It’s that time of year
As we enter the week of Thanksgiving, and head into the core US holiday season, we’re supposed to be thinking about giving thanks and being generous.  Of course, we’re also entering the final stretch of the quarter and the year, so we’re over-committed at work and trying to balance our obligations at home as well.  It’s a tricky time to be an effective employee. It’s worth noting, however, that managers are also soon going to be working on annual performance reviews.  And while we all know reviews should cover the entire year’s work, often times a high-impact event at the close of the year gets some extra mental attention during this busy tim

Discard your crutches and run!
If you’re in the corporate workforce, you’re familiar with Powerpoint, and probably familiar with various controversies around it.  People spend a lot of time debating how much or how little to put on slides, they design cool systems for maximizing impact, and they worry endlessly about how to word something on a slide in case it somehow bites them later. There’s a radical solution here which I like to apply once in a while.  Don’t show any slides.  Just call your meeting and meet. You should see people squirm when there’s nothing being projected.  You’ve forced them out of their comfort zone, and set the stage fo

Nothing is so constant as change
You’ve probably noticed over time that “talks shop” takes on a variety of meanings on this blog.  I might talk about EMC, corporate life in general, high tech trends, or management.  I occasionally mention software development, but it’s not a big focus here, even though that’s what my team does.  Finally, I almost never talk about the products my team works on. There might be some changes coming on some of those lines. Today I officially enter a new role at EMC.  I still work for the same team, doing Storage Resource Management for Ionix.  But I’m stepping “sideways” into a Technical Lead role.  The context o

Meandering thoughts on social search
On my drive into work on Monday, my mind was filled not with thoughts of Storage Resource Management but rather Social Search.  Google recently made some inroads into this area, but I feel like we’re on the cusp of something revolutionary and nobody is seizing the opportunity to change the game. Everything I am about to describe is achievable with today’s technology.  And yet it sounds like science fiction.  Here’s the world I want to live in. Somewhere, an agent acting on my behalf understands my networks.  My networks overlap, are complex,

Working in the moment
I’ve been thinking a bit more about the topic of my previous post (deadlines forcing decisions and focus), and comparing it to some other moments of high-energy, high-engagement, high-satisfaction productivity over the years.  I realized there was a factor I hadn’t really considered before, and that was the capacity of the task to force all participants to remain in the moment. For example, contrast these two anecdotes: Ben knows his daughter is home sick from school today, and he’s worried about her.  He keeps g