Taking off

Im sitting in the lobby of the international terminal at Thurgood Marshall International Airport, or BWI, waiting for the 767 to arrive. This is my first trip to England. Its my first trip internationally, not counting a deployment to Okinawa when I was enlisted in the Marines. Deploying to Japan did teach me a valuable lesson; never drink so much alcohol while on a nine hour layover in Honolulu that you end up hungover in Guam. The airport in Guam is no place for a hangover.

I decided to blog this trip for a couple of reasons, but mainly because I will be away from my family for two weeks. Ill be away from my farm for two weeks. I have undoubtedly left many strings untied at home, and Im sure that there will be many small emergencies with the pig's waterer, or the lamb's hooves or some fox in the henhouse tragedy. My wife, Annette is more than capable, even if she is scared of the pigs. But then who wouldnt be? They are probably close to 225 pounds apiece and they romp like teenagers at a Judas Priest concert. Well, thats probably a bad analogy since most of the people at the Judas Priest concerts these days are older than I am.

Another reason I decided to blog during this trip is to help participants at the conference who are attending for the first time. I wont be able to have in depth conversations with everyone I want to so I will try and put down as much as I can every night so that everyone can see how I am working through my PUDE's and UDE's and D and D' clouds. If you dont understand what Im talking about, just wait. The cloud will begin to evaporate next week.

The Odyssey is a 5 day course on Eli Goldratt's Theory of Constraints. Eli wrote a wonderful book about his theory called "The Goal". I understand that it has become standard fare at most business and engineering schools around the country and world. It really is a fabulous book. The Goal is written as a love story. A fictionalized account of a manager at a manufacturing facility faced with being shut down that just happens to be a love story. Theory of Constraints, or TOC, is an elequent way for solving problems. It requires you to step back and reexamine the way you are operating, either in a factory or in your own life.

Obviously, I dont work in a traditional manufacturing environment, I have a farm, but its really no different. TOC exists as a tool to help people understand that things are not as complex or difficult as they might imagine. It forces you to challenge your assumptions, rethink what you think you know and identify behaviors to change and then how to change them and keep improving. You can never be satisfied that you have achieved all that you can achieve. You must keep improving. Otherwise, as Eli might say, (If I may be so bold as Ive only met him one time) if you dont set goals and spend your life trying to reach them, you might as well give up now because if you dont, you are simply waiting to die.

I heartily agree.

I will be examining my own personal goal over the next 2 weeks and writing about it here. Of course, I will probably be posting photos and stories and other interesting and fun travel experiences. If you can bear with the photos of crazy English toilets and Third Largest Balls of Twine in the Free World posts, I think you may learn something.