HOW DO YOU ACT? by THOMAS L. GERBER As a manager of a computer installation, what do your actions say to your subordinates? A manager can know what good management is all about, but might not put this knowledge into practice. Actions can contradict both beliefs and statements. Do you act as though: i. Bad operating practices will go away if ignored? 2. Your operators will always hold the same job? 3. People cannot learn a better way of carrying out a task? 4. Good housekeeping has no relationship to efficiency? 5. You don't really believe in standards? 6. Appointment to a new position means that a person can handle the work without some guidance and training? 7. Only you can do the work correctly--even after you assign it to others? Think of how else you talk a better game than you play. practicing what you really believe in! Then try VICIOUS CIRCLES by Richard Atkins and Douglas Becker Picture, if you will, a husband and wife bedding down in the evening with a dual control electric blanket. Each one is able to control the heat individually without affecting the other. As it turns out this particular evening, the electric blanket was on upside down. Everything would have been fine if they both liked the same temperature, but the husband liked it cool and the wife liked it a bit warm. No problem. The wife turns up the heat a bit. His side gets warmer. Too warm, he thinks. He turns his control down. She is too cool, so she turns her control up. This process continues until he his burning and she is freezing. Fortunately, it does not take them very long to figure out the problem and find the solution. The greatest force in the world is inertia. Newton's Law points out to us that an object at rest tends to remain at rest until influenced by an outside force, and an object in motion tends to remain in motion until it is influenced by an outside force. This applies as well to the human realm as to the physical. There are so many examples of human inertia we could fill libraries with them. Consider the case of a job that was created by the British in the early Nineteenth Century: A sentry was posted on the English Channel to watch for the coming of Napoleon's army from France, and to warn his countrymen of impending attack. It took over a century, but the position was finally eliminated in 1945! We have all heard of incompetent civil servants who could not be eliminated and those with tenure who could not be fired. Inertia by itself is a neutral force. Depending upon the situation, inertia could be considered either good or bad. Each of us would llke to keep those things that we consider "good" and put a stop to those things we consider "bad." Some of us wish the weekend would never end, while others are ready to go back to work. Genuinely. We like to stay healthy. We don't llke to be sick. A government study was conducted for hundreds of thousands of dollars to determine what makes people happy. It was discovered that generally speaking rich people are happier than poor people, young people are happier than old -2-

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