as important, i think, is the kind of influence you’re letting other people have on you. pick your role models carefully because they’ll have more of an impact on you than you realize. a good mentor is worth her weight in gold.

to be successful, a small organization needs to specialize in something—one thing in particular above all else—and perform really fantastic work when it comes to that one thing. you can’t spread your resources too thin in a small organization because you just don’t have that much to distribute. the resources you do have must be very smart, very talented, and very motivated around your core mission. because of this, you should be paying those people with the talent and ambition to force success on your organization better than most others would pay. they are your bread and butter and you cannot succeed without them, and the name of the game is success. the work itself is often smaller and more transactional than enduring. yet due to the unique output from your highly talented resources, however, it’s possible to charge more for your products and services.

on the other hand, large organizations need work that is both larger in scope and has a longer duration. you have many resources that need to be paid and stability is paramount—”job security or job satisfaction” as they say. the nature of your large scale work is generally far less innovative or ‘start-up’ minded and more focused on sustainment and improvement which requires a different breed of employee. your resources are butt-in-seat personnel paid to do a specific task for some specified (or unspecified) amount of time. these personnel demand far less in terms of compensation because they are interchangeable parts—more trained in breadth of knowledge rather than in depth—which can easily be replaced.

every organization needs to make this decision, large or small? the worst part is when organizations find themselves caught in the middle: the culture is too small making it impossible to compete in the market with larger, cheaper organizations, but the organization is too large to maintain that smaller culture and still make a profit.

so which one will it be? large or small?

too often we try augmenting our talents before we nail down the consistency part. instead of trying to operate at a higher level, try consistently operating at your current level first. when you do, you’ll know that you’re finally ready to make the jump.

and along the way you’ll start to build a reputation—one that says you can get the job done. every time.

image from wikipedia, used under creative commons license

“thank you for coming out here today; i appreciate you all being here at the lincoln memorial with me.

“first i want to talk to you about abraham lincoln and his emancipation proclamation just to give you a little back story on what we’ll be talking about today. next i want to introduce the concept of ‘the bank of justice’ before moving into the urgency of now — why we need to act now to make a change. finally, i want to discuss my dream for the future.

“so, with that, let’s get started…”

if martin luther king, jr. started off his ‘i have a dream’ speech with that kind of introduction, in what ways do you think the impact would be different? would his speech be as famous as it is today? would we teach it to our kids in middle school? in college communication classes?

i don’t need, nor do i want, a purpose or agenda slide from you in your presentations. if there’s a specific purpose, i’m sure that i probably already know what it is. i was either sent an invite to your meeting — which hopefully, for both our sakes, has already mapped out the reason — or i found your talk whilst reading through the program list of breakout sessions at a conference. what i want from you is a story. i want a reason to believe in what you’re talking about.

we’ve already taken care of the purpose long before you took the stage. right now — with you standing in front of me — it’s your time to shine. it’s your time to share your story.

i want to know: what’s your dream?

image from wikipedia

a friend and colleague asked me a question regarding some internal communications within our firm last week. during our conversation, she said, ‘i don’t know why [my team] won’t just ask everyone on yammer.’ i said it’s because on the internet, no one knows you’re a suit.

every day, in corporations all across the world, people go to work wearing a mask — sometimes more than one. like the billy joel song, they’re the faces of the stranger but we love to try them on. the marketing specialist. the associate. the senior vp of sales. but when you’re on the internet, no one can see that mask; all they can see are the contributions that you make. to put your ideas out in a public forum is to open yourself up to all kinds of criticism.

in business, you used to be able to hide behind your title. the senior tech said this is why we’re taking a certain approach, and that was the end of discussion because who would stand up to him? now the first-year analyst out of college can raise questions about, and disagree with, that approach. the person from accounting can share her thoughts on the marketing specialist’s ideas on the name of the redesigned newsletter. these enterprise 2.0 systems like yammer cause a flattening of the hierarchy and a cross-pollination of teams that we have never before seen in business.

and that scares the shit out of people.

but if we’re going to get the most out of our organizations — if we’re going to really excel in what we do — we’re going to have to become more agile and we’re going to have to look for solutions outside of our normal channels. each person has to pull on the same rope. the only way to really accomplish that is if we put down those masks, get over the fear, and go into work tomorrow as ourselves ready to work openly with each other.

i’m john scardino. i have a few ideas that i’d like to explore.

i hope i can explore them with you.

i got nothing.

after that failed, i sent a question out on our yammer network to my colleagues and friends asking the same question. roughly 2 minutes and 30 seconds later i had a colleague of mine forward along an example document with exactly everything i was looking for. this was a colleague whom i’d have never even known existed if it weren’t for social networking within the enterprise.

but here’s the kicker…

the enterprise system we’ve developed has cost the firm countless thousands of dollars (probably millions), meanwhile the yammer network we’re using is the free version — no cost at all to us. using this high-cost technology outfit provided me with no answers at all and was actually a time-suck when you look at it, meanwhile a free system available to anyone was able to connect the person who needed information with the person who had the information.

the moral of the story is this: business needs to rethink where it’s spending its money. high cost IT departments in organizations don’t have to be high cost anymore. there was once a time when machines could do things that we mere mortals couldn’t, and so we developed these new systems to supplant humans. the problem is that that paradigm has shifted.

the focus needs to not be on what the technology is capable of, but on what the technology enables us to do.

at the end of the day this change in focus is better, faster, cheaper, and more efficient.

not easier, but better.

midterms were going on, everyone was studying, and the lab was packed with people, so i looked over at the two rows of empty imacs and thought to myself, “why the hell not?”

when i grabbed that mouse and first logged in to OS X, it was like i was using something that was years ahead of its time. oh, of course it was odd at first — the feel of the keyboard, the click of the mouse, the simplicity of it all — but as i used it to write that paper i began to fall in love.

with a computer.

after that day, whenever i was in a lab, i’d always choose the apple machines unless i was working on a project for class which required something windows-specific. god, how i hated those days. the year after, my brother — a graphic design student at the time — would get his first powerbook, a titanium g4. there was a special kind of awesome in the air on the day he unboxed it; a feeling that you honestly were touching the future.

i secretly envied his new computer whilst i continued to do the geek things i did on my dell — running my own apache web server, checking visitors logs, creating web sites in macromedia flash, playing battlefield 1942 — and running away to one of the computer labs to use an imac whenever i could just to get my fix of apple. and as time went on, an interesting thing began to happen: the rows of macintosh computers were suddenly being filled, and empty seats began to appear around the dells running windows.

i finally after a few years (and some begging and pleading with mom and dad) got my own powerbook, an aluminum g4, and an ipod photo. hot shit! this was the big time, people! and it was at that point when my perspective on things really began to change.

i used to love the windows platform because i loved the control i had. i could customize anything i wanted to customize, install web servers, log readers, hack registry items — i could do just about anything i could think of doing. but just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should. that’s the greatest impact steve jobs had on me. he showed me what design really means.

suddenly, the web sites i was creating got a lot more simple. i took out the needless animations, simplified my color palettes, switched to web standards, and thought first and foremost ‘what can i remove from this to make it better?’ while classmates were still talking about — and having problems with — their windows machines and how the latest hack they applied fouled up the hack they implemented the week prior, i was using a stock setup on an apple laptop with no bells or whistles. and not because i didn’t have them, but because i didn’t want them.

my computer was perfect the way it was.

i learned that simplicity can be beautiful and that it’s more about the user experience than it is about the development experience. [honestly, it's fun as shit to play around with animations and 3D objects and pushing the technology to the max, but at the end of the day it's not about you, it's about the user.] that’s a lesson that i apply to my life still to this day.

and what an apple-filled life it has become.

i’m writing this right now on a 13-inch macbook, listening to music streaming to my stereo via an airport express, riding on wi-fi waves from my time capsule router/wireless storage device while getting updates from twitter on my iphone 4. and while my digital apple life all seems so commonplace now, i am still amazed sometimes when laying on the couch swiping through blog posts, videos, and more my ipad. because every now and then, i have flashbacks to that day — freshman year, 2002, in a penn state computer lab — logging into an imac for the first time.

because every now and then, i look down at my hands and truly feel like i’m holding the future.

image by scootie, flickr artist

i like trance music. a lot. in fact i’d say that i truly love it. the reasons why are many, but aside from being good music it’s the trance community surrounding it which makes it so special to me.

in a musical genre categorized by well defined characteristics, the level of innovation and collaboration is off the charts. to use such common musical elements and structures as other artists and rearrange them to form entirely new tracks takes a great deal of creativity. add to your original mix countless mashups and remixes from other artists and your EP is — the vast majority of the time — largely filled with someone else’s work.

what i love so much about trance is that these artists not only create their music but they actively invite people to take it and make it better — to put their own spin on it (sorry for the pun).

the business world could use a little trance influence.

you never see the giants of industry partnering together to create something special. when was the last time you saw facebook and google working hand-in-hand on anything? or microsoft and apple? or sony and samsung? for that matter, sometimes we even have trouble getting our own internal teams to collaborate together — like information security and the end users.

we were always taught that competition makes everyone better, and there may be some truth to that. business has no doubt followed in that tradition ever since history can remember. but what if we took the time to collaborate a little more? what if we partnered more between business and charity for instance? what kind of mashups and remixes could we make?

that would be some kind of beautiful music.

image by cheukiecfu, flickr artist

work is a lot like racing cars.

the one’s who go full throttle all the time are the ones who surely wreck. the key is being smooth around the track, easing into and out of turns and knowing exactly when to shift.

there’s this thought that if you’re not writing code all day, or you’re not editing powerpoints all day — if you’re not on the throttle the entire time from 8 to 5 — that you’re not really working.

and it’s bogus.

if you’re doing nothing but ‘taking care of business’ all day long, you’re forgetting about the most important part: you. if you don’t slow it down every now and then, you’re going to end up in the wall, and that’s not good for anybody.

i believe that everyone is motivated by something. i’d say that most accountants have a natural love of working with numbers. i’m sure that stock brokers get a special kind of high out of making the deal that nets their clients big returns. and i’m sure that if you spent even just a little time with three of my colleagues as they talked about solving linear programs and differential equations you’d be amazed at how much they can geek out over it. but when was the last time, as a manager or leader, that you had a discussion with your employees to find out what drives them?

some of you might answer — if you’re being honest with yourself — “the job interview”. how long ago was that? people change over time, and so you must be willing to spend the time to really watch and track how your people are changing and the kinds of people they’re changing into. you might have someone with a modeling and simulation background whom either suddenly or even gradually falls in love with data visualization. you might have a history teacher whom has a newfound love of english literature. but you’ll never know any of this unless you take the time to know your people.

do you have carrots (bonus structures, awards systems) or sticks (hard deadlines, performance reviews) in place because they actually work? or is it just because it makes your job simpler?

everyone is motivated to do something.

find out what that is. then have them do that.