Category: SignPosts
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The Rare IT and Music Joke
This joke has been bouncing around the music forums on the internet for a generation, so I can’t take credit for it. It was probably first written by an IT Admin with a love of Thelonious Monk. And now it’s time to come clean…I fudged a bit for the joke. Cdom9 is actually just written…
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The Mandela Effect
I love the sentiment of this quote; achieving success sometimes means you have to be a bit different. What’s more interesting, is that the entire world and internet attributes it to Dr. Seuss. Yet it never appears in his writings and was never something he said. Like Sinbad’s Shazam movie and the Fruit of the…
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Vogon Poetry
From The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979). The first in a 5-book trilogy, the original HHGTTG is one of sci-fi writing’s foundational novels. Originally based a BBC Radio Play, Adams developed it into a novel, then a series, and then a movie (seen above) in 2005. If you ever want to…
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Now Here’s a Guy
John Madden (1936-2021). This quote was used as the title of his primer about football, written in 1986. I own a copy somewhere, and it’s a wonderful read whether you know nothing about football, or everything. John Madden was football. No one else shaped the NFL like him, which is especially fascinating considering he never…
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Basil!
If you travel a lot for work or fun, at some point you have to commit to certain brands. It is an epic choice to make in the travel game, one taken very seriously by like 15 people on the internet. Fawlty Towers was the next program John Cleese worked on after wrapping up Monty…
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Resume your Disorder.
I use this phrase both earnestly and sarcastically. It doesn’t make much sense either way if you haven’t seen the show. Star Trek: Voyager S6E18
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…but that’s not important right now.
Airplane! (1980). Airplane! itself is a deadpan comedy remake of 1957’s Zero Hour!, lifting the entire plot and huge chunks of dialogue, and wrapping it in the style that Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker made famous.
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Changing everything, fixing nothing.
I am a big believer in process improvement. Pick whatever methodology you want. For 95% of the people and companies in this world, it won’t make a difference whether you’re a Six Sigma company or a Lean Company or a TQM Company or something else. They’re kinda all the same to immature companies. Almost every…
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The Original
I honestly don’t recall where I cribbed this quote from. The “Absence of Accidents” part appears in a few different books and sources. Each author tends to define the “presence” part a few different ways. This was one of the first quotes I put on the board, appearing early in 2020. Since that time, I…
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What are you looking for?
When investigating accidents and failures, professionals seek to find cause. This is a different concept than finding fault. Causes are factual, faults are personal. Exercising the separation between these two items is critical to creating progress. Good leaders avoid playing the blame game, and even when individuals have a direct action in a root cause,…