Category: General

How to Guide Your Organization’s Culture

  1. Name it: create a living document, be it a mission statement or a creed or even a motto. Use it as a touchstone to guide your decisions.
  2. Refer to it: a culture that is neglected will still develop, but it will develop in accordance with the various contexts of your organization, possibly not in accordance to the vision or values of the larger organization.
  3. Live it yourself: do your best to reflect the culture you want to cultivate
  4. Establish buy-in from tastemakers: any organization will have folks from whom many others take their cue. These are the most important people to have believe in, and act to advance, the culture of the organization.
  5. Empower: Give everyone in the company the trust and the power to act in accordance with the company culture, be it greater latitude in serving customers or flattening the hierarchy, put everyone in a position to advance the positive culture.
  6. Be flexible: everyone will have their own interpretation of how an organization should operate – a good culture is able to handle debate and criticism without breaking down.
  7. Revisit and Reflect: take a hard look at your organization’s existing behavior and culture from time to time. Is it as good as it could be? What are the pain points? How can you always be improving?

Ways to Improve Modern Furniture

  1. Make it easier to repair
  2. Make upholstery easier to remove for laundering or changing color/style
  3. Small pockets in couch and armchairs for tablets and smart phones
  4. Integrated power cords and USB ports for charging devices
  5. Built-in Bluetooth that ‘talks’ to your home thermostat
  6. Surfaces that can heat or cool their occupants
  7. Stylish chairs that fold flat for small apartments whose residents like to host
  8. Lamps that adjust their brightness according to the time of day and whether their room is occupied
  9. Mattresses that monitor your sleep quality and provide feedback via software

Ways to Use Technology to Make Gardening Easier

  1. Use Google Calendar to outline your planting times, indoor and outdoor, as well as fertilizing schedule, harvesting schedule, etc.
  2. Use a spreadsheet to track your current crop as well as notes from season to season. I prefer Google Drive for this sort of thing.
  3. Communicate with other gardeners and growers across the world on message boards, social media, etc. Any question you might have is either answered, or someone out there is happy to answer it.
  4. Check out the cooperative extensions of agricultural schools in your hardiness Zone – Cornell’s is great for Upstate NY!
  5. Use a modern soaker hoses combined with a fertilizer system to irrigate your garden.
  6. Use a hose timer to automate your watering schedule
  7. Create a Bluetooth device & associated software for hose timing that takes local weather conditions into consideration and adjusts waterings appropriately – even while you’re surfing in Costa Rica
  8. Review your hand tool options – I was astonished at the variety and quality of hand tools out in the world – Johnny’s has some good examples.
  9. Get heating pads and proper indoor lighting for your indoor seedlings: your final product will only be as good as your preparation.
  10. Use your phone camera to take photos of weeds, plant disease, or flowers, and then use Google Image Search to identify them.
  11. Construct a tiny drone with an adorable machine gun to kill vermin and other pests

Ways to Improve the Tenure Process

  1. Eliminate it altogether. In our litigious society, the protection from reprisals that tenure once offered is no longer necessary.
  2. Move to a more transparent model: tenure as a black-box process is terrifying and inefficient. The only thing worse than moving the goalposts is hiding them entirely.
  3. Hire professional management to run academic departments: good management would help more folks attain tenure, and have a better understanding of why they fail, if they fail.
  4. Cut it down to size: Offer tenure in 10-year chunks, rather than in perpetuity. This will help maintain performance and allow for regular reviews.
  5. Standardize the expectations within departments, and state any changes to those expectations when adjustments need to be made. This should be public and on paper.
  6. Offer a choice between a significant raise and tenure. Could be especially interesting in combination with #4.
  7. Create databases of student ratings that can make expectations more clear, both for pre-tenure faculty and those assessing them: if Class X traditionally receives much lower student ratings than Class Y, all parties should be aware of this, and adjust their understanding accordingly.
  8. Use database from #7 to demonstrate scores of current tenured faculty vs. pre-tenure faculty. Make this public to both students and faculty.