The Friday Thing #815

Oh hey…Friday.

The Friday Thing #815 has been bouncing around in my head this week - mainly on my bike rides as I am finally back out on the road. It’s always a place where I come up with new ideas and synthesize lots of input from the week. That word synthesize is one I am getting more comfortable with as I think it’s a big part of my new job, and a big part of what I have always enjoyed doing. I like joining dots. And I like building things. I don’t mean the literal buildings of things and I have trained myself to be careful about the overuse of “architect” which is prevalent in the tech industry. I have a real architect in the house who actually does design and build real, physical structures that are worthy of seven years of education and will almost certainly outlast any piece of software that is “architected”. Noted.

I digress. The point of this week’s edition is simply to direct you to the Beyond the Blue Badge podcast from the Microsoft Alumni Association. I stumbled across this via the September 2002 edition where Neil Holloway talks about Adaptive Leadership – including a fun journey he and I took to Leeds United football club way back when that ended up with Neil holding an Xbox on the centre of the field at half time during a mid-week game against Everton. It happened to be the Xbox I “imported” to the country before it was available or announced in the UK. Fun times ??

There are tons of great episodes in this podcast with people I worked with, for and admired from afar. One such character is J. Allard and having listened to his episode a few times, one thing really stuck with me that I came back to this week. J talked about the moment he realized his core skill was a builder vs. a fixer (or as he characterized pioneers vs. settlers). The world needs both of these skills – and, I have tried both over the last few years. In doing so, I have learned that I can do settling, but my energy is comes from pioneering. Neither is better than the other but knowing where you sit is insightful. And once you figure out where you operate best, the quicker you realize how much you need the opposite skills around you. It’s illuminating. J also talked about ‘high wires and wide nets’ but that is for another day and I briefly covered it back in edition #776.

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That’s all for this week. Well, apart from the fact that Terry Smith , Janelle Poole , Bradley Tipp , Karl Noakes , Mark Croft , Jennifer Smith , and whole host of others needs to be on this podcast….c’mon people.

Happy Friday friends. Music for this week is Run by Snow Patrol.

-Steve?