I have a tendency to over-commit myself, which usually takes the form making a claim that I’ll finish something by a particular date, when there was really no realistic way to make that deadline. I just noticed that way, way back on July 9, I introduced the Featured Books category on this site with Jane Bath’s The Landscape Design Answer Book: More Than 300 Specific Design Solutions for Your Landscape
and said that I’d publish a review of the book in a couple of days. Well, I’m not finished yet, and I only know that I’ll be finished sometime soon. Bath’s book is no ordinary garden design book, and I’ve ended out taking a very close look at it, reading it from cover-to-cover — which I suspect (or believe, from my own experience) is not what usually gets done with a book of that kind. Why I’ve ended out approaching Bath that way should be clear from my review, once it’s completed; for now, I’ll just say that Bath’s entire approach is so different that I’m determined to give the book the attention I feel it deserves, even if the review seems to suffer from a long delay.
On a lighter note, I guess, the good thing about setting your own deadlines is that it’s really pretty easy and painless to break them. To a point, anyway….
Daily Blog Tips has become one of my favorite sites for reading blogging tips and advice. Their writers don’t just make suggestions; instead, they place their suggestions in a more substantial context to help their readers understand why a particular tip or bit of advice is important.
One of today’s tips, by Ryan Imel, suggests how bloggers might approach blogging in ways similar to innovations in the work environment being undertaken at Best Buy. Ryan quotes Best Buy’s Revolutionary ROWE: Results-Only Work Environment from the Balancing Life and Law blog, where you will find a summary and some comments on Best Buy’s radical approach. Balancing Life and Law links to Smashing the Clock at BusinessWeek, which is a fascinating and detailed examination of the ROWE approach and how Best Buy has pulled it off.
I’m going to devote several more posts to the BusinessWeek article, so stay tuned. For now, let me just say that the idea that companies must pursue innovation has become so endemic to how corporations describe themselves and their culture, that — even though it’s true that they should pursue innovation — the idea of actually pursuing any has become an almost meaningless adventure in corporate-speak. That in itself would make Best Buy’s attempt to transform the workplace significant, even if in the end it was a failure. What they have sought to do is drastically alter the nature of work entirely, stripping away much of its typical hierarchical and authoritarian structure and establishing an individualistic orientation that focuses not on the demands of authority and bureaucracy, but on accomplishments and results instead. That what they’re doing mirrors changes that have been occurring in the broader society and culture probably goes without saying; but that corporations — the very source of the technological innovations that give Best Buy a good chance at success — may be one of the last cultural elements to loosen their structural grip on people’s lives seems terribly ironic to me.
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. I’m sorry to hear about plumbing problems at your house. I’m pretty sure that it is a quite distraction when you hope to be able to spend times on other interesting...