Post Graduate Depression
I’m sure that I am not the first one to use this term. Or the first to feel this way. But it’s been nearly a year since the conferment of my Masters degree and ever since then, I’ve been feeling a little out of sorts.
I’ve decided to call this my “post graduate depression”
Here’s the issue: for almost 2 years, I was surrounded by really smart people. Really smart people that I enjoyed being around. We interacted nearly every day, and worked on projects together that pushed the limits of our cognitive abilities, our communication skills, and our patience. Read more 
Up in The Air
We’ve just taken off from San Francisco international airport, and we hit that little patch of clear air at about four thousand feet, not jostling, but just enough drop in altitude to make your stomach rise just a bit. A cheap thrill, a strange comfort brought on by a familiar feeling.
I think back to my former life, the one where I traveled more than half of the time, flying hundreds of thousands of miles every year. Some days I miss it, the excitement of being in a strange place, meeting new people, closing a big deal or sorting out some vendor issue that other people in the company didn’t have the stomach to deal with.
A few years ago I cut my traveling down significantly. Having attained the highest position possible at my previous firm, I set my sights on a dream I had deferred for far too long: going back to school to pursue my MBA.
My father, a source of many valuable insights, advised me that I should consider leaving my current job and getting a paper route for the 2 years that I would be in school. “I don’t mean literally a paper route, I just mean, with the hours that you put in at your firm, and amount of travel that you’re doing these days, it would do a disservice to both your job and your studies to attempt both at once” I knew he was right, but it was still hard to make such a change consciously. I loved my job, I really did. But I knew there was little future in it, and so in the spring of 2008 I left my former company, signed up for more loans than I could fathom at the time, and registered for classes at Thunderbird.
Things have not necessarily turned out how I planned. I managed to quit my job just prior to the onset of the global economic downturn. Needless to say, recruiters were not exactly beating a path to business schools in late 2009 to recruit recent grads.
Looking back, I would do it all again in heartbeat. Really. Thunderbird was an amazing experience. Life since then has been an amazing experience. Even the job that I looked at as my “paper route” has taken my life in new and interesting directions, teaching me valuable lessons about business and entrepreneurship along the way.
I think the thrill I get from travel is based in potential. Step off a plane in a new city and the world is your oyster; it’s all about potential energy. Graduating from Thunderbird felt similar; full of potential, not sure where it’s going to go, but thrilled to be traveling.
South By Southwest Wrap Up
This past week I had the opportunity to travel to the South By Southwest conference, and now that I’ve had a chance to digest everything (well, mostly), I’d like to summarize my impressions here.
Overall, attending South By Southwest was one of the most amazing experiences that I have ever had; not because of the panels or events, but because it really helped me look introspectively at what I want out of my life and career. I came back from the conference more focused and energized than I have been in a long time.
Focus
During the five day conference, there were over 300 panels, speeches, round-tables, and workshops. At any given time slot, I had a dozen or more panels that I needed to choose from. At first, I started sitting in the back of the room so I could panel-hop, but I quickly realized that my best course of action would be to choose one or two subject matter and focus on the panels that would fit in best with those subjects. I choose to focus on the two subjects that I am most passionate about, Open Source and Entrepreneurship.
At first, I simply looked at these two topics as just that; two different topics that I have an interest in learning more about. As time went on, I soon realized that there is significant overlap. From a very over-simplified perspective, Open Source is based on the premise that by sharing information freely serves to benefit everyone.
As a student of global entrepreneurship, I am driven to empower entrepreneurs to bring their ideas to reality. Never before have I been in a place where so many people have so many great ideas that have the potential to change the world. In consulting with early stage entrepreneurs, I started to see that the guiding principles of Open Source can also be of great benefit to the entrepreneurship community as well.
In this current economic climate, there is ever increasing pressure for entrepreneurs to go further on their own than they have before. By sharing information and best practices together, everyone can benefit.
I returned from South By Southwest committing to make more of a contribution back to the entrepreneurship community; look out world!
Energy
I said that South By Southwest energized me, and it even manifested itself in behavioral changes throughout the week. Those of you that know me know that I love coffee, and I can easily have 2-3 double espressos in a day. During South by Southwest my coffee intake fell dramatically, often only 1 per day, and I think I know why:
As a technical business professional, I spend a great deal of my time translating information between technical and non technical employees and clients. This activity is very much akin to translating between two different languages, and can be, at times, equally exhausting. Attending South by Southwest was like showing up to a conference full of people that all speak my native language, room after room of people that are just like me, people that understand technology and business; people that “get it”, without requiring long explanations. My theory is that being in this environment allowed me to survive on less coffee, and food for that matter, than I need in my normal day to day existence.
Connections
There were many great, great presentations that I attended at South by Southwest. One of my favorites was a presentation by Peter Shankman titled “How Self-Promotion Will Save the World” which was a lot less cheesy than the title would lead you to believe. One of my favorite points made during the presentation was the importance of building and maintaining strong connections among all of your contacts. I was inspired by a lot of his points, and this one especially. As soon as I returned home, I started emailing a few people that I know I have not spoken to in a long time, and I even have a few appointments to grab lunch or coffee with long lost classmates and business contacts.
I also had the chance to finally meet a lot of other young professionals that I have known for some time via sites like Brazen Careerist; it was awesome to meet people that I’ve know by reading their writing, and finally putting faces to a names.
The SXGenY panel was another panel that I was excited to attend. As a GenY employee, I am always looking for more input and experiences from other GenY employees in the workplace. This panel was very active, probably the largest amount of people from the audience waiting to address the panelists; I would say questions took up nearly half of the panel. It is obvious that the entry of Generation Y into the workplace has created a lot of opportunity for understanding on the part of all generations. The only other thing that I would have liked to have seen was for the panel to have had an older panelist to talk about working with GenY from the other side of the table.
Conclusions
For years, I said that I wanted to go to South By Southwest, and always found a way to not go, and regret it later. A good friend (and SXSW veteran) told me that I needed to just stop thinking about it and go. He was right; I still have a hard time articulating how great of an experience this was for me, and at the same time I know that I’ll be there in 2011.
The other major take away that I gained during South By Southwest was the rekindling of my passion for entrepreneurship. Having studied business in grad school, I found my passion for entrepreneurship came right back to the surface when I arrived in Austin. There are some many people there in this one place, all inspired to make the world a better place. It was an inspiring feeling, and something that I miss being a part of. I came away inspired to make a better contribution back to the world of entrepreneurship. How? Don’t know yet. My brain is still a little mushy for all of the information we crammed in last week. But keep your eyes open, it won’t be long.
We’re not different…We’re just artists
For the month of March, I’ve been contributing to my “750 Words” page, a private brain dump where I put 750 words per day. It’s fantastic, especially when done at the end of the day. You can even share stats from your writing. As I suspected would happen, there have been times where my brain dump resulted in a blog post. Like now…
Generation Y is a very different generation than our predecessors. I know every generation says that, and in fact, it’s mostly true. But the acceleration of the gap between generations is absolutely startling. It’s like something of a “Moores Law” of generation gap, that is to say, with every generation, the gap between it and the previous generation seems to widen by a growing margin. Good golly, what is generation Z going to look like? But seriously, I’ve been thinking about generation Y a lot recently, and I’ve come to some conclusions. You saw a few in my video post yesterday, and here’s another.
The generation Y mind is a young mind. Not to say that we are immature, but young in a different way, in outlook and in how we interpret the world. In my video post yesterday I mentioned that one of the hallmarks of Generation Y is that we are not afraid to fail. One of the reasons that artists are successful is that they are not afraid to fail either. Bad photo? Take another. Bad sculpture? There’s always more clay. Pablo Picasso said that “all children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up”; Generation Y, has, I think, stayed artists far longer than previous generations.
My mother worked for the World Book encyclopedia company. You remember them, right? They authored huge volumes of information and placed that information into lovely red-leather bound books with gold leaf edges. Working for World Book meant that my mom brought home an endless supply of encyclopedia volumes for me to read. Which was fine by me, geek that I was. I could not get enough of them, I read everything that I could get my hands on. I realize now that it is only through the acquisition of knowledge that we learn to make rational decisions. I learned to learn by reading books. Lots of books. Today, people are doing the same thing by via the internet.
I’ve always loved computers as well. I had my first computer by about age 5 and as you can imagine my ability to write code in Basic on my TRS-80 was a real hit with the ladies.
I remember telling my mom that someday, all of the information in those heavy encyclopedias would be available right on the screen of a computer. She thought I was absolutely bananas.
Look who is laughing now mom!
Just kidding.
But seriously, the amount of information that is available to everyone, at almost any time, is startling. Think about that. I mean, I remember hearing about “Mosaic” from the guys in the computer lab, and after I had a play with it, I brought a copy back to my dorm room on 13 floppy disks. I was hooked. Really. I cracked open notepad and starting writing web pages a few days later. There we were, witnessing the birth of the internet; sadly Al Gore never really did get his figure back. And now here we are, less than 2 decades later, and look at how far we have come. It’s almost easier to talk about the things that are not on the internet than it is to do it the other way around. It’s funny to say, but really, I find myself doing that all the time.
Generation Y has access to all of this, basically the world of knowledge, right there in front of them. They have grown up in a world where they have had to search for information, fail, and try again until they found it. This action changes people. I recently attended a speech where the presenter put forward his theory that people, it seemed, were changing the internet to mirror their behaviors. That “these kids today” invented twitter because 140 characters is the limit of their attention spans. I’m pretty sure he’s wrong, and in fact, I think the exact opposite is true. It is the internet that has enabled generation Y to evolve into what they are, a group of people that are hard wired to try, fail, and try again without getting bogged down. You know, like artists.
Who wants to be a sales guy?
This morning I attended a meeting of our local “lean startups” group here in San Diego. The lean startups movement, as put forth by Steve Blank and Eric Ries, is the study of customer development as a method for bootstapping the early stages of startup growth, and is one of those things that you wish you had heard about before you joined your first startup. There is a local group of lean startup executives here in San Diego, and periodically, thanks to the efforts of a few of our members, we sit down to breakfast together to talk about all things startup.
During the meeting, one of my colleagues was speaking about his company, and in the course of describing his technology made the comment “I don’t want to get too sales-y; I mean, who wants to be a sales guy?” (cue nods of sales-guy disdain from folks around the table)
A few other people interjected, talking about his technology, and asking about his early successes. When it finally came time for me to speak up, I immediately countered his earlier statement. Having spent nearly half of my career in startups, I have heard similar statements from nearly every founder. This is to be expected, given the nature of startups. Startups, in my experience, are founded by a person or group of people that are driven by a passion for the solution or the product that they have created. The question that needs to be answered, however, is do you have a solution that addresses a customer’s pain well enough for them to make a purchase?
Too often passionate people find themselves building or creating technology for the sake of the technology. While creating for the sake of creation is important, at a certain point it needs to change. Startups that survive share similar DNA in this regard. While almost all companies start singularly focused on technology, early successes drive the need to continue selling their product to more and more customers. I read a recent article by Carl Eibl at Enterprise Partners, where he discussed that nearly all startups that get funded share one major trait in common: they not only have customers, they know exactly why those customers made a purchase. This is the core premise of the lean startup methodology, which put simply, states that startups should sell their product, find out why early customers purchased, and then capitalize on that pain point to sell to more and more customers. I encourage everyone to read Steve’s book “Four Steps to the Epiphany” to learn more.
Back to my point about not wanting to be a Sales guy. Almost every engineer I have ever met has one image in their mind when they think “Sales Guy” and it’s this guy right here:
This is a really unfortunate situation, as this is not what I mean when I counter that
you do, in fact, want to be a sales guy.
Being a “sales guy” doesn’t mean some high-pressure, used-car, software-pushing salesperson who looks at clients and sees dollar signs. Being a sales guy means being able to speak to executives about the solution that your company has to offer. Being a sales guy means speaking to a different crowd, and as a result, using a different vocabulary. At the end of the day, the sales guys and the engineers are all striving towards the same goal: to solve problems through the use of technology.
The main problem, when you talk tech, is that you are generally speaking to the people who will be implementing your solution, the IT manager and that general area of the company. their concerns are “does it authenticate against our AD server” or “can it render our existing embedded files”. As an engineer, you can speak to this goup, and it is probably the group of people that you are most comfortable working with. The problem is, for the most part, your average IT person is not the one that signs the check. At most they tend to be the “technical buyer” to use the Miller-Heiman description. They can recommend a solution, but they can’t write a Purchase Order and send it over to you without approval.
If, instead of talking tech, you spoke about your solution in terms of the business problem that you solve, now you can speak with executives using their language. Executives don’t care about how efficient your SQL queries are compared to the competition. Executives care about solving business issues. You need to be able to frame your conversation in terms that they are familiar with. If you could, instead, meet with a manager or executive and say “You are spending an average of 10 minutes with each customer in your call center; with our new Phantasmotron 2000 software, you can cut this time down to six minutes. Imagine the savings across all of your call centers that you will realize right now by deploying our solution!”, Now you are speaking in executive language. Extra points if you say “decreasing your variable overhead costs by 40 percent will save you millions in the first year alone”!
Of course the manager is going to ask his IT manager if your solution will work with their existing data center structure, and now, by all means, feel free to geek out with the IT guys and sell them on the solution as well or maybe you sold them ahead of time or delegated the technical details to your Sales Engineer. Regardless, in this scenario, you have tackled the hard part first, selling the buyer on the business case for purchasing your solution.
It is important to note, that although you first spoke to an executive and then he brought his IT manager into the conversation, it is much, much harder to push things along in the other direction. I have seen salespeople drive themselves to the brink of madness by speaking with IT managers and then trying to get them to push the decision up the chain of command.
I am a big believer in investing in personal self improvement (for example…the total cost of my education, up until this point, exceeds the cost of every home I have ever owned), and while many startup founders have brought in salespeople early in the life of the company, I do not think that this is the best path. As founder or even an engineer, you need to understand why you are building the solutions that you are building. If the time comes to think about bringing in financing, VCs will want to see that you are one of the best salespeople in the company.
There are a lot of sales books and sales methodologies, and all have their perks; However, the best education that you can receive in from information that is available right in front of you: find out why customers purchased your product. Not just who (it’s an CIO) or where they are using it (accounting uses our software to manage payroll) but rather seek to understand WHY EXACTLY, did they spend money on your product. You want an answer that you can re-use a part of your sales process. Ideally, you will hear that they had a problem that they knew was costing them money (e.g. – the call center example above) and they tried other solutions, and none worked until they tried yours. Look for pain points, understand how your solution eases the pain, and now you are armed with a fantastic business case to present to the next client.
Who wants to be a sales guy? You do.
Creating Great Demos
As a Sales Engineer, I spend a great deal of my time either speaking to customers or planning to speak to customers. Recently, I have started to create short recorded videos to demonstrate products or to teach quick lessons on how to use our software.
It is understood today that the best way to create long term customers and evangelists is to engage those customers, both in your firm as well as in your product. One of the best ways to get users engaged with your product is to get them using it as soon as possible, and I have had great luck using short videos to engage with users, and get them excited about using our product. I’ve also had terrible luck with actually making these videos, and my present methods are the result of 6 months worth of refinement to my process. Today, I had the opportunity to discuss some of the lessons that I had learned over the past few months, and I thought others could probably benefit from this knowledge as well.
So today is going to be a short look into the tools that I use to create screen casts and demo videos.
Here are some of the techniques that I use now when creating content:
1. Create a basic storyboard – I’ve found that videos need to be either very quick and functional (e.g – here is how you restart the server) or they need to follow a narrative that engages with your viewers (e.g. – Let’s look at how Bob can do his job better with new widgets2.0). In either case I usually set a hard stop of 10 minutes; anything beyond that is usually pushing the limits of your viewer’s attention span. You would be surprised at how much content you can fit into 10 minutes with good editing. Even this badly edited first draft of me demonstrating how to install and configure a MindTouch server stays under 10 minutes. So staying with the 10 minute or under guideline, I create a storyboard of what high level topics I need to express in the video. I use MindTouch, but Google docs or any word processor works nearly as well. I start with section headings for each of the high points, then I start writing the actual script for each section; just do a brain dump, refinement comes later. Which brings us to our next point.
2. Have a practice read-through with the teleprompter – You will feel like Ron Burgundy at first…and that’s ok. There is nothing that can help you become a better writer than reading your content aloud. And you don’t need a real teleprompter, or even teleprompter software at this point; just read your writing off the screen. I add in keys for myself in appropriate places, adding in bold comments like
[SLOW DOWN, DRIVE HOME HOW IMPORTANT THIS IS]
I spent a lot of time listening to webinars and watching videos, and I found that the presenters that I found most engaging had a very even cadence when speaking; whether this comes naturally to them or they just read well from a prompter, it doesn’t matter; the end result is the same. So when I start reading my script, I speak with this same even tempo, and feedback from viewers has been very positive. Lastly, record yourself. I initially had a hard time listening to myself speak and giving objective feedback. I got past this issue quickly, and then I was able to hear how I needed to change my speech to improve my presentations. You will make a lot of changes to the script here, which is why I don’t really worry about writing the perfect script when I am storyboarding in step 1.
One point that I really want to drive home: Don’t Rush. Videos take a lot of time to make. A lot. As in, way more than you think. So be prepared to take a break and come back to it later. I estimate that I put in 2-3 hours per minute of finished video. Borrow some advice from moviemakers: break movies into scenes, and be prepared to have multiple takes of each scene.
3. Don’t Waste Film – I know, I know….but really, before you waste time screen-capturing, do a dry run. Does everything behave how you thought it would? I always seem to forget about some option that is not enabled by default or some extension that users need in order to make everything work right. Your viewers are not using your computer. Think for a minute about what they will need in their own computer to do what you’re doing. At startups we always seem to forget that most of the people that we’re talking to have never seen our software before, whereas I can work the control panel with my eyes closed. I continuously remind myself to be on the lookout for anything that I might be taking for granted. Remember, “PC Load Letter” made perfect sense to anyone working at HP.
4. Use the right Tools – The right tools make all of the difference in the world in terms of quality of capture and ease of editing. Here are the tools that I use. Your mileage may vary.
- Camtasia Mac – I’ve used a lot of screen capture tools, and Camtasia from Techsmith is the best that I have found. In addition to being a fantastic screen capture tool, it is also a very capable editing studio, allowing you to add transitions, graphics, text, and even other videos and images into your project.
M-Audio Microtrack II Digital Audio Recorder – I have recently started recording the audio and video portions of my videos in separate takes. I get the video exactly right, and then simply play back the video while reading from my script. It adds surprisingly little extra work, as you can drag the .WAV or .MP3 from the Microtrack right into Camtasia. Lastly, if you are using video of yourself in your production, the audio quality from the Microtrack is going to be vastly superior to that from all but the most professional camcorders. If you don’t want to spend money on a separate recording device, the Open Source Audacity software does a great job of capturing audio, although you will have much better luck with an external microphone.
- Sony HandyCam MiniDV – Making video for the web means you don’t need anything flashy. Certainly nothing HD. Your average single CCD miniDV cam from 5 years ago will do a fine job adding your face to a web video. If you want to get really crazy, get a 3-CCD cam or a used Canon XL-1S. Since most of your takes are going to be short, the easiest method to capture the video is to stream it right into the computer using firewire or USB.
- Apple MacBook – It’s simple to use, comes with great video editing software (iMovie), and runs all of the
applications that I need to create great videos. - Ample hydration – when you’re talking a lot, drinking water is key to not sounding like Patty and Selma when you’re reading your lines. And a beer or some scotch when work is done for the night is optional.
5. Get feedback – Doesn’t matter who it’s from, and in fact, the less technical the user, the better. Listen to feedback, and don’t be afraid to change something around and make a second (or third) version of the same video to address the feedback that you receive.
That’s it. And as always, practice makes perfect. Start by making a video about something that you’re an expert in, whatever that may be.
Compare my most recent video, below, to that 10 minute install video that I linked above. What a difference!
Lessons Learned at Grad School: Part 1
About halfway through my coursework in the pursuit of my MBA, I remember pausing for a moment to take stock of where I was, had been, and was going.
In the one year since starting school, a lot had changed; mainly, I quit my job and moved to California. I had left my former employer, as they were closing the office in which I had been working, and they wanted me to relocate to Siberia Minneapolis. I decided that this was as good of a time as any to leave the company on a high note; I had just finished launching our most successful project to date, and I had no desire to live in Minneapolis. So with that, we packed up our things and headed out to San Diego, a place that I had been trying to return to for the past decade.
A short time later, I remember remarking that had I known a few years ago that I would resign from my job less than a year into a 2-year executive MBA program, I might have done things differently. I thought that, had I known this early enough, I would instead have just taken a year off and gone back to school full time, or even considered going to INSEAD instead of Thunderbird (Gasp!), at least partially so that we could have a reasonable excuse to live in France for a year. I held this belief until I joined the team of my second startup, MindTouch, here in San Diego.
While I was coaching some of my colleagues here at MindTouch, I had an epiphany. I realized in that moment that in addition to all of the business knowledge that I gained over the past 2 years, I had learned another very valuable lesson; I had learned to manage my time extremely well. I had no idea what a valuable asset this was, both to my team, as well as to my mental health, until I came on board at MindTouch.
Enrolling in an EMBA program taught me to containerize my time very well. Working at a startup, it is very easy to fall into the trap of working nearly every waking hour. In having to balance school, work, and personal life, I learned to turn off “Startup Employee Mode” and turn on “Focused Student Mode”; on top of that, I made sure to turn off both modes and turn on “Personal Life Mode” to spend valuable time with my significant other, which was very therapeutic. For those of you that have worked at (or even with) a startup, you know how hard it is to turn off “Startup Employee Mode”. I was in a situation where I had hard deadlines created by others, as at work and school, which taught me to create some of my own deadlines, like scheduling date night, and workout times and sticking to these as unmovable commitments as well. The truth of the matter is, if I didn’t schedule time for all of the other things that I wanted to get done, all of that time would be eaten up by my company and my school. Startup employees know this pain well; you start work early in the AM and suddenly it’s 10PM; unstructured environments like startups demand a great deal of personal time management.
Following graduation, I have continued to set deadlines for all of my commitments, personal and work related, and this time management has enabled me to get a lot done (or at least feel like I get a lot done) and keep my stress down to a reasonable level.
Where did all these experts come from?
I remember years ago listening to a publisher friend of my parents lamenting the invention of the modern word processor. He went on to elaborate what he saw as the major issue: the barrier to entry was now far too low to prevent bad writers from creating and sending manuscripts to every publishing house they could find. Add this to the list of things that our children will not understand; the concept of having to correct typing errors by applying liquid paper to the page will sound to them about one level more advanced than chiseling our cuneiform into clay tablets. The word processor allowed far more people to write rapidly, and reproduce endless copies of those documents at a low cost.
We’re facing a similar issue now in media; the rise of social media tools has lowered the barrier to entry for broadcasting your voice to the masses, and this is not necessarily a good thing. First, let me say that I am not against social media, nor do I deny the power of giving a voice to the people. The elections in Iran proved the value of social media in empowering people who previously did not have a voice, I am not disputing this.
What I am saying however, is that social media has allowed people to define their status without earning their status. This issue goes far beyond groups of facebook users suddenly calling themselves social media experts, to a complete collapse of our traditional methods of searching for and identifying experts or authorities.
In the past (“the past” being 2 or more years ago) when a person held a position of authority, there was a clear understanding about how they got there. A professor of Entrepreneurship with a Ph.D. followed a known path of study, published articles in peer reviewed journals, and defended their thesis before a panel of people that had followed that same path before. Without getting stuck in the mentality of doing something because that’s the way it has always been done, the reasoning behind going through all of these steps is more than just tradition, it is a method for establishing personal authority in a particular topic or course of study.
I have started my own company; I learned a lot about the mechanical and the personal effects of being an entrepreneur; does that mean, based on my experience, that I now teach a class on entrepreneurship? Should I start a consulting firm, and use my experience starting one company to advise others on how they should run their own firms? Yeah, probably not. I remember visiting the office of my grad school entrepreneurship professor. In addition to the degrees on the wall, he also had shelves of books that he had written (I remember he was working on his 26th when I visited his office) as well as displays showing all of the products produced by him and his partners (He invented the Crest SpinBrush, among other things). Suffice it to say, he had the credibility to back up the advice that he gave to us.
What is happening today in the social media space is a breakdown of these traditional avenues of expertise recognition; we have not yet established the social media equivalent of the peer-reviewed journal or the Ph.D. , as a result, some people are gaming the system, using social media tools to create a following or maybe execute one “big win” and then parlaying that into an implied expertise in whatever field it is that they are in.
In no way am I implying that social media is a bad thing or that the net impact of this increased communication is negative. As with many technological advancements, it is possible to for first movers to exploit the advantages given to them. What I am saying is that this breakdown of authority warrants increased scrutiny before we accept the work of these “experts”. There are plenty of people in positions of authority blogging, twittering or otherwise using social media, and there are even more narcissists speaking from a position of self appointed authority. The crazy guy in the street corner now has the ability to publish his writing for the world to see; that doesn’t make him any less nonsensical.
Commercial Open Source Panel
It’s that time of the year again, time to vote on the proposed panels for the 2010 South By Southwest Conference. This year I have proposed a panel to briefly discussion the concept of Commercial Open Source, a model being followed not just from within the software industry (although software is our focus) but from many innovators in a diverse array of fields.
Winding Down at Thunderbird
It is really hard to believe that 19 months have gone by so fast, yet at the same time, I know that it is time to be done. I am back on campus for the last week of class, and all things going well, my MBA will be conferred this coming Friday.
My classmates and I are participating on our capstone courses, receiving debriefings on a lot of the projects that we have been exposed to over the past few years. It’s been hard work, and this has been a long time coming. At the same time, I am sad to see it come to an end, and I will miss the classes and classmates that have come to occupy all of my formerly free time.
They asked us to stand up and say what our most important take-away from this program has been, and it was very hard to narrow it down to one single thing that stands above all others. For me, my greatest take away has been understanding that the most important responsibility that I have as a manager is not having all of the answers, but rather, knowing how to ask the right questions. One of the litmus tests that I revisit frequently is to look at past situations and ask myself if I would act differently in that same situation; in many cases, the answer is yes. Of course, I don’t know whether the outcome would have been different, but at the very least, I know that my increased knowledge helped me have a deeper breadth of understanding of all of the factors in play.
In other news, my session at South By Southwest has made it into the panelpicker, and is up for vote this week. I will be talking about the emergence of “Commercial Open Source” as a business model. Although at first, I had aimed this session at firms in the software space, my research in this topic over the past few weeks has led me to the realization that it is not just software but many industries that can drive innovation from the bottom up.
Michael Diliberto 