Today, I was talking to Gary Bailey, the VP of IT at Penn Virginia in Houston., and he mentioned the need for meaningful, compelling IT metrics to put in front of his board and his business that say “What we are doing matters.” And to say it in a way that non-IT people could hear.

My playback to him was when it comes to IT metrics, what we need is no more blah blah blah. Lord, when I hear that, my eyes roll back in my head and I reach for a cup of coffee. Gary’s board is no different.

So we got to thinking.

Here are the 2 metrics (and maybe the only 2) that an IT leader needs:

Metric 1: IT’s Net Promoter Score. What if IT leaders took a lesson from the online world and asked the people they serve what they think of the job IT is doing? In the online world, it’s net promoter score – how many of your customers would recommend you? And then provide specifics.

Imagine if IT leaders tell their board or boss: Here is IT’s net promoter score. This is one of two measures by which we live or die (there’s that existential gene again). If it goes up, we are on the right track. If it goes down, then I will personally lead the charge to outsource this whole shooting match including myself.

I know, I know, you are thinking “I might not have a job with this approach.” Today, you might have a job but do you have a life (down, existential gene, down!). I would argue this is THE path to job security and, more importantly, job satisfaction. If you were THE guy to take that on as THE metric – you would be employed til kingdom come.

Metric 2 – The Cost of 1 Minute of Downtime on (Critical App Here). Tell the board, “Last year, I saved this company a potential loss of $x/week and $y/month and $z/year by having this application up and running for our company.” Put a stake in  the ground. Quantify it. Claim it.

If not now, when?

If not, why not?

The last thing any of us need is another blah blah blah powerpoint presentation.

Let’s give it a whirl. Wisegate members are now coming up with this approach and other game-changing metrics for the leaders in IT. Join in.

I was asked whether I agreed with any of the negatives the author mentions related to constant connectedness and also whether I understand. Yes, I strongly agree with a number of the negatives mentioned. But as CEO and Founder of a high-tech start up, I also understand.

I believe it is axiomatic that what we give others (e.g., judgment, acceptance, harsh words, patience) is what we give ourselves (times ten). So the problem with hiding from others behind devices is that we are really hiding from ourselves. The problem with that as I see it is three-fold:

• Each human being has something to offer the world that the world has never seen before. If we don’t take the time to embrace stillness and solitude and the discomfort it brings, then the risk is we will never discover what we have to offer and we will never reach our potential on this planet. Constant connection necessarily prevents this.
• If all I can give you is a quick text or message, then it’s very likely I am never giving myself more than a few seconds of undivided attention. And a few seconds will never be enough time for me to get to know myself. And if I don’t know myself, I don’t really know what matters to me — and I’m vulnerable to the rampant, fleeting influence of digital connections.
• Empathy and deep thought are slow neural processes; the multitasking of texting while eating/tv’ing/sleeping/getting married are by definition fast and shallow ones. Empathy is required to embrace others. Deep thought is required to figure out who you are and what you care about. While I might be “living” with the illusion of connectedness, I am in fact destitute when it comes to true human relationship.

My definition of a friend is someone who will come get me out of jail at 3 a.m. in the morning. A high bar, I realize, but really, shouldn’t we have a standard for ourselves? The concept of friends being a quantity game to me is nonsense (but then I’m in the process of reducing my LinkedIn connections…).

Finally, I can’t help but wonder whether all of this connecting is related to our addiction to multi-tasking, which is very related to our inability to be alone. Being alone is not a problem to be solved; I think of it as a threshold to cross into uncharted territory and adventure. Here’s a test for you: Go right now and sit quietly in a room with no device or distraction of any kind  (including a watch) for 10 minutes. Just you and your breath. I bet you can’t do it — unless you have been practicing. What does that say?

As to the question – do I understand our addiction to being “connected” through devices?

Yes, I understand. I am trying my car as a device-free zone and failing. I can’t believe how seductive my phone is when it sits there on the passenger seat, seeming to call to me to pick it up, put my fingers on it, connect. I observe myself in this pattern and laugh, cry and am stunned. All.

Also, I try doing email only three times a day, but that little Outlook icon saying I have a new email sucks me in like a monkey to a shiny object (who is the lower primate in this story?). At least I can observe these in myself. Perhaps that is a step toward freedom.

Not necessarily an easy question to answer. It requires taking an honest look at your life.  And taking an honest look at your life takes courage.

Homer ran a construction company for more than 20 years —and was still in the midst of that when we started having this conversation. And when he asked himself the lottery question, he didn’t like the answer.

For both of us, to answer the question honestly meant we had to make changes or stay unsatisfied. Those were the options. A dear friend of mine calls my optimism dangerous – my ability to make the best of things, which is extreme, can keep me from seeing things that need to be seen. Call it a strength and a weakness. But for me it means I have to very careful and face things squarely.

Fast forward: Homer is now a full-time musician. Now, he answers the lottery question differently than he did a few years ago.

We don’t get a life, we live a life. So, he’s living his life and it’s inspiring to see (and not a little puzzling to his former colleagues.)

And me? Yes, same goes for me. I won the lottery (well, not literally). What I mean is I wake up a lot of days and feel like I have won the lottery. If tomorrow I woke up with all the money in the world, I would keep doing what I am doing: loving Homer, playing with my dogs and building Wisegate. I love what I do (most days).

There are many days that at the end of a long, hard day, I am filled with energy. Though it has been a long day with a lot of things to tackle and work through, I wrap my day fulfilled, in the midst of my destiny. (And what I am in the midst of –  getting a brand-new concept company off the ground is challenging.)

I had many years where this wasn’t the case. The end of a long day felt like I had been run over by a truck. Heck, the end of a lot of not-that-long days felt like I had been run over by two trucks. The money was cushy. My health suffered. The stress of not being where I needed to be wasn’t made up for by the big bucks I was being paid. I was not living my life, I was merely existing. It got to a point where I had to do something about it.

I don’t have it all figured out. I do have a taste now for the uncharted life that seems to be mine. Though it is uncertain and ever changing, I wouldn’t trade it for another.

This is a struggle for many of us. Ask yourself the lottery question. If the answer is something other than what your life looks like today, what are you waiting for?

Post note – my friend Margaret read this post before it went live and she wrote me  these truly inspiring words: “Great post! Very thought provoking (and a little depressing.)

When I try to do several things at once, I am truly present for none of the tasks at hand. That’s when I lock my keys in the car, arrive at work and can’t remember driving there, or finish a meal and can’t recall savoring a single mouthful. My mind is elsewhere. Literally. I understand and feel the pressure to handle so much and feel so little. And I understand the temptation. Though I know the dangers of it, using my phone while driving is so alluring – while my phone sits innocently in the passenger seat, it seems to call to me, lure me, to pick it up.

This multi-tasking diminishes my ability to focus. Fast is the enemy of deep. Deep thought and empathy are slow neural processes, meaning I will need to focus and slow down if I hope to experience them.

I have several practices that help me stay focused and present — hot yoga, a daily practice of stillness (I briefly retreat 3 times a day – this is a new one), and several silent retreats each year. Like the French philosopher Blaise Pascal famously remarked, all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone. If he had known about hot yoga, he might have changed that to “sit quietly in a room and sweat profusely”. And I wonder what he’d say about email…

Stillness is a constant challenge. And while I was terrified on my way to that first silent retreat years ago, they are now a part of my rhythm.

Recently, I was among a number of women CEOs interviewed by a writer for Forbes — a cool woman named Molly — about women executives achieving balance. I talked about stillness. It was a bit of a kick to be in Forbes, I gotta say. Maybe I need to go reflect on that.

This weekend I got to thinking — how do we spend the time that we save?

So I want to send a challenge to my members.

The next time Wisegate saves you an hour or two, spend that hour on something that matters to you. Hang out with your family. Work for a cause of any kind as long as it matters to you. Simply sit on the grass and stare at the sky contemplating life. (Insert your own list here.)

Don’t spend it working. As I was thinking about this, the picture that came to mind is a person at the ocean’s edge, down on their hands and knees, digging a hole in the sand. You keep digging and no matter how fast or how much you dig, the hole immediately fills up with more water or more sand. Work is like that. There is always more work. It will fill up as much as we let it.

We bring our best to our work when we have full lives and when we take time to place ourselves elsewhere.

I’d like to hear from you about how you spend the time you save.

The best story (according to me) gets a free 1-year membership to Wisegate.

Levena has the honor of being the person in the info security industry that the most Wisegate members had told me I HAD to meet, and who we HAD to get as a member. Well, after several members had told her about Wisegate, I recently got a chance to visit with her (along with Bill Burns of Netflix and Denny Dean of a big insurance company who doesn’t like their name mentioned publicly.)

After spending a little time telling her about who we are and what we are up to (and showing her the site) she wrapped up our call by saying to me (I paraphrase), “I want to thank you for what you are doing. I don’t often hear someone who is so passionate about what they are doing. And, we really need this in our industry. So, thank you.”

Not an exact quote, but that is the gist of it.

I told my husband. I told the team. I told our board. I had a glass or two of wine to bask in the afterglow (haha!).

Never in my entire career have I been thanked for what I am doing. Not once. I understand; I started on Wall Street doing M&A, which doesn’t conjure up a lot of warm and fuzzy sentiments. And in my last two start-ups, I was a vendor hawking a software product. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Today, I am so glad to be building Wisegate – because I do believe in it and that makes it fun to get up and go to work each day.

Levena Bailey made my day.

I was talking with Scott last week and asked him if we could quote him in a press release announcing this newest Wisegate community. What he said made my (and the whole Wisegate team’s) day. Here it is:

“I strongly believe in the value of Wisegate – the high level of member participation and proactive, entrepreneurial nature of the Wisegate staff set it apart from the alternatives I have seen. I have heard many sales pitches over the years for IT collaboration communities, but Wisegate is the only one I have accepted.”

Then he told a peer or ten about Wisegate, explaining it like this:

“The site allows for collaboration via product reviews, polls, discussion questions, etc. You can host a conference call to get peer views on any IT subject (we are diving into cloud-based CRM; I hosted a call on that and got some useful feedback). The grunt work of setting up events is done by the Wisegate staff, so it is fairly pain-free.”

Wow. That can keep me going for days. Next time I talk to Scott I am going to find out more about how what we are doing that helps him. I really want to know.

In the meantime, Scott Chiavetta made my day.

Which got me to thinking…

Do you remember life before Google? Before we knew about Google and had used it, it was hard to imagine what it could do for us. It was hard to envision how habit-forming it would become; that we would be using it every day. Can you remember that point in time?

That point is where we are with Wisegate; building a service that can help, a service that can change the way we work, a service on which people will come to rely.  We are here to bring people together who have the same job in the same industry and who are struggling with the same challenges — the people you need to know whether you know them today or not, available to share expertise and solve problems.

And we are working to help our members understand how to get in the Wisegate habit.

Yesterday, an immigration attorney was telling me they need a Wisegate because so many in their profession are solo practitioners and if they could come together to share experiences, collaborate and solve problems, it would be of enormous value to the attorneys and their clients.  A few days ago, a venture capitalist was telling me he needs a Wisegate for his founders because great things happen when they get together, but that only occurs once a year. And a few weeks ago, two Wisegate members were telling a group of CISO peers at an annual dinner that the way to keep that meeting of the minds going (between now and next year’s dinner) is to bring them on Wisegate (and here they come!).

I believe in what we are building and that it will become a beneficial habit for our members. And I’d love to hear about how your Wisegate habit has helped you — and how it became something you rely on.

Yet again recently, a journalist asked me the following question:

Do you feel pressure to conform in order to fit in with the guys, or is this outdated thinking? What have your experiences in the (high-tech) industry been like? Is it an industry that’s welcoming of women?

To which I responded:

Every time a woman in high tech (or any industry) conforms to “fit in with the guys,” the only thing that happens is the loss of a good woman. Everyone loses: the woman, if by conforming she is not true to herself; and the company, which won’t have the advantage of that woman’s unique gifts and perspective.

I am strongly against conforming. I believe each person has genius to offer the world (and their jobs) and only by developing and embracing who we are will we ever truly shine and offer the world what we have to offer.

The danger of conforming, and I do believe it is a danger, is two-fold. First, each day of our lives that we are focused on conforming, we are robbed of part of our energy. To sustain a façade of being someone we’re not, we have to think about it, weigh it, act it — constantly. It takes energy to repress who we are. If I am spending my time and energy conforming, I am robbing myself and my company of what I truly have to offer in terms of innovation, ideas, human spark.

Second, conforming is not sustainable. Sooner or later something in us will rebel, will demand that we let our true selves out. This can take the form of burnout, depression, major stress – or worst of all, regret. Will we look back on our lives and be thrilled by years spent conforming?

I certainly have felt this pressure, so I understand the question.

The tech world is a great place for women — for everyone — to bring their unique strengths and talents to the table.

What about you? Have you felt the pressure to conform in order to fit in and succeed in the high-tech world? How did you stay true to yourself?

This article resonated with me. Thanks to my friend Rich for sending (fascinatingly enough, he gets me.) This month I celebrate 10 years of not owning a television. I have happily missed the “Reality TV” craze, though even without a TV I have certainly heard about it.

I have removed most media from my life, including newspapers, radio and magazines. (The quarterly exception is my on-again off-again love affair with InStyle magazine. It is a pure indulgence I periodically enjoy.) This has been a gradual process and one that, in my profession and my world, makes me odd.

Once in a while, as in this case, someone I trust and who knows me sends me something from the popular press that I will read. I trust Rich, he knows me and so I read it. Without meaning to, he paid me a compliment when he told me I was the first person he thought of when he read article.

I started taking silent retreats in 2007. The first time, I didn’t even know what a silent retreat meant; I just felt drawn to it. I remember flying home from some conference where I was on stage in front of more than a thousand people. Doing that, I felt no fear. The anonymity and passing glory of being in front of a big crowd and giving a talk were all I needed. But as I headed from that experience to spend two nights and one day by myself in silence, I felt terrified.

Though still angst-inducing, silent retreats are now part of my rhythm.

So, I relate to this article. I hope you like it.

And in the midst of our crazy work-obsessed world, I am trying with Wisegate to give our members a bit of quiet. A place where they can hear themselves think, listen and gain insight from people just like them. I’ll tell you more about how we do that in an upcoming post.