Becoming Polynomial
Taiwan Travelog #2
Tokyo Narita Airport - Tue 28 Sep 2010 - 5:30pm
I'm jotting down a few thoughts at a sushi bar at Tokyo Narita airport while awaiting my connecting flight to Taipei. I must say, eating fresh fish in Japan prepared by a master chef standing 3 feet away from me is a real "doesn't suck" aspect of international travel. I'll make a point of visiting this restaurant again on my way home 5 days from now.
Speaking of travel, I anticipate that I'll be doing fewer of these overseas trips in the future. I've been officially promoted to manager of the sales engineering team.
I've been shouldering at least half the duties of this management position for upwards of 2 years without the official recognition, so my day-to-day work isn't going to change tremendously as a result of the new job title. It's more a shift of responsibilities. I'm still going to travel a lot but the nature of the work I do when traveling will change. Instead of flying around the world to sit down at a computer and fix complex software configurations, I'll be flying around the world to sit down with people on my team and help them improve their skill to fix complex software configurations.
What's the difference? It's about the impact of my work. I think of it in terms of mathematics.
As an individual contributor on the team I travel from one hotspot to another, knocking down one problem at a time. The value I add to the company and our customers is a simple, linear function of my time:
value = f(t) = at
The coefficient "a" represents how much skill I bring to the task at hand. I'm very adept at what I do, so that multiplier is pretty high compared to other people who work in this technical field. And as I increase my expertise my multiplier climbs ever higher. But regardless of how skilled I am the value function is still limited by t -- my time. The total time I spend working projects is not going up, and it's pretty much never going to. So simply increasing my multiplier (i.e., getting better at what I do) from this point is not going to increase my value dramatically.
That changes, though, when I focus on improving a team instead of just improving myself. As a manager I'm using my multiplier to improve the multipliers of all the people on my team. Mathematically that makes me a higher order polynomial.
Tokyo Narita Airport - Tue 28 Sep 2010 - 5:30pm
I'm jotting down a few thoughts at a sushi bar at Tokyo Narita airport while awaiting my connecting flight to Taipei. I must say, eating fresh fish in Japan prepared by a master chef standing 3 feet away from me is a real "doesn't suck" aspect of international travel. I'll make a point of visiting this restaurant again on my way home 5 days from now.
Speaking of travel, I anticipate that I'll be doing fewer of these overseas trips in the future. I've been officially promoted to manager of the sales engineering team.
I've been shouldering at least half the duties of this management position for upwards of 2 years without the official recognition, so my day-to-day work isn't going to change tremendously as a result of the new job title. It's more a shift of responsibilities. I'm still going to travel a lot but the nature of the work I do when traveling will change. Instead of flying around the world to sit down at a computer and fix complex software configurations, I'll be flying around the world to sit down with people on my team and help them improve their skill to fix complex software configurations.
What's the difference? It's about the impact of my work. I think of it in terms of mathematics.
As an individual contributor on the team I travel from one hotspot to another, knocking down one problem at a time. The value I add to the company and our customers is a simple, linear function of my time:
value = f(t) = at
The coefficient "a" represents how much skill I bring to the task at hand. I'm very adept at what I do, so that multiplier is pretty high compared to other people who work in this technical field. And as I increase my expertise my multiplier climbs ever higher. But regardless of how skilled I am the value function is still limited by t -- my time. The total time I spend working projects is not going up, and it's pretty much never going to. So simply increasing my multiplier (i.e., getting better at what I do) from this point is not going to increase my value dramatically.
That changes, though, when I focus on improving a team instead of just improving myself. As a manager I'm using my multiplier to improve the multipliers of all the people on my team. Mathematically that makes me a higher order polynomial.