December 31, 2007 • 2:49 pm
Having finished at my old position on Friday, I am now laptop less. I am trying to work in the most wired city of the world, through a 320×240 pixel Windows Mobile screen. It is both liberating and frustrating.
Despite playing it out in my head a million times, I was not prepared for the huge sense of loss as Sharine, Kylie & Hunter drove down 39th Street back to DC. I was also unprepared for the sheer number of tourists and people in Times Square … OMG
Sharine felt right at home in the throngs of the city. I felt like a kiwi trying to fly … pointless.
I can already feel the loneliness of thw big city settling around me. I want to share things with people, but this is NYC …
Filed under: NZ vs USA, USA, consulting, marketing, mentoring, mobile
October 30, 2007 • 1:32 pm
Slow Leadership has this great post about a WWII general and his “management technique”. To quote them …
The German World War II general Erich von Manstein is said to have categorized his officers into four types.
The first type, he said, is lazy and stupid. His advice was to leave them alone because they don’t do any harm.
The second type is hard-working and clever. He said that they make great officers because they ensure everything runs smoothly.
The third group is composed of hardworking idiots. Von Manstein said that you must immediately get rid of these, as they force everyone around them to perform pointless tasks.
Filed under: consulting, mentoring , consulting, management, people
One of the things I always try to instill in those I mentor and talk with about work is the power of reading. There is a great post over at The Optimized Life called The Power of Reading. I think my favorite quote is:
In today’s society, lifelong learning is a necessity.
Self-education has become one of the greatest factors of
success. Those who are most successful in today’s world are
those who know how to find the information they need and
apply it to their situation. Today’s ever-expanding technology
requires us to be lifelong learners. Otherwise, our jobs and our
paychecks will both become outdated.
However, today’s most successful people are not necessarily
those who have the highest ACT scores, but rather those
who have learned how to learn. Passion and curiosity always
surpass IQ. This passion is engrained through truly great teachers
who challenge their students to think deeply.
Filed under: currently reading, mentoring, personal improvement
August 23, 2006 • 8:10 am
So last night I had dinner with my friend, mentor, boss, VP, confessor, and executive guide. He is transitioning (polite consulting term for being ushered out) to a new role back in Boston. The order of those qualifiers for him has changed regularly over our more than 2 year history of working together. I was walking from Farragut North Metro to the office this morning (a very nice 7 block walk through the not too humid DC morning) thinking about what I’ve learned a lot from Mike over these 2 years. Here are my highlights:
- To be an effective executive you must focus on the big picture and not sweat the small stuff - I struggle with this one to this day because I feel I do not have a strong command of the business, just the content of what I do (this is probably a fallacy, but it’s how I feel).
- You must give and receive feedback to truly grow – my coach and I had several really intense session of feedback while trying to work out how to work with each other, keeping each other honest is critical to an effective mentoring relationship
- You must take time to think about your peers – not just talk to them, not just netowrk with them, but look for the small iota of value you can offer them without expecting anything in return. Sometimes the things my coach brought to the table appeared small but had a major impact on who I am and how I work
- Here’s an example: after agonizing that I didn’t understand my client position, I couldn’t plan forward without understaing it better, my coach asked me “Why don’t you ask your client directly?”! I was so wrapped up in over analyzing the politics I forgot the number one rule of relationships and sales: ask questions, listen to your clients.
- Think like a CEO – I am busy planning for the next government fiscal year and the strategy for my account (many things are changing). My coach encouraged me to think like the CEO of a company, not a Director in a BU. That way you’lll feel empowered to make big decisions, then ask forgiveness not permission. If you fall into the permission trap you may never get anything done!
- Never forget your family - The things you learn, talk about, teach at work can just as easily apply to your family, don’t fall into the trap of “comfortableness” with either work or your famiy life. You never get a second shot at briging up your kids, or having a happy and harmonious life.
There are many other things my coach told me, I’ll obviously still keep in touch, but distance changes mentoring relationships … I wish him all the best and look forward to braving the road ahead.
Filed under: consulting, mentoring, other people, personal improvement
August 20, 2006 • 8:10 am
… not indigestion! In discussions with my coach/mentor he mentioned that he thought I read incredibly broadly and wondered aloud where I find the time. The answer is simple: I trained myself to read quickly and “shallowly”, and I use public transportation (DC Metro) so I often get about an hour a day to catch up on my reading! The power of not reading too deeply (i.e: not evaluating every argument/hypothesis/conjecture in detail) is that you can scan an entire subject area, then aggregate the best practices from it quickly. Here’s an example:
I am interested in database and there are free database magazines and several database aggregator/RSS web sites that I know of. I subscribe to all of those magazines: Oracle, Teradata, DB2, MYSQL, and add the aggregator sites to my RSS reader (Google homepage). I scan these publications quickly: I don’t care about obscure PL/SQL syntax, but I do care about an article title or neat trick to do with PL/SQL. I can then locate the detail if I need it, or pull out the common themes and best practices across all those technologies.
This allows me to ingest (find, read, process, “index”) information very quickly.
Filed under: consulting, currently reading, deano diagrams, mentoring, personal improvement
