Monthly Archives: July 2012

When a team becomes a team

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I really love it when a team finally becomes “alive”. Anyone who has played on a sport or ever worked on a major project (theater, music events, etc) knows what I’m talking about.  There’s that tipping point where a group of people who work together realize that they’re relying on each others’ strengths/weaknesses, and start talking frankly about how to optimize.  There’s a rhythm that’s established, there’s excitement that happens whenever everyone’s clicking, there’s really awesome sense of ownership and purpose whenever it happens.

I love it. It’s the best thing to happen in an organization.

Of course, people on the outside may say “hey, why didn’t that start from the beginning?” And the reason is that we had to 1.) get a good leader in place 2.) come up with a gameplan 3. ) get everyone on the same page to make this happen.

The hardest part was getting a good leader who was able to lead. Then it took a bit of time for all the members used to that person.

But now…it’s go-mode! The team is alive, ALIVE!

 

Humans are “beings”; not Human “beens”, or Human “will be’s”

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Lives are verbs. Humans are being, like rivers are being, like anything that moves and grows and suffers the spectrum of life are beings

We live too often thinking that a milestone, or a collection of milestones, will build us into a monolith of adulthood. As if all wisdom, knowledge, and experience can be encompassed in a life. I once conceited that the best approach to experiencing life was to suffer, celebrate, be destructive and cruel as well as kind and creative. Why not know how it all works?

I think when people approach their jobs, they view it as an end-all-be-all to their growth. They hope to find fulfillment through something that requires you to commute 2 hours/day; work 8 hours/day; and think about more than appropriate on something that ultimately is perhaps a distraction from their true interests and vision. But it’s not so. We’re beings. We need to recognize what is our work and what is our distraction, and being our work means that we’re making the concerted effort to live.

Buckminster Fuller says it best.

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

This may be a bit scattered, but I’ve been thinking about this for a while. Perhaps, like all other things in life, it’s a work in progress. And perhaps that’s apropos for this entry.

 

This is what all jobs look like, for people who have 50,000 ft optics

What I do on my time off

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Julie and I flew out to chicago to meet vendors and plan out more parts of our wedding. We saw bakers, photographers,  caters, a florist and met with our musician. It was pretty jammed-pack day because I was still fielding calls from work, responding to emails, and in general pseudo-working. This is the worst thing about being a small business-owner – your life is work. And the important milestones in your life (like a wedding….) gets impacted. Lucky for me, Julie is patient and I have learned to not jump on the phone at every text/call/beep.

While we were in Chicago, Julie really wanted to enjoy the city. So what did we do? We called up Mike Else, aka Professor Kliq, who is also D&T’s Social Media guru, and spent the day with him. We went to brunch, checked out shops ( he took us to several awesome shops where I got an AWESOME hat + vintage shirt), walked by the lake, tried out a few beers in the neighborhood, ate ice cream….we enjoyed Chicago in the summertime.

The day before that, we hung out with Paul Petrowsky – D&T’s Creative Director.  I’ve been friends with Paul since grade school. Julie and I went over to his house to see him and his wife, and later that night we went out to a craft brew bar and drank amazing KC beer + local brews. Good time had by all.

The day before THAT, Julie went over to Tim Daly’s parents place to celebrate the 4th of July. Tim is D&T’s Director of Operations, and also a great friend for life. We shot nerf guns, ate great food, and played card games. My parents came as well.

So…what I guess I do with my time off is still interact with all the people at work. Which I couldn’t ask for a better lifestyle. I’m glad and grateful I get to impose on all these people and hopefully it’s not obnoxious.

 

Yay! Mike Else is a friend!

Mistakes were made

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Mistakes are made daily in a company. Everyone knows mistakes are going to be made. We tell each other this, we tell ourselves the same, and so you’d think we’d all be ready as all get-out when a mistake is made.

 

But it never happens that way, right?

 

Mistakes get made, and we do the following:

1.) CYA – Cover your a$$. We argue why it wasn’t our fault, how we did everything in our power to prevent it, how we warned against x thing. This is a scary reaction: it indicates that the company harbors a culture of fear. A company that is afraid of making mistake  is afraid of taking risks. 

2.) Argue why it, what IT is, is not a problem. “It’s just the course of business…you’re being to hard on this….etc” We deny that there was a problem, that a ball was dropped, and so we pretend that we can’t improve systems or work better in the future. This is a dead-end to any company that hopes to grow.  

3.) Dredge up OTHER mistakes to gloss over the current issue. Again, another form of denial. This is another version of CYA only it brings a tit-for-tat dynamic that is ultimately destructive.

 

We as a company need to be proactive and treat mistakes as opportunities. We need to acknowledge mistakes and provide viable solutions, even if the solutions are wacky and incomplete. There is no defense against human nature – we WILL make mistakes – so let’s get to a place to grow up and deal with them when they happen, not if they happen.

 

This has been a PSA from the guy who made a truck-load of mistakes in the last 24 hours alone....