Information Technology Dark Side

Really, you should be nice to everybody. But let’s just talk about admins first.
Mistreating an administrative assistant is an excellent indicator that someone is a complete jerk. There are few ways of deducing someone’s nature than watching how someone interacts with someone else who is significantly lower in the corporate food chain. In terms of [...]

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One of the great books I’ve read lately is Love is the Next Killer App, by Tim Sanders. It really opened my eyes to a lot of concepts that have been really useful to me in my own career. Well, now Tim has a blog, and his latest post is really very useful. It’s about [...]

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I’m reading The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant right now. Why? I’ll explain that later when I finish the book and review it. At any rate, something I read sparked a lot of thoughts this morning on my daily commute in to work. It compared the philosophies of Descarte and Francis Bacon, calling one [...]

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A while back I blogged about questions you should ask your potential employer that reveal what it’s really like to work at the company. Lately I’ve been thinking about the kinds of qualities I would like in a manager. I’ve broken them down into a few categories:
Need to Control
Ability to Facilitate
Ability to Resolve
Ability to Judge
Need [...]

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What are the five words you absolutely can’t say at the office? What are the phrases that will bring you “on the carpet” (so to speak) faster than any other?
Is it “BS”? What about “sucks”? Or the dreaded eff bomb?
Heck no. I’ve heard these words used at all levels of organizations I’ve worked in. I [...]

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One of my personal little trials in life is that my last name is difficult to pronounce. I grew up in Texas, where my name was abused tremendously. It only makes matters worse that my family uses an unusual pronounciation of Christiansen: Kris TEE ann sen (not Kris chen sen). I can’t tell you how [...]

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Yet another performance review idea - it’s midyear’s at my employer. This is an idea I’ve been working on for a long time, and it’s one for which I really have to give someone else the credit. Allen Childress, this one’s for you. Thanks for the idea!
Dungeons and Dragons (and other RPG’s) give us a [...]

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I’ve alluded to this before in a previous post about Interviewing the Interviewer, but I feel the need to elaborate on this a little.
I have a mental tool that I have used for years to help me describe my workplace to others - the BSCP, or Bureaucratic Scale of Corporate Process. The scale, which I’ll [...]

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In most companies, changing a broken process is about as easy as building a defibrilator from household components. Sure, Macguyver could do it, but would you want my home-made defibrilator used to resuscitate you after a heart attack? Not me.
It is particularly difficult to change an inefficient process in a time of reasonable stability. If [...]

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A few days ago I saw a bumper sticker that reminded me of a lot of IT people. It was a list of nine political/social topics, all of them with a red “anti” symbol (you know, a red circle with a line through it) over them. The list included all the “hot” topics of the [...]

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