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A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking to a history class at Siena College on the value a history major can bring to the business world. The values are too many to enumerate here, but I’ll share a few. When I was a history major, I believed the only career path was a teaching job somewhere in the in the education sector. However, as John Lennon sang, “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” Fast forward 20+ years and my success in multi-national companies, local non-profits, state government, education administration, and as a business owner are directly attributable to the skills I learned as a history major in college.  

What are these skills? For my presentation to the Siena class I focused on the ones listed in the image above. 

The final point, “living a life of augmented reality that brings inexplicable joy” is the most important to me these days. When I walk down a city street, dine in an old building, visit government and religious institutions, my study of history provides me with glorious context. This awareness tells me stories that others simply don’t hear. The location of a city, shape of a roof, the stone in a wall, the porch on a house, name on a building, the width of a sidewalk, the font on a sign, the clarity of a window, and many other metadata clues not only educate and entertain, but continually instill awe and respect for all that humans have created and their struggles to create it. Beside the skills of great value to businesses, being a history major gave me the gift of perpetual wonder of our never-ending story.  

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Know the IT No’s

When IT says “No,” what are they really saying?

After 20 years as a customer and provider of IT inside organizations, I have learned that there are many reasons IT says “no.” Clients who are not in IT often ask me, the outsider consultant, to force/cajole/convince/sway their own IT department to take on a project desired by the business. I am brought in because, at some point in the past the non-IT person/group asked for something from IT and someone in IT said “no,” and that is where things were left. When presented with this situation I advise clients to “know the IT no’s” and work with IT to get to an answer that starts with “Yes, we could do it, but….” From this point, the non-IT person/group can often work with IT to move to a “yes” or, at least, a satisfactory mutual understanding of the “no.”

To be fair, IT often has very justifiable reasons for saying “no.” In these cases, it is extremely helpful for IT to explain why they must say “no.” Equally, the business unit does have a responsibility to probe IT for why they are saying “no.” At first, the ask and response may feel more like an interrogation than work and all may be uncomfortable. Ultimately, the back and forth becomes agile and builds bridges between business units and IT by implanting a level of trust that all are working together to achieve the best for the organization.

The list below is not a judgement, but rather an objective inventory of the IT “no’s” I’ve experienced over 20 years of giving and receiving IT "no’s." I am sure there are many more and, hopefully, you will add to this roster in the comments.

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YACM - Yet Another Compliance Mandate

The GDPR will mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. For organization leaders, it will mean yet another compliance mandate. For vendors, it will be an opportunity to sell more of everything. For consumers, it should mean that their privacy will be protected at a heretofore unprecedented level. This article provides 5 tips to keep organization leaders from being toppled over by the marketing hype, fear-peddling, crowd noise, and information overload that comes with new compliance mandates.  

 1.       Understand the GDPR. This is an important compliance event. You don’t want to sweep this down the chain of command. You need to be able to speak to it in an intelligible and confident manner that inspires your colleagues, directs your employees, and comforts your customers. You can go online and get caught-up here:

·         Overview of Preparing for the General data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – video of slide presentation with narration - 1.5 hrs

·         General Data Protection Regulation - Wikipedia article

·         Expert tips: Get your business ready for GDPR – blog

There are many other resources. Please feel free to share your favorites or critique my choices here.

2.       Bolster your Information Governance (IG) capability. If you have left the management of data and information to IT, we highly recommend you revisit the situation. Ask probing questions such as:

·         Who is responsible for the data?

·         What are our obligations to keep/delete data?

·         Is our data easily ‘findable’?

·         Do we regularly review and dispose of ROT (Redundant, Outdated, and Trivial) information and data?

·         “Do we have a clear line of sight to legacy data stored off line in hard drives, tapes, and rogue computers and servers?

Just asking questions like these will give you a clear insight on the state of your information governance.  

3.       Keep technology solutions at arm’s length, for now. We are optimistic that there will be useful technology solutions that will help meet the mandates of GDPR, but we are not there. Be careful, we are in the initial period of “solution” marketing designed to scare you into purchasing something big and expensive you don’t really need.

4.       Ask the expert. There is a wide range of experts available to help you, whatever budget you may have. Lawyers, international consulting agencies, IT services groups, professional organizations, governments, non-profits, and technology vendors will all have guidance. However, that guidance may need to be translated into reasonable and defensible actions that meet the needs of your organization, while ensuring compliance. It is important to note that nobody has done this before, so be

5.       Own the solution. Involving the experts will provide a bounty of opportunity to solve the GDPR challenge, however, you will need to own the solution. Be sure that you are working at C-level. The CEO, CIO, General Counsel, COO, and head of HR must all agree on the solution. Train your IT to be responsible data stewards, even if the data lives in the cloud. IT may be excellent pipe builders, but have they ever been asked to care about the quality of the water? Help them see that content in their systems is also their responsibility as IT professionals.  

GDPR is a significant regulation that should be followed with an indisputable commitment from your organization. That said, compliance can be achieved by due diligence and reasonable actions. So breathe deep, after all, this is only another compliance mandate and it will not be the last!  

Visit PIOT at www.piothub.com. 

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Make Meeting Management a Core Skill

Running an efficient and effective meeting is not easy. To help employees master this skill, the organization should have one general method for meeting scheduling and meeting management. Robert's Rules of Order isn't necessary, but everyone should learn these ten "how to's":

1) Decide if a meeting is needed

2) Determine who to invite

3) Build an agenda

4) Assign roles

5) Manage time in the meeting

6) Diplomatically stop runaway conversations

7) Move non-agenda issues to a parking lot

8) De-distract attendees (no email!)

9) Take notes

10) Track actions and decisions

If the organization gets everyone on the same page with running meetings effectively, it will have fewer meetings. People will think before scheduling meetings, "Is this the best way to achieve the goal?" The meetings you do have will be shorter and incredibly more valuable. Whichever method is chosen, it should be introduced at new hire orientation and carried through the organization with the same commitment as ethics, fair-hiring, procurement, and other critical organizational DNA.

While I learned these skills in high school (Model Congress) and college (Model UN), it was clear that few of my colleagues had been exposed to this knowledge when I entered the professional workforce. If your colleagues/leaders haven't seen an organization with an effective meeting culture, it can be difficult to show the value and get them to buy in, and thus, perpetuate the ineffectiveness. In my experience, organizations that have absorbed this skill into their DNA have moved beyond the "meeting madness" to other more important business process challenges.  

Here is the Harvard Business Review article that inspired this post: https://hbr.org/2017/07/stop-the-meeting-madness?utm_campaign=hbr&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social