Cam Findlay

Archive for the ‘Study’ Category

Welcome back to 2010, it has been a while since I last posted anything Techy or Samurai related it reminds me how quickly we can go from leadership thinking to management thinking when one gets very busy (My company re-launched our flagship Guitar learning product Jamorama at the end of 2009 which didn’t leave me much time for blogging, a poor excuse I know!).

As it happens it looks like Julia (my partner) and myself are moving to Wellington! (NZ’s Captial City) for a change of lifestyle and a lot more Film and Television work for Julia.  So I am putting together a proposal to keep working at Rock Star Recipes but remotely!

Remote work and more interesting, remote or distance leadership is something I have become very interested in, how can we in 2010 with all the technology easily available to most businesses lead from a distance?  What are the challenges? How does communication, face to face time, company culture and atmosphere differ? I suspect a culture of great communication, trust and respect is key.

I’m hoping to document as much as I can while I learn more about this and also put my proposal forward to actually experience and work as a remote staff member and remote leader…

Perhaps we are coming to a point where there is no real difference whether someone is in the office or not as long at the end results are met and accountability is key. In the 80’s they called it “Tele-Communting” more recently it was dubbed “Tele-Work” (Perhaps to make it sound more like working for those managers who could not let micro-management go?) but I think going forward it will just be “work” as the technology and easy constant contact and communication from anywhere in the world becomes the norm.

More to come…

Oh, and for those who need their Technology and Ninja fix… check out the new Nexus One powered by Google Android.

I brought up the “5 whys” exercise back in the lecture 2 post last week but to recap the basic idea is to think of an important event that has occurred in your life and ask yourself why that was important.  Then take your answer and again ask yourself why that answer was important.  Repeat 5 times.  The idea being that after digging down to why an event was important to you you should start coming across some ideas or themes that could potentially be your core values or your purpose in your life. On a side note you can also use this technique for finding root causes for problems by digging down through symptoms.

So here is a brief run down of the three events that I chose:

Important Event 1: Winning my Iaido Competition
1. Why was winning this important?
Because it showed that I have a talent or aptitude for my chosen martial art.

2. Why is it important to show your talent?
Because I put a lot of hard work, learning of new skills and mental discipline into practice.

3. Why was it important to do all that hard work and mental discipline?
Because it helped me overcome my nervousness and fears while performing my Iaido Kata in front of an audience.

4. Why was it important to overcome your fears/nerves?
Because I was able to show confidence and believe that what I was doing was bigger than the fear.

5. Why was it important to believe in what you were doing?
Because I want to be more honest with myself and be able to do anything I put my mind to and grow my character.

Important Event 2: Being able to attend the X:Media:Lab Conference Workshops as part of my work at Rock Star Recipes.
1. Why was it important to attend the workshop?
Because I got to network and talk about our companies ideas with some of the worlds best digital media gurus.

2. Why was it important for you to network with these people?
Because I was able to make some great business contacts and mentors and gain insight on our ideas.

3. Why is it important to you to build these relationships?
Because it builds a community of support around the work I am doing and our companies vision.

4. Why is it important to build support in the form of a community?
Because it seems the nature of business is changing and that engaging and building a community around your vision/product/organisation and engaging in real dialogue with those in the community.

5. Why is it important to understand this change in the business environment?
Because I want to help businesses understand how to talk to their community and conduct themselves more openly and honestly.

Important Event 3: Returning to Universit y to study part time
1. Why was it important to return to your study?
Because I want to finished the degree (BCom) that I started several years ago.

2. Why I it important to finish your degree and learn more?
Because I want a greater understanding of my work and the business environment that I operate in and where this environment is going in the future.

3. Why is it important for you to have a greater understanding?
Because I feel by understanding and gaining more knowledge I will find more purpose and meaning in my work.

4. Why do you want more purpose and meaning?
Because I want to enjoy what I am spending a lot of my time doing, I want it to be more that just a job.

5. Why do you want to enjoy and have more than just a job?
So I can share my excitement and enthusiasm with what I do with others.

So what can I take from the above exercise?
1. Being honest and striving for personal growth is a core value for me.

2. I think perhaps my purpose might have something to do with communities (either online or offline) and pushing for this new change in the way we communicate/market/exist in business in the future. I need to explore this more.

3. I want to enjoy my work and share what I am passionate about with others.

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