"Keep the trains running" leads to management denial?

My son and I played with with his train set a couple of days ago. We had made "an accident track" - a perilous system of curves and hills where trains regularly fall off.

Now if he only had one or two trains then they would have enough space between them, and no accidents would occur. But he put on lots of trains, and they travelled at different speeds because of variations in battery power, and so we saw accidents. Lots of accidents.

And I found myself saying "Keep the trains running". A phrase that I have heard from numerous CEOs in companies that I have worked at. A phrase which I had always thought of as management padding when a more honest "we have made changes, you will not find them easy, you have not felt the full impact of all these changes yet, so we expect you to keep doing your job despite the change". Or a more cynical "look, just make the changes work and quit moaning, cover up our mistakes".

A quick link for Change - ChangeThis

ChangeThis.com acts as a monthly source for 'new' ideas. I subscribed to their bulletin so every month I get an email reminder detailing the new manifestos that ChangeThis have selected for e-publication.

They also provide an rss feed to keep you up to date with the manifesto publications.

5 Recent Manifestos that caught my eye included:

• The Freak Factor: Discovering Uniqueness by Flaunting Weakness


• The New Time Management: Simply Focus on the Fundamentals, and Toss Away the Tips


• The 10 1/2 Commandments of Visual Thinking: The "Lost Chapter" from The Back of the Napkin


• Marketing Mismatch: When New Won't Work With Old (Riffs on Meatball Sundae)


• Drawings that Will Change Your Life

I make a point of reading these manifestos when they come through. The manifestos usually exhibit a high standard of writing and even if you disagree - the short manifesto format does not tie up your time unduly.

A recommended rss feed or newsletter to sign up for.

Book Review: Connect! A Guide to a New way of Working by Anne TruittZeleneka

Much of this book dishes out information that I already knew and I found myself rushing through it to find things I didn't. And eventually the book did dish out some things I didn't know. I also found that someone else had already implemented some product ideas I had planned to follow up on, so I saved myself some development and research time.

So will you find the book worth spending any time on?

[amazon.com][amazon.co.uk]