Spent most of yesterday doing a brain dump on social networks and media for the Managing Partners of the firm. Today’s task will be to cull it down to the relevant and actionable for them to prioritize and work on. The tough part of this assignment is trimming away to the required vs. desired. I always believe that the background information is just as important as the action item it supports. As I’ve been and continue to be a trusted advisor and –I hate the term—coach/mentor to numerous executives, professionals and people just starting out in their careers; the one thing I found that’s gotten most of them into CLMs (Career Limiting Moves) has been not getting enough depth to appreciate the situation.
Today, more than ever almost every situation is nuanced. While the 5 minute manager approach may help with delegation, clearing one’s desk before the end of the day, it brings with it the risk you’ve hidden a problem that will fester and come back in a day, week or month in a more critical form. This because one didn’t want to take the time to really listen. If you follow the news on the economy and all the shortcuts that are being taken you can see the end results. We seem so fixated on instant gratification and new experiences our society seems stuck in a Mobius Loop trying the same solutions with new window dressing and labels expecting a different result. Einstein’s comment on insanity seems appropriate here. — Just a random but connected thought to my task at hand today.
What I had started to post today was reviewing my reading stack and retooling activities. –for those that haven’t met me face to face, I’m known to be a voracious reader ~10 books a month. The majority of these are typically business and technology books. Many in different fields that give me insights to solving problems in my field, which is how I came about naming my company Intellectual Arbitrage Group (leveraging knowledge from one field to solve problems in another). The picture is last month’s and this month’s current reading list. [Not sure if I’m winning or losing, the stack keeps getting bigger]
Three of the several I’ve started this month are fairly practical are by friends: Ira Fuch’s Enterprise Application Development in SharePoint 2010, Steve Fox’s Developing SharePoint Applications using Windows Azure and David Pallmann’s The Windows Azure Handbook Volume 1. Like the books so far, extremely jealous that they manage to write books. I’ve about a half dozen false starts on my Enterprise Architecture book. The best I’ve been able to do so far is contributing ideas, concepts and methodologies to others books, staying in the background or writing articles or creating methodologies and training materials. This blog and a writing course a friend, Ken Hall at Gensle, had referred me to, is an effort to finally get what I do that friends and clients say they admire that I do into print, so they can do it too. The other books are more theoretical, however, what I seem to be able to do for others is bridge that gap from theory to practice making these concepts actionable, thus is the life of an architect/methodologist.