I don’t have very much to talk about today — I had an early phone call, and, as often happens on such days, I wound up spending the day working from home instead of driving to the office. This saved me from another exposure to the world’s saltiest sauce; on the other hand, it’s not clear that microwaving a frozen entree is much better for me (even if it did come from Trader Joe’s, so it was low in fat).

Turnabout is fair play

I’ve just finished providing “360-degree input” for four of my fellow employees. This is an exercise in which you are asked to answer two simple questions (slightly paraphrased):

• What behaviors has this person exhibited in support of Win/Execute/Team and what effect has this had on others?
• How can this person improve their behavior and what positive effect would there be?

The results are sent to the employee’s manager, who then consolidates them into one document which is made available to the person with the attributions removed. This is supposed to provide perspective for the manager’s year-end evaluation of the employee; since I’m not a manager, I can’t say whether it works or not.

The first question is usually pretty easy to answer — in general, no one is going to ask you to provide a 360 unless they expect you to be able to say good things about them, and I like giving praise (especially when it’s deserved). I’ve always found the second question to be much tougher — even when there is something I’d like the person to do differently, this doesn’t seem to be the right way to get the point across. So I find something to write, but it’s usually inconsequential (along the lines of “Fred would be more effective if he didn’t include the entirety of every e-mail in his responses”), and I feel like I’ve wasted my time.

Do other companies have this particular ritual?

Shabbat Shalom!

The day didn’t get off to the best of starts: the radio didn’t go off — and I had two different X-10 boxes programmed to fire it off. But we woke up only 20 minutes or so late, which isn’t too bad (actually, it felt good to wake up naturally instead of to the radio).

And Jeffrey got off to school on time — in his pajamas, true, but it was pajama day, so that was fine. And we found out that the cleaning service would be at our house on Saturday morning instead of today, but that’s ok, it gives us more time to straighten up for them. I even got a bunch of e-mail tended to before leaving this morning. And remembered to buy gas on the way to work.

Got to work, opened up the trunk to take out my briefcase…and it wasn’t there. I could have sworn I’d put it in there, but maybe not — and I have two other computers in my office, so that’s not a big problem either. Off to the presentation on “Emerging Technology Opportunities”, which was quite interesting — unfortunately, I couldn’t resist the donuts which were available before the presentation, but at least the one I ate was chocolate, so the calories weren’t in vain.

I should’ve let the donut serve as lunch, too — I had pasta (feeling slightly virtuous in doing so), but there was a small problem with the marinara sauce — whoever made it decided that salt was the most important ingredient. I spent much of the afternoon going to the cafeteria for yet another mug full of ice water in hopes of conquering the thirst!

It didn’t seem like a good day to work late, so I left on time, but was slowed in my progress halfway down the hill by a line of stopped cars. This is very unusual, since the road down the hill only serves Almaden traffic — no intersections to mess up the flow. But then I looked ahead of the first car, and realized why we were stopped: there was a long line of wild turkeys crossing the road, at least a dozen of them, with another dozen or so staying put where they were. Somehow, it seemed appropriate.

And how was your day?