justdrew

A few months ago, I read “A Whole New Mind” by Daniel Pink (which I highly recommend- it’s excellent). As is becoming common knowledge, our brains are made up of two different brain styles. The left hemisphere of the gray matter tends to work very logically, linearly and literally. This is where most of history’s best and brightest really excelled, since success with this type of thinking can pay immediate returns in cultures that live with less technology.

Thing is, the better machines get at performing left-brain (computer-like) tasks, the less valuable it is to be super-strong in left-brain skills. Pink’s premise in the book makes a lot of sense. We are probably many generations from the day when machines can surpass human creativity- that is: right-brain activities. Therefore, if you want to be in demand in this future of ours, you’d better be good at the things that can’t be done by computers. You’d better be creative.

I was inspired to create a series of sessions where folks could explore the creative side of their minds. This would be something everyone would benefit from, but those who would benefit most would be those geeks among us who feel that the entire brain is a Left-brain thing.

Note that I said “inspired”. I haven’t started yet, but the idea is to follow the model of BarCamp. An open forum with guest speakers, meetings, informal classes and lots of socializing (which, BTW is a very right-brain thing…unless you’re only interacting with others as part of a calculated ploy to get something in return).

Coming soon- updates on next steps to bring something together.

Great panel @ SXSWi about how fast a company can and should go. Subtitle: How to do big things in the smallest time possible.

There was some discussion about the nature of speed and how fast things can happen in your business. Many examples from the panelists included impressive results in successful business enterprises were shared. The panelists tried to enunciate ways to increase speed.

Twitter was an example. I’m still not sure why that tool is successful. Microblogging seems odd to me, but there is no doubt it has achieved a critical mass. Achieving buzz within the tech community was a big reason for its widespread adoption.

An example from a successful pod-caster (Lewis: GeekBrief) cites “community & passion” as her two reasons for success. Hard to argue with that, but it was hard to map that back to speed.

How do you get to market quickly? Streamline product feature set. Throw it out there and watch what people like. Usability testing: people talk about it but don’t do it. You should sit with random users and get them to talk out loud about their experience.

Mistakes: what are common mistakes that slow people down? Building the team is critical, but don’t get hung up on costs and miss attracting the stars. Hiring issues: get paperwork done first so the new hire’s first day is truly hitting the ground running. Set the tone for the pace.

Times to slow down: interpersonal issues. Speed can kill here.

Advice: build relationships with as many people as you can. This will help you seed your talent pool in a way that will help you when you need it- rather than trying to build key relationships when you need them.

Tim spent a lot of time promoting his work, which is fine- that’s what this forum is for. Apparently he just redesigned his blog. There’s a lot of good stuff there which I highly recommend.

Greetings, any of you who know me or know of me, and might be wondering what I’m doing.

I am no longer recruiting for a living. It was a fun run, but ultimately that career lacks something I discovered I MUST have in my professional life: the ability to build things.

Now, I’m with a terrific company called Optaros. They’re a consulting firm with an innovative and creative development methodology. Effectively, we develop solutions for companies and leverage opensource solutions to deliver high quality with short turnaround.

The challenge I have embraced coming to the company is to provide leadership around the User Experience discipline. You’ll read more about my thoughts on UX design and how it factors into the coming wave of opensource development and implementation.

For now, feel free to contact me if you’re looking for opportunities- I may not be able to help you as actively as when I was recruiting, but I can very likely point you in a positive direction or introduce you to folks who can help.

Sometimes the things we do only seem to be effective. Recognizing what does and doesn’t work is critical to success.

One of my colleagues, Linda, had the funniest story about technology and people’s perceptions of how things ‘should’ work.

She was working with an auto parts company in the Midwest. This happened during the labor-intensive and sometimes painful transition of repair shops going from paper-based to electronic systems.

Her job included everything from transitioning records from masses of index card files into an electronic database to stringing up cat-5 cable to network a handful of machines in the office and shop floor.

Between climbing up and down ladders and dragging cables through drop ceilings, she had pinched one of the cable ends into one of the partly-open file drawers to hold the wiring in place so she could reach it once she got to the top of the ladder. Just then, one of the shop guys walks past and notices the cable dangling from the cabinet on one end and running across to the office computers at the other.

“Is that how you get the information into the computers?”, he conjectured.

I absolutely love this story; not because I’m laughing at the guy’s ignorance of early data entry techniques and technology. It’s funny because it is reasonable for him to suspect that since information can travel along a cable, and information is held in the card catalog, 1980′s computer technology could vacuum up data simply by dropping a cord into a file cabinet.

Of course, most of us know that you can’t suck up data by waiving a network cable over some hard-copy, there are some critical (deftly avoids using the pun word “key” here) steps missing.

Still, many people have replaced the job-hunt myth of combing over the classified ads with the more modern myth that posting to the big job boards is all you need do to secure your career’s next step.

Obviously, that’s not enough to increase your odds of finding the right best job opportunities when you’re looking, nor is it the best way to find excellent candidates when you’re hiring.

Working with a professional recruiter (of course, as a recruiter you would say that) is one way to dramatically increase your odds of success and increase the quality of the opportunity and the candidates you see.

Read more articles here for details on just how it helps to work with a top recruiter and what exactly makes one recruiter better than another.