retreat, not surrender
Well, I'm back. The retreat was fun, and surprisingly useful. I'm more hostile than most when it comes to what I call team-ology — the sort of unscientific time-wasters that arise when someone takes an ex-CEO's platitudes about proactivity (or whatever else) a little too seriously. A surprisingly large number of people can be convinced that a set of successories-style cliches nested in a simply-made-up dependency tree counts as a theory of something. Ropes courses and trust falls are infinitely more useful than that sort of bullshit.
Fortunately there was surprisingly little of that stuff on the ED retreat. Most of the exercises we did were useful or led to useful conversations. Still, for sheer team-building efficacy nothing can compete with drinking beer and playing DDR:
We had almost no internet access at the site, so I've been out of touch. That's led to me being a bad blogger, contenting myself over the weekend with adding useless Technorati widgets and archives to this site instead of content. I can't say that the trend of pointless but technically interesting effort is going to end anytime soon — here's a teaser for the latest useless thing that I'm trying to do with video:
But I realize that I've been putting my few long-suffering readers through a lot of technical mumbo jumbo lately. I promise I'll try to reengage the non-robotic part of my brain sometime soon.
UPDATE: Here's a workplace philosophy that I wholeheartedly endorse (see final paragraph).
Comments
so, I think this means you had fun and learned something. just as a point of reference, how many company retreats have you been on?
Well, obviously this was the first retreat I've been on with EchoDitto -- or anybody, actually. Nevertheless, I think I've been exposed to a surprisingly large amount of management philosophy bullshit for my tender years, from offsite training in the Poconos to on-sites at various now-nonexistent dot-coms to mini-seminars in the boy scouts (!) and church youth group (!!). Don't get me started on the Six Sigma bullshit I was exposed to at GE. In between there've been the odd keynotes and seminars (e.g. Guy Kaw/asaki's at last spring's N-TEN -- he was at least pretty entertaining, and taught me about iStockPhoto). See also this and this episode of The Office.
I have no doubt that the checklists and ladders and pyramids and whatever else work for the people presenting them. In nearly every case, there are probably a couple of things worth taking away from the presentation.
But it's also kind of a silly exercise. It's just somebody spouting off their opinion based on their anecdotal experience -- typically none of their management system has been tested in a scientific way, right (six sigma may be an exception, but I'm not sure)? And a lot of it tends to be composed of platitudes and painfully obvious common sense (e.g.: Communication is important! Teamwork relies on people being polite to each other! etc). Then you invariably have the assembled list problems and shoehorn them into the philosophical framework that's just been detailed ("She keeps stealing your Diet Coke from the fridge? That's because she hasn't been [all together] Primed for Proactivity!!!").
But, like I said, those complaints don't really apply to this retreat. I learned a lot about my coworkers, renewed my sense of excitement for working with them, and generally felt refreshed thanks to being able to take a step out of the daily grind.
Have you read The Company? Its not the finest literature, but its a funny nail in the coffin of that Six Sigma crap.
Hmm. Can't say that I have. The Amazon description sounds good, though. I like the idea of a company only selling training on how to manage its own processes. You'd be surprised the extent to which Microsoft already uses this model in its partner program.