I’m flying out Sunday via Alaska Air, taking the direct flight from Orlando to Seattle, arriving at 11:40 am. If you’re there about the same time and want to share a ride in, email me. I’m staying at the Sheraton only because that’s where the Board stays, otherwise I’ve always preferred a hotel a few blocks away, I like the 3-4 block to/from “work” every day to unwind. Maybe I’ll just walk around the block to accomplish the same!
Don Gabor is coming in Sunday afternoon and we’re planning to have dinner and chat, and if you’re in Seattle and want to join us, drop me an email. Not sure where dinner will be, but someplace between the Sheraton and the water front. In between I’ll check in with PASS HQ and see how things are going, and probably just see who I run into.
On Monday I’ll be in the volunteer session in the afternoon and then in Don’s networking seminar from 4:30-6:30. Then it’s off to the opening reception, and then the SSC party, where Steve makes me pay $30 to get in!
Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday I’ll be present for the keynote (rarely the best part of the day in my view), and I’m going to go to a few sessions, with a focus on seeing speakers that I have not seen before. I’m going to try to be there for lunch on Tues & Wed to network and facilitate networking. The food is ok, but usually I’m ready for a walk and something besides convention center food – we’ll see. Thursday having lunch with a friend. I’ve left evenings open so far, I’ll probably hit the expo Tuesday night, and other than that will see what else comes up.
Tuesday at lunch I'll be hosting one of the Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions titled 'When and How to Participate in the SQL Server Community'. I hope you'll join me for lunch and discussion!
Friday I have a board meeting in the morning, and then fly out at a fairly horrible 10:30 pm on Delta to eventually make it back to Orlando at 9 am the next morning. Long flight, long week!
Want to talk blogs, SQL, woodworking, PASS, SQLSaturday, mentoring, careers, family, business? Or pretty much anything else other than politics? I won’t be too hard to find, very often it’ll be at the top of the escalator on the session floor or at the coffee shop on the third floor, or somewhere in between. Email me, or try me on Twitter @SQLAndy – though be warned I’m new to Twitter and could easily get it wrong. I’m going to set a goal of meeting 50 people that I don’t know. Is that a impossible, or too easy? Don’t know, but it’s a start.
Back in July we had Chad Miller visit oPASS to do a presentation on Powershell. It was well received and kudos to Chad for a nice presentation and taking the time to drive up from Tampa. Going in to the presentation I would say my view of Powershell was interesting, but over hyped, but then again, I’m typically not a bleeding edge adopter of technology either.
Chad made some interesting remarks during the presentation (and apologies if I put words in his mouth by accident):
The first one sounds plausible. The second – I think – is over stated. I’m sure there is a limit, but verbosity of code has never struck me as a major impediment to getting things done. Of course, that assumes more than passing comfort with the syntax. I’m probably also biased, as many C# people consider VB.Net to be verbose, but I find VB.Net to be reasonable. In both cases it’s the difference between code you really write and pre-packaged/reusable code that impacts productivity. On the third one I agree about 50% – PS does make it easy to discover, but so does the Visual Studiio IDE, either via the object browser or via the immediate window. Calling it 50% is probably unfair, because I think easy of discovery is critical to learning any new product. The last point was really great, until we build that shared knowledge it’s hard for anyone to move into deeper areas. Interesting to see how (if) this moves forward in the next couple years.
I’ve done my fair of scripting and batch files over the years, ranging from almost vanilla batch files to more advanced ones using things like PC Magazine Batchman (best link I could find), VBScript, and just a small amount of PS work so far. Scripting is a useful technique, but once I moved into “real” programming environments I found that going back was hard. Even VBScript scripts I’d write in VB6 for the intellisense, debugging, etc, and then as a final step make it a true VBScript file. I’d say in many ways that a very nice IDE trumps all, for learning and pure efficiency. The Powershell IDE seems like a useful step in that direction, but note quite all the way there.
Some of us will need PS at work, others may never need it. As SQL professionals I think we need to know the basics; what is Powershell, how to load and run a script, the basics of variables and comments. After that you make the decision about where to spend your very limited professional development time – do you learn more PS, Analysis Services, or even something else? No wrong answer.
For those that really enjoy Powershell, I’d suggest taking one more step and trying a “real” language, something that has a first class IDE, supports all the concepts that go into programs today. A good way to do this is with SMO (SQL Management Objects) to build a first class UI around some solution you need. You can call SMO from PS of course, but if you want something really sophisticated, use Visual Studio or similar. Make sure you learn how to use source control either way, and to put good comments in – because even something as small as a batch file can end up being a key part of the enterprise strategy.
It proved to me (again) that I’ll always enjoy hearing about a topic from someone who is both passionate and knowledgeable, someone that has put some effort into making it do tricks.
I enjoy woodworking as a hobby and as I try new things I find that my work habits during the learning stage tend towards chaotic and I wind up with stuff every where. Part of that is just enthusiasm, wanting to move ahead and do stuff, part of it struggling so hard to master ideas and techniques that I wind up with tunnel vision. That often leaves me with tools, notes, and everything else stacked all over the place.
It’s a pattern I see in beginners with SQL too. They are intensely focused on syntax, trying to map how it works to whatever tool set they used before, and the early work is rough. As they begin to get over that first bit of learning curve they can then start to think about how do more interesting things.
You could call it lack of discipline and that’s true to an extent. On my new projects I need to slow down, clean up more often, try to see which tools I’m really done with and can put away. But it’s also true that I often don’t know when I’m done with a tool. Maybe I think I’ve done the final drilling, but then I find I missed something, or drilled a hole in the wrong place!
Many years ago I worked with an engineer that was meticulous about his work environment. He laid out a set of 8 pencils and pens in a certain way, had his log just so, and as he worked he would pickup a pen, use it, and then put it back in the right place. At the time I didn’t entirely appreciate the discipline it requires to build good habits, even if I still tend to think that one was a bit much.
Another story from even further back, I had a co-worker who drove a car that didn’t have the now entirely common warning buzzer if you left your headlights on. He had devised his own system; each time he turned the headlights on he took a clothespin from the ashtray and put it on the door handle, that way there was no way he could (reasonably!) exit without noticing the clothespin and that would cue him to turn off the lights and put the clothespin back on the ashtray. It worked well enough, though sometimes it did seem like a man that could do that every time could just as easily remember to run through a mental checklist each time he turned off the car.
For me, I find it’s easier to build bad habits than good ones, and probably true of most people. Good habits require you to make a continuing investment of energy that doesn’t seem to have a clear pay back. It’s also important to remember that while we might have good work habits on something we do all the time, we may have to build those habits on something new – think starting to use SSIS if you’re new to it.
As I've related previously (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5) I've been working author and speaker Don Gabor on my networking skills. We recently did our final call of the six hours coaching planned, and thought I'd share some final thoughts.
Whether it's natural, because he often does training, or whether it's part of what makes him good at speaking, Don is a good listener. Not the listen and nod your head kind of listener, the listen for the hidden meaning and clues that enable him to offer feedback and insight. I imagine it helps some to have a lot of experience versus my limited experience, but still he asked me quite a few questions during our four calls that proved to be helpful in learning.
One minor learning moment came as we discussed meeting people the first time versus second and third times. If you've met someone once and had even a minute or so of conversation, the second time seems more comfortable, and by the third time you start to feel like you know them, even if your total conversation time is 15 minutes. Strange, but true, and I've seen that reflected in the networking I do at various events. But that's not quite the learning moment. The key - to me - is to realize that in many cases you're 'interviewing' and 'being interviewed' to see if you want at some later point to have a longer or deeper conversation.
That's not to say that every time you meet someone new it's all about you, or that you're testing them. I think there is value in just meeting new people. But realistically, we're hoping that some of those connections turn into something richer. For me for example, nothing quite so interesting as to meet someone knew that can bring a new and thoughtful perspective to something I am interested in, or maybe don't know I'm interested in yet!
Another point was that if someone approaches you because of who you are (author, speaker, etc) pay extra care in dealing with them. They are to a degree sold on "you" and from a business/networking perspective you want to handle that meeting well, and also do some good follow ups, even if just an email to say it was nice to talk for a while.
I asked Don about his strategy for touching people in his network, if he has an A list, B List, etc. Interestingly he doesn't, though he knows that many experienced networkers do that. He said it was a combination of having a system that worked for him that didn't require it, and lack of a system that might make it easier for him to try to manage his list that way. He does highly recommend dropping a note or a call to people you may have a chance to see at an upcoming event - a way to refresh things prior to the meeting. I think that's highly relevant for many of us that rarely meet in person. Making the assumption that everyone will put your forum nickname or twitter handle to a face isn't always a good one!
I had a friend ask if I would recommend this six hour phone coaching approach to others. That's a good ($400!) question. I was very pleased with what I learned, but I also felt like it was the right learning at the right time. I had a number of events coming up where I would have lots of chances to meet people during presentations, I'd be giving presentations, attending dinners, etc. Those opportunities were real world workshops for me, without those I would have learned stuff, but it would have much more theory. I'm not the networking master by any means, but the feedback I received from Don enabled me to remold some ideas I had about networking in positive way. But I still haven't answered the question, right?
Ok. If you're doing presentations, training, thinking of moving into management or consulting, I think spending some money on networking books is a must-do, and then - with some ground work in place - I would really recommend the coaching. What if you're a 'regular' person, a DBA or developer who wants to improve their skills? The books still make sense, but I think an in person class is a better fit so that they can provide some of that workshop time as part of the class. Probably the same amount of money, but I think it would be a better fit in that case.
I'll finish up by saying that I still struggle to remember names, that is going to take effort and practice. Follow ups and conversation I think do ok at. Analyzing networking styles I'm not great at, but just understanding some of what drives people to network (or not) in different ways definitely has helped some already. I'm also thinking that companies are missing out by not providing some of this training to employees, because even if you only network within your company it's an incredibly good skill to have, but most of us just work in a very small community.
With luck, one more good Don story to go!
I bought Real Leaders Don't Do Powerpoint by Christoper Witt ($15 at Amazon) on a trip, Powerpoint catching my eye and then deciding it was something I needed to read. It's not anti-Powerpoint, it's more about passion and messaging, something I've come to appreciate in both business and politics. For me the essence of the book was that to be a good to great leader you have to be able to communicate well. Some of that is body language. More of it is selling ideas and your ability to make to them happen.
You could call it speech writing and it wouldn't be wrong. As a blogger/writer there is value in shaping words for the desired impact, to me it's easily a step harder to write words that you or someone else will speak and then deliver them with the value add that only a good speaker can do. First you have to have a message, one that you're passionate about. Then you have to learn to deliver it in a way that opens doors instead of closing them.
Technical speaking is on the opposite end of this - there we're trying to portray complex ideas in a way that others can follow and learn from with typically no attempt to inspire or challenge. Technical speaking is far more teaching than speaking. Not bad, just different.
To give you a feel for the book, in one chapter the author talks about being yourself, being bigger and louder, being passionate, and being dramatic. If you don't see value or challenge in those, you won't enjoy the book. On the other hand, if you want to start down the road to real speaking, I think this book is a start and is approachable. Not sure? Think about speeches from history you admire. Was it the message or the delivery? Would it have been as good if you delivered it?
I've read it once and set it aside to read again later in the year. For now it's theory, at some point I think I'd like to try it.
I've been reading What Got You Here Won't Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith over the past couple months, and found it to be a useful book. My one sentence summary is that it teaches without the ability to be introspective and let go of your pride, you can't evolve to use your potential. In fact, a big reason I picked up the book is that it's a problem I've seen often and of course suffer from myself at times. Especially in start ups, it's pretty common for the people that helped get things going just aren't the people that take you to the next step - sometimes because of lack of experience, but more often because they don't want to change.
Introspection is hard. First because you're biased, followed by being defensive. Not a lot of fun to look at yourself and see flaws, and fixing them sometimes requires adjusting long held positions. I find many people view introspection as self defeating or worse, and while it's possible to work on it so much you only see flaws, it's good to realize once a year that you can be better than you were last year. Not just technically, just better in general.
So to give you a better idea of the book, here's the list of the bad behaviors that are listed as most common, and there are examples and ideas for fixing each one. I'll make this a little more personal by adding a note to each about where I think I stand, and you can tell me if you disagree!
1. Need to win at all costs. (I've long outgrown this one, which isn't to say I'm not a fierce competitor once engaged)2. Desire to add our (my) two cents to every discussion. (I worry that sometimes I do this, I like to participate and think ideas grow from discussion - but too much maybe?)3. Need to rate others and impose our standards on them. (I don't think I'm bad about this, but I do assess people against my own scale)4. Needless sarcasm and cutting remarks that we (I) think make us sound witty and wise. (I don't think I'm too bad on this)5. Overuse of "No," "But" or "However." (Don't know, need to watch my conversations more)6. Need to show people we (I) are (am) smarter than they think we (I) are (am.) (If anything the opposite, I try pretty hard to be a regular guy - though one of the points of my blog is to show that I enjoy and can do "deep think")7. Use of emotional volatility as a management tool. (Think I'm ok here)8. Need to share our (my) negative thoughts, even if not asked. (??? Maybe part of adding two cents, but I think I'm not bad at this)9. Refusal to share information in order to exert an advantage. (Not at all)10. Inability to praise and reward. (I've improved on this a lot in the last couple years, I tended to expect people to do their job, but I've added 'thank you' as a powerful tool in my bag of tricks)11. Annoying way in which we overestimate our (my) contribution to any success. (Don't think so, if anything I tend to be too low key about things)12. Need to reposition our (my) annoying behavior as a permanent fixture so people excuse us for it. (Hope not!)13. Need to deflect blame from ourselves (myself) and onto events and people from our (my) past. (nope)14. Failure to see that we (I) am treating someone unfairly. (Hard to know? Don't think so, but not to say I don't hold a grudge sometimes)15. Inability to take responsibility for our (my) actions. (No)16. Act of not listening. (Could be better, but only because I'm often enthused, but listening is a great way to learn)17. Failure to express gratitude. (Same as 10)18. Need to attack the innocent, even though they are usually only trying to help us (me). (No)19. Need to blame anyone but ourselves (me). (No)20. Excessive need to be "me." (Yeah, sometimes maybe. Like to think that isn't all bad)21. Goal obsession at the expense of a larger mission. (No)
It's kinda in the self help category, but I think how useful it will be is more about whether you can answer those 21 questions and then try to change your behavior - let go of your pride, but might also be useful to get you thinking about other people you deal with too. More on this soon, but I'll just add that once you build the ability to be introspective it changes you, and it changes how you view others.
My friend Grant Fritchey recently posted in response to a quiz and at the end of that mentioned that he'd be interested in hearing about my thoughts on the topic. It's an interesting topic, so I'll see what I can come up with. I'll start by saying that I definitely see a difference between leaders and managers. Definitely they share some skills, and many people are more one than the other, not often to find people who can do both really well.
I had to think on this some and ended up defining 'great' as those that had a large impact on me. The first was Jody Gresham, my second leader in the military and we almost started off on the wrong foot. I had been in long enough to get established and earn some trust, when I moved to work for him he would constantly check my work. Finally asked why, and his answer was that he was responsible for what I did, and I had to earn that trust with him, even though he was pretty comfortable with my skills. If you think about it, that's really a good answer! Maybe more so when you factor it was working with explosives, not waxing a car. As time progressed we did a lot of stuff that was beyond what I was used to doing with my first leader, and it didn't take long to see that doing that extra work made things easier down the road, but it also made us better at what we did than the rest, and because of that approach he had earned a lot of trust (and freedom). I was never lazy, but it was a great lesson to learn early in my career.
A few years later it was Bill Reid, a career military guy who was the seasoned version of Jody. Well rounded, calm, tons of experience, and the patience to mentor a young man that had a lot of ability but not always the experience to exercise patience. I can't say I mastered the lessons then (or now), but many years later I'm a lot closer than I was. He played by the rules, built relationships, and was just one hundred percent dependable, because in that line of work you don't make commitments you can't keep. Bill also brought me into training, taking me with him to teach at the NCO Academy, and somehow I'm doing that for a living today.
On the tech side my favorite leader has been Tina Rourk. Tina took the time to show me what the business needed beyond pure technology and later when I was on track to stay a more focused technologist/consultant, persuaded me to take a position as a manager and there's no doubt that step just five years ago changed and challenged me in ways that were probably overdue, and again, lead directly to where I am today. One of the great lessons I learned from her was that it's not always about blame; mistakes happen, just keep them from happening again.
Now that I've written this I'm not sure that great leaders is the right title, and mentor doesn't quite fit either. Role model perhaps? Guide? I've worked for a lot of different leaders, a few that were terrible, most were decent, and honestly very few that were just stellar. I do think that great leaders care about people, and they see past the obvious to find and grow people with potential. I also think that working for those kinds of people shows you what is possible, and that's something we need more of in our business (and others as well I imagine).
Finally, it reminds me why I'm driven to give back. It's part of who I am now, but it's definitely part of the deal that there's a debt to pay forward in return for the help you receive early in your career.
I was reading a book recently and it equated brand with reputation. My first thought was "aha", that brand is just a fancier/newer word for reputation and why I hadn't I matched those two up before? But as I thought about it a little more, I'm not sure the two are the same. I think of brands as the very public face we project, the one that gets our foot in the door or that causes people to contact us with work, where reputation is something that's determined by what you do rather than what you say you'll do.
I think that's an important distinction because building a brand can often just be cosmetics. Yes, it takes some work, but there are ways to short cut that and even if you don't, that brand may not accurately reflect who you are - it could be who you want to be, or who you think I want you to be.
Reputation is something you earn by being who you are. You can be nice, or not, hard working or not, reliable or not, fun to work with, or not. You can try to earn a reputation for being whatever, but you don't get to decide what your reputation is. Of course that doesn't mean you can't work on your bad habits or your rough edges to make your reputation stronger.
I happen to notice this in a class recently that I had the rare student - one that could take notes that seemed to have value to them the next day. If you watch people take notes, I think they fall into one of these categories:
I'm mildly judgmental about note taking, mainly because the trend we've seen is that the more they have their head down writing, the less they actually listen, and not unexpectedly, the less they listen the less they learn. We all learn differently, so I don't force people into taking or not taking notes, I just try to engage them with eye contact and conversation because I've always believed the biggest win in an attending a class is participating in a discussion, not just just watching slides and doing labs.
My own style you ask? For standard hour presentations I'm basically a No-Noter, if something really interesting pops up I'll jot a note on my for later, but I try to just relax and listen along at whatever pace they set. For classes I switch over to The Questioner. I've tried highlighting and it just doesn't help me. Definitely I don't want to try to write it all down, I find that a serious distraction, and tiring too.
Some of it is about how you learn, but my challenge to you today is to look over your last set of notes from a meeting, class, whatever - were they useful then? Are they useful now? Where they meant to be only be useful then (ok with me), or do you see them as long term documentation just for you? An interesting test is to imagine that after taking a class you return to the office and are asked to spend 15 minutes at a meeting talking about what you learned. Would you pull that from notes, or just from memory?
I don't have all the answers, heck, maybe not even the right questions, but now that I've thought about it beyond just the filter of how it affects me as a trainer I'm interested in finding out a little more, and that should be interesting.
Many of us make a living by working on tasks while monitoring email, taking a few calls, and in non uncommon cases also keeping up with Facebook, Twitter, and more. Often it's multiple tasks, and we get better at plate spinning. To a degree that's good, because if you want to move into management, consulting, or run your own business you won't have the luxury of just doing one thing. In fact, it's that move away from doing one thing (and being good at one thing) that is the deciding for many of us to prefer being 'just' an employee. Nothing wrong with that.
But, getting better at plate spinning doesn't decrease the cost of doing it, or at least the decrease in productivity for any one task. I'd like to think I'm reasonably good at juggling multiple tasks, but it is tiring. Ever watch them spin plates? It's fun to start with, you think you can add one or two more, then you hit the point where it's an all out sprint to keep them going. When you're well rested and energized, you can do it for quite a while. But then you get sick, tired, or maybe someone (often you) decides you can always do one more plate - and then you start dropping things. Hopefully you drop the things that matter the least, but regardless it usually means you've failed to do something you committed to - how much that matters depends on your ethics and pride.
The challenge here is that when you're spinning two plates and you're doing it easily, when that third task comes along there doesn't appear to be any reason not to do it - you don't want to look lazy, you want the money, or just like the challenge. You go from 50% capacity to 75% - and that still leaves room for one more right? We need to stay at a pretty high utilization rate to earn the money, satisfy customers/employers, but at least for me, stay short of the point where any minor snag means I deliver something late.
So the title is about measuring, and maybe that's not the best title, but I do have a way for you to assess the cost of the task switching. Stop doing everything and do just one thing. Turn off the phone, email, instant message, blog reader, etc, and just work for 4 hours. Then turn it all back on again and think about the difference. I've made it a habit for the last several years to spend 3-4 hours on Sunday morning working on tasks that are either nice to have, or require serious concentration. It's relaxing to be able to focus and stay focused.
We can't go back to doing one thing at a time, if there ever was a time when it was that way to start with. But we can work on more accurately understanding our utilization rate and the strain it's placing on us, and then use that to make decisions about things that come along that we didn't expect.
Yesterday I was commenting on how a big part of stress for me is getting that sudden burst of work that leaves me so far behind it seems the only answer is to just work harder - but that doesn't often work.
I think we should all manage our own careers, tasklists, and stress - but what role does the manager play?
One part is that if you take my advice and decide to just take a break, it's very common for the manager to want to deny the break 'because you've got so much on your plate'. You can show them my blog post, but I suspect that won't change their minds! The alternative is to take a couple sick days anyway, and that works.
Another part is that they aren't managing well, and I'm as guilty of this at times as anyone. Assigning tasks isn't simple, and has to take into account skills, recent projects, review and career goals, other team members...and ideally, the stress/rest level of the person being given the task. One of the evil paradoxes is that managers tend to give the hardest/most important projects to their best people - part compliment, part realism, but over time the best people get tired and cranky while the less talented ones are cruising along happily. It's not always easy to tell, as a manager you definitely wish for a gauge on their forehead that will tell you their mood and energy reserves, but you have to infer it and that doesn't always work.
It can also be a case of not managing well when you're not holding them to intermediate goals, letting the deadline (and the stress) build up to the last minute. Yet another instance is giving them multiple things to do and not setting real priorities - is it this one or that one?
Perhaps the toughest part on both sides is when someone tells you they are stressed. Sometimes that's a nice calm conversation, sometimes it's work not quite as good as usual, sometimes it's a screaming fit. Most of us don't recognize the magnitude of the stress, we don't like to admit that we are stressed, and we definitely don't want to tell our manager (who is just supposed to know). Once we know someone is stressed, are we in a calm place to hear and respond - or is more like "we're all working hard right now"? And if that isn't enough, managers also report to someone, and that someone may not be as enlightened, causing a mildly complex problem to be that much harder.
I was trying to think of an analogy, and my first thought was that there is only so much gas in the tank - but that's not a good match. I think maybe better is oil changes. You can put off an oil change for a while, but do it long enough and real damage can result, causing more downtime than if you just took the car out of service for the couple hours needed for the oil change. The question is 'how long is too long', and that's where being human we tend to stretch it right to the edge.
Don't expect your manager to manage your stress, or even to care. Don't get me wrong, it's great if they do, but you have to be set to survive bad managers, or at least managers that don't read minds.
As I gain more experience I've found that stress comes in three forms; stress that is there that you don't see, stress that you recognize but still don't seem to manage, and on rare occasion when you see the stress and manage to change your behavior to fix it. For the most part I'm able to recognize what causes me stress, and in a lot of cases it's how rested & focused I am that determines whether I fix or live with it.
Even when I'm oblivious (on purpose or not if that makes sense) to the building stress, there's always one signal that I can count on to recognize that I'm oversomething, and that is my todo list growing against pending deadlines - which in turn triggers in me "work harder". Even when work iharder consists of putting in place some efficiency that will help me later, it's the danger zone. More work leads to more stress or at least more tired, things take longer, the cycle grows. The exception is when you can clearly define it as "if I can x, y, and z done then I'm back to normal...and...I can see that happening in 7-10 days max". I suppose you could draft more rules on top of that, one perhaps being that this only applies if you haven't done this in the last x days, but that's not important. What is important that due to email, client visits, lack of ruthless focus, illness, over committing - whatever the reason and they happen, you're jammed up and thinking to just work harder.
In most cases working harder is the wrong answer, what I call the death spiral. Instead, you go back to basics and prioritize...ruthlessly. Usually some of those have to have things don't really have to be done, and others can just wait a little longer. But it's not as easy as saying you'll just work 40 hours and go home, I wish it was! Sometimes it means closing the door and putting the head phones on, going all out or a few days to hit max productivity.
The other part - and the hardest lesson to learn - is that when you can't seem to get caught up, it's time to take a break. It's tough love, and doesn't sound like common sense, but we make bad decisions when tired and stressed. I wouldn't take this advice 10 years ago, and sometimes I still don't, but more often I do and it does help.
Think about that, and tomorrow we'll talk about it from a management perspective.
Most of us aren't good decision makers. We make decisions based on emotion rather than facts, and for many decisions the top most emotion is fear. As I pause at mid life to assess where I've been and where I want to go, in almost every case I regret making decisions based on fear/worry. That's not to say you shouldn't listen to your instincts, but it's a good idea to understand how you reacting to a situation. It requires introspection and that in turn requires courage, but more on that another day!
Here's an example; once upon a time I was managing a team that needed to pick from two technical solutions. One was older and proven, the other was newer and reasonably proven. Ultimately both were capable of solving the problem, and acquisition cost was the same either way. Implementation cost also looked to be a wash, but who can know? As I looked at the decision I came down in favor of the older/slightly richer solution, but it was a 51% kind of decision. I had a guy on my team that was very technology savvy, and he really - I mean really - flared up about the decision. Gave me pause, after all it wouldn't be the first time I made a bad decision. I set aside some time to chat with him about it, explained my decision process, and asked if he could show me any point that would really make it decisive to go the other way (because if it's a coin toss, just do it and go). As the conversation evolved, it turned out he had a ton of experience with the newer solution, absolutely zero with the older solution. I asked him to spend two hours to build a "hello world" type implementation using the old technology, and when he returned, he was a changed man! He was able to see then why it was such a close call, and actually saw some things in it that he thought would reduce our implementation time.
I was lucky that time, I found out by accident about the fear induced bias. He didn't want to be a "senior" guy and have to admit he knew nothing about something that he thought he should (I didn't have that expectation, but he didn't know that). Would it have mattered if I changed my mind and went with the other technology? Maybe or maybe not, but it was a lesson I really needed to learn. This is the kind of thing that gives managers and business owner the shakes; you want input based on experience and knowledge, but all too often the decision is based on something else entirely. It's also why it's important to frame decisions correctly - what are the deciding factors and how do are they weighted?
You don't have to tell the world about your fear of falling behind, not knowing enough, worried that they are working you out of a job, whatever - but admit it to yourself. Do you really want to make fear based decisions? How can you offset the risks and still make a good choice?
If you read the books on decision making one of the big items is that most people think they are better at making decisions than they really are. I'm hoping that's not true for me any longer, because I know I've blown quite a few calls so far!
I've scheduled another iteration of my Technical Speaking Seminar for March 14, 2009 in Orlando. It's free, and I'm hosting it on a Saturday this time to open it up to those that can't get away from work during the week. It's designed for the novice to intermediate level speaker with the intent of giving them the skills they need to do a technical presentation at a user group (preferred starting place) or a Code Camp or SQL Saturday.
It's a fun day - if a little nerve wracking for first time speakers. My business partner Steve Jones is also planning to do one in Denver, date not yet set, and we're thinking later this year we'll break it down into our short and sweet video format and get them posted on JumpstartTV as well.
Last week I posted Speaking at Community Events - Time to Raise the Bar?, a first cut at talking about to what degree we should require experience for speakers at events like SQLSaturday as well as when it might be appropriate to add additional focus/limitations on the presentations that are accepted. I've got a few more thoughts on the topic this week, and I look forward to your comments.
One area that worries me slightly is that as individual brand building really starts to take hold (I've written about my take on that, as have Steve Jones & Brad McGeehee among others) we're going to hit the point where we have more speakers than sessions, and someone has to be told no. PASS has already run into this problem with their annual PASS Summit (disclosure: I currently serve on the Board of Directors for PASS) and though I haven't been involved in the selection process for the Summit, I hear it's grueling and stressful (or does grueling=stressful?). There's definitely the prospect of hurt feelings, why did that person get selected instead of me, what do I have to do next time, etc, kinds of pain. That might sound trivial or worse, but only if you've never been a first time submittee and got rejected.
As a local event organizer I don't have the pressure to make sure that attendees "get their monies worth", but I still want a well rounded schedule. That means a good variety of topics, session levels, experience levels, etc. I actually work pretty hard at building a good schedule, but still there will be a few complaints about too much of x or not enough of y! Human nature, and we're all guilty of that at times. But I've been lucky in that so far I've just expanded the schedule, but that's not always going to be an option just from pure logistics. If I have to start saying NO to people, I 'd like to be able to have at least a broad set of guidelines in place about why I didn't select someone.
If you happen to be an ACM subscriber, there was a very relevant article in the January 2009 issue titled Scaling the Academic Publication Process to Internet Scale that talks about very similar challenges in academia, where publish or perish still seems to be the rule. To borrow very lightly, they quoted five major problem areas:
I think those match pretty closely with the challenges I see headed the way of local events. I don't have an answer yet either. The challenge with publishing any type of guidelines is that they will always be subjective, and in my view they should - especially for free locally run events I think the person leading the charge deserves wide latitude, and if they screw up - well, they'll hear about it! Still, that seems wimpy, so I want to work on better suggestions for managing the process. I'm hoping you will send me some ideas while I ponder on it more.
The other part that needs work is schooling speakers to be better at networking and volunteering. There's a tendency to treat speakers as superstars and regular volunteers as labor, you'll find relatively few speakers that also put in time helping run an event. A different part of that is that speakers tend to hang out with speakers, partly perhaps from a sense of being peers, partly being in the cool kids club, but I think more likely that they just aren't very good at networking and socializing. Most of us participate in these events to build our brands, do we do that by spending all day in the 'speaker ready room' or by mixing it up by helping serve lunch or check people in, or just have lunch with some people we don't know?
Maybe that sounds like tough love, but I like to think it's a fair trade. I want more from speakers, but I want them (and the attendees) to get more out of it than they do now. And I think it works. Both Brian Kelley and Robert Cain came down to spend time at SQLSaturday Orlando last October, and both of them were cheerfully handing out lunches. I think they learned more about the event, the mood of the attendees, and just felt better about their own contribution. And from my side, you can bet that those two (among others) are tops on my list if they want to attend/speak next year - do you agree with that, or should it be a purer process?
