agile
Early in my career, I was a leadership development conference (through Lockheed's great Engineering Leadership Development Program), where we played a game called Gold of the Desert Kings -- it was a group game, in a big event space ballroom packed with engineers from all over the country.
lessons-learned
My grandfather, a NASA engineer who worked on telecommunications systems for many of the Apollo missions was always coming up with things I never saw anyone else doing. Some of that came from having engineering education and skills, but much of it came from a willingness to learn new things
lessons-learned
As I've gotten older, I've realized how each person has different tendencies. Some of us are introverted. Some are analytical. In addition to personality axes like introverted vs. extroverted, thinking vs. feeling (see Myers-Briggs); people often have a tendency to either live in one of these
lessons-learned
My dad was full of lots of great advice -- he was raised by polar opposite parents, a reserved NASA engineer and a high-energy, life-of-the-party mother who was always a great hostess. His wisdom comes from a diverse career that includes working at McDonald's, selling microwaves when they
lessons-learned
I was chatting with some friends recently about making time to reflect on your life, and making time to really connect with close friends, digging into each other's lives. It stuck me that the concept of 'You need to work on your business, not just in your
lessons-learned
Growing up, my father had a few mantra that he would repeat over and over again for my sister and me. One of them was: Always return things to the way you found them When I would borrow my Dad's tools to take a part something (hopefully something
leadership
Several years ago, near the beginning of my professional career, I was a junior engineer helping with the design and issuance of new access badges for a campus of employees where I worked. Thousands of employees would be getting new badges, they would wear it around their neck on a
lessons-learned
A few years ago, we did a team building exercise at work which involved the group collaborating on a vague project with no defined roles for any of us. I think exercise was intended to show how different personality types could better collaborate, though I learned a very different lesson.
lessons-learned
This may be obvious to people, and it's probably near useless now that everyone has a GPS in their car or on their smartphone; but if you want to turn around and go the opposite direction on the highway, you should take the second exit. The first exit
lessons-learned
Apparently Robert Havighurt wrote a book in 1952 that popularized the concept of teachable moments. I've never heard of Mr. Havighurt, nor his book, but fortunately my father taught me all about teachable moments. When I was learning to drive, my father insisted on logging many, many hours
lessons-learned
I was at a Subway recently, where I (very) often grab a sandwich during the work week, and a guy in line started a conversation with me, complimenting me on talking to each of the sandwich artists. We talked about how people so rarely take the time or energy to