iNoob – Chapter 2: Learning to be Productive

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English: Product icon for MindView mind mappin...

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I’ve been in the crucible of work with my MacBook Air for nearly 3 months now.  I’m finding myself feeling more at ease with many of the differences between Windows 7 and OS X. There is still the need to have a mixed environment for me to be productive AND happy.  One thing I found that I just NEEDED to do was purchase a copy of Parallels for Mac so I could get to Windows software like Visio, Project and Mindjet MindManager (there is a version for Mac, but I already own a license for the Windows version….). The installation of Parallels, Windows 7 and the various programs I wanted (including Windows Live Writer with the Zemanta plug-in, which is still my favorite blogging tool) went flawlessly.  Windows even boots faster in the Parallels environment than on my quad-core at home!

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Coming up for air

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Korg M3 Music Workstation Sampler

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It’s true…..this space has been as dead as a bag of hammers for a couple of months. I’ve switched companies and jobs, and that has made for a very exciting and immersive few weeks.

I’ve switched jobs before.  I worked for my previous employer for 14 years and had a number of positions, each a challenge and none of them easy.  Learning the ropes, discovering who were the go-to people on the team, what were the local processes for getting things done and re-jiggering my goals and deliverables for the new gig always took a bit of time, but the corporate culture was basically the same (there were actually some differences between business groups, but I learned early on that was the norm for my company).  I didn’t have to learn a new repository of information, a new information discovery tree or deal with a new way of thinking about what we did, as a company.

THAT has changed.

Boy Howdy….

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iNoob – Chapter 1: Jumping into the Pond

/ Jeff Hora / 1 Comment

I just started a new job and decided that things weren’t going to be tumultuous enough, so, on the recommendation of my new manager, I signed up for a brand

English: New 11.6 MacBook Air

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spanking new MacBook Air as my work PC. This after working with nothing but Microsoft Windows since version 3.0 back in 1991.

Wow…lots of things to notice…

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Short and…….sweet?

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Readers own scan of the PD document

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When I sit down to write, my first instinct is to spend time noodling on a topic I might have captured previously or something that I’m confronting or working through right now. I feel that somehow whatever I could come up with in a stream-of-consciousness sessions might resemble a walk through an unsightly neighborhood and not have much coherence. I need to give myself a break and realize that there is more coherence to following a path of thought than I give credit to the desire to write.

This is just such a post.

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Short and…….sweet?

/ Jeff Hora / 2 Comments
Readers own scan of the PD document

Image via Wikipedia

When I sit down to write, my first instinct is to spend time noodling on a topic I might have captured previously or something that I’m confronting or working through right now. I feel that somehow whatever I could come up with in a stream-of-consciousness sessions might resemble a walk through an unsightly neighborhood and not have much coherence. I need to give myself a break and realize that there is more coherence to following a path of thought than I give credit to the desire to write.

This is just such a post.

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Fail and Win

/ Jeff Hora / 3 Comments
Wattenberg chess visualization 050421

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I have been thinking about a post by Tac Anderson on his NewCommBiz blog about making mistakes, crisis-based decision making and how we learn.  It specifically got me thinking about organizations that learn and those that don’t really, or at least not very well (or easily).

Things move terribly fast in today’s marketplace and the halls of business. We blame it on the Internet, on the 24-hour news cycle, on our growing propensity for being “always on and connected” and on “everyone else.”  There have been countless barrels of ink spilled on the importance of failure for learning, both as individuals and organizations.  Even just thinking about how you learn personally will confront you with the first attempt at doing something, assessing how well that went, tweaking, trying again, etc.

So why do we not get it?  I’m not saying we drive for failure (although that seems to be the direction of some I’ve noticed….), but, short of life-and-death, why do we not accept that failing is at least as important as not failing?

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On noise and filters

/ Jeff Hora / 1 Comment

I’ve begun teaching my fall class in social media in business and have led the group in a collective moan about the sheer volume of data and information available, some of it valuable, but much of it ancillary at best and junk/noise at the far end of personal/professional value.  It’s pretty easy to sell a good set of filters to allow the really good stuff onto our desktops and ignore the rest.

But at what cost?

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Movin’ on up…

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Wheelbarrow

Image by wayne’s eye view via Flickr

My Dad had two primary refuges from work and my brother and me.  In the winter it was his shop in the garage and in the summer it was the yard and the garden.  He had apparently inherited the ability to grow almost anything from my grandmother.  She could take a fallen, brown leaf from a plant and nurture it into full health in the space of a year or two…..amazing.

One of the things I used to kid him about was his penchant for regularly moving shrubs, bushes and sometimes trees from one spot to another around our yard.  We used to joke that he was never happy with where God put them and was trying to improve the arrangement.  The moved item always seemed to thrive anew, regardless of where he planted it.  Now I see what he was doing in a different light.

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Movin’ on up…

/ Jeff Hora / Leave a comment
Wheelbarrow

Image by wayne’s eye view via Flickr

My Dad had two primary refuges from work and my brother and me.  In the winter it was his shop in the garage and in the summer it was the yard and the garden.  He had apparently inherited the ability to grow almost anything from my grandmother.  She could take a fallen, brown leaf from a plant and nurture it into full health in the space of a year or two…..amazing.

One of the things I used to kid him about was his penchant for regularly moving shrubs, bushes and sometimes trees from one spot to another around our yard.  We used to joke that he was never happy with where God put them and was trying to improve the arrangement.  The moved item always seemed to thrive anew, regardless of where he planted it.  Now I see what he was doing in a different light.

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I love it when a plan comes together….

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Swooshable Planning

Image by Bohman via Flickr

Earlier this week I was fortunate enough to sit in on a quarterly meeting of some of the hardest working folks I know. My company calls them Product Planners.  The difficulty of what they do is hidden by the simplicity of their title…if you’ve never worked in an enterprise that is tracking released products, fixing them as needed, and then planning new ones with the added uncertainty of forecasting their popularity, then you aren’t aware of the tricky dance these folks do.  Years ago while watching one of my favorite Mystery Science Theater 3000 movies, I remember Crow T. Robot remarking, upon seeing a credit for someone tasked with Planning, “Oh, that’s what I want to do….I’ve always wanted to Plaaaaaan!”

I thought it was a bit odd too, at the time.  Now I know better.

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