The CIP Man

I used to work for a high street bank, in their management services centre in the city. I worked there for fourteen years, and in that time I found a lot of changes.
The major change I saw was in the reporting/bonus system. When I started, the people who worked the hardest/smartest got rewarded appropriately. However this all changed.
One day the bank bought in a system called "CIP" - the Continuous Improvement Program. And this CIP idea was for members of staff to come up with ideas as to how to improve their work and the work for customers. If you had an idea, you wrote the idea on a CIP form, and posted it in a little CIP box. And then the CIP man would open the CIP box, and read all the CIP's. The CIP man would then evaluate all the CIP's, to see if any CIP's could be implemented. (The role of CIP man was highly sought after - the excitement of opening the CIP box was just too exciting for words....)

However, at the end of the day - IT WAS A LOAD OF BOLLOCKS.
THE BIGGEST LOAD OF BOLLOCKS I'VE EVER SEEN.

Before "CIP's" came in, if someone had an idea to improve something, they improved it - not rocket science.

So come the end of the year - it was report time. I'd had a decent year, pretty good results that stacked up well against my peers. But this year I was just one of the pack - and my report/bonus was pretty average.
When I questioned this, it was because of my lack of involvement in the CIP program. I'd only submitted one CIP idea, which wasn't implemented (it was something they implemented three years later after I had left).
I then found out that one of the guys I work with had a bigger bonus than myself, despite doing 30% less work than I had over the calendar year.
Why did he receive this bigger bonus?
Because he had a CIP idea implemented.
His CIP idea?
To laminate a training worksheet (3 sheets of paper)
Maybe I should have played the game - but I only like playing a game if it actually means something...

Which leads me to poker. I have been doing my own CIP.
I've realised that my cash game still needs a lot of work, and 12-tabling micro-stakes, though OK (not great by any means though) is not going to gain me anything in the long run.
So I've been doing a lot of reading, posting on forums and cut down to just 2 tables - so I can really understand and learn whilst I'm playing.
My post flop play still needs work - so I now have much more understanding of concepts like "way ahead/way behind" situations and "absolute position/relative position" - and these have given me a much broader game, and a lot more understanding of why position is so important (I'll admit to knowing that position is important, acting last etc, but not understanding completely why - a situation a lot of players would probably be in).
The last couple of days since I went down to two tables has been pretty outstanding for me. My win-rate is at it's highest it's ever been, though only over a small sample - so I'm not putting any real stock into that - but there are many more situations where I feel completely confident in my play, and a lot fewer moments where I feel unsure of my next action.
It's these times, when you learn something new, that are the most exciting - and for the first time I feel that I could make a decent cash player, as opposed to hoping that I could make a decent cash player.