I was the head coach of my two older kids’ little league team this past spring. The whole thing was a little bit of an accident – I vaguely volunteered for something and ended up in charge. The commitment was a little daunting, but I was ok with it since the season was only a couple months long, it was both Casey and Wilson, and both kids, especially Wilson, are really into baseball. Other than helping out a bit here and there, I’d never coached a sports team before. What started off as an unclear assignment ended up as one of the most fun and fulfilling things I’ve done in years. I loved every minute of it, looked forward to…
Archives / August, 2015
ReturnShip Program, Part III
I’ve written a couple times this past year about our ReturnShip program, which is a 4-month paid internship program designed for women who have been out of the workforce for more than 3 year to re-enter and build credible and relevant experience, and to expand the talent pool for our organization. I wrote about the initial concept when we launched v2 of the program, and then again when v2 concluded with the hiring of four of the six participants. I’m immensely proud of our organization for inventing the program (Andy Sautins, our CTO, gets credit) and for managing it so well during the last cycle (Cathy Hawley, our VP People, and Miranda Reeves, VP Solution Management, get lead credit, but…
The Phoenix Project
The Phoenix Project: a novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win, by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford is a logical intellectual successor and regularly quotes Eli Goldratt’s seminal work The Goal and its good but less known sequel It’s Not Luck. The more business books I read, the more I appreciate the novel or fable format. Most business books are a bit boring and way too long to make a single point. The Phoenix Project is a novel, though unlike Goldratt’s books (and even Lencioni’s), it takes it easy on the cheesy and personal side stories. It just uses storytelling techniques to make its points and give color and examples for more memorable learning. If your…