milos topic

What do meetings bring to those who attend? Are most of them annoying, boring and a waste of time or is there a valuable component to them?

While I was thinking what I should write today I got a phone call from my boss, which set the theme for today’s post. Coincidentally, it is closely related to my previous post (video), people matter.

We ran into several issues while getting some well deserved and a bit over due paperwork through certain channels, but it is nice to know that we have internal support at least. Our vertical chain of support is very strong, it’s when we have to work with some horizontal departments (which don’t have insight into our daily operations) that we run into difficulties. This relates to the previous post of “people matter” and goes a step beyond selecting right employees for the job. Having a great manager in place who understands employees, works well with them and is there to provide support in every way possible is the final component in building and sustaining an amazing unit.

Once you have a well functioning team and things are working smoothly it is important to maintain that group and do what’s needed to help these professionals achieve personal and professional satisfaction and recognition. It is the manager’s responsibility to promote their employees throughout the enterprise, fight for more resources and recognize their accomplishments.

Having a great team which is poorly managed will eventually cause one of the two (or both) things to happen:

1. Team will start falling apart (performance wise or literally), and/or

2. The manager will be severely disliked (poor working environment) and in some instances even pushed out.

It is essential to understand that everyone works together towards a common goal. Each of the team members have different rolles and responsibilities, but are equaly important to the success of the team. While a great group of individuals is essential to productivity and efficiency, the significance of a well repected, qualified and knowledgable leaded should never be underestimated. That leader must manage his or her team, focus their energies in desired direction and fight for that team every step of the way.

All managers must understand that once you give up on your team, they will give up on you.

This video was prompted by a phone call I received yesterday from a person whose department clearly doesn’t understand the value of good, professional and knowledgeable individuals.

Make sure you appreciate good people you are surrounded with, whether they are on your team/department at work or in your personal life, because they don’t come around often. Once you have great friends, family or co-workers everything else will fall into place and things will get easier.

It’s time once again to re-organize my office, file paperwork and get rid of all the unnecessary things which have been cluttering my work space. I’m not a big fan of doing this frequently as new files, invoices, requests, propositions and notes will come across my desk again and again, so I figure what’s the point. However, I’m aware that if I haven’t been going through this potentially futile exercise every so often I’m sure that I would have no place to put my laptop and actually do some more interesting work. I see it as one of those so called “necessary evils”, you hate doing it, but you need to in order to get some other things done and move along.

On the other hand, while going through some of the paperwork I kept asking myself do I really need to keep this? It’s online, I can get a copy when I need it, but yet again somehow most of those papers found their way into neatly organized folders where they will be filed away until I go through this “infinite loop” again.

I understand the need for some documents to be printed, especially the ones requiring signatures, or exam questions, but most of those can be computerized as well (i.e. digital signatures, online testing). In any event, I have started to move everything that can be moved at this time online in order to reduce paper use as well to enable myself (and others) to search for files and have access to them from anywhere. A good portion of our faculty have also started to post majority of their materials on Blackboard (our CRM system), but there’s room for improvements on that front as well. Bottom line, going away from paper is slowly happening, but there’s still much work to be done.

Besides the green initiative and desire to save trees which are extremely important in our Ecosystem, what is your take on paperwork you have to deal with; is it necessary (all of it?); can it be replaced somehow and how often do you go through your piles of papers to get them down to a more manageable size?

Here’s the video I mentioned of Gary Vaynerchuk breaking it down yesterday at a Mashable sponsored event. They were outside as you can see, which wasn’t planned, but they still went ahead and made it happen. Perfect example of how to improvise, be creative and deliver.

This event was promoted through Facebook and Twitter among other services. Btw, if you don’t know who Gary is, please go to his site and read about him or watch some of his videos. He’s a rock star of social media, a vino connoisseur (Host of Wine Library TV) and a very cool guy.

If you are passionate about something and enjoy doing it, nothing around it should be difficult.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

* Missouri and North Carolina are still counting their votes (slowly).

#votereport voted in #07442 and it was all smooth like butter. #wait 1 minute.

That was the message I sent to Twitter Vote Report this morning as soon as I was done casting my vote and it made me think a bit more about this election. Not just how it is different from all the previous ones for the obvious reasons, things that are at stake, our current international and economic position, race and gender of the candidates and their running mates. Furthermore, it is also significantly different in how it is covered and how people get involved, what tools they use to get their voice out, share their experiences, opinions, concerns and reservations about the candidates and the entire election process.

Starting from the candidates themselves, they have built a significant online presence and marketing avenues which have been used for months to get their messages out. On the other hand, people are talking about politics, the election and future of the U.S. online, on their social networking sites and services.

Some of many (way too many to list here) examples of how people share their election experiences, political views and ideas online:

People are using Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, MySpace, and many other online services and websites to promote their views and support their candidate of choice. This is something new and I am sure will continue to expand and grow into even a bigger force in 2012 election.

I love the fact that people now have more power and opportunity to get independent information and news from other voters instead of simply being fed information from media conglomerates often controlled by people heavily invested in politics with their own personal agendas.

Please share what you have to say, someone out there will listen!

So far everyone I spoke to today has been very happy and positive and it was contagious…it was amazing to be surrounded by so many happy, easy going people. Hopefully we all get to experience more days such as today.

The title of this post is something I get asked frequently, especially by people online who see my daily messages (on IM, Twitter, Plurk…) saying that I’m on a “coffee run” (see above example from Twitter). My friends and people I work with are already accustomed to it and know that it is just one of those things I do so they don’t pay much attention. I have even “converted” some of them to join me on these runs. Bad, I know.

The answer to the question is 3 cups/day on average. In addition to coffee I’m also “addicted” to chocolate and we all know that the two go great together. :-)  While I know that too much coffee is probably not great for me, on the other hand it is probably not the worst thing I could be consuming daily. I don’t smoke, I actually hate cigarettes and smoking and see them and pointless and disgusting and for the most part try to live a healthy lifestyle (with an occasional drink or two).  As you can tell that is my justification for coffee infusion. It might not be the best reasoning, but it’s what I have and I’m sticking to it.

Having said that, what are your habits, or foods/drinks you consume daily (your favorites) and what is it about them that makes them so appealing?

Make sure you always keep things in perspective, stay positive and don’t allow little things to spoil your larger plans and dreams.

p.s. I said “ummm…” way too many times in this video, but that’s how it goes when you do only one take. ummm…!