The power of the mind to delude itself into thinking that one’s actions are morally and ethically correct has always amazed me. I’ve never claimed to be a perfect individual, far from it, nor a perfect manager, but I’ve always been able to admit mistakes, learn, heal, and move on with my life a better person and coach in an efficient way, and I rarely care who knows about those mistakes.

I saw good people poisoned by negativity and allow their personal and professional growth to be stunted and corrupted in 2010. It will probably be one of the lasting impacts of the recession, an entire generation embittered by a few rough years. I found a few of those people and helped pull them out, but just as many I know I could have done more for. Maybe it was one more positive email, one more meeting for lunch on me, one more unexpected phone call just to see how things were going.

Ultimately it’s all up to the individual to see their life for what it really is, to recognize and admit to bad decisions and bad attitudes. People have a choice to see the positives in the world around them or to focus on what’s negative, or perhaps just different than what they’re used to. We can explain away bad choices in a way that avoids having to grow indefinitely, but it’s just a convenient form of self-deception.

Perhaps the worst part about managing people is that you can’t let everyone in and experience what the inner workings of a company are really like, even if you trust you them, enjoy their company, even see management potential in them. When something great happens it’s generally a simple matter to communicate it to your team, and transparency is always a positive- “This amazing event happened because of A, B, and C”. But when it’s negative, even poisonous, it gets infinitely more complex. I’ve learned a tremendous amount about human resources laws, privacy laws, and finances in the last few years, for which I am immensely thankful for- but all of which cloud any attempt to lay out lessons learned, to divine some sort of wisdom from an event, or series of events you’d wished never happened. Knowing the truth and not being able to say anything is bad enough, but seeing the truth misrepresented and not being able to say anything is worse.

To tie this ramble all together, it’s always easier to point the finger at something you don’t understand, especially when it’s to save face, and not doing so would mean you’d have to change and accept things about yourself that make you uncomfortable.

Clearly I’ve found it difficult to keep up a personal blog in 2010. At least one I’m comfortable with my business colleagues reading.

It’s not that what I do isn’t interesting- something wacky comes up almost every day, good bad or indifferent. Maybe it’s that the last two years have humbled me a great deal, and it’s hard to justify writing something I know only a handful of people would find stimulating and entertaining. I’ve also found that, perhaps as a self defense mechanism, my own personal interest in the world of technology wanes when I don’t have the disposable income to actually buy the things I would typically be so enthralled with. Student loans, a tough economy, and the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink random expenses that get thrown at you when you’re just about to come out ahead have made 2010 a frustrating year, to put it lightly.

I’ve had to force myself to find new ways to cope with changing reality, and I’m learning things about myself all the time as a result. I’ve found that just by losing weight, it doesn’t automatically give you motivation to keep it off. It’s my biggest vice, and I’m accepting that not going hogwild with the food and the beer and the etcetcetc is going to be a lifetime struggle. That’s ok. There are worse things out there other people are battling. Instead of going to the gym, I’m trying to get involved in sports. Instead of dieting, I’m going to (when I lose some of the weight I gained back last month!) just commit to cooking at home more. Instead of Whole Foods, Costco. You get the idea. I’ve also developed a bit of an obsession with my balcony garden and growing my own chili peppers. I have a feeling it’s not going to end well for my stomach.

Resisting the temptation to be reactive instead of proactive is the most difficult part of my career thus far. When I’m in a tough meeting with someone that works for me, or in the zone training, or deep into writing a new policy manual or training webinar, I can’t be stopped. I know that when I’m on my feet and running with something, there is nobody better at this job than me. The dangerous part is when your machine is well oiled, it’s sometimes hard to imagine it better than it already is. Or to reach down and find the fortitude necessary to rock the boat that is sailing along respectably without your meddling. What I’ve found in the last two months is that this process snowballs- when I get one thing going that I just pulled out of nowhere and it works, it motivates me to mess with something else, then something else, until I sit back and say, “Everything about this is wrong!”

Then, of course, I have to get a cup of coffee, because I know I’m going to be up all night anyway.

Here is a picture from the vacation I took this year in Trinidad, CA. If you ever drive through Northern California, you owe it to yourself to stop in.

When I hear that the unemployment rate is over 10%, that is only shocking in that it’s double what we normally are. But logically, without historical context, I’m kind of surprised it’s not more. You can’t tell me less than 10% of the people you know aren’t totally incompetent.

For a few months I ran a private, just with friends blog anonymously sharing some of the more funny applications for a job I get. Stuff from having “GANGSTA A$$ (censored)” as the “From” name in someone’s email address, to telling me a long story about how you ran a tow-truck company before your husband divorced you so please give me a computer job. While these were the top 5% in hilarity, well over 75% of the hundreds of job seekers I review are just… ordinary.

While I’ve finally scheduled some interviews for a couple of open positions I have that I feel confident about, this most recent search has taken almost a month, even in this job market. Maybe it proves just how picky we are at Make It Work when choosing our employees.

There’s been a lot of talk about big, slow, and dumb at Make It Work lately. Specifically, how no matter how far our company’s reach grows and how successful we are, we can’t ever let ourselves “feel” like one of those Big, Slow, and Dumb companies. Our business has to move at the speed of technology, which naturally builds in a pace of innovation, fresh thinking, and new ideas that most companies will never achieve.

I have an example of a big, slow, and dumb company to illustrate my point. I’ve been a very, very loyal subscriber to DISH network for almost five years. Until recently, I’ve had 99%+ uptime, excellent quality signal, and was really pleased with the customer service experiences I had had to that point- they have moved with me four times and each time came out and moved my dish to my new apartment, sometimes at great peril- for free.

But then, things started to unravel and I started to realize how slow this company had gotten. I started have massive DVR problems about four months ago- it would reset itself automatically and was boot-looping like crazy. Confident it would be a simple replacement, I called DISH tech support and had one of the worst customer service experiences of my life. I don’t need to explain it in detail because everyone reading this has had the same thing happen to them- disconnects, busy signals, language barriers, unnecessary troubleshooting (“I hear that you are saying that your lightbulb is dead. Can you please try to turn it on for me sir.”) and then they tried to charge me for shipping of the new DVR, which by the way, I’ve been paying $10 a month for 5 years for (Do I own it yet or something?).

Anyway, the new DVR arrives and, of course, it’s clearly a refurbished device. A week later it starts doing the same thing. Rinse and repeat terrible tech support experience, and I have yet another one. Two months later, same thing. I’m not bothering this time- I, like many of my coworkers, am switching to DirecTV.

But bad service and an insistence on cheap, old equipment isn’t even the biggest reason I’m switching. I’ve had the DVR I’ve had since 2004. When I called to get my second replacement, I asked if there was a new model available, and low and behold there was one available- only one in five years. It boasted literally only one new feature at the price of $200 to upgrade (plus still pay the $10 a month)- I could watch two HD shows at the same time. Neat. I realized then that this technology company had basically sat around doing nothing with their products the entire time I’ve been with them, offer essentially no on-demand programming, and charge the same as a company that, while certainly not perfect (I so wish I was in a FiOS territory…), at least *tries* to keep up.

After my experience at MIW, I could never work for a big, slow, dumb company. I’d feel stifled, unimportant, and frustrated unless I could affect a massive change in company culture. At MIW, I don’t have to affect that change, because from the ground up we’ve built a company that is moving faster than the speed of “cool”.