Search results matching tags 'PASS' and 'Goals'

The Year That Was - 2012

KKline — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 19:31:00 GMT

2012 was, simply stated, a year that kicked my butt. When I wasn't struggling professionally, I was struggling personally. Health issues, culminating in a diagnosis of Type II diabetes, and the passing of my father soon after Thanksgiving marked my biggest struggles. I apologize to those of you who are normally on my Christmas card list for not sending any this year. The wind was not in my sails. On the positive side of the ledger, I made a scary but exciting leap to SQL Sentry midyear. This was a huge shake-up after 10 years with my previous employer, but one which has been met with unbridled enthusiasm everywhere I've gone. Thank you for the handshakes, high-fives, and hugs! We're doing some really exciting things at SQL Sentry (such as SQLPerformance.com and Plan Explorer Pro) and I hope to engage with you more than ever in 2013.

Blogging Activity, Plus Leadership Skills & Professionalism

2012 marked a bit of a shift in my content creation direction. I've seen an uptick in struggles in the non-IT part of our career - communications, leadership, motivation, goal-keeping, all of those sort of things. I feel like I have some wisdom to contribute in that space. So, in addition to technical blog posts, I been putting down more of my experiences and lessons learned on the interpersonal side of the IT career path. My top ten blog posts for the year reflect some of that new direction:

Do You Have One of "the Three W’s" to Sit on a Board of Directors? -- Important tips for any IT pro considering a role in strategy and executive leadership.
Timewarp: What Is a Relational Database? -- With all the talk about NoSQL databases, let's go back to the fundamentals.
Want Another Reason to Hate iTunes? -- A throw-away article that precipitated a maelstrom of comments. Them Apple fanboys are passionate!
Why Do IT Pros Make Awful Managers? -- Not all IT pros make awful managers, but when they're awful it's often for similar reasons.
High-Availability White Papers and Resources for SQL Server -- Read the latest about AlwaysOn Availability Groups, and more.
New White Paper: SQL Server Extended Events and Notifications -- SQL Server 2012 great augments the Extended Events feature set. Find out how.
Build Your Own Microsoft Operations Management Pack -- Resources to build out your own SCOM management pack.
Help Me Update the History of SQL Server -- I started with SQL Server when it was still an OS/2 product. Jeesh! Lots of versions have come out since then.
TIE: Recorded Webcast Available: Extend SCOM to Optimize SQL Server Performance Management and The Expert's Conference (TEC) - For AD, SharePoint, Exchange, PowerShell and Other Admins -- Pointers to a webcast about extending SCOM and the TEC conference.
A Fond Farewell to Quest Software -- I learned so much in 10 years at Quest Software.

As I mentioned in the opening paragraph about blogging, I'm putting more energy into best practices for professional growth among IT pros. Along those lines of thought, I started a website called ForITPros.com with my long-time friend Joe Webb (Twitter | Blog) and, in partnership with SSWUG, developed a 2-DVD set and streaming media class called Leadership Skills for IT Professionals containing 14 hours of leadership and soft skills training specifically crafted for IT teams.

I've also been working with PASS on the Professional Development Virtual Chapter (VC), led by Mark Caldwell (Twitter). We've already got a full year of content schedule and are trying to figure out how fit in more sessions. Maybe moving to more than one webcast per month? The PASS Professional Development VC archive has lots of great content for you to review and future sessions are detailed at the PASS Professional Development VC homepage.

In-Person Activity

2012 was busy where I actually appeared in person or put in a big effort to write or create content. Here's a run-down: Articles (2), Conference Spoken (12), Customer Calls (88), Customer Visits (4), Magazine Columns (14) at SQLMag.com and DBTA.com, New Books (1) with Ross Mistry, PASS Chapter Presentations (12), Pre-cons/Full-day Seminars (4), SQL Saturdays (4), SSWUG Sessions (4), TechNet Radio Broadcasts (2), Technical Book Reviews (3), and Webcasts (10).

In 2013, I expect to travel a bit less. But I also expect to do many more webcasts. Let me know if you have some ideas about what you'd like to learn! One business trip that I refuse to give up, though, is SQLCruise. (Register!) I know it sounds like the worst possible way to learn. I mean who'd want to learn on a cruise ship in the Caribbean?!? (I hope you could detect the sarcasm dripping from those two sentences.) But here are two favorite aspects of of SQLCruise that are totally ferreals - 1) You simultaneously can relax and focus on learning. You are disconnected from the mainland. You don't have to worry about the mobile phone going off. 2) You get extended ours in a intimate setting with the top talent in the SQL Server world. It's always a pleasure to attend a conference session from the best in the industry. But you'll get hours of time to talk with these veterans of the industry about your specific problems and situations. It just doesn't get better than that.

Social Media

It's hard to believe that only a year ago, 2011, was my first year on Twitter. By years end, here's where my stats had moved: 5,507 tweets (up from 3,452 tweets), 661 following (up from 531), and 3,720 followers (up from 2,656) . I didn't check my social media numbers last year, so I've got no point of comparison. But I'm currently sitting at 2,327 LinkedIn connections and 1,157 Facebook friends. One of my standing policies on Facebook is that I don't "friend" someone who I haven't personally met. That doesn't help detangle the hopeless mess I've created by having only one identify on Facebook, both personal and public. So, on the one hand, I owe all of my longtime friends a big apology for all of the SQL talk and, on the other hand, a big apology to all of my professional friends for not posting enough news and advice while dilute my status updates with personal minutia. Oh well - it is what it is.

My blogging activity for 2012 was the lowest it's been in many years, down to 44 entries, down from 77 in 2011 and well into the hundreds in 2010. My answer to that sort of doldrums for 2013 is to get sloppy! And by that, I mean less of a perfectionist and more of a content machine that just cranks it out! Most of you, as my readers, have been very forgiving of a misplaced verb, a missing punctuation, or -heck- a totally malformed sentence that makes no sense at all. So I'm going to try much harder to churn through the 700+ nascent blog posts in my notes folder and get those ideas out there!

I hope to see you following me on Twitter soon! Thanks,

-Kevin

Do You Have One of "the Three W’s" to Sit on a Board of Directors?

KKline — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 17:28:00 GMT

Let’s get one thing clear right off the bat – I’m not typing “Board of Directors” repeatedly throughout this blog post. It’s just too much typing. BoD will have to do. Live with it.

Perhaps, you’ve been paying attention to the PASS Twitter feed, read the newsletters, or otherwise stay abreast of happenings within PASS. If you haven’t, here’s a news alert – it’s time for a new round of the PASS leadership cycle. And since this is the season of PASS nominations, I thought it’d be an appropriate time to share some of my lessons learned about effective BoDs.

Having spent over a decade sitting on various BoD’s, I can testify that the most effective directors are those that bring at least one of the three W’s to the table. (I learned the three W's from a former executive director of PASS, Jon Lindberg). Note that the three W’s are not characteristics or traits. They are behaviors, that is, observable sets of activities. The keywords in the previous sentence are observable and activities. You might have every intention in the world of doing the three W's. But if other people on the BoD cannot observe that you are performing the actions, they don't exist. The three W behaviors are Wealth, Work, and Wisdom. They’re major behaviors in my leadership ethos, called servant leadership. (I’ll talk about servant leadership in another post at some time).

Let’s talk about the three W’s in detail:

Wealth

This is simple and direct. Some directors come to the boardroom with a checkbook and they’re willing to use it to further the goals of the organization. Because they fund strategic initiatives of the organization in cash or in-kind, they literally change the reality for the organization. Directors with this W remove barriers and constraints that would otherwise end many discussions and initiatives before they got off the ground due to lack of resources.

However, directors with wealth are usually their as a part of their job. In other words, their employer has a strategic reason for supporting the success of the organization. Therefore, directors with wealth often seek to ensure that the organization is tracking against certain high-level goals that coincide with the goals of their employer. This is not to say that such directors have ulterior motives. They are typically very ethical and insightful members of a given BoD. But this perspective also means that a director with wealth may be interested in activities or metrics which other directors have considered. After all, if you were to pony up big dollars for a new initiative on your child’s soccer team (say, new training equipment) you’d also want to ensure that money was spent to greatest effect.

Note that wealth doesn’t always mean cash. It can mean many other things - your presence is a form of value. (Many times, directors come to BoD meetings and proceed to work on their email. That's a major breach of sharing your wealth of knowledge). Here’s a more concrete example. Back in the early 2000’s, around 2003, PASS received a significant amount of in-kind support from Compaq Corporation at the encouragement of then Microsoft liaison and board member Ryan Trout. (In-kind support, by the way, is support that has a cash value, but is an action or activity offered instead of actual cash). In effect, Compaq conducted a major direct mail campaign to their sizeable SQL Server user base to help drive attendance at the PASS Summit and to encourage interest in both the international organization and local user groups. This contribution marked a major turning point for PASS both in terms of high-level vendor support and in visibility to the SQL Server user community.

Axiom: The golden rule, for directors with wealth, is “he who has the gold makes the rules” with all the positive and negative connotations that holds.

Work

There’s no getting around the fact that the directors who are most willing to invest personal time and energy are the most effective. (And I mean the term “effective” in the most literal sense of “having a measurable effect on the enterprise”). In a typical strategically-oriented board, the extent of work is usually to remain current on all important reading material, to strive to be aware of shareholder issues and concerns, and to formulate opinions on important strategies for the organization to consider or implement as a form of guidance for the CEO and COO.

In a portfolio-oriented board, such as the structure used by PASS and many other large IT professional associations (including most of the other major database BoD’s such as IOUG, IDUG, ISUG, ITUG, and Share), directors not only have the burden of the strategic director, but also act as the head of a specific function of the organization. For example, in a portfolio-oriented BoD, a single director might be responsible for growing and guiding the local chapters of the association (the Chapter Portfolio), another might be responsible for driving value back to members (the Membership Portfolio), a third might be responsible for the selection and implementation of the content delivered at major events (the Program Portfolio), and so on. There is no doubt that some directors are much more effective than others at managing a portfolio and leading a group of volunteers within that portfolio.

While a full discussion of the best practices that make some directors really effective at this second W could fill a couple additional posts, I’ll put a few quick hallmarks here in case you’re curious:

Priorities

Smart directors set their sights on a very short list of goals that follow the SMART standard. And by “short list”, I mean a list with no more than three goals. The goals are achievable and, usually, not terribly expensive nor complex to implement. If one of their top goals turns out to be much more expensive or complex to get rolling, then they move on to their next most important goal that is easily achievable.

Axiom: It is better to make small, measurable gains than to set big goals that never get accomplished.

Alignment

Smart directors make sure that the goals they’re working to achieve complement the overall strategy of the organization. This alignment provides a strong incentive for other members of the BoD to back their proposals and to act as allies in the event that a board vote is needed to settle the way resources will be directed or whether a proposed goal is accepted by the board as a new policy or program. Alignment of goals with the top-level strategy of the organization also means that successor directors will have a much easier time continuing where the original board member left off because the work simply makes sense. Plus, when a director’s goals seem unusual or very different than other goals of the organization, organizational resistance is sure to come in to play.

Axiom: Unless there’s an emergency, it is better to couch visionary change within the overall strategy of the organization than it is to introduce changes that represent a major shift in long-standing culture, priorities, or processes.

Focus

Directors who have a short list of goals are also much more successful when they devote their energies to …, oh wait a sec, gotta check email. Just kidding. But I hope you get the idea.

I’ve seen a lot of brilliant individual directors who, upon prioritizing their work, spent enormous amounts of time and energy working on other people’s problems, working on their own issues at the wrong level, or talking about an issue way after its major parameters have been decided. I’m not saying stop helping others or stop discussions. But I am saying that a portfolio director must remember that the success of their team is their success. Many IT professionals are used to being individual contributors and so they feel that if they’re busy and working hard, it must be good, right? No. If the director isn’t working to achieve the goals of their portfolio, they’re basically not working at all. Here are some common traps that damage focus:

A common way IT pros on a BoD lose their focus is to get into the details of a new program or process. For example, say that PASS wanted to introduce a cool new feature on their website. An unfocused director would immediately begin to start designing the system in their mind – “We’ll use Active Directory to authenticate new users and then they’ll connect to the services using that cool REST-ful technology I’ve wanted to try. And maybe we could use SSIS packages to…” You get the picture. The BoD hasn't even fully fleshed out the business plan for the new program and yet this director is off and running after the specific technological solution to the problem. The problem that is not yet fully mapped out and understood. Remember, directors are supposed to assess and manage the business value of any given process or new organization program, not sling code. By focusing on the intimate details of the technology first, the director short-changes the business value of the initiative. It's like the programmer who starts writing code before any requirements are understood or documented. I’ve seen directors invest huge amounts of time into initiative which, in the broad analysis, were only half-baked and not worth pursuing. The focus must for a director, first and foremost, be about business value. (As a side-bar to this line of thought, many directors are the only person who can make certain important decisions. If that person is encumbered with relatively routine but demanding work, they actually shortchange the organization of their true value. If the VP of Finance is spending a lot of time working on a technology problem, they're not just working on technology - they're also NOT WORKING on financial matters).

Another common mistake that IT pros make when managing a portfolio is failing at delegation. IT pros, as I mentioned earlier, are usually most successful when they’re a strong individual contributor. They’re used to being judged on their own technical skill. They’re not used to being judged on the success of a team. Consequently, inexperienced directors frequently under-delegate and/or under-communicate which leaves volunteers feeling unwanted and unimportant. In the same vein, directors may act rudely to their committee members or other volunteers, or may simply treat them like employees –definitely not the way to treat a volunteer. This behavior is like torching your own support network. Volunteers can quickly become demoralized, or even quit, when they feel unproductive or unwanted.

Axiom: As a smart director of a portfolio, it is better to focus on business outcomes and the success of the team than it is to perform the detailed work yourself.

Wisdom

Dictionary.com tells me that wisdom is “knowledge of what is true or right coupled with just judgment as to action”. Money cannot buy wisdom. It can only be earned through many years of manifold experiences. Some young people are wise and insightful, but frankly it’s usually the grey-headed types who’ve usually lived through enough dumb decisions to recognize when a pattern in a social situation or set of human behaviors is being repeated. A great example of wisdom on the PASS board comes from the two CA representatives who sit on the board, Neil Buchwalter and Rick Bolesta. In addition to serving on the PASS board for perhaps longer than any other sitting board member, they’ve also both sat on other boards before and concurrently with the PASS board. Their stability, deep history, and analysis of the interplay between people (or groups of people) are extremely important to the successful workings of the board.

You might thing, based on what I’ve said described about wisdom, that a wise director is prone to pontificate and engage in long-winded discourse. Nothing could be further from the truth in my experience. The typical wise director tends to be brief, interjecting comments and thoughts of great weight and importance. What they say is usually worth careful consideration. Conversely, directors who spend a lot of time talking are often the least worth listening to. Many long-winded directors often use discussion to figure out what it is they really think about a given situation. Wise directors already know what they think and, when the speak, produce fully formed thoughts and arguments in a given situation.

In some cases, a BoD can help build institutional wisdom through diversity. As I mentioned earlier, wisdom is earned through experiences (usually bad experiences). When the members of a governing body like a BoD are young and/or inexperienced, they can supplement their breadth of experiences by selecting members of a variety of background, ethnicities, nationalities, ideologies, orientation, etc. This broaden of perspective raises the quality of dialog, helps identify problems and issues in policy discussion, and helps to foresee major obstacles on the horizon.

Axiom: Wisdom and insight are crucial in building a base of institutional knowledge, context for key decisions, and insight into the highest-probability for success in socially complex situations.

If you’re involved in a governing body of some kind or are considering volunteering with PASS (or any other BoD for a professional association), do a little introspection. Do you possess one or more of the three W’s? Or do you have big dreams or a burning ember of ambition? What do you need to learn to equip yourself with one of the W’s?

Let me know what you think!

-Kevin

A Fond Farewell to Quest Software

KKline — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 23:01:00 GMT

The week of the 4^th of July is a happy week for Americans. Most families get out for a parade, a fireworks display, a picnic in the park, a movie where Will Smith puts the beat down on a bunch of aliens, or an afternoon at the pool or lake. We celebrate the contributions of our service men and women. We honor veterans. We drink a lot of beer. We reflect on the founding of our nation and the meaning of “Independence Day”.

My own reflections over the Independence Day holiday took me in a new and rather unexpected direction. After ten-and-a-half immensely rewarding years at Quest Software, I have decided to seek new opportunities.

Today, I wanted to publicly reflect on my time at Quest Software, saving my next blog post for some thoughts about my new endeavors. I could probably write a short novel about all of the great experiences and learning opportunities I had over the last ten years. Part of the reason it might make a good novel is because my memory is notoriously weak and my creativity is equally strong. I might just make up details to fill in the fuzzy recollections. Just sayin'... But just to give you a taste, here’s a brief timeline of my ten years at Quest, highlighting some of my favorite experiences:

I joined Quest on January 2^nd of 2002 as Senior Product Architect to design the tools that would become Quest’s first foray into the SQL Server database market. Quest dominated the Oracle tools market but was at square one for tools in the SQL Server space. I’m grateful to Eyal Aronoff, CTO in those days, and Guy Harrison (blog | twitter), current leader of the Melbourne office, for mentoring me through the near-comically hard process of designing and building software products that can sell. Dax French, then product manager, taught me about the concept of salability. Oh, it’s easy to put requirements down on paper. But that’s about as close to a finished and sellable product as a laptop is to an abacus. I also learned a whole heck of a lot about software development from Patrick O'Keeffe, and about corporate politics in a worldwide development organization, especially from Julie Ackerman, then VP of Operations.
In late 2003, I became the Director of Technology for the SQL Server Solutions Group. (Yeah! We had a team name and a few products!) Hiring your own team is a dream for many leaders in IT. And I have to say with more than a little pride that the organization we built included the most intelligent, energized, and fun people I’ve ever known. Being empowered to hire a team, set goals, and deliver on them was a fantastic, though demanding experience. . I’m thankful to the team for their incredibly hard work and unsinkable ethics: John Theron, Johnny Ortez, Lee Grisson, Joe Motley, Hassan Fahimi, Israel Kalush, and so many others. I’m grateful that my more experienced peers on the other major dev teams, Rony Lerner and Steve Rosenberg, enthusiastically taught me how to answer the needs of both a sales-driven corporation and a deadline-driven engineering process.
Throughout this time, I experienced the full support of Quest’s executive leadership as a Microsoft MVP and, even more so, as a founder and eventual president of PASS. I can’t emphasize enough what a big deal this was. The leadership of PASS was an incredibly difficult workload to support, basically equivalent to a second full-time job, and also a difficult period in my life personally. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to fully thank the top leadership of Quest for allowing me, around 2006, to move some of those PASS hours into my day job at Quest. I literally could NOT have served two terms as president of PASS without this level of support. Yeah! Now I was back down to an acceptable number of hours per week, including the time spent on PASS, blogging, etc with my day job.
In 2005, I again ventured into new territory and new experiences. I never in my wildest dreams anticipated that I’d someday learn about and actually work on M&A deals. I knew Quest did some M&A from our acquisition of Leccotech, bringing in the outstandingly talented Claudia Fernandez and Darren Mallette, among many others, and FastLane, where I learned a lot from David Waugh. But that’s exactly what happened when Quest finally acted on my advice to acquired Imceda, where I got to meet and work with the likes of Douglas Chrystall (twitter), Jason Hall (twitter), and David Gugick (twitter). During this time, I learned an amazing amount about executive leadership from some of the very best in the IT industry – Vinny Smith, Doug Garn, Charles Ramsey, Steve Dickson and John Newsome. I think they’d probably laugh to hear me say this, but I have confess that I was at the level of “barely able to hold my fudge” intimidation whenever I breathed the same air as these guys. But I also watched them closely, tried to absorb their wisdom, and emulate their behaviors that engendered the success of the company.
2006 marked another new adventure for me at Quest because, for the first time, I began to work more heavily on technology evangelism than on product development. We now had several products which needed more attention and focus on campaign-driven marketing efforts. Billy Bosworth joined as our new VP and General Manager. Christian Hasker (twitter) joined as our new Director for Product Marketing, while Heather Eichmann and Andy Grant joined the effort. This team rocked! We became a team of thought leaders that influenced the way the rest of the company did business. I learned an enormous amount from these folks about advertising, marketing, technology evangelism, and community building. I could easily write a book with anecdotes and lessons on how to be an effective technology evangelist. Charles Ramsey, president of Quest during those days, bestowed the title of “Technical Strategy Manager” upon me due to all of the time I was spending on a wide cross-section of activities for sales, marketing, R&D, as well as interfacing with Microsoft’s SQL Server team, to name a few, Paul Randal (blog | twitter), Kevin Farlee, Gert Drapers (blog), Joe Yong, Bob Ward (twitter), the late Ken Henderson, Jimmy May (blog | twitter), Mark Souza (twitter) and the Jedi of SQLCAT, and many others.
I still remember fondly how a friend had forwarded a “tweet” from a certain Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) about him being excited to sit in my session at the PASS Summit in late 2007. My first thought was “What the heck is a tweet?!?” My second thought was "I should meet this guy!" Before long, though, I was working with Brent in his new role as our full-time technology evangelist whence I moved to Pre-Sales to work more directly with large customers and key accounts - and where I have been ever since (until now). During that time I learned how to give a really good product demo from Jason Hall, David Swanson, and Ari Weil (If you don’t already know how to give a good product demo, check out http://www.secondderivative.com/ and buy their book post-haste). It was also very education to learn from great Pre-Sales leaders like John Milburn and Robb Dunewood. I also learned a whole lot about the awesomeness of Camtasia – which you should buy right now if you ever do recorded presentations. Brent stayed with us for a couple years, teaching me an enormous amount about social media and, although I’d been blogging since 2004, a whole lot about how to be a better blogger. Someday, I hope to actually apply what I learned from Brent.

From that early team, we built a culture of trust with our customers, attempting at every turn to add value to what we built. And it shows. Our products have won a multitude of awards and plaudits. I’ve seen a host of product launches and major new releases. I cannot take nor deserve the credit for these great tools. I was merely a very small part of the team that brought them to life.

I’m so very proud of the full-stack monitoring and alerting in Spotlight, of the unmatched analytics in Foglight Performance Analysis, of the raw value of LiteSpeed. I’m also very proud of the evolution of Toad, from a small and practical aggregation of utilities, into a full suite for developers, data modelers, and data analysts. Add in the unique scalability testing features of Benchmark Factory and I can say without any apology that we built the definitive and comprehensive platform of tools for the database professional.

Working deep in technology has always been interesting and exciting. But my favorite part of the job has always been interacting with customers and partners. It’s an uplifting experience to share the ways in which the Quest tools empower customers to do things they’ve never been able to do before and to make their jobs and their lives better. Meeting our clients on four continents over the course of thousands of presentations and meetings has been a top highlight of my career. Whenever I interact with customers, I want the focus to be on mutual learning. Customers teach me as much as I’ve ever taught them.

As time advanced, though, I gained insight into why some periods at Quest were more enjoyable than others. The laser-sighted focus of our early, smaller organization was a definitely highlight. The rhythm of business travel also picked up dramatically in recent years, with a commensurate decline in my overall health and wellbeing. Clearly, I needed a change.

You might be asking “If it was so good, why are you changing things?” Well, I’m not leaving because of a negative of some kind. I can assure you that it is not because I’ve had some kind of personality conflict, disagreement over strategy, or that I’m otherwise unhappy with Quest. Quite the opposite, I’m leaving because I’ve been offered an new opportunity that is both very exciting and enormously reinvigorating.

To all of you that I’ve already mentioned mentioned by name, and to the multitude more whose name I wasn't able to record above, I owe a debt of gratitude. I wish you not goodbye, but the fondest of farewell.

Farewell is also in order because to you, my readers because, well, you’ll still be seeing me in all the old familiar places. So where am I off to? Tune in next Monday for that bit of news.

Until then. Enjoy!

-Kev

-Follow me on Twitter

Leadership, Management, and SQLRally

KKline — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 14:55:00 GMT

Transparency - A Great Leadership Quality

I've always appreciated how Andy Warren (blog| twitter) operates in the most transparent manner, especially as it relates to his role as a director for the Professional Association for SQL Server. For example, Andy's latest blog post about prepping for the SQLRally, to kick off in less than 30 days, is insightful and gives you a good idea of the sort of work a strong director for PASS needs to put in. I also enjoy how Andy more or less thinks out loud and offers you the chance to provide your input. In that latest blog post, he was mulling different after hours entertainment options, giving you a chance to pipe up with your opinion if you had one.

Learn from My Mistakes

Times running out for the early registration discount. Save $50 by registering before the end of the week! And while you're at it, register for my full day, pre-conference seminar on learning leadership and management skills especially tailored for the IT professional. Here's a quick run-down of the topics we'll cover in my pre-con:

Earning the respect of your team
A deep understand of effectively motivating technology professionals
Specific skills to lead database professionals competently that broadly fall into the categories of:
- Coaching team members to effectively meet goals and deadlines
- Facilitating change and navigating organizational disruptions
- Promoting communication within the team and with management
- Keeping teams and projects on task and within scope
- Dealing with difficult team members
- Practicing good team time management techniques

Read all about the goals of the session here. If you're coming to my session, I'd love to hear your thoughts ahead of time about challenges you're facing!

Personal Experience, Personnel Experience

Also, just a word about my bona fides. I've had a lot of leadership and management training over the years, but like many professionals I consider my on-the-job experiences to be the most valuable. On the education side of the equation, I received a bachelor's degree in the school of management back in the 1980's. I've also gone through the Center for Creative Leadership's leadership training curriculum, the Blessing and White Management Training curriculum, and SmithBucklin's not-for-profit governance and organizational strategy training curriculum. On the experience side of the equation, I led small dev and admin teams of 3-7 people starting way back in the early 1990's. In the late 1990's, I started taking a more strategic direction with my skills as the manager of information architecture at the firm where I worked as well as taking a role as one of the founding directors of PASS. In the early 2000's, I joined Quest Software as our initial SQL Server product architect and spent several years leading the team to a over 50 individuals in a half dozen teams in as many disparate locations around the world.

A Few Words About Community from SQLBits8

The more I go, the more reasons I find to go back to the SQLBits conferences held around the UK. The starting image isn't very flattering, but here's a fun little interview put together by Andrew Fryer of Microsoft: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4EjZ-FutLQ Enjoy! -Kev Twitter at kekline More content at http://KevinEKline.com

What Three Events Brought You Here?

KKline — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 04:09:00 GMT

Whiners and Whingers Get Wedgies

Yes, I deserve a Wedgie

There I was, just a couple weeks back, whining that I wasn't getting tagged by friends when a new meme comes out. Sure enough, when my friend, Paul Randal (blog | twitter), starts a new meme with me as one of the first handful of people tagged, it's taken me a full ten days to get a response out the door. Yes - I deserve a wedgie.

In Paul's initial post, I saw that he'd asked for three events that were pivotal in why I'm where I am today. To be honest, I've been noodling over my response ever since Paul first tagged me. So, in a sense, I've been writing this blog post for about twelve days now. Not that I'm off the hook or anything.

What Didn't Make the List

Still, I have to admit it's taken me some time to get to a point where I could write about the events that have brought me where I am today. Because, when I give a truly honest accounting of some of these major life changing events and pivotal decisions in my life, I'm not always proud of what I see. Like item #4 on my list of life-changing decisions. Don't you DARE ask about #4. I mean it. If you do, there will be blood (see picture below)...

There are also a couple other non-events that also had a huge impact on my life's direction. By non-event, I mean these things didn't have a specific date and time. But they were enormously influential about how I handled opportunities or even helped make opportunities happen. First, I'd be remiss not to mention the impact that my personal faith has had on my life. Countless decisions were steered by that faith. Second, my upbringing naturally had a huge impact on shaping my personality, preferences, fears, and joys. (My mother is Italian, so I can honestly say that Parmesan cheese is one of life's greatest joys.) Finally, my immediate family -marrying very young and having a rather large family- also meant I made a lot of decisions in certain ways, such as opting not to move for a better job so that the kids could have greater stability. Things would be very different if I'd put my own desire and ambitions ahead of them. With that said, let's hit that top 3 list.

Add 1/5 Beefeater Gin + Article of Lingerie + Collegeboy Prank at a Zoo = Lifetime of Regret, a.k.a #4 on the List

Event #3

Pivotal, life-changing events shouldn't come knocking on your door every day. In my case, one of the first and most pivotal events for me happened about 3/4 of the way through my senior year in high school, just a few months before graduation. Like my brother from another mother, Buck Woody (blog | twitter), money was a huge issue in my household. (I'll save you the sob story. But trust me, there were many tears.) So whatever college and career I chose had to provide the most upward mobility as quickly as was humanly possible within the boundaries of the law (that meant no drug dealing). This is where my analytical side kicked in. Looking over my college scholarships, I examined the undergraduate catalogs at the various universities in one hand and the salary survey about their respective careers in the other.

I came up with a two-column list. The first column contained college majors that I would really enjoy career-wise, though not necessarily big money careers. Column #1 contained entries like teaching, writing, farming, and being a stoner. Notice how entries in column #1 were all among the most noble of professions and yet virtually guaranteed a life of penury? Yeah, I noticed that too. The second column contained college majors that I could tolerate, but had much better money prospects. Column #2 contained entries for engineering, medicine, law, becoming Hugh Hefner's protege, and ... computers.

I'd lived with computer since before I could read or write. My father was an analog computer engineer and, I still remember with great clarity, the desk-sized analog computer we had in our house in the 1970's. It had 4K of memory, used punch cards, created a flurry of discarded chads when it would write data out to a punch card. My dad taught me about binary, octal, and hexadecimal, and the joys of vacuum tube computing. Unfortunately, he did not teach me how to throw or catch any sort of ball, which had dramatic repercussions throughout my school year (refer to wedgie picture above) - but I digress. Suffice it to say that by the time college rolled around, I was already well versed in 8-bit computing (I used Kaypro's for you Osbourne and Sinclair snobs out there) and could envision that being a good career.

My Initial Career Choice - Stoner

Right about the same time I was choosing a future career, just before I graduated from high school, IBM launched an exciting new business computer called the IBM PC. It was a hugely successful product with the ultimate killer application - a spreadsheet. (The spreadsheet was an amazing innovation in its day. VisiCalc was the one I remembered being all the rage at the time.) These personal computers were also hugely expensive - a nicely loaded IBM PC or XT could routinely cost $5,000 and that's in 1983 dollars, friends. So that's when I started a part-time business, which I maintained all through college and a short while after, building and selling IBM PC clones. I learned a lot from that experience - how to pay taxes like a responsible business owner, a lot about salesmanship, quite a bit about business accounting, business law, and the goodness of being an entrepreneur. One surprisingly good outcome from all of this was that I didn't have to sell out my love of writing and teaching. That's probably 40% of what I do today, just with computers.

Event #2

Another major turning point in my professional life occurred in the early 1990's. By that time, I'd held a couple professional jobs of the programmer/analyst variety working with Unix-based CAD/CAM tools, dBase, Fortran, and very early versions of Oracle. While my skill in these technologies was growing by leaps and bounds, this particular event isn't about technology. You see, my first three professional jobs (outside of my own little business) all held in common the fact that I worked for terrible bosses. (I wonder if it's any coincidence that these bosses, all male, were from the John Wayne school of management?) I then had the opportunity to move from those smaller businesses to a fairly large company called Nichols Research Corporation, now a part of Computer Sciences Corporation. I gleefully clapped my hands because my title was "Research Scientist" and, get this, I was actually working on NASA and US Army missile projects. I was literally a rocket scientist! However, the thing that truly amazed me about this new work environment was that my bosses were women. Great women. Women (like Liz Kennedy, Pat Burns, and Bev Meeler) who were collaborative, consensus-driven, and encouraging. They made me wonder why my male bosses never figured out that cussing an employee for 15 minutes at a time might not be the best way to motivate staff. These excellent business leaders taught me my first real world lessons in the difference between the autocratic style of management versus the coaching style of management. It was a lesson that I carried with me the rest of my life and try to instill in others whenever I get the chance. (Blatant Plug - Attend my top-rated professional development sessions at the next PASS Summit and read my professional development column in the PASS Community Connector e-newsletter!)

Event #1

She was my sugar-mama, and I was her lovin' cabana boy. She put me through college...

The number one event that changed the course of my life came up quite accidentally. I'd set my sights on earning a Master's degree and, as the truly lazy know, you can complete a Master's degree two semesters early by writing a thesis rather than sticking strictly with classes. Laziness (or perhaps it's creativity?) raised it's head once again with this thought "Why not write my thesis as a dual-purpose document? One that will earn the advanced degree and be published as a book?" That's when I saw a rather small advertisement in the back of one of my favorite computer magazines of the day, a now defunct mainframe-oriented publication called Datamation, calling for authors for a new IT series they were starting. I pitched my master's thesis and was shocked that I was accepted. I find it funny that I finished the book, Oracle's Cooperative Development Environment, but never finished the Master's degree. That book helped me land a new job in Nashville, TN at a prestigious Big 3 accounting firm, which helped me get another book deal with O'Reilly & Associates, which earned me a seat as a founding board member of the Professional Association for SQL Server, which helped me land my current, wonderful job at Quest Software. And which will eventually earn me a place in history for being the first database expert to dance on the bar at Coyote Ugly.

What Others Are Saying

Let me be honest with you. I really enjoyed this meme. And it's one of the things that I've really enjoyed seeing happen with the SQL Server community in the last year or so - people opening up and sharing. This is what community is all about. One hundred years ago, I would've been thrilled to live in a town with as many supportive and encouraging friends who were just down the street from me. But thanks to the technology we work with and the willingness of all of these people, it's almost like a small, friendly (Southern!) town all over again. I intend to read more in the meme thread, but here are just a few others that I've already read and enjoyed:

Brent Ozar (blog | twitter): I loved BBS'es too, amigo!
Kim Tripp (blog | twitter): She taught the first SQL Server class I ever attended!
Jorge Segarra (blog | twitter): He's Mr Popular, being tagged 4 times. But who doesn't love chicken, I ask?
Scott Gleason (blog | twitter): Does Mr. Gleason watch Glee?
Donabel Santos (blog | twitter): She's a ninja, but a very nice one who's not likely to cut your arms off.
Andy Leonard (blog | twitter): We've got to Mrs Leonard and Mrs Segarra to cook a big ol' dinner for us. Then we can all die happy.
Jeremiah Peschka (blog | twitter): You'd think it was a movie based on real events, with a little extra drama added in, but it was ALL real.

There are so very many other good ones that I could go on for several more paragraphs. The reason I mention them, though, is that I somehow feel closer to all of these people. And at the end of the day, our lives are really and truly about the people we have touched and the friendships we have made. Everything else stands for naught.

So on the off chance that others have not yet been tagged, I'd like to loop in these folks from far-afield: Simon Sabin (UK), Henk Van Der Valk (Netherlands), Edwin Sarmiento (Philippines), and Charlie Hanania (Switzerland).