Note: This article originally ran on July 31 2007, is slightly edited for reprint in an effort to share previously published ideas with new readers.

Often times, when interacting with a new group of people it can be difficult to decode the roles and responsibilities that have already been established among them. Inadvertently directing comments to the wrong person can spark insults or waste time, generally yielding poor results. Taking the time to ask about who is in charge of what can make a big difference for everyone involved.

When my maternal grandfather (inventor of concussion grenade fishing) died in 2002, my Mom went back to Oklahoma City before Dad and I could join her for the services that would be held. My grandmother wasn’t up to planning the funeral so her 3 daughters and son did the job.

My Mom (back left) with her siblings and parents, circa 1982.

As much as we all love them, it’s a known fact that my Mom and her sisters all got the family “bossy gene”. They have a need to be in charge. Don’t get me wrong, all of them use their powers for good instead of evil. When any of them are on the case, stuff gets done and you don’t have to give it a second thought.

As a result of being raised in a house with these people, my uncle is an extremely laid back guy. He’s a very hard worker, but he’s always had other people around him to do the worrying so he doesn’t do a whole lot of it himself (and, by extension, he was more fun to play with when I was a kid, a comment I’ll surely take flak for from my aunts). If you had three people barking orders at you all the time throughout your childhood who weren’t even your parents, you’d be the same way.

So, the four of them are sitting in the funeral director’s office planning how the services would go. The conversation quickly fell into a pattern. A gentleman in his mid 50s, the funeral director would address his questions directly to my uncle, who would say nothing when eventually the silence would be filled by one of his sisters interjecting the answer. Not understanding the dynamic, the funeral director continued to address my uncle almost exclusively, presumably because he’s male and the assumed leader of the group despite evidence to the contrary. After awhile, my uncle couldn’t stand it any more and with his gentle drawl, politely said:

“Excuse me, sir, but are you under the impression that I’m in charge here?”

Needless to say, the format of the conversation changed for the better after that and helped them all achieve a much swifter resolution to the issues they were there to discuss.

The next time you find yourself confronted with a new group of people with a prior relationship, take a minute to assess who is playing what roles. If you can’t figure that out for yourself, ask. Knowing who is interested in what is half the battle.

When having a dispute with someone, I like to think of the situation in two parts:

1. Make sure everybody has the same set of facts
2. Try to understand what in the other persons perspective is causing them to have an opinion different from yours despite #1

I spend a lot of time in this space writing about #2, but was reminded recently that you can’t forget #1 in the process.
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Technorati Tags: argument strategies, dispute

Hi everyone,

Unless you were one of the lucky few, you probably missed out on seeing a picture of 18 year old me with my most recent post. It turns out that I was storing the image in way too high resolution and was hitting a bandwidth limit with the folks over at Geocities.

The picture should now be viewable, sorry for the mixup.

—Pete

Most people reading this will never meet me in person, but I’m quite tall.  My 5′4″ mother and 5′9″ father produced a 6′6″ son (who subsequently married a 5′ wife) so I kinda stick out in family pictures.  As a by-product of my height, I played a lot of basketball in my youth.

We’re staying at my parents house while we await our new house to be ready for move-in, and I was greeted with this picture for the first time in years.  It sparked memory about a lesson I learned at the time about how not to inspire people:

My senior year of high school, I was co-captain with the other two seniors on the team and learned the hard way that you can’t inspire people with aggression.  We’re all smiling in the picture above (I’m on the far right with a lot more hair than I have now and the ’80s short shorts), but those guys hated me and with 20 years of hindsight I have to agree they had a good reason.
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Technorati Tags: bridge burning, leadership

If you’ve got a free hour and 15 minutes, it’s hard to beat spending your time watching The Last Lecture video, which went viral a little less than a  year ago.  The book by the same title (The Last Lecture) introduces some new material, but is mostly the same as the video.  I found, though, that by absorbing it in smaller pieces in book format I liked it a lot better.

Be forewarned, though, especially if you have small kids.  This is only the second book to ever make me cry.  So much so, in fact, that I couldn’t finish the last 5 pages.

In case you have been living under a rock for the last 11 months, Randy Pausch is a professor at Carnegie Mellon who was diagnosed with terminal cancer and delivered a stirring last lecture that became an online phenomenon.  And for good reason.  Both the book and the video serve as a list of things he wanted his 3 kids to know about him and serve as the advice he wouldn’t be around to deliver to them.  Of the book, he has said in interviews that he only cares about the first 3 copies.

I found the end to be quite heartwrenching since his oldest son is about the same age as my daughter.  I can’t possibly fathom what it would be like to know I was leaving her, but Pausch takes it on with an optimistic enthusiasm that is infectious.  Instead of trying to paraphrase his insights, here are my favorite quotes throughout the text.

“We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand”

“It’s not helpful if we spend every day dreading tomorrow”  –his wife Jai

Tips for improved group collaboration (paraphrased):

Meet people properly

Find things you have in common

Try for optimal meeting conditions

Let everyone talk

Check egos at the door

Praise each other

Phrase alternatives as questions (’What if we did A instead of B’)

“Go out and do for others what somebody did for you.”

“When giving an apology, any performance lower than an A really doesn’t cut it.  Halfhearted or insincere apologies are often worse than not apologizing at all because recipients find them insulting.”

“But remember, the brick walls are there for a reason.  The brick walls are not there to keep us out.  The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.  Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough.  They’re there to stop the other people. “

“Brick walls are there for a reason.  And once you get over them — even if someone has practically had to throw you over — it can be helpful to others to tell them how you did it.”

Technorati Tags: inspiration, motivation, the last lecture

Many years ago, Dave Packard noticed that his accounting staff had to put in overtime at the end of December in order to process all the necessary paperwork to close out the financials for the year and he didn’t think that was fair for them to have to give up family time in that way. So, he moved the start of the fiscal year to November 1 (moving it back to December 1 complicated Thanksgiving plans) and thus HP’s unusual financial quarter boundaries were born.

That’s a really long-winded way of saying I’m late when it comes to completing my mid-year accomplishments list, which I should have done in May but am only getting to now.

Why make a mid-year accomplishments list? Well, what did I do last November? Uh, off the top of my head I can’t remember. If I can’t remember that now I have no hope of remembering it in October just before my performance evaluation. Hence the need for a mid-year accomplishments list.
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Technorati Tags: accomplishments, performance evaluation

There’s always a reason for why someone does something. Your challenge is to figure out why. That’s true of a business meeting just as it is of a married couple. Figure out why and you get a better understanding of the other person’s perspective and can find a better common solution.

Case in point:
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Technorati Tags: perspective, psychology, relationships

At first, this book scared the crap out of me.

Then, it validated what I write about on my blog.

Finally, it made me think. It made me think a whole lot.
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Technorati Tags: book report, economics, globalization, the world is flat

My team just went through a pretty significant re-organization and as such are choosing a new name (not yet chosen of this writing). This reminded me that the first organization I worked for in HP was the Response Center Lab, which went by its acronym RCL. After a few months of working in RCL, I was told that the name used to be the Response Center Technology Lab, but that the acronym “RCTL” reminded too many people of the word “rectal” so it was changed.

That trip down memory lane sparked this months question over at LinkedIn Answers:

“What’s the worst acronym for an organization name you ever heard of (or were maybe a part of)?”
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Technorati Tags: acronym, naming, organization

Note: This article originally ran on June 11 2007, is slightly edited for reprint in an effort to share previously published ideas with new readers.

When you have a meeting with people you’ve never met before, those first couple of minutes when everyone is getting settled in can be extremely awkward. You want to be friendly and potentially build your network by engaging the people who are new to you, but gripping questions like “So, how’s the weather where you’re from?” or “How long have you been with Black Sun? Do you like that company?” don’t exactly spark interesting conversation.

But, if you and I were in a meeting and you asked me, “Did you ever go to that nude beach near UCSD?” that would get my attention. How might you find out more detailed information about someone that you can use to establish a relationship BEFORE you meet them?

This is yet another magic of LinkedIn. Check out my LinkedIn profile as an example. If you dig into my full profile, you can discover that I went to school in La Jolla for 5 years, been issued a patent, and worked a lot with Struts and ASP.NET. You can come up with a lot more interesting questions based on that information than the normal pre-meeting chit-chat (although you have to have knowledge of nude beach locations to ask the example question) and by extension be more memorable.

That’s not to say you can get away with being a total moron in the meeting itself, but if you shine there too the combination of the two can make a bigger impression.