My view on writing - First of all it is important to note that one of the great parts of majoring in engineering was I didn't think I would have to write. The education bore out that illusion - I tested out of freshman comp and only took tech writing. Not much later though, reality slammed into me like a runaway freight train. To be a good professional I was going to need to be a good writer and I most certainly was not!

20 years later, through the school of hard knocks I have learned two important lessons about writing. Here they are:

1. To write effectively, you must be passionate about your topic. You have to care about the thing you are trying to communicate. If you don't, your attempt to get the point across will likely fail. After all if you can't show you care, why should your reader care. This isn't always easy to do, but quite necessary.

2. The second lesson came as the result of having written several grants. With a grant you are given an outline of all the things you should cover in the proposal. I always just get started and write everything I think needs to be said to fulfill the requirements. The problem (good thing in disguise) is that the proposals have page limits. For example for NSF, the limit is 15 pages. I typically write 20+ pages. Now the good part is having to go through and eliminate the things that I thought were important originally, but are probably not essential to get the point across. This having to "filter" the message usually improves it greatly!

TBL - To write effectively, write with emotion and after your first draft go back and see what can be taken out to improve the quality of the message by eliminating the deadwood.

Mike took lots of great pictures today, but it is late and I am at a pay by the minute terminal. I also have to get up in 3 1/2 hours for a flight to Italy. Pics will have to wait till tomorrow.

Sunday from Huntingdon England:

Here is an exerpt from the Sticky-Book. For a little background, the authors tell us that for an idea to "stick" it must have the following attributes: Simple, Unexpected, Credible, Concrete, Emotional, and be told in a Story - they make the acronym SUCCESs. Each chapter of the book goes into detail about one of the attributes. Here is an anecdote from the Unexpected chapter.

A high school journalism teacher was trying to teach students how to create the lead paragraph for a school newspaper story. He gave them this information: "Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund 'Pat' Brown.

The teacher let the students go on the assignment. After some time he collected their work. Most students organized the above information into a single sentence. Something like "Governor Brown, Margaret Mead, and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the faculty next Thursday....blah, blah, blah!". He laid the papers aside and said "the lead for the story is 'There will be no school next Thursday.'"

See how effective that is? It would certainly be communication that stuck!

TBL - Go buy this book!

P.S. I have changed the settings for the blog so people can leave anonymous comments without having to log in.

Here are some pictures left over from yesterday. The first two, though are pics that Mike and Barry got today at the Ely Cathedral (built in 1081).

CAPT Barry hanging out with the young Londoners!

Today’s Bottom Line is more on communication. Each of us has a need to effectively communicate. Recently I bought a book about communication. It is called “Made to Stick” (the book cover is posted below). This book demonstrates how important it is to realize that it is not what we say, but how we say it. The book goes into excellent detail on “how” to get your communication to stick. I have had the book for nearly 3 weeks and am only about 2/3 done. It is so powerful that I can only read 3-4 pages at a time otherwise I get info overload. If communication is important in your career, I highly recommend picking up a copy.

TBL: Any book that has duct tape on the cover has got to be made for engineers!

Today was the one day of my life that I have spent in London. Check out the pictures – Mike, Barry, and I walked nearly 12 miles while seeing all of these sights. In order they are: Platform 9 ¾ at Kings Cross, the Tower of London, the Tower Bridge, the monument to the fire of London, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Big Ben, Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, and Piccadilly Circus. I have another big set of today’s pics ready for tomorrow’s blog. Happy Saturday.

Today I would like to make a quick comment about emails. We are in a world of texts and quick computer messages (whether facebook or IM or whatever). This sort of communication is awesome - it keeps us connected in a way I never would have dreamed of when I was in college. The thing about texts is we forego all capitalization and punctuation. Personally, I love it! From a guy who only shaves 4 times a month and never ties his shoes, this is yet another efficiency! However, we all need to be careful to not let this carry over to our professional lives when we are communicating with either our clients, supervisors, or worst of all - people we are trying to convince to hire us.

TBL - keep the punctuation and capitalization when sending important emails.

We ate supper at a Pub in Huntingdon. Below are pictures of the pub (Samuel Peppes) and my boss (looking rather European) in the pub.

Happy Thursday!

Today I am going to switch gears. Our team is at Royal Air Force Base - Molesworth England. We spent the day interviewing different US military people about issues they may have with our processes. During this day we interviewed a person named Lisa. Lisa was a knowledgeable person who gave us a lot of insight. However, she has a professional weakness. She talks too much and has to dominate the conversation. This reflected poorly on her in the group we were with and we could tell it irritated her co-workers. Just to show an example, we all went out to lunch together. After 15 minutes of eating, we were done with our meal and her plate was still full. From a professional standpoint, what this comes down to is self-awareness. We should be consistantly monitoring how we are being perceived by those around us. From this monitoring, we can pick up non-verbal clues and act appropriately.

The BOTTOM Line: Effective communicators are sure to allow communication to happen equally throughout a group.

Beyond the bottom line:

Below are some pics from our first day in England. We ate at a pub and then went to Cambridge University. The pictures you see are of buildings at St. Johns College and the chapel at Kings College. The bridge is called the Mathematical Bridge. It is at Queens College - when originally built hundreds of years ago, it was completely constructed without bolts - an engineering marvel. Cambridge is composed of 33 colleges. It is quite amazing.

The last picture is in a town called Lavenham. Do you remember the line: "there was a crooked man who had a crooked house"? This is the town where the crooked houses were built....500 years ago! And they are crooked as can be. But inside they are beautifully finished. It was a neat place.

Happy 20th Birthday to my Katie!!

Kind of tired tonight. We woke at 4 AM to travel from Germany to England. Got some free time in the afternoon to visit Cambridge University - Quite impressive. Pics aren't downloaded yet, but will hopefully have some tomorrow night.

This entry is still on interviews. Particularly how to end an interview. This is a really crucial point. Up to the end, things are pretty scripted. They ask you a set of questions and you give your replies. This is the same for the other candidates as well. But at the end they put the ball in your court. They ask if you have any questions for them?

This question is the beginning of make or break time.

First there are some don'ts. Don't ever ask about salary, benefits, work week, overtime, any of that stuff. It will put you in a bad light. If you are selected as the successful candidate, you will have plenty of opportunity to ask these questions before you accept.

The next thing you don't want to do is seem desperate. You need to stay positive and energetic. You should have some good questions to ask them. Spend lots of time before the interview planning several options. The reason you need several, is they are likely to have answered some of them during the interview. You want to be able to ask a good question or two otherwise you will look like a putz.

A couple of good options are the one I mentioned yesterday about work environment or perhaps ask about outlook for the company for the next few years.

After asking the couple of questions and getting the answers, you have the opportunity to make a closing statement. I have seen people completely win jobs on this point. If you can be sincere and look the committee members in the eyes and tell them why you want this job and how it will be of a benefit to them, you can score big. Of course the risk is if you don't come across right, you can lose some too. You almost need to read the situation and determine if you think you can make a good impact. If yes, do it. If no, don't risk it.

The Bottom Line: The last five minutes of an interview can be the most important. Spend plenty of advance time planning out your options.

Back to job searches for a little while. We have already talked about the multi-prong approach to finding opportunities. Now let’s go to the next level – interviews. Mentally you need to approach an interview as a two-way street. Not only are they interviewing you, but you are interviewing them.

Too often, we are so excited just to get the opportunity and we are too focused on wanting to impress and get offered the job (anything else seems like failure), that we do not spend enough energy on determining whether this actually a place we would ever want to work!

Well, the next question then is how do you do that? If you ask pointed questions during the group interview like “how many hours per week do people work?” they are going to think you are a slacker. Yet, we really do care to know if they expect us to work 50 hours a week or 80 hours per week.

The key then is to be discreet. Ask these questions matter of factly when you are on a one on one tour. Try and determine whether the people who work there, like to work there? do they like their supervisors? do they work a lot (ie. too much)?

During the interview process you need to impress the hiring committee. Where possible, be discreet and try and determine the work climate. That way if you are offered a position, you have the info you need to make a good decision. If you did not get the info you need to make the decision during your interview, you will need to get that info after an offer is made. You can ask the person who is offering you the job if it would be ok for you to call and talk to some of your future co-workers to ask them about their job and how they like it. (If they say no, there is the answer to your question about whether you want to work there).

The Bottom Line: Just because someone offers you a job, doesn’t mean you want to work their. It is your job to try and figure that out before you accept it.

Tomorrow morning we are off to London where we will work for the next week.

Today’s Bottom Line is about eye contact during communication. Everyone knows that to be successful, you need to be a good communicator. But too often we tend to think that means just the outward delivery of information. Really, though, the inward reception of information is just as important. When someone is talking to you, look them in the eyes and communicate with your body language that you are listening to them and that you care what they are saying. I will be the first to admit, that this is one of my weaknesses and a place I can focus on getting better (nice little reference to yesterday’s TBL J).

The BOTTOM Line: Try this out the next time you are in a conversation. Becoming a good listener is just as valuable (maybe more) than being a good presenter.

The posts and pictures for today are in reverse order. You may want to go to the bottom and work your way up!

The day in Garmisch ended at Alm Hutte where we had a healthy supper. This WAS supper by the way. After this we drove the 3 hours back to Stuttgart where we will go back to work tomorrow morning. Tomorrow evening I will have dinner with Katie Iaizzo in her town of Heilbron.

Next we took a trolley to the top of the Zugspitze. It is 2900 m above sea level. If you look in this direction it is the Alps in Austria. Absolutely amazing views in every direction. Between Mike and I we took nearly 700 photos today.

This is from the top Eckbauer. We took a four hour hike to get to this point. It is at 1238 m above sea level.

This is Partnachklamm gorge (look sideways)!

Today we woke at the military resort in Garmisch called Edelweiss. It is a beautiful resort for US servicemen/women.

These two pictures of Schloss Linderhof. Here is where Ludwig spent most of his time. He was a little goofy as I said yesterday. He started his day with breakfast each day at 5 PM. Then stayed up all night reading before going to bed at daybreak. This castle is built to reflect the court of Louis the 14th and 15th whom he idolized.

These 4 pictures ( 2 above and 2 below - if I have them posted right ) are from Schloss Neuschwanstein - The King Ludwig Castle we visited yesterday.

Happy Sunday!

Todays message is about striving to do your best. Doing our best in anything is a goal - at least it should be. But often times, we leave it at a distance. Something we really don't think about or focus on. "Sure I want to be the best possible college student" - "I'm doing the best I can everyday."

But I have a different piece of advice. Rather than leaving it out there as something you are always trying to do, every once in a while (or more often) focus in on your goal of getting better. To do this grab a pen and paper and write down a list - a list of the things you could do to get better.

Sabbatical has done this for me. I have been teaching for 19 years. Sure I've always wanted to be the best teacher possible. But over the past year I have been asking myself, "what does that mean?" and then writing down what that means to me. As a result I have spent a lot of time searching for the answers and hopefully, when I step foot in the classroom again on May 14th, there will be a positive result.

The BOTTOM Line - to do well in anything, we have to want to do better - to do better, we have to know what that means and then act.

This part of Germany was once known as Bavaria. In the 1860-1880 timeframe the ruler was King Ludwig II. He was a crazy character who spent lots of money. He had 3 castles built for him, before he was declared insane and was "inadvertantly" drowned. Today we visited 2 of the castles. The scenery was incredible as were the castles. Here is one. I can't spell it,but it starts with N. It is the castle that Cinderella's castle was patterened after. I will have better pics and appropriate names tomorrow. It is now half past midnight and we have a full day planned for tomorrow. Good night.