Actions Talk Louder than a Thousand Words

Set your objectives, goals, targets or simply the thing you want to do and go for it.  I know it sounds simple and it really is.  Without momentum we go nowhere, no matter how much we want or wish of it.   You have to do something to things happen.  That does not mean the journey is simple or what has to be done is simple, it simply means you have to take action and the very first action that needs to be taken is always easier than you think.

Over the years I have managed, coached and inspired many people as well has driven myself and the simple truth of taking action is a constant.  Many times it is just a matter of figuring out the very next thing that you need to do and not getting bogged down in the enormity of getting to the end result.  For example if you have decided to change jobs the very next action might be to update or write your resume and then from there determine the type of job/career you want to do and from there contact an employment agency and from there, well you get the idea.  A simple step wise approach compartmentalizing your next action so that you are not overwhelmed by the whole.

Now I would love to be credited with this pearl of wisdom but like most of what I plan on sharing with you, you probably already know it, have heard of it or someone else has written about it.  My goals it to share what I have learnt having lived it and learnt it through personal successes, but mostly from the mistakes I have made alone the way.

You would be amazed at how many ideas and dreams fall by the wayside as a result of inaction.  Think back on your own experiences, of the times you may have spent thinking about something or talking to friends or family about an idea only to have nothing happen.   When it comes down to it, it was simply an idea and whilst the mind is great and forming them it cannot manifest an idea without action.

Inaction in the work place.   A meeting is held to discuss a project or direction.  The participants in the meeting talk with passion, share ideas, set direction share experience and then they leave the meeting only to get together again a short time later to have the same or similar discussion.  Unless someone takes actions based on the meeting topic nothing will happen and the meeting cycle will continue and it does.  Regardless of the number of meetings I have been in and I have been in a lot, I always find the dynamic of who is going to take the actions and get stuff done vs those that come to talk an interesting one.   The talkers only add value if someone takes the actions.  Now we are wandering into the realm of meeting dynamics and I will save that for a separate topic.

In my personal and work life the only times I have been successful have been when I have taken action, oh and don't be afraid of taking the wrong action unless there is real danger attached to it.  The wrong actions have always helped inform me of the right action, if we don't make mistakes we are not trying.  I like the saying "someone who never made a mistake never did anything".   Ironically our mistakes lead us to our successes either now or in the future, so embrace them.

Here is an exercise to help you explore how strong your action muscle is.  Reflect on the ideas you have had or the things you want to do, you know the ones.  The good ones that you have always thought would change your life.  Then as you go through them ask yourself what actions have you taken and if you have taken actions what has stopped you taking the very next action to move it forward.  Now my challenge pick just one of them and take the next action and the one after that … who knows where it will take you.

In my next post I will explore why we don't take actions …..

 

 

Introduction - "You Will Never Make it in Computing"

"You will never make it in computing" is a statement I heard twice in the early part of my career.  Once from my computer studies teacher and again in my first computer related job working for a company called Computacenter.  The second time the unsolicited feedback was received from  a technical support engineer and someone I looked up to, in a role I aspired to achieve.  To add insult to injury he then went on to tell me I would be suited to a retail sales position.  I sometimes wonder about the direction life would have taken me and if it would have been easier if I had taken that advice.  Well as you can guess I did not take the advice and I have built a career in Information Technology that spans the last 25 years.  It has not been all plain sailing but then nothing really is unless you are one of the lucky ones.  For the rest of us success comes via the university of life and hard knocks and can often be bitter sweet.   But as I have learnt very recently life is truly a gift and one we must embrace every day.

One thing I have learnt over the years is that I have a gift for inspiring people.  Ironically it was whilst inspiring a friend that he in turn inspired me to share my experiences and pass on the lessons I have learnt.  One of those lessons is "no matter what, don't listen to people who say you are not good enough or that you won't make it."  If you listen to them they will be right.  In the Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy by Douglas Adams he describes learning to fly.  The art is to throw yourself at the ground and miss.  If you succeed in missing you will find yourself floating just off the ground, at this critical point you must not listen to anyone who tells you it is impossible, for the moment you listen you will no longer be flying.  I think of learning to fly whenever someone tells me I can't do something. 

(An inspiring moment for me - Picture I took of Stonehenge at Sunset)

Ok, so why should you listen to me? Now that is a great question and one that has blocked me from writing before.  I mean why would my experience be interesting.  It was not until my friend pointed out the substance of my experience and expressed his belief I had something meaningful to share that convinced me.   It is always easier to give advice than act on it yourself.  We all need a support system and those around us to motivate and encourage us to be better than we can be or to just enable us to get out of our own way and take a chance.

So let's start out with a little bit about me.  I grew up in south London living in a council house (government housing) with my parents.  I attended a secondary modern high school.  because my 11+ grades were not high enough for  grammar school.  In England the secondary modern high school was the option available to those who were not smart enough at 11 years old to attend a grammar school.  I am almost fully deaf in one ear and partially deaf in the other.  As a child I suffered from extreme hyperactivity a condition that has stayed with me all my life although thankfully not as extreme and in recent years significantly improved through a change in diet.  I am dyslexic a condition that runs in my family.  Oh and during my formative years I had protruding front teeth with a severe overbite which made my school life a breeze.  Getting them fixed in recent years was not exactly a picnic either.  I left school at 15 with little in the way of qualifications with no idea of what I wanted to do or be.  I just knew I did not want to go back to school.  One day I told my mother "I want to work at a desk and wear a bowler hat in London".   I scored two out of the three, I never did get to wear a bowler hat to work.  With no real idea of what I wanted to do I joined a program in England called the youth training scheme (YTS) and was accepted as a trainee draftsman for Texaco Oil earning £25 a month.  Some complained it was slave labor but I for one was grateful for the opportunity it gave me.  An opportunity that would have been hard to come by without the program.

 

In an interesting twist of fate I turned down a trainee position with IBM.  I chose Texaco over IBM because I allowed myself to be influenced by my older brother who was my idol.  I can remember quite distinctly him telling me the money and opportunity was in oil.  My brother was a successful graphic designer and I thought there was no cooler job than that.  I can't blame him too much as I was easily influenced especially as I had no clear idea of what I wanted to do.  When I look back the lesson is sometimes your own council is the best council and following your instincts is the right thing to do.  In this case I did not.  I was so excited to have been accepted by IBM but allowed myself to be influenced otherwise.  This is another branch in my life I wonder about sometimes in those moments of reflection.

Whilst working at Texaco it hit me that I needed to do something about my education if I was going to make a living.  There is nothing like earning £25 a month to make things real.  Thankfully as part of the YTS program I had the option to attend a part-time college course in business and finance.  After my experience at school no one was more surprised than me to find out that I enjoyed it.  I was even more surprised when on completion of the course I won the British Gas SE student award for the year.  To this day I don't know if I would have made such sensible choices without the opportunity to join the workforce and understand what was needed to become independent.

It turned out that whilst I enjoyed drafting I spent a good amount of time playing with the office IBM PC something that did not go unnoticed.  At the end of the program my manager suggested I find a job in computing.  Reflecting on YTS what might the journey have been if I have taken the IBM role.  Maybe I would be a graphic designer today, who knows.  Regardless of what could of been this was the first of many career changes I have made over the years.  It was the point at which I abandoned the idea of being a draftsman or a graphic designer and set my sights on the Information Technology market. 

 

Inspired and hungry for career progression I took a job at a stock brokerage firm as an office admin on the dealing floor.  I can tell you I turned stuffing letters into an art form in an attempt to do them as quickly and efficiently as possible.  In my spare time I was again drawn to the office computers and ended up working on the office Apple IIe even writing my first application that I am sure was never used. When they needed someone with computing skills to help shutdown a satellite office I was surprised when they asked me.  It was a crash course in technology that I went on to leverage to get my first job with a computing company as an office junior.  Whilst working with them I would like to say I was a sponge and went from strength to strength.  The truth is however far less inspiring, whilst I learnt desktop applications such as word perfect and multimate and provided office support I also spent a good deal of time playing PC games, trying to hack passwords and generally goofing off in the office.  Needless to say my career did not take off as much as it started a slow burn.  I learnt much less than I could have but one thing I did learn was that I wanted to be a customer support consultant.  The job came with a company car and the consultants got to travel regularly coming back to the office with interesting stories about stupid users and their ability to heroically solve problems.  The glamour and the heroics appealed to me and looking back was the first indication that I wanted to be a go to guy in a glamorous job and get recognized - oh yes and did I mention my developing Ego.

 

I was also not the most patient of people, a skill that I have been forced to develop over the years.  I just could not wait for them to promote me so I took matters into my own hands and found a position as a technical support  consultant for a software company.  If ever there was a time to use the analogy "out of the frying pan and into the fire" this was it.  As moves go this was not my finest.  The position was miles away from home with a horrendous daily commute on the British Underground.  Had I asked the right questions at the interview, been a little more discerning or just thought about it a little more maybe I would have made a better decision but I didn't.   The first day set the tone.  They used Apricot computers in the office and for those of you who can remember the specifics of an Apricot computer there was one very significant different from the IBM computers.  In there wisdom Apricot decided that the hard drive would be designated as A:  whist on and IBM PC A: was the designation for the floppy disk drive.  You got it on my very first day I was asked to format a floppy disk and in my hurry to impress I did what came naturally to me "Format A:"  yup I formatted one of the company servers.  To say I got noticed is an understatement. 

The job was not the glamorous role I had seen in my previous company.  It did not come with a  company car and the application was so interesting it could put an insomniac to sleep.  I was a call center consultant that dealt with unhappy customer problems daily.  I was one of many and struggled to stay interested and motivated.  As a result my performance fluctuated and my relationship with my manager deteriorated.  This was a dark period in my early career and I did not know what to do.  Throughout my life one strategy has never failed me and that strategy is learn.  Learning more about what I am currently doing or learning something new has been my method of breaking out of a funk and opening up opportunities.  I wish I could say I am wise and informed enough embrace the dark and move on through learning.  But no for some reason I have had to dwell in the valley of despair for a while before clawing my way out.  I decided that a career in customer support was no longer working for me and applied my attention to learning to program.  I had never done well with machine code but a new database programming language gave me the opportunity I was looking for and I spent my spare time learning and coding.

I learnt enough to talk my way into a small IT firm as an application developer and this time in the interview I made a point of asking about a company car.  I was told that after my three month trial it would be reviewed.  As every optimistic person does, did I mention I am an optimist, well I am and I took that as a confirmed company car.  The position was everything I hoped it would be. I travelled to client sites to gather requirements, I wrote the specifications, I developed the applications, then I built and delivered the training and provided ongoing support as a team of one, me.  It was a great time and I learnt a great deal about customer service, programming, support, training, budgeting and end to end delivery.  The downside was that it was lonely and whilst I enjoyed the customer interaction and the programming and problem solving I was not so excited about the specification writing and change control.  Also it seemed everyone but me had a company car, even when I went to clients I had to borrow a car.  You might be getting the idea that a company car was important to me at that time.  It was, it was a status symbol for success and a goal I was determined to achieve regardless of how unobtainable it seemed.  I would like to say I moved on because I realized I needed to develop or for other equally mature reasons.  The truth however was I wanted more recognition and a car.  Back then I was not particularly diplomatic and tended to wear my emotions on my sleeve. As a result what started as a great relationship soured as my discontentment grew and my maturity did not allow me to get out of my own way.  Eventually we parted company and it is debatable if I left or they asked me to leave, the result was the same.

I was confident and sure of myself having honed my application development and business skills allowing me to get a job with a large pharmaceutical company as an in house application developer. no car. For the first year or so everything went great.  I built applications, delivered training and built my skill as both a consultant and a programmer. 

That was until the PC team was disbanded and I was integrated into the mainframe team.  This marked my third and unintended career change.  What I should have done was get out, but I didn't.  Instead I allowed life to dictate what was going to happen instead of taking control.  

In my experience when you let life dictate things generally things don't do so well and this was no exception.  I allowed myself to be systematically stripped of my development skills as I struggled to change from the fast paced PC world to the steady state of the mainframe world.  It was not long before I realized that I was not cut out to be a Cobol programmer.  Everything just took forever, from the feasibility, business case, computer system design, program specification, test plan and delivery, oh and it was certainly not sexy or glamorous.  Something however kept me plugging away and despite myself I learnt.  It would be years later that I would be able to reflect back and leverage the hard won skills and experience, and leverage them I did, many, many times.  Thankfully a few years later as the PC revolution started to take hold in the company I was able to repurpose old development skills and reshape myself as an Access Database developer.  To help me through the struggle at work I turned my attention again to study.  I signed up for evening classes and completed studies in Information Technology as well as Business and Finance. I also did something uncharacteristic for me back then.  I made an appointment with a manager I respected and asked his advice.  He gave me one of the most important pieces of advice anyone has given me.  He said "Matthew, you need to learn how to make friends", it would have been easy for me to have taken offence or just let the comment slide.  I didn't and I asked him what he meant.  Instead of telling me he gave me the book "How to win friends and influence people" by Dale Carnegie.  I read the book cover to cover and that simple meeting started a life long interest in self development.  I read book after book and re doubled my studies.  I graduated from my class with honors and immediately started to look for a new direction. 

It was about this time that I came across a job opportunity to sell Dale Carnegie training.  Interestingly the interview process required candidates to attend training over 4 weekends.  I was excited about the opportunity and the training at the same time.  The training was everything I hoped it would be and I embraced it with enthusiasm and passion.  It turned out they thought I was exactly the material they wanted and by the end I was offered a sales position.  I could not have been more excited, but before handing in my notice I decided to take time off work to attend the mandatory sales training before accepting the formal offer.  I made only two of the classes.  The training could not have been more different. It was pressure selling and pounding streets neither of which appealed to me.

Disappointed I went back to the drawing board, I continued to search for that elusive next opportunity.  It is worth mentioning at this point another strategy I have found to be successful.  That strategy is "Don't give up", keep trying and adjusting as every failure is one more step towards success.

Shortly afterwards a friend asked if I could carryout an analysis of software his company had purchased.  I jumped on the opportunity thinking this was it, a career in consulting, what could be more aligned to my skills.  Well it was a great one off exercise that developed into exactly nothing.  Another dead end. 

Then I got a call from a recruitment firm regarding a job with Walt Disney.  I could not believe it, it seemed perfect and 5 interviews later everything was lining up with a verbal job offer.  I was just waiting for the formal offer letter to hand in my notice and move on.  I waited and waited and waited only to find out weeks later that they had frozen the headcount and the position was eliminated.  Talk about disappointed, well I am sure you can imagine.

After that I had interview after interview after interview.  I was even subjected to a group pub interview.  The least said about that fiasco the better.  On the up side my interview skills were being honed to perfection when an opportunity with a company called Blue Circle Industries presented itself.  I went in with low expectations and left so excited I could hardly contain myself.  The only problem was that they wanted someone with Microsoft back office skills.  Skills I wanted to learn but did not have.  It turned out that the hiring manager was not looking for someone with the skills as there were very few people with them, rather he wanted someone who could learn them and it turned out I had positioned myself perfectly for the role.  I got the call just after I got home from the 3rd interview, the job was mine.  It paid more than I had hoped and it came with a company car.  To say I was excited that night is an understatement and a half.  I had finally reached my goal of a company car and to top it off I was going to earn my age a very respectable salary. I was on top of the world.

It is funny how things turn out.  The position could not have been more perfect and if the Disney Job had transpired or any of the other jobs I would have missed out on one of the highlights of my career and a period I look back on today with fond memories.  My manager over the years turned into my friend and I am grateful to this day for him taking a chance on a career hungry young man. 

 

At Blue Circle I reinvented myself for the forth time as a back office hardware engineer.  I set aside my programming and development career and studied hardware night and day becoming the companies first Microsoft Certified Engineer.  And so started a golden period in my career.  I was recognized as a technical expert and my manager gave me the right mount of space and encouragement to allow me to go from strength to strength.  My days consisted of learning and implementing new technology. I was the go to desktop engineer providing support and rolling out new applications and services.  Everyday was an adventure in either building something or helping someone out.  I woke up excited to go to work.

Life was good, but I made a mistake, I allowed myself to be carried by the wave of life and eventually all waves flatten out.  That happened at a time when most would have thought I made it.  My manager moved on and I was promoted to the Head Office IT Manager.  The title and pay was great but the job, not so much.  I had a new manager and for the first time in a long time I started to see a wall approaching.  Fortunately I did not hit the wall as a newly formed business call eCement.com needed an IT Manager and after helping out I was offered the position.  I got the opportunity to build off the ground a new dot com businesses infrastructure.  It was a very exciting time but sadly all good times come to an end.  In the 100th year of business for Blue Circle Cement the company lost to an aggressive take over.  The business we were running came under scrutiny and energy was running high.  Something had to give and after a particularly difficult night it did.  It is funny how silly things seem so important at the time.  At the end of a weekends effort I had taken my employee out for dinner to say thank you.  Yes it was an expensive restaurant and no I had not asked permission.  When I submitted the expenses I was given a harsh talking to.  I could not believe it.  We had pulled off a small miracle but all that my manager could see was the expense for dinner.  Looking  back we could and should have resolved it but we were both stubborn and something that should have been not more than a blip escalated to the point I decided I had, had enough, I felt I had been slighted.  Looking back I regret my rash behavior and wish I could say I learnt from it but alas it would not be the last time I let my ego get in my way.  The timing as it happened was perfect, because of the takeover I was able to volunteer for redundancy and leave with a years severance pay.  I was a hot commodity with both skills and experience under my belt.  Having just returned from a visit to New Zealand I knew my skills were in demand so we decided we should move there and I should find contract work.  That never happened, before the tickets were booked I went to a blind interview, it was blind because I did not even pay attention to the company.  I just decided to go for the interview experience, that is how confident I was.  As it turned out the company was Microsoft and it goes without saying we never moved to New Zealand.  

I accepted the position as UK Hosting Manager for Microsoft UK.  I have since been with Microsoft for 14 years and during the ups and downs of my career at Microsoft I have helped manage and expand the UK data center, relocated to the U.S, built and managed 15 collocation data center spaces around the world, lead the anti-malware operations team, managed the deployment of high density infrastructure, helped evolve a program management office, participated in the shipping of 13 products, built a hack team that won the first company hackathon and transitioned to a business program management role driving web site and application accessibility across the Sales and Marketing division.   I have been an individual contributor, formal line manager and v-team lead.  I have learnt a few things alone the way and continue to learn every day.  I would like to say that the last 14 years have been sunshine and light but that would be a lie.  I have had great times, sad times, frustrating times and down right dark times but those are stories for another time.

I have been inspired to share my experience and learnings with you and I hope in some way my failures and successes can help you in whatever you choose to do.  In the end we are brothers and sisters under the same sky and I look forward to someday meeting you and sharing stories.