Charity Water
We have a lot of pretty awesome people at Magnet Forensics, and every day I'm reminded just how awesome. A colleague of mine, Danielle Braun, had what I thought was an incredible idea for her birthday. For Danielle's birthday, she's not asking for more new clothes, for her parents to get her a car, for help with paying off tuition, or for some new fancy tech gadgets. But she's not asking for nothing. Danielle is asking for your support with Charity: Water this year.
Charity: Water is a non-profit organization with the goal of bringing clean water to people in developing nations that don't have access to it. Reading their mission page probably opens your eyes a fair bit about the lack of access to drinking water in other countries. They're not about some complex and elaborate plan to revolutionize access to clean drinking water. However, they do have a simple and straight forward approach. Donate a little bit of money and they can install wells, rain catchments, and filters in areas without access to clean water. Your small contribution can make a huge impact on other peoples' lives.
Please consider helping Danielle out with her goal of raising money for clean drinking water. A little bit goes a long way with Charity: Water.
Articles
- Guest Post: 7 Deadly Sins: How to Successfully “Cross The Chasm” By Avoiding These Mistakes: In Geoffrey Moore's article, we get to revisit some of the great learnings in Crossing the Chasm. If you haven't read the book, although it's a bit old now, it's still a solid read. This post was a great reminder of a lot of the things the book talks about. It's important to know where your business sits in the chasm model so that you know what you should be focusing on. Too many companies focus on the right things at the wrong times and have terrible missteps. Check it out (and the original book too)!
- Holiday Gifts EVERY Employee Secretly Wants: Dharmesh Shah is a guy who always seems to have an awesome perspective to share. There are a few things that despite someone's level of performance, length of employment, or amount of skill should be deserved. Often these are overlooked either by grumpy managers or because perhaps the person may not have been a top performer. In Dharmesh's opinion, that shouldn't be a factor. The holidays are a perfect time to remind ourselves to recognize all of our employees' accomplishments and treat them with respect. If you aren't already, maybe this article is the little wake-up call you need.
- 6 Things Really Thoughtful Leaders Do: Nothing groundbreaking here, but like the article says, this time of year is great for reflecting. Do you consider yourself a thoughtful leader? Do you observe the people around you, how they interact, and how things are flowing at work? Do you take the time to reflect on things you've done, how you've acted, or even how employees may have improved in areas you've discussed with them? There's a handful of great reminders in this article that I would suggest you check out!
- 14 Code Refactoring smells you can easily sense and What you can do about it?: This week's first programming article! Except... Well... This one is about the management side of programming. How do you know if your software team's code is in a real stinky spot? This doesn't necessarily mean your developers write bad code. It could just mean that you need to hit the brakes a bit and go revisit some problem areas in the code. This article talks about some of the warning signs.
- What Makes A Good Manager? 7 Things To Ask Before You Promote: Does it make sense to give anyone you're promoting a management position? Probably not. Seems obvious when you ask it like that, right? The unfortunate truth is that a lot of companies take the simple path and for anyone they want to promote, they throw a management position their way. Some people just don't make great managers. This article talks about the qualities you want to look for in managers. Maybe the person you're looking to promote won't make a good manager *now*, but if it's something they can put time and effort into building the skills and experience towards, it could still happen.
- 10 Major Causes for Failure in Leadership: While lists of things to do are always nice, having a list of things to definitely not do is also helpful. Here's one of them. Some of the leadership-don'ts I liked on this list were being too good to serve your followers, using your "authority", and fear of competition. I think those are a few that are easy for people to forget, and there at the top of my list of leadership-don'ts. Read some more great points in the article!
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