Just returned from an eight day trip to Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, for a destination wedding. This was my first all-inclusive resort experience, and it was pretty fun, although I probably wouldn't do it again. It's nice getting food and drinks whenever and wherever you want (plus, they were extremely generous with the alcohol) but I discovered I'm not really a beach person. I enjoyed the pool, horseback riding, and snorkeling (another first for me!) and it was great relaxing amid the coconut trees and sand, but after a few days, I was ready for something else.
Did I mention they were extremely generous with the alcohol?
Overall, it was a good vacation. There were some hiccups with the particular resort we stayed at, but the wedding was beautiful and the setting was lush. Definitely the warmest Thanksgiving of my life!
I've been selected to attend some sort of Management Training next week.
On the one hand, it means my bosses are paying attention to me, because those invited to this training are a small hand-picked group, obviously being groomed for something.
But it's an all day session. About Management. More specifically, about "Managing for Value" which is about as bullshit as corporate training gets.
Of all the courses I took in college, management was the most useless. Not because management as a discipline is useless - on the contrary, good management is necessary and difficult. It's because no classroom can ever imitate real life. No class can prepare you for navigating petty departmental in-fighting, coping with inane employee sensitivities, and surviving the general stupidity of corporate politics and policies. Management in real life is about dealing with people. And the only way to learn how to successfully deal with people, is to truly deal with them, again and again, in all their various fucked-up forms. All those case studies, fancy models, paradigms and methods, fly out the window when you're in an actual room with actual people. At that point, you have to rely on force of will, personality, healthy doses of common sense and luck, and experience.
Suffice to say, I'm not looking forward to losing a whole day of work to this training. Perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised, but I'm not betting on it!
