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Jon Gatrell

Stuck in the Middle: A series of lessons in leadership and execution…

So I’ve had the opportunity to see a great deal of management and leadership styles over my short career so far. This series will provide hopefully and interesting views coping, surviving and ultimate enjoying work with a little humor as a member of middle management.

I’ve all kinds of roles/areas of partial to full ownership in my career (Product Management, Marketing, Strategy, Support, Corporate Drip pan, Customer Advocate, Research guy, Utility Player, Business Development, Business Analyst, Corporate Development and Strategic Initiatives) – not as fun as it sounds, but a great deal more fun that just doing 1 thing for nearly a decade, which unfortunately many folks have. Change is good and brings opportunity – I guess that’s this post’s nugget.

The most unique thing I’ve had the opportunity to witness is leadership styles, so I think I’ll spend some time highlighting experiences I’ve seen on leadership, process and general observations. The majority of my career has been in and around Product, the biggest of the 4 P’s, but in most organizations product management is not understood.

This corporate reality has offered me an interesting opportunity to sit back, analyze and apparently – write and outline of content, which was going to be a book, but is the core content for the blog.

So I will embark on a series of post about being stuck in the middle – mid-sized companies, mid-sized talent and mid-level management.

At some point I will write on Pattern matching, as I think it is a good thing and about the only real skill I have. To that end, I have noticed some patterns in leadership and organizational dynamics which I will explore from a process and persona perspective. I will start with personas.

Some of the leadership personas examined will be geologist, the ameba, category killers, technocrats and Visibility Manager.

August 8, 2007 by
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NZ Couple wants a SUPERMAN Baby

It takes all kinds in this world and apparently I don’t take the cake for odd naming. I have kids named dijouri (after a didgeridoo) and Kevren, after the village of St. Keverne and Ron Kevern, a mentor of mine. Apparently this couple wanted to keep things real, by originally naming their newborn 4 Real, but it didn’t pass the naming rules of NZ.

Now the original idea is – what if it became a trend to have cool license plate like names – – agrav8 or 78 Stang. Think of the fun we could have Kewl Kid or RZR07, you could brand your kids. Brand as in logo, not scar – there will be enough scarring in life with a name like RZR or Dijouri – errr wait. Ok apparently I didn’t think ahead that there would be a cartoon called Digimon, admittedly I thought Digit might be a cool nick name – go immediately to math geek do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars.  I got the nickname Golum and Sancho later in life – both are somewhat amusing stories, to other people.

In principle this is a growing challenge for individuality is increasingly over populated planet. I’m not sure what is a good name or a bad name, but I think culture and language are changing so quickly that all the old barometers are no longer viable. So our flat world is not only running out of IP addresses – apparently names as well.

All things are relative and typically where you predicts you views – so alas, as I left the greater Ann Arbor area after the birth of my twins to ATL, I felt a little more compelled to get a more mainstream name for my latest child, Prescott. We can’t all be super heroes, but we should all try to be super people and super tolerant. I look forward to the day we look back to superman being just another name…..  Alas – what’s in a name?

~! cheers

August 8, 2007 by
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A new theme is developing – random movie quotes

The Case of the Horrible Horticulture Happening

While you might not know and mainly because I haven’t posted on it – I’m a gardener. I set out to be a tomato KING this year. Please note: I don’t eat tomato’s, but Emily does and oddly enough I’ve found good vegetables make good neighbors. The more diversity in veggies from the garden the wider the smiles when you show up unannounced to your neighbors doorstep. So I got that going for me in the neighborhood.

So we don’t only have our focus garden – a plot of peppers and spices were have been tending to for 2 years, this year we added cucumbers, tomatoes and cantaloupes in a annex plot we established to wayward plants. We planted the seeds and waiting, nothing, nothing – so we go on vacation for 7 days and the mystery greenery exploded to our amazement.

Shaggy: This is, like, the opposite of what I wanted to do today

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Questioning if it was real, we started our sleuthing. So we set in our lead investigator to go into the Horrible Horticulture thingy.

Shaggy: Like chill out, Scooby-Doo, stop shaking.
Scooby Doo: Me? That’s you.
Shaggy: Oh right it’s me, sorry.

—

Fred: This is more embarrassing than the time you started cleaning your beans at Don Knotts’ Christmas party.

—

Velma: Oh please. You get kidnapped so much you should come with your own ransom note.

After crazy high jinx and a bunch of running around the our brave investigator, P, went into the green nexus – discovered it was in fact NOT just tomatoes, but a messy intertwined set of unruly plants that had found out that we just planted too many thing in a single location – an amateur mistake.

Shaggy: Scooby-Doo, where are you? P?

Velma: Let’s get jinky with it.

So P, then went to randomly pulling off pieces as a point of enjoyment.

So we have brought the garden back under control and we are harvesting 1-3 cucumbers a week, 2-4 tomatoes and anxiously await our cantaloupes. Upon review the green mess would have gotten away with taking over the backyard, if it weren’t for that meddling kid!

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P: I did it, I did it ….

Scooby Doo: What Now?
Shaggy: Let’s do what we do best Scoob, eat.
Scooby Doo: Ramburgers.

August 5, 2007 by
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