Author Archives: Scot

I am can be powerful!

The other day, someone came into my office with a bad idea for a project of mine. I regularly get bad ideas from this person, so I naturally have just set myself to resisting whatever this person (let’s say a … Continue reading

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Real vs. fake work: What are emails, meetings, etc.?

A couple years back, a group of us at work put together a series of classes designed to help people better communicate and manage their tasks more efficiently.  We present them in a sequence we think makes logical sense: Email … Continue reading

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Superficial pleasantries vs. honest relationship building

In my last post, I discussed some thoughts from reading Conger, Lawler, and Finegold’s Corporate Boards book. Here is something else that caught my eye in that book that has near universal applicability -not just to corporate (or observatory) boards. … Continue reading

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Balancing Two Boards

Gemini has two Boards – the Gemini Board from the international partnership agreement and the AURA Board. It’s actually a bit (well, OK a lot) more complicated than this. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is Gemini’s Executive Agency. They collect … Continue reading

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Agile development and change implementation

While I’m on the topic of change management and how it isn’t very different than plain old good management, I feel like I need to address one additional aspect that people often get wrong. Initiating a big change is hard … Continue reading

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Change Management – Another Instance of Management 101 Getting it Wrong

Change Management is a idiom often heard these days where I work. I’m sure you know what it refers to – the process of implementing change in an organization and converting employee’s initial reactions of fear/anger/doubt to ones of discovery/understanding … Continue reading

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Musings on career paths…

I look younger than I am.   I hear this a lot when people find out (or ask) my age.  People seem surprised to find out how old I am.  I’m never quite sure how to take this, though.  The vain … Continue reading

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“I set early deadlines so people work hard to get done as soon as possible.”

I recently heard a project manager say something like, “I set an optimistic, aggressive schedule to make sure people work hard to meet the deadlines, otherwise, they might back off and not work as hard as they can to finish … Continue reading

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