June 16, 09 by Craig
For some time I’ve always felt there was value in having a mentor. Though over the course of my life I’ve seldom setup a formal mentor, though looking back I supposed I could nearly consider many people such a person. Rather than just stress the value of having a mentor I’d like to look at the value such a relationship can provide. Whether you get those pieces of value in a formal mentor situation or just through dinner with people the key is to grow.
1. Find someone to learn from
The obvious first step you should take is to get face time with those that are more experienced and have done it before. This is usually something that younger people that have not been out of school long steer away from approaching those with experience. Perhaps its intimidation, perhaps its that you feel they don’t think it would be worth their time. But from my personal experience I’m normally more than happy to help anyone that asks, and likewise anytime I’ve asked someone I’ve gotten positive results. This is usually as simple as can we get dinner/lunch/coffee sometime?
It should be pretty obvious who you may want to spend this time with. If it’s not then start simply take a boss, teacher, or some manager/supervisor in a lateral department.
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June 13, 09 by Craig
Having spent most of my early career in consulting and now being at a software company I’m realizing there were a lot of principles I picked up that I now readily apply in my daily happenings. As I find myself interacting with most of my colleagues, many of whom have only been in software companies, these principles are as evident.
1. Listen to the problems not the solutions
Often times in early interacting with a customer people will ask what do you need. As a consultant I would never ask what they needed, if they knew this I wouldn’t be there. Instead, I ask about their problems. It’s then my job to take what they tell me about their problems, their environment, and then steer them in the direction of an appropriate solution. While very basic this is the key to consulting, asking the right questions to steer your customer so you can provide value.
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June 08, 09 by Craig
Google doesn’t understand social or collaboration. There’s not much more to it than that, though for the sake of making this a an actual blog post I’ll explain a bit more.
Blogger was huge, it was the place to go if you were creating a blog. There weren’t many www.mybloghere.com, many of the largest most popular blogs on the internet were on blogger. People had accounts, people registered to post comments, people had full fledged profiles that could have easily preceded a facebook profile page. Google bought blogger and had more than enough resources to grow blogger into a sizable social community. But if you visit it looks much the same as it did 5 and almost 10 years ago.
Google spreadsheets is one of the best online spreadsheet programs, and you can even collectively work on a spreadsheet with others at the same time thousands of miles away. Who do you know that uses google spreadsheets that isn’t some form of a techie? It likely has a user base of under 1% of users of spreadsheets, and its not because it’s missing the power features of pivot tables and such. If you re-brand it as a collaboration tool when working and throw chat/video/whiteboarding in the same application google would have an instant growth 10 fold of users, but they don’t understand that a user seeing the same thing on a spreadsheet and seeing what the other types in a single document isn’t collaboration!
To jump ahead of the curve, counter arguments I’ve already heard are around ads and gmail. Gmail, google didn’t improve email, they simply give you lots of space for free, if gmail were to cease to exist tomorrow users would simply jump over to yahoo or microsoft. Ads, google changed the ad industry by making search effective, they’re good at algorithms and such, but they don’t get users and collaboration, and at their current rate they never will.
Wave isn’t meant to just improve email, it’s meant to be a tool for collaboration, to view a conversation as an entity, and google just doesn’t get the conversation part.
