Programmer, Analyst, Learner, Leader, Gamer

Between the Warhammer Beta, college, my car being broken into, changing job roles, possibly other opportunities, house hunting, preparing out household budget, moving finances, keeping my head screwed on, meeting with mortgage lenders to get pre-approved for a future home purchase, finding the PERFECT place, signing paperwork, working with a homeowner/landlord who’s not even in town, dealing with getting new teeth put in my mouth after fracturing two of them, and now packing and preparing to move by the 15th starting this weekend (wears me out just saying all that)…

Let’s just say I’ve been busy. More details forthcoming as I find the time to post.

I am a very honest person. I like speaking my mind. I especially enjoy spreading good news. This is why I am HORRIBLE at keeping secrets. I really… really… want to leak information about the top secret project I’ve been working on. Every time I go to the site to customize something new, do data entry, putting up articles I’ve written over the years (to help jump start the site) and otherwise do things to make the site more and more awesome, the more I want to tell people about it.

I’ve told my guild and I’ve told people I know and trust, but I want to tell everyone else out there who is going to be SUPER excited about this project. My site has a very focused user group that I’m targeting, but that user group will be very interested in this site. Right now Kerrie is working on the branding design for the site including logo design and other things which will give us a professional look. Also I know a friend who is an Internet journalist who is working on pointers and will get back to me soon. I also have a friend who’s mom is an Internet marketing consultant who has been doing it for so long she works via word of mouth through contracts for big customers and not under some big agency. I don’t have any upfront capital for any of these people, but they are willing to help out which is great.

I can assure you this, the subject matter is… related to the MMO industry. I’ll leave the rest of the clues up to your imagination to figure out.

Yet another week of this hellish session is complete. I’m not really struggling on he classes anymore, but they still are quite time consuming. I particularly like how at this point, Accounting is starting to make sense and the Structured Analysis and Design class is becoming easier as well. I think Accounting is making more sense because it’s getting more logical and less memorization. Structured Analysis is getting easier because I’m more… familiar with the later steps in the structured design process. Most of the time at previous employers (and current one included) we skipped the first couple of steps so those steps were most foreign to me. The information security class is still brain dead easy, although it’s giving me all kinds of crazy ideas on what I can do to help make our office more secure.

Yesterday Scott sent out an email that’s really got my grey matter flowing. It is a 111 page PDF document (WITH NO BOOKMARKS, ARG!!!!) that illustrates and describes the core values and core competencies of IHS and how they line up with the 5 separate paths (not including management path) of IHS. Software Quality Assurance, Technical, Development, Program Management, and finally Business Solutions. I’m obviously on the Software Engineer path right now, but my desire is to be on the Business Solutions path. Actually, technically right now I’m on none of the paths, but hopefully that’s going to be fixed soon.

The nice thing about this document is that I have not only a visual picture of the path (Business Solutions Architect, Senior Business Solutions Architect, Principle Business Solutions Architect, and Executive Business Solutions Architect), but clear job descriptions and the core competencies IHS views that play a role in job performance / reviews. An extra bonus is that it gives me even MORE excuse to talk to my colleges about it and share my career goals openly while telling them WHY I’m interested in that path even more so than the engineering path. I had a very long conversation wtih Don and he agreed with me that from my passions, education, and experience that the Business Solutions Path is there I should be going.

NOTE to Self: change the Dolphin Software category it IHS…

My mind is numb.
Accounting: ~ 6-8 hours
Principles of Information Security: ~1 hour
Structred Analysis & Design: ~2-4 hours

Accounting especially is killing me, but that’s offset by the fact that Information Security is a breeze. Structured Analysis and Design is a mind trip, but a well structured class (lol, punny much?). Overall I’m enjoying my classes this session, but I’m really afraid that this session I will see my first B. Who knows I might even see two. Either way I’m still doing amazing in school and I doubt two B’s after all this time will lower my gpa any lower than around a 3.9 or so. We’ll see I don’t want to do the math right now (not after all that Accounting).

You know the thing that pisses me off the most about Accounting and I think it’s why I’m so bad at it. Accounting is nothing more than a giant exercise in memorizing rules. The concepts that are based on good, common sense business logic I get. But there are some concepts in Accounting that are simply rules you have to memorize. The math involved in Accounting is no more complicated than 2nd grade math, but knowing all the rules and formulas and how to derive these business conceptual numbers makes the formulas and rules of Physics seem simplistic.

Mah, I’m off to play some Lost Odyssey or Portal or something.

Excerpts from Harvard Business Review

A number of our conclusions about the future of business leadership were unanticipated. For one, individuals you’d never expect to identify—and who’d never expect to be identified—as “high potentials” for real-world management training end up taking on significant leadership roles in games.

The closest thing I can liken the leadership of an 80-person modern raiding guild to is the management of a medium-size business

Quite an interesting and powerful article I must say, particularly coming from Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and IBM. It makes me a bit proud of my online leadership accomplishments over the last few years. 

I’ve been busy the last few months. This little bit of self reflection will give you some insight into what I’ve been going through with recently, particularly within the last few weeks.

My journey into leadership began many years ago when I was the sole IT manager and programmer at a small commercial real-estate management firm. I was coached by the President on ways to improve myself as a leader. I was challenged to find better ways of doing business and how to communicate those changes to others. This journey expanded when I was encourage to pick up the leadership torch as a volunteer leadership position in an online community of over 100 individuals. This expanded later when I left that community and again was pulled (almost reluctantly) into another organization which is now around those same numbers. Right now I hold a second volunteer position that involves leading communications and facilitating change goals for a community of thousands of people, compiling feedback, and delivering reports to key players in a much larger organization. Over the years people have described my leadership style as democratic, pragmatic, and visionary. How did I develop such strong leadership skills in such a small amount of time?

The key factor that has been advantageous to my journey has been RAPIDLY growing environments. The real-estate management firm was constantly in a state of change. During my time with them they grew to a handful of people to over 65 people. In all of my volunteer leadership positions, they have taken place in an even more rapidly changing environment growing from a handful of people to well over 100. My exposure to rapidly changing environments has allowed me to learn how to properly lead change. Furthermore, I’ve had the power to experiment with various techniques of leadership (learned through formal education as well as self study) with little to no fear of “ruining a good thing”, especially with my volunteer leadership positions.

The more I learn about leadership, the more I realize that the average person doesn’t understand the difference between management and leadership. The more I learn about leadership, the more I realize that this is a product of history and the way individuals in business were trained to manage, and how individuals have learned what “managers” are like. When two organizations come together, one who understands management and the other than understands leadership, a serious challenge presents itself. This challenge is one that we will face going forward. 

P.S. Yes, I fell off my wight loss plan. I’m still struggling with a lack of a real schedule in my life.

The most important excerpts of Tom Kotter’s book “Leading change”

Some of the most common errors when transforming an organization
1. Allowing too much complacency
2. Failing to create a sufficiently powerful guiding coalition
3. Underestimating the power of vision
4. Under communicating the vision by a factor of 10x-100x
5. Permitting obstacles to block the new vision
6. Failing to create short-term wins
7. Declaring victory too soon
8. Neglecting to anchor changes firmly in the corporate culture.

The eight stage process of leading change
1. Establishing a sense of Urgency
2. Creating a guiding coalition
3. Developing a vision and strategy
4. Communicating the changed vision
5. Empowering broad-base action
6. Generating short-term wins
7. Consolidating gains and producing more change
8. Anchoring new approaches in culture.

Volunteer organizations exist in all shapes and sizes. Team based sports are a type of volunteer organization that most people are familiar with, but a specific kind of team based sport most are not familiar with is a guild in an online game. Guilds can be defined simply as a group of players, ranging in numbers of a few dozen to several hundred, who play an online game together regularly under the leadership of a single or multiple other players. A guild leader faces the same organizational challenges that a coach faces when organizing a purely volunteer baseball team. Through proper planning, anyone with the aptitude for leadership can create and maintain a richly rewarding guild that will hold up to the test of time.

Individuals contribute time, effort, and in some cases money to participate in organizations they want to be a part of or believe in. Unfortunately, the definition of participation is different for everyone. Some people believe that simply being associated with the organization is enough; while others will give their all to make sure the goals of the organization is achieved. Deciding on what level of participate that is wanted from people in a guild can be difficult. Online organizations also face unique challenges which include geographical differences, ever changing personal schedules, and the barriers of online communication. All of these issues play a role in not only acquiring the right people, but keeping those individuals who will define your organization over time.

When creating a guild, the first step should be to take the time to define it. This process should include not only defining policy and procedures of how the guild should operate, but also clearly state the feeling of the guild. Some guild leaders create a militaristic style guild with hyper focused goals while others might choose a laid back structure which promotes a family style atmosphere. Regardless of how one defines the feeling of a guild, clearly defining it ensures that the people who are recruited into the guild feel the same as the person who formed it. There also needs to be clearly written policies including a code of conduct, disciplinary steps, and some kind of recruitment or evaluation process. All these policies should give structure and support the written vision of the guild. These steps are no different than those a corporation takes to define a mission statement and write an employee handbook. Every document written in these early days of a clan, builds a solid foundation for the creation that is being built.

No organization of significant size can be lead by a single person. Choosing the correct people as officers of a guild can be one of the single actions that can result in the failure of even the best planned guild. Thankfully if the guild is clearly defined, attracting the correct people to help lead an organization will come with time. While previous leadership or managerial experience is helpful, having motivation for leadership and having a high belief mission of the guild result in stronger officers. Strong officers will help lower the stress and responsibilities of a guild leader, allowing the leader to focus on maintaining direction and guiding the guild, not running it.

Creating and leading a guild can be a daunting process, but if a guild leader follows the appropriate steps during creation it highly increases the success rate of a guild. Many guilds don’t plan correctly in the beginning, inevitably resulting in the failure of the guild after only a few months. The investment of a few days of planning can increase the longevity of a guild from a few months to several years.