Tuesday, October 25, 2005
blog.setBlogCadence(BLOG_INTERMITTENT);
One year ago today, I was presenting my first paper at the TOC ICO World Conference in Miami. It was very well received and I was mobbed with questions after the session. When I finally broke free and turned on my mobile phone it was beeping at me with messages. There were two - one from my wife and one from my brother - my father had passed away several hours earlier (back in Scotland). He had struggled with prostate cancer for 3 years. It hadn’t been detected too early and it had already metastasized before he received much treatment. In the end, he died from a heart attack. His heart weakened from chemotherapy which was intended to buy him another couple of years. He was 78 when he died. On the day, it was a shock. Living as I do in Seattle, a long way from Scotland, I am finding it difficult to find a satisfactory way of paying my respects on the anniversary of his death. His ashes along with those of my mother were scattered on the beach close to our home in Scotland according to their wishes. There is no headstone at which to lay the flowers. So today’s blog entry acts as my mark of respect. I miss you very much Dad!
The Theory of Constraints (and its community) has been good to me. TOC helped me to get a book published and was directly involved in Microsoft’s decision to pursue me for a position. The TOC community has embraced my work, despite the fact that I am an outsider, whom they’d never heard of, and who had never taken any of their training courses. I’m as impressed with these people both individually and collectively for their warm embrace as they appear to be with me - a guy who read the books and “got it.” However, TOC will always be associated with pain in my life. A year before my father’s death, my mother passed on the weekend my book was published. She too from cancer.
Next month, following my success last year, I’m scheduled to give a new paper at the TOC ICO in Barcelona. This time it is a case study of a Drum-Buffer-Rope implementation in one of Microsoft’s IT departments. It shows the power of simplicity from TOC and how it helped to improve productivity by 155% with no new resources, or money or change to either the software development or testing methods. However, I’m not sure whether I’ll be attending. I may yet have to delegate it to someone else. For once again, for the third year running, I find our family fighting against a life threatening illness - this time much closer to home. As a result of this, I’ve put most of my life on hold. In fact it is as if real life came to a stop one Thursday in October and our family entered an alternative reality. I need to be focused on being a dad and helping out at home in between doing my day job. As a result, I’ve cancelled all my travel and all my speaking engagements through until February. All the organizers of the various events have been informed. Where possible I’ve recommended an alternative speaker. I hope to reschedule some other events for next year when hopefully things will be looking better. This time detection was early enough and Seattle’s health care facilities coupled to the Microsoft health care plan should bring us a positive result. Such things in life are sent to test us. I’m sure all the Andersons will be stronger for it when we come through on the other side.
Expect blogging to be intermittent this autumn.