Some time back I spent about three hours writing and doing emails at one of our local malls.  I love this place because there are lots of tables to sit at and the mall has free wireless access so I can be online all the time.  As I was exiting the mall I noticed a woman about 20 feet away from the entrance heading into the mall.  As I walked out the door I held the door open for this woman for a few seconds.  As she walked by me into the mall she said "WOW!"  She was surprised that I actually took three seconds out of my life to hold a door open for a complete stranger.  Imagine what I could have done with those three seconds that I wasted :-). 

Project management is changing….it's becoming more strategic, more mainstream, and not just synonymous with technology implementations. Today's PM needs to be more than technically adept or be able to whip out a gantt chart.  Get a read on some of these crucial skills the everyday PM will need to succeed:

In a prior life I was having a discussion with two of our managers on deciding between which of two food shows we should have a booth.  As the discussion went on, one of our managers said, "well, we just need to do more research on what the best food show is for us to attend."  While it is true we didn't have enough information to make a good decision, what we were missing was the decision criteria in which to make the right decision.  Once we focused the discussion on what our decision criteria was (buyer attendance, breadth of product line which we can show, and cost), our data gathering became much more purposeful and focused and yielded a better-informed decision.

In 2004 I left a career that I loved at Microsoft so Patty and I could team-homeschool our son Trevor. With Trevor being on the autism spectrum, we felt he was going to need more help in his transition from 6th to 7th grade than the school system would provide. I focused on math and science, and Patty focused on arts and languages. We ultimately mainstreamed him back into public school by 9th grade. Today he is a college graduate, living on his own, paying his own bills, and leading a typical life for someone his age. Each time I look at my son I'm reminded of how the decision we made in 2004 was so right.

Fast-forward to today. My career post-Microsoft has been extremely fulfilling as an author, consultant, and publisher. But I deep down wondered what our life would have been like had I stayed at Microsoft. I decided to go through an exercise where I looked at what our life was like today versus what I thought it would be like had I stayed at Microsoft.  This is where something I created called The Eight Drivers of Contentment comes into play.

On one of my consulting assignments I worked with one of the client's young rising stars who I'll call Buddy.  Buddy was an incredibly hard worker, could take on a number of projects at one time, and managed to deliver results on a very timely basis.  Buddy was also brilliant and had a very practical and keen business sense.  Great raw materials for a great future leader.