Friday, February 15, 2008

Into the Lions' Dens

It's been an interesting week. This past Tuesday through Thursday at work we had the IT Leadership meetings. Yep, I'm now an IT "leader". Those geek numbers must be coming back to haunt me. The company has all of the direct reports to the CIO, plus the next level down and select others come to a series of meetings at the home office. Thankfully, it isn't "death by Powerpoint". There is an attempt made by all of the featured groups to be creative in delivering their messages. It was interesting, although I'm not sure all the messages were effectively delivered.

We also did a bit of team building and had a fair amount of time for socializing, so I was able to put a few faces to names.

(I also found out that a high school classmate -- actually, a guy who was usually in my homeroom -- is a peer of mine. There are a couple other guys that I knew in high school who work for our company as well -- effectively one percent of our graduating class works here.)

I sat through more than one presentation where I was lost in a sea of acronyms and IT-speak (actually a peculiar dialect specific to my employer, I guess). But I followed most of it and had some of it interpreted for me.

My little corner of the world sometimes feels like a stretch in the IT world, but at least I am making connections.

Today, I was on a panel discussion for the Chicago Bar Association and Chicago-Kent College of Law. The audience was a room full of lawyers looking for CLE credit. We had what seemed like several hundred slides for seven panel members. I managed to elicit some laughs and still deliver a clear message without being beat up by the lawyers. I guess that is a good day.

The whole week was really long. Several 12 hour days and lots of intensive listening and focused concentration. The week went by very quickly and I have a lot of work piled up. So no real gems of wisdom beyond a sense that I can hold my own with IT and lawyers. I guess that's a pretty good week.

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