I’ve been meaning to put together one of those “What’s Out, What’s In” lists. Recently I was speaking at an event and I came up with an abbreviated list of outs and ins that I thought I would share. You know the list I’m talking about? The Washington Post usually puts one in the Style section in the week between Christmas and New Years…probably because all the highly-paid writers are off on holiday, so the hoi polloi stuck in the office get the task of putting one together. Lately the list has served as notice to me that I seem to have lost track of what’s hot and what’s not in the world these days. Here’s a link to this year’s list. I got about 10% of the items. Swedish Death Cleaning? What’s that? I did think the “Plastic Bags Stuck in Trees ⇒ Cardboard Stuck in the Gutters” was pretty funny, given the huge number of Amazon boxes in circulation. You could spend all day clicking on the links to try and understand the humor, but why bother when I’m about to give you a much easier to understand list? Feel free to send me some more and I’ll put them in. Here goes:
LPTA
R&D
Big IT Buys
Servers
Desktop
Single Awards
Last of the Boomers
Office
Multiple Services
Service Medical
Audit Prep
Pokémon
Continuing Resolutions
Fires/Floods/Hurricanes
2016 Presidential Election
Service Dogs
National Security Strategy
Performance Based
Innovation
Agile
Cloud
Mobile
Multiple Awards
Millennials/Xers/iGen
Flex
Shared Services
DHA
Audit
Poke
More Continuing Resolutions
Meteors/Earthquakes/Zombie Apocalypse
2020 Presidential Election (Already?)
National Military Strategy
OK. That’s all I could come up with on short notice, but it’s a fun exercise to think about what seemed to be so critical 365 days ago is all but forgotten now. Every time I do this exercise, I am reminded about the progression on leadership themes I have seen in the Navy since I was a midshipman. Let’s see if anyone remembers: Day-long Sensitivity Training, Management by Objective (MBO), Total Quality Management (TQM), Lean, Six Sigma, Navy Enterprise Model, Accelerated Learning, Business Process Reengineering. I can still see the TQM workshops with the red and white balls in my mind as well as watching videos of Demming droning on. I remember when it was declared that all SES and Flags should be at least a Brown Belt. I’m not quite sure what management fad we are in now, but if you have some ideas, please comment. By the way, I hope this page looks decent. It taxed my knowledge of HTML to get columns into the article…And harder still to get them to stop. By the way, for all you retired Flags and SESers, I will be happy to collect your brown belts and sell them on consignment.