New Friends, missing news

Turbo Todd muses over on his blog that he missed the friendster/facebook announcement because he was on a plane and it didn’t have wireless and the implications of being behind.

Todd, get over it, you are not in fact behind, getting off the plane after something has been announced, you are in fact ahead in these modern interconnected days. Just through our common twitter “friends”, there were 10-blog posts within 90-minutes that carried the news and gave an analysis, just like the VMware/Springsource acquisition, there are more angles than you can measure with an Isosceles triangle. Unless you are suggesting your are wiser than the crowd and knew all these angles and more.

Also, since Silicon Valley is to the tech industry, what LA is to the movie industry, get used to making new friends, this years movers and shakers are next years fail whales or Scott and Larry, either way, you’ll need new friends!

Oh, yeah, we must be friends, Facebook says so…

Visible personal branding and the big company

I’m keeping busy at Dell, currently working on designs for both our 12g and 13g servers. My current motto is less is more, I’m trying to see what I can cut out to simplify things, as well as what can be automated. In my blog catch-up this morning I came across this excellent post, The psychology of social media: Can a visible brand ruin your life?

No, it is not another warning about posting compromising pictures on facebook, or blogging about doing outside work while telling your boss you are off sick. It talks about some of the issues and values of creating your own “brand” through social media tools. Now, back when Nigel Dessau and I worked together at IBM UK in the mid-1990’s, Nigel was quick off the mark creating content for, and getting involved with IBM UK and IBM Europes first web sites. I had the chance to work with him on some of the content and low and behold, the first Cathcarts Corner was published almost 13-years ago. Over the years, it moved, grew and contracted, and now is just this blog.

One thing I learned though was indeed the value of the perosnal brand. When reading Jennifer Leggios’ blog posting a few things rang true. One, it is worth thinking through before you launch into “just blogging”. It’s not sufficient to work out what you want to talk about and how you say it, but who your audience are, how you will reach them, your style and much more. Secondly, at many IBM Acadamey of Technology annual meetings, and often at other events, we were told by the business executives how IBM wanted the company to be more recognised for its innovation, for its technical leadership, and yes, they promised action. However despite the multi-million dollar marketing campaigns, there are and have never been almost any household names of technical leaders at IBM, or for that matter any major publically qouted company like Oracle, HP in the tech business, but also in other traditional NYSE style big companies GE, General Motors etc. Have there ?

In the second section of her blog post, entitled Workplace Impact, Jennifer talks how the corporation handles the rising, and visible brand that is a key spokesperson. I also worked with one of the tech industries most visible brands, Simon Phipps of Sun, now Oracle. It will be interesting to see where his “brand” goes once things get sorted out at Oracle. While Simon and I worked together at IBM, I was the Linux/Open Source guy, Simon was the Java guy, but he has done a much better job of communicating, and putting the case for open source than I ever could, and in the process created a brand through his blog, twitter and other contributions. I can’t see he’d have had the same success at IBM.

The point that Jennifer makes is it’s how the company reacts that makes the difference. My IBM UK managers where always very supportive of my personal brand, they definately empowered me. However, at a corporate level, unlike Simons’ experience at Sun, it’s my view that most companies practise what Jennifer describes as “talking out both sides of their mouth”. That is they realise that an engineer or technician that creates a personal brand is both getting distracted from their “day” job through their activities, and secondly, is a risk to the company if their exposure gets them unwanted attraction from competitors, start-ups and analyst companies who might offer them a better deal in order to capture the value from their brand.

I’d never thought about it that way, but it certainly puts into perspective the legions of corporate Vice Presidents who march through the PR sausage machine and come out the other other side talking tech, only to disappear 18-months later when they move on to their next assignment and are replaced by the next [insert name here] VP. The only really famous technical person I can recall from IBM, from a public perspective is Gene Amdahl, and thats more legend than fact. Sure, I’ve known many others, but none outside their narrow specialist area and through personal contact rather than through their notoriety, promotion or brand. Can you name anyone ?

Jennifers article is a long, but worthwhile read on the subject of personal brands, and certianly made me reconsider some of my long held views.

CV as a cloud tag

@epredator came up with a great idea, to create a tag cloud from your CV using wordle. The output wasn’t perfect the first run as it didn’t match Mainframe with mainframe, or IBM with IBM’s, but after doing a few global changes, here is what I got. Pretty good summary.

Click the thumbnail for a larger version, or try your own via wordle.net

Coming out – intp.org

So, off the back of the careers presentations and posts I’ve been discussing personality types with my eldest daughter, Eloise, who works in HR.

I remember doing the Myers Briggs stuff a while back, maybe the late 1990’s. But for the life of me, I couldn’t remember my type. Today while trying to find my folder that has hardcopies of all my PC Software licenses, I came across my “Sixteen Personality Types at work in organisations” booklet, written by Jenny Rogers for ASK Europe plc and Management Futures Ltd.

Right there in the back, was my Myers Briggs type indicator assessment. My reported type is INTP and my preference scores are 23/23/37/9. It’s pretty risky declaring this stuff in public, if it leaked I could always get another US Social Security Number(SSN), but you can never take back a web disclosure of your Myers Briggs type.

Posts on a journal and to news groups might effect your future employment, especially if you are two different people, one in person, and one online. But your MBTI is an insight into the real you or in this case, me.

Looking at INTP.ORG, it has a list of jobs, I smiled quietly as I’ve done four of them, double counting my IT roles, in the list it says “Career satisfaction lies in doing what you enjoy”. Exactly, so I better not try to become a “marketing professional”, since this is a job I wouldn’t enjoy and would be least chosen by an INTP.

Just in case anyone was wondering why I was working for the VP of marketing for Power Systems

Best Career Advice: What’s yours?

Debbe Kennedy over on the Greater IBM posted on career advice, which lines up with my most recent post. I’m making some good recent progress and have some great feedback from my recent IBM ATSM presentation on careers.

Managing your career

No, not the verb, the noun.

One of my early posts in this blog was “A. Seven – Q. Ways to measure progress ?”, a response to an entry on Brian Peacocks internal blog. Thursday last week I had the pleasure of doing the pitch behind the post, to the world-wide IBM Assistant Technical Staff Member(ATSM) community. Although “corny“, one of the phrases that is a staple in the presentation is “Make sure change is something that happens for you, not to you”.

It stuck in my mind. When I got off a flight from the UK on Tuesday night, actually early Wednesday morning, I decided that I needed to live up to that mantra.

And so it was after some frantic last minute activities yesterday, I’m pleased to announce that today I signed form to become a full IBM US employee as of today. Nothing much else changes, I’m still leading the marketing requirements, scenarios and related work on Systems Management. I’m pulling together a number of important threads for the p7 based server, and I lead/own the Power Systems Appliance strategy work. But as of today I do that as a full IBM Corporation employee and will be resigning from IBM United Kingdom, and at least for the foreseable future, no more assignments. Colour me really excited.

Make sure change is something that happens for YOU, not to you.

[Update: I've uploaded the slides after a couple of requests, you can view them online or download from slideshare.net here. ]

A. Seven – Q. Ways to measure progress ?

Some how I should have guessed that as soon as I restarted my blog a load of opportunities to comment would come up, that wouldn’t have been there if I didn’t have the blog….

I’ve just been catching up with Brian Peacocks IBM Internal blog, its great to see Brian still blogging, he is currently theme-posting, blogging on single themes. This weeks theme is careers. In his introductory(internal) post Brian muses that he thinks it would be good if “one of the Execs (VPs) wrote articles explaining the career path that ends up with an Exec position, something that many of us would find fascinating.”

I don’t think I can offer that but I can offer my “Seven Ways for a technical person to measure their career progress.”

The loves and life of an evangelist – no, not me!

Sasha asks in her personal and IBM internal blog about the rate of attrition in her sphere and what the problem is?