tasks critical to business success flawlessly. Marshals resources (people, funding, material, support) to get things done; Can be counted on to exceed goals successfully; Leverages metrics, tracking, and dashboards to make sure that positive business results can be delivered, communicated, and repeated; is constantly and consistently growing top performers, steadfastly pushes self and others for results; focuses on the Bottom Line in a wholistic way;
Roadblock – Over controls and meddles; does too much of the work themselves; doesn’t get the most out of people; has weak followers and teammates; often traveling alone
The summer of 1976 was full of global events. Bur for me, I had 2 remaining Outcomes to close before heading off to college. First, ironically, I had gotten good enough at Student Congress – an actual NFL event – to qualify for the National Debate Tournament in Colorado Springs. Second, I had been selected as an exchange student for the Lions Club to spend 6 weeks in Sweden. The bad news is that those events overlapped.
High School’s end was rapidly approaching, an Outcome we had all been working towards for 12ish years. Our class was graduating in a momentous year – 1976 – the Bicentennial, so additional press coverage by the newspaper and local TV station was invited. Over 3000 were gathered in the local Junior College auditorium for the event, including my own grandparents from both sides. I was not… I was sitting across the street at a donut shop with a legal pad and a pen….
Wandering through my High School years, I played a bit in politics. It was an interesting use of my ability to speak and think on my feet. I was on the Student Congress as a Sophomore and a Junior. I was not a very active member, but I loved wondering how we could get 30 people to agree to any Outcome. I am never sure who or why, but someone nominated me for a very prestigious event, particularly in Texas: Boys State.
By my Junior year in High School, I had found at least the beginnings of who I was becoming. Now officially on the Debate Team, I spent the summer at a camp for Debaters at TCU. Yes… I am a real nerd who actually spent two weeks preparing, studying, and practicing the debate topic for all of the NFL that season…
Texas is not friendly to mass transportation. A mix of the frontier mentality, setting out to control your destiny, and then floating in oil, everywhere you go is in a car. Particularly as you came of age, you would get your license and head out on the town… which I couldn’t until I was a senior in high school – an Outcome assured when my parents put me ahead a grade way back in Kindergarten.
Coming of age in Tyler – deep East Texas – many things managed my trajectory through this season… and into the better part of my life. My parents didn’t let me “work” so I could focus on my “job” … to get good grades, the doorway to what would be coming. Work hard, study hard, and that will pay off with Outcomes… which, to be honest, were pretty unspecific.
We hear a lot about Outcomes these days, and one of the reasons I wanted to write about Cat is that his career has a lot of ups and downs. As you saw in Decisions last week, he was once again on the upswing. By the end of this week, the Outcomes take a very different tack in his life. The soundtrack of the music and my life rarely sync up so completely, and I remember these albums coming out, and hearing some deep meanings that were obvious… at least to me…
“It is 10 to the hour, and based on our agreement, this meeting is over. Thank you for coming, we will schedule a follow-up soon. And now you may all go to your next engagement”. Stunned is probably the best description of the people in the room, including me…
As I started this series on Surf music, today’s song is probably what came to mind first. The song—this version as well as cover versions—has been featured in over 20 films and television series since 1964, appearing at least once a decade since. You may not know the name of it, but the opening and ongoing drums instantly identify it as one of the most well-known songs of that era….
Our dinner out that night in Manhattan was lovely and relaxed. Mostly because we were killing time… until an overnight flight would deliver a replacement card for a demo scheduled the next morning. In setting up our demo at THE seat of Power of IBM at that point, 590 Madison Avenue, in the boardroom no less, I had discovered the hardware was dead. And, there was something called DeltaDash that at that point was slightly more common than FedEx, and would bring us a new one at 3 am. No problem, we would drive back and have a few hours before our 10 am demo.
The code name for the series of PC’s that were the centerpiece of our Space Station Demonstration Lab was appropriately: “Circus”. All the Clever code names were things having to do with “circus” – like the network was “Ringmaster”, which is what I had now become. Our proposal would incorporate all of the elements simulating execution of the whole computing infrastructure. We had Fiber Optic Networks, Color Displays, real-time test equipment, all coordinated with a simulation environment that leveraged IBM’s PC’s in every element. Sadly, we had just been told, our proposal was mandated to bid the Division Standard 1750 chipset – or don’t bid…
Sitting in the conference room waiting, I was nervous about what was about to happen. The experiment had been a success, and we should be celebrating as a group, an Effective use of all of the talents of the team. Sadly, I had jumped the gun and helped get attention through my friends in communications, and now they wanted to feature the team in an upcoming publication. Sadly, it was not the Right thing to do, and the rest of the team was furious with me, particularly the group that was supposed to be “in charge”. And, my boss had accompanied me up to be confronted and what I thought would be an execution by the other members of the team…
My real job for this season was to design a memory card for the Display System of the Space Shuttle. Our funding was to prototype what a newer computer and color display could do to help automate the very manual ways the Space Shuttle actually worked. If you have ever used an HP calculator, their Reverse Polish Notation approach to math was very similar to what the astronauts did to command the vehicle to fly. It was very labor-intensive, and our mission was to renew that technology from a mid 60’s torpedo computer into the 80’s…
So, no problem. I had to get the facility that thought they were the center of ALL radiation knowledge in our division to work with the other facility that manufactured ALL the equipment we could build. And both thought they were the pre-eminent facility in our Division… And did I mention by this point, I had executed repeated railings about how behind the times both organizations were? And not in small ways – in a couple of cases taking on older and wiser leaders with both memos and in-person indictments of the lackluster execution from both…