Nov
14

The Visionary

Thanks to my employer I had the opportunity to attend the Get Motivated Seminar at the Sprint Center this past Wednesday. My favorite speaker was Colin Powell who spoke about leadership, but I also liked Krish Dhanam a lot, I will have to write about him some time soon. There were many more speakers and I actually missed Rudy Giuliani, but one of them had such a great message that I wanted to share it with you guys.

Her name is Tamara Lowe, and she is a great speaker. She might come off as a little cookie to some, a little to Christian for others, but when she was talking about motivational DNA I was pretty impressed.

Many people think they know how everyone around them is motivated. Motives are probably the easiest thing to guess on, but probably the hardest to guess right. Some people are as cynical as to believe that for most people it boils down to money, sex or power. Funny enough, that is not the whole truth, and with her little method you can find out quite a bit about how people are motivated.

I took the online test and came up with the following.

Logtar’s Motivational DNA Type is PVI
(Production-Variety-Internal): The Visionary

Visionaries are persistent, energetic and confident. They are able to organize people and projects. Visionaries exhibit strong leadership potential and react quickly to crisis. Creative thinkers, Visionaries have the ability to craft a vision and get others excited about it. They enjoy working on multiple projects at the same time and like to be involved in exploring alternative concepts. Farsighted and imaginative, Visionaries are good at finding original solutions to difficult problems. Visionaries enjoy change and thrive under pressure. They have the ability to shift gears and turn on a dime. They are confident in their ability to master new skills. Visionaries enjoy challenge and desire personal growth. Visionaries want to know that their work matters and desire to “go where no man has gone before.”

PVI Motivators: Inspiring work environment, opportunity to originate and initiate ideas, peer respect, credit for work accomplished and a strong sense of mission.

PVI De-Motivators: Rigid structure, routine, delays, time-consuming details and bureaucracy.

The funny thing is that it is very accurate. I think this is a great tool for managers to read their employees, or sales people their potential customers. I ordered her book and plan on reading it. The simple online test gives you more than the usual; it actually gives you some tips on how to get motivated right now in ways it will work for you. Take the test, I found it quite useful.

Aug
26

Productivity Tip

Luigi, one of my coworkers was redoing her list of todos yesterday. One of those lists is so clever that I thought I would share it here. She called it a ‘get back to me’ list. She records all of the people’s names that she communicates with and expects a response from, then checks them off. I can remember several times where I began communication with someone, but did not get a response and ended up getting bit on the butt by it. So there it is, I share the best productivity tip I have gotten in a while… got any?

Jul
28

H4X0R again

I never really became a hacker, I used to hang out with some people in college that knew how to get around some places but were mostly not really dangerous or malicious. However, recently I have been wanting to just start all over again and just take down sites… which ones, the ones that take over my browser.

One of the most annoying things that a website can do is resize my window. I know I can prevent it, I know its not the end of the world, but I dislike it more than being bombarded with adds or music.

I am not sure why they are lazy enough to not do something that works with all resolutions, but even if they do want to do that then launch another browser window. Why resize my current browser window and make me to through extra clicks just to get my interface back to normal?

Most websites are designed to transmit some kind of message, and the ones that are advertising or selling a product are the biggest offenders. Why would I ever want to buy a product from a company that is already making decisions for me on how to set my home computer resolution?

So what are some of your web annoyances?

Jul
25

Stats Whore

Blog's Stats

Should you be impressed by those numbers? I think not. I feel that 90% of them are spiders crawling the web. I really don’t think that stats mean much, at least not to me because I don’t try to make money of my blog (even though I do use google adsense and amazon links sometimes) and I do this blogging for totally selfish reasons. Sure it has been kind of cool to have a higher google page rank than most of my employers, but in reality it does not do all that much for me.

I have talked about the subject of why I blog before, but it boils down to two reasons.

Blogging is way better than therapy and I use it to practice my writing in English.

Recently Faith wrote a pretty good post, fueled partly by XO asking why any of us bothers. While the nicest side effect of the blogging world has been the friends I have made, one actually staying with us this weekend, I bother because in the back of my head I think I am doing something good. I hope I am sparking some people to look at a different point of view that their own.

When I started blogging I had no clue that it would actually get as many visits as it started to get. I think by my second year blogging I had become a total stats whore. I would go to other sites just fishing for more readers. Then life kind of made blogging take a different direction and it became my only outlet. I forgot about stats completely, I did not think anyone would care for vague posts that talked about almost nothing.

Moving to KC changed all of that. I had the chance to begin a new life and a lot of changes came about. Blogging was once again as fun as it used to be when I started. However, I never picked up the whole stats whore ways. I really don’t have the time, I barely get posts in when I want to… and have way too many (57 to be exact) half written and saved for another day.

If you want to be impressed by stats check out TKC. While Faith even put it simply as posting half naked woman and news links will get you there, I disagree. Even though I DO NOT share his views on many topics and he has ticked me off more than a couple of times with his borderline personal attacks (alas never on me) I do give him the credit that his writing style and good sources is what put him on the top of list of most visited sites in Kansas City. Anyone that is a stats whore would be jealous of the numbers of hits he gets. I just want to get to meet him some day, hopefully at one of our meet ups… I think Chimpo and I can do crowd control if things get out of hand. We almost thought he had shown up unannounced to our last meet up, but it was just a shy Mexican dude that sat at the bar.

Jun
18

Teamwork

Not too long ago I saw a TV show about video games. It highlighted that new multi player games that allow a user to be part of a team with specific tasks helps build the teamwork mentality.

I started to think of my corporate world experience and the more and more I thought about my past experiences the more I saw that teamwork is often talked about but seldom really implemented.

We live in a very individualistic society, and no matter how much corporate America tries to sell us the idea that there is no “I in teamwork” we still don’t get what that really means.

At the first opportunity people try to make themselves look better, or when there is blame to be passed around the finger pointing begins. There is the exception of the person that for some reason likes to take the fall, but because of their strong character they get a get out of jail free card every single time.

I think the breeding ground for teamwork is sports, but this country has diverted from actual keeping score for kids to everyone is a winner. I think this further enhances the notion on every kid that they are the best and they have to fend for themselves.

Life can be cruel at times, as can work environments, but a good team behind you is what gets you through. In life it is your family and friends when they selflessly rally around you when you need them. In the corporate world when something goes wrong and the team does the best it can to make the project work.

Maybe multi player video games will help people understand that every role in a team is important and it is ok to just be good at one thing. Maybe sports at the little kids level will start keeping score again; Because in a society of only winners, everyone ends up being a loser.

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