I came across this quote from Avinash Kaushik today, which provided the perfect reflection to end the week.
“Spend 70% being spectacular at your core focus area (accountant, lawyer, perl programmer) and 30% being good at everything in the immediately adjacent areas (marketing, finance, digital, real estate). The web has broken down traditional job silos in companies. The web demands immense agility and flexibility within every company. Those two things mean that being a one-trick pony limits your capacity to help your companies think smart and move fast. Deliberately identify the areas immediately adjacent to your job and invest your own time and effort to build out your 30% skills.”
I was immediately amazed at how true that rang. In a previous life, I worked in a marketing department where we were responsible for all things marketing, but limited to print, traditional advertising, and a very early iteration of the company web site. I had the expertise to complete any project quicklybecause I’d done it before. It was comfortable and familiar. When I began here, I became the first person responsible for the college site, ending an era of letting anyone interested publish directly on the web.(people wondered aloud why it was important for someone to have this position and put some standards in place – how far we’ve come!)
While I am forever grateful for my early work experiences as each helped me discover where my interests lied, I was siloed. As our digital world expands, becoming more popular and pervasive, success depends on being agile. One of the things I’ve always been grateful for is this pace of change (which I need to remind myself of in times of stress). I’ve found that if I’m doing my job well, I don’t have time to be comfortable.
It’s a constant challenge to sift through the noise of shiny new objects and find those activities that bring strategic gains. New activities bring new learning, new measures and new challenges. New activities also bring the chance to work with new people on campus, understand new business processes, and see things in a new way. It’s those opportunities that help me reach toward the 30%.
View from the Trenches 