Favorite Thanksgiving 2006 Story

My friend, Burnie, has a vast array of grandchildren. He sent me this the day after Thanksgiving describing their holiday:

"We had a big leaf raking yesterday. What a hoot. Everyone had a different idea about raking .... some with fly swatters, some with sticks, and some with tacos (this is another story)."

Baby Snooks

My Hair is Brown by Katherine Holt

My hair is brown. There is no other word you can use to describe its color. No glamorous words like auburn or chestnut. Just brown. Certainly if I am sitting under a strong light and the angle is just right you may see a hint of blond or red but these occasions are rare. Brown is on my driver’s license. Brown is the word the police would use if I become a wanted criminal. Brown is the color of my hair.

Straight is the other word used to describe my hair. It will curl slightly, ever so slightly under the ends, but that does not change its status. So there you have it. My hair is brown and straight.

This is a fate I share with many women, ugly women, and beautiful women. It is not a bad fate. It’s far better than baldness. Yet these two simple monosyllabic words are the jumping off point of major family discussions.

To put it more bluntly, my family hates my hair. They have always hated my hair. From the moment I was born it has annoyed them. I was born with a head of hair. The only problem was it stood straight (of course) up. As my parents drove home from the hospital they stopped at the store and bought a jar of Dippity-Doo and there begins their obsession with my hair.

There was a brief moment in my life when my hair looked good. It was after three years of exposure to the California sun. My hair had achieved a golden color that my family, particularly my father still reminisces about. The Ohio sun is not as kind and so soon after moving here, my hair reverted back to its natural brown.

Of course my mother does have one quarrel with those golden days. It is the same quarrel all my conscious life. My hair was too long. My hair is always too long. That is why today their obsession with my hair is so intense. According to my mother I am committing the greatest of sins. I am growing out my hair. My mother believes that my hair always looks best short. She says the last great haircut I ever got was when she had complete control over my appearance and I would get a pixie cut. In other words, I had my last great hair when I was three years old.

Even today my mother always goes with me to the beauty parlor and supervises every snip of the scissors. When I’m fifty my mother will in all probability still be going to the beauty salon with me and she will be leaving the salon with the same feeling of disappointment at her advice being unheeded.

A week before my appointment she begins her routine. “Well what are we going to do with your hair this time?” When I answer, “Just a light trim” a look of sadness will pass across her face.

When my parents were reading Dr. Spock’s book on child care, they skipped the chapter on positive reinforcement and went right to hair care. That is why my life is filled with phrases like, “You could be a beautiful if only . . . . “

Rocks in a Jar

One day an expert was speaking to a group of business students and, to drive home a point, used an illustration I'm sure those students will never forget. I hope you won't either.

As this man stood in front of the group of high-powered over-achievers, he said, "Okay, time for a quiz". Then he pulled out a one-gallon, wide-mouthed mason jar and set it on a table in front of him. Then he produced about a dozen fist-sized rocks and carefully placed them, one at a time, into the jar.

When the jar was filled to the top and no more rocks would fit inside,
he asked, "Is this jar full?" Everyone in the class said, "Yes."

Then he said, "Really?" He reached under the table and pulled out a bucket of gravel. Then he dumped some gravel in and shook the jar causing pieces of gravel to work themselves down into the spaces between the big rocks.

Then he smiled and asked the group once more, "Is the jar full"? By this time the class was onto him. "Probably not," one of them answered. "Good!" he replied. And he reached under the table and brought out a bucket of sand. He started dumping the sand in and it went into all the spaces left between the rocks and the gravel. Once more he asked the question, "Is this jar full?"

'No!" the class shouted. Once again he said, "Good!"

Then he grabbed a pitcher of water and began to pour it in until the jar was filled to the brim. Then he looked up at the class and asked, What is the point of this illustration?"

One eager beaver raised his hand and said, "The point is, no matter how full your schedule is, if you try really hard, you can always fit some more things into it!"

"No," the speaker replied, "that's not the point. The truth this illustration teaches us is: If you don't put the big rocks in first, you'll never get them in at all."

What are the 'big rocks' in your life?

Your faith?
Time with your loved ones?
Your education, your finances?

A project that YOU want to accomplish?
A cause? Teaching or mentoring others?
Remember to put these BIG ROCKS in first or you'll never get
them in at all .....
So, whenever you choose to reflect on this short story, ask yourself this question: What are the 'big rocks' in my life or business? Then, put those in your jar first.

Christmas Puzzle

“When I was growing up, every Christmas we would get a puzzle to solve as a family. By coincidence, there was a family next to us that also got a puzzle to do every Christmas. Now, my father is in the military and I have one brother, so we had a small nuclear family of four people that approached our puzzle in a rather military-like, hierarchical fashion. But the family next door had eight kids and dozens of relatives hanging around all the time, so their puzzles were solved in a far more chaotic way.

At our house, the puzzle was always placed on the same table with two chairs, and if you wanted to work on the puzzle, you had to wait. Further, the puzzle was done in a very organized fashion. You first found pieces for the corners, which could take hours just going through the box. The second job was to fill in the border. Only when these first two jobs were completed would you work on some inner section, and even then there was a rule that you were to look for pieces that could be identified by the color or pattern of the section being worked on. So when you sat down at the table you had to find out where we were in the process and move ahead logically.

Of course, growing up in the family it seemed perfectly normal to me. However, I noticed that the people next door did not use a ‘puzzle table,’ but worked wherever in the house they happened to be sitting. Also, sometimes six or seven people would be working on the puzzle at the same time. Some were looking for corners, some just found three or four pieces that fit together, and some thought they’d like to do a border. Although they worked in this very chaotic way, their puzzle always got done before ours. It made me mad because we were so much better organized.” From Terri Holbrooke, “Novell’s Ten-Thousand Piece Puzzle” in the book The Infinite Resource by William E. Halal, Jossey-Bass, 1998.

Playing on Teams

"I had been educated in an individualistic culture. My scores were mine. No one else came into it, except as competitors. in some imagined race. I was on my own in the learning game at school and at the university. Not so in my work, I soon realized. Nothing happened there unless other people cooperated. How to win friends and influence people was not a course in my curriculum. Unfortunately, it was to prove essential in my new life. Being an individual star would not help me much if it was in a failing group. A group failure brought me down along with the group. Our destinies were linked, which meant that classmates were now colleagues, not competitors. Teams were something I had encountered on the sports field, not in the classroom. They were in the box marked “fun” in my mind, not the one marked “work” or even “life.” My new challenge, I discovered was to merge these three boxes. I had discovered, rather later than most, the necessity of others. It was the start of my real
education."

Charles Handy in his book The Hungry Spirit

Collective Memory

Collective Memory

From the Media History Project website

Collective memory is the set of ideas -- derived from literature in literacy, psychology, history, and cultural studies -- that our own memories are not entirely personal.

Experimental and ethnographic evidence indicates that recall improves when two or more people are asked to recall together a particular memory. That is, a single person attempting to recall an event will be able to retrieve less information less accurately than two or more persons working on the same retrieval task. Thus, there's some indication that actual memory storage is, at least in part, a social, not purely psychological, phenomenon.

We also know from history that certain "traditions" of cultural heritage or shared cultural events have been invented and then naturalized as "historical". For example, George Lipsitz (1990) argues that 1950s television helped to invent a fictional past in which the nuclear family and its emphasis on consumerism was indicative of family health, wealth, and virtue; thus the new collective memory engineered on television played a key role in the promotion of consumption, in the disruption of longer-standing non-nuclear familial structures, and in the naturalization of a women's sphere.

Finally, there is the argument that the role of the media in stabilizing or fabricating partial (even entirely fictional) "memories" of a shared past (particularly evident in mainstream media) is paradoxical. On the one hand, such shared notions often form the fabric of our beliefs about ourselves as a collective society -- about our past, our goals, our ideals, and our future. In this sense, collective memory can be seen as fundamental to national identity and unity.

On the other hand, however, such shared notions are inherently selective and, consequently, inherently exclusionary of actual events, ideas, and memories of sets of persons who do not easily fit the alleged mainstream narrative of "who we were." Women, minorities, gays and lesbians, the disabled, the elderly, and the poor have, historically, been rendered invisible by many familiar narratives of the past. In this sense, collective memory also forms the basis for what Gramsci calls "hegemony" -- in which certain ideas that are beneficial to a particular group of people are naturalized as the ways things ought to be (and have always been).

Collective memory is a mechanism through which a community of agents can learn improved patterns of cooperative activity to take advantage of regularities in their domain of problem-solving activity. Collective memory is defined as the breadth of procedural knowledge the community acquires through experience when interacting with each other and the world. This
knowledge may address many aspects of multiagent problem solving, but we will focus on two aspects: learning cooperative procedures and learning agents' capabilities. We demonstrate how collective memory reduces the amount of total effort and communication needed by a community of agents to solve problems.

Collective memory is a mechanism through which a community of agents can learn improved patterns of cooperative activity to take advantage of regularities in their domain of problem-solving activity. Collective memory is defined as the breadth of procedural knowledge the community acquires through experience when interacting with each other and the world. This
knowledge may address many aspects of multiagent problem solving, but we will focus on two aspects: learning cooperative procedures and learning agents' capabilities. We demonstrate how collective memory reduces the amount of total effort and communication needed by a community of agents to solve problems.