August 21, 2024

Greg Thomas

Gaining Traction

Ideas don’t grab people all at once. People all of a sudden just don’t get what you’re proposing – despite all the infinite possibilities that you ran through your head and all the great responses you’ve already built up. Traction takes time and oddly enough it doesn’t require you to go as fast as possible. Think of a vehicle going up a hill, do you floor it and go up full speed?  Does that even work if you’re on a dirt road? It doesn’t, you drop a gear, build momentum, build traction, move forward, and then you get there. Traction

August 20, 2024

Greg Thomas

It’s Good Enough

No one sets out to make something “Good Enough.” When asked for our best work we never said “I’ll make it Good Enough.” Work gets to “Good Enough” when we lose energy in what we’re doing – maybe we’re tired, frustrated, or even bored with what we’re doing – so “Good Enough” becomes the yardstick for what we want to deliver. But we’re giving up when we do this, we’re lowering the bar and dropping the value of what we could create – it’s half delivered, half created, half the value. Good enough should never be a goal and when

The Season Finale Setup

Season Finales set up the next season. Their magic is in taking a break and creating that tension between the end and the new beginning. I was recently reading Patrick Stewart’s Make it So, where he pointed out the Borg cliffhanger that left many of us young Star Trek fans, waiting, patiently, very patiently, running through scenarios as to what would happen when the series began anew. We don’t have season finales in our work where we finish off a great release and then hold off doing anything new so we can think about the next season – what characters

August 18, 2024

Greg Thomas

What’s in a Title? (Revisted)

The only thing in a title that matters, is what you want to matter. If you need it to say, Senior, that matters to you.  When I was a junior, getting out of being called a Junior mattered a lot. I struggled with being called a “Senior” because then everyone thought I had the answers (I didn’t). At my first company, I made up a title so I had one, then realized I had to get a bit more formal when explaining who and what I did to people. Now, I keep it simple, open-ended, I rarely use it, when

August 17, 2024

Greg Thomas

The Evening Summary

The evening summary is the look back at what happened during the day. What worked? What didn’t work? What do you need to do differently? Its a 5 – 10 minute reflection on the day on where your priorities lie for tomorrow.