Congratulations to Jon for completing the SUBARU IRONMAN CHALLENGE in Penticton, BC today!!!
Jon battled 32+ degree heat to complete the grueling IRONMAN triathlon along side his brother-in-law Pat. It was a family affair and a point of pure pride for the Holt’s, the Teucher’s and everyone here at E-By Design Technologies. Congratulations to you both.
Join us and raise a glass to Jon for having the strength of an Ironman and integrity to match!
Cheers,
Eunice
I recently had the privilege of speaking at a Teleforum for CanWIT (Canadian Women in Technology).
The first speaker, Ms. Shelley Hessian, presented us with the statistics of exactly where we stand with regards to representation in this industry. The truth is we are under represented in the field and that under representation gets more and more significant as you move up the career ranks. It is shockingly low when comparing the numbers of start up founders and C-Level positions held by women versus those held by men.
The third speaker, Chadia Moghrabi, enlightened us on the challenges and statistics of positions and income levels of females in Academia. Similarly the differences in salary and opportunities for women in technology and Academia in general are significant. As women it is often our careers that suffer in the face of heavy obligations outside of our careers.
These challenges are real, significant and surmountable. I have been extremely fortunate to have bucked the trends outlined by my fellow speakers. I graduated from a high tech college, I climbed the career ladder to the directorship level and I started my own tech firm.
The most significant statement I would advise women to take from the forum was a question from Ms. Simpson-McKay.
The question was: “Eunice, Did you have a mentor ?”
The answer is that I have had a mentor throughout my entire career, someone that advised me, helped me navigate my career for the sake of my success. In the coming posts I will write about my mentors, how they became my mentors and how they allowed me to be as strong and committed in this career as I have been.
So I have a question for you. Are you a women in technology, do you have a mentor?
While I was at the library on Sunday I met the most interesting and entertaining gentleman who was kind enough to share a book with me. The book was called “The Power to Soar Higher” and the gentleman was Peter Legge.
I read the book and found it full of inspiring stories and comforting quotes. My favorite and the one most fitting my own experience was right there in the introduction.
“You need to find a person with the following three qualities:
The most important of these is integrity, because if they don’t have integrity, the other two qualities – intelligence and energy – are going to kill you”
It was the first of many, many giggles I had throughout my afternoon with this gem. By the end I had spent hours thinking about the best and the worst of my entrepreneurial experiences with a huge smile and light heart. I had become blessedly detached from the big things that go right and wrong in my business, the things that feel like they will swallow me whole some days. With each chapter and each story I settled comfortably and cozily back into the small things that are fun and fulfilling to do. The things that created all of the opportunities in the first place and the ones that really matter.
If you are looking for your “little engine that could” spirit, here it is. It is an uplifting book that reminded me of what I can laugh at and what I can let go of along with an infusion of encouragement on every page.
Originally from a small town in Newfoundland, I found a window to the world through Sidney Sheldon’s intriguing and spell binding stories about faraway exotic cities. Through these books and the wonderful librarians at the Deer Lake Public Library I learned what it would be like to be a doctor, a lawyer and a spy. Versailles and the Sydney Opera House were painted with written words and became my travel guide for future adventures. It is my honor to play a small part in the priceless journey’s embarked on from our library.
Join me for our annual Martini Challenge and Silent Auction, this year’s funds are going to our mobile library! Come on Coquitlam MOVE THAT BUS!!!
Do you remember when you were a kid and you waved to police cars? I do, it was nice. Somewhere along the line we got afraid of the law. At some point the predominate impression of the law changed to “being in trouble with the law”. In my small town that was a fate worst then leprosy. The next law we dealt with was the hundreds of dollars to buy our house scraped up from buttons and beach rocks it seems. Then the legal disclaimers at the bottom of my emails and the client contracts that cost as much as a reasonable divorce . Then there’s divorce! I suspect the legal bills and time lost to divorce in this country would rival the national debt.
The tail is wagging the dog and Philip K. Howard makes a remarkable argument for dumbing this down. http://on.ted.com/8DXy
As I was helping my daughter with decimal math the other night I realized something. A simple example of our management buzzwords Analysis Paralysis and Cowboy.
Analysis Paralysis
If she thought about the questions and worked it through in her head a disturbing trend appeared. She substituted something easier when things got hard (even though it wasn’t a part of the equation). Now with all of this new, easy and irrelevant additions she was in an endless loop of finding where she was and what she should do next.
Cowboy
If I gave her the pencil to hold she would just write an answer, no thought, no words, just an answer completely unrelated to the question.
I was quite baffled by all of this so I asked her to SAY what she was thinking so that I could better understand where she was going with her work. This resulted in her meltdown and my realization.
I now understand how we get to both analysis paralysis and the cowboy approach. It seems when we do not have the proper vocabulary to SAY what we are working through we are left with one of two choices. Do nothing or do anything.
The moral of this story is to READ. Your vocabulary is the key to your strategic thinking.
We pride ourselves on being a company of values. We also build teams around value structures and how we see ourselves as a team. It builds a culture. Our team code creates a set of rules to go to when stress and scope hit the fan and it leaves no doubt about our expectations. That is why I loved this when I read it today.
Great teams know exactly who they are.
1. Team Canada’s credo — Leave No Doubt
Below is the English version of the credo that adorned a wall in the Team Canada dressing room in Vancouver. There also was a French version. It was written by Canadian head coach Mike Babcock with help from a friend from their Saskatoon days, Rick Larsen. He runs the Chicago advertising firm Leo Burnett.
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/sports/hockey/story/2010/03/02/sp-wharnsby-take-five.html#ixzz0h3QGcSwT
After watching Capitalism: A Love Story by Michael Moore I understood why the bible says its easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle then a rich man to make it into heaven. I was incensed by what I learned about the types of activities employed to increase or generate profit. Surely these executives were not going to heaven.
Being an entrepreneur and a business manager this presented a bit of a quandary for me as it is my job to generate revenue. If a rich man cannot make it to heaven and Jon and I both live so that heaven is on our destination list how do we generate revenue and grow the company without throwing away our years of good behaviour? The answer came in this article.
Paul Graham is a gentleman who grows startups, he invests his time, experience and dollars generating companies like ours, and yours! And what these companies do is employ people and buy services supporting other people thus increasing the amount of information and choice in our world. He’s feeding the multitudes with his five loaves and two fish. With $6000 per person he supports the original founders until they can support a full staff and a market need. If his 20 entrepreneurs hired five people in the first year and ten the following year all of a sudden we have 100 new jobs in year one and 200 in year two; 300 more people are paying mortgages, buying cars and donating to charity! Isn’t that what Jesus did with his loaves?
As business owners, managers and entrepreneurs we have the opportunity to build something so much more meaningful then profits.
Be a Venture Capitalist within your organization and industry.
xperience
