Titan Called

Human beings naturally care and are easily influenced.

Years ago, I became very frustrated that people in my profession (Agile and Lean Organizational Design) were very content to read books about Agile and Lean exclusively. So I created this post with a list of books about Lean that don't mention Lean. And in the interim I wrote two more books about Lean, the Collaboration Equation and a still unpublished book on office toxicity.

And it became clear that I couldn't say what I needed to.

You see, we create rules, frameworks, and religions and those things start out helping us communicate, finding people of like minds, and slowly (though increasingly less slowly) solidifying, dividing our like-minds from the "wrong" minds, and creating animosity. I knew from the very start that when we released kanban on the world of knowledge work, it would become exactly the religion it currently is. I'd seen it with Agile and Lean and the various sects that attempt to follow them.

All the people stuck in those quagmires started out caring and became influenced by the format. Frustrated by deviation. Driven by a need to be correct.

Non-fiction never cares about such human foibles, which means every non-fiction book is wrong in the end, and useful for a time.

All models are wrong, some are useful. ~ George Box

So my reading list went for caring. You have to care before you help, you have to be aware of care when it is being done to you, and you have to not give in to the illusion of care.

My novels are about flawed but good people in flawed situations doing flawed things. For good or ill. There are heroes, but villains are a little more subtle. The first book, The Social Life of Small Enclosed Spaces takes the main character, Laura, and surrounds her with...

The future is beauty and sorrow. ~ Paul Simon

beauty and sorrow.

Expectations and denial. Wonder and fright.

Or maybe

Maybe they are more about the continuums. Beauty to sorrow. Expectations to denial. Wonder to fright. Victory to defeat to victory to defeat to…

We all feel these things. That great job on Tuesday that is scuttled by Friday and we grieve and mourn and bitch and moan and then two weeks, two months, two years...two decades later it comes back as a later win.

That is the story that needs to be told. Not that victory is finite, but that our will is infinite. That's why I wrote these books. And why I'm anxious to share them with you.

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