by James | Jun 21, 2012 | Business, Leadership, Presentations
Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.” – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, German Philosopher
At Tigerpaw, we have five core values that we hold dear. They are:
- Passion – Perform our roles with purpose, pride, and a positive attitude.
- Performance – Strive for excellence in all we do.
- Teamwork – Drive success with strong collaboration and communication.
- Integrity – Uphold our ethics and principles with every action and every decision.
- Adaptability – Be flexible and embrace change.
This month, we are focusing on Passion. It’s no coincidence that Passion is the first item in the list. Passion is what happens when your activities and responsibilities align with your being, your true self. When this alignment takes place, you come alive! No barrier seems too high and no river too wide; you simply won’t accept setbacks as failures. Without passion, it’s pretty difficult to find success in what you do, and all of your actions will suffer for it.
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by James | Jun 11, 2012 | Business, Leadership, Presentations
Relationships make the world go around. They build businesses, blossom into friendships, and even make babies! Developing strong relationships quickly with strangers is something that I’ve often found challenging. My nature is to have a relatively small number of very close friends, and therefore I often keep my private life private. This means I also don’t ask others about their private lives – and that’s what keeps people at a distance.
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by James | May 14, 2012 | Business, Leadership, Presentations
One of the challenges I have is that I am often giving a presentation as an evangelist for my company Tigerpaw Software. The simple fact is, that no one wants to listen to a vendor give a sales pitch in a presentation – including and especially me!What I’ve learned to do is provide value to the audience in the form of education – while highlighting my product in the process. If you take the role of teacher rather than “sales guy”, people pay attention! When you see heads vigorously bobbing up and down and people quickly reaching for their notepads, your presentation is resonating with the group and you are doing something right! When you get off the stage and people earnestly thank you for your presentation, you nailed it!
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by James | May 4, 2012 | Business, Leadership
I have spent the last year reshaping our executive leadership team at Tigerpaw. Not a day goes by where we aren’t discussing leadership, culture, and the myriad things that go into building a great organization; people are always a central thread in these discussions.
When we were smaller, we primarily hired individuals based on the skills they brought to the table – could they get the job done? As we grew, we realized that skills alone aren’t enough – job performance simply was not enough. As our new leadership team began to implement a shared vision, we found ourselves terminating some employees, “right-sizing” others to more suitable roles, and (most excitingly), hiring new team members. Throughout this process, many questions arose – why was this person not a fit for their current role? Why was this person viewed as a good employee for some time, but no longer a fit for the organization? What qualities should we be looking for in new candidates?
As a result of this questioning and reflecting, we identified the key attributes exhibited by our best employees. These became our core values.
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by James | Apr 18, 2012 | IT, Leadership
I was recently asked to comment on how an IT manager can most effectively build partnerships with the business side of the company. Having a very technical background and a business background as well, I have had the benefit of sitting on both sides of the fence. To the IT director, the IT department is the heart and soul of the company; without IT the company would grind to a halt. To the rest of the business, IT is often looked at as a necessary evil. They don’t really understand what IT does, and they often don’t care. They just want their computers to run quickly, their printers to print, and they want their reports to contain accurate data that they need to get their jobs done. This dual perspective can create tension between IT and the rest of the company, with IT feeling unappreciated and the other departments feeling that they are at the mercy of IT.
For an IT director to be successful, he or she needs to bridge the gap between the technical side of the house and the operations side.
The following are some techniques that an IT director can use:
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