SAFUN

Happy New Year!

So what’s new for 2010? I am coaching my first volleyball team! This is something I have always wanted to do but never ran into the opportunity. When my aunt contacted me about a volleyball club needing a volleyball coach for a 12 & under team, I jumped on it. I’m passionate about the sport and passionate about working with our youth so I felt this was my calling.

I can’t tell you how nervous I was meeting the parents. I have been in business for 7 years and have had to present to high profile clients and executive leadership numerous of times but never was I this nervous. These parents were meeting someone for the first time that would be working with their daughter for the next 6 months. I needed to earn their trust. Talking a bit about my experience helped. The next step was proving myself.

I outlined what I was going to go over in my first practice and reviewed it over and over and over and over in my head. Once practice came and I started running the drills, I realized that I was way ahead of myself. These girls are only 9 and 10 years old! I needed to teach them the fundamentals of just passing the ball and controlling the ball. I had to go back and re-outline my practices. I now have the hang of it.

Our first tournament was this past weekend. We are in the 12 & under division so I knew we were going up against girls that were older than my girls and had 1 year under their belt in club volleyball. Mentally, I was prepared for this. Was I prepared for our opposing team to be twice the size of my team? No! I showed up at 7:30am to see a bunch of mammoths warming up. I only had a few girls there and we were scheduled to play at 8am, against the mammoths! My poor parents were so freaked out. I kept my composure. I got my girls warmed up and ready to play. We had to play them so there was no use in freaking out. And although we lost, we took the mammoths to 3 games. Not bad.

We went on to lose 1 more match but won our last match, yeah! I was so exhausted by the end of our last match. I had such a blast and left with an amazing feeling inside. We are only going to get better and now, I actually want to play some more mammoths.

This year, it’s not about my success. For me, it’s about helping my girls succeed.

This video is my new medicine. I think we as a society make too many damn excuses on why we can’t do something. Life is too short for us to look back and say “I should have.” Take the word “can’t” out of your vocabulary and maybe you won’t be saying “I should have” as much.

Posted via web from Life is too short to not have fun

I haven’t had a chance to blog in a while and not to make any excuses but I am at the Rackspace Cloud now and they don’t mess around when it comes to working!

It’s been about a month into my new role at the Rackspace Cloud and I am loving every minute of it. I am on such an awesome team and I will introduce them in my next post.

I was a Rackspace employee back in 2003 when it was only around 100 employees and now its over 2500! You can imagine a company changes as it grows but one thing is for sure, the core values and vision of Rackspace have not changed.  Rackspace makes all new employees attend orientation called “Rookie O” which didn’t exist when I was there previously. Even though I was a former Racker and have already been at the Cloud for a month, it was mandatory I attend as part of the SAS70 requirement.

So last week I attended Rookie O led by Larry Reyes aka “Sugarbear” (explanation coming later). It was 4 full days! Yes, they were long days sitting at a table for 7 hours, however, there were definitely some very enlightening segments to the orientation which I’d like to share with you.

Sugarbear schedules representatives from each department to come and speak about what they do. He also sets it up as a storyboard so for example our first speakers were the founders of Rackspace.

There were 80 new hires at this orientation. Over half of the group were customer facing employees – you know Rackspace isn’t messing around when it comes to Fanatical service. Further, over a fourth the employees were being hired into the Cloud division – so you know we are growing!

I was assigned to a table of 6 Rackers, all from various parts of the company. At our table were our name tags that also listed our top 5 strengths from the Clifton Strengths Finder test that Rackspace requires all new employees to take. We were a team and were going to have score points over the next 4 days by asking questions, participating in games and decorating our table as a theme.

I won’t highlight everything but I would like to comment on some of the segments I found to be enlightening.

Founders, Dirk Elmendorf and Pat Condon

I have worked with Dirk at ServerBeach long time ago. I knew the Rackspace story but man it was good to hear it again! Pat Condon, Dirk Elmendorf and Richard Yoo were Trinity students with an entrepreneurial spirit and didn’t want to work for “The Man.” They did technical things for clients and realized that the most important part to people’s businesses was making sure their website was online. They began hosting out of their apartment and as they grew, they saw that if they wanted to expand their business, they would need investors. This is where Graham Weston came into the picture. When they proposed the idea to Graham and Morris Miller at Chester’s Hamburgers, Graham said “I get it! It’s like an apartment complex with never ending apartments!” Dirk said “Wow, this is why I am not the business guy, just a geek.”

Dirk and Pat still live and breathe Rackspace. Dirk says “Technology will continue to change but we will continue to chase the technology we can help people with.” And what he has learned is “We make money doing what’s right.”

I really appreciated Dirk and Pat’s genuine and real speech. Dirk was from Indiana and Pat was from California but they knew San Antonio should be the home for Rackspace. Of course, we are happy they stayed.

Chairman and former CEO, Graham Weston

Graham is the most humble and down to earth person you will ever meet. I actually briefly worked for Graham back in 2003 and I can tell a couple of stories that describes Graham. I was finishing up college and was hired on as an intern to help with Graham’s office stuff. He had two assistants, Mona, who managed all his real estate stuff and Sheryl, who managed his Rackspace stuff.  Graham really didn’t know me yet because I worked weird hours. I worked right outside his office door. Graham saved everything! Even if it was an idea on a napkin, it was filed away – and he had lots of ideas!  I believe it was the 2nd week I started, both Mona and Sheryl were out. While they were out, Graham came in one day with 2 boat propellers. He sat them on the desk and said “Hi, I am Graham and you must be Angela. Listen, these propellers are broken and was wondering if you could get them fixed.” Then I think his phone went off and he was gone. I was there with 2 boat propellers that I had to figure how to get fixed! Another time, Graham asked me to move his car so some employees could load some old computers into it. He gave me the keys to his SUV and he hardly knew me. This was Graham, trustworthy!

In his speech, he spoke about the importance of discovering your strengths and using them to your benefit. Rather than focusing on improving your weakness, he wants Rackers to focus on their strengths. He knows organization is one of his weaknesses and instead of wasting time to learn how to get organized when he knows he’ll never be good at it, he just utilizes tools that will help him such as his BlackBerry! We touched on a couple of strengths and one thing I found to be hilarious is that he asked for all those who had Achiever as one of their strengths to raise their hand  (me being one of them) . He then asked “Do you keep a To Do list and write down things you have already completed just to say they are completed?” Ha, we all kept our hands raised! Wow, I can’t believe I do that!

I really enjoyed Graham’s speech. I think it’s important to understand why Rackspace asks us to the take the Strengths test. They want to genuinely help employees with their personal development because they know that happy employees makes for happy customers and essentially makes for good business.

President of Rackspace, Lanham Napier

Lanham came into the room and personally introduced himself to each Racker in the room. I never worked with Lanham so I was surprised he even remembered me. When it was Lanham’s turn to speak, he just said ” I am really tired of slides so I am just going to sit up here and talk about what Rackspace is up to.” He was sincere, transparent and real and offered to answer questions. With a company with even 100+ employees, it is very rare that you will ever have the opportunity to engage in discussion with your president. He really laid out the vision of Rackspace and where we are headed. I was instantly motivated!  One thing for sure is that Lanham’s dream is to create jobs for people. He wants every employee in the room to be able to put Rackspace on their resume and be automatically labeled a winner. He says “Finance is just a tool to do the job; how many jobs we create is really the success metric.”

He says the number 1 thing Rackspace looks for in employees is expertise, “We have to be smarter than our customers so we can solve their problems before they even know about it.” He also notes that the perception of operational efficiency means more people in the back office and less in customer facing roles. He says that is not the case at Rackspace. It’s about bigger DC’s, systems integration and happy customers. Rackspace wants to put more people in customer facing roles.

Consider me very impressed!

GM of The Rackspace Cloud, Emil Sayegh and Founders, Jonathan Bryce and Todd Morey

These were 2 separate presentations but I’d like to comment on Cloud at Rackspace. Here is what I find to be really neat about Rackspace. Todd and Jonathan, 2 developers working at Rackspace, had an idea about providing a different way of hosting. They proposed their idea to Rackspace and Rackspace actually allowed them to set a team aside and work on it. Cloud hosting really wasn’t the term at the time but the technology behind it was essentially what is being called Cloud today.  Rackspace could have easily said “No, we want to perfect managed hosting services only.” But they were willing to take a risk and change as technology changed. Too often too many companies do very well at what they do while the world around them is changing and what they are working on might not even apply in the new changed world. I really admire Rackspace for taking risk.

Sugarbear presents the Core Values

First, who the heck is Sugarbear? Sugarbear is a long term Racker of 10 years! He is the perfect person to be leading Rookie O. His name is Larry Reyes and he is a good salsa dancer. He had a friend whose godmother was Farrah Fawcett. When his friend had his wedding, who showed up but Farrah. Turns out that Larry had the opportunity to dance with her and from that, he got a nice photo of them together. That photo sat on his desk at the office. One day, Lanham was walking by and noticed the photo. He looked at Larry and said “Well aren’t you the Sugarbear” and the name has stuck since.

He went over the Rackspace core values:

• Fanatical Support in all we do. Create customer experiences that generate recommendations.
• Results first: substance over flash.
• Embrace change for excellence.
• Passion for our work.
• Keep our Promises. Bad news first. Full disclosure. No surprises.
• Treat fellow Rackers like Friends & Family. (Sugarbear’s favorite)

These values serve as a foundation so when you are faced with making a decision, it’s easier for you to know what the right thing to do is. I am not too sure how a company can survive without core values.

Overall, Rookie O was awesome! Our team didn’t win but we didn’t lose either. We named our team “Rack in the Day” and decorated our table like a college student’s apartment trying to host servers.

My entire career has been in this industry so I don’t know what it’s like to come from a mega corporate environment. But there was one person that did comment on Rookie O and she came from various jobs from all sorts of companies, she said – “This has been the best employee orientation I have ever been to. At least you didn’t hand out an outdated video with your CEO wearing a business suit talking to you about the mission statement of the company.”

Rack on!

For those of you that know my history, I started my career off at Rackspace back in 2003. I left Rackspace to work for PEER 1 in 2005 and spent the last 4 years at PEER 1. I have had the opportunity to work with some outstanding individuals (clients and employees) and have been a part of some great things. But business changes and sometimes you have to make change for yourself. Your gut will tell you when that time is.

I’d like to share a story that serves somewhat as analogy to my situation today.

If you look back on your childhood, I am sure you can name persons that had an impact on your life (positive or negative) that have helped you develop into what you are today. Persons that brought out the best or worst in you, helping you find the path you are suppose to be on. You didn’t know it then but you know it more than ever when you are out there in the real world trying to make some tough decisions. You have to sit down and take a look back on your life. Who are you? What makes you happy? What drives you?

How volleyball fits in

I grew up playing volleyball, playing since I was in 2nd grade. I am very passionate about the sport. From 5th to 8th grade, my school team didn’t lose one game in all 4 seasons. Her name was “Coach Debbie” and man, we thought she was so mean! She made girls cry all the time.
I also played club volleyball and my team made the Junior Olympics twice – once in San Jose, California and once in Orlando, Florida. I wasn’t the star player but I was always the dependable player. Volleyball taught me about discipline, gave me that competitive spirit and showed me what being a team player meant.
As a freshman in high school, I made the varsity volleyball team. I was excited and proud to have made the varsity volleyball team. Granted, I went to a private school but still, I was the only freshman on the varsity team.  As the season progressed, I noticed that we weren’t very good and I hardly received any playing time. My coach would put me in 2 points away from the other team winning game. I didn’t have the chance to make a huge difference on the team.

The confrontation

I decided to approach my coach about it. I was nervous of course, I was just a freshman. She taught a geography class so I went to her classroom one day after her class let out. I asked for a few minutes of her time. I let her know my concerns about not receiving playing time and asked her what I could do to improve so I can play more often. All I wanted to do was help our team get some wins. She said this “Well, we have a lot of seniors on the team and it’s their last year to play.” I was so turned off by this and actually replied right back with “ Well, I didn’t realize the varsity team was built based on tenure, I thought it was built based on attitude and skill. If that is the case, then I want to be put on the Junior Varsity team where I know I will get some playing time so I can improve for the years ahead.” She was really caught off guard with my comment (and so was I) but she respected my comment and said that she wanted to keep me on the team.
She did end up playing me a tad bit more and I was able to get some solid playing time in. But it wasn’t enough. I didn’t feel that the team shared the same passion I did for the sport. Nothing against the team but my heart wasn’t it and it wasn’t a good feeling. I spent the next year there and decided that I wanted to leave the high school for a better opportunity.

The transfer

My parents accepted my decision and I transferred to another school my Junior year. I made the varsity volleyball team there. This was a solid group of girls that were passionate about volleyball, about their teammates and about having a good attitude. I will never forget our coach, “Coach Joyce.” She was tough. We practiced everyday except Sundays. We did pool workouts, weight work outs and speed workouts. She had us on a diet and that’s when I learned about protein shakes. I remember being in so much pain. But at the end of the day, we all wanted to feel that pain because we knew it would bring us to that win. We went on to win the state championship. It was the best decision I ever made.

The purpose of me telling this story is that first, I remembered it so I had to write it down so I never forget it. But when I think about it, I realized that my volleyball journey gave me the opportunity to know what it felt like to be passionate about something. When that passion was gone, I felt it and was more inclined to do something about it. Today, I am passionate about many other things and it all revolves around helping others and improving my well being. I want be part of a team that shares that same passion.

Rackspace had a great opportunity that I was fortunate enough to have offered to me. Sometimes change is good and I don’t see this transition being any different.

I hope I can inspire others see the opportunity for a change and embrace it.

When I read Nan Palmero’s MySA blog posting on his thoughts what makes a great leader, I was inspired to write my own thoughts on leadership. Many of us have different views on what we believe to be necessary qualities of true leaders (although attitude will almost always be one of them). I think every leader should have the following 5 qualities :

Willing to engage
I believe that leaders have to be willing to go out and meet people, get to know them on a personal level and be able to find a unique quality in that person that can be used to have a positive impact on others. I think often times, persons in high level positions don’t see the importance in engaging with others at various levels. You cannot be a leader without followers. You create followers by listening, understanding and helping.

Doesn’t get hooked on titles
One of my favorite books is “You don’t need a title to be a leader” by Mark Sanborn.  When someone asks you where you want to be in 10 years, your answer shouldn’t be “I want to be a CEO of a company” or “I want my company to be #1 in the industry.” What matters most is how you get there. If you do all the right things, you will be put into a position to lead. One of my favorite quotes from a leader was from Lanham Napier, CEO of Rackspace. When Rackspace went public, they hosted a large employee event to announce the news. I joined my husband for the event. When Lanham went up to speak, one of his comments really stuck with me. He said something along the lines of  “Rackers, I do not want to walk through the office and see the stock ticker on your desktops. If we continue to provide Fanatical Support to our customers, the numbers will speak for themselves.” Focusing on the fundamentals and doing what is right for the customer is what will drive them to be a leader.

Attitude
Regardless of your skill level, experience, the number of people you know, you can never be a good leader without having an optimistic outlook on life. You may end up in unfortunate situations, someone may have burned you, you may not like everyone you meet but if you cannot find an optimistic outlet, it is almost impossible for you to succeed. You may be able to get by in the short run but you will never be able to endure leadership in the long run.

Brings others with you
Being a leader is not about you, it’s about everyone around you. It’s finding ways to bring out the best in others so that they too can lead. One of my favorite quotes was from Obama when P. Diddy  interviewed him 4 years ago before he was president. Obama was talking about celebrities and other high profile individuals like P. Diddy and said this: “There are a lot of brothers and sisters out there that are doing well but aren’t thinking about the folks being left behind. And if you can’t reach back and pull some folks up with you, then you shouldn’t be in the position you are in right now.”

Always willing to learn
Leaders should always be accepting that they don’t know everything and should look forward to learning from others. One of the most inspiring stories for me was that of Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy’s. He was a high school drop out and although extremely successful, he started “realizing that his success as a high school dropout might convince other teenagers to quit school (something he later admitted was a mistake).” So he became a student at Coconut Creek High School and earned a GED in 1993, at the age of 60 yrs!

We are never too old to learn.