I had a colossal speaking engagement failure, and I mean that in a really good way.

The high school that my daughter will eventually go to also happens to be the one where my Dad ended is 25+ year teaching career in gleeful retirement bliss.  As such, he’s got a lot of friends still there on campus and one of them happened to be teaching a pair of courses in the business department that seemed ripe to pick my brain on things I’ve learned over the last 15 years at HP.  The first is a business development course where students arrange themselves into groups and run a ficticious business of their choosing, having to deal with accounting, hiring, business analysis and the like.  The other is an HTML development course that eventually gets into Flash editing.

I’ve done dozens of presentations for HP VP’s over the years, but there’s nothing quite like being stared down by an angry teenage girl and I was reminded about a few things in the process.
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Technorati Tags: bad public speaking

I’m back from my annual Disneyworld pilgrimage and since January is a month of new beginnings, I thought this often quoted statement from Walt himself was particularly fitting:

“I only hope that we don’t lose sight of one thing - that it was all started by a mouse.”

Today, of course, The Walt Disney Company is a 35+ billion dollar operation but it started with a huge failure: Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.  The cartoon itself was entertaining, but in 1927 Walt got completely screwed over by Universal on the distribution of it and company lore tells us that on the train ride back to Hollywood after unsuccessful negotiations, Mickey Mouse was born as a replacement.

That begat the first talking cartoon (“Steamboat Willie” although that has been disputed), the first feature length cartoon (”Snow White”), the first theme parky (Disneyland), and a host of other innovations.  Oswald returned to the Disney fold in 2006 when he was traded for Al Michaels, and you know you have a Disney geek like myself on your hands when that’s trivia they know off the top of their heads.

A bad time and a starting over, something a lot of folks can relate to after recent world economic events, sparked a media empire.  Walt never forgot that and didn’t let his people forget either, as this quote reminds us.

Technorati Tags: starting over, Walt Disney

The good folks over at the Online Education Database ran a great list of lectures and commencement addresses that are sure to inspire.  My favorite, of course, is Randy Pausch’s famous Last Lecture and Steve Job’s Stanford commencement address is on there too, but there are some surprises on their list (like Conan O’Brien’s Harvard speech) as well that make it a worthy read.

Technorati Tags: inspriration

I have a cool aunt.  

If you don’t have one, I highly recommend seeking out some very cool older lady who knows a lot of stuff and start calling her your aunt even if she isn’t.  It’s just one of those things everybody needs, really.

Among the impressive things about my cool aunt (who really is my Dad’s sister) is that she made an unusual career change from thoroughbred horse trainer to self employed accountant and has been extremely successful at it.  When I doubt whether or not I can accomplish certain things, it’s one of the things I point to when I’m in a “If she can do THAT, then surely I can do what I’m trying to do” mode.

She recently found a nice list of how to deal with stress, whose original author isn’t clear that I wanted to share (some silly, some serious):
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Technorati Tags: stress management

I was watching MSNBC the other day when a guy came on whose job title was “NBC News Presidential Historian”. How cool is that? Then another guy came on who was their “Pop Culturist” I have title envy as I recently went from: 

“HP.com Chief Architect” 

to 

“Marketing and Internet Platform Solutions IT Portals and Applications Chief Architect” 

not because I changed jobs but because of a reorganization. 

So, I asked over at LinkedIn Answers: What’s the best or the worst job title you ever heard?
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Technorati Tags: job titles

Nate Silver has had quite a year.  Not only did he and his team at Baseball Prospectus correctly predict the Tampa Bay Rays would have a big year (they reached their first World Series), but on the side he launched a political prediction career that culminated when he correctly predicted the popular vote of the recent US Presidential election within four tenths of a percentage point.   He’s been working on a round of post-election analysis and had a rather heated exchange with a conservative pundit that he commented on a week before Thanksgiving:

There are a certain segment of conservatives who literally cannot believe that anybody would see the world differently than the way they do. They have not just forgotten how to persuade; they have forgotten about the necessity of persuasion.

Regardless of whether or not you agree with this assessment of political conservatives, read the quote again but replace the word “conservatives” with the word “engineers”.  That version I’ve found it is absolutely true.
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Technorati Tags: perspectives, persuasion

A big part of the job description for a dad is to dish out advice.  Throughout my life, I’ve tended to put a lot of pressure on myself.  It’s just the way I am.

To combat this, my favorie piece of advice my Dad has ever given me is:

“Whether you succeed or fail, there are a billion people in China who don’t care either way.”

While the origins of this statement predate globalization (Dad had no way of knowing when I was 10 years old that maybe some day a few folks in China might actually care since they were working on the same project as me), the fundamentals of the quote ring true.  The sun will rise again tomorrow no matter what happens, so it doesn’t hurt to not take things so seriously all the time.

Technorati Tags: father advice, global economy, pressure

Note: This article originally ran on November 29, 2007, is slightly edited for reprint in an effort to share previously published ideas with new readers.

We’ve all been there: you take some time off and you come back to an avalanche of email. As you may know, I recently went on my annual vacation (last time I mention it, I promise 8)) and when I came back I had 259 emails to read. This Running Diary tells gives a rundown of how I reduced it to zero in about three hours.
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If you’ve heard of this book before (or the movie, which opens this week), I know what you’re probably thinking:

“Dude, that’s chick lit!”

Worse, actually, it’s adolsecent chick lit. 

My wife and I regularly give each other reading recommendations and while we don’t always take each other up on them (for example, I’ve only read one Jodi Picoult novel and she’s read several David Sedaris titles and a Chuck Klosterman), this one was particularly interesting to me because of the genesis of the story.  

The thing is, ideas come from lots of places.  Walt Disney invented the theme park industry on a weekend while sitting on a bench.  Shai Agassi realized that the cel phone business model might be our best hope for green cars.

Twilight author Stephenie Meyer simply woke up from a dream one morning and wrote it down.
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Technorati Tags: creativity, hard work, stephanie meyer, twilight

The nice folks over at Web Worker Daily were kind enough to let me share some ideas with their audience on the topic of multitasking during long phone meetings.  It begins:

As an IT teleworker for a large company over the past 10 years, I’ve spent my share of time on conference calls. The other day, in fact, I set a personal record with 11.5 hours of them in a single work day (and I had the sore headphone ear and hoarse voice that came along with that feat). Despite this meeting load, I still had to respond to IM’s, reply to a multitude of emails, prepare slides early in the day for a presentation later on, and a host of other tasks. That begs the question:

How do you effectively multitask in meetings in a way that lets you get work done?

For the rest, head on over to WWD. 

Technorati Tags: meetings, web worker daily