Moving On, Good Tools & Bad...

Faced with an opportunity in our personal lives, perhaps even something that's challenging and difficult, we leverage our past experience or reach out to someone in our personal network that has that experience or who knows someone, the open ended friend of a friend connection.

YouTube extends that friend of a friend network.  If you want to do some brake maintenance on your 2008 Ford Fusion you can find it, and some person doing it casually will be more authentic than a slick video production by Ford (who would not do this anyway because of the service business revenue stream).

During our employment (or business ownership) we have a range of resources both subcontractors and vendors and of course our valued employees.  This is the strength of 'the organization.'


Leadership...
I used to judge my peers, fellow managers and executives, quite simply.  Would they make a good neighbor, honoring boundaries, showing up to help without solicitation and understanding the proportional responsibility of talking and listening.  Seth Godin writes frequently on his blog and in far fewer words than I use, convey thoughtful prompts at business, life, leadership, etc.

The essence of his blog post which started me thinking was on a theme of looking foolish.  Good leaders are willing to set down their guard, to not act corporate, not be aloof and to not play it safe.  

The long term CEO of my former employer was an interesting guy.  His grandfather started the business and he grew into his leadership role under the guidance of his father and at least one of his uncles.  Today I wrote the following:
 
Jim Ryan, while clearly in charge and in pursuit of his vision, drew his audience in, pleasantly comfortable with pointing the 'fool' finger at himself and others.  I enjoyed his ability to do that, not at the expense of others.

Revised Criteria List for Good Managers & Executives:

• Would they make a good neighbor?
• Are they comfortable being foolish?
• If they were in the front of the room how long could you listen to them?

Tools...

 My Facebook comment for this image was "
Consideration was given to attempting to re-enter the earth's atmosphere but there may be a problem with the heat shield...this is all I have to work with."  That seemed to be clever at the time.

Good tools and good people help us succeed.  The screwdriver and the Irwin Vicegrip are junk. The bolt cutter looks good but I fully expect it to explore in my face at the worst possible time.  The Milwaukee screw gun is old and but a 12V but I just bought new batteries for it because it was USA made.  The new batteries are Chinese.

People let us down, especially those that are tools.

The next time I'm in a hiring position for IT people I'm going to show the candidate this image and ask them 1) what the items are and 2) what are three things they could do with these.