MBTI’s INTP rocks!

 Influence, Leadership, Psychology, Software Development  4 Responses »
May 282013
 

MBTI wheel

 

The reputable MBTI personality test to help you know yourself and others

 

 

 

Blurred signature

 

If you have ever received a work email from me, I’m wondering if you have ever noticed the last line of my signature? It looks like this:

It’s two URLs (highlighted in yellow here) and if you were to click on them you would find out that I’m an INTP-type person according to the well-known and respected Myers-Briggs test (based on the theories of Carl Jung).

The history behind this is that many years ago, my company invested money and effort to get a lot of people through the Myers & Briggs test and training.The rationale of knowing that type in the workplace were manifold but mainly:

(inspired by http://www.myersbriggs.org/type-use-for-everyday-life/mbti-type-at-work/)

The rationale behind the MBTI® personality test

 

  • Know thyself:

When you understand your type preferences, you can approach your own work in a manner that best suits your style, including how you manage your time, problem solving, best approaches to decision making, and dealing with stress. Knowledge of type can help you deal with the culture of the place you work, the development of new skills, understanding your participation on teams, and coping with change in the workplace. If your work involves selling, knowledge of type can be helpful in understanding what clients need from you, especially how they best like to learn about products and services and how they like to interact during the process of gathering information and making decisions.

  • support many different functions and situations including managing others, development of leadership skills, organizing tasks, creation and management of teams, training for management and staff, conflict resolution, motivation, executive coaching, diversity, recognition and rewards, and change management.

The rationale then is still very valid now.
The reason I’m bringing this up is that recently while researching my son’s type in order to help find a future college major (he’s 16), I found a website that allows you to take the test, for FREE. I took it and it arrived at the same conclusion that the professional tester did when she administered the test to me…. Minus the $$$ my company spent.

Take the test

I would encourage anyone to take the FREE (yet pretty thorough) test at http://www.mypersonality.info/basic-vs-pro/personality-type-test (it requires you to create a login but they have a “zero spam policy”).
If enough people take it and are interested in sharing their test, I think it would be pretty cool to create, in your organization, a wiki/SharePoint page listing everyone and their associated personality type.

If you do take the test, the website will produce a nice summary chart like this one:

INTP chart for me

If you end up being INTP, I’m sure that you’ll agree that INTPs rock!
Take it and let me know…

And for those who know me and thought that I was an extrovert, you’ll come to the realization that I’m a good faker. 🙂

Cultivate Mental Confusion

 Creativity, goals, Innovation, Psychology, Software Development  4 Responses »
Apr 212013
 

Muscle Confusion -> Mental Confusion

mental confusion brain

If you have been to the gym or involved in any fitness for the past few years, you certainly run into the concept of “muscle confusion“.

The idea behind the concept is that muscles accommodate to a specific type of stress/exercise when the same stress is continually applied to the muscles over time. We become very proficient at doing that same exercise but we eventually reach a plateau, where we get stuck.

The solution:  mix up your exercise routines. You are a jogger? Try some strength training. Yoga is your passion? Give swimming a chance, every so often. A mix of different exercises was the novel ingredient to the incredibly successful P90X

When it comes to our daily job, we also become very proficient at it over time. Our brains develop routines and we stick to them because they work. That said, by not challenging the way we do things we invariably plateau and reach a state of pleasant comfort, sometime without even realizing it. However, there is nothing more dangerous in life than comfort because it can quietly kill your creativity, desire to innovate and aspiration for a better tomorrow.

If you have reached that dangerous level of comfort or don’t want to get even near it, let me offer a solution: Mental Confusion.

I do realize that “train your brain as if it was  a muscle” metaphor has been overused but in this case it seems very apropos.

2 ways to stimulate Mental Confusion

How do you go about creating “mental confusion”?  My suggestions are simple:

  • do something unrelated to your day job
  • do whatever makes you (somewhat) uncomfortable

Say, you are a software engineer, programming all day. Why not pick up a book about doing simple sketching. Check out Mark Kistler‘s books. That new skill will help you express your software design to non-engineers.

You are a finance guy, and although no one can rock a spreadsheet like you do, writing has never been your forte. Why not start a blog on a topic you cherish? It can be finance related or not.

You are a math teacher and you nailed your lesson plan… 10 years ago and you can now do it with your eyes closed. How about looking into the ways Khan Academy has successfully harnessed the elements of gamification into their own lessons plans? How? Take this excellent Coursera course on the topic.

You are a magazine editor with a successful personal blog on the side about fashion and have always wanted to customize the look-and-feel of your WordPress blog. Why not take a class on HTML5/PHP/CSS? They are so many good  resources (videos, classes, etc…) on those topics that it’s a shame not to take advantage of them.

I could go on but I’m sure you get the idea.

Benefits of Mental Confusion

Outside the obvious  advantages of broadening your mental horizon. The new skills will make you more creative overall, more able to be innovative and find better ways of excelling at your trade.

It is no surprise that successful entrepreneurs these days no longer look for talents in a narrow field. Instead they seek well-rounded, dual (T-shaped) or even multidisciplinarity individuals who can contribute at many levels and bring both left and right brains at the table. Companies like IDEO have long preached the gospels of having employees being skillful  in more than one field. Practicing “mental confusion” will lead you to become one of those creative innovators.

Universities have also noticed the trend with schools like the Stanford D-school  offering a degree in design, combining traditional design teaching with finance/entrepreneurship  acumen. Even, bastion of technical/scientific knowledge like Caltech now offers the very popular class PA 16… on Cooking Basics and other typically right-brain topics.

Innovation often emerges at the intersection of 2 disciplines or when 2 experts in their respective domains have a chance encounter. Imagine what you will be able to achieve once various areas of your brain have been sufficiently cultivated .

Ready to get “mentally confused”?  Don’t wait, get out of your comfort zone.

If you still need some extra motivation, check out Seth Godin‘s excellent blog post “the simple power of one a day”.

[Image credit: lightwise / 123RF Stock Photo]

Stay passionate!

 Creativity, Design, Innovation, Leadership, Software Development  No Responses »
Mar 062013
 

Credit: zazzle.com

I have been working for the same company for many, many years. When I talk to my friends from college, they ask me how could I be working for the same company for so long? I tell them I’m still having fun and still doing things that interest me. In asking them why they have hopped from one company to another, I often come to the realization that it’s not the company they dislike, but it’s their job. Digging some more, it’s clear that regardless of the company, they will very likely always end up disliking their job.

Why? Because, they are missing one important ingredient, passion. For me, tinkering with computer “stuff” is something I’ve always loved. And it’s that passion that lead me to buy my first computer and made me sign up for my first Computer Science 101 class. That love is still there. Yes, I was and am still a proud nerd.

Many people start just like me, though that passion erodes over time partially because of the jobs they end up taking but mostly because they decide that they are no longer happy and don’t make room in their daily job for things they do enjoy. This recent article in Inc. brings up a similar point: they complain about their job but don’t do anything about it.

Maybe I have been lucky to have managers who have allowed me some wiggle room to explore new technologies, new ideas, and new methods to keep that passion alive.

Example 1: back in the mid-90s, we used to create bug reports using a home grown app (there was no Bugzilla back then)  running on an xterm-type of terminal. The Internet just started to emerge with technology like Apache and CGI. I pushed to start using it as a new front-end for the bugs system , and people are still using today. Though phased out for the RallyDev  tool, it was fun to develop and watch it grow to 150,000+ logged bugs.

Example 2: when I became a manager in early 2000, I realized that I wasn’t very good at the tedious job of keeping track of my team’s many tasks. Hence, I created “Tasks!”, a tool that allowed me to assign tasks to people, keep track of changes/updates (with email automatically sent to assignee and assignor), and monitor progress during the development and QA. At the end of the week, when meeting with my product manager, I had a nicely formatted report to share with him and talk about the week’s progress. I loved the tool because it took care of the things I didn’t like to do.

I could provide other examples, but you get the point.

Did my company breathe that passion into me? No.

Would I be as passionate at another firm? Probably. At least, I would hope so.

Did my company do something right to keep and nurture the passion alive instead of snuffing it? Yes!

Do I have a point here? Yes! My point is actually two-fold:

  • If you are a nerd like me,  a jock or just an average Joe with a passion for computers, find a way to remain passionate about it and share that passion with your co-workers and managers. If you’ve found something new that you are excited about, find some time to explore it (at work or home) and share your findings/excitement with the other nerds around you.
  • If you are a manager (or a company), please do allow your employees to spend an hour here and there to explore next technologies and share it with the rest of the group. Google has it right allowing its employees to spend 20% of their time on things that interest them.

Bottom-line: Stay passionate and keep “it” alive!

Are you the creative type?

 Creativity, Influence, Innovation, Leadership, Psychology, Software Development, Technology  4 Responses »
Mar 012013
 
Creative Type

Credits:http://bit.ly/Z8yooH

Let me start with this a true, personal anecdote…

Many years ago, I was at a party chitchatting with a young lady, when the inevitable “what do you do for a living” question came up.

The following ensued (with some embellishments):

  • Her: what do you do for a living?
  • Me: why don’t you guess? (I was so cool, back then)
  • Her: Are you a chef?
  • Me: Non. (keeping it cool but seriously thinking, can you be any more cliché!?)
  • Her: A musician maybe?
  • Me: No. (I had longish hair then)
  • Her: do you work in the clothing industry?
  • Me: no (back to the French theme)
  • Her: The movie industry?! As a director or writer maybe?
  • Me: Nope
  • Her: alright, I give up.
  • Me: Ok, I’m a software engineer.
  • Her (barely masking her disappointment): REALLY!? I thought that you were more of the “creative type”! (She probably did the air-quotes with her fingers)
  • Me (Trying to ignore her disappointment): Why would you think that I can’t be both a software engineer and also creative?!

And this is really what’s at the heart of this post: Can one really be a software engineer and be creative too?

Can one really be a software engineer and be creative too?

Talking on behalf of my software development  brethren, my answer is a resounding, heck yes!

Of course,  for the uninitiated eye (like the person in the dialog above), software engineering/development might look more clerical than intellectual, and more structured than imaginative. But for anyone who’s worked in the field, it should be apparent that our work is more governed by ideas and possibilities than the monotony and tedium of routine tasks.

Surely in recent years, the hundreds of companies and thousands of applications (for iOS/Android) created by software engineers are a very clear and visible testimony that software engineers are a creative bunch.

One might say that the coding, the testing, the debugging are probably not what comes at the top of the list of exciting things to do. But can’t they? Who among us never felt the touch of divine inspiration when coming up with a genius way of coding or testing something? That “aha” moment when the idea that makes all the difference comes to you.

How about “being in the zone” when the code seems to write itself and designs, made of one clever idea after another, comes alive before your very eyes.

To me (and I’m not a musician), it seems very much like what composers must experience when they create music: breathing life out of nothing (bytes vs. notes)

As a software engineer, if you don’t feel that you are creative, maybe you never tried to picture yourself as a creative person and maybe it’s time to come out of the “creative closet”.

On the other hand, if you feel that you are actually very creative and full of ideas but your creativity and ideas haven’t been acknowledged by your peers, by your boss and by your company in general, then you need to wake them up.

I could go on but hopefully you get idea.

So, you the teacher, the QA analyst, the engineer, the equity trader, and you who’s always been labeled as “non creative”, do feel that you are the “creative type”?

Share you thoughts/frustrations/inspirations in the comment section below.

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