Professional Development > Leadership
Leadership
I am an enthusiastic "right hand man" when I find an inspiring leader, but I can just as easily take the reigns of leadership myself.
Over the years I have initiated several IT-related projects even when I wasn't working in an IT role, because I saw a gap that I could fill. I have initiated and completed complete overhauls of several websites, including the Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations, and a prior version of the MIM Software website. While I worked for MIM as part of the sales team, I saw that there was no easy way to visually group client sites on a map to help make travel more efficient. I had tinkered with Google Maps on several occasions in the past, and I started to make inquiries in the engineering department to see if the home-grown customer relationship management database could be tweaked in such a way that I could pull address, sales status, demographic data, and recent notes. We formed a loose ad hoc group where they made changes to the back end while I built a fully functional prototype for a Google Maps front end that would display color coded pins based on how fresh or stale the leads were, along with popup bubbles that showed the name of the site, address, and the most recent note. The data was sortable and filterable by sales team or even by individual salesperson, and it could also be filtered by product line.
On the more human side of leadership, when I was still at Case Western Reserve University, I served as Staff Advisor to two groups: the CWRU Aikido Club and the Case DDR Club. The DDR Club was quite literally fun and games because it was based off a weekly gathering of students and local community members who met to play the music and rhythm video game Dance Dance Revolution. The CWRU Aikido Club was a more serious role. Aikido is a martial art based on fluidity of movement, redirection of momentum, and manipulation of balance with the goal of diffusing conflict or better yet avoiding it altogether through awareness of one's surroundings. The club met twice each week and our senseis (teachers) came from a local city-wide dojo. In order to test for ranks, we traveled to the main dojo periodically. We also traveled as a group to regional weekend seminars in other cities, and it was my responsibility to chaperone the group and make sure that our behavior reflected well on the university. In most cases I worried about the behavior of our hosts much more than the behavior of my group. I also sat in on meetings of the student governance of the club and helped them to overhaul the club constitution into a document that other clubs eventually started to use as a template for their own constitutions.
Over the years I have initiated several IT-related projects even when I wasn't working in an IT role, because I saw a gap that I could fill. I have initiated and completed complete overhauls of several websites, including the Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations, and a prior version of the MIM Software website. While I worked for MIM as part of the sales team, I saw that there was no easy way to visually group client sites on a map to help make travel more efficient. I had tinkered with Google Maps on several occasions in the past, and I started to make inquiries in the engineering department to see if the home-grown customer relationship management database could be tweaked in such a way that I could pull address, sales status, demographic data, and recent notes. We formed a loose ad hoc group where they made changes to the back end while I built a fully functional prototype for a Google Maps front end that would display color coded pins based on how fresh or stale the leads were, along with popup bubbles that showed the name of the site, address, and the most recent note. The data was sortable and filterable by sales team or even by individual salesperson, and it could also be filtered by product line.
On the more human side of leadership, when I was still at Case Western Reserve University, I served as Staff Advisor to two groups: the CWRU Aikido Club and the Case DDR Club. The DDR Club was quite literally fun and games because it was based off a weekly gathering of students and local community members who met to play the music and rhythm video game Dance Dance Revolution. The CWRU Aikido Club was a more serious role. Aikido is a martial art based on fluidity of movement, redirection of momentum, and manipulation of balance with the goal of diffusing conflict or better yet avoiding it altogether through awareness of one's surroundings. The club met twice each week and our senseis (teachers) came from a local city-wide dojo. In order to test for ranks, we traveled to the main dojo periodically. We also traveled as a group to regional weekend seminars in other cities, and it was my responsibility to chaperone the group and make sure that our behavior reflected well on the university. In most cases I worried about the behavior of our hosts much more than the behavior of my group. I also sat in on meetings of the student governance of the club and helped them to overhaul the club constitution into a document that other clubs eventually started to use as a template for their own constitutions.