Recreation, work and news of the day

Seems the year is flying by!  Yesterday I did a fab 7 mile run through Wilder Ranch. A state park about a mile out of Santa Cruz.  It is a mixture of open meadow and forest, a lovely place to run. Just when you think you might get bored with the hills or forest you round a bend or crest a hill to look out across some very spectacular scenery.  I enjoyed some nice encounters with some folk too.  You can read more about that in On the Run if you are interested.

Work was busy this week.  I had to let one of my folk go, which was a little tough as it wasn't on the plan for this quarter.  Over the past year I've learnt a lot about managing a team (I now have 12 people!!!).  I've also stuck by the idea that I roll them on so I roll them off, letting people go in this economy is a tough call but part of the job.  The job has gotten exponentially bigger and I am going to have to adjust how I manage the team as 12 people working on upwards of 6 different projects makes for a lot of complexity, relationships and politics.  My "favourite" IM of all time is the one that starts "Can you talk"....this usually means "something" is up and I go into management mode.  Things in the workplace seem to move so much faster here than I remember in NZ.  Decisions generally get taken very quickly and need to be acted on equally as fast.  Working in a global environment also means managing very diverse expectations - I've got very thick skinned and figure it's a good day when most of the people are mostly happy (or, at the very least, not complaining too loudly!).

The horror story of the last two weeks for me has been the Fort Hood shootings.  This is terribly sad, not least of which because so many people are now thinking someone somehow should have been able to anticipate it.  Maybe, maybe not, hindsight's always twenty twenty - all not helped by it very nearly coinciding with Veterans day.  The shooter is still alive which will drag the whole thing out for a very long time (hard to think he's going to be considered sane enough to go to a trial).