Tim Osborn’s Blog

CJ is an eleven year-old girl on my daughter’s basketball team. While most of her teammates have played together for 4 or 5 years, it’s CJ’s first year with us. She’s also a bit short and has never played before. Skill- and knowledge-wise, she is clearly starting out behind her friends. Perhaps her opportunity to play competitive basketball had passed her by before her twelfth birthday? (”Sorry kid, but we only invest time in second graders with potential. At age eleven, there’s just not enough years left to get a good return from you. Maybe you can try chess.”) Yet everyday she brings what she can to the team: a great attitude, 100% effort at all times, and a desire to learn.

When it came time for our first game she nervously sat on the bench, draped in her uniform and watching the action with eyes as big as silver dollars. She rapidly fired many questions, yet I could tell for every one she spoke out loud there were five more that she kept to herself. In the second quarter I turned to her and asked, “CJ, are you ready to go in?” Dwarfed by the teammates on either side, she scrunched down as if she wanted to disappear, shook her head side-to-side, and timidly replied, “N-n-no. I-I-I don’t think so.”

One minute later I didn’t give her a choice, but simply said, “CJ, go check in.” (Yes, I had to explain what it meant to “check in.”) Slowly, but without delay, she stood up on her shaking legs and walked to the scorer’s table and waited. The whistle blew, the referee waved her in, and soon she was no longer a spectator, she was a player. And when she came out of the game several minutes later, she jogged to the bench and with complete boldness exclaimed to anyone within earshot, “That…was…soooo…much…fun. I love this!”

I found some good lessons in this. First, it’s normal to have some apprehension when you are attempting something new and outside of your comfort zone. If failure is only ever a remote possibility, I’m not truly stretching myself, and I’m not growing like I could be.

Second, when it’s time to check in, check in. Don’t let the fear stop you. You may think to yourself, “I’m not good at this. I need to stay in my area of strengths.” But strengths have to be developed and that means you will be weaker before you are stronger. Take comfort: what’s green is growing, but what’s ripe is rotting. It’s obvious that at age 11, it shouldn’t be too late for CJ to try basketball. Is it really too late for you to try something new?

Lastly, when you step on the court, give it your all. CJ didn’t let her actions reinforce her fear. She could have given less than her best, and her mind thought, “See, this really isn’t for me, I knew I wouldn’t be good.” But she didn’t, she did the best she could. This isn’t Hollywood, and she didn’t score 20 points and hit the game winning basket at the buzzer. She did some things ok, some things less than ok. But she learned and she was better at the end than at the start. And she had fun.

Let’s learn from CJ. After all, we don’t want to miss the opportunity to discover something that will lead us to unexpectedly and boldly say, “I love this!”

The 2008 USA Olympic men’s 4×100 relay team was the first to have all six runners on the team (counting both alternates) to have run the open 100 meters in sub-10 second time. Canada had none. Team USA was the clear favorite for gold. But with a dropped baton they never made it out of the semifinals, while Canada moved on. Watching the athletes perform at this level of competition you realize that it is not enough to have four fast runners on your relay team – every team has that. The winning team is the one who runs fast and also efficiently executes their handoffs. A drop is a disaster. But even a bobble, or a member having to slow down, or turn around, forget it – the race is lost. But with a clean handoff, no effort or time is wasted. The one receiving the baton does so at peak speed and takes it from there. And it’s beautiful to watch.

At Southworks we view our emails like handoffs. We practice and strive to make them cleanly. We’ve all had the experience of emails bouncing back and forth between people adding only a single point when three is required, or answering just one question of the four posed. In our company culture, those emails represent botched handoffs.

To help with this, we follow some simple A-B-C-D-E principles:

• Action. Put items requiring action at the top.
• Brief. Don’t assume the user will page down - keep it to the point and concise as possible.
• Context. Include the required context the reader requires to answer or act on your email. (Yes, some tension exists between supplying the necessary context and keeping it concise.)
• Default. When possible, specify the default action you will take if you do not hear from the receiver within a particular time.

And our number one guide:

• Easy. Make it easy to read and easy to act on.

After all, you just never know when a botched handoff might take your team from being the favorite to simply a spectator.

The way to get a front row seat at TechEd isn’t to line up early, but rather to parachute into the conference.

Five weeks before the event, I met with Zach Owens and Anthony Carrabino to discuss if Southworks could help them put together an application to show off several cool features and technologies in SQL Server 2008. Anthony’s only request was that it be something amazing. And while Zach also wanted something cool, he really wanted whatever we created to be credible; as in, it had to be fully implemented. Nice pair, those two. So together we decided to create a Web application that:

1. Submitted images and text to the cloud (i.e. SQL Server Data Services)
2. Used Microsoft Sync Services to synchronize from the cloud to the local SQL database
3. Used a WPF app with to perform SQL Server spatial queries and and Virtual Earth to display the results.
4. Not quite sexy enough, Moe Khosravy thought he’d chip in and create a mobile app that would allow him to take a photo during the keynote which would be synced to the cloud and down to the local DB, and appear in the WPF app for the audience to see just before  Dave Campbell (SQL Technical Fellow) finished the demo. Okaaaaaaay.

(You can see a video of the TechEd demo here, and for a descriptions of the finished application, see excellent posts by Zach, Anthony, and Maxi)

But Lito, Johnny and I only ended up in Orlando because of the Southworks’ principle that we pack each other’s parachutes. Consider the person who leaps out of a flying airplane wearing a chute prepared by someone else, and what they must assume. For us, this principle means two key things:

1. We all trust one another. We can take risks (5 weeks to sink or swim on a highly visible TechEd demo), knowing our colleagues will do their job with full commitment and give it their best effort.
2. Just like the parachute packer, we recognize that those taking care of responsibilities out of view are just as essential as those with the name on the front of the plane and sitting in the cockpit. In the case of the TechEd demo, there were many people that stepped in to help, not only through code or suggestions, but also by taking care of other responsibilities to allow the team freedom to focus.

When it came time to celebrate the successful demo (while we were in Orlando, the rest of the company was watching it streamed live in Buenos Aires), we wanted to recognize everyone. Those of us in Orlando had a Trey Research T-shirt (created by Anthony for all of us to wear there) signed by Dave Campbell, Nigel Ellis (SSDS Architect), S. Somasegar (Senior VP), Brian Harry (Technical Fellow), Anthony, Moe, and Zach. We had it framed to and presented to the company to recognize everyone’s efforts, pilots and parachute packers alike.

It’s a good feeling to be able to arrive a work and figuratively let go of the plane’s struts, knowing that you can trust those who took care of your ‘chute, and realize that when you pack another’s, it means something.