In-Flight WiFi

OK, here is an experiment. I want to see if anyone reads this by the time I land in Seattle. I am on a flight from Oakland to Seattle. I am on the plane and using the Alaska Air In-Flight Wi-Fi. Sometimes I like not being connected to everyone, but i wanted to test this whole system out. So again, pushing the concept of communications, I am blogging from a plane.

It does bring up the question of how far can you take connectivity. We all know that it can be too much, sometimes way to much. you need down time. you need vacation. you need to be able to have time for yourselves. So dont let connectivity take over your life. I think that the STAK experiment is great in that it makes information free within our group. All professionals need to be "in the know". I dont care where you are in the organization. And most of that information should be free. I dont mean that you have to pay for it, but that there should not be a barrier to getting it.

You all know the managers that you have had (or maybe still have) who control information like currency. they save it and dole it out to their favorites or use it to extract a certain behavior. Now I understand that certain information is confidential, but come on. Some of the stuff that I see is not fair. People should have access to information they need.

You need to have an understanding of a project...hey here is a Google Earth video of the project.

You want to know how we are doing as a group? here are the metrics

You want to know about new wins...you should have that. That information should be free.

But with that freedom comes responsibility. Remember information or data is neither good nor bad. It is simply data. What you do with it and your actions will be good or bad. If you react unprofessionally to information, we start to have issues. I want information to be free. I expect that you will be mature enough in you professional careers to manage that responsibility.

I did, however, pay $4.95 for the Wi-Fi service.....although I may get a credit as an Alaska Gold MVP member. I will lobby hard.

Are you "healthy"?

Did I get your attention. I want to talk about your client management/development activities. But let me use a specific way of talking about it.

Say someone goes to the doctor, they drink excessively, they smoke and they eat at McDonald's 4 times a week and are 20-30 pounds overweight. Do you think that when they meet the doctor, they are amazed and SHOCKED when the doctor tells them to stop drinking and smoking and to eat healthier? I dont think that they are. I think that they know that. they all hope for a magic pill that will fix the problem for them, but there is no magic pill. Being healthy take time, effort and energy. It takes, as Laurie Raskasky tells me all the time, PERSONAL ACCOUNTABILITY.

So ask yourself this question, are you healthy at work when it comes to your clients and selling more work? Any training I would give you would be like that doctor talking to the patient. You know the answer already. You do. You just need to start doing the things that will lead to more work and, we can talk about this later, moving your career ahead. It occurs to me that people who bring in work, get ahead a bit quicker, not that it is the only way, but it does seem to have an effect.

Don wait for the client to call out of the blue (that is the magic pill you are waiting for), pick up the phone, dust off your rolodex and start getting healthy.

Best Practices for Career Development

OK, here is a thought on career development best practices...you have to talk with your staff about where they want to go. Pretty simple. I dont care what forum it takes or how you do it, but if you have staff working for you, you should be talking to them about their career. If your work for someone (and we all do) you need to make sure that they are having these discussions with you.

One of the reasons why I like the Jong Baggaar group is that it does create a new channel for me to talke with staff. I think that this is important. Maybe 90% of what we talk about does not matter to 90% of them. But there is some real and valuable discussions that have happened because of the JB group concept. Another reason I love this is that when we started this people predicted our Financial Billability numbers would go down. The opposite has happened. They have gone up. Interesting!!

More to come on the concept of collegiality and information sharing in professional services.

An awesome start to the week

Just got off a call with Paul Doody and Joe Corrado on the Hudson. But Paul started talking about the new work on 12 mile creek. This is great. Lots of new work.

Test again

This is another test

This is a test of the blog system.