Archive for the 'communication' Category

16
Jan

motivation

By Don Ardonio 0 Comments
Categories: communication, leadership, management and motivation

After a conversation with one of the suits in the office, I got an email late at night that same day…

To our conversation of this morning…
Kennedy’s challenge was to land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth by the end of the decade…but the first step was to build a rocket powerful enough to escape earth’s atmosphere without blowing up.
I think we’re at the same stage.  Some of our rockets are going to blow up.  Some are just going to fall over.  But if we can start to take major ‘time buckets’ out of our production process, we’ll be getting closer to the stratosphere.
…
Confident of achieving orbit,

Sometimes knowing that high up in the company problems are understood and the message you were trying to send out hit home is a very rewarding, motivating and inspiring event.

Hope comes in many forms…

14
Jan

The morning routine

By Don Ardonio 0 Comments
Categories: communication, personal and strategy

I’ve been trying out a new morning routine for a couple of months now. Here’s how it looks.

  1. I wake up around 8:30
  2. I pick up my iPhone and read the mails that were sent overnight by my colleagues from around the world (mainly US)
  3. Mails that require a lengthy answer or research are marked, short answers are sent directly
  4. Get out of bed by 9:00, take a shower, get dressed and walk to work. So by the time I’m at my desk it’s about 9:40

I find that this strategy offers me a few significant advantages over going to the office and start working through my inbox.

First of all, I give my brain a kick start by digesting work related matters straight away forcing myself to get a lot of stuff into memory instead of somewhere latently present in a galaxy far far away. While I’m walking I give myself time to reflect on the information I just received. Those 20 minutes walking are vital since they largely define a plan of action for the day. I draw up a mental list of people I need to speak to, topics I need to digg in, ideas I want to bounce around in a meeting, … . Basically, I’m compiling a to do list on the way to work, knowing I have the latest info available.

Second, and more important, I’m up to speed before I arrive in the office. Our great landscape office is ideal for being harassed every minute of every day, meaning I hardly ever get a quiet 30 minutes stretch to work through some topics (I’d give money for a private office with a door sometimes).

27
Nov

Programming language

By Don Ardonio 2 Comments
Categories: communication, language and software

I was browsing through some resumes lately and besides the standard templates and paragraphs everybody has, there was one thing that jumped out. In the languages paragraph, one person was claiming to be fluent in the following languages: Dutch, French, English … and … C#. I admit, I was intrigued.

Why would one consider a programming language in the same area as human language? Is it just a trick to make a CV stand out or are these languages essentially the same? How can you find a common denominator to indicate fluency in these languages? Do you read, write and speak C# as well as your native language?

Looking at a definition of language: "a systematic means of communicating by the use of sounds or conventional symbols". Pretty obvious, that does entail both human and programming languages. Still, it somehow doesn’t feel right to think in the same way about human and programming languages.

On human language we often split up our knowledge in 3 areas: reading, writing and speaking. Where reading is the ability to understand text, writing the ability to create text for others to understand and speaking the rapid fire combination of the other 2 abilities.

Maybe if we translate that to programming languages, reading would become the ability to filter out the logic from a piece of code and see the underlying architecture and patterns. Writing could maybe translate to the ability to create code using a base set of functionality from the language, much like most junior developers produce code. Speaking in the end should be what someone more senior does. To know and understand the strength and weakness of a language, the standard interfaces and how/where to use them.

But still, I’d argue to keep them separate on your resume…

25
Aug

Twitter

By Don Ardonio 1 Comment
Categories: communication and twitter

For those of you who don’t know yet, twitter is a micro blogging platform. Meaning you can post a short message (140 characters) to update people that care enough to follow you of your current ideas, activity, whereabouts or other piece of genius that fits the char limit.

I’ve been on there for some time now and, after a getting started period, must say that it somewhat changed me. I’m not going to make this one of these "10 reasons why I love twitter" type of posts, but let’s just make clear that twitter delivers instant news/headlines in bite size packages.

The people that I follow are carefully selected to keep the signal to noise ratio high. Basically, when they are going wild about something or another, chances are high I will be interested in that subject also. And since it’s only a short blimp of information, I’ll make a snap judgement to invest more time in it or not. The thing is, I got the info at hand (google), and a lot of what’s interesting is pre-filtered through people that deeply care about topics I would otherwise never dig into. So I get a lot of inspiration and topics handed by a variety of people and all I have to do is look at what’s relevant to me. Great, isn’t it :)

There’s 2 evolutions I’m waiting on:

1. Politicians making more active use of twitter. I know some people are trying (Barack Obama, Yves Leterme, Elio Di Rupo, … ) but I’m looking for more activity. Keep us posted on thoughts, ideas, developments in your world, … anything basically. Maybe we’ll catch something that inspires us. Not just during campaign…

2. What I’ll be looking at next is probably a way (yahoo pipes) to filter a bunch of RSS feeds from news sites into a twitter feed. Not because I don’t want to have their RSS feed, but because I want headlines in a centralized place (let’s say, only the soccer news for the Belgian first Division).

12
Nov

2.0 in the Enterprise vs Enterprise 2.0

By Don Ardonio 0 Comments
Categories: 2.0 and communication

2.0 is everywhere these days. It’s not a thing reserved for early adopters anymore.  It’s found its way into politics, the media, marketing and (no surprise) the enterprise. The enterprise, Did it really? Let’s take a sidestep first and explore some basics about communication.

How we communicate

Communication as found on wikipedia:
"Communication is a process that allows organisms to exchange information by several methods. Communication requires that all parties understand a common language that is exchanged with each other. Exchange requires feedback. The word communication is also used in the context where little or no feedback is expected such as broadcasting, or where the feedback may be delayed as the sender or receiver use different methods, technologies, timing and means for feedback."

Let’s just focus on the key ideas I conveniently underlined.

Exchange requires feedback
I’d like to rephrase this for the sake of this post to: Thinking requires feedback. Strictly speaking, exchange is not necessary as one-way traffic exists. We all know the typical all-hands meetings where our beloved CEO, CIO, CTO, CFO and whatever CxO we could find comes to tell us how we are doing. It’s a form of communication where there is very little feedback generally. You are informed of certain events and general status. It does not require a lot of activity from your side and certainly not a lot of thinking. Now when it comes to thinking, even when doing it all alone, your inner self will use language to help your other inner self (or inner selves) understand the problem and you’ll try to describe it. Writing it down, talking it through with others (in or outside your head), … they all require a common platform…a common language.

Language
Probably the single most important thing I know. Language is your gate to the world and is probably worth an entire weblog discussing it.  The thing is, if you can name something there is a link formed in your brain that allows you to think about it. Arguably the single most important thing about language: Language facilitates thinking.  

Information
If Language is your gate to the world, than information is what is behind the gate. There’s literally thousands of information units generated this very moment. And they are all out there, for you to grab, as long as you know what gate to go through.

Let’s now have a look at communication in a 2.0 environment.

Communication 2.0

We’ve spent ages defining language, getting new words and getting our brain to link up everything so we can think about stuff. With great results, no doubt. But exactly what have we been investing in?

As stated above we invested in a lot of words, forming a language. And that language facilitates thinking and we have a lot of information out there. So seems like we did a good thing, we invested in the 3 key concepts. Great job! Go humans!

And yet, there’s something missing. Communication amongst peers does not stop because of language, nor does it stop because of information. It’s hampered by the feedback part.

Just keep your attention span a bit longer on this article and follow me: you and your colleagues sitting in a meeting room, facing the same problem. There may be 4 of you using language and giving each other feedback on bits of information that could add up to a solution to your problem. Great. There’s 4, no doubt brilliant, minds in that room trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Now imagine you would do that with every engineer in your company (assuming you don’t have a 4 engineers company). And even better, let’s take if full scale 2.0. Imagine solving this problem with every mind on the planet that knows this language. Wouldn’t that be something worth investing in? Welcome to 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0?

So there are some tools out there that facilitate communication 2.0. Think about wikis, sharepoint, blogs, … . Which is easy to set up in your enterprise. So here we are than. We all see the benefit of communication 2.0, we have a central wiki page to capture and discuss our issues and to keep others in the loop and allow them to give an opinion. Enterprise 2.0? I, for one, disagree. You introduced 2.0 in your enterprise, but you’re not at Enterprise 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0 is not having the tools in place. Enterprise 2.0 requires an upgrade from Employee 1.x to Employee 2.0. It requires every last one of them (or at least "the critical mass") to actively participate in your company. It requires them to invest time in a philosophy, to maybe pick up the pace on some language from another department. And above all…it requires them to think!

Transparency, open communication, information sharing, collaborative thinking, … to me they’re more than buzzword compliancy for the execs in their speech. They are the next evolution for communication, for better thinking.