Thoughts on Art and Business

I lingered in bed this morning, enjoying the quiet of the dawning day. The encompassing warmth of my comforter was a pleasant cocoon as I lay there and looked out at the green trees beyond the window and the gray clouds beyond them. I am not sure if the sun is going to break through today, though the weather channel was forecasting what T.R. likes to call a "partly" day. Either way, I am looking forward to the day off. I am supposed to meet some of my friends for breakfast in about an hour and a half, so I am sitting here, writing, drinking coffee, and watching the day open up.

Yesterday was a pretty good day. Breakfast, a trip to Best Buy, then a trip up the the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford. Tony and I had drifted up there is spend the day just wandering. The weather was very nice, a cool, blue California spring day. Specifically, I'd wanted to go up to see "Illustrated Title Pages" exhibit and I'm planning on going up next weekend to see "The Art of the Book in California" exhibit. I'd considered just waiting until next weekend and going up to see both exhibits at the same time, but I decided to split the trip between two weekends. Sometimes, when you are in a Museum, seeing too many exhibits can dilute the impact of a singular exhibit. The Illustrated Title Pages was a very cool exhibit - the intricacy of the work on the face plates of older books was pretty astound, especially when you consider at it's very heart it is merely lines of varying thickness and spacing. Truly astounding stuff.

We grabbed lunch at the cafe there in the museum and it was also surprisingly good. We ate on the balcony outside of the cafe, overlooking the Rodin sculpture garden. I had a pulled pork sandwich on panini, which was excellent. After that, we checked out the sculptures, always one of my favorite parts of the Cantor Arts Center.

This was all followed by a lazy afternoon at home, including a short nap, a conversation with one of my sisters, reading Li Young Lee, and watching John Carpenters "The Thing" on HBO. Dinner was a tasty home made chili con queso, followed by a quiet evening reading and watching the DVR until "Game of Thrones" at nine. All it all, I have to say that it was a pretty nice day.

I was a little disappointed that I had work intruding on my brain off and on over the weekend. I would have liked to have made a clean separation to enjoy the three day weekend, but things are confused and lacking direction at work lately (not so much from my management, but from upper management), and there seems to be a lot of "activity without a purpose". We seem to be moving around a lot, gathering data, analyzing it - but there isn't a central underlying theme.

When it comes to leadership I've developed what I call "the theory of bright lines". I think the purpose of leadership is to draw bright lines. In short, leaders need to draw three bright lines. These lines delineate two things. The first line, the center-line, points to where the organization is going and the path it needs to take to get there. The second set of lines are the outer boundaries - these lines delineate where the organization is not going to go. These bright lines should clearly define what the organization does and why (the center line) and what the organization doesn't do and why (the boundary lines). The brighter these lines are drawn by leadership the more likely the organization is to be successful, in whatever terms are defined as being successful (the center line).

Leadership is responsible for drawing and communicating these lines. When leadership fails, organizations drift. We're currently caught in a situation right now in the work environment where our leadership is not drawing the bright lines. They are drawing lines, but there is discernible pattern to those lines. It is quite possible that the unifying theme is going to be revealed at some point in the future. More likely, upper management thinks they are drawing those lines clearly and simply doesn't realize that, to those of us in the functional levels, we're just seeing semi-random lines.

Daily Life: Sunnyvale Art and Wine Festival

Today was the second day of the Sunnyvale Art & Wine festival, so that was the centerpiece of the day. It has been an excellent weekend and I am wrapping it up relatively tired. I awoke early this morning, spend some time online, wandering the wilds of the internet, and learning to use Tweetdeck (for Twitter) with T.R. It was a good morning, that ended in high spirits.

Then, I went up to the festival with Pierre and Helen, had a nice lunch at Tao Tao in downtown Sunnyvale, wandered the festival and looked at the arts, crafts, and people and took some pictures. (I will transfer the pictures from the camera to Flickr sometime this week - with the new computer I have to instally Adobe Photoshop on it, which I have not got around to yet.) After the festival we stopped at Cupertino Square for ice cream at Coldstone Creamery and I picked up Volume 11 in Bill Willinghams "Fables" series at Legends.

From there, I swung over to meet Tony at Carrows for dinner (Belgium Waffle) and conversation about our favorite topic - science fiction! Then, I swung home, watched an HBO movie about Winston Churchill starring Brendan Gleason, took a hot bath and an unintentional nap. I swear, I just laid down for a moment and slept about an hour. Woke up for a phone call and came online to make this journal entry, and now I am going to go read myself to sleep. It is going to be a short read since I am already fighting to keep my eyelids open.

All in all it has been an excellent summer weekend here in San Jose.

Daily Life: Friday in California

It's a bright, cool, beautiful California morning. Not a cloud in the
sky, a temp of 65, and a slight breeze. I made the most of the morning
doing nothing. Breakfast, coffee, watching "The Mexican" on HBO.
Simply an excellent morning. I am going to head out in a few minutes
and drive up to Sacramento with a friend of mine to pick up a
motorcycle part and the grab some lunch. Depending on the traffic it
should be a five hour roundtrip, putting me home mid-afternoon.
Tonight's plan is dinner with the nephew and then a quiet evening. My
nephews birthday is Sunday so he and some friends of his are
celebrating tonight - I might join them for a while, but we'll see.
I'll make that call when the moment arrives. So, for now, I am heading
out into that beautiful morning.

Sent from my iPhone

Daily Life: I Dreamt of Execution

I dreamt that I was being executed and that I was helping my executioners with advice. I recognized the overall framework of the dream - it was, in some ways, a recreation of the scene in HBO's "Rome" where Titus Pullo executes Cicero in his garden.

I was on my knees and there were two men standing near me - one was the executioner and the other was the witness. The execution method was to stab me through the heart with a spear, but it was obvious to me that the executioner was unsure of how to best do it. So, I was telling them how it was done.

The best approach I told them was to hold my left arm up above my head, for the witness to hold it tightly and to brace my body against his thighs, so that I wouldn't try to pull away from the spear. Then the executioner was to take the spear and thrust it in through my armpit at a slight downward angle.

If he made sure the spear blade was horizontal to the ground, it would slip in between the ribs and make a clean wound, severing the brachial artery on the way to the heart (which in itself is quickly fatal). I assured them that it would be relatively painless for me if he thrust quickly.

It was vivid dream - and I thought two things were interesting in the dream. First, I was not afraid or apprehensive about being executed, but rather I was concerned with the form of it, I was concerned that it be done correctly and efficiently. There was no sense of injustice. I obviously felt that, whatever the cause of my being executed was, it was a just cause. Second of course, I did not actually dream I was being executed, I dreamt I was about to be executed.