Regular readers may have noticed a decrease in the number of blog posts. I will be scaling back the number of blog posts during the summer to roughly one per week.
Steven Covey wrote several of my favourite books including; Principled Centred Leadership and the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Habit 7 is Sharpening the Saw. Sharpening the saw is a metaphor for taking the time to take care of you. The intent is to rejuvenate you in each of the 4 areas of; physical, social, mental and spiritual.
Part of rejuvenation involves more play and less work. Let the summer of the saw begin.
Ian Graham
Filed under: Featured, The Code Factory by Ian
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Its 5am raining and the neighbourhood is just starting to come to life. Birds are chirping, the odd car drives by and the coffee pot has just finished brewing. It is the perfect time for writing with little or no distractions and a fresh mind.
I am feeling very reflective today and pondering to myself that big question should we live our life by numbers. So often in western society we try and boil everything down to a very specific solution. Nice compartmentalized solutions that speak for themselves. In school particularly in engineering and science there is usually some formula or method for determining the “right” answer and correct methodology. Life isn’t a formula or a methodology and I don’t think you can boil everything down to a causal analysis or finite solution. Perhaps the key point is numbers are important but they are not the only dimension to a potential outcome.
The challenge of course is that how you feel about a possible outcome can be equally or more important than what you think about a potential outcome. In fact Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink delves deeply into the science of “thinking without thinking”, which really is very likely feeling. You often hear stories about CEO’s that make decisions based on that gut check. Getting in tune with how you feel about a potential decision and visualizing the outcomes IMHO is probably as or more important than the math.
Perhaps one of my most important lessons learned in the last two years is don’t live your life as a slave to numbers. Numbers don’t always tell the whole story and sometimes you just have to go on that gut check.
Ian Graham
Filed under: Entrepreneurship, Featured by Ian
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Perhaps one of my proudest moments in the past two years was last week when the summer time edition of Carleton University Alumni Magazine came out. Thank you to Zachary and Fateema for their contributions to the article. The article is entitled “Office 2.0” and has a picture of some of the really talented people that are Carleton Alumni and faculty. While I am not a Carleton Alumni I have worked very closely with the students, faculty at the university and like to think I share the same entrepreneurial spirit.
In the picture from left to right are:
Richard Alam – co-founder Blindside Networks, BEng/96, MEng06
Tony Bailetti – Associate Professor, Technology Innovation Management Program
Michael Weiss – director, Technology Innovation Management Program
Jason Daley – President Ucreate Media, BComm/99
Steve Muegge – faculty member, Technology Innovation Management Program, MEng04
Ian Graham – founder TheCodeFactory
Filed under: Collaboration Corner, Entrepreneurship, Featured, Innovation, Ottawa, Start-up, The Code Factory by Ian
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TheCodeFactory quietly celebrated our second anniversary on May 26th, 2010. A very happy day and certainly cause for some reflection and the opportunity to look back over the last two years. There is also a time to ponder the infinite opportunities that have unfolded in serendipitous sort of fashion. Finally where does TheCodeFactory go from here …
I have decided to turn these thoughts into my Summer time series of blog posts. I am not really sure how many posts there will be or the exact content, however, I am really looking forward to writing this series. As the title suggests the themes will be:
- Reflections
- Small Victories
- Future Plans
These posts will be in a pseudo random order.
Next post – Small Victories – The Carleton Connection
Ian Graham
Filed under: Featured, Ottawa, The Code Factory by Ian
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… And the one you have the most control over.
I was letting people into a training session this morning at TheCodeFactory. The board room is designed to hold 16 people. The trainer called me in and pointed out that there were only 2 extra seats and they were expecting 3 more people, shouldn’t I look to find another chair for when the 3 people arrived.
The response was “when the third person arrives I will find them a chair.” My thinking was that right now this isn’t a problem and I have other stuff to do. The risk is relatively low and I know where to find a chair, why solve a problem that doesn’t exist.
When managing time does a stitch in time save nine or is solving problems that don’t exist frittering away valuable resources on useless pursuits?
Time will tell.
Ian Graham
Filed under: Featured, Start-up, The Code Factory by Ian
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