The otherside

Hi world.
Take your morning coffee with you to the balcony and enjoy the fresh air. Go for a run during the day. Meet clients and network with smarter people than yourself. Learn. All the time. Learn a lot. Read. Blog. Study. Read some more. Go to conferences. Speak at conferences. Work a lot. A lot! Because I don’t know if there will be much work after this project. So I need to work now while I have this. Get things done. Projects are limited, clients really want you to help them. The objective is clear. My strengths are clear. (I mostly work with my strengths, those pay my bills). The results are clear. The KPI’s are client references and recommendations, and own learning curve. New jobs. Through old clients. With new clients. More learning.

They say being an entrepreneur is difficult. Never previously had I had so much clarity, self-directivenesss and sense of direction than by driving my business myself. That is my entrepreneurial mojo, to get things done which clients could not. To facilitate understanding. To challenge where internal mouths could not.

Now, I’m on the otherside. In a company (still on a mutual tasting period, though). Having real colleagues, which I do enjoy a lot. I enjoy the brilliance of my new colleagues most. Almost every day I hear about something geeky and exciting we are working on. I am stopped in the corridor to be tested on facial emotion recognition. Yikes! I am offered to be taught how to run a service design based process development workshop. Yes, please! As a people operations professional, I am watching my colleagues from the organization (who have no responsibility of HR/resourcing, but just care enough and are capable in skills I don't possess) taking responsibility in finding, testing or developing a modern internal resourcing tool themselves. What? Yes! Please! More! Go, you smart professionals, go!

At times I feel like under-delivering, because the list of development needs feels endless and occasionally I get a strange thought that all this organizational development should be “my” job. The traditional brainwashing still lurks somewhere in this modern thinker’s autopilot. Of course it is not my job alone. It’s everyone’s job to create the workplace we want to work in. 

What excites me the most is to tweak organizational practices and wipe the floors from Tayloristic thinking, really. Out with control and command. In with trust, self-directiveness, transparency (as much as a listed corporate can handle) accountability and full focus on customer value. We have a long way to go, and we are learning. A purpose of an organisation often takes years to crystallize. Our direction is pretty clear. This is how I'd explain it over a beer to a friend: "Being a ridiculously brilliant Northern European partner for anyone who needs geeky data-tech-analytics-intelligence-software-end-user-location services-big data-IoT-predictive analytics...Well, you name it, we have geeks for it, can build it, can analyze it, can predict it, and can help you make revenue on it."

There is so much potential. There is so much we can do together.

Hi, Affecto. Thank you for the first two months. It is a pleasure to get to know you better.

Oh, and by the way. We are hiring.

/Riina