward that great goal of organizational change, which is a hard goal to achieve indeed. If individual change is hard, organizational change is orders of magnitude harder – but this book will show you how to do it successfully. Get it, and achieve lasting change!

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Reviews

Two Tickets to Broadway (1951)

Two Tickets to Broadway (1951)The story of this movie is simple, and normally bankable: small town girl makes good in big city. This is a story with plenty of room for nice little twists and turns that make a movie worthwhile. However bankable the story is, the movie feels fake all the way through. Granted it’s a musical, and they’re always a little fake, but still, it’s terrible, and I can point exactly to what’s ruining it: the screenplay. Who wrote this pickle of a screenplay, anyway? Yikes! It’s just not grounded, it goes all over the place and tries to do too much. They should have used it for toilet paper instead of filming it.

It’s a shame, too, because the actors were good, and the singing was good, even great at times. Bugsby Berkeley’s choreography was surprisingly toned down, and it sort of fit in with the atmosphere of the movie. I say sort of, because Bugsby’s stuff never really fits in, it always stands out. When he steps into a movie, it changes. Thank goodness there were none of his usually outlandish dance numbers here, although I have to say the American-Indian dance was too weird. It was just insulting, and I bet it wouldn’t get done nowadays, in our more relaxed culture. What were those people thinking when they left that number in?

Things to watch for if you want to kill some time watching this movie: Janet Leigh is great all the way through, Tony Martin sings beautifully, Ann Miller is her usual self, dancing all over the place and baring her long legs as usual, and the reparte between Charles Dale and Joe Smith, as Leo and Harry, the owners of the deli, is just plain funny.

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Thoughts

Restoring planes is one expensive hobby

Paul Allen, one of the Microsoft co-founders, turns out to have more up his sleeve than the X Prize, although it’s related to it. He loves restoring old war planes. I’m not talking about painting them up so they can be placed in a museum, I’m talking about getting them up in the air! Just the idea sends shivers down my spine. I’d love to see a 1918 Curtiss Wright, or a Messerschmitt take flight, and he’s done it! What’s more, no expense is spared to restore them to their exact state when they were in flight, with the same materials and look. This is amazing restoration work, and it’s also very costly, bringing the price to hundreds of thousands of dollars per plane.

He’s purchased about three dozen airplanes since 1998, and about half of them are on display in two hangars at the Arlington airport outside Seattle. Once a year, he holds a flight day, where these old planes take flight for a public audience. His collection is open for viewing on Fridays and Saturdays, and the fee is $20. Definitely worth it!

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Thoughts

The Internet is not a truck

You may or may not have heard about the serious gaffe on the part of Senator Ted Stevens (R), who is Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. He voted against the Net Neutrality Act, and gave a speech on the Senate floor to explain his actions. He may have been better off not saying anything.

By giving this speech that keeps on truckin’, Senator Stevens has shown that he wasn’t knowledgeable enough about the issue to even speak about it, much less vote on it. It worries me that he’s in charge of a committee charged with deciding on matters as important as science, commerce and transportation, when his understanding of the Internet is that it’s a “it’s not a truck, it’s a series of tubes” that can get “clogged up”. I wonder which telecom lobbyist fed him that analogy. At any rate, the aftermath of the speech is haunting him, and one of the funniest takes comes from The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart.

I am reminded of an Abraham Lincoln quote: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”

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Reviews

Hasselblad H2D-39: A 39-megapixel DSLR!

The Hasselblad H2D-39 DSLR Camera

Hold the presses, because I’ve just stumbled onto an amazing DSLR. I used to think 22-megapixels was really something, but this puppy cooks up 39-megapixels! It records in RAW format, and the photos are so big that it comes with an external 80GB hard drive. You can even connect it directly to your Mac or PC and transfer the images as you take them.

Of course, if you yearn for mobility, it also writes to CF cards. I can’t imagine how big they’d need to be or how many you’d need for a typical commercial photo shoot, but hey, it’s your call, right?

It comes with a rechargeable Li-ion battery that will let you take up to 250 photos, or “captures”, as they call them in 4 hours. Needless to say, you won’t be able to put it in your pocket: the camera plus battery and CF card comes in at 2,175 grams, a little over 2 kilos, or 4 pounds.

So how much will all this megapixely goodness cost you? $29,995 seems to be the going price, although I’ve seen it listed on Froogle for as high as $32,973. I can’t say that I’ve got a burning need to get one, but I suppose if my livelihood depended on delivering really high quality pics, it’d be on my shopping list. Read up on it right here.

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