Articles for category: Drive

September 7, 2015

Greg Thomas

Forget the Small Stuff

A member of your team has just entered the office, quickly throwing there bag at their desk, omitting their usual morning schedule with their only intent to sit down with you. They are almost out of breath. Without skipping a beat, they whip through a new idea to solve a problem or maybe they show you some code they just wrote that could solve a problem the team is having with the latest builds or maybe they wrote a design spec for a new feature that Product Management missed. And what you focus on… How hastily they have prepared for the

September 5, 2015

Greg Thomas

The Big Computer Reset

Two nights ago we had a big thunderstorm – the power was going in and out the whole time.  It was the first time I can ever remember seeing all the lights in my house dim to their lowest potential and then come all the way back up.  As I watched it happen a few times I thought to myself that this cannot be a good thing.  Doing an on/off would have to a much safer approach to all the electronics in the house. Despite having a surge protector power bar and after all the power being abruptly cut, that

August 8, 2015

Greg Thomas

Customization as a Product

Every time I take my family to a certain Coffee Outlet, I am simply gobsmacked by the number of times our order is wrong.  It was got to the point where my wife and I now split up the kids to make the order smaller but even then it still comes back as something we didn’t ask for. In my most recent encounter, I stood at the cash looking at my kids (the customers) who need to customize their meal, because they are picky (like your customers) and were met with a certain look of disdain because they wanted to

July 14, 2015

Greg Thomas

LinkedIn Invites Should not be about the Numbers

I used LinkedIn everyday – it is a great tool, but like any tool it sometimes gets abused and we start to develop bad habits around it. I read an article a few years ago that you should reach out to whoever you want to be associated with, the kinds of people you want to know and meet and send them a connection request on LinkedIn so you can connect with them. I’d like to update that request with a few ancillary points; If you really want to talk to them, there are many other channels other than LinkedIn to

July 7, 2015

Greg Thomas

A word on Improving Meetings

Meetings are horrible, albeit necessary – you need to talk with people to resolve an issue, sometimes they are not always in front of you (in an airport, at home with sick kids, in the branch office, etc) and you need to nail someone down with the hopes of getting their undivided attention.  There are two problems I see today with meetings – Engagement and Attendance. Engagement The worst part of any meeting is when you ask someone remotely to provide their thoughts and they ask you to repeat the question – not because they are trying to figure out