Accidentally in Code

Tag: ghc

  • GHC: Leadership Workshop with Patty Azzarello

    GHC: Leadership Workshop with Patty Azzarello

    Bouldering
    Credit: Wikipedia

    I was interested in this workshop, because I had read Azzarello’s book, Rise: How to Be Really Successful and Like Your Life.

    “Your job description is not a life sentence.”

    “You have more control than you think.”

    These quotes set the stage for a really helpful presentation about how we see our jobs, and how we advance using a framework of Do Better, Look Better, Connect Better.

    As a kid, Azzarello was into arts, and her mother said to her: “You will go to college. You will get an education. You will support yourself. Don’t expect anyone else to support you.” As a result of this, Azzarello decided to do Electrical Engineering instead of art, where she was one of three women, also achieving a minor in CS. Electrical Engineering wasn’t natural to her, but coding was ideal.

    Azzarello’s first job was at Bell Labs, which should have been a dream job, but wasn’t. She wasn’t using enough of her strengths, and was interested in products and business. So she took a job as a Sales Engineer at a Silicon Valley company. She’s held every level of position at a company, didn’t drop into being a CEO – had entry level jobs. And Engineering and tech education was a big part of her success, it taught her about problem solving, and that there is always somewhere to start.

    Did Product Marketing at a couple of Silicon Valley startup companies. Azzarello was technically in Marketing, but spent half her time with Engineers. At HP, she had the choice between Marketing Manager and Software Development Manager. She picked Software Development Manager, because she knew she wanted to be a General Manager some day.

    The product was a mess. Quality and morale were both low, they were on a two year cycle and running late. After a year, all the problems were fixed, in part because they had moved to a 6-month development cycle. But after all that, Azzarello did not get a raise. When asking why, given that, the answer was “I tried, but nobody knows you”.

    This was a huge slap in the face about how the world works. Work is not enough. To have more impact, it’s not just about recognition and raises, you need to be known, respected, and recognised. As a result, you get more opportunities, more money, and more interesting projects. The results have to be seen.

    Worst job, was Sales and Marketing for HPs desktop systems, but it gave her more experience to help become a GM. You can’t get a job without experience, but you can get experience without the job. Moved to HP Openview Software business, ran a global org with 5k people. Then became CEO of a startup. Then Chief Marketing Officer at Siebal, but after that was bought by Oracle she was paid off and has been running the Azzarello group for 6 years.

    Do Better

    Work, or the environment, beats the “I can change the world” out of you”. The key is to focus on your natural strengths, which we often take for granted. When working in our areas of greatest strength, it feels ideal, and we don’t think that it can be impressive. When others are amazed, and it doesn’t feel like a big deal to you… that’s a strength.

    We are impressed when others do the things that we think are hard.

    Invert that – focus on the strengths. The ROI on strengths is higher than the ROI on stuff we’re not good at. So spending time on things we are naturally good at, has big returns! Hated every minute of working on weaknesses, and never got any better at any of it. Once she stopped worrying about weaknesses, and invested in strengths, business improved and her career soared.

    No one person can be good at everything, but a team can.

    Tune your job over time to suit your strengths. Know what works for you – you can change your job, without changing your job.

    EXERCISE: Think about a time when you were at your best.
    What was special (extra good!) because you did it?

    The energy in the room is tremendous when talking about strengths – I know I feel a boost focusing on a positive experience.

    Celebrate natural strengths – figure out what you’re naturally good at. Don’t try to earn your primary living doing something you’re not good at. It’s painful.

    Developing a strategy to use strengths and values at work.

    Too Busy

    To think, to reorganize… “to busy to scale”.

    No-one other than you has any motivation to make you less busy. Most successful people didn’t happen to be less busy on the way – they figured out how to get things done in spite of being busy.

    If you are overwhelmed by your job, you aren’t ready for promotion. People wish for work that is more important and has more meaning, no-one wants more meaningless crap.

    Are you a workhorse? If you are, the reward is – more work. It feels like you’re doing the right thing, but you have to catch and wiggle out of this way of working. It doesn’t get you ahead, it just gets you more work.

    There was an inventory crisis at HP. A guy spent time on crisis, but he wasn’t a workhorse, he was strategic and so delivered better results without burning up all of his time personally.

    Give yourself time to think – get known for rising above work, solving problems in a more strategic way. You need a system or process for dealing with it in a different way. Move yourself out of workhorse mode. No-one will do it for you.

    When you have time tot hunk, consider what the business really values. Think about how to do your job better.

    Ruthless Priorities

    Too many things on todo list, all of them seem important. Decide, what are the things that you will not put at risk? Ask how bad is it if this fails?

    It’s not about saying no, it’s about allowing yourself to finish your ruthless priorities first. Get famous for finishing important things, not for being busy. Talk about what you are doing, not about what you are not doing.

    Being a leader is about getting the most important things done when it is hard.

    Defend Your Time

    Your job is not to do everything and die trying. Not all requests are created equal. Advise your boss, and negotiate. Your boss delegates thinking and judgement, not just the work.

    Look Better

    This is about credibility. Being invisible doesn’t work – you can’t opt out of communicating. If it’s not a natural strength, develop it as a skill.

    If you are not communicating, you are communicating. But, it’s OK to be just OK at it. Azzarello trained herself to be a more convivial listener.

    Be visible, but not annoying. You can’t be credible if you are invisible. You are never annoying if you are genuinely adding value, or if you are communicating about important outcomes achieved.

    Be more relevant, you need to translate:

    • Business first.
    • Don’t educate
    • No jargon.
    • Talk their language.
    • Create “the hook”.

    If you have to educate someone about what/why – you are not relevant. What’s relevant is what they wake up in the morning worrying about.

    Magic Communication Tool

    Business initiative / realities (“hooks”). The only way to know their hooks is to ask. Really understand who your stakeholders are.

    Personal Brand

    Your brand is how you are perceived by others. Example: Disney has the brand as the happiest place on earth. They have turned waiting in line into an art form, and you never see a security force (but they are there).

    Your brand is not what you say, but what everyone else says. Your brand is what people see from you most consistently.

    PERFORMING OR PRESENTING

    Performing means owning the outcome.

    • Not just content.
    • You are being assessed.
    • Not about having a “big personality”.
    • Humility is OK… invisible is not.
    • Don’t be afraid of being judged – seek it out.

    Patty told us an embarrassing story of going to a client and having someone say: “why did you bring her? She doesn’t know anything.” She didn’t die. “Fearless” people are afraid, but do it anyway. Just because you are scared, doesn’t mean you are not qualified. Be scared, and do it anyway.

    “Men will say anything”, men with no experience will be saying “Sign me up! I’m your man.” Recommends Amy Cuddy’s TED talk on Body Language.

    Body language is not just what you show to others, it changes you. Influences your brain chemistry. When you smile, sends stimulus to your brain. It makes you feel more powerful and less afraid. A pen between your teeth achieves the same thing.

    Power poses. Wonder women – don’t hunch in on yourself! Wear a sweater (theory is that women sit like this because we are cold).

    Be very focused on outcomes and excellence, and just stand your ground. You are stronger when you are yourself – don’t try and turn into someone else.

    “The last thing you need is another one of you.”

    Connect Better

    Get help! Never struggle along. Get mentors, and build your extra team.

    The most successful people are those who get the most help.

    Types of Mentors

    Smart people.

    • Can’t have too many.
    • Engage several per year informally.

    Personal Career Advocates.

    • Add one every 1-3 years (informal and formal).

    Business Advisors.

    • Be on the lookout for help at getting better at your business.
    • Create your personal advisory board.

     

    You can attempt your career by yourself, without mentors, but why would you?

    If you have mentors, good for you, get another. If not, get one.

    “Mystery mentors”: they are your mentor, but they never know it.

    Figure out what job you want, then figure out how to get that experience.

    You current job will never give you all the experience you need to get the next one.

    Networking Paradox.

    • Need a network that can help you.
    • Networking is about giving, not taking.
    • Give before you need anything.
    • On balance, always take less than you are giving.

    Authentic Networking

    • Keeping in touch with people you already know.
    • Meeting new people.

    Meet new people based on things that actually interest/inspire you.

    • Give positive feedback.
    • Reach out based on something specific.
    • Offer to be of service.

    Recommendations:

    • 30 minutes networking a month.
    • Send 10 emails a month.
    • Connect properly with 2 special people.

     

    Summary

    Do your job and change your job.

    Do Better – impact.

    • Refuse to burn time on low value work.
    • THRIVE: redefine your job to add more value; raise the bar.

     

    Look Better – Credibility

    • Be visible, but not annoying.
    • Be a translator: be relevant, show your value.

     

    Connect Better – Support

    • Build a broad network.

    All in all, I enjoyed it, and I got things out of it – more so than when I read the book, I think. I was a bit wary at first, because I hate the advice of women with other interest, take less technical roles, but I don’t think it went that way at all, and this advice is relevant whether you’re in a technical role or more of a management one.

  • GHC13 – What Are You Going to Do Differently?

    GHC13 – What Are You Going to Do Differently?

    Credit: flickr / j.k.doyle
    Credit: flickr / j.k.doyle

    I have a bunch of posts to write up from GHC last week, which was as usual, awesome. But the question I was interested in people I went with answering was – what are you going to do differently when you get back?

    For me, it was a reminder about the takeaway I got from Whistling Vivaldi – that whilst women have it bad, they are not the only minority (or the smallest!), and our efforts in that direction would benefit from being more inclusive of other minorities.

    So my change – make my own diversity efforts more inclusive.

    How about you?

  • GHC: Sheryl Sandberg, Maria Klawe and Telle Whitney in Conversation

    GHC: Sheryl Sandberg, Maria Klawe and Telle Whitney in Conversation

    leaninFirst real event of the conference, and sadly we were running a few minutes late, but I got to see most of this amazing conversation.

    Came into the middle of a conversation about women being described as “aggressive” – part of the bitch/pushover dichotomy. If you’re a pushover, you don’t get things because you “didn’t ask”, and situations aren’t fixed because you “didn’t complain” but if you ask, and complain… it’s easy to get branded as “aggressive”. An alarming number of women in the room put their hands up when Sheryl Sandberg asked who had been described as aggressive.

    Great comment from Maria Klawe (President of Harvey Mudd), that the response to Sandberg’s book shows why she wrote it! I’ve definitely found a lot of the criticism to Lean In (Amazon) overstated – I thought that Sandberg did clearly recognise the level of privilege she herself had experienced, and despite the title, the book is heavily about the ways in which the world could better accommodate women.

    Maria Klawe asked, if they had a magic wand, what would they change.

    Sandberg talked about her daughter asking why all the presidents of the US were “boys”, and a friend’s son in Germany saying he couldn’t be Chancellor because he wasn’t a girl. This gendering of careers is bad for everyone. She quoted Jocelyn, Facebook’s director of Engineering, who says in Engineering you bootstrap a problem, and then you find a real answer. And her niece, who went to a summer camp to make a video game, but was really disappointed and discouraged to discover that they were only making shooting and driving games – she wanted to make a word game. Luckily for her, the instructor went home and looked it up.

    She says she doesn’t give specific career advice, as people take it too seriously (and she often lacks context), but she did tell an intern not to be a management consultant! I love this.

    Made a great point – we don’t have to stay, but she hopes more do. I like this – I’m very into the availability of CS, engineering, as an option, not coercing people to take it! Although something I often point out to people is that once they go less technical, it’s really hard to go back.

    She feels she herself would would be better at her job with a more technical background, and this is likely true everywhere.

    Telle Whitney‘s (CEO of Anita Borg) magic wand wish, is for everyone at the conference to ask for what they want, and recounts her story of being underpaid. And, 50% of product development being women.

    We want to change the world.

    Why the Lean In Foundation? To help women be as ambitious as they want to be. They have built a community of 300,000 in just 6 months, with expert lectures. Took an existing course, and put it online, making it free and available to everyone.

    Lean In Circles – evidence is that peers make a big difference, and Sandberg talked about how when she was thinking about joining Google and Facebook, her mentors discouraged her, but peers said “yes, do that!” There’s a plan and curriculum for circles, but you don’t have to use it – just meet up!

    Moving on to what they do differently at Harvey Mudd – plummeting numbers since the 80s, but Harvey Mudd is reaching parity. What have they done that others can emulate?

    They found that there were three main reasons why high school girls weren’t interested in Computer Science:

    1. “Boring”
    2. They think they won’t be good at it.
    3. They don’t want to associate with the people who work in CS.

    In order to change things around they:

    • Take all first year girls who want to go to GHC.
    • Made it interesting, with a complete redesign of the first year course.
    • Made it not scary – there’s a split stream, and the stream for students with no CS experience is “gold” (with experience is “black”).

    What they found is not that students took one course and decided to go into CS, but that they took one course and then felt they could take another one. The next one is also fun, and after that, they can get a job (internship, I guess?) at a company like Facebook, or Google.

    Now 48% of their graduating class in Computer Science are female.

    I wrote ages ago about how having terrible programming courses for non-CS majors was a huge missed opportunity, it’s great to see Harvey Mudd really capitalising on that, and recognising that it’s a process of not-dropping out, rather than a one-off decision.

    Now they have 441 students taking their first year CS class, 160 from Mudd, but the rest from other nearby schools. Now they have the problem that there are so many students in their CS classes! Good problem to have!

    Sandberg talked about how the US economy will be short 1.4 million Software Engineers by 2020, and that getting to 40% women would go a long way to closing that gap.

    Whitney talks about the impact of the Grace Hopper conference – there are so many women here, and it’s full of examples of women in this field, which students lack. At 4600 people this year, the conference has tremendous impact. People come here, and it helps change their lives – she talks about one girl who decided to go to grad school. The studies show that this conference has an impact on retention, but it’s once a year, Lean In circles are year-round.

    Other things they are doing at Mudd, is using the ideas from their first year CS class to develop a MOOC (massive open online course) for high school students, which will be available from 2014. They have the idea of allowing students to choose their exercises (which all teach the same thing), which allows them to pick things that match their interests – lots of different kinds of people love CS!

    They have made their first year curriculum widely available, and it’s being used by other universities, and Klawe gives a lot of talks about how to adapt to get more women in. She mentions universities having “not invented here syndrome” and instead trying to start a dialog, which I have seen elsewhere too – I think it’s unfortunate, there’s a lot of data, and the solutions are pretty clear… it’s just hard work. Companies/universities who insist on studying their own data to come to their own assessment of the issues are, in my opinion, just wasting time and energy.

    What can everyone do to encourage women to empower themselves? Women are the best encouragement for other women, and so they are announcing the partnership between ABI and Lean In. Encouraging women to create circles, where they can discuss gender issues and be honest.

    What would you do, if you weren’t afraid?

    Go and do it, when you leave GHC.

    Harvey Mudd can be replicated, and more women will see more women – they will want it too. Technology is a great career for women, with the flexibility.

    “Sometimes, and even today, the experience can be pretty horrible” – one way to address the gap is to bring women back.

    Woman in the audience asks about helping her high school daughter, whose interest in computers is fading because of geeky boys. She wants a Lean In circle for high school girls (I think this is an awesome idea!). Need to help her find a group of people to support and peer mentor, and they arrange to find a group after the session. So cute!

    Another audience question about supply chains and relying on minerals that were sourced using slavery. Really interesting answers on this, laws are changing apparently (Klawe is on the board of Microsoft).

    Most destructive thing that has happened around gender, is that we have stopped mentioning it. Sandberg talks about a conversation her brother had with a potential hire about thinking about having children (and how he would support that) – Sandberg makes the point that it’s not illegal to talk about having children, it’s illegal to discriminate on that basis.

    Sandberg told a story about another conference she was at – where a guy said “most women aren’t as competent as Sheryl” (notice competent – not brilliant?). Another comment from the same event – a guy saying was that his wife was worried about him hiring young women in case he slept with them… and he might. (Guys actually get up on stage and spout this kind of nonsense! It’s insane!)

    Audience question about retention – women dropping off at 7-10 years, and at senior/director level. They get tired of competing. What would level the playing field?

    Sandberg talks about a study that concludes that women don’t want power, because men get paid more, men get more respect, and so – men like it more. She suggest that women might want it, if they were paid fairly and respected.

    Talking about the likability penalty, saying to a little girl that if daddy does well at work people like him more, and if mommy does well at work people like her less, the little girl’s conclusion is – then I would be less good at work.

    Men do less work in the home, and the result it – success comes with a higher tradeoff for women.

    Analogy of a marathon – men are being cheered on, told they are doing great. Women, get asked why they are running, told they shouldn’t be there. Asks how many people have been asked “should you be working?” – worrying amount of hands go up (especially considering many women here are students).

    Klawe talks about the proffesional development offered for women and minorities at IBM, says she would like to see that in all tech companies.

    A student talks about one of her friends dropping out of CS, and asks exactly what Harvey Mudd is doing differently. Includes: python, modular (choices of problems), team-based, help in labs, and fun! (Robots!)

    Audience question: what about people who say women-only events are harmful, make us look bad, like we need them to get ahead – how to respond to them?

    Sandberg says it’s because talking about gender isn’t OK, and we have to acknowledge issues and address them because not addressing it clearly isn’t working – the numbers aren’t changing – women only made up 14% of C-level executives, and that was true 10 years ago, too.

    “I am a feminist” – Sandberg says, but only 25% of women in the US will say that. However 60% will say they believe in the definition of feminism – equality. We need this conference, because it works.

    Klawe: When things are made better for women, everyone benefits.

    Whitney: “There was a time when it was hard to get people to come to the Hopper conference. But then they saw the results.”

    Sandberg: Tech will change the world. To do so in the right way, we need women leading along with men.