Incubating

Interesting first visit to The Startup Building co-working space in Provo today to attend a Million Cups event. I met the building owner, Tom, and his family who seem to have made the space quite successful in the 4 years that they have owned it. Surprisingly, ‘Startup’ is the name of the family that started a chocolate company in the building 100+ years ago, and are still producing today.

I got a quick tour after the Million Cups event and was impressed by the number of entrepreneurs and students who have made this building in Provo their home.

One of the great things is the location. Right across the street from the Frontrunner train stop. Sure made getting to and from the event easy!

Meeting space:

Along the Wasatch Range you almost always have a view:

More information on the co-working space is here Startup Building

Now with 50% more Data!

Got this message today – “Going forward the weekly 4-ups will now have 2 more charts. To avoid confusion, we will continue to call them ‘4-ups’. As before, they will be published every 2 weeks”

Annual Performance Review Time

I just got my performance review. I’m still trying to figure out if I did OK or if I need to find a new job. Here is the summary section – tell me what I should do.

Jim needs to get out of his silo and work on some cross-functional synergies so we have alignment on the world-class operating rhythm around the white space opportunities that out disruptive technology allows. That is – if you accept the key learnings from out recent buzz session about our architectural entitlement that we benchmarked vis-a-vis the voice of the customer analysis that should give us a significant force multiplier if we can connect the dots and get to the end state we see in the adjacent markets. If Jim can focus on his core competence and particularly on projects in his wheelhouse he will likely achieve escape velocity in his career as I believe he has demonstrated full-spectrum leadership abilities.

Achtung!

Because everyone knows our 3rd most popular language is German.

Corporate Training Day

Now that you have completed this course you should be able to:

• Pepper your language with various buzzwords and TLA’s that give you a false sense of competence
• Show understanding of process methodologies that align to the company’s core vision and give you validated ways to slow progress
• Articulate the Product Development and Release process and ignore the fact that we don’t really follow it

Design for…

There is a new initiative where a friend works called Design for Aesthetics & Beautification. Couldn’t they have stopped at Aesthetics? Or should they just call it Design for Aesthetics, Beautification & Redundancy?

Cross-continuum Collaboration

So he hates being called ‘my old friend, Andy’ but the other night, my old friend Andy passed on a few nuggets of corporate obfuscation from the large multi-national he works for. Following is one of the best. This comes from an email from HR announcing a new hire:

‘In this new role, she will drive the alignment of internal business operations to enable cross-continuum collaboration in the business unit’.

The thing that amuses me is that NOBODY talks like this in real life. You only see this type of BS in corporate videos and press releases. Can you imagine some HR VP speaking like this at home with the family?

So if you have a translation for this help me out.

Worst Job Description Ever?

He/she contributes in a creative and collaborative way to achieve the companys goals of producing market leading products through positive outcomes.

Never worked in a building so big that…

… I needed a map to navigate. Seriously – there is a site on our Intranet to enter names of people or rooms so you can navigate to them. The building is 280,000 sq. ft. and I’m just happy when I find my desk every morning. Something like 220,000 sq. ft on the 1st floor and 60,000 on the 2nd floor. At my last company I could stand up and see everyone I worked with except the 2 guys in the machine shop.