Posts filed under 'BizExecToBe'
Catching up on the pile of magazines – business and technology – that are stacked up on my desk here. Saw an article that says StarBucks is considering letting suppliers make after-hours deliveries by using RFID to track who’s coming and going. (Starbucks’ RFID Plan, Informationweek, Dec 13, 2004). They must be pretty serious about it (or Laurie Sullivan was running low on material), because when I went to their website to try to find the link to the article, I found articles two weeks in a row saying basically the same thing (Starbucks Considers RFID for Deliveries, Informationweek, Dec 6, 2004).
This suggests a couple of ideas to me – one, that Starbucks set up a supply holding area for suppliers to drop things off. Assuming that supplier don’t generally actually put things away, they could drop them off and the RFID system would tag when they got there. It would have to be a climate-controlled system, so that the milk wouldn’t go bad overnight, but Peapod’s already solved that problem for local groceries. Two, that the RFID be mapped to a schedule so that a given tag couldn’t get in at just any ol’ time. If you’re not expecting a shipment at 2:00 am from SupplierA, then SupplierA’s ID shouldn’t let them into your building. That reduces the chance that a stolen RFID token lets Joe Schmoe burglar gain entrance to your facility: they have to at least have done the due diligence to figure out when shipments come in. And three, that the RFID entry system be matched with a camera system to snap pics of the guy coming in with that RFID tag. That way, the access log can be synchronized with the picture of the person who made the access.
Just wanted to jot down some ideas… Carry on with any ideas that I’m a geek. Or, worse, a failed geek.
January 10th, 2005
I write too much in emails, I’ve found. Just chopped a probably 600 word email down to in the area of 100. Decided maybe the reason that some of my emails weren’t getting the reactions I wanted was because they were too long. Too long means either not read, or read and dismissed on a technicality buried in the email, or dismissed based on plans divulged that folks didn’t want to sign up to. Get ‘em in with the light one to get ‘em to the table, then get ‘em with another light one to get them another step further.
Terse. Action-oriented. Against my natural email tendencies, but I like it. Draft the email in my usual style, then chop/cut/axe to get to the bare marrow. Save the expositions for here.
Email, haiku-style.
November 20th, 2004
Noticed a trend in the spam on my website of late. Instead of pharameceutical ads, or sex life enhancement ads, I’m getting more and more poker site ads. Texas Hold’em seems to be particularly popular.
Then I got the latest copy of my campus newspaper in my mailbox. At my Jesuit university, just a couple of entries below the one talking about students parking at the cathedral, is an announcement of a Texas Hold’em tournament on campus.
I’m particularly attuned to this poker thing of late due to something I’ve noticed at work. Used to be, the guy talk around the office centered around the football pool and the latest XBox or Nintendo games. Football’s still big (and, unfortunately for my conversational options, still not high on my personal interest list), but electronic games have been dropped as a topic in favor of poker. Seems there’s a regular game, rotating amongst various folks’ homes, that lots of the guys here are in on.
Note that I say “lots of the guys here”. I’ve yet to run across a woman here who’s been in any of those conversations reminiscing about who’s stash got taken at the last game, or who’s set to lose their shirt (so to speak) at the next one.
Curious. Used to be the golf greens were the place to socialize with the guys while the women weren’t around. At least the guys could claim to get some exercise that way, little though it may be for the majority of golf-cart renting golfers. Building business relationships out in the open air, learning how the other guy approaches the shot – is he overconfident? Risk averse? Does he cheat on his score card? There’s a lot to be learned from observing a golfer, I hear. I assume the same’s to be said of how a person plays poker – how high does he bet? Does he bluff often? Can he keep a poker face? How big a pot does he come to the table with? When’s he tend to fold?
Again, just curious. Interesting dynamics in the study of work.
October 7th, 2004
When you’re an interviewee, interviewing for a position that will involve programming, interviewing with a guy who does programming for a living… don’t tell him that programming is easy, and that there’s no point in asking you about that stuff because you’ve done all of these other “harder” managerial things. Probably a poor move, if you actually want the job.
September 23rd, 2004
“Tina – If you can write this up, that would be great.” – from email from someone up the management chain from me, in an email sent over the weekend, referring to work that needs to be done by Monday. “Heard” as the boss from the movie Office Space. “yeaaaaah… that would be great.”
August 29th, 2004
Spent several hours this weekend working on my self appraisal. These are tricky things. You want to honestly evaluate yourself against your goals so that you know what to do better next year. The trick, though, is to figure out just how honestly to write your failings. Failings jump out in an appraisal. Successes, poorly expressed, end up buried. Business is a game – almost like a card game where you bet the number of hands to win. Aim too low, and even if your estimate is spot on, you still lose. Bet too high, and even if you win more than the next guy, you still don’t end up ahead. I think I bet too high this year. My goals outstripped my ability to deliver. (My project also outstripped any reasonable estimate of how much time and energy work should consume, directly contributing to my delivery problem.) What I did do was great work. What I didn’t do was check off the list of skills enhancing, career development goals – the goal of quickly assimilating new technologies to build a dependable solution that met my clients needs within a very tight timeline overtook all other career development goals. It also overtook a great deal of other time I hadn’t exactly earmarked for career stuff. Luckily, my husband and family don’t keep a file on me, and my pay rate of baby kisses and hugs isn’t tied to a requirements checklist or a timesheet.
Crystal ball in hand, I attempt to set new goals for the next review cycle. Will I bid too high? Settle too low? Bleah – settle, period? Not in my nature. I’ll probably be in the same spot next year. The consolation is knowing how much I achieved. The pain is in knowing how much higher I set the bar.
August 9th, 2004
Martha Barletta’s interview with Tom Peters, discussing What do Women Want?:
Key insight: women want what men want, just more of it. Martha makes the point that research has shown that women are more detail-oriented than men. Details bother us or delight us. To give a concrete example lots of folks can identify with, who’s bothered first by the dirty dishes in the sink at your house, or the layer of dust on the shelves? Women make the details work, and that benefits everyone (men like houses that aren’t dusty too, right?)
So, women want the details right. That’s true for the products marketed to us, the services given us (I won’t work with a company that does a horrible job at service, no matter how good the product is), and our work environments. OK, but so what? The ‘so what’ is that we, directly or indirectly, control the vast majority of the money in our economy. We either directly make the decision, or offer the input to the decision, for most purchasing decisions. We make more than our husbands 30% of the time, and as much as our husbands 20-30% of the time. We control the checkbook 83% of the time. [Think of your own finances - most of the money goes out the door for the basic category items that never hit the big decision making processes that the guys have been typically attributed with.] We talk (you knew that, right?) and give references lots more than guys do. If you’re looking to sell to us or to someone we know, that reference can make or break you. If you’re looking to hire us, or someone we know, similarly, that reference can be the difference between an enthusiastic hire of a super-qualified person, or the continuation of a long and expensive hiring process.
So, listen to us when we offer opinions about the details. Actively solicit our advice, encourage us to offer it, rather than burying us in low-level areas. Seek to find and develop women into positions of influence – who better to lead your business than someone who’s wired to make the details better for both your women customers (note that whether or not you see them, their influence is mighty!) AND for your male customers.
July 13th, 2004
In my hunts for formats for lessons learned documents, I ran across the following conference listing on the Project Management Institute’s website:
Five Lessons Learned From the Memoirs of Wile E. Coyote, by Kelly R. Slone.
Looks like a looney kind of session, if you ask me… One I’d have happily attended.
(A little bit of follow-up search found an article of the same title, written by Kelly R. Slone, in the newsletter for the Western Michigan Chapter of the PMI.)
July 7th, 2004
Something for my next employment contract: if it remains necessary for me to work at some large threshold above normal for more than 3 weeks in a row, I get an automatic bonus in the paycheck. This idea came to mind as part of the wrapup for our phase 1 deployment. This phase has been a beast – since December and up until just a few weeks ago, our whole project team was consistently wracking up work weeks in the 55 to 60 and up range. Software professionals expect that once in a while; it’s an accepted necessary evil to hit “crunch time” and work a bit harder. To do it for as long as our team did it, though, speaks of a team’s commitment to making the impossible happen, and is an expression of just how near impossible what we pulled off was. High personal cost, to us individually and to our families. Low corporate cost: there’s no financial indicator that any of this happened, since we’re all salaried. Salaried does imply a bit of leeway for the corporation, hence setting the performance bonus out after a lengthy period of overtime, rather than at the first bit. The idea is to remind somebody who runs the purse strings that this isn’t the way things should work. I’m a bit cynical: corporations learn best, I believe, when someone looks at cost versus benefit. It’s hard to quantify personal cost…. it’s a lot easier to quantify dollar cost. So it makes some amount of economic sense to make the picture clearer by assigning a dollar value to the personal impact.
June 25th, 2004
I was intrigued to see a new book by the guy who wrote The Millionaire Next Door, Thomas Stanley. His new book is ‘Millionaire Women Next Door’. Apparently in his research for his first set of books, he discovered that some 92% of the folks he ended up speaking with were men, and he decided that it was time to look for the millionaire women and find out what their secrets were. I haven’t read the book yet – want to check it out of the library – but according to the book review on Amazon, “While many characteristics such as frugality and simplicity of lifestyle are similar to those of their male counterparts, Stanley demonstrates that most millionaire women work harder and do better at school, in business, and in investment practices”.
So it highly amused me to see the book that Amazon is offering to pair it with in one of its ‘Buy Together’ promotions – ‘Lottery Master Guide’. So the secret of millionaire women has nothing to do with financial or business acumen or personal achievement; it’s that they know how to pick those numbers??
June 24th, 2004
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