My Own Brand

Determine who you are and what your brand is, and what you're not.

The rest of it is just a lot of noise.

Geoffrey Zakarian

There are times in life when you are worshiping at the altar of Busy, without rest. If you're fortunate enough to enjoy your work, and find meaning in it, it feels good. And then there are times of rest, of idleness. I don't like idleness. It feels like there is something missing when you're not moving full speed ahead. Sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes it affords the reflection needed to chart the next course.

My brand is evolving, and more so my ability to articulate it. Often others identify your brand faster than you do. You need to describe it, both to yourself and to those who can use it.

At my core, I'm a problem solver. I need three things: a problem, a compelling and pressing reason to solve it, and the freedom to solve it. These three are not always present at the same time, but where they have been I've done my best work, hit my stride, made my mark, and been an immensely profitable hire.

It has confused me considerably that the majority of my professional problems to-date have been technical. My background is principally in the IT space, loosely called engineering. Within it I've ranged somewhat, solving problems with servers, to storage, virtualization, and finally moved into a dedicated network engineering world encompassing routers, switches, firewalls, encryptors, and other things. I've identified as an engineer for a long time because these are the majority of my solved problems.

Yet, where I've been best is where I've held the big picture. The technical items are tools to enable the business. And the business is what I care about. Where I've solved problems that make only my life easier, or only those of the engineers around me, it's always felt like something's been missing. And then, early on, I played Director for a few years, had to do the planning, budgeting, defending the budget, identifying allies and managing friends outside of my department, thinking and scouting ahead to make sure the trajectory was solid. And I, without embellishment, turned a failing IT unit into a success. There was an addictive pride. And no shortage of adrenaline leading up that point.

I found I liked the possibility of failure, of not knowing whether I was up to the task, and then marshaling every last bit of energy and ability to do it anyway.

The waters calmed and I liked the storms. I liked conquering.

I don't like failure. That's a powerful motivator if you constantly look to be in situations where failure is a possibility. It's why some people thrive when the odds are most against them.

I'm bothered by failure, to the point that I am often investigating and absorbing all kinds of information in the event that I'll need it down the road to make sure that if I ever encounter this situation I have at least a starting point if not a plan. Sometimes this is wasted effort, sometimes the payoff is terrific, if long-term. I can probably understand sales and HR issues far better than the average engineer. And if I needed to build up an environment than needed more than engineering, I'd have a starting point, a sense of what I don't know and what I need to do to fix that.

When I first arrive, I'm looking to see what resources I have, even the unused that could be used, what are the problems, what are the strengths, and what is the mission. And where are the opportunities. It's instinctive. I need to stabilize the environment and then push forward and out, expand and consolidate my position. This is where I'm in my element.

Lately, the technical problems have ceased being the most obvious and pressing problems. I've seen now no shortage of good engineers idled, bored, tired, just hoping to collect and paycheck and go home. That's a waste, and then we blindly hunt for creative ways to motivate them and that falls flat. I've seen good teams ruined by bad hires. It's a waste of a team. I've seen good engineers ruined by miserable onboarding and follow-through processes such that they will leave again without having made any impact on the company and work. Project stall, they fail, they under perform.

We all want to work in a challenging and thriving environment, and we stack the deck against ourselves.

I've had a few very good managers, and very many bad ones. I've met many more still from other groups. Many of them I liked personally, but their departments suffer nonetheless. I'm farther away from management now than I was ten years ago. I lead teams intermittently. I mentor and train intermittently. I happen to think I do this well. I want to get back to this vein. I want to lead teams. I want to hire people. I want to train them. I want to plan objectives, lay out courses, make the decisions. And provision and shield those under me and keep them engaged. This is to me engineering, yet something beyond the technical. I want to take the abilities I've been using peripherally and use them consistently.

I solve problems. If I have to solve a technical problem to solve my non-technical larger issue, that's a great feeling. The interesting problems are less and less technical. I follow the problems. And I become who I need to be to solve them.

Personal Branding

Determine who you are and what your brand is, and what you're not.

The rest of it is just a lot of noise.

Geoffrey Zakarian

In this day and age, there's a brand for everything, comically ostentatiously flared logos for companies you've never heard of and judging by the quality of their products and services, may never hear of again.

The proliferation of so many brands makes so many of them into just background noise.

And for many of us, trying to develop our own brand of living and usefulness to the world, there is a steady fight to make our little offering stand out.

Most people don't think in terms of brands, or marketing. We just "are", even comfortably so. "What is my brand?" becomes a proper question only if you are actively trying to market yourself or your product.

I'm finding that in interviews it does help enormously to be able to articulate your brand and allow the interviewers to view your career through its lens. Thinking it out ahead of time, you stumble less over failures and know exactly why you succeeded by understanding how your patterns fit your brand.

You have a brand already, what others see in you, good and bad. So define it for yourself, and then stay true to it.

It doesn't have to be enormously complex. It just needs to explain why you succeeded and why you failed and give a sense that where your work stays close to your brand you are likely to be the success every employer should need you to be.

Having defined my brand, I can now look back at the roles in which I did brilliantly and understand why, as well as those roles where I was less than spectacular without regret. If much of my success depends on the environment, then I need to be targeting optimal environments where I will succeed and not spend time looking for what won't work.

Certification and Continuing Education

I am always doing that which I cannot do,

In order that I may learn how to do it.

Pablo Picasso

My Bachelor's of Engineering was a wise investment. I use next to nothing of the technical skills I learned, from breadboarding circuits to VLSI to transistors to programmable digital logic. Rather it changed how I think, how I approach problems, to be comfortable with and work with uncertainties, and to methodically work out the solution. This works on technology. This works on organizations. It can even work on people.

The Perfect Position - A Wish List

“If you want to build a ship don’t herd people together to collect wood
and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them
to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

– Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I'm discovering that I'm not an engineer in the same vein that many seem to commonly use that term. I'm probably in the top half – on a good day perhaps even in the top quarter – of networking-specific technologists in my area. It doesn't bother me to have met many I consider better. I keep them in the back of my mind when I need to vet an idea or problem. Or one day hire them. I can stand out well enough technically, but my own selling point is different:

Career Growth Calculus

It's up to you to prioritize your growth in a position.

Time = Money : we trade our time to the company for their money.

So: Time (ours) = Money (theirs)

This is the general idea, but really:

Time (ours) = Money (theirs) + Growth (ours)

The Evolving Career

For the 6-year work, I accomplished a lot. This was the beginning of my career and among my two unqualified successes. I should have left at least a year earlier. Best to leave while there is a little challenge still to look forward to and work is still exciting.

Challenging work should be distantly achievable, but put you far out of your comfort zone. I've come to associate minor heart palpitations and panic attacks with the subsequent obsession over problems that drives personal growth. If I don't have that stunned feeling of "how in the world do I do this?" I won't enjoy it. The pattern is the same: a problem is introduced, I panic, I sit back paralyzed, and as I calm down and ruminate over it, I find ways to eat around the edges of the problem with potential solutions until the path forward appears. And then full steam ahead.