Friday, April 22, 2016

What a motto?

... "Nuthin', what's a motto you?"  (Lion King)

I can't hear the word motto without thinking about Timon and Pumba.  Now a bit more than 30 days into the job, motto had become super important to me of late.  It may sound as if I am simply "drinking the Kool-Aid", but when you have a good motto, its worth talking about.  Coda's motto (or tagline) is Do something great.  Every day.  Being in the software business, there is a very real risk of missing the mark with your solution should it come out at an inappropriate time, be irrelevant in its message or function, or any other number of conditions that have led many good things to an unfortunate end.  Every day I try to do my part to ensure this does not happen with Maestro. 

Coda's motto couldn't be more appropriate for our line of work, as if we do not move the needle even just a little bit each and every day, there is a chance someone else may seize our market.  Keeping an eye on the future, while managing the tasks of the day, and learning from the past and those before you can definitely leave someone with a dizzying view of life.  We don't have to always see in all directions, just never lose sight of the goal and nudge, leap, claw, climb, run, fly, whatever you need to in the right direction and good things will happen.   Maintaining momentum is easier than trying to generate it in the first place  Motivating multiple teams to move in one direction to build, market, sell, and manage the flagship product offering for a new company has been extremely rewarding and an amazing growing experience so far, and it is JUST starting! 

So my advice to all, do SOMETHING every day.  Make it great, or trust that it will be a step towards something great regardless, and see what happens.  Positivity is as contagious as negativity, but has a better effect on morale and productivity.  Try to see the positive in all that is happening around you, and continue on your respective journeys.  You never know how your journey may overlap someone else's and the amazing things that happen when you get the right band together.

Thursday, March 24, 2016

Introducing: Coda Global

For the majority of my career I have been a consultant.  An information technology consultant.  A geek.  While the lifestyle (no, consulting is not just a career) afforded me opportunities to travel a bit, see different parts of the world, experience different foods and people, it came at a price: family time.  The importance of work-life balance, not missing so many "firsts" with my four children, and enjoying the fruits of my labors a bit in the moment (as opposed to the perpetual "some day") is more important than maintaining gold status with a given airline.  I needed to realize that and work towards right sizing my work life.

Beyond racking up status points, I also highly valued the customers who saw me as their "trusted advisor" for all things within my area of expertise.  Building the laundry list of skills like a buzz-word dictionary to describe what I "do".  So, what do I do?  I have always gravitated towards collaboration as a focus area of expertise.  Over the years this discipline has been referred to as knowledge management, or more recently social collaboration, or others I cannot think of at the moment.  Regardless, my career has been largely centered around helping people work together better, faster, or more efficiently.  I do not see this entirely changing, but for me it is evolving.

This brings me to the topic at hand, which is Coda Global.  This latest chapter in my career is built on the same foundation as always, helping people work together better, but with a twist.  Among other focus areas, Coda is a product company, and I am the first to bear the title of Conductor.  Our business platform is a cloud solution, built with a combination of open source and proprietary IP, designed to provide large enterprise like capabilities to small and medium size businesses in an affordable and flexible manner.  Conductors in music help direct and shape the performance of a group, so too do Coda Conductors  We take the base platform (our score) and work with customers and our service professionals (the orchestra) and deliver a solution (performance) to solve the complex and sometimes unique needs of our customers.  The most significant difference for us is that we do not see each of the movements of our piece as stand alone engagements, but rather a variation on the theme, which offers opportunity for features and capabilities to find their way back into the product.   This productized approach also affords us the opportunity to be prescriptive with certain behaviors and aspects of the tooling, but our services arm is capable of tailoring to the business needs of the individual customers we work with.

So, take a moment to get to know Coda Global.  Understand our differentiators and capabilities.  Perhaps we can bring better harmony to your organization too.