Quick Reads (Under 5 Minutes)

Doing the budget exercise of assigning 2022 actuals to department and our revised chart of accounts. Remembered this illustration from my childhood copy of The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.

I best learn a thing by dismantling and building it from the ground up. (Childhood box of loose clock parts aside). I did that with our sales forecast. I’ve done it at a with our P&L. Now I’ll do it with our expense budget.

The time I spend “in a zone” or just hunkering in to get things done only works if I also take quiet time to think through what I essentially need to do and more importantly what important things I’m not going to put off.

It’s easier to glean information from data than it is to alter behavior based on that information. Or maybe not. Maybe they are both —-ing hard. Yeah, that.

Some days I’m challenged to drive from hope and not anxiety or dread. I try to focus on being of service to my co-workers those days. It really helps.

I look at my growth as a business leader as part of a journey towards self actualization. I’m not so much adapting to the role as learning who I truly am in service to other people in this role.

Can we sing the praises of engineers for a moment. The audacity and genius of entrepreneurs and scientists is awesome but what about the skill, ingenuity, and practiced discipline to craft a solution that actually works and that doesn’t fall apart when you turn your back on it.🙌

At our town hall I showed how our exec team’s use of data created blind spots that delayed our response to a decline in revenue. Thanks to our sales, marketing, and consulting teams we have course corrected (woot) - though we still won’t achieve our plan. I showed a side by side comparison of our old key indicator and our new one to demonstrate why the latter provides better information. I updated our company wide dashboard and invited everyone to use it to hold me accountable so it doesn’t happen again.

I’m totally okay working to earn the trust of people who see the world differently from me. It’s with them that I’ll achieve anything truly interesting.

First session of annual planning was modeling key activities that create value: assumptions, inputs, process steps. Agreeing on leading and lagging measures for quality and growth. Then confirming where that data exists and deciding how to make it available to everyone.

Each day we root ourselves in the reality of today’s choices while walking towards the future we want to build (as best as we can see it). It’s an iterative act of self-assertion. And not without drama. We re-tell each other the saga of our journey even as we walk it together.

One piece of advice I’d give anyone in a leader role is learn how to model in numbers the value your team creates. I learned how over years as a mid level engineering manager and it’s a transferable skill now that I’m diving into the forecast models for my business.