Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

If You’re Gonna Read, Read Something Productive

One of the best advice I ever got was some­thing my aunt told me back when I was still a uni­ver­sity stu­dent. I have always been an avid reader, but at that point I had got­ten to read­ing a lot of fic­tion and not much else. I was on a trip to visit a num­ber of aunts and cousins down in Cal­i­for­nia that sum­mer, and I brought a small stack of books with me. My aunt, who has always been forth­right with me, sat down at one point and said to me, “If you’re going to spend time read­ing, read books that will actu­ally help you. I sug­gest read­ing biogra­phies so that you can learn from the expe­ri­ences of others.”

She said more than that, but those were her two key points.

Sur­pris­ingly, that has made a tremen­dous dif­fer­ence in my life. I took her advice to heart. Now, for the most part, I read busi­ness books, biogra­phies, selected his­tory books and books per­ti­nent to my work or busi­ness activ­i­ties and aspi­ra­tions. My one big diver­sion are cook­books and books about food. But, part of that diver­sion still includes books about the pol­i­tics, ethics, and health of what we eat. I try to read things that will teach me new con­cepts, rein­force con­cepts I already believe to be impor­tant, intro­duce me to new areas of knowl­edge, or teach me new skills. I don’t touch works of fic­tion any more, except in very excep­tional cases — and each time I’ve made such an excep­tion, I find that the works have been totally unable to hold my atten­tion because my mind tells me what I’m read­ing is ulti­mately pointless.

There is noth­ing intrin­si­cally wrong with read­ing fic­tion or read­ing mag­a­zines for enter­tain­ment. How­ever, the time that we each spend read­ing — whether that’s just 15 min­utes a day or even hours on end — is time that could be used to increase our knowl­edge, skills, or understanding.

Just recently in my work with the gov­ern­ment, I have ben­e­fited greatly from the skills I learned from 3 or 4 books on visual com­mu­ni­ca­tion and inter­face design. Those were books that I read on my own time dur­ing my daily com­mutes and over my lunch breaks. The end result was hav­ing devel­oped new skills and under­stand­ing to be able to develop dash­board sys­tems and struc­tured sitreps that have gar­nered our Branch much pos­i­tive feed­back from through­out the Min­istry. It has, of course, also given me a fair bit of pos­i­tive expo­sure as an individual.

I acknowl­edge that there are some things that can­not be learned from a book. I know that full well from my con­tin­ued busi­ness efforts that have gar­nered me less-than-spectacular returns. How­ever, I truly feel that I have ben­e­fited both on a per­sonal basis in terms of broad­en­ing my hori­zons and under­stand­ing, and on a pro­fes­sional basis with improved skills that I bring to my work.  I enjoy the time that I spend read­ing and learn­ing, and my aunt’s advice to me to use that time pro­duc­tively has had great impact on the paths that I have taken since that dis­cus­sion years ago.

So, I pass along to you this advice: If you’re going to spend time read­ing, read pro­duc­tive mate­r­ial that will broaden your hori­zons, deepen your under­stand­ing, or develop your skills.

The 8 Keys to Success — and Staying Successful

What are the keys to suc­cess? To many peo­ple, that’s like ask­ing what the win­ning num­bers are to the big lot­tery jack­pot. There is the belief that there just might be a sim­ple key to suc­cess, like turn­ing the key to start­ing a car. Well, the recipe for suc­cess is indeed con­cep­tu­ally sim­ple, but it’s not at all easy. I’ll let you see for your­self from these quick, but insight­ful and moti­va­tional, lit­tle videos what the 8 keys to suc­cess really are and let you think about how you can apply them to your own life and circumstances.

Government Will Not Act Until You Speak Up

I work in gov­ern­ment in the pub­lic ser­vice, and I see gov­ern­ment from within the offices and hall­ways of the bureau­cracy. I oper­ate in the pub­lic ser­vice which means I do not see what hap­pens in the polit­i­cal wing of demo­c­ra­tic gov­ern­ment, but I see what hap­pens in the admin­is­tra­tive middle-ground between the polit­i­cal decision-makers and the front lines where transfer-payment agen­cies actu­ally do the work. My col­league who is lit­er­ally my office neigh­bour recounted to me last week about her dis­cus­sion with some­one from one of the Province’s emer­gency response teams, who asked very straight­for­wardly, “What is the Min­istry doing this year to make the team bet­ter?” That is an hon­est and sen­si­ble question.

There is a con­cept that I’m sure many who went to busi­ness school learned about: kaizen, or con­tin­u­ous improve­ment. The idea behind this is to make small improve­ments on a con­tin­ual basis so that, over time, you end up with sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment over where you started but with­out hav­ing taken any momen­tous leaps at any point. It’s the idea you may have come across in per­sonal improve­ment about being 1% bet­ter each day, or learn­ing 1 new word each day or doing 1 new thing each day. It’s some­thing that every high-performing orga­ni­za­tion really ought to have instilled in its culture.

As I’ve writ­ten before, gov­ern­ment is not about excel­lence. Gov­ern­ment does not, in all hon­esty, need to be excel­lent because there is no com­pe­ti­tion. Fur­ther­more, the cul­ture is risk averse to the extreme, find­ing it bet­ter not to do any­thing than to do the wrong thing.

The end result is that a gov­ern­ment as a polit­i­cal entity, and the unelected, for-the-most-part obe­di­ent bureau­cracy work­ing for it, will only do what it has to out of prac­ti­cal neces­sity or out of polit­i­cal urgency. You may have noticed that the lat­ter often trumps the former.

My col­league in the instance men­tioned answered the team leader in a very diplo­matic man­ner, but was really think­ing, “Don’t you know by now that gov­ern­ment won’t do any­thing unless it has explic­itly com­mit­ted itself to doing it?” In other words, there is no con­cept of con­tin­u­ous improve­ment in gov­ern­ment. Well, that’s not entirely true — I think there may be the occa­sional speech or moti­va­tional memo (isn’t that in itself an oxy­moron?) that talks about the pur­suit of excel­lence in the orga­ni­za­tion — but in my opin­ion and based upon what I’ve heard over the years from my col­leagues, the con­cepts of excel­lence and con­tin­u­ous improve­ment are for­eign to the pub­lic ser­vice (and almost assuredly equally for­eign to many elected officials).

If there is some­thing that you feel your gov­ern­ment — be it munic­i­pal, regional, provincial/state-level, or fed­eral — ought to be doing, you need to write to your rep­re­sen­ta­tives and even call their offices. In a demo­c­ra­tic gov­ern­ment, elected offi­cials run the gov­ern­ment and its bureau­cracy and require your votes to be re-elected. They want to know what you are con­cerned about because they will focus their atten­tions on what you are con­cerned about, and not on what you don’t give a damn about. It’s log­i­cal, really. If they rep­re­sent you, and as far as they can tell, you don’t care about Issue A, they won’t lift a fin­ger about it. They will not spend a dime on it, they will not devote any gov­ern­ment resources to it. But, if enough con­stituents write or call about Issue B, it may gar­ner enough polit­i­cal weight that the machin­ery of gov­ern­ment starts to move and do some­thing about it.

You may well receive a form let­ter response or a generic non-answer for your effort, but keep at it. Don’t take an answer about how the issue is “impor­tant” or that it’s a “pri­or­ity” at face value, either. I once heard a col­league remark how she had heard from a Com­mu­ni­ca­tions rep say, only half-jokingly, that say­ing some­thing is “a pri­or­ity” means noth­ing because the gov­ern­ment has so many things labeled as “pri­or­i­ties” that in real­ity none of them are actu­ally pri­or­i­ties. Press for a com­mit­ment. You likely won’t get it, but at least you have to try.

If there is some­thing you really and truly think that your gov­ern­ment should or should not be doing, you need to put in some effort. You need to say some­thing, say it strongly, say it often. Your voice counts, par­tic­u­larly when the vast major­ity of the pop­u­lace remains silent.

There are some, or even many, politi­cians who want to do the right thing and do good things, but they need to hear from you. There are many pub­lic ser­vants who want to do the right thing and do good things, but we can only do what our exec­u­tive lead­er­ship enables us to do — and they in turn are given their march­ing orders from the elected offi­cials. All of us, as indi­vid­ual cit­i­zens, are ulti­mately respon­si­ble for get­ting our voices and con­cerns heard.

If you want your gov­ern­ment — at any level, in any juris­dic­tion — to be doing some­thing, you have to speak up and say some­thing to your elected offi­cials.

How Do the Taliban Train Young Boys to Be Suicide Bombers?

Two of the most impor­tant things we in the priv­i­leged world can do to make the world a safer place is to make it a bet­ter world for all. Not just our­selves, not just our neigh­bours, but for all.

1. Eco­nomic devel­op­ment because it brings hope and options.
2. Lit­er­acy and free­dom of infor­ma­tion because it enables peo­ple to truly think for themselves.

Many of us have prob­a­bly asked the ques­tion how a per­son becomes a sui­cide bomber. What is it that “makes” some­one do such a thing?

This lit­tle video from Sharmeen Obaid Chi­noy pre­sented at a TED con­fer­ence sheds a lit­tle light on those questions:

New Restaurant in Markham: Mong Kok Chinese Restaurant

I tried a new Can­tonese restau­rant in Markham yes­ter­day called Mong Kok (like the neigh­bor­hood in Hong Kong). It’s located in the plaza on the south­west cor­ner of Kennedy & High­way 7 (at 8360 Kennedy Road), and when I went it was only its third day in oper­a­tion. When I say new, I mean very lit­er­ally new!

Since it was only a party of 2 at the table, we tried their $24 combo for 2:

• soup (lai tong)
• bbq plat­ter
• 2 main dishes (song)
• dessert

The bbq plat­ter came first, and was bar­be­cue pork (cha siu) and soya chicken. It tasted pretty good, par­tic­u­larly the chicken, but the bbq pork was a lit­tle tough. The plat­ter was alright. Unfor­tu­nately, the first thing on the table really should have been the soup, which we had to ask two dif­fer­ent servers for before it arrived.

The soup was quite tasty, with an obvi­ous pork bone fla­vor and what might have been fuzzy melon. It’s hard to say, because they served the soup in indi­vid­ual por­tions (which is dif­fer­ent from most other Can­tonese restau­rants that serve in large com­mu­nal serv­ing bowl) and had only given us the soup liq­uid. We won­dered whether there was MSG in there, but since my din­ing part­ner is usu­ally quite sen­si­tive to it but expe­ri­enced no issues, the soup is prob­a­bly MSG free. That speaks well of the restaurant.

The two main dishes we selected were stir fried pork neck/jowl with veg­eta­bles and stir fried chicken slices with bit­ter melon in black bean sauce. They stir-fried well, with obvi­ous wok hei, and decently tasty but they really could have used some more fla­vor. The meat could have been mar­i­nated longer or at least more fla­vor­ing added dur­ing cook­ing. The por­tion sizes were good: we had enough left over to take back home and use for lunch today.

Dessert should have been some­thing like red bean dessert (hong dao sah) but they were out by the time we got there, so we had hon­ey­dew melon for dessert.

All in all, the food was decent. The envi­ron­ment is nice, like what a decent, large Can­tonese restau­rant should be. Ser­vice for the most part was good.

I say for the most part because there was one young gen­tle­man who was very rude to his col­leagues. Seri­ously rude and was grat­ing on his col­leagues. He never inter­acted with us — he looked to be a bus­boy — but since we under­stood what he was say­ing to his col­leagues and obvi­ously heard the tone, I was left with the impres­sion that he’s a nasty lit­tle bug­ger with a seri­ous atti­tude prob­lem. The ser­vice staff who inter­acted with us were good with but one excep­tion. We paid by credit card and they brought the wire­less card machine to our table to process the pay­ment — but the gen­tle­man never said thank you after we paid he walked away to process the next table’s card payment.

Mong Kok is a decent Can­tonese restau­rant. There are those that are bet­ter, and there are many more that are worse. I wouldn’t specif­i­cally rec­om­mend this restau­rant, but I feel no need to warn any­one away from it, either.