Restart and reintroduction

I'm returning to this blog for now as I try to embark on somewhat consistent writing.  When I started this blog, most of my writing was art criticism and a little music writing.  Fun, and something I care about a lot, but actually not that connected to the core of what I spend my time thinking about and working on.  For years I've been working with organizations in very close ways on decision-making and basic management structures, especially around resource allocation.  Money yes.  People and politics too.  And the more time I spent with it, the more I understood it tied up with fundamental questions.  Of how people experience and understand the world--phenomenology and epistemology. And of what happens when you mix those together in increasing large groups of people--organization theory. 

I have tried to work on this on my own over the years, intermittently and incompletely.  Finally last year about this time of year I got the idea to revisit the possibility of starting a doctoral program.  I was on staff at Portland State University at the time, which had promising programs and very nice employee tuition benefits.  Thanks to encouragement from Sy Adler, the interim Dean of PSU's College of Urban and Public Affairs and a person of great wisdom and generous counsel, I enrolled in the doctoral program in Public Affairs and Policy.  There are so many reasons to do this.  It simply guides you on the things you need to understand to have a comprehensive view.  It forces you to define objectives and refine them all the time.  It gives you a relationship with faculty who have mastery, and a cohort of people working on ideas that are more or less similar. 

One goal is to push my methods of organizational and resource work much further.  I have large ambitions there, I would claim radicalness for them.  I also want to get a jump start on writing about the material that I work with, where I arguably actually know something and have developed some craft. 

This summer I have a break from classes and am preparing a reading program for myself.  One thing I probably knew, but which was firmly reinforced in classes this year, is that you need a discipline of writing to go along with your reading.  So I'll do that here until I decide there is a better platform for what I'm doing.