It’s a mutual friend’s Christmas party and I’ve just been introduced to you. After a few minutes of conversation I ask you “What do you do for a living?”
How did you respond?
How do you describe what you do for a living? I always wrestle with that. I’m a degreed electrical engineer that became a software engineer and haven’t written a lick of professional code in 15 years of engineering management and leadership. Yet none of those are the right answer.
Well, I finally went and addressed some of the usability issues with the blog. What you see now is the starting point of the new look.
I found over this past year that while I like the warmth of the old design, it had three major problems.
A special thank you to one of my favorite bloggers, Michael Hyatt, for the recommendation he gave on the template he uses. If you haven’t read his blog yet please go check it out.
Despite what I wrote back on January 1st, tonight will be the only true blue moon this year. Science is fascinating to me in that it never takes anything today as absolutely true, only a stepping stone to what is likely more true tomorrow. It’s in a constant state of refinement and understanding.
Take for instance our dearly dead friends Ptolemy and Copernicus. You may remember that Ptolemy once proclaimed that the planets and sun all revolved around the earth. The difficulty with this easily accepted idea was that there were a lot of things that didn’t quite add up and required very complicated explanations on how this all worked.
Nothing can kill employee morale more than a corporate performance review. Nothing can kill leadership morale then having to give them. It doesn’t have to be this way and I have a very simple solution.
The critical mistake that most mid to large sized companies make is that they confuse dollars with performance. Dollars are an economic scarcity – there are only a limited amount of them available and they must me applied judiciously when it comes time to offer raises.
Performance is not. In great companies performance is in abundance – it has no limits. It is absolutely possible that everyone on your team has done an outstanding job this past year yet due to the economic of the situation you may be forced to declare 10% of them “underperformers.” Sound familiar?
Continue Reading…
