Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO of Apple yesterday. The evening news, blogs, news sites, and radio were all struggling in some way to make sense of the change happening at Apple. For many, it was a time of reflection on Steve's illustrious, amazing and yet disruptive career. He was one of the key players in launching the PC era at the beginning of his time with Apple. He built one of the world's most successful movie production studios with Pixar. And he returned to Apple culminating with launching the post-PC era before he resigned as CEO. An amazing story by all accounts. Now, it's no secret that I've been a big supporter of Apple for more than a decade. Ask anyone around BuildDirect and they will emphatically agree with that statement. Some people may think I’m even a bit crazy. But that’s how great brands and great companies affect people. They turn customers, business associates, family, friends and anyone else they come into contact with into passionate evangelists. In fact, … [Read more...]
Alignment and Execution
At BuildDirect, there are many things we do that are strategically right. Our culture pervades the atmosphere here in our office not only making it one of the top, most sought after places to work but making it a place you "love" to work. The team is built of "A" players actively helping the company capture market share in one of the worst markets in the past hundred years. Our culture and values, our goals, in fact, the essence of who we are as a company has never been more aligned than now. Alignment is important because execution matters. Some things you choose to execute on will fail. That's a fact of life. Taking bold action and executing with precision is better than not taking action at all. However, taking action with poor execution can lead to the same or worse results as doing nothing. I was reflecting today on an article in the New Yorker written by Jose Antonio Vargas about Facebook. In the article, Chris Cox, Facebook’s vice-president of product, said “Getting … [Read more...]
Buried in Emails? How I Dug Myself Out.
Based on a post by Michael Gray I embarked three weeks ago on an effort to minimize the emails I receive. Like many of you, I was getting on the order of 100+ emails per day. Now I don't know if you are anything like me, but try as I might I kept checking my emails throughout the day. A long time ago I turned off the visible and audible alerts that Outlook used to throw at me every time I got a new email (though I still haven't managed to do that for Tweetdeck updates - I need my tweets). Despite that I'd spend a large part of my commute on the train every morning looking at my emails and deleting the ones I didn't want and spend time checking for new mails throughout the day. I wish I had the focus to ignore the emails that come in throughout the day and only look at them at predetermined times but I'm not that disciplined yet. The fact that they are there, unread and unanswered, bothers me and I need to do something about them. It's something I'm working on... In addition to the … [Read more...]
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