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Yet another friend thinking about greener grass

I have been thinking of greener grass on and off over the last few months, but I have a friend who works in a services company and she has been thinking a lot about the other side of the fence.

Let me be a bit clearer. She provides services by the hour. And she always wonders what it is like to be on the other side. To work inside for a company. And she gets offers. And sometimes the pay is better.

Today, she called and asked my advice on a real, honest to goodness offer. So I asked why she was interested and the number one reason was the opportunity for advancement. OK, let’s pause and think this one through:

1) She is currently a high level service provider with minor management responsibilities in a service company. She is a Subject Matter Expert who is encouraged to mentor the rest of the team.

2) The company is growing and is in the early stages of that growth.

3) If she takes the new job, she will be the only expert in the subject at the new company which is also experiencing growth.

So if the opportunity for advancement is the goal, which company is the place to be?

As companies grow, who moves up? The experts in the core business. It isn’t the experts among the support staff that run a company. You are a distributor of plumbing products and you need a new operations or marketing manager? Who do you tap? The IT manager? Hmmm. On the other hand, you are a growing IT services company? Who do you tap to be Customer Service Manger, or QA Manager? An accountant? A Lawyer? Or how about your best service provider?

Is there a moral to this story? Well, that remains to be seen, but having a deep understanding of your core operational model is a key to advancement, or rather should be!

Posted in Business.

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By Anonymous – January 22, 2008

Finding talent…

The members of a good team, the search for greatness…

This is something that I spend a lot of time thinking about. How do you know from a resume if this person has what it takes to join your team? As “Daniel” admits, this isn’t fool-proof, and you shouldn’t be looking for 100% coverage here, but he makes a lot of good points.

So too do the people who are commenting. And there is definitely a contingent of people who DON’T like this list. In fact, I even read a comment by someone arguing AGAINST passion. I’ve worked with those people though. And I’ve worked on those teams.

Uhhhhh… Yeah… Not for very long. These are the same teams who spend a year on a release and have 6 months into their spec. Imagination is key to problem solving, but some people don’t believe in problems. TRULY. And in many cases I agree with them. When you are writing an application to handle welfare checks, or water bills for a major city, OK. In that case I want a complete spec. I want waterfall methodology. I want big iron. I WANT BORING.

BUT, when I’m trying to build something NEW! Now I want everyone who left that other team. Oh, yeah, don’t forget that the other team needs at least one guy from this team to help with security. I’m not kidding about that.

I’m also not kidding when I say that I’m not the guy to go to when it is a billing application running on SAP. I’m the guy to go to when you need to take your cool idea and transform it into a viral web application. And I want a bunch of bright, twisted, articulate, interesting, misfits. Now that is a group that I can build into a team!

Posted in Business, Passion, Team.

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By Anonymous – January 11, 2008

How much of Sales is JUST DOING IT?

You can talk about it all day, but how much of sales is just getting up and doing it? You can spend all the time in the world designing a great product and great information about it, but it isn’t going to sell until you actually get up and sell it.

This summer we were launching a new product (a service actually) and we were talking about sales a lot. We even had two people “doing sales”, but not a lot was really cooking, so to speak. I wanted to know what was really in the pipeline, so I asked.

I got out the famous dry erase pen, cleared an area on the board and called them in. Who are the prospects? Really, who are they? We listed them. I sorted them by probability. We added prospect value. And then we got serious.

They were in black and white. Or rather blue, green and white. Having them there made more of a difference than I expected. I’m not typically in charge of sales in an organization, but I can say that I consider every single person in a company to be in sales. And in the future, I will make sure that the prospect list is prominent. This is especially important as we are considering both a distributed company AND sales driven by the owners. A slice of every day will be spent on sales, and this list will be maintained.

In a previous life (or so it seems now) I was running IT for a eVineyard (wine.com) and we had been told by our CEO (he had promised a prospective investor) that we would meet a daily revenue goal by a certain day. The thing is that no one was paying attention to how we were going to get there. We had built some tools to track sales in real time, we had even devised a simple system to guestimate likely sales for a day based upon sales to that point, but NO ONE was tracking sales vs that target revenue goal.

I was running IT and I was very young. Very young! I had hired a friend, Greg Zuro, slightly older, more experienced and much smarter. He called a meeting (keep in mind, we were IT, not marketing, sales or even ops) and he asked how we were going to hit the target.

Well there were a lot of long silences, and no real answers. We reconvened the next day and we brainstormed, we came up with some great ideas for promotions. A few days of development and we had one or two of them in place. They weren’t all great, and they definitely weren’t perfect on day one. We were learning on the job, along with the rest of the industry. Most importantly, we met daily as a team and we hit that target.

I’d love to say that we all made millions. Or at least I wish a few of us had made millions. The truth is though that it was just one of the many lessons I learned at eVineyard/wine.com. I also learned that once you accept huge investors, they want huge returns, but THAT is another story altogether.

Today’s thought though, is simple. Track your pipeline. Meet often. Don’t be stubborn at the wrong time. If something works tweak it, if something doesn’t change it!

Posted in Uncategorized.

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By Anonymous – January 11, 2008

Professional Services? Business Consulting? Venture Capitalist?

So, as I mentioned, we’ve been thinking about a company… And we’ve been thinking about culture (open for sure) and sources of power… Basically, we’re thinking about a business.

BUT

But we don’t want to be like so and so. Well, I’ve heard that about a hundred times, and I’ve even walked away from groups starting up because of it.

BUT

But we really mean it. We want to be different. What’s that you say, you’ve heard that before too? Well damn it, we DO mean it. And so did the others. And in the end, we’ll all be about the same, I’m sure.

BUT

But we are going to ignore that whole thing and be excited and talk about being different anyway…

So, business consultants, specializing in online product facilitation. We have partners and alliance members who are Venture Capitalists, Development Companies, Hosting Providers and Support Specialists, but we are the experts who you can call to get your product or service back on track.

We will be your one stop shop. We will help you design the project, build it, finance it, host it, support it and in return, we will want a piece of the pie. Phone systems, monitoring, tech support, software frameworks, hosting environments, if you don’t have them, we can provide them. In return for part of the risk though, we ask for part of the pie.

Tom Peters (yes, I keep coming back to him) has a post, Create the Perfect Storm PSF on a company Schlumberger that acts as a hired gun professional services firm in the Old & Gas industry. Basically, they work on fixed fees, and in a growing number of cases, a percentage basis to provide soup to nuts services in their industry.

Tom’s posts in always hit fairly close to home, but right now, this is exactly what we are planning. We want our clients to be in the midst of a perfect storm opportunity. We want them to be facing obstacles which will force them to be thinking creatively. We want to unabashedly bring our resources to bear. We want to leverage the last 20 years of experience and contacts. We want to leverage our network.

Yep. Tom is someone who writes something almost every day that makes me go, “Exactly!”

Posted in Uncategorized.

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By Anonymous – January 8, 2008

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.

Posted in Business, Contemplative.

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By Anonymous – January 6, 2008

Religious write, or wrong?

I’ve been going through a job change lately, and it has given me a chance to listen to NPR during the day… So here I am, driving home from the gym today listening to an interview with a few christian ministers (yes it isn’t capitalized AND I specify, as there are LOTS of ministers that aren’t christian).

The topic today seems to be revolving around the idea that we (thinking humans) must accept the religious right because they freed the slaves! THEY WHAT??? In fact, their argument seems to be that they forced the idea of abolitionism onto the slaveholders and therefore, it is OK to force their ideas upon us… Where do I start. I really shouldn’t drive and listen to the radio. Even stations that I like and agree with…

1) The concept of slavery itself involves forcing others (in this case of a different skin color) to do and think as you want them to; in effect giving up all rights, including that of life.

2) Religious leaders of the day landed squarely on BOTH sides of the argument.

3) What they were doing at the time, at least the way I see it, was to force slaveholders to accept other’s viewpoints and let their slaves begin to excercise their freedom (I say begin, because in many ways it wasn’t until the 60’s that freed slaves in the South began to get ahead).

4) Who claims (and can back up that claim) that the religious right of today is even remotely connected to the abolitionists of pre-civil war usa.

This argument is ridiculous. It is like saying that christians are good and muslims are bad. There are good christians. I even know some. If a particular good person is a christian, it tells you nothing about christians, except that one of them is good. The reverse is also true. If a bad person is a christian, that tells you nothing about christians, except that one of them is bad. Other christians may claim that the bad person isn’t a real christian, but that is really up to the christian to decide. (Are mormons really christians? I’m sure the pope feels differently about that than your local LDS leadership team.)

Why are people so keen to relinquish their responsibility to think before acting. I have some good friends (a couple) who are so anti-abortion that they are happy to let thousands die in Iraq (basically they agree with this sentence) as long as they are voting against abortion. Neither of them are at all worried about the growing polarization of society (worldwide in my opinion), as long as they are voting against abortion. She freely admits that she isn’t a fan of democracy, but favors a benevolent dictatorship. She does give me the point that we haven’t found a benevolent dictator yet though. It is all she can do to get through the hectic day that we’ve thrown in front of her, and she is so disaffected with the current society that she really could care less if the country ended. Abortion is the only issue that she really cares about. (Once again, basically her words.)

On the complete other end of the spectrum, enter my mother. Harvard educated. Retired. VERY liberal. And so disaffected that I’m not even sure she votes on national election day. (Well, actually she did vote for Nader I believe, but that is another story unto itself) Her conclusion is that society as we know it is basically coming to an end. She therefore has spent the last 8 years studying plants; medicinal herbs specifically. It is her belief that this is her best way of fitting in to the world that is coming, and coming fast.

In the middle, is another friend, once again well educated (masters) and well read. He has spent the last 10 years writing a post-apocalyptic novel about surviving after society crumbles. This is a book which is based upon his feelings about our direction and where it will lead us.

I guess what I’m saying is that listening to people arguing (with a straight face) that the religious right should be allowed to control my life because they earlier freed the slaves, makes me want to focus my energies on what happens when the postman arrives (welcome Kevin Costner). This was a movie that bombed at the box office in the 90’s but maybe more because it is a future that we can easily get to, but don’t want to.

I have no problem with people being religious or even following a religious leader. BUT. Morality comes from within. You can’t be a moral being by following. Morality is about leading for yourself. It is about truly thinking issues through. It is about lots of gray areas. It is about taking ideas all the way to their logical conclusions, BEFORE jumping in.

Enough of a rant? I hope so!

Posted in Personal, Politics, Rant.

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By Anonymous – October 3, 2006

Easter, spring, 41 degrees!!! :)

On this Easter, the sun has even shown… But spring doesn’t feel around the corner. That must mean it is though. Isn’t that how the world works?

I have to admit to a great winter. While I had a good job, I now enjoy an even more challenging and rewarding one. I’ve always had lots of good friends but now I seem to have even more. Maybe even one in particular, but really, who is counting?

While the body is definitely aging, isn’t it amazing how we get to watch our kids grow and blosom? At 2 and a half, or as she says, “two-half”, my daughter continually amazes me. Her ability to roll with things, to gather information like a sponge, to smile, to offer a hug, to DEMAND a park. And really… What is it about a swing? 45 minutes? Tisn’t mine to understand I guess.

Somehow I’ve been thinking about teams a lot lately. Obviously this has something to do with helping to craft and mold one. Inheriting a strong team is such a gift, but tuning isn’t always as easy as it looks. I miss the team at home though. Its been a few years now, since the team split up. And more still since it fired with any accuracy, but building a great team at the office has made me miss the one I had at home even more.

And in the end, isn’t that what family is? The team at home…

Posted in Contemplative, Personal.

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By Anonymous – April 16, 2006

Transitions… Life, puppies, kids, life…

So, as I move from one job to another… I ponder. As the last puppy leaves, as life moves on, one day breaking into another, as I meet new friends…

I find myself pondering.

I find myself looking back as I move forward, looking into my past to guess my future. Have I learned, am I learning? Will tomorrow look like yesterday?

I love the idea that people read this, that someone might stumble upon it. That
by some stroke of coincidence, of luck, that someone in my future might read this in their past. That I might stumble upon someone’s writings in the past of my future and that I might be changed.

In truth, very few people read this. And I write rarely. Therefore, the odds are low, but that is the thing about fate. It strikes when we aren’t looking, when life steers to the right and we turn left instead. And so, maybe…

But one thing I do know. My daughter, maybe my kids, will see this someday, and maybe find herself there. At least she will see herself through my eyes. See my thoughts as I wrote them. I don’t know that I write anything of importance, but in truth, it is only when read next to the calendar in my head that I see my true thoughts. It is like a code, what I wrote and what I remember. Together, they help to clarify what was.

B

Posted in Contemplative, Family, Personal.

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By Anonymous – January 29, 2006

On this rainy night…

So, in the tradition of a wet and rainy winter evening, it is a chance to reflect on work, and life and 7 cranky barking puppies…

I’ve been interviewing for several weeks with a local company. We have come to a verbal agreement and it looks like I’ll be changing my work address. When your dream job knocks on the door and asks if you are interested, what do you do? Well, duh! You ask when the start date is.

This new position will leave me the manager. If there are leadership issues, they will be mine. Mine I tell you. LOL. I am goin back to the client side of the fence. I will bein charge of the IT Department, reporting to the CFO for the time being and combining a team in Washington with a team in Oregon to build a single team. I’m sure that challenges will abound, but what can I say. I can’t wait for the challenge.

It is very hard to not be thinking about those challenges. I still have challenges in my old job. At least for a few more weeks. There is a transition to be undertaken. There are projects to be wound up. There are details to be handled. But generally, those are all things that serve to distract me from spending all of my time thinking about the upcoming job!!!

Oh, yeah. Isn’t she cute?

B

Posted in Contemplative, Family, Personal.

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By Anonymous – January 16, 2006

Wow. Chirstmas is here!

So, in the midst of this thing that we call Chirstmas, driving the 3.5 miles from the office to home, it occurs to me. Well actually, it takes FOURTY-FIVE minutes this time of year. It occurs to me that I have what I want for Christmas this year. Things are a bit tight this year. Which turns out to be just fine.

I have exactly what I want. And it isn’t going to cost me a dime to buy a present for Grandma. See that picture to the left? Well, I have her, and Grandma is going to get an 8X10 and she is going to LOVE it.

This isn’t the best year for some of my friends. The news is full of people who aren’t going to have jobs in January. Others are giving their life to support freedom. Whatever you think of our president. Whatever you think of our motives. The troops are doing what they’ve been trained to do. They are getting killed. And we are definitely making the world less safe. But it is a path that has been chosen for us. We are now on it. And that can be scary. On the other hand, even Mr. Bush is running into a rough patch, so maybe there is such a thing as Karma.

Well then, what about me you might ask? Well, I’m in a bit of limbo. But there are worse things. Limbo between many positive choices. In general, I entered the year moving forward, and as I leave the year, I am moving forward. Joined by my amazing daughter, good friends, new and old, family and everyone else. Join me in welcoming 2006!

B

Posted in Uncategorized.

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By Anonymous – December 22, 2005