Empowering Leadership and Music Articles
Each article uses our empower framework that we also use for our leadership coaching services.
renewing Persistence
Three amazing gifts of moving to the DC area and working for Fannie Mae changed the course of my life. The first was realizing that THESE people had a LOT of money, so trying to...
Persistent execution…
You’re going to think all of my time as a “customer” was doing deals with vendors, and that is not far from the truth. I came of age as custom software turned out to be more...
wonderfully Persistent…
This spring I will have worked full time for 45 years. From age 17 till now, almost exactly 15 years as builder/vendor of computer systems, 15 as a customer/user of computer...
observing Persistence
As engineering continued to grow, I picked up another direct report with a great team focusing on backend services. While our handcrafted tools were great, we observed companies...
A partner with Persistence
The NeXT team was integrated, with both Ops (now) and engineering (the future) in the same small team. This meant those engineering the future were also living with the actual...
managing Persistence….
If you talk to any IT person, other than those on the Network team, you will find that pretty much everyone hates the Network team. They are never wrong, never changed anything,...
Persistent engagement
Now that you know the Team, there are still a few stories that are worth spinning around my tour through Ops with the NeXT team. Today’s starts with the fact that our NeXT PC’s...
renewing Promises
The culture of most Ops groups are the same everywhere… and yet unique compared to other parts of IT. It is almost entirely understood by one simple metric: have you been on...
How does a Promise execute?
We were again in my office, which you are going to soon think is more a Disaster Recovery location, particularly after today’s offering. We were sitting in the dark - not...
wondering about Promise…
I know I have written before about the great office I had for this season - whiteboards on both big walls - and a big conference room table - a very nice dining table, actually. ...
The Promise of observation…
Like children, you don’t really have favorites on a Team… or shouldn’t. It is where the analogy with Pooh may break down, as he is Christopher Robin’s best friend and confidant,...
The Promise of partners…
When I started teaching at JMU, I started to notice people that I worked with from there… and there was a very consistent theme. They were all really nice people. In fact, if...
Management Promise…
I really hadn’t intended to land in Ops, and frankly thought my “career” was over. Pretty much everyone wanted the NeXT team to fail… hold their breath, and this will pass like...
engaging the Promise…
Our group was “Advanced Technologies”, doing cutting edge work with the Promise of Object Technology, Artificial Intelligence, etc. And we were in the IT group responsible for...
renewing your Thanks…
We spent about as much time at Church as we did at home during this season. Some of it was proximity - we were the go-to for all kinds of things since we could walk there in 30...
executing Thanks…
After playing for a few years, particularly around Church, people got to know a bit about what we were doing. A member of our church approached us: his son was taking “violin”...
The wonder of Thanks…
Fannie Mae was located off of Wisconsin Ave in a HUGE palace of a building - fitting for the “home of housing”, but imposing and a little stifling. As such I had a regular habit...
Thanks-observing
Happy Thanksgiving! ….and, of COURSE I have a story - actually more than one. Come on - it is 250 days in a row - today, and that doesn’t count the 175 I wrote before. You may...
Who are you Thanks partners?
When I arrived at Fannie in 1992, there were about 400 developers/contractors… and we used about 400 development tools. Now, innovation and creativity are important, but at the...
Can Thanks manage?
Before I left IBM, my new Boss needed me to come to a very important kickoff meeting before I was supposed to start. The good news is that the meeting had some people from IBM...