SEPG North America – Day 3

The Spectacular Crash and Burn (mine)

My morning talk on Top 10 Clues You’re Probably Not Doing Engineering was a spectacular bust! Oh, but the lessons I learned!

In the immediate after-action analysis I realized what had happened. (Any other excuses I might’ve made at the time to the contrary.) Here’s what actually happened (at least the most likely scenario):

I was tired.

On the evening (read: early morning) when I was working on the final final of the presentation, instead of merging the presentation’s pictures with the slides right there, I chose to procrastinate that task to the next day (or later). Welllllll, being as tired as I was, by the morning I’d forgotten that I had not completed that task.

OK, so that explains why my slides didn’t have their pictures. So, moving on, my next idea was to just present without the pictures. That idea was met by the audience with a resounding moan of disappointment. (I guess a lot of folks were at prior presentations and they liked my pictures.) So, off I navigated to grab the source files from their folder. The folder where all the pictures were supposed to be. And they weren’t there. WTF? How do you/ I explain that!?!

I was tired.

So, back to the night (read: early morning) of the great non-merging event. What must’ve happened (at least the most likely scenario) is that some files were saved to some folder other than the one with all the source materials, and I was completely oblivious to it. How? Of course! I was too tired to notice.

Always quick to find the silver lining, my tremendously inspiring wife, Jeanne, (she’s a veritable silver-lining-finder) pointed out, "You’ve got great material for future presentations! Just talk about how you can’t take care of business if you don’t take care of yourself!"

Dangit!

Caught. Red-handed. Pants down. Wedgie.

The same applies to your team, work group and your company. If you don’t take care of them, they can’t take care of the business. That’s a People CMM presentation if I ever heard one!

The rest of my day was spent licking my wounds.

Thanks to everyone who said nice things about it nonetheless.

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Hillel

My professional passion is to build high performance organizations out of companies motivated to be lean, agile, and achieve world-class results. My best clients are companies who have the courage, leadership, insight, foresight and discipline to be the best places to work, the best value to their customers and the best performing for their shareholders. I take a tough love approach and, frankly, have little patience for executives who *want* these things but expect to achieve them without putting in any effort or making any changes.

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