Spherical Cow Consulting

Translating geek to human

Business travel - a photo of a man with his feet up on his luggage, looking away from the camera at an airplane taking off.

Surviving Business Travel

“With age, comes wisdom. With travel, comes understanding.” Sandra Lake  With business travel comes the understanding of so many things: Over the last seven and a half years, I’ve traveled over 800,000 miles. I personally know some people (but not many) who have traveled even more than that. And if I’ve learned nothing else, I’ve
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Human networking - a photo looking straight down at three people working on a single laptop.

Human Networking

“If our hopes of building a better and safer world are to become more than wishful thinking, we will need the engagement of volunteers more than ever.” Kofi Annan When I try to explain to friends and relatives who ask, given my travel schedule and the strange interactions I have with technology and people, what
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The Meaning Behind Meeting Minutes

This post is an expansion on something I mentioned a few months ago in my post, “Herding Cats“: If it isn’t written down somewhere that stakeholders can get to it, it didn’t happen. Even if it is written down, if it’s not well indexed, it still didn’t happen. I’m going to start by assuming that
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Small set of balance scales to help you weigh your time management decisions

Making Decisions

It’s impossible to ignore the pain the world is in right now. When I originally wrote this blog post on mindful decision making back in 2019, I was thinking about my usual, day-to-day considerations. And while it still applies to those considerations, I realized that it also applies to bigger social issues. Whatever actions you
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Photo of four cats on a counter, the ultimate in project management

Project Management and the Art of Herding Cats

“Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up.” Oliver Wendell Holmes My experience of working with globally distributed, multistakeholder, volunteer communities as something of a project manager has taught me a few things. Project Management: tl;dr The short, short version: Collaboration in More Detail The somewhat longer
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