June 18, 2005 – 12:42 pm
If you are a company that prefers to hire (cheaper) new grads with no skills but lots of potential, you better as a company set in place a policy that gives your people the time and resources to train those fresh grads into skilled workers.
If you don’t have the time and resource, if you insist on working everyone at 120%, then you better damn well hire only people you can use off the bat, who already know how to work and grow on their own. Otherwise, your company is never gonna get better, and in fact it will just get bigger and worse.
Anyway, have your teams share and exchange and report. Commit to education and training. Deferred gratification.
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June 15, 2005 – 11:19 am
Hmm, been neglecting blog-chan. Anyway…
Yesterday I made my first presentation to a Japanese client, in Japanese. It was a bunch of bigwigs at a major newspaper publisher, accompanied by some dudes from a somewhat famous consulting firm (okay, quite famous), and other miscellaneous Interested Parties.
I had been working on said presentation like mad for the last week or so. I realized, halfway through, that it was pretty frickin’ hard to wing the explanation of a very technical, complex technology, structure and site concept. Ugh. Not pleasant. People say I did very well for speaking in a non-native tongue, but I’m just upset with myself that I failed to perform well at a very important meeting, up to standards of any other Japanese.
Another thing that is frustrating is just how much time the presentation consumed. We’re not talking just the anount of time required to write sentences or create examples. (Which, incidentally, could be due to both inadequate language skills and intelligence levels, I’m starting to feel.) Without being able to do final checks, I have to wait on others to do the polishing up. On the one hand, it’s ridding me of my micro-management tendencies. On the other, everything takes a long time.
One solution is to graduate to not making the nitty gritty, and just spell out the main story and points to hit. Kinda like how I design sites and technologies now, without touching one wit of programming or design.
Okay, I do a lot of design. Overall design. It’s good.
What else happened in the past couple weeks:
- Karen and MG came over from Korea, bearing gifts of soju, seaweed and kimchi. We went to an onsen in Hakone with Jun and Ayu. Was good.
- Went drinking with dudes from work at a really nifty place close to my house. Expensive but excellent sake.
- After that, went to Shinjuku for a club event with a friend, till it was light out and I was ready to keel over. The crowd was young, the music sucked, there were some very pretty people, and some not very pretty people, and my friend could only shake her head in exasperation when I refused to pick anyone up. Sorry, ain’t my style…
- Dead dead dead the next day. Lack of sleep is becoming an everyday experience. I can survive it, it’s just like going through a day with fuzz in your brain and the feeling that your body has been wrung out
- BTW, the beautiful traditional black kawara tiles on my house have been removed. “Dangerous in an earthquake” they say. The replacement was an extremely ugly green sheeting, which didn’t even have the decency to look more than half-heartedly shoved on. I think I would have rather taken my chances in an earthquake.
- Hekiru’s new single “Neppuu” came out. It’s a song about losing your love. Hekiru’s mail message talks about love and lost and other shit like that. It’s depressing, really, because…
- Quite soon, I will see a good friend again. There were many memories, and too many things left unsaid.
The rainy season has started.
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