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.

image by Robert S. Donovan, flickr artist

“wishing someone would sneak up behind me with a chloroform soaked cloth while I sit here in my pathetic cubicle doing work that means absolutely NOTHING to me.”

wow.

a few days ago, i saw this in my facebook feed. it was a post from a friend of mine with no fewer than 6 ‘likes’. it’s a pretty powerful statement and a sentiment that apparently resonates with more than a few people.

we need to find a way out. and soon.

on this 4th of july, it’s time to declare your independence. independence from the norm. independence from society’s expectations of cradle to classroom to cubicle. independence from NOTHING.

read, books, the internet — read anything that deals with what you want to be doing. watch documentaries about that field. LEARN about what those people do, and what they have done, in order to live the life you want to be living. pay close attention because chances are you’ll have to do some of those same things to achieve your own goals.

it’s time to declare your independence from yourself.

people have made changes before; they have given up on the 9-5 workday and they’ve gone out and made their lives work for them. in all of these cases, one thing remains true: it started with a conscious decision to give up on what they knew in order to start something else. that kind of commitment takes courage. it requires fortitude. if you’re going to have any chance of living the life you want to live, you’re going to have to decide if it’s worth the risk or not. is it worth giving up the comfort of a consistent paycheck? is it worth moving to a new city? is it worth moving away from your closest friends? your family? your mettle is going to be tested for sure; before you go running off to start your own company or head back to college, ensure that it’s really what your heart desires.

it’s time to declare your independence from doom and gloom.

you might strive to reach your goal, to find that new job in that new place making more money than you hoped for, and never see those dreams become reality. yet there is no failure for anyone who strives to make themselves better, for even if you never reach your goals you are still better off than you were on the day you started. you will have experienced new things, seen new places, and learned what it means to be on the path of continuous improvement. and should your new endeavor not work out, you can always return to the corporate world of “business casual” dress and cubicle farms. there is no shame in that; there is no shame in trying.

it’s time to declare your independence.

what better day to start than today?

what was worse than being stranded in denver’s airport after a redeye flight cancellation fiasco was being stranded in presentation after presentation filled with slides of information and no real message. for some reason, it seemed to me that people forgot a very key aspect of any presentation: a clear, understandable purpose.

there’s no doubt in my mind that those people who presented their work at these conferences are smart, talented, ambitious people. i was honestly surrounded by some brilliant people — leaders in their field with more certifications and degrees of higher learning than they have the wall space for. but knowing what you’re talking about and being able to pass that information on to others is an entirely separate matter.

it’s imperative that you reach your audience. why are they there? what’s in it for them? you have to convey what you’re talking about, where is it going, and why they should spend the next 30 minutes listening to you speak. you have to connect.

each of my presentations started off with a reason for listening ['this is going to solve these specific problems that our clients are having'], and each ended with a call to action ['this is just one example, and it's only the start. let's build on this together']. i was shocked to see just how few followed the same approach and just how many presentations i felt lost in.

we’re better than this, and there’s no shortage of resources available to help us improve.

• resonate and slide:ology by nancy duarte are must reads
• nancy also has a collection of tools on her organization’s website you can view for free
• the naked presenter and presentation zen by garr reynolds are also canonical texts

even if you don’t give presentations in your day-to-day work, read these books or any of the hundreds of articles online devoted to making presentations better. at some point in time, the lessons you learn are going to be valuable; i promise you that.

image by NHLFlyers, official twitter handle of the philadelphia flyers

when your favorite sports team finds issues to work on, they spend more time on it in practice.

powerplay numbers down? you can bet that your favorite hockey team is going to spend more time in the umbrella during practice.

not winning the battles along the boards? eat your wheaties and have yourself a powerbar before you hit the ice, because we’re doing nothing but 2-on-2′s for a solid 15 minutes down in the corners.

sloppy line changes in the second period? get ready to play a lot of dump and chase and listen for your line to be called.

i think we’ve got the individual training down pretty well in industry. we have one day training events to introduce people to new concepts. we have 2 and 3 day seminars to teach solid fundamentals of what makes a good consultant. we have week long “boot camps” for certification training and exams. but what about the rest of your team?

granted, there’s no way you can take an entire 30-40 person project team and send them all to the same PMP boot camp for an entire week. but why don’t we practice as a team on other things, like email communication? or developing presentations? or leading effective meetings? i think you’ll hear people expressing this need often enough (“hey guys, we really need to be doing a better job of sharing information.”), but we don’t ever seem to follow up on that? how come?

here are three things that should help you practice as a team:

1. set a benchmark and a goal.
   you need to know what your current ability level is first. it’s going to be hard to quantify certain things — like effective communication — but try as best as you can to keep from giving yourself an arbitrary ‘poor, average, good, awesome’ rating scale. once you know where you’re at, set a goal for where you want to be. “hey gang, our email strings are on average 6-8 messages long. let’s start using wikis and cut this number down to 3-4 messages by next month.”
2. focus on the bright spots.
   you can’t all be terrible at everything.. or maybe you are. either way, someone somewhere has to be doing things the right way, or at least closer to the way you’d like to be doing things. focus on what these people are doing and learn from them. “the client has always been impressed with julie’s presentations. let’s try to be more like julie.”
3. forgive, forgive, and then forgive again.
   people are going to make mistakes, but you should never hold this against them. how many times do you see a running back in football fumble only to have his head coach call a running play the very next series out on the field to build his confidence? forgive mistakes, use them as learning experiences, and then give that person another opportunity. “hey, trish, you were pretty shaky in speaking with the client today; you’re doing alright on your own, but you’re not there yet. we have another meeting coming up on tuesday, and i’m going to need you to be on your A-game. before the presentation, spend at least one more hour reviewing the materials and practicing than you did last time.”

use these three principles to shape your project team’s practice playbook. rather than individuals returning from training courses to a project team that isn’t fertile enough for their newly acquired abilities to incubate, you’ll see improvements across the board if your whole team focuses on that same thing. change always works best when done in groups.

it doesn’t make sense to practice your 5-on-4 powerplay one player at a time — so why do it with your project teams?

image by setlasmon, flickr artist

i’m a new breed of employee and, believe it or not, there are a lot more like me. we’re all over the place, and the best news — for us anyway — is that there are more of us coming. and perhaps the first thing that we could care less about is the traditional corporate structure.

to us, it doesn’t really matter what your title says. it doesn’t matter how old you are, or where you come from, or even where you went to school. what we do care about is what value you bring to the table… and what kind of computer you use (mac, for the win!). it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been around or how new you might happen to be because good ideas are good ideas, no matter who has them. and that’s what we gravitate towards.

we don’t want someone who sits at a bigger desk to tell us what to do, and it’s not about a lack of respect for authority. for us, we just have a different idea of who actually is the ‘authority’. for many of us, that happens to be ourselves. we want to work on what we want to work on, and it’s because — on some level — we have an attachment to it. we’re passionate beings, and we like to express and explore that passion. we don’t want to just go through life checking boxes.

we care about what we do and how we do it. employees like us don’t want email and we don’t want telephones; we want facebook and twitter. we want to be mobile. we want our office and our information in our pocket because we want our work to be anywhere. board shorts on a beach? no problem. off-site meeting with a client? no problem. we also want to have a voice in the direction that our tribes take. but beyond having a voice, what we really care about most is actually being heard. we’re not all stupid.

we care just as much about giving information away as we care about consuming it. why should anything be strictly mine? or yours? or anyone’s? you may be a great analyst and do great things with information that is provided to you, but when have you ever given back to the community that provided that opportunity to you? because if there’s one thing you should know about us, it’s that we’re relentless.

we don’t think that we can have an impact on the world — we know that we can. so don’t try to censor us. don’t hold us back. don’t act like you know what’s best for us. don’t think for one moment your ideas are better than ours just because you’ve “been there, done that”. don’t expect the same things out of us because you’ve gotten it out of everyone else who has come before. obedience without question. satisfaction over scraps of success. sorry, but we’re not interested. not anymore.

i’m part of the new breed of employee. i’m a 2.0 in a world of 1.0. so whatever expectations you had for me, go ahead and throw them out the windows 95/98/2000/xp. maybe the reason you’re having such trouble with me is because you’re putting artificial boundaries on me. it’s time for a paradigm shift; dare i say it’s time for a revolution.

so don’t box me in.

i’m glad.

image by john scardino (that's me)

when i really think about it, it’s difficult for me to believe that i’m only 25 (coming up on 26).

i’m a real hard-charger; always have been.

that makes putting my career into perspective all the more difficult.  in the grand scheme of everything, i’m only just starting out.  i’ve got miles of road ahead of me.

i’ve had more than a handful of colleagues say that i’m “on the fast track to principal.”  for someone in my position, that’s some high praise.  but i, being young, still know a bit about the way the world works:  there is no fast track.

i have to pay my dues just like everyone else (and by “pay my dues” i mean “deal with organizational politics”).  i have to work hard just like everyone else.  i’m young, so i’ll go on making mistakes that young people make.  i don’t fear mistakes because i know that’s how people learn.  i do fear, however, that people will hold my mistakes against me.  i fear that people may use those mistakes to define who i am.

it may take me 10 years to get where i’d like to be going, or maybe more; that’s the hardest thing for me to internalize at the moment.  i really feel like i can have an impact right now.  the trick is going to be in finding a way to make an impact on my world as it is today.  if i can’t affect change at the higher levels, then i need to work on making change happen around me; start with the world i know first.

for me, my hope is that my leadership will give me the opportunity to make my mistakes, and provide me the necessary support when i do find myself in those situations — rather than holding them against me.  i hope that, while the journey may be long and hard, as time goes by i won’t forget about who i am and what makes me the person i look at in the mirror every day (and it’s not just about cool shades and a fierce mustache).  i hope to keep the same passion for doing what i do.

i need to put faith in myself and believe that as long as i do what i have been doing, i’ll reach the end of my road with a few hours of daylight left to spare.

image courtesy of the herb brooks training center

“you can’t be common, the common man goes nowhere; you have to be uncommon.” — legendary hockey coach, herb brooks

of all of herb brooks’ quotes, i love this one the most.  i don’t know that it’s something i do intentionally, or if it’s something in my natural programming, but i don’t do common work.

over the last week or so, i’ve heard some pretty high praises from my client.  the program manager said of me in a management meeting, “john scardino, that dude is phenomenal.”  and just about a week after that comment was made, another member of my client’s organization said, “not to put any pressure on you, but you’re going to save [this project].”

i only know how to do things one way: the best way that i know how to do it.  so, to me, i’m not so sure that i’m really doing anything that’s truly special.  i see coworkers all the time logging long hours and doing a lot of great things.  the stuff my officemate, m. gregory white I, is doing makes me shake my head in astonishment.  i say it no matter where i go:  there are better people than me.  but there’s something that seems to separate me from the rest.

i’m uncommon.

i do a lot of the same things that other people on my team do.  i build models (sometimes fairly complex ones) in microsoft excel, just as they all do.  i build powerpoint decks, just as everyone else in booz allen.  what i don’t do is use default formatting.  and what i don’t do is take the easy way out.

i could create models that illustrate how things will work once in the system, but i don’t.  i create models that work now, outside of the system.  if you expect drop-down menus with options online, you’re going to get the same features in excel.  i could create images in powerpoint that use the default formatting, but i don’t.  i create slides that present information in a way that makes more sense, keeps clutter down, and looks good in the process.

having recently passed my 1 year mark at booz allen, i’ve been trying to reflect on what i’ve accomplished over that 12 month span — something that i can look at and say, “you know what, i’m doing something right.”  and i can say that the one thing i can hang my hat on is influence.  i’ve been able to influence the other members of my team.  my supervisor has learned as much from me as i’ve learned from him, and every day i’m seeing my officemate and other coworkers on the team starting to introduce bits of my work into theirs.  i see them starting to become uncommon.

i hate two words more than any:  ”default,” and “common.”  because it means that you’re being wholly unoriginal.  you have to be original.  and honestly that’s the best thing that i can say about a person — that they are original.  because as herb brooks said, ‘the common man goes nowhere.’

i can sit around and do common work, but frankly booz allen pays me too much money to do so.  they deserve better from me, and i deserve better from myself.  i do uncommon work because in the end, that’s what separates me from the rest.  there are other people who are smarter than i am, who are better than i am, and who are more talented than i am — but i’ve been able to reach the levels of success that i have strictly because i do things differently.

and because a year ago, there was a man who took a chance on hiring me.  thank you, brian.  you’ve helped entirely change my career and my life.  i am eternally grateful.

when you set goals, you want to make them SMART:

• specific
• measurable
• attainable
• relevant
• time-bound*

example of a really bad goal: “lose weight this year.” first of all, losing weight is a stupid goal to begin with.  most people don’t realize that muscle weighs more than fat does, and working out might cause you to actually gain weight.  you should be looking for a better resolution.

example of a really good goal: “run in four 5k events for charity this year.” it’s specific, not just a random notion of weight loss.  it’s measurable because you can mark off events as the days pass through the year;  make it one run each quarter.  it’s certainly attainable.  asking yourself to run 4 marathons might not be, but a 5k is much more manageable and takes less time to train to.  it’s not an ‘always on’ kind of goal and allows yourself some wiggle room.  it’s relevant because your overall mission is to be healthier.  your soul will feel better too because you’re doing it all for charity.  and that asterisk i placed above is the most important for making goals… although i don’t necessarily see it in the same way as the textbooks do.  instead of time-bound i say to make that T in SMART stand for ‘tell everybody you know’.  telling other people puts that goal up-front and center.  you can’t hide from it because you just might have someone say to you in june, “hey, i thought you were running those 5k things.  what happened to that?”

so when it comes down to business, are you making SMART goals for your organization?  for yourself?  for your career?

it’s a new year, and there are no excuses.  come up with smart goals, write them down, and make sure you’re taking steps towards getting them every day.  start with something specific, measure your progress, make sure it’s feasible, ensure that it’s in keeping with your overall mission, and tell everybody about it.  you haven’t failed in the past because you weren’t good enough; it’s because you weren’t reaching for the right goals.

image by elvez40, flickr artist

… they say you have to know where you’ve been.

i say, to get where you’re going — you have to know where you’re going.

stupid, right?  or is it?

whenever you start some sort of new venture, you have to know what the end state is. you have to set some sort of goal. otherwise, when do you know that you’ve gotten to where you want to be? when do you call it quits and move on to the next challenge?

i think one of the worst feelings in the world is when you’re churning away at something, tirelessly working, staying up night after night obsessing about how to perfect your work, and then one day asking yourself the question, where am i going with this?

some colleagues and i were talking about version control recently. in development terms, a product is usually given a dot-notation, integer-based version number.  v1.0 is generally identified as the first time you ‘go live’. this of course is not 100% solid; take, for instance, public betas and other test releases (you’ll also find RC — release candidate — versions in the wild). but what’s the difference between going from v1.0 to v1.1 — or — from v1.0 to v2.0? again speaking in generalities, a major change in functionality is usually denoted as a new version (i.e. v2.0) whereas enhancements to existing functionality or bug fixes are some form of dot-notation (i.e. v1.1 or v1.0.1).

but where does it end?

what’s the end state of your software, or your document, or your ms excel data model? do you stop at 3.0? at 4.0? at 4.0.23? beyond that? this is my point. when you talk about versions of something, it’s nice to say, “well we rolled out version 2.6 and we’ve started development on 2.7.”  it’s good for team morale. it certainly keeps the client happy (at least for a while) — but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have an exit strategy. you ought to be building towards something; towards some kind of goal.

this is especially dangerous in agile or “spiral” development where requirements are made up on the go. “we’re done when we get everything into the system” is a horrible way to approach things. no one wants to be told that they could potentially be paying for something until the cows come home. there should be something that your system, document, etc. resembles in its finished state.  take that vision, make it your goal, and turn it into your mission.

what about your career?  what does sarah 2.0 look like?  for that matter, what does sarah 3.0 look like? when do you reach a new plateau and change direction to work on the next mountain?

to get where you’re going, you have to know where you’re going — otherwise, you’re just spinning your wheels.

if you hear those words in your job — leave it.

i’m not joking. those are quite possibly the worst words that you could ever hear from your manager. those words say, “we’re not committed to diverse viewpoints.” they say, “we’re not committed to rewarding people for good work.” and worst of all, they say, “we’re not committed to being agile. we don’t like change.”

you don’t want to work for a company that doesn’t want to change. find a new job while you still have one. in your interview process with any new, potential employers, be sure to ask “how do you solve problems?” and “i have big ideas. if i wanted to change things, what kind of resistance would i face?”

you need to feel free to make the changes you see fit, and you need to have leadership that will allow you to change the world… even if it’s their world.