The three Strengths exercises (energize/drain journal and paper, StrengthsFinder online quiz, and the Strengthsfinder Worskhop with Professor Busch) that I completed for BUAD 620 and the results of the Birkman test that I completed for MGMT 614 provided excellent insights into my personality.  I discovered key linkages repeatedly revealing themselves in the results from these activities, and I found many overlapping elements that helped me understand my core strengths.  This knowledge provided guidelines that I have added to my approach to meeting my professional and personal goals.

THE TEACH-INTELLECTION-DEVELOPER LINKAGE

Teaching was one of the energizing activities I derived from my energize/drain journal, and this links with the intellection and developer themes revealed in my top five strengths.  As evidenced by my intellection strength, my appreciation for intellectual conversations explains my interest in the cerebral discussions that often occur when I teach others.  Also, the developer theme explains my interest in seeing people grow as a result of my teaching efforts.  Finally, my Birkman results identified a strong link to the literary area of interest which describes my fondness for abstract ideas and creative communication.

This linkage also explains why I feel drained when I lack knowledge about a subject.  If I do not have a sufficient level of knowledge about something, then I am unable to teach others and help them grow.  Therefore, ignorance prevents me from operating in my themes of intellection and developer.  As a result of this insight, I was further convinced that I need to find a career path that allows me to educate others and invest in their growth and development.

THE TECHNOLOGY-INTELLECTION-CONNECTEDNESS LINKAGE

Using technology was another energizing activity I identified from the contents of my energize/drain journal.  This also links with my intellection strength, but it also links with one of my other top five strengths:  connectedness.  One primary reason I am drawn to technology is the way it lowers the barriers between people.  For example, with a cheap webcam and an affordable internet connection, two people can communicate and see each other despite being separated by vast geographic distances.  Also, online social networks like Facebook allow individuals to reconnect with long lost childhood friends or become friends with those they would have otherwise never met.  Technology is helping people understand that we are all connected, and our ability to participate in shared human experiences can be very enriching and powerful.  This technology enabled connectivity is one reason I am so fascinated by the many ways technology changes the way people live and interact.  Furthermore, my Birkman results showed a strong link to the scientific area of interest which reinforces my desire to work in the technology industry.

My tendency to become drained by new experiences may also be explained by this linkage.  When I do something for the first time, I initially lack the ability to connect it with similar experiences that would provide me with insight into how to best perform the task.  This disconnects me from a comfortable frame of reference, and I lose motivation and interest in the task.  In the business world, when presented with a new idea or activity, I will have to seek connections between it and a similar experience.  If I am unable to do so, then I will need to find colleagues who can help me see these connections.

THE FAMILY-BELIEF-CONTEXT LINKAGE

Spending time with my family was another energizing activity highlighted by my energize/drain journal, and this links with the belief and context themes shown in my top five strengths.  Taking an active role in the success of my family is one of my core values.  No matter how impressive the accolades I may gain in other areas of my life, they would all become meaningless if I fail as a son, husband, and father.  Also, my deep interest in understanding my family tree and the lessons of my ancestors is explained by the context theme.  I believe that I can better understand my present circumstances by learning about my family history.  It will be important for any company that desires my employment to respect my desire to balance my work responsibilities with the needs of my family.

My belief strength may also explain why I become drained by details.  Having a strong set of core values helps me when I have to make obvious moral choices.  However, my values do not always provide clear choices when I have to deal with the subtle nuances of morally ambiguous decisions.  As a business professional, I will have to make sure I have multiple viewpoints to help me see a decision from multiple viewpoints.  It will be important for me to work on diverse teams and respect and encourage the expression of perspectives even when they are contrary to my own.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

When I began the Texas A&M MBA program, I expected a rigorous education in the core business topics of accounting, finance, operations, strategy, and management. The program has provided such an education, but I was pleasantly surprised by the opportunities to take an introspective view of who I am as a person.  The three Strengths exercises and the Birkman test provided the opportunity for me to become better acquainted with myself.

I have grown in many ways over the past nine months.  Some of the growth was due to the confirmation of the skills I knew were strong before I entered the program.  These included information technology expertise, strong written and verbal communication ability, and effective leadership strength.  It was comforting to know that these skills transferred from the professional world to the academic world in an intact state.

I also grew by being surprised by the areas in which I was weak.  Despite my strong technical background and an overall strong mathematical aptitude, I have struggled in my accounting and finance courses.  While I once thought I could adequately function as an accountant or financial analysis, I know realize that those would be very poor career choices!

I have also grown to love the culture and history of Texas A&M.  Having gained my undergraduate degree from the University of Texas at Austin, I was apprehensive about my ability to fully integrate into life as an Aggie.  However, the awesome traditions of Texas A&M, the genuine friendliness behind the signature “howdy” greeting, and the excellence of the faculty have converted me into a lifelong lover of this great campus.

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Today is the first day of the New Year.  I hope that the next 364 days are very good to everyone.

This is just a short blog post to acknowledge this milestone.  I could do something like see how many of the predictions I made last year came true, but I’ll give you a hint: I was wrong about most of them!

However, I do think that 2009 will be a great year for technology.  I hope to see many advances across the board.

I also think that 2009 will be a trying time for almost everyone.  We have a weakening global economy and various conflicts around the globe.  I hope that all of us try to make things easier for someone else in some way every day.

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America has been blessed with a plethora of inspirational leaders and people who have worked to advance the common good. We see it in many of our Presidents, activists, and also regular citizens who work in obscurity.

Many of these individuals have been blessed with great intellect, drive, stamina, or just a desire to help those who are less fortunate. However, is being “extra ordinary” a ticket to a life of ease that few of us will ever enjoy?

The latter part of verse 48 in the 12th chapter of the Biblical book of Luke states:

When someone has been given much, much will be required in return; and when someone has been entrusted with much, even more will be required.

A more contemporary version of this can be found in the Spider-Man comic book where Peter Parker’s uncle cautioned him that,

With great power comes great responsibility.

Many of us wish that we were given the “much”. Maybe it is great intellectual insight (e.g., Albert Einstein) or some innate aptitude for a certain sport (e.g., Tiger Woods). Many of us want to be extraordinarily beautiful, handsome, strong, wise, and we often begrudge those who have been blessed with those attributes, seemingly with little effort on their part.

However, there is a burden that comes with those blessings. Often, there is the weight of simply being different. Women who are extremely attractive often lament being hated in high school by other girls. Also, men often find them intimidating so they sometimes find it hard to date. Also, being extraordinary often has the same outcome of being inferior: loneliness. When who you are sets you well above the general population, then you often find yourself alone.

Perhaps it is not surprising that people who are naturally good at certain things feel a duty to serve.  Maybe they want to do something to combat the feelingness of loneliness.  They may feel that despite their “specialness”, people often fear and distrust them.  So, they try to do as much good as possible to finally be accepted.  The very things that make people want to be like them often make it difficult for others to understand them.

Since, by definition, most of us are average, we would do well to appreciate our mundane attributes. We are free to live our lives sheltered by ordinariness without the burden of being fantastic, amazing, or incredible. This makes forming friendships easier, and shields from the often extreme reactions (including inflated expectations) that the “gifted” endure. Indeed, being just “regular” means that you are “normal”. And normalcy offers greater freedom than those who are “rare” are able to enjoy.

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The Presidential Election of 2008 brought a new found interest in politics.  The historic campaigns of Barack Obama (offering the first African American President) and John McCain (offering the first female Vice President) caused many people around the world to follow the political process in unprecedented detail.

What was not so historic was the emphasis on the religious views of both candidates.  Despite his well established Christian faith, Obama had to constantly deal with false rumors that he was a Muslim.  While McCain never showed the overt displays of religious belief that George W. Bush displayed, his pick of Sarah Palin for his running mate was a clear bone thrown to Christian conservatives.

It is clear that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for a person who professed to be an atheist to be elected President of the United States.  This is due to the religious foundation of this country.  Many of the early settlers of America were Puritans, and their views can be summed up in the famous speech by John Winthrop in which he described the young country as a “City upon a Hill”.  This speech set forth the idea that the world would be watching America to see if it held true to it’s covenant with God.  Furthermore, America’s success or failure would be based on whether or not it maintained Christian principles and values.  In many ways, the early Puritan settlers saw the new country as a congregation and not just a collection of colonies.

Naturally, the view of America as a church led to the belief that the President was, in many ways, a pastor who was responsible for nurturing the spiritual health and well being of those under his leadership.  George Washington underscored this belief in his Farewell Address composed at the end of his second term as President (which set the precedent that Presidents would only serve two terms).  In this address, Washington cautioned Americans against the idea that “that morality can be maintained without religion”.  By tightly connecting morality and religion, Washington enforced the idea that a moral President had to be a religious (i.e., Christian) person.

This idea of a “Christian President” continued in both explicit and implicit forms throughout the history of America.  During times of national peril, Presidents drew from the Bible and Christian principles to guide and consol the nation.  Despite the fact that Article VI of the United States Constitution explicitly states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States” (commonly called the “no religious test clause“), few Americans would be comfortable with an atheist as a President.

However, America has changed in many ways from its early days as a colony of those professing Puritan morals and values.  The population of the United States is composed of many relgious faiths including those who claim no religious faith at all.  Should Americans still expect the President to be Pastor, shepherding the country through good times as well as bad times?  Or, is America more like a corporation that needs a strong CEO who should only be expected to run the country well?

If Americans came to view the President as more of a CEO, then they would expect fiscal responsibility with the budget, a strategic vision for the country, a plan for defeating competitors, a marketing strategy to positively promote the country, and efforts to maintain high individual productivity and morale.  Few Americans know whether or not the CEO of their company is a Christian so a President’s personal faith would be irrelevant under this point of view.

In the difficult economic climate of America, many Americans want a President who can solve their problems.  Just as a person who is drowning does not check the Christianity of someone who dives in to save them before accepting their help, most citizens simply want a healthy job market, low taxes, and reasonable prices for goods and services.  Imposing religious requirements on a President is a privilege that often only nations going through prosperous times can afford.

So, will the President of the United States be one day sworn in on the balance sheet and income statement of the country instead of a Bible?  As America continues to diversify and go through tough economic times, such an outcome may not be far from reality.

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I have a laptop in the kitchen that I use to look up recipes, catch up on feeds in my RSS reader (Google Reader), check the weather and do general web surfing. It’s not a powerful computer at all being an ancient Dell Inspiron 4100 with in Intel Pentium III clocking at 1.2 GHz and 256 MB of RAM. While these were impressive specs when the laptop came out in 2001, they are quite wimpy by today’s standards.

I initially tried to run Windows XP on the laptop, but waiting 15 minutes for the machine to boot up became hard to bear. Additionally, every task took forever to complete so I realized that, despite my very limited requirements, the laptop needed a more forgiving operating system. So, I then tried Windows 2000 which improved the performance of the laptop, but it still often took up to a minute just to launch a web browser.

It then occurred to me that a lightweight operating system would be ideal for my laptop. However, such an option was not available from Microsoft and nothing from Apple would run on a Dell laptop even if they had a solution. So, I decided to look to the Linux world and eventually found Puppy Linux.

Puppy Linux is a lightweight Linux distribution that has a very small footprint. The distribution is only 85 MB and can be run as a live-CD meaning that it can run from a CD-ROM drive instead of from the actual computer hard drive. This offers the convenience of trying Puppy Linux without modifying the resident operating system on the computer.

I downloaded the Puppy Linux distribution (version 4.1.2), burned the resulting .ISO file to a CD, and then inserted the CD into my kitchen laptop. I initially ran it from the CD and used the option to load the entire Puppy Linux operating system into RAM. Doing this required 128 MB of RAM, and my laptop had 256 MB which was plenty of room. The installation went very smoothly being composed of a number of wizards that stepped me through each step. Soon, I was greeted with the Puppy Linux desktop.

The interface was clean and similar in layout to Windows XP with a Menu button in the place of the Start button, and applications ran in a task bar. Clearly labeled icons on the desktop indicated which applications I should use to browse the filesytem, write a document, or browse the web.

Since the main use of my kitchen laptop is to surf the internet, I clicked the icon for the “browse” which launched SeaMonkey, the native web browser in Puppy Linux. It was clearly based on the same Mozilla source code that underlies Firefox, but it looked a couple of years out of date. At first, I was unable to get online, but I clicked the “setup” icon on the desktop, found the entry to marked “connect to the internet or intranet…” and configured my ethernet adaptor to use DHCP. This fixed the problem, and I was soon browsing the web using Seamonkey.

SeaMonkey did a good job of faithfully rendering web pages. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that it also played flash content on sites like YouTube and Hulu. However, the main benefit was that SeaMonkey (along with the overall operating system) ran extremely fast. Since a CPU can quickly access RAM, the operating system was very smooth and responsive. I launched some of the other native Puppy Linux like Abiword, the word processor, and it also ran well. I found that I could open multiple tabs in SeaMonkey and still achieve great performance.

Although SeaMonkey was a decent web browser, I yearned for the familiarity of Firefox. I used Puppy Linux’s package manager, PETGet and found Firefox 2.0.0.7. This was not the very latest version of Firefox out in the wild, but it provided the classic Firefox look and feel. I found that Firefox ran as responsively as SeaMonkey, and I realized that I had found a great operating system for my old kitchen laptop.

Although my kitchen laptop is rarely turned off, I didn’t want to have to configure DHCP and install Firefox in case I had to reboot the machine (which would wipe out RAM and force me to run the Live CD again). So, I formated the NTFS hard drive of the laptop into a Linux friendly ext3 format and installed Puppy Linux to the hard drive. This allowed me to enjoy the speed of Puppy Linux while maintaining the settings I liked despite the occassional shutdown of the laptop.

If anyone has an old PC that is used for light tasks like web browsing or word processing ,then I think that Puppy Linux is a great solution. It is fast, easy to learn, and has a wide variety of applications despite its small size.

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This blog has been upgraded to WordPress 2.7. Very little will be apparent on the front end, but back end administration and management is much easier.

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As the first term of the MBA program draws to a close, I find myself reflecting on the many lessons that I have learned over the past few months. Of these lessons, I can think of three that have made the biggest contribution to my success in the program.

Effective Teams are Essential to Success

Fortunately, I was assigned to work on a team with a great group of people. Although we have very different personalities, we have learned to appreciate healthy debate and focus on the overall success of our group. Also, my team developed a “divide and conquer” approach where one person took primary responsibility for a set of assignments, gathered input from the group, and managed the effort to successfully complete the work. Our approach led to high grades on our assignments that would have been difficult to achieve through individual effort. I look forward to maintaining relationships with all of them long after we complete the MBA program.

Don’t Let the Opposition Cloud the Goal

Athletes must always know the location of the goal. Whether it is the basketball hoop, the uprights in the end zone, or the soccer net, a successful player always knows the location of the goal despite a cloud of opposing players. Similarly, a successful MBA student always keeps in mind the ultimate goal of the program: find a job commensurate with the skills gained in the curriculum. However, career management can easily take a back seat to the flurry and intensity of the academic requirements of the program. The BUAD 620 class has helped me to maintain focus on my career by forcing me to hone essential job search skills such as résumé writing, interviewing, and developing professional presence.

Take Care of Home and Home Will Take Care of You

The time commitment of the MBA program makes it difficult to spend time with my wife and three children. I often leave my house before my family wakes up and return home once they have gone to bed. However, I always keep at least one day free during the week to fully engage with my family and remind them that they still have a husband and a dad. Although that day could be spent making progress on the myriad (and seemingly never-ending) MBA assignments, I find that I am a better student when I spend uninterrupted time with my family. A kiss from my wife, a hug from my kids, or simply sitting down to eat together makes it easier to return to Wehner and endure the demands of lectures, homework assignments, quizzes, and exams.

By continuing to implement the lessons of collaborate to success, focus on the end goal, and take care of home, I am confident that I will achieve true success in the MBA program that extends far beyond the classroom. These principles will also serve me very well in my post-MBA life.

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I have moved this WordPress installation from a sub-folder to the root of my hosting folder.  It’s a minor change, but I like that it allows me to use the main URL for my site.

I am working on finding the themes and widgets that will allow me to align this web site with the design I have in store for it.  So, expect changes to its look and feel unti l announce that the final version is ready.

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In 1944, Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal published a study called An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy.  In this study, Myrdal claimed that white people, in general, want to see black people (then called ‘Negros’, although this term is usually inappropriate to use today) disappear from America.  This is due to the perception by whites that blacks are inferior in every way.  Without earning the benefits of having them as slaves, white people saw no use for black people in America.

However, Myrdal believed that the “the Negro problem” was a “white man’s problem”.  This is due to the fact that white people, through enslavement and institutionalized racism, were responsible for the low estate of black people.  Only by using the privileges that the social and economic structure of America gave to whites could blacks be elevated.  Once blacks were able to improve their situation, then white people could look at them favorably and cease to see them as inferiors, thus leading to improved racial harmony.

I suggest that there is a “new” Negro problem.  As black people have improved their situation, white people see fewer and fewer reasons to accept the problems (social, economic, health, etc.) that have historically plagued the African American population of this country. Furthermore, black people who have been successful, such as athletes, actors, politicians, etc., give the impression to other races that there is no longer a need to pay special attention to racism.  Since many blacks have “made it”, then the struggle for racial equality must be over.

This unprecedented level of success in the African American community, particularly in the ascension of Barack Obama, is a potential problem because there are many black people who still struggle with the many damaging legacies of slavery.  Without a focus on their needs, then a large segment of the African American population will continue to suffer from racist attitudes directed at them from blacks as well as whites.  While toiling in darkness, their problems will be ironically hidden by the blinding lights of black luminaries such as Oprah Winfry and Dick Parsons.

The solution to this problem is for successful black people to be ever vigilant in the defense of those African Americans who still have not found success either through racism, ignorance, or simply bad luck.  Also, white people need to understand that the crippling effects of centuries of racism cannot be reversed by the relative new phenomena of equality and inclusion.  Only then can the appropriate assistance (educational, economic, and social) be extended by those who have often been denied the American Dream.  I am not calling for eternal welfare for African Americans, but I am calling for help for black people who have a desire to improve their situation but simply cannot due to the realities of our nation’s history.  As Myrdal postulated, the improvement of the state of African Americans will help all Americans free themselves of the historical negative view of blacks.

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I received a link to download the beta of the Skyfire Mobile Browser. I installed it on my Sprint Mogul, and it is pretty slick.

It seems to do a lot of server side processing so it is not as snappy as Opera Mini. However, it does a great job at handling YouTube and other video sites.

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