I am blogging everyday (or nearly everyday) on The Daily Drucker: 366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done.

Tuesday - Crossing the Divide

Next time I hear a colleague pounding the table for something that is clearly yesterday’s news, I’m to tell them they need to wake up. I feel like I may be that person because I express my opinion about how things operate. Often times it’s in a way that does things a little different than others. So, there is some forward thinking and new ideas. I can’t really recall a time when a colleague was expressing a desire for something that happened a while ago. And I’m not sure there is an easy way to tell someone to get woke on an old idea. The message though is that things change regularly and fixating on something that is already out dated is a false view. There’s a balance to be struck for businesses.

There are several big companies trying to get into the cloud computing space with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Yet, I feel those companies are already moving onto the next idea while everyone is trying to play catch up. Instead those companies should look for the next thing past the current space.

Wednesday - Face Reality

The action point is to list three new opportunities created by demographic shifts. I think virtual is a huge one for a lot of businesses. Healthcare has gone to more virtual visits. Restaurants are more app focused. There’s also a lot more contact-less activities going on. Behavioral health will also see a big boost as we’re coming up on year of being tied to our own houses 90% of the time. We are social creatures and not meant to live like a hermit.

Thursday - The Management Revolution

The action point asks me to list three tasks that I should eliminate to be productive. This is a good question. With my team I’ve started to delegate some of the meetings I attend to them. One of the meetings that I’m still a vital part of is our data flow discussion meetings. This is usually a design meeting that I run to pull out security requirements for designs. I still run them because none of my team know how to run them. Really, I just need to give them the opportunity. I partly hold on to them because my team is really busy. In reality, I enjoy doing them and better understanding what’s being designed in house.

Another one is managing the service desk ticket queue. I’ve tried getting that off my plate. It hasn’t gone as well as I would like. Part of that is because I know one team member will always be on top of them. Which means they’re distracted from getting more project type of work done. While the other person I’m trying to work with on communication.

Multi-tasking during meetings. When I was in the office I would not bring my laptop to meetings because I wanted to be present in the meetings. That’s been a bit more difficult when I’m home because I have access to multiple monitors and can get easily distracted. I like to sit outside when it’s warm and that helps. These cold months have gotten me into a bad habit of doing that.

Friday - Knowledge and Technology

The action point is to list results I’m responsible for. Then what specialists are dependent on getting these results and how can I improve coordination. We have to ensure all vulnerabilities are identified and remediated for internal and third-party applications. I have security engineers as specialists for these results. I need to have them coordinating with each other and take myself out of the equation. Right now things come to me and are then handed off to another engineer.

For security it’s hard to define results because we have to avoid security incidents. One of the things I do want to improve on this year to improve overall coordination is to provide more regular feedback. I’ve done some through out the year but not nearly enough in my opinion.

Yesterday - Shrinking of the Younger Population

The action point is to determine whether the organization is betting on young people, older people, or immigrants. I didn’t realize the younger population is getting smaller. The birth rate is now at 2.2 in all developed countries. That’s interesting because it feels like we’re continuing to grow and grow as a world. New neighborhoods are going up on a regular basis. I don’t think we’re betting on one group of people over the other. We have a pretty diverse set of ages and people in the company. We’re growing so new people young and old are joining the company.

Today - The Transnational Company

The action point is to compare support for foreign technology companies and the local cable provider. At this point both aren’t great. When I or one of my team members has to call support for one of our technologies it seems that the person wants to push the problem back onto us. So they try to prove it’s not them and use weak evidence to indicate the issue. The cable company doesn’t necessarily do that. They do however play the hold game. There’s a lot more listening to hold music.