This whole internet thing is going to be big someday...

I promised Janelle that I would participate. I'm not the most outgoing and/or open person and I am not even sure anyone really wants to read this. However, it does seem like a good way to share thoughts and ideas with my son. As he gets older and is able to experience more life, maybe someday he will value the time his mother puts in on things like scrap books, photo albums and this blog. And for the rest of you... well, I'm not making you read this.

This has been a crazy couple of weeks for my work. We've been working at a pretty high clip for several months now but these last few weeks have really been a crunch time for us. For those of you who know me; you know that if I'm going to do something then I'm going to try and do it the best that I can. I may not always be better than the next guy, but I have that competitive nature that keeps me going and it is often persistence that pays off. These last couple of weeks I decided that I was going to put in the extra hours needed to really have crunch time produce a result that the whole team could be proud of. With a lot hours of hard work, some amount of coordinating team members and some cheerleading, we "may" meet our deadline tomorrow night. The fact that I have to use quotes around the word may or that I even have to use the word at all really bothers me. It's true that ultimately, the success or the failure of any team falls on the weakest link.

When I used to make sports a priority (and I probably should make more time again), I always gravitated to games like tennis and golf. With golf, success or failure is ultimately on me, in tennis it's on me and the guy staring me down on the other side of the net. But if I didn't perform well and I lost, the only person to get upset with was me. I think I really could have used some more time playing sports that were more team focused like basketball or football. Not because I am not a "team player", but because part of that experience is really learning how to deal with your teammates when they let you down.

I've been a manager, and I think that I have a pretty good grasp on the need to balance circumstances with business, but I really wish I could definitively make this statement: In the work place, if you're that weak link, you only get the one chance to find out that very important piece of information before you are told to pack up. Failure is not an option.

The truth is, the people that are the weak link become very good at staying around. A handful of them even become managers. Maybe I'm just in the wrong company, but one would think that Microsoft could add some shareholder value if they were a little more hard-line on performance. Give bigger bonuses for success and trim the fat more aggressively on failure.

All that being said, we "may" still meet this deadline tomorrow. Either way there are a couple of people that need a good kick the rear. But I am proud of the work that most of the team and I have done over the last few months.

I'll post a comment saying whether or not we make it tomorrow night.