Cam Findlay

Archive for July, 2009

I spent a good half an hour or so going through the survey handed out to us by Lane Perry who is looking at leadership and engagement in tertiary students and undertaking his PhD in Higher Education at Canterbury University, New Zealand.
Looking back during high school I don’t think I really did much in the way of any community type service as part of my schooling.  Whether my high school did not provide the opportunities at the time or perhaps I was busy being a teenager and doing my own thing (Probably a lot of hours on gaming consoles!).
I have found now that I have gotten older, getting involved in things and helping or serving others has started to become a bigger part of my life.
Up until a few months ago I was in a Board of Trustees position at the White Elephant Trust, an organisation some friends and myself set up about 4 years ago to provide youth focused events and activities (When we said “youth” we meant 15 -25 years).

Making the decision to leave my place on the board was pretty hard as we had done a lot of great work and had made great friends not to mention had provided some amazing events and opportunities for youth people in Christchurch.

My focus now is on continuing with my study at university and taking some time out to learn more about myself and what I want from life. Fortunately the paper I’m taking is all about that so I think I’m on the right track.

If I also think of service in terms of providing help and spending time with other staff at work or friends to help them succeed I feel I have good levels and strengths I think area too.  While not part of my official “job” at RockStar Recipes I like to share what I have learnt from 10 years of technology and web development with anyone interested.  One staff member, Moses, I am helping him learn HTML and web design by providing him with resources/books etc and making an effort to follow up on his learning process every few days to make sure that he is on the right track, he’s doing really well.  I also have several friends studying at Polytech that come to me for advice and resources around my area of expertise, again I’m always ready to help and provide resources to help my friends learn.

So engagement and service is definatly a plus for me and is very rewarding.

I think to “up” my level of self-responsibility I will need to take more time to explore my ideas more fully and following through on them.  Though in saying that I have recently had the idea of blogging my university paper journal questions which was an idea I spent some time going over in more details and acted upon and made it happen using some easily found tools on the web available to anyone.
I’m also hoping I can use this platform to deliver my final Personal Development Plan assessment due later this year.
Having this blog space acts as something to help increase my personal leadership as I now have a space to get ideas down and spent a little time each night thinking and writing about topics I’m either learning about or am passionate about.

I have also taken up Iaido classes (which is great for the spirit and promoting a calm, reflective mind) and play a little indoor football once a week with a great team of friends.  Again these are all activities I envisioned doing and stood up and started doing them for no reason other than enjoyment & building spirit, body and mind.

So rather than this being “what would you have to change?” it has become more “What have I changed recently and started in motion?”.
I’m not sure how you would quantitatively measure self-responsibility but hopefully the more I contribute, share and write on my blog, commit to training and get involved in a bit of team play, the more I can hit that magic 20%.

So for a “Samuari Tech Geek” i haven’t really put up anything on the tech tip yet so I thought I would talk about a couple of useful little tools I have been using.

I just spotted an interesting article on Read Write Web (a great tech blog I read) about a backup tool for Google Docs.

I had a quick read and installed the software only to find it is only for the Enterprise Version of Google Apps (And for those of you out there using Google Apps it looks like a good tool).  Myself being a big cloud computing advocate (I live in gmail and Google Docs nowadays and haven’t even opened Outlook since the start of the year!) I wanted something that would work with my personal GDocs to have a backup of everything sitting in the Cloud.  A quick search turned up a tool called GDocBackup which does exacly what I want. Within a few mouse clicks I had all my documents and spreadsheets saved to a USB drive!

On to useful tool number 2!
The most annoying thing I think about windows is that as time goes on and you are constantly installing new applications and removing old ones Windows just seems to collect fat in its arteries and slow down.  I think I experieced this on every windows machine I’ve ever used.  Rather than having to do a fresh install of windows everytime I came across this tool called Registry Fix (Which I now run on every windows machine I work on and even installed it on my parent’s computer to keep them from having a techno freakout).  I usually run this tool every month or just whenever I feel my machine has become a bit slow of the mark. It takes only a few minutes to zip through and cleans everything up in your windows registry and gains back that bit of lost performance and productivity while not breaking the bank.

SO thats all from me on the tech tip today, I hope to post more useful tools, websites and write some articles on getting the most out of todays technology and looking forward to tomorrow’s.

With self-responsibility in the context of personal leadership being the process of “Waking up”, “Standing Up”, “Making choices” and “Self-Responsibility and Courage” I feel that I am reasonably self responsible.
All through my life so far if there has been something I have really wanted to do I have always put steps in motion to achieve it and learn from the experience.  From getting the reasonably good and meaningful job I current have a RockStar Recipes Ltd to waking up and deciding to return to study at university.

I have definitely gone through the stages of waking up (feeling like i need to do something more), standing up (working out what this something else is to be i.e. maybe return to part time study), making choices (Deciding to definitely take more course at university again and enrolling in them) and self-responsibility & courage (Making sacrifices of my time towards study and despite feeling a little nervous about returning to study).

Feeling that fear and just doing it as I know having a great chance to learn more, do more and apply these new ideas and skills back into my working and everyday life is worth far more important than the fear of it.  Everyone is resonsible for thier own lives and anything you can think, you can do.

I quite often wake up in the middle of the night with ideas. Ideas for exciting developments at work, ideas for possible tech start-ups or web services, ideas for things that excite me about the future and what I could do.

While I flesh out these ideas in my head down to sometimes very detailed levels I usually end up forcing myself to go back to sleep so I’m not totally drained for the next day and forgetting something important about the idea because I did not catch it when it was fresh.

If there was one thing I would like to start doing to start pushing my leadership to management ratio up to the apparently prescribed 80% leadership/20% management it would be to perhaps start an ideas journal or sketch book.  Something that I can keep next to my bed so if the midnight ideas train starts rolling I have something I can capture these ideas with so that I can more fully explore and expand on this untapped well of ideas and visions on the possible future.

A quick trip to the stationary shop may be in order soon.

Last thursdays lecture covered a lot of ground in terms of what it is a “leader” actually does either in a position of leadership in an organisation or more importantly I think personally.

Those 4 main tasks being

1. Envisioning
2. Engaging
3. Enacting
4. Creating a Hi-Performance Context or Environment

I hope to write more about these point individually in a later post.

We ran through a very interesting exercise during the lecture called the “five whys” exercise.  Basically you pick an important event in your life (Or for an organisation a statement about what the organisation does).  You then ask “why is this important” 5 times each time asking why the the answer to the previous “why” is important.  Eventually you will get down to what is really important or a core value and purpose for that event or statement you stated with. For example, the important event that popped into my head when asked was winning my Iaido competiton a few weeks back.  I was asked by another student “why was that important” and the flow went as such:

I won my Iaido Competition > Important because: I was able to successfully apply some skills I had learnt > Important because: I enjoy learning new skills and knowledge > Important because: I have a thirst for new knowedege > Important because: Learning is most likely a core value for me etc etc

The plan is to try this exercise on serveral import moments in life so far and try an boil down those core values that have threaded their way throughout my life and whether what I am doing now aligns with them or whether I need to start making a move to something different.

Development questions for this week were:

How clear is your strategic intent/BHAG at present?

How clear is your strategy?

To what extent does your vision translated into SMART short-term goals and how clear, relevant are they?

What are your values?

What are you passionate about?

Five whys exercise, do the whats important questioning with at lest three ‘important’ events, what purpose or values come from this exercise?

What is your purpose & what do you hope to contribute?

How much alignment is there between your values/purpose and your current direction?

I sense I have a lot of writing and blog posts to get done.

On a side note: I had a really good training tonight at Iaido still working on my Seitei Iaido Kata but coming along nicely.

Righto here are the questions Tom Matthews proposed last week:

1. Name one thing/activity you could do that would make a difference to your management/leadership ratio?
2. How self-responsible are you in your life?
3. To be 20% more self-responsible, what would you have to change?
4. Complete the ’survey packet’ (handed out at the lecture) and record your reflections on your present levels of engagement and service.

Will need to have a quick refresh through the notes from that lecture which was talking about differences in historical views of leadership to new ideas and theories of what a leader is.

Most importantly it seems that personal leadership is most important…as how can one lead others if one cannot even lead oneself properly.

The ideas of the 3 stages of “Waking up”, “Standing Up”, “Making Choices” and “Self-Responsibility” i think really resonated with me… I feel I have always had a great deal of self awareness and if I want to get something done I put things in motion and do it. Deciding to head back to university after 7 years of doing other things and working was one of these personal leadership moments.

Anyway… class tomorrow I need to get some reading done!  Tom seems to have posted up a personal values questionnaire on the university intranet which looks like it could be something interesting to fill out and see what the tests say I value…

I will attempt to blog post on the above questions over the weekend, hopefully after Iaido training when I am always at my most relaxed and focused… perhaps I will attain some secret enlightenment of Ki Ken Tai no Ichi… then again… I think I need a lifetime of practice before that kicks in.

Yeah so I managed to pick up my name as a domain name… reason…

Long term hopefully i will post alot of interesting case studies and information about what i do for a living, perhaps i might write an ebook or something like that I haven’t decided yet.

For now though the main reason I decided to get this site up and go is that I have just started another paper at the university of Canterbury called “The Principles of Leadership” MGMT208 for those of you course code inclined.

The course so far looks very interesting (all be it that there has only been one lecture so far).  Each week our lecturer, Tom Matthews is proposing a series of developmental questions for which we are all to write in his words our “musings” about the questions.

What better way to keep track of these questions and share a bit of knowledge than to blog my thoughts on each question.  I guess that also gives others a chance to comment or add to the thoughts and conversation around the question and for us all to learn a bit more.

That’s all for now… i will post more ideas as the course progresses and start a new blog entry for each of the development questions hopefully within the next week.

Thanks

Cam