Winter 2015 January 29 Thursday

54 Degrees this morning 45:06 minute walk.

Had an appointment downtown in the City yesterday.  I was surprised again at the poor planning in this city.  All of the construction etc. downtown and they haven’t  upgraded their planning.  Their planning practices are about from the early sixties, if that,  a sad commentary.

Outside of the downtown area, where I really notice the extremely poor planning  is in the lack of connectivity of shopping areas which leads to  excessive traffic (especially short trip traffic) on major roads.  It is a real mess even in new areas where they still don’t consider the needs of the customer.   

Another extremely poor planing practice is allowing new construction without a left turn lane or a turn lane is deplorable, much less requiring bike/pedestrian  lane on new construction on them.

Anyway, that is my opinion.

I was surprised how much change there had been, just enough that I really couldn’t get my bearings.  

I am remembering it from the past, and it is now in the future.  Maybe that is a problem with a lot of situations, we don’t look at them in their present situation, but as we viewed them in the past or in the future.!  

Thinking about it, I think that is why organizations (and people etc.) get stagnant, failing to recognize that new techniques and procedures are required and the old procedures   and practices are simply not effective in what has become the real world.

On the other hand, automatic responses and procedures used in responding to the environment also has a lot of strengths, since you save time and have the capacity to develop new responses and react to the new environmental.

I know when I was City Manager, sometimes I would look back and think how much time I would have spent on researching information about a decision  As I gained experience,  I simply made a quick decision.and  really consciously  of how I made the decision. 

There’s a name for that but I can’t think if it right now.  

Hopefully I will get to the point where I will make  decisions  the same way on my present job also.

I have grown to absolutely hate passwords on computers, especially the “automatic lock after 3 incorrect entries”, which is about as thoughtless as one can get.   I don’t think it does a lot of good and it takes a lot of time to deal with it, since I have to put the password in every time I am away from the computer and it randomly asks for it.

Back to organizational change, I have to really question how someone can buy 6% of a company and  than demand changes  that may be good just for that persons.  6% of the voters isn’t anything, but a tiny minority.

They can ask all they want, but I don’t see why the company management should kowtow to the person who owns the 6% (or, usually a bunch of greeds who are trying to make a bunch of money that is not in the best interest of the rest of the stockholders).

If they buy a majority of the company, I guess that is just the system,l but why someone can buy 6% and force the company to do somewhat that benefits only them to a substantial degree should not happen.

It would be like 6% of the population saying they vote so they should control all the decisions, which doesn’t make a lot of sense. 

By the way, including things not making sense, the the only Starbucks in the entire east half of this metropolitan area is in a Target.  Nothing wrong with that, but it isn’t really he atmosphere i want in a Starbucks.

That’s it for now, Thursday, January 29, 2015.