Friday, August 31, 2012
Phrase of the day...
Sumo wrestlers are athletes, if you have a body like that but don't practice Sumo, can you say you've got an athletic body?
Thursday, August 30, 2012
The next shocker, instructions and language structure
Any time you're managing anything, there are 3 basic things we should all do:
- Plan: Detailed or informal outline of things to do, here we should also set milestones and control points if necessary.
- Control: Set control points in which we can check if the work is on time, taking preventive actions when we see something could slip up, or corrective actions if something is already going 'not so well'.
- Review: Here we see how the plan was executed, see metrics of success or failure and identify lessons learned.
So far this is pretty obvious, but I found out the hard way, that in Asia sometimes things work differently, and things don't get done as they did in the previous chapters of my life. Looking in retrospective, it was kinda my fault things didn't get done.
Now I will speak about the language and language structure in general. I've got to warn you, I'm not a linguistic expert or read much about it, all I will say here is based in my own personal observations and experiences.
In the Western world most languages come from 2 main sources, Latin (Also called Romance languages) and Germanic/Anglo-saxon, these 2 sources gave origin to languages such as Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, etc (Latin) and German, English, Dutch, etc (Germanic) - I know this is all very boring, but I'm talking about it because I've got a point to make - these 2 sources or roots are quite different, but also because of centuries of invasions, cross-breeding and other events, all these languages share common things, ergo, Westerners share many things as well, and language structure is one of them, molding our behavior and thinking processes. In the same way in which Arabic and Chinese roots, structure the language and the way of thinking of Asian people. We're different, our brains are wired differently and that's a fact, but it's also a fact that our brains are as flexible and malleable as play-dough. That's how our old brain can learn new languages and behaviors, creating synaptic connections which make our brains more agile and in general sharper (it may not be my case, since I still haven't learnt more Thai than just enough for taking a taxi or ordering food :P). This is what I will call, the first big PLUS of managing in Asia (or vice versa, for an Asian learning about us).
After that long intro, I will finally make my point. Because our languages are so different and our brains are wired so differently, we need to be careful in the way we communicate with each other when we ask for things, I think the best way of explaining this, is tell you about my failures in this area and how I avoided them, after I understood what I did wrong. This was a conversation I had when I called one of my new staff to my brand new office with view to the golf course:
Me: What are you working on right now?
Him: Testing some stuff to release on the next code release cycle
Me: Is that important? When is the next release?
Him: Not so important, it's all mostly done and the code release is in 6-8 weeks
Me: Excellent, do you think you can do a small module for the e-procurement site?
Him: Yes
Me: This is what I need done (showed him the specs and my plan without dates), how long do you think this would take you?
Him: 6-7 days
Me: OK, that's pretty good, I will write down 10 days just in case. Thanks a lot!
After this I updated my plan with dates, setting the first review milestone a week after.
Can you see from that dialog what I did wrong? If you're like me back then, you probably don't, I will explain you why I didn't get what I was expecting a couple of weeks after this conversation happened and why it was MY fault, not his.
Even though his schedule was very relax and he could easily accomodate this piece of software in the middle, I asked him if he could do it, and after he replied yes, I assumed he was going to do it... BIG mistake, he replied correctly, he CAN do it and he could do it in about 6-7 days, he never said he was going to do it, and I never told him he had to do it right away or instead of what he was doing now, so who's fault it was? well, it was mine!
What I should have done was:
- Tell him the task I was going to assign to him was important and took precedence to the one he was doing
- Ask if he could stop his task without causing too much disruption when he had to re-take the task later, if the answer was yes it would be make it hard to re-take the task later then, I should have asked how much longer he needed to minimize the disruption or assign the task to someone else
- Once the previous was settled, I should have told him when to start and share my plan/Gantt chart with him and maybe even review it with him if it needed adjustment
As you can see there are many differences from how I used to do it before, in the past I would have just assumed that talking with a person, he/she would have informed me of the problems regarding doing a task right now (sometimes bitching a bit too much about switching tasks) and tell me when they could start, I'd have also assumed that they understood they had to start the task ASAP. Looking back, that's bad management as well, now I know, from many bad experiences, including Westerners, I should NEVER assume, as my friend John would say, assume - makes a ASS of U and ME (reads 'assume' if you didn't get it)
So the pointers of today's post:
- Never, ever assume
- Be as clear as possible, you can never be TOO clear
- Confirm verbally or in written form that you have mutual understanding (written is always better)
- When starting in a new job, always schedule shorter checkpoints to avoid misunderstanding and steep deviations to your original plan
- Communicate as often as possible, not just about the plan, but sometimes just stand from your desk and walk to your staff just to see how they're doing or if they need help with anything
- A pointer for Asians; some foreigners will complain about everything when they're taken outside their comfort zone or you ask them to switch tasks, the best way of dealing with that is 'sell not tell', that means, get them to agree to do something, do not 'tell them' to do something, this works best for both Asians and not Asians, but Westerners tend to bitch about things more - I will dedicate a whole post to 'Sell, not tell later on' and why it works much better than just telling someone what to do
In my next post I will talk about body language and social interactions, hope so far I'm not boring you too much and if I am, at least you can use this in your daily work.
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
About arriving to a new country
Let me start this by stating a bit of the obvious. I'm writing my blog from the point of view of a Westerner coming to work in Asia (myself), but I see no reason why this cannot be used by Asians who want to understand better about managing in Western companies or understand better their bosses or peers. I'd love to see people commenting on the shockers people get when getting a foreigner manager here in Asia for the first time. I think it'd make for a fun conversation :)
Personally I've managed teams in countries like India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and Thailand, and managed people from many nationalities while I've been here, such as people from Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and Bangladesh, all of them with cultural differences and the particular idiosyncrasies that are common to their particular country.
One thing was evidently immediately to me, they're a lot more friendly and welcoming than Western people.
If you think my blog will be about bitching about the difficulties of working in Asia, you're partly wrong, there are many things that make managing in Asia both a challenge and a blessing. But now to the subject in hand.
Before coming to Asia, I had contact with people from around the world, via phone, e-mail, issue logs, chat and video chat, that gave me my first taste of the Asian flavor. I enjoyed very much the conversations and their sense of humor - except when the calls were at 3am in the morning - and I found their technical level and understanding of issues was very good. On that time I was working for a company with a very centralized management, so people in regional offices and agencies had little control over systems and the flow of information. I can imagine that being very frustrating for them, but I think that was the moment when I experienced for the first time what people call 'oriental patience'.
My first incursions to the continent were short one week visits (in some cases a lot longer than that), visits in which I was treated extremely well, these visits opened my eyes to the fact that I could enjoy living in Asia, so when an offer from a company to move indefinitely to Thailand came, I took it!
I've gotta say, coming to Asia visiting is not the same as a full time job here :)
When I got to the country - about a week before I had to start my new job - the first thing I did was looking for managerial books related with the country... I found none (I've got no intention of writing a book about the subject), there may have been some, but if they had, they were all in Thai, if you've never seen the Thai alphabet, it looks like Chinese characters made 'italic'.
The main difference from coming in sporadic visits and working full time here was the nature of the tasks (I know I'm pointing out the obvious, but I think I have to anyway). When I came visiting, I normally had a pre-arranged agenda, check this, meeting here, meeting him, meeting her, fix this, scrap that, and that was it, my visit was over. Now, I still had meetings and things to do, but those things were not pre-arranged, now I had to ask people to do things and get me things. That's when my first 'shockers' happened.
The first 'shocker', was in meetings. For my convenience meetings were all conducted in English, which made it pretty hard for the local guys, but also for me, because I wasn't used to English with Thai accent, I had to concentrate very hard to understand, thankfully English is a very forgiving language, and when people talked and misused words, given the context, I was still able to understand pretty much all. I'm pretty sure they had trouble understanding me as well, I tend to speak very fast, and even though I've been told I don't have a heavy accent, I'm sure my slight Italian/Spanish/Latino accent didn't make it very easy for them to understand. This shocker started dissipating quite fast, here I saw glimpses of them working as hard as me, or even harder to understand me. I saw many of the guys who would go into meetings with me, whose English was not so good, with dictionaries and English learning texts, they also started teaching me a few words in Thai. They would crack up every time I tried to speak in Thai, but that was all part of the fun of working with them. After a couple of weeks, we started understanding each other much better.
My advices for this shocker would be: Stick to a person who speaks English well and ask for a quick summary meeting after the main meeting - just in case you missed something, always carry a notebook and take lots of notes. Make sure someone is also generating the MoM (Minute of Meeting) and compare your notes with what was said in the MoM. If your notes are not in concordance with what was written in the MoM, clarify RIGHT AWAY, do not wait!!! As an extra note, one technique that worked well for me in meetings to generate the MoM, is rotating the responsibility, that way besides rotating the responsibility and teaching a bit of accountability, you're also teaching English skills. If you have the time, ask them to generate a draft of the MoM and then review it with you before sending it out.
My next shocker will talk about instructions, and how language and the structure of the same can give you big headaches when asking someone to do something.
See you in my next post!
Personally I've managed teams in countries like India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and Thailand, and managed people from many nationalities while I've been here, such as people from Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and Bangladesh, all of them with cultural differences and the particular idiosyncrasies that are common to their particular country.
One thing was evidently immediately to me, they're a lot more friendly and welcoming than Western people.
If you think my blog will be about bitching about the difficulties of working in Asia, you're partly wrong, there are many things that make managing in Asia both a challenge and a blessing. But now to the subject in hand.
Before coming to Asia, I had contact with people from around the world, via phone, e-mail, issue logs, chat and video chat, that gave me my first taste of the Asian flavor. I enjoyed very much the conversations and their sense of humor - except when the calls were at 3am in the morning - and I found their technical level and understanding of issues was very good. On that time I was working for a company with a very centralized management, so people in regional offices and agencies had little control over systems and the flow of information. I can imagine that being very frustrating for them, but I think that was the moment when I experienced for the first time what people call 'oriental patience'.
My first incursions to the continent were short one week visits (in some cases a lot longer than that), visits in which I was treated extremely well, these visits opened my eyes to the fact that I could enjoy living in Asia, so when an offer from a company to move indefinitely to Thailand came, I took it!
I've gotta say, coming to Asia visiting is not the same as a full time job here :)
When I got to the country - about a week before I had to start my new job - the first thing I did was looking for managerial books related with the country... I found none (I've got no intention of writing a book about the subject), there may have been some, but if they had, they were all in Thai, if you've never seen the Thai alphabet, it looks like Chinese characters made 'italic'.
The main difference from coming in sporadic visits and working full time here was the nature of the tasks (I know I'm pointing out the obvious, but I think I have to anyway). When I came visiting, I normally had a pre-arranged agenda, check this, meeting here, meeting him, meeting her, fix this, scrap that, and that was it, my visit was over. Now, I still had meetings and things to do, but those things were not pre-arranged, now I had to ask people to do things and get me things. That's when my first 'shockers' happened.
The first 'shocker', was in meetings. For my convenience meetings were all conducted in English, which made it pretty hard for the local guys, but also for me, because I wasn't used to English with Thai accent, I had to concentrate very hard to understand, thankfully English is a very forgiving language, and when people talked and misused words, given the context, I was still able to understand pretty much all. I'm pretty sure they had trouble understanding me as well, I tend to speak very fast, and even though I've been told I don't have a heavy accent, I'm sure my slight Italian/Spanish/Latino accent didn't make it very easy for them to understand. This shocker started dissipating quite fast, here I saw glimpses of them working as hard as me, or even harder to understand me. I saw many of the guys who would go into meetings with me, whose English was not so good, with dictionaries and English learning texts, they also started teaching me a few words in Thai. They would crack up every time I tried to speak in Thai, but that was all part of the fun of working with them. After a couple of weeks, we started understanding each other much better.
My advices for this shocker would be: Stick to a person who speaks English well and ask for a quick summary meeting after the main meeting - just in case you missed something, always carry a notebook and take lots of notes. Make sure someone is also generating the MoM (Minute of Meeting) and compare your notes with what was said in the MoM. If your notes are not in concordance with what was written in the MoM, clarify RIGHT AWAY, do not wait!!! As an extra note, one technique that worked well for me in meetings to generate the MoM, is rotating the responsibility, that way besides rotating the responsibility and teaching a bit of accountability, you're also teaching English skills. If you have the time, ask them to generate a draft of the MoM and then review it with you before sending it out.
My next shocker will talk about instructions, and how language and the structure of the same can give you big headaches when asking someone to do something.
See you in my next post!
Phrase of the day
If you have to choose between 2 evils, always choose the one you haven't tried before :P
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
My thanks to blogging geeks
As you know now, this is my first ever blog and this is also the second day I write in it, and I find it very difficult to keep focused on one topic only, because my brain behaves like a hyperactive kid running up and down and moving from the seesaw to the slider and then to the sandbox and back. But what I will write about now has been in my head more present than other stuff I want to post about, so I better get it out sooner rather than later...
I made a comment in my first ever post saying I was thinking on doing this for a very long time, and the time was now, well, there are several reasons why the time is now. No, I'm not sick, I'm not about to die (that I know), that's not the reason. I don't have many people I can talk to, and the people I normally talk to, look upon me for advice and as a model to follow (in some cases). I think I'm what many people call a 'nice guy', always helping people, giving advices and writing recommendation letters from scratch to people for new jobs to show them I care and that I remember why I hired them in the first place, this can be a huge task when you had lots of people in your departments and many of them have outgrown their baby clothes and are ready to take on new challenges.
I'm a very positive guy, I never give up and I never let a problem I cannot solve depress me for more than 24 hours, literally, I don't allow myself that. I also try not to bitch about life with the few people who wants to listen to me, because I'm a believer that negative thoughts bring negative things.
I will reveal something here only my wife and my parents know I'm doing. I'm taking classes from 3 different universities online and not just easy stuff, I'm taking a class in programming from Harvard, another one from UC Berkeleys and artificial intelligence from M.I.T., but this is totally not what I want to talk about, but it's slightly related. I've been a manager for more than 10 years now and I'm a happy guy managing people, I love mentoring and transferring my knowledge and experience to people in the hope they will get my job later down the road or better than me. But as a software engineer and assumed geek I also miss the smell of fresh code being brewed in the morning and that's the reason why I started these courses. Two of these courses touch the subject of programming in Python, a very cool programming language that I'm slowly getting to know and like. To make this long story short, I've been reading lots of blogs about Linux, Python and other technical stuff and although the reading was quite interesting, it got me curious about the people who wrote these blogs, because same as me now, they're just doing it as a 'labour of love', no one is paying them, not many people is saying well done, in my case, no one even started reading my blog yet, but they keep on doing it and I wanted to see why and how they are like. Funny enough, I realized they're kind of a community of nice guys, who spend their time trying to help others for no foreseeable reward, but to feel good with themselves and sometimes get a small recognition from their peers. But in some cases I went deeper and I started reading what they wrote about their personal lives, the problems they've been through and they continue going through.
I've been reading about workaholics like me, that now are working less and working out more (I, myself I've been working out a lot more lately), about geeks who became dads and because of that they spend more time with their families (or coding games for their kids instead), about nerdy guys who were happy being nerdy guys, but now because of cancer or other terrible reasons, they are no longer with us or will be shortly gone.
Many of these things I feel deeply identified with, I work extremely hard to be able to maintain my family, sometimes I make lots of money, sometimes I don't, but I always try hard and I always try my best.
I won't give you links to all the blogs I've been reading or talk more in depth about them, but if you're curious, you can see the blog of this guy, Jesse writing about his daughter, he's the writer of one of the blogs I read that convinced me to use my blog as, not only a tool to share my knowledge and love for geeky stuff and management, but also about myself and things that have happened in my life and are still happening, that normally I wouldn't share, not because I don't want to, but because I have no one to share them with in some cases.
I'd say the best example of this is the time my wife was in a coma, during that period (2 months), I slept in a hospital chair, because someone had to be there to authorize any medical procedure that was non-standard, and I'll have to say, that was more than 50% of the things that were done to her. During that time, many people went to visit her, she grew up here in Thailand and since she's such a nice person, there were tons of people who knew her who dropped by to see how she was doing, some of them, a fucking pain in the ass (forgive my French), with questions about funeral preparations, comments like "have you thought of re-marrying?" and other things like that, not counting the innumerable amount of time when I had to repeat the same story over and over again. The most recurrent question was "Does it have anything to do with her giving birth not long ago?", damn!!! That pissed me off big time, but I was able to keep my cool anyway because I know their intentions were good, it was annoying having to defend my little dude, and have to repeat to all these people I barely knew, "no, it had nothing to do with her pregnancy, it was a pre-existent condition that was luckily triggered after Alessio was born, otherwise we would have lost them both".
A couple of times, maybe 3 times, my own friends came to visit, Keenmeng, Kai, Ken, Keith and Handino (damn!!!, lots of my friend's names start with K), a couple of times I was able to chat with one of my childhood friends from Chile, Juan Carlos, but even with them I wasn't able to empty my head, because they had questions and I had to answer them and take care of them, I've got to recognize, I did bitch about stuff and had negative comments about the amputation of my wife's leg, nothing too bad and nothing really to do with her, just about feeling useless and wishing my idea of bypassing the catheter would have occurred to me earlier so I could have saved her leg. I even wished I would have listened to my mom when she told me she wanted to me to be a doctor, but it was all too late, all I could do now, was Google stuff and read medical books to prepare for when Stella was up and I had to explain her everything, and show her that life goes on, even on one limb. Due to my positive nature, I never prepared for what would happen if she didn't make it, in my positive mind, that was not an option, I'd do whatever I could to avoid her not being here anymore for my little dude, talking with the doctors in medical terms, going into meetings with them and tell them about treatments and ideas, sometimes freaking them out, sometimes giving useful observations and other times just pissing them off.
Now looking in retrospective, I think that was my way of coping with all that, keeping myself busy, reading a bit too much, playing way too many brain teasers and sudoku online.
In conclusion, I had a rough time, in some cases I'm still having it. Many things in my life haven't been going the way I wanted them to go, but reading these other guys have made me feel a bit better, I always knew I wasn't the only one with problems, and many times I wondered why the universe was punishing me, if I'm a 'nice guy', I thought of being an asshole for a while, stop helping people, stop playing by the rules, maybe that way I could make more money and be happier, but the truth is, nope, I won't be happier and it's in my nature helping people, makes me feel good with myself, and I'm not doing this to go to heaven, or to improve my karma in next life, because I'm not religious and I don't believe in these things (my mom will flip if she reads this after raising me as a devoted catholic :P). Reading these guys I found out there are many people with problems who are not quitting because they have problems, guys who don't blame god or bad karma or the Newtonian laws of cause and effect or bad luck, they just go on with their lives same as I'm doing because we know life is not easy, and because we know we can maybe change a little corner of the planet for our kids or even just for ourselves, because being negative and bitching about things brings nothing back.
This may sound stupid, but reading about their problems make me feel a bit better about my own problems, reading about them being 'good guys', 'good dads' and in general just 'good people' just for the sake of getting on with their lives put a smile on my face more often than putting some tears in my eyes with a bit of emotion, sometimes putting myself in their shoes thinking 'what if that was my son?'. Fuck, I don't know, I'm used to solve problems and find solutions, these things are hard for anyone, but seem to hit harder on people like me and some of them, socially impaired... When I post more things in the future, you will find out I have lots of troubles expressing my feelings, I can write a business plan like nothing, I can write a quarterly report with my eyes shut, I can design a full new software and a database schema in a few days which another guy would take weeks or months, but I can't say 'i love you' or 'thanks' or take a compliment with the same fluidity, I've got the feeling that's why many other guys a bit like me write blogs, they need an outlet just like me, to express their geekiness and creativity as well as to talk about their feelings.
This post is for you geeks, nerds who keep technical blogs and share your life with strangers in your personal posts, most people may not give a damn about what you have to say, but from time to time someone like me can stumble upon one of your posts and learn, and through your words feel a bit more connected with the world and his own feelings... if you're reading my post and you also stumble upon one of these geeks, say well done to them (if they have the anonymous comment option enabled), I think many of them will appreciate it.
From me, if one of those geeks stumble upon MY blog, just want to say THANKS! Keep up the good work! :)
I made a comment in my first ever post saying I was thinking on doing this for a very long time, and the time was now, well, there are several reasons why the time is now. No, I'm not sick, I'm not about to die (that I know), that's not the reason. I don't have many people I can talk to, and the people I normally talk to, look upon me for advice and as a model to follow (in some cases). I think I'm what many people call a 'nice guy', always helping people, giving advices and writing recommendation letters from scratch to people for new jobs to show them I care and that I remember why I hired them in the first place, this can be a huge task when you had lots of people in your departments and many of them have outgrown their baby clothes and are ready to take on new challenges.
I'm a very positive guy, I never give up and I never let a problem I cannot solve depress me for more than 24 hours, literally, I don't allow myself that. I also try not to bitch about life with the few people who wants to listen to me, because I'm a believer that negative thoughts bring negative things.
I will reveal something here only my wife and my parents know I'm doing. I'm taking classes from 3 different universities online and not just easy stuff, I'm taking a class in programming from Harvard, another one from UC Berkeleys and artificial intelligence from M.I.T., but this is totally not what I want to talk about, but it's slightly related. I've been a manager for more than 10 years now and I'm a happy guy managing people, I love mentoring and transferring my knowledge and experience to people in the hope they will get my job later down the road or better than me. But as a software engineer and assumed geek I also miss the smell of fresh code being brewed in the morning and that's the reason why I started these courses. Two of these courses touch the subject of programming in Python, a very cool programming language that I'm slowly getting to know and like. To make this long story short, I've been reading lots of blogs about Linux, Python and other technical stuff and although the reading was quite interesting, it got me curious about the people who wrote these blogs, because same as me now, they're just doing it as a 'labour of love', no one is paying them, not many people is saying well done, in my case, no one even started reading my blog yet, but they keep on doing it and I wanted to see why and how they are like. Funny enough, I realized they're kind of a community of nice guys, who spend their time trying to help others for no foreseeable reward, but to feel good with themselves and sometimes get a small recognition from their peers. But in some cases I went deeper and I started reading what they wrote about their personal lives, the problems they've been through and they continue going through.
I've been reading about workaholics like me, that now are working less and working out more (I, myself I've been working out a lot more lately), about geeks who became dads and because of that they spend more time with their families (or coding games for their kids instead), about nerdy guys who were happy being nerdy guys, but now because of cancer or other terrible reasons, they are no longer with us or will be shortly gone.
Many of these things I feel deeply identified with, I work extremely hard to be able to maintain my family, sometimes I make lots of money, sometimes I don't, but I always try hard and I always try my best.
I won't give you links to all the blogs I've been reading or talk more in depth about them, but if you're curious, you can see the blog of this guy, Jesse writing about his daughter, he's the writer of one of the blogs I read that convinced me to use my blog as, not only a tool to share my knowledge and love for geeky stuff and management, but also about myself and things that have happened in my life and are still happening, that normally I wouldn't share, not because I don't want to, but because I have no one to share them with in some cases.
I'd say the best example of this is the time my wife was in a coma, during that period (2 months), I slept in a hospital chair, because someone had to be there to authorize any medical procedure that was non-standard, and I'll have to say, that was more than 50% of the things that were done to her. During that time, many people went to visit her, she grew up here in Thailand and since she's such a nice person, there were tons of people who knew her who dropped by to see how she was doing, some of them, a fucking pain in the ass (forgive my French), with questions about funeral preparations, comments like "have you thought of re-marrying?" and other things like that, not counting the innumerable amount of time when I had to repeat the same story over and over again. The most recurrent question was "Does it have anything to do with her giving birth not long ago?", damn!!! That pissed me off big time, but I was able to keep my cool anyway because I know their intentions were good, it was annoying having to defend my little dude, and have to repeat to all these people I barely knew, "no, it had nothing to do with her pregnancy, it was a pre-existent condition that was luckily triggered after Alessio was born, otherwise we would have lost them both".
A couple of times, maybe 3 times, my own friends came to visit, Keenmeng, Kai, Ken, Keith and Handino (damn!!!, lots of my friend's names start with K), a couple of times I was able to chat with one of my childhood friends from Chile, Juan Carlos, but even with them I wasn't able to empty my head, because they had questions and I had to answer them and take care of them, I've got to recognize, I did bitch about stuff and had negative comments about the amputation of my wife's leg, nothing too bad and nothing really to do with her, just about feeling useless and wishing my idea of bypassing the catheter would have occurred to me earlier so I could have saved her leg. I even wished I would have listened to my mom when she told me she wanted to me to be a doctor, but it was all too late, all I could do now, was Google stuff and read medical books to prepare for when Stella was up and I had to explain her everything, and show her that life goes on, even on one limb. Due to my positive nature, I never prepared for what would happen if she didn't make it, in my positive mind, that was not an option, I'd do whatever I could to avoid her not being here anymore for my little dude, talking with the doctors in medical terms, going into meetings with them and tell them about treatments and ideas, sometimes freaking them out, sometimes giving useful observations and other times just pissing them off.
Now looking in retrospective, I think that was my way of coping with all that, keeping myself busy, reading a bit too much, playing way too many brain teasers and sudoku online.
In conclusion, I had a rough time, in some cases I'm still having it. Many things in my life haven't been going the way I wanted them to go, but reading these other guys have made me feel a bit better, I always knew I wasn't the only one with problems, and many times I wondered why the universe was punishing me, if I'm a 'nice guy', I thought of being an asshole for a while, stop helping people, stop playing by the rules, maybe that way I could make more money and be happier, but the truth is, nope, I won't be happier and it's in my nature helping people, makes me feel good with myself, and I'm not doing this to go to heaven, or to improve my karma in next life, because I'm not religious and I don't believe in these things (my mom will flip if she reads this after raising me as a devoted catholic :P). Reading these guys I found out there are many people with problems who are not quitting because they have problems, guys who don't blame god or bad karma or the Newtonian laws of cause and effect or bad luck, they just go on with their lives same as I'm doing because we know life is not easy, and because we know we can maybe change a little corner of the planet for our kids or even just for ourselves, because being negative and bitching about things brings nothing back.
This may sound stupid, but reading about their problems make me feel a bit better about my own problems, reading about them being 'good guys', 'good dads' and in general just 'good people' just for the sake of getting on with their lives put a smile on my face more often than putting some tears in my eyes with a bit of emotion, sometimes putting myself in their shoes thinking 'what if that was my son?'. Fuck, I don't know, I'm used to solve problems and find solutions, these things are hard for anyone, but seem to hit harder on people like me and some of them, socially impaired... When I post more things in the future, you will find out I have lots of troubles expressing my feelings, I can write a business plan like nothing, I can write a quarterly report with my eyes shut, I can design a full new software and a database schema in a few days which another guy would take weeks or months, but I can't say 'i love you' or 'thanks' or take a compliment with the same fluidity, I've got the feeling that's why many other guys a bit like me write blogs, they need an outlet just like me, to express their geekiness and creativity as well as to talk about their feelings.
This post is for you geeks, nerds who keep technical blogs and share your life with strangers in your personal posts, most people may not give a damn about what you have to say, but from time to time someone like me can stumble upon one of your posts and learn, and through your words feel a bit more connected with the world and his own feelings... if you're reading my post and you also stumble upon one of these geeks, say well done to them (if they have the anonymous comment option enabled), I think many of them will appreciate it.
From me, if one of those geeks stumble upon MY blog, just want to say THANKS! Keep up the good work! :)
Monday, August 27, 2012
Phrase of the day
This is my first post of this section, I used to do this on Facebook before, but I got bored. These are my original phrases, born from long bathroom sessions, showers, watching TV, and sometimes just sitting somewhere, they're all original, so if you've seen them before or something similar, is just purely coincidental.
For today:
"I'm not pro gay marriage, I'm pro marriage, full stop... If an institution is created, but only some can participate, that has no other name but 'discrimination'"
For today:
"I'm not pro gay marriage, I'm pro marriage, full stop... If an institution is created, but only some can participate, that has no other name but 'discrimination'"
A glimpse into me and my family
Personal stuff... hmmm... hard topic.
I can start with telling you about me, simple things like my name and where I was born, but I will instead start with telling you shortly what I will do in this section. I will share personal experiences, family stuff, one or two pics of my little dude and personal problems (maybe).
Now the easy stuff. My name is Giovanni Bergamin, I was born in in March 18th, 1977. I've got 2 brothers I love very much but because I moved to Asia, I don't see much, their names are Franco and Fabrizio, I really wish I could see them more, because I really like spending time with them. My parents Enzo and Patricia, also love them loads. My dad, can't stay in one place for more than 5 minutes, he's always on the move, fixing stuff, getting dirty and crying with movies on TV, tough exterior, creamy filling. My mom, she's a party girl, a socialite, always in some party, meeting with friends or charity or in courses to learn new stuff, she's a bit of an artist, painting and writing poetry, I've got several of her paintings and to be honest, I like them quite a bit (not writing this for her, since I know she will never read it, she's what we would call, computer impaired :P).
All of them living in the same country where I was born. I don't think I need to tell you, we were an Italian family living in Chile, I'm sure you can deduct this by the names :)
About my new family, yes, I'm married, in fact Stella (my wife), was the main reason I moved here, she's also Italian and had a successful modeling career here in Thailand (she was also an actress), she works now as a GM for her family business. She's a great person, strong, caring, an excellent mom and a great friend.
In January a bit more than 2 years ago, she gave birth to my son, Alessio on January 2nd, but I will get back to that a bit later, because this is all about her right now, 2 weeks after that, she got very ill, because of complications related to a hyperparatyroidism we were not able to detect in time (even though we tried very hard), she was in a coma for 2 months and because of complications derived from her body rejecting the machine that in the long run saved her life, she lost her right leg above the knee. Now she has her 'robot leg', as we used to call it before, and she goes about her business almost 100% normal. That can give you a good idea on how wonderful and strong she is... I will probably talk about the hospital and things that happen during that time later, when I feel like it :)
My son, we call him piggy, because of the funny snort like sounds he makes sometimes when he laughs. He's the reason I stress myself about everything and also the reason I can relax after a stressful day. He smiles and I melt, do I really need to say more? I better post a picture of him, so you can understand.
I think this can give you a good idea about my family and me, I will be writing more about all of them, but mostly about me and my interaction with them, after all, this is my blog and it's about ME :)
About managing in Asia, an introduction
It'd be very egocentric of me saying I know everything about managing in Asia, I don't and I'm still learning, but being more than 8 years here and managing from small departments and companies to big departments and big companies I can say with certain property, that I've been through a lot!
I've seen authors talk about culture clashes and about learning about culture and customs before you go to some new place. Well, that can help a bit, but no matter how much you read and think you know before you reach your Asian destination, you will get a surprise once you get there. These surprises can be several things i.e., gastronomic, like the infamous 'Deli-belly', religious, like someone standing up in the middle of a meeting or conversation because they have to do their prayers, gestural, like the peace hand-sign but showing the dorsal part of the hand (my British friends found this quite amusing), idiomatic, like someone saying 'I like cock' when they really meant to say 'I like Coke' (some very funny here, but will probably leave them for later on my writings), and many more.
Some people call these barriers, I don't, I call them shockers, and the reason I don't agree with the term barriers is because they're not, they're just things that shock you when you first arrived to a different place, and some of them, believe me, will shock you until the day you die. But these shockers happen everywhere, even if you stay in your own country and move jobs or even just departments.
Once you get used to these shockers, they shock you less or they stop shocking you altogether.
But now let's face it, you're the invader in their land and you're the weird one in this place, not them. And if you were to go against them using you physical strength, forget it dudes or dudettes, you'll get your ass kicked, always remember, they outnumber you, this is their country :)
Well, they sent or hired a foreigner to Asia because the locals in charge couldn't understand the way foreigners ask them to do things or just plainly, didn't get along with other people. So, you were sent or hired to:
I will try to explain you how to become a good 'translation manager' and hope you can criticize me and my ideas as much as you can, so I can learn from this, my first blog ever... For today I think it's enough, I hope you don't find my way of writing boring and my one or two bad words offensive, I can tell them in front of my kids, so since this is partly an outlet for me, I will be saying them here :P
Have a good day everyone and I really mean everyone, reader, non-reader, catholic, muslim, jewish, christian, agnostic, atheist, etc.
I've seen authors talk about culture clashes and about learning about culture and customs before you go to some new place. Well, that can help a bit, but no matter how much you read and think you know before you reach your Asian destination, you will get a surprise once you get there. These surprises can be several things i.e., gastronomic, like the infamous 'Deli-belly', religious, like someone standing up in the middle of a meeting or conversation because they have to do their prayers, gestural, like the peace hand-sign but showing the dorsal part of the hand (my British friends found this quite amusing), idiomatic, like someone saying 'I like cock' when they really meant to say 'I like Coke' (some very funny here, but will probably leave them for later on my writings), and many more.
Some people call these barriers, I don't, I call them shockers, and the reason I don't agree with the term barriers is because they're not, they're just things that shock you when you first arrived to a different place, and some of them, believe me, will shock you until the day you die. But these shockers happen everywhere, even if you stay in your own country and move jobs or even just departments.
Once you get used to these shockers, they shock you less or they stop shocking you altogether.
But now let's face it, you're the invader in their land and you're the weird one in this place, not them. And if you were to go against them using you physical strength, forget it dudes or dudettes, you'll get your ass kicked, always remember, they outnumber you, this is their country :)
Well, they sent or hired a foreigner to Asia because the locals in charge couldn't understand the way foreigners ask them to do things or just plainly, didn't get along with other people. So, you were sent or hired to:
- Satisfy a necessity related with the Western world
- Work as a link between the Western and Eastern worlds
- Increase productivity
- Reduce costs
So far is all quite obvious, but have you thought how you will do all these things?
That brings us to lesson 1 and the topic of today's blog.
Forget everything you know about managing and all the books you read about it, they may not apply where you are going, you have to be a 'flexible' manager, many things you learned before, may not work in Asia, you will have to find a way to achieve the same or similar results, through other methods or a modification of what you 'learned' before.
In simple words, you will have to become a hybrid, you will have to stay Western enough to be able to receive requirements and ideas from your old life's people and learn your new culture well enough to be able to translate those requirements and ideas in a way your new people will understand them, share them and follow them, and vice versa of course. You will become a 'translation manager' and if you do your job well, you will probably like it a lot, you will feel very useful.
I started this blog talking about authors and how their books will most likely not help you much, I still maintain this, but it doesn't mean you should stop reading managerial books, I'm assuming that, whoever is reading my blog, is a smart person with imagination and all this said, I'd assume that you don't read managerial books to follow them as if it was a rule or a law, you read them to get ideas on what could apply to you and even use these ideas as a spring-board and jump higher than the author with your own 'genius' ideas, and improve ideas the author suggested or even come up with you own theories and management paradigms, I love to read them all!!!
My writings are mostly about me and my experiences managing in Asia, so I won't be recommending books or talk about particular managerial styles, but I will talk about things I've seen which have worked well for me and things I've seen and done that I'm sure don't work in this beautiful part of this gorgeous planet.
I will try to explain you how to become a good 'translation manager' and hope you can criticize me and my ideas as much as you can, so I can learn from this, my first blog ever... For today I think it's enough, I hope you don't find my way of writing boring and my one or two bad words offensive, I can tell them in front of my kids, so since this is partly an outlet for me, I will be saying them here :P
Have a good day everyone and I really mean everyone, reader, non-reader, catholic, muslim, jewish, christian, agnostic, atheist, etc.
My first ever blog post
Well... here we go. My name is Giovanni, my friends and family call me Gio (I've been called other names too, some good, some bad, but for space reasons, I will stick to Gio), I'm, at the moment I'm writing this, 35 years, 5 months and 9 days old. I've got a beautiful wife, who's one of my best friends and a 2 and a half year old son, who's my life and for whom I'm partly doing this...
I've been thinking long and hard about blogging for several reasons and several years, until today, day I decided, it was time. My reasons are mainly 2, but I have more, which I may or may not reveal as the time passes, also since reasons could change, but mainly my 2 reasons are: first, when I arrived in Asia I wish I could have found a blog for a young manager to read that would give me pointers and experiences on how hard or easy could be to manage people from a culture that, can look for some, as alien as managing in an unknown planet. Second, I don't have many friends here and the ones I got are, for lack of a better word, 'busy' and we don't meet or talk much, so I thought this could be a good outlet for me to talk to everyone and no-one at the same time.
I won't publicize my blog to people I know, instead I want people who are looking for subjects I'm talking about, learn from my mistakes and experiences and maybe ask me questions or comment in my topics. From the beginning you should know I welcome all questions, posts, critics, hatred letters, etc. Learning is a life-long experience and I want to learn from everything and everyone, in fact this blog will be a big learning experience for me, even if no one reads it :)
I'm doing this for very selfish reasons as well as trying to help whoever I can. I read many managerial books and blogs in my life, most of them beautified versions of bullshit and unpractical things which are so hard to do, that when you can do them, they don't apply anymore or don't work the way they should, others gave me very little I didn't know or they were just plainly a waste of time. My first and only advice in my first post here is "apply as much common sense to your management as you can, no matter if what you're planning to do applies or not to the managerial methodology your company adheres to". Common sense is not a common thing, even for authors writing books... I really hope here you can find something that can help you with your career or life in general.
I will divide my blogs in several areas, going from technical to personal, so enjoy the ride... if you have time, are interested in what I have to say, or just bored and want to read something from someone you probably don't know.
For all you who will 'potentially' read me, please bear in mind, English is not my mother language, but I thought I could reach more people in English (universal language of business and technical geeks like me), than with languages I manage much better as Spanish and Italian, but if you have questions in those languages, please feel free to write to me in them and if I think your question will serve others, will do my best to translate it into English to the best of my abilities to enrich the conversation. I really hope there will be people out there who will want to read my blog, but if not, I will continue writing and maybe some day my little dude will read them and understand daddy a bit better. if you think my blog could be better written better, you want to correct my grammar and/or syntax, then go to hell... hahahaha, nah, just kidding, please let me know, any comments or suggestions will be more than welcome, they will be deeply appreciated.
So you know how I look, here's a picture one of my staff took of me in one of our outings together:
I've been thinking long and hard about blogging for several reasons and several years, until today, day I decided, it was time. My reasons are mainly 2, but I have more, which I may or may not reveal as the time passes, also since reasons could change, but mainly my 2 reasons are: first, when I arrived in Asia I wish I could have found a blog for a young manager to read that would give me pointers and experiences on how hard or easy could be to manage people from a culture that, can look for some, as alien as managing in an unknown planet. Second, I don't have many friends here and the ones I got are, for lack of a better word, 'busy' and we don't meet or talk much, so I thought this could be a good outlet for me to talk to everyone and no-one at the same time.
I won't publicize my blog to people I know, instead I want people who are looking for subjects I'm talking about, learn from my mistakes and experiences and maybe ask me questions or comment in my topics. From the beginning you should know I welcome all questions, posts, critics, hatred letters, etc. Learning is a life-long experience and I want to learn from everything and everyone, in fact this blog will be a big learning experience for me, even if no one reads it :)
I'm doing this for very selfish reasons as well as trying to help whoever I can. I read many managerial books and blogs in my life, most of them beautified versions of bullshit and unpractical things which are so hard to do, that when you can do them, they don't apply anymore or don't work the way they should, others gave me very little I didn't know or they were just plainly a waste of time. My first and only advice in my first post here is "apply as much common sense to your management as you can, no matter if what you're planning to do applies or not to the managerial methodology your company adheres to". Common sense is not a common thing, even for authors writing books... I really hope here you can find something that can help you with your career or life in general.
I will divide my blogs in several areas, going from technical to personal, so enjoy the ride... if you have time, are interested in what I have to say, or just bored and want to read something from someone you probably don't know.
For all you who will 'potentially' read me, please bear in mind, English is not my mother language, but I thought I could reach more people in English (universal language of business and technical geeks like me), than with languages I manage much better as Spanish and Italian, but if you have questions in those languages, please feel free to write to me in them and if I think your question will serve others, will do my best to translate it into English to the best of my abilities to enrich the conversation. I really hope there will be people out there who will want to read my blog, but if not, I will continue writing and maybe some day my little dude will read them and understand daddy a bit better. if you think my blog could be better written better, you want to correct my grammar and/or syntax, then go to hell... hahahaha, nah, just kidding, please let me know, any comments or suggestions will be more than welcome, they will be deeply appreciated.
So you know how I look, here's a picture one of my staff took of me in one of our outings together:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)