Listening

It had all the earmarks of a disaster, a real career-sinker of a project. And here was my old friend and former colleague calling me up enthusiastically, on the phone: “Hey Lisa, we need a Technical Project Manager for this start-up I’m working for, in Redwood Shores… you’ll love the project and the team. It’s [...]

If you are going to lead hordes of peeps someday you’d better start by being able to lead a single individual. Pretty much the only way we have of directly leading another person is through communication, and I sure as heck don’t mean email! (Talking face-to-face is fraught with plenty of misunderstandings, and [...]

There’s been an oft-repeated observation that there’s a high incidence of classically trained musicians in the software industry. I’ve seen this myself; it’s not hard to identify enough people for a jam session or chamber ensemble in any association meeting here in Silicon Valley.
I had the good fortune to be trained in orchestral conducting at [...]

Imagine this: it’s Monday, and a co-worker had a rough weekend with his family. He wants to talk about it. What to do?
On the one hand, I want to help out. I mean I’ve been there, I’ve had my tough times, and it’s nice when I’ve had someone to talk with. Not for hours, just [...]

We all know that project management is primarily a people business. As such, communicating with humans is the most important skill you possess to achieve success. How well do you communicate? I have been married for 40 + years and a project manager for over 25 years and I am still trying to improve my communication skills. Ask my [...]

My mother-in-law got her kitchen remodeled, and let her husband and the contractor pick out her stove. When it arrived, this little old lady had a tough time using it. At Christmas, when visiting, I tried it out, being a cook, and found it poorly designed with questionable quality. As the Christmas Dinner chef, I [...]

Having been told my whole life that sometimes I can be a bit too intense, it was enormously liberating to finally find an environment where I blended right in: a drum circle of more than 50 passionate lunatics banging away like they were being paid by the decibel. These were not people in search of [...]