How’s your Easter holiday ? I have a rather busy weekend as every hour or so, I surfed to our web site to see if anything went wrong – kinda like a part-time operator. It’s almost like part of my job at home already. In any case, thanks to those who worked in the weekend for the company to keep the system up and running, web page updated etc.
Obviously we have a very busy month as we rolled out many services. I aware that many of you worked late nights or even overnights to keep the tight project schedule on target. Thanks for all the hard works. For those lucky ones who don’t need to work late, please extend your hand to help. In nowadays’ economic climate, all of us need to work closely with all the team members to get the job done – it’s no longer a 9 to 5 job.
And more importantly, no matter how tough a problem is, we need to propose a solution to kill the problem. It is simply unacceptable to say “no” to a request but not proposing a solution. And it is also unacceptable to say “yes” to a request but not delivering.
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I will not recommend to you the two books I am reading, as I have not finished it (and those are pretty boring stuff). Anyway, there is an old book I think it’s excellent -“Only the Paranoid Survive” by Andrew Grove (the boss of Intel).
There is one chapter in the book that lingered in my mind for many years. Basically there was a time that Intel went through a very difficult time and Andrew Grove was going to be fired by the board of directors and replaced by a new chief. Andrew asked himself what would the new chief do the first day report to work. He reckoned the new chief would probably wrap up the Memory chip business and set up CPU business. He eventually decided to close all Memory Chip branches (a painful decision by that time) and set up the CPU lines to produce the 8086 CPUs for personal computers. The rest is history.
The lesson to me was every day we encountered numerous problems and we do not resolve the problem straightaway because of various reasons. Many of the reasons were justified by the project background, history, some environmental issues, and most of all, some beautified excuses. What we need however is to ask ourselves if one day someone picked up the mess, what would they do ? They would probably decisively take some actions and kill the problems. They would probably stop doing the wrong things and save cost.
So don’t give yourself any excuses, but ask yourself, what would you do if you can solve your own problem from a new staff’s point of view, then take the action.
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The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.
~ Babe Ruth ~
M.Y. Lessons Learnt 