Author: Skipp Symes

I am currently listening to the book- Naked Money by Charles Wheelen. Before I started listening to this book, I would have said that we should go back to the gold standard for monetary policy but since listening to this book, I have changed my mind.

I had an uninformed view of the gold standard. I thought is was good to have a reserve of something to back-up every dollar but I didn’t think about several things.

1. The gold standard pegged the dollar to the value of gold but inflation and deflation still happened when the price of gold went up or down. Economies where vulnerable to up or down swings in gold regardless of what their economy was based on.
2. Who ever has the most gold wins and the finding of new gold would swing economic realities. Finding new gold would bring down the value of current gold. Countries with limited natural resources would struggle to make money regardless of fiscally responsible and knowledgeable they were.
3. There are more economies in the world now but the amount of gold is finite. In the book it refers to a poker game where their are 50 chips which is fine for a single table but the amount of tables playing poker is multiplying but there are still only 50 chips for everyone.

These are the main points that have swung my preferences away from a Gold Standard but the book makes several more. I definitely recommend reading this book.

Last week I went for training in Colombo, Sri Lanka to be become a CSPO. The training was really good. I now need to figure out how to incorporate it into our practices at work.

The class was a little too IT focussed for my liking but in the end, it was really good. The instructor, Pete Deemer, was excellent and I would highly recommend taking a course with him. He made our class of 30 students seem more intimate than a class of 15 students. He was also very knowledgeable and did a good job of keeping participants engaged.

I am going Agile with my project management skills. I just finished a taking the Certified ScrumMaster training and the accompanying test and I am now a Certified ScrumMaster.

Interesting methodology which works but needs a really good Product Owner which so few organizations have.

I have been studying 2+ hours a day for the last few weeks and all that work paid off. I wrote the PMP today and passed. I am now a Project Management Professional.

I finally submitted the application to write the PMP. I got confirmation 5 days later that my application had been accepted. Now it’s time to hit the books and attain the PMP certification .

In the book, Good to Great, Jim Collins talks about how successful companies have to right person driving the bus and the right passengers in the right seats on the bus. When I first heard this, I thought how cute but now I know it to be true. I love this book but this is the quote that I keep going back to again and again.

This is especially real to me as I was a school bus driver in my twenties.

If you have the right driver but the bus is filled with bratty kids who run up and down the aisles and throw things at the bus driver than the bus driver could still crash because their attention is on the fire in the back of the bus and not on the road. Even if their attention is off the road for 3 seconds it would be enough to crash.

If you have a bus filled with the right passengers who make sure that everything is going well and when problems arise they can deal with them. Such as a sick kid or the bus going -off course or even changing course if it needs to because it’s original destination is wrong or there is a detour ahead.

See Jim Collins explain it better below.

I see how this plays out at work. You can have a great team who are good passengers but some of your team members are in the wrong seats and others are passengers who are on the wrong bus.  They need to change buses. You also have the right passengers in the right seats. Also, the driver needs be able to drive the bus. Dispatch needs to let the driver drive the bus. They provide insight but in the end the driver should be in control of the bus not the dispatcher who doesn’t know the road ahead.

I recently started enjoying basic economics. I think it is because of the recent price of oil and all problems and opportunities that it has created. So far, I have listened/ read two book on the subject and I am currently making my way through the third.

The books are:

1. Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan
2. What you need to know about Economics by George Buckley & Summet Desai
3. Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell (currently listening to)

All are good books so far but I feel that Sowell’s writing has a little more opinion thrown in then the other books.

In my pursuit- I also found this great little cartoons on Economics