I want a team of superheroes!

I remember one of my mentors once telling me that I should "Hire a team of Superstars", I remember this first and foremost because it's one of the few areas that I still disagree on, and it's primarily because of my personal belief that instead of getting a bunch of superheroes, "I should be enabling normal people to achieve abnormal results".

Superstars like comic book heroes are more likely (gross generalisation alert!) to have deep personality flaws that prevents them from becoming good team players, look at the classics, Batman? Socio-path! Superman? Goody Two shoes Boyscout! Thor? Arrogance!

The "normal hero" typically has insight into their weaknesses, knows their limitations and their boundaries and is more likely to team with others who are stronger in areas that they are not and inherently trust others (though sometimes they can be overly dependant) to do what they can not, rather than thinking that they can save a universe single handed without anyone helping them.

The key is how to enable the normal hero to perform superman feats.


The Blogger who wrote this post is Iron Man

Iron Man 95% Hulk 90% The Flash 60% Green Lantern 55% Catwoman 55% Spider-Man 50% Supergirl 50% Superman 45% Batman 30% Wonder Woman 30% Robin 12%

Inventor. Businessman. Genius.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

The only constant in life is change

1 month ago I and my team got outsourced to a Managed Services Provider, I have to admit it came as a bit of a shock, since I did not see it coming, but one of the common threads that came up was that my Executive Staff were not conformable dealing with the overhead that new technologies were placing on them and wanted to focus on their core competency of running a business.

The great thing about IT is that there's always something new to learn and the bad thing about IT is that there's always something new to learn. And this constant chop and change puts pressures on everyone involved.

Even though my team and I got outsourced unexpectedly there is a huge plus to this and that is that we have greater career progression opportunities in a company that sells our skills as a service, we immediately move from a cost to a profit center and we are become part of a organisation that places a higher degree of value on our knowledge as a mean to making extra revenue.

Me? Well I'm looking forward to the wider future opportunities this will bring!

Fried Monkey Brains!

Just completed the Prince2 Practitioner course and my brain is completely fried, will blog about it later when I feel a little less like Johnny Mnenonic!

A funny thing happened on the way back to work....

Some of you may have caught my earlier blog post on the reasons why I choose Cisco equipment over everything else i.e. I can throw a brick out of the window and hit someone who knows it.

Well would you believe it? I threw a brick out my windows and hit.....well no not really but...

Here's the story I was driving back from my Cisco exam this morning and I was stopped to do a roadside census, I wound down my car window and the census taker asked me a few questions about my journey, he then spotted the CCNA book in my front seat and asked me how my Cisco studies were going!

I was a bit taken aback, I mean a census taker knowing about Cisco certifications! What are the odds? Last time I checked they weren't quite the "in" thing. He then told me he was a CCNA himself and he was working as a census taker while his visa got sorted out.

Life is funny like that!

Keep Learning

Learning is not compulsory but neither is survival (W. Edwards Deming)

Unleash your inner Creative Laziness!

“Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things”

— Robert A. Heinlein

I have a special talent it's called creative laziness, it's a strange skill because it's driven by the tentative possibility of not having to do something monotonously in the future by putting near herculean effort in right now.

Why would you be crazy enough to do this?!? Well here's why:
I hate monotonous tasks! They tend to:

• Have highly complex routines and rituals ;
• Are extremely susceptible to error and;
• Take up time that could be better utilised on more important things.

Example?

Well if I find I'm doing a task more than three times (Remind me to blog about my 3 time rule!) successively, I instantly think... "Hang on! Can't this be automated somehow?" and 99 times out of a hundred it can be with enough effort and a "Can do" attitude.

In fact yesterday I was doing some operations across multiple systems and it was the 3rd time I was doing this within 2 weeks, I instantly stopped because even though the operation only takes about 3-5 minutes then that's 3 to 5 minutes of me doing something that I could [read should!] be saving by automating the process.

So I set about automating the operation and it took me over an hour of writing, testing, optimising and fine tuning the script so it could all be run at the proverbial "flick of the switch", when it runs the entire operation completes in under 2 minutes.

You may say, "You fool! You invested over 60 minutes to save yourself a couple of minutes, what a pointless waste of effort, you should be put against the wall and shot! In fact where did I put that rubber hose!!!"

But wait! In my defense, yes I did put in all that effort, however it doesn't require any mental distraction to run the script over and over again, so I don't actually lose those 2 minutes in fact my input approaches near zero and the process can be easily delegated to someone else who does not need to have the high level skill or knowledge that the original process required, and those 2 minute savings start to mount up over time, and if god forbid I ever had to do that operation over 30 times I'll get back my hour!

Now I know my strengths!

I took the Strengths Finder test from http://sf2.strengthsfinder.com and here are my top themes:

• Deliberative
• Command
• Significance
• Relator
• Analytical

The results were so spot on I found it almost scary!