My Thoughts

VT KnowledgeWorks Gets International Recognition

Congratulations to Jim Flowers and VT KnowledgeWorks for winning the "Most Promising New Incubator" award in Paris last week.  VTKW is doing some awesome things for business in the community and its great to see them getting the recognition for it.  Very well deserved. 

The Value of Facebook is Dropping Fast

Even Facebook is losing value.  When it loses 87% a few more times I will sign up.

Layoffs in Southwest Virginia

There is now a Google map of layoffs in Southwest Virginia.  Okay, that is kind of crazy. 

Modea.com

Modea (short for ‘Modern-Idea’), the company next door that helps us with a lot of our interactive website stuff, just launched a new website.  Check it out; it’s pretty awesome, especially for a version 1.0.  If you like flashy graphics and techno music, the two minute video on the homepage is pretty cool stuff.  I highly recommend these guys for high-end web and interactive work.

Taking Me Literally

In recent months I have [finally] realized how literally people take me.  Combine that with the fact that I simply can't remember everything I tell people and all of a sudden I've set off a chain of events without even realizing it.  This is especially embarrassing when the end result of the chain of events are bad or distracting.  Then I wonder why we did such a thing, and everyone looks at me and says, "because you told us to."  Crap.

Luckily, this happens to other people too.  Joel on Software sums it up nicely, as usual, in Amnesia.  This sounds way too familiar:

"In short, I’m turning into one of those crazy bosses that approves things, and then gets upset when you do them. This keeps happening. I must be driving people crazy.

In my defense, usually what happens is that the thing is described to me in general, vague terms and it sounds great, and I say, “sounds great!” and then I see the thing a little bit closer, and it’s awful, and by this time, I’ve forgotten about the time I said it sounds great....

The solution, of course, is what I’ve been saying all along. STOP FRIGGIN’ LISTENING TO ME. I don’t know what I’m talking about. If you work for me, you’re welcome to get my advice, but you have to make your own decision because chances are you’ve thought MUCH MORE about the issue than I have and in fact we probably hired you because you’re smarter than I am."

Layoffs at Yahoo

Layoffs at Yahoo announced today.  Any Yahooligan Hokies out there that want to come back to Blacksburg or move to San Antonio? 

Hire Smart People That Get Things Done

Brilliant.  I couldn't agree more.  We need to keep raising the bar.

Servant Leadership

I never heard the term "servant leadership" until this past Monday.  Since Monday I've heard the term three times.  Seems like it always happens that way. 

I heard of it for the first time when a couple of employees sent me this article in Inc. Magazine by Joel Spolsky.  I recommend reading it.  In fact, I recommend reading Joel's blog too.  He's one of the best writers out there.

Here is my favorite part of the article which I think says it all with regards to servant leadership.

Anyway, on my first day of work for the sergeant major, I didn't know what to expect. I was sure it was going to be horrible, a suspicion that seemed to be confirmed when he took me to the officers' bathroom and told me I would be responsible for keeping it clean. And then he said something I didn't anticipate.

"Here's how you clean a toilet," he said.

And he got down on his knees in front of the porcelain bowl -- in his pressed-starched-spotless dress uniform -- and scrubbed it with his bare hands until it shined.

To a 19-year-old assigned to clean toilets, which is almost by definition the worst possible job in the world, the sight of this high-ranking, 38-year-old, manicured, pampered disciplinary officer cleaning a toilet was a shock. And it completely reset my attitude. If he can clean a toilet, I can clean a toilet, I thought. There's nothing wrong with cleaning toilets. My loyalty and inspiration from that moment on were unflagging. Now that's leadership.

Email Storage Space

I just hit 5GB of storage space in my mailbox.  Crazy to think about when we started this business several years ago I only had a 6MB limit (that's with an m, not a g).  And check it out... unlike some other busy people I know, I actually read all of my emails.  I guess you could say I enjoy the whole email thing.

 

Google CEO Talks About Blacksburg

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, was in a town a few weeks ago talking to all of us at the Lyric Theater.  He and Mark Warner put on a good show and answered lots of questions about the economic climiate we face, our energy challenges, the future outlook for small towns like Blacksburg in the global economy, and so on.  They did a pretty good job of keeping it relatively non-partisan, too, which was nice.  Dr. Schmidt was actually raised right here in Blacksburg.  Here is video with Dr. Schmidt talking about on growing up in Blacksburg.