Thunderbird

Thunderbird has been on my mind a lot lately, mostly because I have just taken a new position as my first expatriate assignment, and I continue to run into Thunderbirds overseas at a rate that is pretty amazing.

I started to write a post about my upcoming move to China (coming soon), but I soon realized I needed to give some background first, specifically how I got where I am right now.

I’m a technologist by training, and along the way I had picked up enough business knowledge to advance reasonably far through my career.  A great deal of this knowledge was picked up from my mentors, members of my “personal board of directors” and my good friend, Google.  As I became less of a hands-on technical staff member and more of a manager, I felt increasing pressure to defend my decisions with sound managerial decision making. Read more

South By Southwest 2011 – Time to Vote

It’s that time again: Time to vote for the panels that will be featured at South By Southwest 2011. 

This year, I have proposed a panel covering the topic of enterprise collaboration tools.  A complex topic, to be sure, but the focus of my panel discussion will center on the types of tools that can be deployed in the enterprise today, and in the course of our one hour panel, I will make the case that the best choice for enterprise collaboration tools is often the simplest.

Our Panel:  Can We Fix the Workplace in 140 Characters?

Keep it Simple

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Who are you?

I was recently speaking a friend, helping him to position himself for a job hunt following a layoff at his firm (the second time I’ve done this in the past month, actually).  One of the first questions that I asked is, “who are you?”.  I asked him to give me a 30 second elevator speech about who he was, to sell himself to me.

It is amazing how many people that I talk to have a hard time with what, at first glance, seems like a simple task. Later on, I was thinking about what I would say if someone asked me for my elevator speech.  So I tried it.  Out loud.  While home alone.  After fumbling for about 2 minutes, I realized I needed to work on my own elevator speech. Read more

Up in The Air

We’ve just taken off from San Francisco international airport, and we hit that little patch of clear air at about four thousand feet, not jostling, but just enough drop in altitude to make your stomach rise just a bit.  A cheap thrill, a strange comfort brought on by a familiar feeling.

I think back to my former life, the one where I traveled more than half of the time, flying hundreds of thousands of miles every year.  Some days I miss it, the excitement of being in a strange place, meeting new people, closing a big deal or sorting out some vendor issue that other people in the company didn’t have the stomach to deal with.

A few years ago I cut my traveling down significantly.  Having attained the highest position possible at my previous firm, I set my sights on a dream I had deferred for far too long: going back to school to pursue my MBA.

My father, a source of many valuable insights, advised me that I should consider leaving my current job and getting a paper route for the 2 years that I would be in school. “I don’t mean literally a paper route, I just mean, with the hours that you put in at your firm, and amount of travel that you’re doing these days, it would do a disservice to both your job and your studies to attempt both at once” I knew he was right, but it was still hard to make such a change consciously.  I loved my job, I really did.  But I knew there was little future in it, and so in the spring of 2008 I left my former company, signed up for more loans than I could fathom at the time, and registered for classes at Thunderbird.

Things have not necessarily turned out how I planned.  I managed to quit my job just prior to the onset of the global economic downturn.  Needless to say, recruiters were not exactly beating a path to business schools in late 2009 to recruit recent grads.

Looking back, I would do it all again in heartbeat.  Really.  Thunderbird was an amazing experience.  Life since then has been an amazing experience.  Even the job that I looked at as my “paper route” has taken my life in new and interesting directions, teaching me valuable lessons about business and entrepreneurship along the way.

I think the thrill I get from travel is based in potential.  Step off a plane in a new city and the world is your oyster;  it’s all about potential energy.  Graduating from Thunderbird felt similar;  full of potential, not sure where it’s going to go, but thrilled to be traveling.

We’re not different…We’re just artists

For the month of March, I’ve been contributing to my “750 Words” page, a private brain dump where I put 750 words per day.  It’s fantastic, especially when done at the end of the day.  You can even share stats from your writing.  As I suspected would happen, there have been times where my brain dump resulted in a blog post.  Like now…

Generation Y is a very different generation than our predecessors.  I know every generation says that, and in fact, it’s mostly true.  But the acceleration of the gap between generations is absolutely startling.  It’s like something of a “Moores Law” of generation gap, that is to say, with every generation, the gap between it and the previous generation seems to widen by a growing margin.  Good golly, what is generation Z going to look like? But seriously, I’ve been thinking about generation Y a lot recently, and I’ve come to some conclusions.  You saw a few in my video post yesterday, and here’s another.

The generation Y mind is a young mind.  Not to say that we are immature, but young in a different way, in outlook and in how we interpret the world.  In my video post yesterday I mentioned that one of the hallmarks of Generation Y is that we are not afraid to fail.  One of the reasons that artists are successful is that they are not afraid to fail either.  Bad photo?  Take another.  Bad sculpture? There’s always more clay.  Pablo Picasso said that “all children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up”; Generation Y, has, I think, stayed artists far longer than previous generations.

My mother worked for the World Book encyclopedia company.  You remember them, right?  They authored huge volumes of information and placed that information into lovely red-leather bound books with gold leaf edges.  Working for World Book meant that my mom brought home an endless supply of encyclopedia volumes for me to read.  Which was fine by me, geek that I was.  I could not get enough of them, I read everything that I could get my hands on.  I realize now that it is only through the acquisition of knowledge that we learn to make rational decisions.  I learned to learn by reading books.  Lots of books.  Today, people are doing the same thing by via the internet.

I’ve always loved computers as well. I had my first computer by about age 5 and as you can imagine my ability to write code in Basic on my TRS-80 was a real hit with the ladies.

I remember telling my mom that someday, all of the information in those heavy encyclopedias would be available right on the screen of a computer. She thought I was absolutely bananas.

Look who is laughing now mom!

Just kidding.

But seriously, the amount of information that is available to everyone, at almost any time, is startling.   Think about that.  I mean, I remember hearing about “Mosaic” from the guys in the computer lab, and after I had a play with it, I brought a copy back to my dorm room on 13 floppy disks.  I was hooked.  Really. I cracked open notepad and starting writing web pages a few days later. There we were, witnessing the birth of the internet;  sadly Al Gore never really did get his figure back.  And now here we are, less than 2 decades later, and look at how far we have come.  It’s almost easier to talk about the things that are not on the internet than it is to do it the other way around.  It’s funny to say, but really, I find myself doing that all the time.

Generation Y has access to all of this, basically the world of knowledge, right there in front of them.  They have grown up in a world where they have had to search for information, fail, and try again until they found it.  This action changes people.  I recently attended a speech where the presenter put forward his theory that people, it seemed, were changing the internet to mirror their behaviors.  That “these kids today” invented twitter because 140 characters is the limit of their attention spans.  I’m pretty sure he’s wrong, and in fact, I think the exact opposite is true. It is the internet that has enabled generation Y to evolve into what they are, a group of people that are hard wired to try, fail, and try again without getting bogged down. You know, like artists.

How to connect with Gen Y

My recent video response for a call for submissions by Ryan Paugh