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Searching Chronicles

It’s easy to overlook, but at the top right hand corner there is a search box that allows this blog to be searched using any chosen word.

A visitor to the site who is interested in a certain topic can just enter it in the box, hit return and up comes every article in which the word appears.

Perhaps there is a way to place it in the right column? If anyone knows, do let me know.

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Books I am Reading Now — August

Yet another quick update on the books that have recently attracted my attention:

Reading List (paper)

  • Words to Our Now by Thomas Glave
  • Weinberg on Writing by Gerald Weinberg
  • Presence by Senge, Schwarmer, Jaworski, Flowers
  • The McKinsey Mind by Ethan Rasiel and Paul Friga
  • A Course in Miracles (text)
  • Triathlon Swimming Made Easy by Terry Laughlin
  • Culture Matters by Lawrence Harrison and Samuel Huntington
  • Return on Customer by Don Peppers and Martha Roges
  • The Right Move by Delano Franklyn
  • The Answer to How is Yes by Peter Block


Listening List (audible.com mp3’s on Creative MuVo Slim)
— Lctures by Marianne Williamson
— The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith
— I Need Your Love, Is That True? — Byron Katie
— Fast Company Magazine Monthly Summary
— The Right Use of Power — Peter Block

eBook list (Palm Tungsten eReader or PC)
— InfoGuru marketing by Robert Middleton
— Create Your Own Information Products by Alice Seba

I have my usual list of magazines: Time, Runners World, Bicycling, Tritahlete, plus the occasional others. And of course, there is my daily reading list of : Jamaica Observer, Jamaica Gleaner, Trinidad Guardian, Trinidad Express, New York Times, Sun-Sentinel — and now and then I read the Barbados Advocate.

I am also using Google and Yahoo Alerts to tell me when there is any mention of Human Resources and various Caribbean countries. I also look to see where my firm’s name has been mentioned, of late using a Google alert.

I think I must be crazy to try to read this much…! But, it is fun.

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Who You Are


Blogging seems to have some similarity to me to writing a newspaper column, with one exception: I have real difficulty imagining who you are.

Obviously, the reason I blog rather than just write in a private diary is that I am writing for You, Dear Reader. All I know with absolute assurance at this moment is that you are reading this blog.

Are you a programmer living in New York City, taking a break from crafting some subroutine at 7pm? Are you a newspaper columnist from the Gleaner looking for ideas? Or a cousin of my wife who is trying to catch up with our lives? Or a Trini looking to move to Kingston from Woodbrook in the next month for business? Or a crook looking to see if I slip up at some point and mention my social security number? Or are you some lonely soul who lives in the apartment next door to me who saw me running the other day and has been stalking me ever since (I hope not, because I’m on to you if you exist! )

I suppose that You, Dear Reader, read blogs the way I read them, which is just for the odd moment when something goes click and a connection is made that leaps from my world into Yours. Those odd moments are well worth waiting for, and reading for, and the beauty of blogging is that the jump can happen quickly… without waiting for the book to come out.

And while I’ve met only a few blog readers in person, I imagine that You and I would click if we were to meet in person.

Unless you are a crook or stalker, that is.

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Today is my wedding day

Today is My Wedding Day

I’m back in my room at the Runaway Bay Heart Hotel in Runaway Bay, Jamaica. My new wife is sleeping off four months of hard work that culminated today in a wedding that was simply one of the highlights of my life, and the best wedding I’ve ever been to!

I could go and on about the things that went well, and how easy it seemed to go. Sure, there were a lot of people who worked very hard to make the event a success, but that is true for every wedding that I’ve been to. We had nothing too spectacular in terms of entertainment, food, music, dress or any of the other things that go together to make up a good wedding.

I clearly had something to do with the people that were there.

In the past, I would say that the people that came just happened to “click.” We got lucky to have the right combination in the same place at the same time. But this time, I know that that’s not true.

In this case, my wife and I created something that was different for us – an explicitly, worded “Outcome.”

Now this is probably not news to anyone reading this – after all, aphorisms like Covey’s “Begin with the End in Mind” have been repeated forever, and he certainly was not the first to give voice to that piece of wisdom. I have given this advice to many, in fact, in coaching situations.

Yet, I learned a lot from doing it myself, with my then fiancée. This Outcome struck such a chord, and felt so important that it seemed as if it were worthy of …. not protection per se….. but something like caring nurturing.

Once the Outcome was designed and we started acting on it we found that it was much easier to take some of the following actions, which were essential to having the day turn out the way it did. (At the same time, we used a word that comes from some things I learned about right-brained thinking – “space.”)

To create the space we wanted we ended up:

Deciding on who to invite based solely on the Outcome (which lead to the wedding being very small in numbers)

  1. Finding vows that fit the Outcome
  2. Creating a practice of reading the Outcome together periodically
  3. Sharing the wording of the Outcome with a few trusted advisors and friends
  4. Choosing music, the musician, the hotel, the setting of the wedding, the dress, the minister…. All of it.

This helped us to keep things focused on what we wanted, when there were many competing points of view from friends, family, traditions, cultural norms, personal whims and fancies at the moment…. It required discipline to keep this particular infant (our Outcome) alive, when things were going crazy!

And, it all turned out beautifully – to be immodest! We heard the words of our Outcome used by our guests to describe what they felt about the day, without our giving it to them, which confirmed for us that we had done what we had set out to do.

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Getting married

Today is exactly 7 days from when I get married here in Jamaica, to a wonderful woman I met in Florida. The great thing is that I met her on match.com, which turned out to be the best system I discovered for meeting women, getting in communication with them, and then deciding to meet them based on the interaction.

It’s a great example of a shared community — one that does not have completely open, and public communication, but instead has many, many shared communications.

(If you’re someone looking to meet a significant other, then… yes, I strongly recommend the service.)

But the point of mentioning it is to highlight the power of an invented, online community. If the product of match.com is dates, long-term relationships and marriages, then it’s doing a great job at providing exactly what is promises from my point of view.

This is actually a more measurable outcome than other sites that are only about sharing ideas, some of which are useful, and the majority of which are not. Does this make match.com more relevant or important?

I’m not sure… but I do know that I’m getting married next week, and it’s due to match.com, and it would not be happening otherwise.

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Looking forward to Carnival

I’m not sure what this has to do with the stated and lofty purpose of my blog, but I’m looking forward to this weekend which is the official start of Carnival in Jamaica.

There is Beach Jouvert on Saturday, and also Chukka Cove on Sunday, so hopefully I can get tickets to both and some kind of lime to be there with — we shall see.

I’ve never been to any of the main events for Jamaica Carnival, and the few I’ve been to have been lame (compared to Trinidad) and not much better than Miami.