The Power of Three

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I once worked for a guy that told me that to be successful I needed to do three things at work.  The first was the job I was hired to do (the compete job description) and excel at that and then two other things that helped the organization.

It never really dawned on me as to the Power of the Three.  At google they talk about doing your job, but taking 10% (I think that is the #) of your time to doing something innovative.  In my past iot was setting up or being a part of a social group – that ultimately helped me know people, relate better and have more fun.  Lead the roll out of training or CRM, which always helped me focus on what was core to the role I played and how to be more productive.

Now that I am helping lead Project X, my power of three is even more important, not just as much for me as for the people we bring aboard.  My new take is it should be a corporate cultural thing.  The following are some of the categories I think should be considered:

  1. Your job – with enthusiasm
  2. Evangelist – internally and externally – we all sell whether we know it or not
  3. Productivity – do something that makes your organization more productive, this will increase profitability or decrease cost to customer or just help you in your organization
  4. Innovation – Create your innovation value network, and spend time at it.  In this I mean give, share your knowledge expertise whatever and when you need it later on wow will you be surprised who is there to help you.
  5. Community and Social Involvement – a great way to give back and get involved in the area you live.
  6. Make work fun – we spend more time with our customers and fellow employees than we generally do with our family (awake time) so we need to ensure we have the best opportunity to enjoy our work
  7. SWAT Team – create your own swat team to take on a problem and fix it – six sygma, whatever, but make it go away
  8. Invest in the Customer – take some time to better understand their business, walk their stores, talk to store managers, try and see the picture outside of your project.

These are just some thoughts, so please feel free to comment some more and I will add them to the list.

  1. Stephen Reply

    I spent the weekend reflecting the direction these comments have gone.
    I was a little put off by the tone of the comment from JL and the veiled personal insult, but I have a rule that all comments within reason should pass.
    But mostly JL you are correct. I am an ex-Sales guy, but that is OK we all sell in our own way. But no we are not a general IT services company, we just are big enough to be, and saying it that way without knowing us is dissappointing.
    I tried sending you an email to your hotmail account in an effort to possibly follow-up on your comments, but it bounced back.
    In doing this method of communication with the outside world, you can never know how what you are saying may be interpreted. As Graham mentions we have a very strong pedigree in Enterprise Information Management – or Data Warehousing more particularly and would love the opportunity to understand your particular challenge and if we can’t help that’s OK to.
    Stephen Hayward
    President
    Project X Ltd.

  2. Graham Boundy Reply

    The challenge in analysing data isn’t analysing data and it is not in collecting it from the stores (no matter how many there are). And there are many tools out there to do the analysis — pick one or two — they’re all pretty much the same. The challenge is in getting the data into a format that can be analysed.
    Now if your company’s like most, you’ve done this piecemeal over the past few years and the data gathered is stored in all sorts of places:
    databases, spreadsheets, word documents and on and on. The operations people can’t see the finance data, the finance people can’t see the marketting data. You probably have some idea who your customer is but not to the level of detail you’d like. You’re IT group has lost control of the situation and the users are buying single point packaged solutions (like Cognos Cubes or Essbase databases or Unica like solutions) that in the end will cost the organization more than a single well planned architected solution. But nobody is listening to IT.
    How am I doing so far?
    If what you’re looking for is someone to tell you how to get out of the mess you’re in, “Here we are.” Yes, we know how to work with clients to help them get out of the mess. No, you might not always like what we have to tell you – but let’s work together to get back to the comfort zone. But we can make you successful. Why – because we get Data and you get your Business, together an awesome combination.
    The next challenge is, there are a lot of people out there who will tell you they “get it” and they don’t. Would you like us to tell you why we get it and they don’t?

  3. Stephen Reply

    One of the things we do for Canada’s largest communications company as well as one of Canada’s largest Retailers is Enterprise Datawarehouse and Business Intelligence advisory and implementation services.
    Yes I personally have a sales and previous to that consulting background. The company is not just made up of me, though I am generally the front end of our blog.
    If you would like to talk to Graham who heads the area you may be interested in let me know. Sorry if somehow the content has dissappointed you to say we are just a general services company. Feel free to talk to our clients, they seem pretty pleased with the work we are doing.

  4. jiffyLu Reply

    I am in the retail business at a large Canadian retailer. I needed info with regard to analyzing data from our stores. I checked into you though through a contact I have at a company you named in your blog. Seems you are just an ex-sales guy trying to sell general IT services.

  5. Stephen Reply

    Thank you for the comment JiffyLu. It is great to have someone engage back and ask questions. To be able to help me answer your comments may I ask a couple of clarifaction questions:
    1. When you refer to Data Processing what part of this do you mean (maybe an example)
    2. Focus, is the question in regards to my post content, the nature of all of the discussions or what Project X does?
    As a general comment though – the purpose of my blog is to take real life work examples, items of interest that I come across during my day and start conversations with people to help expand the conversation.
    Please comment and share your experience as this is a new thing for me so I would like to make sure I am learning from feddback like yours.
    Stephen Hayward
    Project X Ltd.

  6. jiffyLu Reply

    I cannot tell most times what the hell you are trying to put focus on! I stumbled on your site looking up info on data proccessing and it was superficially relevant. Most times though your posts seem to lack focus. Is that the kind of work your company does or not?

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