Been awhile since I spoke up…

It’s been awhile since I posted on here… Life has changed, I’ve spent a year in a new company, my personal life has changed too, I think I smile more!

But I also find myself musing on new thoughts and old. Needing an outlet for some of my thoughts on management and leadership. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time thinking about that lately with a few people who I respect a lot. Luckily I get to call them friends.

At any rate we were talking about leadership and companies and power. The topics were pretty broad in fact, and we ranged a bit. But a few concepts came out that we had noticed or heard of and I think they are worth noting down here…

We were discussing power; power can come from education, power can come from charisma, power can come from title, in fact power can come from many areas, but we were focusing on the idea that power from accomplishment is the most desirable. Tom Peters writes about power quite a bit, and I find Seth Godin talks about it too, although less blatantly. Wikipedia has an entry as well. Actually, blogging is a way of developing power quietly.

We were talking about the type of environment that grows up in a company that encourages open blogging. But we didn’t really talk about the bravado that is involved in letting your teams be open, airing the dirty laundry so to speak. Basically, by allowing the company politics into the open, the wind is taken out of the sails of gossip.

There is the genesis for a team underway here. We’ve been thinking about this for awhile and the opportunities abound. But we’re both working on other things right now and will be for awhile, so we’re not jumping into this without plenty of thought.

And culture is everything. You spend a minimum of 8 hours a day working. For most of us, if you include thinking and talking on the phone and email and networking, work is more like 12 hours a day. SO. You had better like the culture. It had better nurture.

Seth’s blog had something interesting the other day. Marketing is making promises. Marketing is making promises. Very simple concept. I’m going to go out on a limb and state something very simple. Success is keeping promises! That gives power through experience.

We also spent some time talking about successful projects. And another thing I read on Tom’s blog comes to mind (that new iPhone has me reading too many blogs!!!). I won’t go into all the detail here, but the point is that successful projects are rarely out in the open, waterfall methodology, big teams. The projects that rock the foundations come from small groups. The boss rarely knows all.

To make a long story not quite so long. I couldn’t agree more wholeheartedly. Trust is a key as well. Take a team that trusts, and you have a team you can trust. The larger the team, the harder that trust is to find.

So where are we now? Small teams. Challenging problems. Open culture. Multifaceted power!

Oh, one more thing. Writing makes things clearer.