We conducted our first in the series of Career Development webinars, hosted by our friend Ashish Bhatnagar of Amazon.
We started with the well-known Rocks-Gravel-Sand analogy of prioritization and the skill to compartmentalize tasks such that your focus is always on those which are important at the moment.
We then talked about maintaining a service-oriented attitude, mentality and follow that with compatible behavior, recognizing that service creates product opportunity, but very rarely is the opposite true.
We also covered the roots of creativity and how critical it is to practice specific disciplines to hone your creative abilities.
Some of the other topics we covered included:
View your career from a place where you would like it to be in the future and pull all your actions toward it.
Using Empathy
- Differentiates you as a problem solver from that of an opportunist
- Helps you view solutions and their impact from the vantage point of the user/client/other party
Collaborative Foundation
- Your Team will elevate you and all others within its rank
- Solo work is the rare exception until you reach your final decision point
- Eliminate any obstacles standing in the way of collaboration
Research and Analysis
- It’s not enough to research a situation/solution
- Play several what-if scenarios to analyze how it will impact the environment on different levels
The Origins of Need
- Deeply understand the original need and its root to become a partner in the Journey of your other party (client, boss, spouse)
Listen and Understand the meaning and strength of words spoken in your environment
- Think -> Opinion
- Know -> Research
- Will do -> Forecast
- Expect to -> Conjecture
Communicate with flair
- Facts and figures work for accountants but …
Stories are needed to solve real problems
- To create a narrative for success – an ending (end-state) that is well-described
- To motivate, inspire and connect with a belief in the success of the venture
- Analogize through stories your objective with past known successes
Flex your Strategy
- Where you end up is rarely where you expected to be when you started your venture
- Assume failure as the most likely outcome of your strategy, then do everything to avoid it (this will keep you sharp and on your toes; the opposite leads to complacency)
- Adjust strategy gradually without erratic course changes unless you’ve reached the fast-fail point
- When you Fast Fail, move around to a completely different new starting point