GIS Day & Some Mentoring Thoughts

I’ve recently participated in several mentoring and young leader development programs through URISA Vanguard Cabinet, Eisenhower Fellowships and Washington Mandela Fellowships programs.?Working on these, I had many discussions and interactions with an incredibly promising younger generation.?On this GIS Day I thought I’d share a few thoughts and some of the things we discussed.

Writing

A professor of mine several decades ago said, “The single indicator of an engineer’s success is his or her ability to write.”?This certainly has shown true in my career.?Writing does many things.?It helps organize thoughts and to articulate them more clearly, and to a broader and more diverse audience.?Writing helps with our own understanding, forcing some level of information organization.?

It’s how we communicate in business with contracts.?For those of you who write scope of services and describe project deliverables, you understand the necessity for clarity and understanding without ambiguity.?It gives you a chance to record the information sources you used.?In the past, this was laborious, but a few hyperlinks in your work helps memorialize where you got your information and helps support your arguments.?Poor writing can get you in trouble – we’ve all sent that email that could be interpreted the wrong way.?Good writing helps eliminate this.

Becoming a good writer isn’t necessarily easy for all of us.?Learning how to edit your own work is difficult, but critically important.?Writing is a lot like running.?If you run all the time, it’s not that difficult, but if you don’t frequently run, jumping up off the couch and running five miles is difficult.?Find someone you trust to help you edit your work and help you become a better writer.

Four Important Things in Business

Consulting and providing professional services in GIS can be challenging but quite rewarding.?The first key to running a successful services company is to make sure you get projects that keep you current and grow professionally. Technology moves quickly.?Current expertise and ongoing professional growth are critical to running a successful company.

The second key is to do work you enjoy.?It’s important to enjoy what you do – you’re going to be doing it for eight or ten hours a day, and for a long time.?What does the day-in, day-out look like??Will it be fun (at least most of the time)??When I interviewed at Esri, Jack asked me, “What do you not like to do at work?”?That’s a great interview question.?It’s also a great question to ask yourself.

The third is to do work that prepares your company for the changing and new markets.?Technology creates new opportunities, but it also erases markets that you may have depended on for many years.?The High Cost of Low Hanging Fruit explains this.?Be sure that a portion of the projects you do helps develop your company’s skills and resources for what’s next.?

The fourth thing you need is obvious.?You need to make money.?Running a company that’s not profitable isn’t sustainable.?This is true for NGO’s and other organizations as well.?I overheard some advice given to an Esri business partner on how to be a good CEO – spend a third of your time on selling, a third on technology, and a third on running the business.?Maybe not exact for every situation, but good guidelines.

Not all projects will deliver all four elements, but a mix of your company’s projects should include the above four, and you should think if there are more for your particular circumstance.

Note Taking

This might seem like a small thing, but it can really improve your work.?It took over 30 years of working for me to discover and develop a note taking system that works for me.?When working as a consulting engineer, we were required to keep a daily journal.?When I left consulting engineering my note taking skills rapidly atrophied.?I tried everything.?Listening to NPR one day, Ryder Carroll was interviewed.?He seemed to have had many of same the organizational challenges that I have had.?He developed and wrote a book on the Bullet Journal Method. ?I read the book and tried bullet journaling.?With a few small modifications, it totally changed how I keep track of my work and commitments.?I’m not saying that this method is good for everyone, but get a good note taking and organizing system going.?It will pay dividends.

GIS And….

GIS is powerful, fun, interesting and it takes a lot to master everything it can do. ?But GIS is super powerful when its GIS ‘and’ something.?Like journalism, one can study journalism and become a journalist.?But one can study and develop expertise in other areas like history, geography or economics and become a journalist.?The journalist with a background in other areas brings different points of view and valuable perspectives.?GIS is the similar.?One can study and focus solely on GIS but combining GIS with other domain expertise can be applied to solve a broader range of problems.?Whether it’s one of our great problems of today such as the changing climate or growing homelessness or some of the ongoing persistent problems that have been with us for a long time like traffic congestion, endangered sensitive environmental areas, or racial inequities, adding domain expertise to GIS (and vice versa) is a force multiplier.

Continuous Improvement

The last thing we discussed in the mentoring sessions is to develop a personal culture of lifelong learning. ?The rate of change in technology, society and business is increasing, and it becomes more important than ever to be constantly growing, learning, and changing.?This is a personal responsibility we have to ourselves.?No one is going to do this for us.?GIS brings powerful tools to help us do great things, but GIS capabilities are growing rapidly, and we need to embrace learning as a key part of our daily work in order to take full advantage.?We don’t know how the world will change, but it will and if we don’t change, grow, and learn, we won’t be able to address the challenges of tomorrow.