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Fourteen years ago, when I joined the workforce fulltime after college, I figured my pay was pretty low. But by starting at the bottom, the folks told me, you are more likely to rise to the top.
Well, the numbers are out and they make their advice look stupid. MSN reports the following mean starting salaries for recent college graduates:
Yes, an English major averages three times my starting salary fourteen years ago. And don't even get me started on my average salary over the last fourteen years. Heck, even marketing grads make more than L made being an academic. We were in the wrong fields.
Of course, these folks don't know how to live off of minimum wage for three years in very expensive cities. Yep, nothing like being able to talk about how you didn't have money for food. It's one of the things that the artists in Chicago used to get from me. I remember sitting in church class one Sunday where the guy teaching said "of course none of us have had to go hungry because we couldn't afford to eat". All the while one of the guys across from me had gone hungry that week because it was the rent bill or groceries.
There are some advantages, I suppose, to being poor. I can look at people who make nothing and empathise: I know how it feels to not know how you are going to pay the basic bills. And when the collapse of the monetary system comes, we won't be much worse off than we are today.
Sigh.
It would be great to be someone else, to have a different set of abilities. Hell, I'd love to have a different past. Or have made better decisions in my early twenties. But I didn't.
I can't even keep IT contracts any more. The days of being the wunderkind, of Mr. Fixit for manasclerk are over.
It sucks knowing that I have gifts but not being able to use them. I can do things that other most other college-educated folks will never be able to do and I can do it with my eyes shut and one arm tied behind my back while balancing on one leg. Or drunk. I can determine where power is in a organization by guessing. I can intuit your company's history by just talking to your people. It's easy. Reallly easy.
[ Continue reading "Griping about pay" ]It's Christmas, L's Grams is dying, the various factions still do the tug of war (how many factions can one family have?) and I'm still avoiding the holiday at my parents. We'll leave soon for the funeral near Dayton. I'm suspecting that she'll die when all of her kids get there on Christmas day. Probably pass on that night. Even though she doesn't know anyone any more. Somehow, the story seems to be the same. My grandfather couldn't die, fighting it all the way, until my cousin-in-hiding finally checked in. He died an hour later.
Regardless, life is sweet.
Merry Christmas.
I sent the recent New York Times article on Celebrex's recent "problems" to an associate. His wife has had one of the modern mystery illnesses and has, by necessity of keeping her alive, had to learn a lot about pharmacy. He sent the following reply:
Yeah, it figures Monsanto was involved. Celebrex and other Cox-2 inhibitors increase cardiovascular risk by increasing the 'stickiness' of blood platelets.
The FDA warned the company on more than one occasion that it's advertisingwas false or misleading.
I recently read that an FDA representative said that they required studies to show that drugs work not that they don't have risk. Actually, the studies (not the majority of the studies mind you but a couple out of a potentially infinite number) are required to show that they work better than nothing and if the study uses a placebo washout protocol, perhaps not even nothing.
The FDA receives funding from the drug companies they regulate.... Surprise.
Only the US and New Zealand allow direct to consumer advertising.
Follow the money.
Not bad for a guy who only finished in Associates Degree this year, after starting college in 1981. He raises some very interesting points about drug interactions, too. If I can get some of his comments, I'll put them up. They're vey interesting and I bet that most of us never think about them.
And he's not a fan of Monsanta for a multitude of progressive reasons, not the least of which that his wife almost died from taking a Monsanta drug that had not properly described the known side-effects of interactions to the doctors.
Whether you like him or hate him, it's interesting to hear the President of the USA making syntatical sense again. You may disagree with what he is saying in his press conference recently (see the NYTimes excerpts), but you have to admit that he sounds a lot more coherent than he did during the Presidential debates. Which is interesting.
He also seems to be dissimilating less than he has in the past four years. It will be interesting to track this across the next four. Second-term presidents have the ability to step up to the plate and create a lasting legacy. Or not.
A friend asked me this question yesterday. I hate having people ask me questions that cut to the heart of the matter. Earlier, a friend asked me a similar question: "What's it going to take for you to get off your ass?" He's from New York: they're less subtle out there. Something to do with the water.
"It's obvious that you can pick up the ball and run with it. I'm not seeing you pick up this ball. You don't have to pickup this ball, manasclerk, but you've got to pick up a ball!"
I'm at the "inflection point", at the point to stand up and be counted. I'm standing before the burning bush and saying that I don't speak clearly enough to do the job. I've got the fire by night and the cloud by day and I'm saying that I don't have enough.
When am I going to leave my parents?
Yep. A winter wonderland. Unless you live here and you have to get somewhere early on Sunday morning. But it's still wonderful to see the first real snowfall of the winter. Okay, so we actually had snow when I was away in November, but that didn't count. Including a good dump on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. It all melted before I saw it. So this is our first snowfall to me.
We're expecting anywhere from 10-20 inches (25-51 cm) over the next 24 hrs. And with the strong dropping temperatures, this snow will harden into floes of solid ice, derms so strong that only a jackhammer or heatlamp will make a dent.
Too bad I don't have a camera. And I'm too tired from shovelling the first nine inches to describe it.
Top Consultant reports that management consultancy salaries have increased and
fee rates are firmer now than they have been for 3 years, and there is a bit more money to spend on salaries. All firms reported a shortage of good candidates, and those that gave October salary reviews awarded increases of around 5%, reflecting the need to attract new staff and retain those remaining.
Of course, these are the firms that were shedding staff two years ago. They'll end up with the usual suspects: under-40s who have no life and are driven by power issues. Or maybe I've been in consultancy for too long.
IT consultancy looked fairly flat. Who wants to spend money? A friend tells me it's the result of Y2K spending. Many companies simply added on additional projects that they could do then, making the upgrades now unnecessary. And once the big shift happened to the Internet, few companies (BIG excepted) had much left that needed doing. Most of smaller in scope. Still interesting, but not needing the hordes of externals.
The previous discussion about Henry Mintzberg's "Quiet Leadership" led me to read some of his newspaper articles. "Africa's 'Best Practices'" is from the Daily Times of Pakistan (March 9,2004), although it has been published elsewhere earlier. Mitzberg asks the important question: do we or even can we develop leaders?
Perhaps we don?t develop leaders so much as foster the conditions that bring out leadership. If so, then a key condition must be the self-respect that comes from working things out for ourselves, individually and collectively. This self-respect is fostered by organizations and institutions that can likewise stand on their own feet, building on the best of their own cultural traditions.
All good leaders, in any field, work to build their people's self-respect — and not "self-esteem". Having a Real Boss is a part of it, but not all of it. Managers must work within the culture in which they live and move. Importing our cultural assumptions simply doesn't work, because they will only be overlaid on top of indigenous cultural assumptions.
Jon pointed out "Managing Quietly" [Leader to Leader, 12 (Spring 1999): 24-30], one of the few articles by Henry Mintzberg available online. It talks about the fact that the loud, glossy CEOs who become darlings of the business press, do not in fact perform all that well. Quiet leaders, whom you never hear about, do much better. It's worth a read.
I've spent the last two days talking with another professional about the fascist tendencies of Stratified Systems Theory adherents. Some of this is a risk inherent to Elliot Jaques's theory of Requisite Organization, although not a inevitable result. Some of it comes out of how Jaques presented his work. Some of it comes out of our own need for the idea of Leader.
It looks like some Gay and Lesbian political groups are reconsidering their demands for gay marriage, The New York Times reported on Dec 9, 2004:
"For a certain segment of the movement, for which I would certainly elect the H.R.C. as poster child, it means that the error was that we were wanting too much too fast," said Jonathan D. Katz, executive coordinator of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale. "It is entirely characteristic for them to believe that what is required is a sort of retrenchment and a return to a more moderate message. They are, of course, completely wrong."
.................
Some gay rights activists, including the leadership of the Human Rights Campaign, said they believed that aggressively pursuing same-sex marriage only played into the hand of Republicans and religious conservatives, who skillfully used the issue this fall to energize their voters.
Perhaps it is time to remind my friends in these movements of a simple fact:
Somehow, I've been shunted off to rereading the major works of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), the Italian genius who wrote the most prominent manual of politcs in the West. I got started with the famous quote about change:
It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more dangerous to conduct, nor more doubtful in its success, than an attempt to introduce innovations. For the leader in the introduction of changes will have for his enemies all those who are well off under the existing order of things, and only lukewarm supporters in those who might be better off under the new.
— from The Prince, Chapter 6
You can pick a different translation if you like.
Machiavelli describes a realism, including much that sounds like offensive realism. To him, the natural state of man is war or preparing for war. "Dominate or be dominated" is a basic summary. But he still has a place for moral behaviour and for God.
There have been some interesting books on the man and his work. I thought that Gary Wills's Certain Trumpets had some good points about Machiavelli's Prince, while also pointing out the other forms of leadership, including spiritual leadership. (Wills uses Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker Movement as his example for that.) It's a good balance to most of the full agreement with Machiavelli.
L and I have scads of memories but not all of them are all that pleasant. This was the perfect Sunday.
I started off just like I do every Sunday: try and take over the world! Oh, wait, that's my workday goal. On Sundays, I get up at 6:45 so that I can rol over to the Boys and Girls Club to do setup for the church service. [Shouldn't it be "Boys' and Girls' Club"? Whatever happened to possessive apostrophes?] I came in late because I had to finish up some of my work for the presentation I had to do during the service. We're starting a campaign to raise $6,000. That may be chump change for y'all, but for us at the PowerPoint Church, it's a stretch goal. Most of us are either unemployed, severely underemployed, students, or single parents. Not a whole lot of money even if everyone gave the Old Testament one-tenth. Even pretax. We just don't have much money.
I'm always tense in front of my church. I can stand up in front of hundreds and thousands and deliver a competent speech. I once had the unenviable duty of telling Pensky that he had to change some environmental practices across his corporation. So I can even do talks in front of hostile coporate audiences. (Penske was actually a really great guy, at least in my conversations. I liked what I saw, which admitedly wasn't much. And he wasn't against these new practices; they were below his radar.) But standing in front of my own community has seemed threatening since we joined that church in Chicago. I'd even been a Sunday School teacher in every church, since I was 16, but not that one. It never occurred to me that I had the quality necessary to do it. I mean, I hadn't even gone to bible college, much less seminary!
UPDATE: McIntosh provides some interesting comparisons to positions which I've added to the table:
A friend loaned me Gary L. McIntosh's One Size Doesn't Fit All: Bringing Out the Best in Any Size Church, a book that argues that churches have different problems at different sizes, and that in order to learn how to effectively manage your church, you need to look at those churches of similar size.
As an organizational thinker type, I can see that this makes a lot of sense. I'll be looking at it from a variety of angles over the next few weeks.
What I wanted to capture here was the table of church size percentiles. I'm not sure where McIntosh got this table, or what "church" means. I imagine that these are incorporated Christian bodies, rather than simply informal meetings or house churches, but maybe it doesn't. If you counted house churches, and included all religious groups rather than simply Christian ones, I wonder if the number would be the same. I wonder if these numbers correspond with Jewish congregations, too.
Also, I'm wondering how this codes with the numbers that Elliott Jaques positted for leaders. You would need a leader who could lead a large church in order to have a large church, I would think. There are some profane knowledge issues at play, simply because churches are human and have organizational dynamics that are common to all human gatherings.
Anyway, the table:
[ Continue reading "Church size percentiles" ]
I didn't get it until recently, so the new issue has already been released. It'll probably show up in the pulls on Thursday, if not already.
TCJ has a great interview with Ed Brubaker, the man who made Catwoman interesting again. Brubaker cut his teeth on some interesting semi-autobiographical comics and has continued in independent comics publishing even while working for the Big Guys. He's currently got a gig at Marvel doing Captain America (this would be volume what, five?) which, regrettably, comes after Marvel's decision to kill off the majority of the secondary characters. Or at least maim them.
Having gone years without any real grounding in philosophical discourse, I have run aground in complexity theory. Most of the chao-plexity writers cite Kant as "the first complexity theorist", so I am forced to read Kant. Which is especially disturbing because Tom Morris of Notre Dame has said "Immanuel Kant has to be one of the most influential and unreadble of all the theoretical philosophers in history." But perhaps no worse than the chao-plexity management thinkers I'm trying to understand. Reading some of those folks at the University of Hertfordshire can cause brain clouds to form. And you know how dangerous those are.
At least Kant will read like an indecipherable bad translation of 18th century German.
McDermott, Robert (1999). "Learning Across Teams: The Role of Communities of Practice in Team Organizations". Knowledge Management Review, May/June 1999.
The article is available online in at leat a couple of formats, but the easiest to get is from Community Intelligence Labs' Knowledge Garden.
McDermott's old article is an excellent one for people who don't yet understand Communities of Practice (CoP). He compares and contrasts them to teams, and describes how CoP can complement teams in team-based organizations in a way that the Matrix Organization ("does the Matrix have YOU?") does not. Matrix organizations are almost always a bad idea because they make accountability cloudy at best.
In McDermott's opinion — and he's pretty darned respected — the way to handle the need of team-based organizations to have not a matrix of functional and project reporting but just project/team reporting, with communities of practice encouraged to take the place of the functional silo's particular focus on their field.
Is anyone else amused at the new JC Penney's television campaign sporting a song from Empty Glass? Beats that Windows 95 advert. Perhaps I should note that Mr. Townshend did not want Michael Moore to use "Won't Get Fooled Again" for Fahrenheit 9/11. Which would have been even more amusing.
I always liked Empty Glass, perhaps because of its excesses.