There’s always a reason for why someone does something. Your challenge is to figure out why. That’s true of a business meeting just as it is of a married couple. Figure out why and you get a better understanding of the other person’s perspective and can find a better common solution.

Case in point:
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Technorati Tags: perspective, psychology, relationships

At first, this book scared the crap out of me.

Then, it validated what I write about on my blog.

Finally, it made me think. It made me think a whole lot.
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Technorati Tags: book report, economics, globalization, the world is flat

My team just went through a pretty significant re-organization and as such are choosing a new name (not yet chosen of this writing). This reminded me that the first organization I worked for in HP was the Response Center Lab, which went by its acronym RCL. After a few months of working in RCL, I was told that the name used to be the Response Center Technology Lab, but that the acronym “RCTL” reminded too many people of the word “rectal” so it was changed.

That trip down memory lane sparked this months question over at LinkedIn Answers:

“What’s the worst acronym for an organization name you ever heard of (or were maybe a part of)?”
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Technorati Tags: acronym, naming, organization

Note: This article originally ran on June 11 2007, is slightly edited for reprint in an effort to share previously published ideas with new readers.

When you have a meeting with people you’ve never met before, those first couple of minutes when everyone is getting settled in can be extremely awkward. You want to be friendly and potentially build your network by engaging the people who are new to you, but gripping questions like “So, how’s the weather where you’re from?” or “How long have you been with Black Sun? Do you like that company?” don’t exactly spark interesting conversation.

But, if you and I were in a meeting and you asked me, “Did you ever go to that nude beach near UCSD?” that would get my attention. How might you find out more detailed information about someone that you can use to establish a relationship BEFORE you meet them?

This is yet another magic of LinkedIn. Check out my LinkedIn profile as an example. If you dig into my full profile, you can discover that I went to school in La Jolla for 5 years, been issued a patent, and worked a lot with Struts and ASP.NET. You can come up with a lot more interesting questions based on that information than the normal pre-meeting chit-chat (although you have to have knowledge of nude beach locations to ask the example question) and by extension be more memorable.

That’s not to say you can get away with being a total moron in the meeting itself, but if you shine there too the combination of the two can make a bigger impression.

It’s almost over, FY09 planning season, that is.

It begins in February and is running long this year compared to the last two. In the past 5 months, I’ve been in a variety of teams that have estimated several million dollars worth of projects when you add them together. Because of this work load, I had the good fortune to be invited to a teleconference with 50+ project managers and talk about the process of estimating. Since I only had 15 minutes to talk about a topic that you could spend well over an hour on, I fell back on my old reliable: The Lego Exercise.
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Technorati Tags: estimation, lego, Making yourself easy to be scheduled

I thought I’d try my hand at podcasting. I spent all of $10 dollars at Target on a PC microphone, downloaded Audacity, and was on my way. One thing I wished I’d done in my first few weeks of blogging was experiment more with the tools before I started to generate real content. I wasn’t about to make that mistake again, but learned something about myself that I didn’t expect to when I started.
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Technorati Tags: podcast, public speaking, word choice

Forgive the intrusion, as this goes a bit off topic.

Sort of.

If you’ve been reading this space for awhile or know me personally, you may know that I’ve been a bit of a gypsy the last few years. OK if you really know me “last few” may be generous, but from 2002-2006 we lived in Riverside, CA near tons of family. After 8 years as a teleworker, the rules changed on me in HP IT and I took a relocation package to Vancouver, WA in April of 2006. While the greater suburban Portland area is quite beautiful, it didn’t work out for us mostly because we missed being around family.

After we left SoCal, other family came to suburban Cincinnati. We’ve spent the last year there and loved spending time with the family with us, but found we really missed California. Sooooo, now that Kindergarten is over I drop off my wife and daughter at the airport Thursday and make a 3 day drive to Rancho Cucamonga, CA with my dog Rosie starting Friday.

Nerd Guru topic-wise, it is a lesson in reading the currents of corporate policy while balancing personal needs. I wish we’d never left California in the first place, but given the circumstances I’m not sure we had much of a choice. I certainly learned a lot from the experience and am thankful that I was able to achieve enough work-wise since we left that my management can justify a return.
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Technorati Tags: cross country drive, twitter

Think about the last time you were in a contentious meeting. You are in a room with a bunch of smart people representing various constituents and not everybody agrees on how to proceed. Arguments ensue, some of them are civil while others are heated. Now, imagine that meeting was nationally televised, live.

Oh yeah, and the outcome directly effects an election for the leader of the free world.

This is what happened to Donna Brazile on Saturday. Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: 2008 democratic primary, arguments, contentious, donna brazile, meeting

In September of 1982, I started my first day at Ramona Junior High School in Chino, CA. First period PE was pretty uneventful, since we didn’t have to dress out for that initial meeting. My best friend Aaron and I stood around and talked about Intellivision Baseball, if I remember correctly. World History during second period was close to the PE lockers and went pretty much as expected too.

But right after that second hour, Aaron and I looked on the map we’d been given and noticed that third period English was completely on the other side of campus. Not wanting to be late on the first day, we did what came to what seemed like a really natural conclusion at the time: we ran.

What we failed to take into account was the scale of the map and that it really wasn’t that great a distance to cover in 5 minutes. This wasn’t lost on Tim, who would prove himself to be the coolest kid in 7th grade over the coming months. He casually strolled into class as the tardy bell rang with a smug look on his face and the collar on his Polo shirt flipped, a wake of girls swooning by his mere presence. The previous year, Aaron and I had been smart kids in a 6th grade class where we spent the whole day in one room and everybody seemed to get along with everybody else just fine. As we would soon discover, though, we would be redefined as nerds at Ramona and be the target of stereotypical teasing.

This social phenomenon that hits most American kids at this same age, and the damage it has done manifesting itself as a shrinking workforce of U.S.-reared workers with strong math and science backgrounds, is covered in great detail in David Anderegg’s Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them.
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Technorati Tags: book report, education, nerds

Note: This article originally ran on May 14, 2007, is slightly edited for reprint in an effort to share previously published ideas with new readers. This entry is particularly special to me because it is about one of my heroes, my grandpa.

My maternal grandfather told me this story a long time ago and its aways struck me as a good example of being creative with what you have at your disposal. Previously I’ve covered this topic of creativity in relation to Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion but you’ll see in this post and a later one involving my daughter that this sort of thing runs in my family (I haven’t figured out how to get my Mom’s cross stitch skills into this blog, but maybe I will some day).

Like a lot of men of his era, my grandfather married his high school sweetheart (that would be my grandmother, who says “Hello” from Oklahoma City to all y’all, and was married to him for 59 years) before getting shipped off to Europe to fight Nazis.

My grandparents right before Grandpa went off to Europe in 1944

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