Business Skills, Personal Skills

Quite a bit of business advice is about networking (something I personally suck at. I get the importance, intellectually. I've even gone to networking events to try to build contacts and stuff but... Idk. You're supposed to regularly reach out with info of interest, so when you reach out for something important - like a reference, or job - it's just one part of the relationship and not like you only contact someone when you need something. I just... Don't. I don't think I'd ever want to be known as the person who always knows where the part is, for similar reasons. It feels like work, it feels forced... And I'm getting off track here. Back to the point.)

Networking matters. What I find kind of interesting is that those are the exact same skills needed to build relationships. And yet we still have a lot of gender based expectations for that. Men often rely on their wife or girlfriend to stay in touch with their family. To call brothers or sisters or nieces or nephews (and in some cases even their own parents). If you can network yourself into a good career, you also ought to be able to build and maintain a strong relationship with your spouse and children.

That we act as though these things are separate says something.

I was actually thinking about that for another reason though. I'm business we have this thing about the '5 why's'. About asking 'why' repeatedly in order to get at the root cause of a problem. It doesn't have to be exactly 5,of course. The point is that it can help you find long term solutions.

For example. We had made a configuration change, per request. A few weeks later that change was reverted. We'd updated some urls and now they were set to the old ones. Fixing it wasn't hard, but why did the old urls come back?

We, like many companies dealing with IT, have version control for our code. Wasn't hard to dig into the history and see that the code changed when someone on our sister team synced it with another repository. 

I don't want to bore anyone with the details of how and why those repos needed synced, and what we did to make sure that our changes weren't reverted again. I just wanted to illustrate some why and how you can dig deeper into a problem. 

And to point out that this, again, is the exact same skillset that can be used in other areas. 

For example, our race issues in the US. 

I've never actually been taught about critical race theory. Like almost any idea that influences enough people, I'm sure there's at least a grain of truth that makes it useful. And there are also some people who will take it to the extreme. (there's always somebody. Like... The map is not the territory, and most ideas are useful for creating 'maps' that are useful for one reason or another, but inevitably people start acting as though they're all more than just overly simplified tools used for specific purposes).

Anyways. I might be wrong, but the term itself implies thinking critically about race. Asking those '5 why's'. Like 'black people are disproportionately poor. Why is that?'

Fewer of them own homes. Why?

And as you dig into that, you can soon see how people who were freed with nothing. Who then only had access to jobs that paid a pittance. Who were unable to take out mortgages for their homes... There's an entire slew of reasons that it was very difficult for them to build up generational wealth, and to have the resources for things like college or starting a business.

That doesn't say anything about what we should do once we've dug into the root causes ofc. But it's awfully telling that so many people resist doing the RCA (root cause analysis).

I can't speak for minorities, but I personally don't care about making people feel guilty, or bad. That honestly just gets in the way of fixing things.

But we can't fix things if we refuse to do that analysis.