Running Diary: The high school speaking gig

I had a colossal speaking engagement failure, and I mean that in a really good way.

The high school that my daughter will eventually go to also happens to be the one where my Dad ended is 25+ year teaching career in gleeful retirement bliss.  As such, he’s got a lot of friends still there on campus and one of them happened to be teaching a pair of courses in the business department that seemed ripe to pick my brain on things I’ve learned over the last 15 years at HP.  The first is a business development course where students arrange themselves into groups and run a ficticious business of their choosing, having to deal with accounting, hiring, business analysis and the like.  The other is an HTML development course that eventually gets into Flash editing.

I’ve done dozens of presentations for HP VP’s over the years, but there’s nothing quite like being stared down by an angry teenage girl and I was reminded about a few things in the process.

Running Diary: Cold weather survival team building

Every year, my boss gets our geographically distributed team of 30+ full time staff together for a  multi-day get together. Among the things we do at these meetings, which was especially important this past year since a reorg brought us a new subset of people, is play some team building game. We shuffle the people in our three development teams so we get a chance to interact with people we normally wouldn’t, which gives us a chance to build a wider set of relationships.  This year’s game was particularly interesting as it presented a scenario that created a microcosm of the things that go on in real projects:

• Requirements were sometimes vague
• The group had to decide what to optimize
• Not everybody got their way and arguments insured
• Time was sometimes not used as wisely as it could have been
• The outcome was mostly correct, but not perfect

Running Diary: The Mid-Year Accomplishments List

Many years ago, Dave Packard noticed that his accounting staff had to put in overtime at the end of December in order to process all the necessary paperwork to close out the financials for the year and he didn’t think that was fair for them to have to give up family time in that way. So, he moved the start of the fiscal year to November 1 (moving it back to December 1 complicated Thanksgiving plans) and thus HP’s unusual financial quarter boundaries were born.

That’s a really long-winded way of saying I’m late when it comes to completing my mid-year accomplishments list, which I should have done in May but am only getting to now.

Why make a mid-year accomplishments list? Well, what did I do last November? Uh, off the top of my head I can’t remember. If I can’t remember that now I have no hope of remembering it in October just before my performance evaluation. Hence the need for a mid-year accomplishments list.

Running Diary: The Elementary School Computer Club

My 6 year old daughter is wrapping up her year in Kindergarten and it’s been a fun time. Volunteering at her school, however, is surprisingly competitive. There are only so many slots to help out in the classroom and they lock up so quickly that up until now all I was able to get into was a book fair. It turns out, though, that not every parent builds web sites for a living and that was particularly attractive to the school’s computer club, who I recently showed the basics of HTML editing.

If nothing else, the experience reminded me that it’s a good idea to get out of your regular work environment every once in awhile. It helps you see the world from a different perspective and, for me at least, let me appreciate the cool factor of my job I sometimes take for granted.

Running Diary: The Podcast Guest

Of all the connections I’ve made since starting this blog, this one was the weirdest.

Back in January, I wrote an article on Web Worker Daily entitled “Get Mad But Don’t Get Even – Turn an Insult Into a Favor” and a fellow HP employee invited me to appear on her internal podcast as a result. So, I made a connection on the inside by doing something on the outside. That’s still very strange to me.

In preparation for this interview, which focused on the soft skills topics I write about here, I listened to a few she had done before with a wide variety of executives from our printer division to get a sense for her questioning style. I wrote down a few bullet points I wanted to cover and then tried to forget about it for a couple weeks before we’d record the session. I worried about being too prepared and sounding stiff, instead wanting things to sound more natural and off the cuff.

Running Diary: The college speaking gig

I have shocking news: Pizza attracts college students.

I know, you’re probably thinking that pizza and beer would do better, but I couldn’t exactly justify an alcohol expense for an official company visit to a college, now could I?

Running Diary: The 18 hour travel day, Part 2

In Part 1 of this Running Diary, which started yesterday and prompted an attempt to record the events real time, I got hosed. Two canceled flights caused what should have been an easy 4 hour trip from Portland to Cincinnati into an 18 hour ordeal of a lot of waiting. To top that off, I’d miss the Pop-Up Video version of the Lost Season 3 finale. I suppose that’s what Tivo is for.

Mostly, this turned into a recording of absurd observations, although I did score yesterday with my tactics to get access to ticket agents that I’m particularly proud of. Then again, I did spend 9 hours at the Portland airport yesterday so I can’t be that smart.

Running Diary: The 18 hour travel day, Part 1

I’m having a Planes, Trains, and Automobiles kind of day today. It is Wednesday, January 30 at 2:25p, PST as I type and I usually don’t go for stream of consciousness entries. Even my usual Running Diary’s are typically told in past tense and, truth be told, I write them after the events have transpired not as they are happening.

But today is different. Everybody has had a bad travel day and I’m having one right now. But with wireless access and 5 more hours to kill before my next flight, I thought I’d try to find some humor in this situation and share. This entry might end up sucking and it is admittedly more for me than it is for my faithful readers, but I’m guessing everybody can at least relate to what I’m going through today.

Running Diary: The trade show presentation, Part 2

In Part 1 of this Running Diary, I discussed how I hoped not to repeat a failed trade show presentation from 8 years ago and what the process was for my coworker Slawek and I went through to get our submission accepted was like. While contemplating how to pronounce “Slawek” (you say the “w” almost as a “v”, but not quite), you’ve likely been on pins and needles wondering how it all turned out.

Good thing for you, that’s exactly what this entry is about.

The actual presentation

Once at the conference, I borrowed an old trick I learned from high school football: case out the venue first. The first thing we used to do when we got off the bus at a road game was go walk around on the field. The idea is that you want to get a feel for the environment before you have to perform in it and there’s a ton of people starring at you.

Running Diary: The trade show presentation, Part 1

In 1999, when I did my first trade show presentation, the room I was given sat 150 people. Unfortunately for me, 138 of them were vacant. That wouldn’t have been so bad had I not worked with 6 of the people present, including my boss, my boss’ boss, and my boss’ boss’ boss. It was a nice show of support, but it turned pretty embarrassing when one of the 6 strangers who showed up left half way through.

I swear, though, I had those other 5 entranced. Heck, one of them even asked a question and that’s 20% of my audience engaged enough to start a dialog. I’m sure that impressed the big bosses of mine in the room. Not.

It’s been awhile since that nightmarish debacle. This two part Running Diary tells the story recent presentation a colleague and I gave at a vendor trade show with my buddy Slawek (and who among you has a buddy named Slawek, I ask?). Here in Part 1, the genesis and creation of the presentation is covered and in Part 2 I’ll go over how the actual event panned out.