When the economy starts contracting, career advisors start talking about the importance of “soft skills.” What are “soft skills,” exactly—and why are they “soft?” Mike Bushong joins Tom Amman and Russ White to talk about why these skills are important, why they are not “soft,” and how we should talk about people skills instead. They are superpowers,” and there isn’t anything “soft” about them.
Communication is one of those soft skills so often cited as a key to success—but what does effective communication entail? Mike Bushong joins Eyvonne Sharp and Russ White on the Hedge to discuss radical candor, and the importance of giving and taking honest feedback to relationships and business.
According to Michael Natkin, “in the tech industry, with our motto of “strong opinions, loosely held” (also known as “strong opinions, weakly held”), we’ve glorified overconfidence.” Michael joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss the culture of overconfidence, and how it impacts the field of information technology.
Network engineering and operations are both “mental work” that can largely be done remotely—but working remote is not only great in many ways, it is also often fraught with problems. In this episode of the Hedge, Roland Dobbins joins Tom and Russ to discuss the ins and outs of working remote, including some strategies we have found effective at removing many of the negative aspects.
But just a couple of days ago, I was talking to someone about managing expectations in the IT world. How do you convince someone else to buy into a project? How do you get them to back your idea, rather than inventing their own? While the question itself is interesting, I’m going to leave my…
Many years ago, I worked for a manager who had two signs on his desk. The first was a pencil with the words, “Pencil 2.0” printed above them. The rest of the sign went on to explain how the pencil had undo (the eraser), was renewable (it can be sharpened), etc. The second sign was…
Last time, we talked a little about making certain your presentation has a point — or a porpoise, as the case might be. This time I want to talk about a few other common mistakes I see network engineers make when building presentations, and actually presenting them. First, you put too much text on your…
Powerpoint doesn’t stink. Our presentation skills do. So how do we fix it? First, you must decide: what do I want this presentation to be? We’ve all seen the brilliant TED talks about new ideas. We’ve all seen the really cool sample presentations from those online presentation sites about someone’s trip around the world. When…
“Presentations are just a waste of time.” “Powerpoint stinks.” “Can’t we do something other than another long, boring, presentation?” “We should just ban Powerpoint.” If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard someone complain about Powerpoint, or presentations, I’d be rich enough to quit work and stop blogging. 🙂 Isn’t it about time…
In the first part of this two part series, I talked about why it’s important to learn to write — and to learn to write effectively. But how do you become an effective writer? I started with the importance of reading, particularly difficult and regular reading across a broad array of topics. Is there anything…