Vendor Story: Message from beyond the grave

I meant to post this Friday, since it would have been more appropriate for Halloween, but I'm a bit late with it.

I had been IT Director of a Boston law firm for about 4 years, which was plenty long enough to have learned to stop answering my phone. For those of you who might not know, anyone with any sort of decision-making responsibilities in IT could easily spend 10 hours/day just fielding cold calls. As such, if we don't recognize the number (or if we don't have an assistant to field the calls), we don't pick up.

While I didn't answer my phone, that didn't mean I didn't get my voice mail. One day, I got this message:

Hi, Jenn! This is (vendor) from (company). I was just talking to (partner), and he told me that you should definitely get back to me, since your firm is very interested in (service we needed like holes in our heads).

Not such an unusual message, right?

Here's the problem: that partner he had "just been talking to" had passed away nine months before. To add insult to injury, said partner had been out for nine months before that battling cancer.

I didn't call the vendor back, but I was sorely tempted to ask him how that partner was doing and what medium he used to talk to him. I mean, wouldn't that partner's widow want to know...?

On Disaster

In my 11 years in IT, I had the dubious honor of going through a few systems disasters. (One actually earned me the nickname, "Waterfall Girl," when I presented on it at a conference.). Here are the lessons I've learned:

1. People want someone to blame. "Whose fault is this?" Was an oft-repeated refrain during the disasters. Unfortunately, in IT, "No one's," is usually the answer.
2. "I told you so" is incredibly dissatisfying to say after numerous all-nighters.
3. There's a big difference between disaster recovery and business continuity. The first is relatively easy; the second will bite you if it's not properly scaled.
4. Geeks surprise you. They will do anything and everything to get things back up and running. If you see your geeks in a disaster, prepare to have your preconceptions challenged.

In a true disaster, my first go-to person would be my brother-in-law, the firefighter. However, in any systems disaster--involving waterfalls or not--my first choice would be to find a good geek!

On Freedom

I've decided to keep this blog focused on leadership (and perhaps grammar), and I've started a different blog on inbound marketing. Why? Because I'm finally free to post my actual thoughts.

I couldn't always post my ongoing leadership thoughts because I had to be very careful that none of my geeks or anyone else in my firm thought that my posts were real. Somehow, if there was even the slightest hint that one of my geek constructs was based in real life, paranoia ensued. Perfectly understandable, but very limiting to my blog!

Oh, my posts still won't be based on actual geeks I know or who have reported to me, but I expect that no one will be suspicious now. As such, I can let my thoughts on leadership and leading geeks "flow" more readily.

I'm excited to see what will come.

On Changing Careers

Eleven years ago today, I started my first job in IT (although it was still called MIS back then). It was a career change away from the medical profession (I was a really bored medical secretary who had applied to med school), and it led me a very long way. I moved from there to my first law firm, and then became IT Director of two different Boston law firms.

By the time this post publishes today, I'll be several hours into my first day as an Inbound Marketing Consultant at HubSpot. Eleven years after entering IT, I am making another career change.

Some of you knew this change was coming, some didn't. I figured I'd take advantage of this "announcement" post to answer some questions that I've been asked recently:

Why the change?
Well, you know the saying that some folks climb all the way to the top of the ladder only to find that it's leaning against the wrong building? Yeah, that's me. I wasn't happy doing what I was doing and cared more about a lot of the peripheral job functions (okay, well, leading geeks and budgeting weren't truly peripheral...) than I cared about the plumbing aspects of the job.

But weren't you really active in the legal IT community?
Yup. And leaving ILTA was incredibly difficult. However, in many ways, ILTA and my role as Social Networking Coordinator for the ILTA '09 Conference precipitated this change. I realized that I adored what I was doing in marketing and social networking, and I decided to follow my heart.

What's going to happen to this blog?
Leadership is still incredibly important to me, and I expect that I will still blog on the topic. I also expect that I will become a "geek in transition" and will blog about what I'm learning at my new job. I'm going to blog on what interests me, and we'll all just see where it goes. I definitely appreciate those of you who have been reading since I started blogging in early '08, but I understand that you'll stop if I bore you. I hope to not be boring, but such is life, eh?

This should be an interesting ride.

On Boredom

I truly hate being bored. I don't mean "I have nothing to do" bored, I mean "I'm doing something that requires less than 1% of my thoughts but doesn't leave me free to think/do something else" bored.

I don't think I'm alone in this sentiment. I've noticed that most geeks also hate that latter form of boredom. I can't say I'm surprised--most geeks are intelligent, creative, and like using their brains; the antithesis of boring work.

The problem with this is that with my job and with the jobs that many geeks have, we have rote, boring work that HAS to get done. This work is very easy to delay until it becomes a problem for me, for the geek, or for someone else at work. To avoid this, I employ the following strategies:

• Identify the boring work. If I want to avoid the work badly enough, I can conveniently "forget" that it exists. I try to identify what I have to do but might prefer to ignore at least once a week.
• Don't delay gratification. I'm a morning person. If I try to kick off my day by getting the boring work done "first", I may as well just go home. Instead of investing my high-energy morning creativity in interesting, creative tasks, I have just frittered it away by doing energy-sapping, boring work. By waiting to do boring work until my mid-afternoon slump, I maximize my time and energy investment. (Note: If I weren't a morning person, I would probably reverse the process and do boring stuff first thing when I was mostly brainless.)
• Assign a time to boring work. Approving invoices is perhaps my most tedious task. When do I do it? Friday afternoons, of course. Why? My brain has already left the premises, so I may as well spend my time wisely and do my rote tasks then. Also, by assigning a time (which is on my calendar with a reminder), I don't allow myself to conveniently "forget" to do the work.

But enough about me. How do you handle the boring parts of your job? What works for you? I'd love to learn new strategies!

See me on ILTA TV

Edited: You can see me talk on ILTA TV (broadcast live from ILTA '09). I talk about Twitter in a one-on-one interview, and then I talk about E2.0 along with John Alber and Gerard Neiditsch.

On Wars and Battles

Over the past few weeks, I've found myself using the phrase, "Right war, wrong battle." As a principled leader, I've fought wrong battles many times without realizing that fighting those battles may have cost me the wars I was trying to win. As a geek, I've found myself doing the same thing. I've been so concerned with doing things right that I miss out on my chance to do what might be far more effective in achieving the right result.

Think of it this way: if you use all of your ammunition in winning a single battle, you won't be able to fight in subsequent battles, which will cost you the war. Whether your ammunition is political capital, human resources, trust, or budget, this analogy holds.

I'm resolving to ask myself the following questions:

• What war am I trying to fight?
• Is this situation simply a skirmish?
• Will winning this battle cost me the war?
• Is there a better battle for me to fight?
• What is my ammunition? What resources am I burning to fight this battle?

Surrendering a battle isn't my nature. I am passionate about achieving effective, efficient results for my company, and my default behavior is to fight for that in every situation. I'm hoping, however, that by prioritizing the war over each battle, I will become a more effective leader.