Meandering Mind - Eva Dillner [12]
Now take your own organization or situation and apply the headline game. What crazy or sane ideas pop into your head? Let your imagination soar, like the therapists did in the above example, and see what you come up with. You may be surprised. Even if only one idea comes to fruition out of it you will have profited from the exercise.
Six
What do you do?
In digging out material for this book, I've revisited resumes, recommendation letters and write-ups I've done during my job searches. A resume shows what you've done, where you've already been. What it doesn't show is how you go about doing what you do, what your MO, or modus operandi is, to achieve results. It felt a natural part of my writing process to redo my resume, just one more time, to help pull together where I had been. I won't bore you with the details here, but it was an interesting exercise that helped move the writing of this book forward.
Putting together your CV or presentation is a way to connect with where you've been and helps to highlight your skills and accomplishments.
When people have looked at my resume and my diverse experience, there is one question I get more than any other “what is your area?” followed by “is it engineering or purchasing or budgeting or...?” We are taught to think in terms of professional areas, which are useful at the level where you need to be a specialist, such as in accounting, or in engineering design. But when you deal with project management and broader logistics issues, there are qualities that reach across the boundaries of traditional departments.
Looking at what you do in a different perspective can help you see where your special talent lies. When I was an engineering supervisor, I had six project engineers working for me. If you looked at their resumes you would see that they were all accomplished at doing project management in a tissue mill. But their particular talents varied. One would be very good at keeping track of the cost management, another was creative in finding technical solutions, another really excelled when there was a crisis, yet another possessed the steadfastness to hang in there year after year with all the ups and downs of the business.
So each one of us brings our special gift to whatever we do. I seem to have a knack for change, for seeing new ways to do things organizationally, to tap the energy of whatever I'm involved with. I see organizations as energy, life energy, and it's just a matter of organizing the work to align with where the energy is and the results take care of themselves. Well, almost, it isn't quite as flippantly simple as that. Usually there is a lot of stewing around before I get there, lest you think I just wave a magic wand and presto! life is wonderful.
Seven
Getting to the heart of the matter
Back when I was actively job hunting, I was asked the “what do you do?” question so often I finally got tired of it. I sat down to analyze my work. Was there a common thread? Well, yes, of course there was. It didn't reveal itself immediately. It took a fair amount of digging and sorting and analyzing. I will get back to the process I used to arrive at my common thread in a bit.
But first. I was so excited when I discovered there were certain elements that I used, over and over again. I called the process re-engineering, a newly coined term in 1994, as it most closely matched what I naturally did. I had been doing it for a long time, only the term re-engineering was new. A former colleague once exclaimed, “Eva, your middle name is change!”
Here is the pamphlet I put together with my newly discovered wisdom:
Fundamentals of Re-Engineering
What does a re-engineering manager do?
Organizes work around individual strengths so that minimum effort yields maximum results for the team. Pares down work to essentials, then adds enough of a human touch to make the work fun. Connects the “dots” in new ways by networking people and information in the most direct and efficient manner. Dives into uncharted waters exploring visions of a new