Saturday, June 7, 2008

Business attitude

As I was walking home late last night, after a long meeting at work, I started to wonder if I'm cut out for the business world. The job I have now is my first "real" job and it's been a learning experience to say the least. I can handle the science/engineering end without any trouble at all, but I'm still getting a hang of office politics. My biggest problems are I don't like to be micromanaged and I can't keep my fat mouth shut. Fortunately, my boss is awesome and walks the fine line of micromanaging and ignoring quite well. He also shields us from the upper management shitstorms which is much appreciated. The other part is because the filter between my brain and my mouth is too coarse to prevent all the stuff rattling around in my head from spewing forth. I have gotten better. I used to be completely tactless and now I might say that I lack tact. I need to improve further though if I want to be successful because you need to be able to collaborate effectively in technology and science.

I don't have much patience for inefficiency or bullshit and there is a healthy amount of that at work. Meetings never start on time and always need to be rebooted when higher level managers walk in. You also need to massage a lot of egos or they won't work for you. A former co-worker told me about a book he read once called, "How to get people who don't work for you to work for you" or something to that effect.

Don't get me wrong; I like my job and I'm happy there. I guess these thoughts come bubblin' up after being at work for eleven hours with most of that time spent in meetings.

1 comment:

Flora Tseng said...

welcome to the real world. Invite your boss and his boss to read your blog, heh.