Recent Posts
For the last couple of years I have been doing some work with a great guy named Kevin Behr who wrote The Phoenix Project. He works in the space of IT and continuous improvement and helps organizations get better at what they do. One of the ways they get better fast is to control Work in Progress or WIP, which led me to the concept of “Kanban” (rhymes with bonbon) and I’ve been curious about it for a while now. What’s a Kanban, you might ask… Here’s what Wikipedia has to say: Kanban (かんばん(看板)?) (literally signboard or billboard) is a scheduling system for lean and just-in-time (JIT) production.[2]Kanban is a system to control the logistical chain from a production point of view, and is not an inventory control system. Kanban was developed by Taiichi Ohno, at Toyota, to find a system to improve and maintain a high level of production. Kanban is one method through which JIT is achieved.[3] Kanban became an effective tool in support of running a production system as a whole, and it proved to be an excellent way for promoting improvement. Problem areas were highlighted by reducing the number of Kanban in circulation. That all sounds great for manufacturing, right? But why would I want a personal Kanban? I asked Kevin for a book recommendation to further explore the Kanban concept and he recommended Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life by Jim Benson. It is about using a Kanban system to help organize the complex and disparate tasks we all juggle. That is why last night I woke up in the middle of the night and spent a couple of hours creating my own personal Kanban. This book is almost diabolically simple and yet offers a solution to the management of life’s complexity by “managing work.” This idea of calling the complex lists of tasks in my life “work” helps me think about them in a new way. The book suggests we can only focus on one task at a time, thus we should only be actually working on a small number of tasks at any...
read more
I have always loved the look of eggplant; when else do we get to eat a purple vegetable? Lured in by its shiny skin and intriguing shape, I used to bring an eggplant home from the market, admire it from afar, and eventually throw it away because I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. Then I discovered this recipe, which has become my favorite way to eat eggplant (even though by now I’ve discovered baba ghanouge and other eggplant-based recipes!) This is a delicious accompaniment to grilled chicken or seafood. Ingredients: Extra virgin olive oil 1 medium or 2 small organic eggplants, sliced & quartered 1 clove garlic, minced 1 white onion, chopped 8 organic mushrooms, quartered 2 tbsp high quality balsamic vinegar Preparation time: About 25 minutes Heat the olive oil in a large skillet on medium heat until it is quite hot. Olive oil has a lower “flash point”–or temperature at which it will burn—than some other vegetable oils, so you don’t want it to be too hot for long. Add the eggplant. Let the slices cook well on one side and then stir them so they can cook awhile on the other side. When the eggplant is lightly browned on both sides, add the onion and garlic. Cover and cook for 15 minutes or until the eggplant is soft and fully cooked. Add the vinegar and stir. Add the mushrooms and cover again. Serve when the mushrooms are...
read more
I met a woman on an airplane this morning. We were sitting next to each other on a very long flight from Buffalo to Phoenix. We said hello and talked about general travel thoughts when we got on board, and then we both napped. Toward the end of the flight we started talking. She was from the Ukraine and had been living in Toronto for 25 years. I asked about how it was for her being an immigrant to Canada. She told me Canada saved her life. She told me how much she loves Canada and about her house she sold, moving to Newmarket, Ontario and retiring. And she said that now she is a little bored. We talked about mothers and mothers-in-law and children. She told me about her first marriage and how she had a mother-in-law that was great but a husband who wasn’t so great and that he had since died. And she told me that she had remarried. She shared stories of life in the Ukraine. She told me about being there when Chernobyl happened. She told me about not being able to get information and having to talk to family in Canada to find out what was happening in her own country. She told me about not being able to get food in the Ukraine before she left. She said there just wasn’t any food on the shelves to buy. She said now there is food on the shelves but no one has money to it. She told me about her step-son who raises chickens and grows his own vegetables because he has time but no money to buy food. It gave me a glimpse of a swing back to an agrarian society and how it might happen. It was a new and interesting thought to me. I felt connection from sharing the intimate details of our lives and our hearts. She was kind and passionate about her family. I felt a little pang of disappointment as we...
read more
