Well, this month I won an award.
Honestly I'm not sure how to write this post. I do not usually deal with praise well, and that is unlikely to change. However an industry award is something to celebrate so I'm going write something about being recognised, and I'm going to keep self-deprecating jokes to a minimum.
Next CIO is an industry award where a group of expect-to-be-CIOs-soon are recognised as the future of the industry and celebrated. They are brought together over the year for workshops and group learning, and hooked up with a mentor - someone who is already a successful CIO.
And I am one of these people. Which means I'm part of the future of our industry. Good grief.
What does this mean? Well, over the next year I'm looking forward to talking with and being mentored by the very generous Wayne Clements, and I'm going to be attending a series of workshops with my Next CIO cohort. I've also got access to a group of excellent people from across the world of Technology - there has to be something useful I can do with that set of contacts.
For the award event, we were asked for volunteers to talk for a couple of minutes about ourselves. I volunteered mostly because while I didn't want to do it, I wanted to make sure I was making the most of the opportunities. That is what this year is going to be about for me - taking opportunities and seeing what happens. In this case, what happened was a talk which got a few laughs (in the right places!) and some excellent conversations in the bar afterwards with people who were interested in what I had said. Only good things.
Looking forward, I'm going to do a few things. I'm going to start posting my blog posts on LinkedIn. Long-term readers will know I write this mostly as a tool for self-reflection. Putting them up on Twitter and Facebook was a big step and LinkedIn will be another (slightly terrifying) moment of development. So ... hello if you're reading from LinkedIn. There are lots of other posts here - you might be interested in the essay subset.
Coming back to the topic of my "about me" talk - I need to think again about how I give back. My particular interests are around how people get into the Tech industry and how they move around and up. Over the years I've coached and mentored, and I want to lean back into this. However, this doesn't scale terribly well - there are only so many hours in the day so there is only so much time I can give - so I want to look at other options. There are a lot of stories out there to be told, and while some people have inspirational tales of mega-success, I think there is a lot of value in the more attainable stories of people who do well without being the next Jeff Bezos or whoever. Can we get better access to those tales?
Anyway, these are thoughts for the future. For the immediate now, I'll end with some pictures from the event and me talking about how I should have been a forester.
