Category: Life

Today’s Measure of ‘Being Somebody’

How do we measure for what makes somebody a “somebody”? Years ago, being somebody meant you had your name in the phone book, which meant you had a phone in your name. Today, we have lost a common measure of what it takes to be a “somebody”.

The standards are now based on the individual, their surrounding, their social circle, short and long term goals and for some, pay.

Being in the phone book was followed on with owning a cell phone or owning a dot-com then onto having a Web site about you. Along the way though, the path forked and now the many options means people have to set their own personal standards which could include being unique and able to stand out.

A year ago, we saw how being Somebody involved getting huge number of friends on Twitter. What does someone do with all of those followers? Are they just quantity or quality? Is the list made up of people who just follow who is popular but never actually have the time to ready through the hundreds of people they ‘follow’?

On one of the new social photo systems, I noticed one person that we getting more and more followers, largely due to their photos always showing up in the ‘Popular’ area. Their pictures where across such a variety that they had something for everyone. I started to think that the images where not actually being taken by the person. It started looking a lot like the sites that feed Twitter automatically just to get hits.

Then came a image of a note stating that the person had to stop posting pictures for a while because their iPhone was broken. Someone commented that the images uploaded by this individual were too important to not have any more so why doesn’t everyone chip in to buy them a new iPhone… it went from there. Genius… I wont get into if it was all a plan or not. But, it does show how creative people are getting by being a ‘somebody’.

Being somebody in the social world, if your popular in the quality crowd, you can get creative with how to turn that into of value to a business.

On the other side of being a ‘somebody’ is the person who isn’t after the masses. They are a somebody because they always deliver… working as a team member for the success of everyone. They never assign their name to the success of a project. They promote it as a team effort since they don’t see the need to be ‘somebody’. Their internal pride makes them a ‘somebody’ to themselves. They don’t need to feed off of being fingered by the masses. Generally, I have found this is driven early in their lives by parents telling kids they were proud in them. This is carried forward in life where the kids as adults know that their performance is recognized without the need to brag.

 

The other way the future is changed forever

There has been several stories, books and movies, where the US is turned upside down by a plane flying into a major political gathering. Ending that complete level of government at least for the while of getting new representation in from other states. Even though the spots can be billed though, the mind set and flow is broken till the new group comes up to speed. Most likely, taking the future in a different direction.

A friend pointed me to a article on TechCrunch talking about a get together that the President did. Inviting many of the top minds in high tech to chat and have lunch. From their post: “the star studded invitee list included Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, Cisco’s CEO John Chambers, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Genentech Chairman Art Levinson; Google CEO Eric Schmidt; former state controller and venture capitalist Steve Westly Doerr, and Stanford University President John Hennessy. The event was held at Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr’s home.”

What if a plane hit that room? Politicians are representatives of a state or country. They have been elected to help get done what is best for us and do the arguing and reasoning for us. The tech group in the lunch do not do that. They are where they are now because the think outside of the box. And then, they convince others to see the vision, encouraging people to go beyond their limits to create the future. They are driven by their idea, building their business and creating something great. Most importantly though, they are gifted at taking their vision and getting others to join in.

Due to their thinking, we no longer have the need to have an agent in a bar in Cuba, getting people excited. Now, a individual on the street can spread the word of an injustice they just saw to millions with only a couple taps. Never once actually speaking to anyone, their message is gathered by others and spread around the world. Of course, like whispering in someone’s ear, the message can get twisted to an individual’s own purpose. Beyond the few unexpected paths, the real message is received, people gather, and a government changes. Or, a business will win or loose.

Whether we are talking about the device the person used or the system that others joined in together to make a difference, they are both creations of someone in that room’s idea being ‘sold’ to others to build on. If any of those, or worse, all of those in the meeting stopped coming to the office tomorrow, the world will change it’s direction forward. There are people that are good at giving speeches and those that are good at coming up with ideas. The group in the room are particularly good at coming up with ideas with others and pushing them to become our reality mind set going forward.

Can ‘doing the right thing for others’ do anything for you?

Everyone around me knows my mode of operation is to always promote people’s efforts and successes. I work their names into meetings and fully expose their delivered work. Presenting the wins as how they will help many rather than just a project done and behind us. This is not only for their ears when the hard working individual is in the room, it gets done if they are present or not. It’s a matter of giving credit so that later when their name comes up, people automatically associate a winning attitude with them.

When things go horribly wrong, those same team members know that it doesn’t do anyone any good to get called out in a meeting as at fault. It isn’t often that there is a single point of failure either so naming names only does harm. We as a team win, we as a team must answer for issues. The team has a tendency to help guide individuals that may put them in the position of failure.

Of course, win or fail, it does come down to the leader and their ability to both guide and forecast. Attention must be given to the what-ifs and the whys as a project moves forward. I usually stand alone in the meeting to answer for any issues so I push the other managers and team members to do the right thing. Take pride in their work so their name is mentioned… yearly reviews go much better for those that had their name mentioned with a win-win.

Team members learn to trust that their name will be inserted when ever possible for maximum credit. They see results when Sr. Management comes through the offices and thanks the team, pointing out wins for individuals involved.

It is interesting that most managers try to look for an hidden agenda for why they are being given credit in a meeting. They keep waiting for the follow up, ‘but’, and then the blame game. Although that never happens, many continue to question the motivation of pointing out other people’s efforts rather than have the manager take full credit. Usually these individuals will accept the credit when their name is called out and take over the meeting with great detail of their efforts. Missing the point that they are diluting the credit and generally causing the meeting to go in the wrong direction, undoing all the positive attention.

The path does require upper management to understand that by giving credit to individuals, you are pointing out the quality of the team members. They must not loose site of the guidance given and the planning that must be done to help make individuals shine. Some, let’s call them ‘weaker’, upper management, will think that unless you take credit your not a key player. They are destine to fail… but you may want to work your own name in there as a direction giving team member.

Lastly, the hope of this method of credit giving, works best if people across the team share in the same mind. When asked, does the individual you gave credit to mention your name as being a good leader? Does the team get referred to as your (enter your name here) team? Do other managers give credit by name to your team individuals or to you?

Just amongst the Business groups I work with now, I find it interesting how they can be so radically different. It helps if upper management believes in the same credit giving. But, if a group is being led by management that spends their time promoting themselves, they most likely wont want to give you credit. It’s a tough field to plow, but I’m going to stick with it. The folks that do the work really need to be called out for their efforts, it helps makes their day job something to be proud of rather than just a paycheck.

Living forever… or until the money runs out

When you get old… will you live with your kids? Maybe you have a big retirement fund set aside so you don’t ‘have to’.

While not so much with our parents, we only have to go back to their folks’ time to find the days that when parents got old they went to be with the younger family members. There is some question around if that was less popular in the US than other countries. This is most likely due to how many generations were actually living on the Continent.

Also going back just a couple generations, we find a time when there were limits to what could be done to prolong a person’s life when there were issues. Food and living habits have changed so that weight issues ripple to health issues more so today than yesteryear. People are getting ill with life altering health issue earlier today.

Medicine, doctors and technology is proving to add a new level of length of life that was not possible a generation or two back. Now, it is possible to medicate or replace body parts that are giving up. People can be kept alive well past the point that quality of life is a factor.

As current generation parents start to get to their elder years, even if they do not live with their kids, they will still impact their kids. Unless there is a dramatic and tragic body failure, parents are faced with a choice when they will pass. For a price, doctors can keep our moms and dads alive past their point of being able to function and most often recognize their kids.

Faced with this fact, kids are needing to support the system of care financially since it is no longer acceptable to do nothing. I’m not saying that it has been the history of parents to move in with their kids and their kids did nothing for them. I am saying that it used to be that a parent moved in and had an expect life expectancy, beyond that there was nothing that could be done. Now, there is something that can be done but it comes at a financial cost. And, for most modern families, that expense if life changing for them too.

Recently I have been hearing more and more conversations amongst the 50 somethings talking about how to fund the care needs of their parents. Unless parents won the lottery or put millions away for a rainy day, there are very large expenses outside of what insurance pays to keep loved ones amongst us for another year. I don’t see the government changing policy to take on more of the family financial responsibilities when faced with bills to keep a parent alive.

I’m not talking about a life support machine for someone unconscious. I am talking about a parent reaching the point of declining health where they need full time care beyond what a family can provide at home. There is no ‘plug to pull’, it is more likely the cost of a assisted care facility. Any of which will go through a parents savings in a year yet hopefully they can live for many more.

The questions I wonder is;

What is the long term impact to people living longer when it directly hits a family budget… do kids not see their folks as they work extra hours for extra income or does it impact future generations from being able to afford school?

How will kids cope with not being able to financially support keeping a parent in a quality of life living arrangement? Both short and long term mentally.

Living longer and being able to keep people alive for things that ‘would have killed us’ before comes at a cost. How do we plan for a future both financially and mentally, it’s a whole new level of responsability and stresses.

Well son, it used to be normal to store things on spinning plastic

I’m sitting in a meeting where the only person using moving hardware is me. I look around the room and see a couple netbooks with solid state memory, as well a couple iPads and MacBook Airs. No kidding, my year old MacBook Pro is the only hardware here that has something moving in it. And that movement is a couple pieces of a plastic like discs spinning at 10,000 RPMs on a cushion of air. What will our grand kids think?

About the same as the current kids when you explain we used to listen (I’m only going back one generation here) to music on round flat discs of vinyl spinning at 78 (or 45 or 33) RPMs. On that disc was a thin wiggly line that when you placed a tiny crystal in would produce the recorded music. Of course, vinyl can scratch pretty easily so you would carry the 12 inch discs in a paper envelope inside of a cardboard folder. If a scratch did happen, depending on the direction of the scratch relative to the rotation of the ‘record’ your music would repeat a few seconds over and over or you would jump ahead a couple songs. That’s just crazy talk!

Of course music went the direction of the lazer CD where dots and dashes where burned into the surface that a lazer would ‘read’ and play the recorded music.

As we started to want to store more than just music, there became a need to store our spreadsheets and documents… and family pictures. So, we went back to the spinning disc world and put the data on ‘platters’ of magnatizable materials. The data gets picked up by a arm swinging back and forth across the disc. Need more memory, compress the data or start piling up the platters. You will need more arms so you are now swinging that ‘actuator’ arm between the discs. Need to get to the data fast, just spin the whole pile of platters at 10,000 RPMs.

Wait, it get’s better… lets put that whole little spinning platic, metal, magnatized opject in our pocket and run around (that would be the early iPods).

Money and technology and the need to get to our growing data faster is driving the world to solid state memory. What is next? Technology we dreamed up many years ago will find it’s way into our pocket devices… water memory may have been laughed at in the move Roller Ball but we may just be going there. Like driving a car without seatbelts, or even cars that had no seat belts, we scratch our heads over how obvious it is now but yesteryear it was common place.

No message here, just thinking about what we think is normal and trying to explain that to someone who didn’t live it how we got to where we are going.

I make recommendations through project success

I received a few emails from friends after they read my post about my not doing endorsements. To keep with full exposure on this site, I thought I might explain how/where I speak to the value of folks which they can use to their advantage to promote themselves as needed.

As you may have started to understand. I have a full time ‘job’ working for a larger corporation which had many years back brought me on to assist with several open issues. Having closed those out, I have stayed on to help put out fires and creating new solutions. Along with the ‘day job’, I maintain my software business and do a variety of other ventures with individuals and groups of individuals. Occasionally the need arises for me to partner with other companies as well.

Because there is many more ideas and opportunities than there are hours in a day, I have to select projects and partners very carefully. Many ideas never make it past the initial outline and planning stage. More than three quarters of my projects requiring finding key individuals to partner with. People with talents outside of my own and who will share the passion in a project can be a difficult last mile that can cause a project to never become a working reality.

When the team comes together, the ideas are flowing, people go off and do their part and we roll out something we are proud of. I then tell the world about what incredible people I’m working with along side of promoting the project. I can understand that the location and time of the endorsement may not present a way for my partners to use as a stepping stone so I’m adding a tab to the site here. It’s light in detail right now but I will be filling the area in with past and current projects. Due to the level of secrecy around new projects that hope to be ‘first to market’, I can not go into detail on many projects in the early stages.

Several projects, like movies and books in play right now will be listed prior to going live since we always want more press for those in advance of releases.

I hope that this will provide a bit more information about the key individuals I have had successes with. Those that are strong in their fields and you would do well to partner with when the need arises.