Month: October 2009

On Disaster

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In my 11 years in IT, I had the dubious honor of going through a few systems disasters. (One actually earned me the nickname, “Waterfall Girl,” when I presented on it at a conference.). Here are the lessons I’ve learned:

  1. People want someone to blame. “Whose fault is this?” Was an oft-repeated refrain during the disasters. Unfortunately, in IT, “No one’s,” is usually the answer.
  2. “I told you so” is incredibly dissatisfying to say after numerous all-nighters.
  3. There’s a big difference between disaster recovery and business continuity. The first is relatively easy; the second will bite you if it’s not properly scaled.
  4. Geeks surprise you. They will do anything and everything to get things back up and running. If you see your geeks in a disaster, prepare to have your preconceptions challenged.

In a true disaster, my first go-to person would be my brother-in-law, the firefighter. However, in any systems disaster–involving waterfalls or not–my first choice would be to find a good geek!

On Freedom

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I’ve decided to keep this blog focused on leadership (and perhaps grammar), and I’ve started a different blog on inbound marketing. Why? Because I’m finally free to post my actual thoughts.

I couldn’t always post my ongoing leadership thoughts because I had to be very careful that none of my geeks or anyone else in my firm thought that my posts were real. Somehow, if there was even the slightest hint that one of my geek constructs was based in real life, paranoia ensued. Perfectly understandable, but very limiting to my blog!

Oh, my posts still won’t be based on actual geeks I know or who have reported to me, but I expect that no one will be suspicious now. As such, I can let my thoughts on leadership and leading geeks “flow” more readily.

I’m excited to see what will come.

On Changing Careers

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Eleven years ago today, I started my first job in IT (although it was still called MIS back then). It was a career change away from the medical profession (I was a really bored medical secretary who had applied to med school), and it led me a very long way. I moved from there to my first law firm, and then became IT Director of two different Boston law firms.

By the time this post publishes today, I’ll be several hours into my first day as an Inbound Marketing Consultant at HubSpot. Eleven years after entering IT, I am making another career change.

Some of you knew this change was coming, some didn’t. I figured I’d take advantage of this “announcement” post to answer some questions that I’ve been asked recently:

Why the change?
Well, you know the saying that some folks climb all the way to the top of the ladder only to find that it’s leaning against the wrong building? Yeah, that’s me. I wasn’t happy doing what I was doing and cared more about a lot of the peripheral job functions (okay, well, leading geeks and budgeting weren’t truly peripheral…) than I cared about the plumbing aspects of the job.

But weren’t you really active in the legal IT community?
Yup. And leaving ILTA was incredibly difficult. However, in many ways, ILTA and my role as Social Networking Coordinator for the ILTA ’09 Conference precipitated this change. I realized that I adored what I was doing in marketing and social networking, and I decided to follow my heart.

What’s going to happen to this blog?
Leadership is still incredibly important to me, and I expect that I will still blog on the topic. I also expect that I will become a “geek in transition” and will blog about what I’m learning at my new job. I’m going to blog on what interests me, and we’ll all just see where it goes. I definitely appreciate those of you who have been reading since I started blogging in early ’08, but I understand that you’ll stop if I bore you. I hope to not be boring, but such is life, eh?

This should be an interesting ride.