Daily Concern

If you don’t know me, let me set the record straight. I LOVE the University of Oklahoma. And I especially love OU football. They lost their 5th straight BCS bowl game on Thursday and their 3rd BCS title game. Maybe it's because they played on Jan 8th – that's normally a bad idea.

Why do I care so much about the Sooners, or the Dallas Cowboys, or whether my +30 golf handicap is better than my co-worker? Why do I lose sleep over a stupid football game? Why do I care if I win in golf when I so obviously suck at the game? Because I have passion. Passion drives me to love things, not just like them. Passion causes me to improve even in areas I’m not naturally gifted at. Passion keeps my mind racing with product ideas and problem solving in the middle of the night. Passion causes me to work harder, study longer, and care more – for just about everything.

Passion is not a bad thing. Sure I’m disappointed that the Sooners lost… again. But as the great philosopher Tony Romo said after a tough loss to the Eagles “If this the worst thing to happen to me then I’ve lived a blessed life”. Without passion, I would be impassionate. I would simply exist. I wouldn’t care. I wouldn’t feel pain. And without pain or loss we cannot fully appreciate or understand joy. So I embrace passion. I endure pain. I embrace challenges. I persevere. I strive to do better the next time. I attempt to learn from my mistakes. (And I assume the Sooners do too!) And when I or my teams (work or recreation) succeed, then success is all the more sweet.

I am thankful God instilled passion within me. My prayer is that I harness it and direct it towards things that matter. Like my faith, my wife, my family, my church, my community, Fellowship Tech, my co-workers, and our clients. If the Sooners, or the Boys’ or the Mavs do win a championship (albeit not likely) then that’s simply icing on the cake.

God bless,

Curtis S

A key aspect of leadership, perhaps one of the most important, is to clear any barriers or impediments to success for your team. I sometimes jokingly refer to it as “removing excuses”. I’m not suggesting that your team is looking for excuses not to accomplish their tasks and/or goals. But I wouldn’t be surprised that you’ve heard them list a number of reasons they fell short of their original plan. Some were likely legitimate and others were barriers you might have liked for them to push past.

It begins with telling your teacher “my dog ate my homework” or the one I heard from my son after he took the ACT test a second time and came back with a lower score than the first time, he said “My battery died in my calculator during the test”. It carries forward into the professional life with “My computer died”, “We ‘thought’ the back-ups were working”, “I didn’t think we had it in the budget”, and “I just didn’t have the time”.

Your role as a leader is to maintain open lines of communication with your team, ask them probing questions, make sure you understand if there are any technology, financial, hardware, software, or personnel barriers that will impede their success, and then remove them. It’s likely far more important that they are productive than you are.

If their laptop is outdated and inhibiting productivity, then upgrade it or replace it. If their keyboard is broken hand them yours until an adequate replacement can be found. If you believe they need a $40 book from Amazon to get them to the next level, then order it for them. You get the idea. Certainly you can’t solve every issue as they would expect. That’s where creativity comes in. Perhaps you cannot afford the specific thing they believe they need but you can help to find an adequate compromise.

Regardless, be aware of their inhibitors and then make every effort to clear the path for them to be productive.

www.AdventConspiracy.org

When I moved my blog back to being a purely personal one I started to put in the standard disclaimer that I see on many blog sites, especially those of Church IT folks, they always say “My views, thoughts and opinions are my own and do not represent XYZ church”. That sounds great, but it’s simply not reality. Through existing and emerging technologies like Email, Instant Messenger, Blogs, Text Messaging, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter we have more opportunities than ever in the history of the world to stick your foot in your mouth.

There’s a mound of evidence that no immunity necklace exists for personal blogs and their disclaimers, even if your content is purely personal in nature. Check out a sampling of the stories here, here, and here.

So you must be on guard at all times. When you talk about yourself, your company, your church, your co-workers, etc. then you are not just representing yourself, you’re also representing them to some extent. You are influencing their reputation, positively or negatively. 

Once it’s out there in the world wide Interweb you can’t take it back. I learned that the hard way in 1995. I was only a few years removed from college. Shortly after joining a telecom company, I was invited to a meeting with some executives from a budding start-up company. It was very cool to be a participant in the meeting. They shared their short-term and long-term roadmap, many innovative things that propelled them to lead the market through the next 5 years.

I couldn’t wait to get access to all of the new features. Unfortunately, I was still very young and naive. So I went back to my desk and used this new “tool” called the Internet that was beginning to explode. I wanted to share my excitement with others so I posted my thoughts on a “bulletin board” (it was the big thing back them). My post was quickly replicated around the world (who knew?). Within an hour I was called into a Vice President’s office as tech engineers in another room tried to figure out how to remove my post. Turns out that my company was under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) with the start-up company and I had inadvertently shared some corporate secrets. Doh! I thought was going to get fired on the spot. I tried to claim ignorance because they didn’t inform me of the NDA between the two companies. But they reminded me that ignorance of the law is no excuse.

Thankfully I was able to keep my job that day, but I’ve been extra cautious ever since.

God bless,

Curtis S

As we near Thanksgiving I'm reminded how very blessed I am. It's impossible to list everything but here are a few highlights. I'm thankful for…

• My salvation in Christ
• My beautiful wife Melissa
• My wonderful kids, Colton and Mercedes
• My church, where my family thinks this, this, and this is commonplace at every church in America
• Faith Christian, where my wife teaches and my children attend school, and where amazing stories like this happen regularly
• My role at Fellowship Technologies, where I can work alongside an excellent team of 60+ individuals committed to changing the world by changing the church world

God bless,

Curtis S