AdamGreenfield.com

PIPA/SOPA

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 17:41:00 -0800

Just watched a good TED Talk on the larger issue behind PIPA and SOPA. It is worth taking a few minutes to understand the speaker's perspective.

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Your words have power use them wisely

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 07:42:02 -0800

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House Keeping

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 22:59:00 -0800

I've started developing in my "free" time and as part of that I decided to fix the screwed up installations of MacPorts and RVM that I had on my primary laptop.

My machine has been so screwed up I've been developing for a while using a Linode instance, ssh tunnels and ExpanDrive. This solution has worked pretty well except for an annoying issue with TextMate freezing every time the application got focus when I had an ExpanDrive based file system opened. I started with blowing away my old installation of MySQL, MacPorts and my previous system-wide installation of RVM.

The new development tool chain uses Homebrew, RVM, and Vagrant. Hopefully the time I had to invest to get to this point will encourage me to keep things clean. The idea of building isolated VMs for project development seems solid and a number of people I have some respect for seem to be using vagrant successfully for this purpose.

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The Good Life

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 20:45:19 -0700

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Forks in the road

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 21:50:00 -0700

Tonight I found out that another co-worker is taking the next step in their career and leaving our company. Selfishly I’m sad I won’t be working with them anymore, but honestly I’m happy for them and know they have a very bright future ahead.

What really got me thinking was the conversation we had after covered the basics (e.g. sorry to see you go, where are you heading, etc.). The reality is that most careers don’t follow the clean-cut path they have in the past. Not very long ago it was common to work for the same company for decades, leave with a gold watch, benefits and a pension. That definitely isn’t the reality I live in, and I often think about the going on five years I’ve invested in my current organization. Granted my career path has been pretty interesting over those years – but I’ve been at the same place.

Today you are responsible more than ever before for your own retirement, your own career and your success. My friend made the comment that loyalty doesn’t exist anymore, I responded that I don’t think it is gone but I think it has changed. Today’s loyalty is a bond between humans, not between a human and an organization. I think I like it that way

When giving me advice at one point a few months ago a senior executive whom I’ve grown to trust said to me that the only way to build the kind of bond he and I were talking about at the time, where near frictionless disagreement and collaboration are possible, was to go through “battle” with someone. He didn’t mean this strictly in the military sense however I can only imagine the result is even stronger in that case. He was referring to the absolute certainty to the guy standing next to you will still be there, fighting right along with you, even when things get ugly. In some jobs, that might be an everyday event or an extraordinary circumstance. Either way the result is the same, you learn who you can trust. You learn who you can count on and you learn whom you can’t.

I’ve lost another one of the people who fit solidly in former category. The good news for me is that you never really lose those people; you just might not know how or when your paths will cross again. In fact, I got a call from another one of the people I’d put in that category earlier today asking me to speak at a User Group his organization is hosting next month.

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360 Feedback

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 13:37:00 -0700

One of the Operations Directors at work developed an application we have started to use to gather 360 feedback from the other people in the organization you interact with frequently. This tool basically asks for a number of objective criteria to be evaluated on a 1 to 10 scale and then provides the ability to give you some structured (but largely free form) data on things you are doing well and things you should consider changing.

I like this application and the idea behind it. When it is presented to you (and your manager) it shows you all the feedback but keeps the people providing it anonymous. I will say that I wish there was a way for me to ask questions (anonymously would be fine) about some of the feedback so I can really understand of it but most of it is pretty interesting.

One of the outputs it gives you is the graphic I'm showing here, it maps your certain traits based on the objective feedback. The other most interesting part is looking at the delta between your average rating from peers and how you rate yourself.

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Steve Jobs on Death

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 20:11:37 -0700

I hope most people have watched this amazing speach, but it is worth watching today. Steve Jobs had an incredible impact on the world in his years.

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The only reason people listen to me is because of my f-ing sweet hat

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 11:01:29 -0700

Andy_n_Adam_Pligirm_Movie.avi Watch on Posterous

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Achievement Unlocked: Workaholic

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 11:58:39 -0700

This was originally a pearl of wisdom I sent to a co-worker who told me I'd have something "by the end of the day" on a Sunday:

After 10 years in different roles I've stopped wearing "workaholic" like it is a badge of honor. I work weekends if I can't avoid it - but it leaves me regretting the time I missed with my son and my friends. I work nights if I have to, because I need to carry my weight and not create undue stress on my colleagues (most of whom I also count among my friends).

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Customer Service

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 13:40:00 -0700

I smashed my touchscreen phone this week. I bought it from my carrier a few weeks ago, and now my new phone was pretty much useless.

I took it to the manufacturer (not even the people I pay every month for phone service). A nice woman looked at my phone for about 10 or 15 seconds (the damage was bluntly obvious), looked at the records on her tablet and said that she would like to offer me a one time free replacement.

She activated my new phone with my carrier, smiled and I was on my way with a working phone less than 30 minutes after I walked in.

Do you know their customer service is awesome? I don't even need to tell you what type of phone I have and most of you probably already know without ever having seen me carry it.

This is one of the reasons I pay a premium to buy Apple products. Good luck getting Motorola or HTC to do this. And that is assuming you can find their place of business, and then good luck getting them to do it for free. And even if you do all that, I bet it took you more than a 30 minute trip to the mall on a rainy Saturday 2 days before you have to travel for work.

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A little stuffed penguin

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 09:06:00 -0800

When I started traveling all the time, my son gave me one of his stuffed
animals to bring with me. I carry it in my bag and wherever I go I try
to take a few pictures of this little stuffed penguin in various
locations. I was touched because it is one of his favorite stuffed
animals and I smile every time I see it in my bag.

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Angrybirds: Dean's Favorite Game!

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 14:28:06 -0800

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Current Status

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 17:06:09 -0700

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Current Status

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 19:41:39 -0700

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Shoot down the stars

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 22:10:22 -0700

So take a step back.. And a breath in.. Let it out now.. Put your chin up.. You can do it tiger.. You a man now.. And in your dream it's time to do the best you can now

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Nostalgia

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 19:42:37 -0700

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Obligations

Thu, 06 May 2010 11:43:39 -0700

If you want me to leave, tell me and I will talk away. If you want to
avoid me, tell me and I will make myself scarce. If I have become an
obligation, tell me and you will never have to bear that burden again

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CloudEnterprise Customer Portal Demo

Sun, 02 May 2010 23:52:06 -0700

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Looking before you leap

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 21:29:00 -0700

Recently it has started to wear on me that I don't have a better idea
of where I want to go next. Three years is the longest I've been with
a single company and while that seems like such little time in the
grand scheme of things it feels like a long time. I am not looking to
change companies but I do need to get a solid feeling for where I am
going next within the organization.

Product management has resurfaced as a love internally. I enjoy
driving our customer portal efforts, but it isn't enough to keep my
attention full time. I think the core issue is that in filling the
void with other efforts but I feel like if I had more information I
could be making a more valuable contribution than I am currently.
People lavish me with more praise than I feel like I deserve, but that
isn't a primary driving factor for me. If I could be a little more
informed, a little more focused, and have a little more autonomy I
feel like I could take my contributions even further.

With that goal in mind I need to somehow draw a map from point A to
point B. Having a few direct reports again would make this so much
easier.

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Stop selling used cars

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 08:04:28 -0700

Today, I had a rare insight into the customer experience of someone trying to purchase a moderately sized managed hosting installation. Somehow in the many years that have passed since I first entered this space I've never stopped to think about how grueling the sales experience must be to have to do that shopping. Most every organization I've worked at that had a sales staff incentives them on the amount of hosting they sell. This makes sense because you want to reward sales people that generate revenue. However many of the sales compensation structures I've seen place little or no emphasis on the long term customer satisfaction and deep relationship developed by selling a customer the RIGHT solution.

People purchasing managed hosting often do so because they want to offload some of the responsibility of building, maintaining or managing their infrastructure. This is the way that many hosting vendors try to position themselves to fill for customers. So why does the initial experience so often begin with someone who doesn't have your long-term best interest as his or her primary motivator?

In many times where I've filled a pre-sales capacity for a customer I've built a deep relationship with that customer that spanned several roles in the company for me and the entire lifetime of their account. As an industry, we need to figure out how we can make that the normal experience, rather than a situation where people sometimes suffer through the sales process in the hopes that the operations experience and the technology they come out with are worth the headache.

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