Jason Alexander

At a friend's bday at the american legion. So country and laid back, but so much fun!

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Sent from my Moto Q.

Continuing on with multi-post, detailed review of Good to Great, by Jim Collins -

Another core concept that Jim talks about is the overall formula to make your company great. It's hard to really boil down the specifics, and many of the Executives at Great companies couldn't really explain what they did or how it happened, "It JUST happened!" but Jim boiled it down to three things, which we'll get to. The main theme of these points, though, is discipline.

Dictionary.com defines discipline as the following:

dis * ci * pline - Training expected to product a specific character or pattern or behavior, especially training that produces moral or mental improvement.

Interesting. I think it's good to keep the context of the word in mind when going through the following points. Again, these points are what Jim states you do in order to become Great:

1. Disciplined People - Those right people that you now hired, you have to make sure they're disciplined. Do they have what it takes to carry to work through the tough times to help push you to Great?
2. Disciplined Thought - Now that you've got the right, disciplined people you have to all come to an agreement and work together, with absolute diligence, towards a common thought or goal.
3. Disciplined Action - And, finally, you have the right, disciplined people with all the same, disciplined thoughts you have to have disciplined action to carry through and take action on your game plan and strategies. Even with this being the last step that doesn't make it any easier, that's why you have to have the discipline to carry through on your game plan.

I know you think, "Duh, that's just common sense!" - and it is! But, for some reason, bigger companies can't see the forest for the trees in this case.

In his book, Jim gives lots of good insight into specific business cases. One of the cases, and I'm sure I'll slaughter this one, has to do with Walgreen's Pharmacy. Walgreen's competitors were all making big bets on the internet, putting a lot of investment into building big, hulking website. Walgreen's took their time, made a slow turn towards the internet, put lots of thought up-front and eventually launched a website that flipped the industry's sites on their heads. But, it took Walgreen's having the right people and team in place, with a unified, disciplined thought and strategy and having the disciplined action to carry out their plans. And, ultimately, this was seen as a huge win for Walgreen's!

Continuing on with my various thoughts after listening to Good to Great, by Jim Collins, I wanted to talk about "The Bus".

Jim does a great job of explaining the right/wrong employee situation using a bus metaphor (paraphrased):

 

First, you get the right people on the bus, and the wrong people off the bus. And, you make sure the right people are in the right seats.

 

This is so true. It's not just important to hire the right people, but it's equally important to make sure they're in the right roles to where they can be effective.

I've seen many companies hire someone who was great, and, for whatever reason, put them into a role that really didn't suit them. Sometimes it was a role that they had never done before, maybe it was a role that they thought they could do, sometimes it was just a temporary fix to get that person into the company with the intentions of eventually moving them to the ideal position later.

But, ultimately, even putting the right people in the wrong roles can be just as damaging to your business.

One of the first audio books that I read, as I mentioned, was From Good to Great by Jim Collins. This was an incredible book. In it, Jim and some of his researchers created a system by which to profile a company to understand if they were good or great, and how to get down to an understanding of what made the company become great. They profiled over 500 companies, and in the book they detail many of the Great companies and the details.

I won't give away everything, but Jim talks about many core, fundamental concepts that companies must follow or do to help them to become great.

In one of those statements he talks about the fact that companies, traditionally, always say that people are their most valuable asset. But, that's not true. It's the right people that are your most valuable asset.

And, he's absolutely right. This principle rang clear and true for me and our practices here at Telligent. As some people may have heard, Telligent has a tough interview process and we're VERY picky about new hires. We are adamant and unwavering in the fact that we must always hire the right people.

Now, that's not to say that we don't get it wrong sometimes. I'll admit, we have hired a few people that weren't a good fit, for one reason or another. But, we're very good about identifying those persons and making the corrections as necessary.

That may seem cold and cruel, but it's a terrible fact about business. Sometimes you have to make those hard decisions. Sometimes you can't avoid conflict. And, sometimes that affects people's livelihood. That sucks. We don't like it at all. But, it's unavoidable, unfortunately.

Take for example our internship program, this summer we started off with 6 great interns. Unfortunately, about half way through one of those interns were asked to leave. In this case, this particular intern wasn't right for Telligent - he was too young, too immature and had too much of an ego to really fit in. Very unfortunate because he was very, very smart. But, that's how it goes - you have to make sure that you're always hiring and keeping the right people.

Definitely check out that book, and look around at your company and think about it - do you think your company has done a good job of hiring the right people and making sure they're in the right roles.

Posting from my Q - wonder if my blogmailr address still works. :)-----Sent from my Moto Q.

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So, I came to bleak realization last month that I'll never read a real book again. Sadly, I just can't ever seem to make time, and unfortunately when I do have time it's very low on the priority list.

It was a really frustrating moment for me to come to that conclusion, as I love to read. I used to go through 2-3 books at a time, mixing both my love for the Fantasy series (Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series still ranks as my all time favorite) and my thirst for technical knowledge.

I kept pondering ways to get around this, certain that if I just managed my time a little better I could squeeze in at least 30 minutes a day to read. Alas, it just wasn't possible.

Then I realized that I spent 1.5 - 2 hours/day in the car commuting, and... whoa, Dallas radio sucks! So, putting 1 and 1 together, I realized I should look back into audio books.

Being the impulse buyer that I am, I ran out to Amazon and bought two audio books. Both were Jim Collins' books, Good to Great and Built to Last.

After having listened to both in my car the past few weeks, I can say... THIS ROCKS! I've never felt so productive. ;) It's been great!

Now, I'm going to subscribe to Audible.com and just download from there and burn CD's as needed. Too cool.

For anyone thinking about audio books, also, I HIGHLY recommend it.

So, this week I'm PTO from work on vacation. My family and I decided to take a "mini vacation" to San Antonio, TX since my youngest is only 11 months old, which makes it hard to take a "big vacation" out of the country, etc...

 Our first day, we left a day early so we could take our time getting down there and wanted to stop at Gruene, TX on the way for lunch. Gruene is the coolest little town - founded in 1872, it maintains it's olden day look and feel. It's awesome.
 

Here's a picture my wife snapped of the country store across the street.  

 If you want to see the other pictures we snapped while in Gruene, check out: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jalexander/tags/gruene/

 You must go visit sometime, if you never have. There's a restaurant there called the Gristmill. The food, and margaritas, here are really good. Definitely recommended.

And, the old Gruene Dancehall is really cool too. One of the original places where greats like George Strait have fabled to play. While we were there a band was in there jumping, and the place was packed. 

Gruene is a must see town! 

 

While I love .NET, and I've lived it in these past 6-7 years now, this whole ALT.NET thing is just nearly comical at this point.

I understand the point they're trying to make, and I think it's kinda funny that it's almost trendy now... but this whole concept that the .NET community has around it, and their now heralded title of "ALT.NET" just really makes me roll my eyes.

Funny enough, when I came over to .NET from the Java world 6-7 years ago, I instinctively looked for all the Java projects that I had used that may have been translated into the .NET world.

Now that there's been a few years and enough time for most to be ported over to .NET, now it's hip if you're a .NET developer and you're using them?

Ok, sure.

Now, Roy Osherove has a hot-or-not post on various things, including ALT.NET technologies and products. Now, let me disclaim up front, this has nothing to do with the fact that he rated Community Server on the "Not" list, I just find this whole list a complete joke. Team this with the ALT.NET movement, and I can't help but sit here and shake my head. You can imagine the collective pointing and snickering this is garnering in the Java world right now.

Please, please, please give it a rest guys. This is embarrassing. 

Just sitting around here on a Saturday morning... nice and quiet. Maya's napping, Dani's watching movies, Jeannie's sleeping... so I start tech surfing. I do this so little these days. It's usually ad-hoc and on demand/need.

Heading over to the .NET Rocks show, their latest show has Ted Neward and Oren Eini going head-to-head on ORM practices. Coming from the Java world myself (many years ago), I know Ted Neward is a god. Now, I don't think much of Oren (I think he's a loud mouth on his blog that just stirs up flame bait, personally, but that's my .02) so I had to listen in.

Check out this show: http://www.dotnetrocks.com/

It was a great show having the two go at it. Now, I don't think it was entirely fair - Ted is incredibly smart and well spoken, and I think he really smacked Oren around in this show. They both had valid points, but Oren just couldn't hold his own.

Given my opinion of Oren, I couldn't help but giggle a little inside while listening to Ted really smack Oren around. It wasn't even a fair "fight" IMHO.

Great show to listen to though, I highly recommend it.
 

It's amazing to me sometimes how some businesses are still stuck in the dark ages, and how society continues to put up with it.

For instance, today I tried calling aroung to make my wife a doctor's appointment with a specialist in town. Now, to disclaim things, she IS a new patient. But, ultimately, I say that this should be a non-factor with this story.

So, I tell them I'd like to make an appointment, they ask the issue, I tell them, they ask if she's ever been there before, I answer no... she says:

"Great, well our next appointment for new patients is July 27th. What time is best?"

After taking a verbal double-take, I figured she made a mistake. I assume she's talking about MAY 27th. Oh no, she informs me, they're very busy.

After a utteral cough-chuckle, I kindly excuse myself from the call and dismiss her, as easily as she dismissed me.

The lesson here:

If you don't want new customers or new business, just don't bother answering the phone. Or, at the very least, tell me upfront.

Now, to be fair, it's one thing to be truly busy. But, when she qualifies the fact that "...for new patients..." there's, apparently, a different priority.

You absolutely want to take care of your current customers, but don't spit on your potential new customers. They may come back one day later when you're not busy. If you upset them, they'll remember.