Posts Tagged ‘Work’

Beginnings…

May 17th, 2010

The title brings to mind some sort of Hallmark card for a major life transition (graduation, marriage, etc.). So I hope that is the case for me as well. Early this morning The Foundry had its first of many Monday morning meetings. The meeting is comprised of a representative from each of the participating companies and is present to both ask and offer resources from the group.

Any time a new group meets it is always interesting to watch the group dynamics begin to form. I think many were expecting the director to take the lead but he refrained from doing so. Quite a few sat silent for most of the meeting while a handful of others spoke up sharing their needs. I don’t know if it was the morning factor or the uncertainty of expectations but the format definitely favors the aggressive.

Major themes included legal, website development, and people. The people issue was something that was continually brought up like an echo that kept bouncing of a canyon wall. So it was proposed that over the next few weeks if anyone came across people interested in working for a start-up they were to refer them to the Gangplank meeting on Wednesday night around 6pm to meet the different teams and find out what they needed. So if you’re interested come on down!

In a previous post I listed out the different teams that were a part of the Boom Startup program (which also started today-with the pairing of the teams with their mentors and expectation setting) so to be fair and to begin to be bias here is a list (names and sites may change in the future-I’ll try to keep it updated) of the different Foundry teams with a brief and probably inaccurate summary of what they’re all about. (hokie pokie everyone!) My apologies for anything or one left out.

  1. Meta Restaurant-Nutritionally balanced fast food
  2. ColdSpoon-Spoon used for cooling food and measuring temp.
  3. Early Stage Legal-Documentation creation for entrepreneurs
  4. EngineerInc-GIS Planning System
  5. Patriotic Reflections-Internet retailer of high quality flag displays
  6. Artesian Systems-Fashionable and easily maintainable water storage systems
  7. RedFlower-Authentic Auga Frescas
  8. Dash & Cooper-Custom suit experience at a non-traditional price
  9. iPadGame Controller-Universal controller
  10. A Priori-Specialty foods wholesaler (by the way he has some great deals on fancy chocolate)
  11. Novobi-IT consulting and creation services w/team in Vietnam
  12. CupAd-Putting the brand in their hand (fun tagline) Ads on coffee cups provide free to coffee shops
  13. Seam Machine-Machine that replaces a 3-man roof restoration team
  14. Salt Lake Mobile Detail-Mobile auto detailing
  15. Tshirts4Hire.com-Marketplace for social media marketing
  16. Btree Media- Media Design and Marketing Company
  17. Reminiscent Pictures-Creating digital memories
  18. Life Sciences- Commercializing life sciences innovations

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Work/Life Balance

March 2nd, 2010

Weighing your options?

Work/Life Balance. It is a phrase I’ve heard numerous times and it is something that seems ever elusive. During an entrepreneur discussion panel the question regarding how to keep a work life balance surfaced and one of the answers offered a different way to approach it. Rich Christiansen of CastleWave said, “ I don’t do balance well. I go to extremes.” He’ll work like crazy until something is up and going and then take a month off to hike the Himalayas.

Another approach is to try a flexible work or work from home job. A cool site for that is http://hiremyparents.com based out of the UK but has jobs both stateside and abroad.

I think I’ll try to pick up something to finance my “surprise my wife” fund and the occasional frivolous purchase. Check out their own blog post about the myths of this work/life balance and suggestions for addressing the challenge.

On the AAUW Blog they cite a paper presented at the Academy of Human Resource Development International Conference:

 “The concept of the workplace community represents the essence of work-life balance. Work-life balance is not about having equal time every day for work and personal time, as some critics have suggested. It’s about being in an environment that honors both needs and builds in consideration for meeting work and personal needs as appropriate. The western philosophical concept of balance is an either-or proposition; you are either on one side or the other. Rarely are the sides of equal value and in balance. The result of the struggle for balance is usually a win-lose situation. The eastern concept of balance is the yin-yang symbol, representing an acknowledged tension of opposing forces. It’s a both-and proposition rather than an either-or one. Both sides can “win” because day-to-day one or the other side will have greater needs. All this is to say that those organizations that are humane know that caring for employees means the employees will care for the organization. One day the situation may call for everyone pitching in on an important project, another day it may mean covering for a team member whose child is sick, and another day everyone may be going to a company picnic. In the long term, everyone wins.”

I guess one of the great things about working for yourself is that you get to decide how humane of an organization you’re going to be; though it also means you don’t have anyone else to cover in case your absent. As for me and my house we’re going to try a work/life integration approach. Previously I have kept things very separate-separate calendars, different contact numbers, attended minimal work-related social gatherings. I think I may have come across as cold or uninteresting-my apologies to anyone who felt that way in the past. I’m going to take a dive into the psycho-analytic pool and say that I think that has been a function of being a different person at work in order to do things that I didn’t really enjoy. Playing a political role-playing game without the cool power-ups; tasked with constant missions or projects that seemed only vaguely related to anything in the big scope of the storyline. It isn’t that I didn’t make friends or wasn’t sincere but it was just a muted existence. 

So as a warning my future posts are likely to contain less than intellectually stimulating accounts of parenting and personal pet peeves as I make my life not just a combination of my work life and my personal life but my life period.

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Seth’s Question

February 14th, 2010

Friday I had the opportunity to listen to Seth Godin at fundraiser for Haiti put on by Startup Princesses that I thought I would share what I heard. He was semi-pitching his new book, Linchpin. Seth began and ended with the same question: Are you a genius? By genius he means someone who creates something that wasn’t there before.

He then launched into a short description of the evolution of the type of work starting with hunting then farming, then factory work. At this point he took a tangent that lasted for some time as he elaborate on Henry Fords ability to make an assembly line and one of the keys to being able to do so is replaceable parts that were fairly consistent and still work within the system. Seth then extrapolated that this view has spread to replaceable people and that more and more all employees are being treated like lunch ladies (at this point Seth was showing us his large collection of lunch lady photos).

He goes onto riff that public school systems really just teach kids to be compliant so that eventually they can be good replaceable employees. Now this is a view I share in large part in that I think a lot of school systems even and especially charter schools are set up to meet the employment needs of major employers. Ideally, I think it should help kids explore there interests but that is another topic for another post.

Okay so some how Seth gets back to comparing Karl Marx’s and Adam Smith’s view of a pin making machine (2000 a day-give or take- vs the prior 4-5 per day per craftsman) Adam Smith apparently looked at it and sees the world through the eyes of those with the capital to buy the machine so that they don’t need to hire as many people and things run more efficiently and Karl apparently looks and sees the dangers to the craftsmen that now they will be replaceable. This is where he introduces where he thinks the next type of work is going to be. He used the term Artist-those that solve interesting problems and create or invent. He then hypothesizes this is because now everyone has The Machine and not just the capitalists because there is this thing on computers called the internet that allows the middle man to be cut out of the picture.

Artists are the linchpins of society that are rare but allow everyone else to work. Seth’s invitation was to become one of them and leave the cog world behind ignoring what he call the lizard brain and the resistance. If fear tells you not to do something then do it! It felt good to be going that direction. I also found his distinction between an entrepreneur and a freelancer compelling-A freelancer doesn’t make money while he is sleeping an entrepreneur does. Which are you or are you still a replaceable cog? Are you a genius?

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