“Here’s the kid, calls me 59 days in a row says he wants to be a player. There ought to be a picture of you in the dictionary under persistence kid.” — Gordon Gekko (Wall Street – 1987)
Today (Sunday) I received a random phone call from someone who was offered a job in our company. He was trying to understand a few more details on the culture and wanted to know if it would be wise for him to work from our headquarters or would the satellite offices work fine for him as well.
Things to note:
1. I did not know this person
2. The person calls me after Googling me up and looked up my information from my website ( www.nainil.com )
Here is complete event in chronological order:
- Receive the phone call from a random person @ 10.50 a.m. – To get advise on the job offer he had already received from our company. Wanted to know what would be better: Working from our Headquarters or Remotely.
- I was a bit busy at that time and asked him to call me after half an hour to discuss the same.
- The person called me 90 minutes later @ 12.20 p.m. . He was already an hour late in calling me.
- This was the time I was to have my lunch. So I asked him to call me at 1.00 p.m. (Within 40 minutes)
- He was again late and called me half an hour later @ 1.30 p.m .
- I told him:
- You are the one in need of the information.
- You should honor the time I give you or else let me know of a different time that’s more suitable to you.
- It’s not polite to call someone who wants to help you and keep that person waiting for your call.
- I asked him to call me at 6:00 pm today evening
- I am amazed by this person’s sense of responsibility. He calls me at 9.40 pm. (which is 3 and half hours late).
- I told him:
- He was not being serious of what he wanted
- He was taking things for granted and thought people would work to his time even thought it should have been the other way.
- He needs to understand the value of time.
- He apologized of his mistake(s) and I spoke with him for a good 25 minutes after that; giving him the advice he needed.
This event made me realize, that in current time, people are being a lot more irresponsible and not focusing on getting the job done in time.
Here there are a couple of things I learned:
- Value Time: One should value his own and the time of the other party. If someone is taking the time to help you, don’t dis-honor that. My father always said to me: Time is money. Use it wisely.
- Correction: If you make mistake once, at least try to correct it the next time. Always accept your mistakes and apologize.
- Reflection: Consistent mistakes leads to a bad impression
- Chance: No matter how much of a mistake someone makes, always give the person another chance to improve and learn from his mistakes. This will make you more respectable and will help the other person in his time of need.
I hope todays experience teaches this young lad the value of time. I was however glad that this person did not give up even after me telling him that he was wrong in many ways. This is what is known as Persistence. (The quality of continuously pushing forward even when failure strikes).
In my professional experience:
- I did not always have a Team to work with;
- I did not always have a Team Lead to report to.
Most of the time, I used to work on Individual Projects assigned to me by the Management. Currently I belong to two teams (Product Management and the Network Team) and I still spend most of my time working on various Individual Projects.
In an environment where I have two team leads and multiple management members to report to, it is often difficult to make everyone realize the current items you are working on.
This results into:
- Difficulty in prioritizing
- Uncontrolled assignment of work (Work load increases)
- Wrong judgment in terms of assigning the correct work to the correct people.
With my 16 years of experience, one of the most important skills I have developed is to judge when it is right to say “No” to an assigned task. It is not always the correct accept all the projects which have been assigned to you. While your team lead does make the best judgment in assigning the task, it is also your responsibility to evaluate your skill set and your current list of priorities to accept the task.
Based on my experience I use a starter kit of questions to evaluate when it’s OK to say NO to an assigned project:
- Do I have the bandwidth to take another project?
- Do I have the right skill set?
- Based on my experience, will this project succeed? Does this project need more planning?
There have been instances when I have personally met the management team and/or the team lead, explained them my skill set and I have provided them with a valid reason as to why I would not be able to take the assigned project. It should be noted that saying “No” to a senior management is not the easiest of the tasks. You need the courage and the motivation to go to the team lead and explain them the same.
By this exercise, the management/team lead is well informed in advance about my thoughts. They then have the time to make the right decision and assign the project/task to another team member. I can now concentrate on my existing projects and complete them on time without any other distractions which might affect my quality of work. The team leads are confident in you as you have given them your honest opinion and prevented any last minute confrontation of backing out of the project.
By learning to say ‘no’ to projects that don’t fit your targeted strategy, you’ll often end up with more time and energy to say ‘yes’ when it really counts.
During his presidential campaign, President-Elect Obama said he would allocate $50 billion over five years to support the adoption of standards-based health IT systems and a national health information network.
On Friday, January 09, 2009: President-Elect Barack Obama Calls for All Americans To Have EHRs Within Five Years. This gives the Healthcare Industry a huge leverage over other Industries.
Here is my interpretation of the future of the Health Care Industry:
- EHRs (Electronic Health Records) will be mandated for patient record keeping
- Personal Health Record (PHR) will gain momentum and will govern the way interoperability is being driven
- Interoperability, Clinical Decision Support, Population Health and Quality Measures are the buzz words which will improve care for the years to come
- Health Information Exchange will bring better control over Patient Consent Management
- Certified products will bring standardization for EHRs. Additional features in form of plugins, extensions and “Surprise” features will be the reason to choose an EHR.
- Technology improvements will allow Privacy and Security policies to improve over the processes.
- Harmonization of efforts will allow consolidation of similar standards
- Coordinated Quality Care will be the norm towards transforming healthcare in the US.
