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Friday October 27, 2006

Inspiration

On Tuesday, I went into the Menlo Park Sun campus (for the first time in over two months), to attend the latest SEED Engineering Mentoring gathering organized by Katy Dickinson and her team.

That morning, as well as presentations from some of the SEED mentees, there were three executive speakers:

Juan Carlos Soto who was the VP in charge of MAX (Market Development Engineering, Advanced Development, and User Experience Engineering) and was my VP up until last week, and is now Vice President of Adoption Marketing and Technology Evangelism.
His talk was on the dual career path ladder that exists within Sun (one ladder is "individual contributor" centric, the other is a managerial path.
I've heard this kind of talk given several times by several people, so nothing much new for me here, but it's exactly what the new SEED mentees need to know.
The one thing that did stick in my head though, was a mention of Jascon McElwain, an autistic basketball player, was got to play for his team for the first time, and scored 20 points in four minutes. Watch the video for more details. The thing to take away from this, Juan Carlos points out, is to be ready "on the bench", to step in and help out when the time is right.
Ivan Sutherland gave a talk on Leadership. As he points out, this can't be taught. Only learnt. It was sprinkled with many pearls of wisdom, wrapped up in interesting stories from Ivan's long and distinguished career.
Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO and Chief Blogger gave a short talk on where we are as a company at the moment, and the kind of things that he's currently worried about, and what's being done about them. Then he opened the floor up to questions.
You could also see that he was very pleased with our last quarters results. So is the marketplace, if the current stock price is anything to go by. About 3-4 months ago, some press wag said:
"They are not out of the woods yet, but they've found a flashlight and are back on the trail."

These latest results just go to prove that. Now we just need to sustain this momentum.
Jonathan is one of those people (like Scott), who you can listen to for a while, and come away feeling all fired up.