BlogSat

Some months ago I had a pull a presentation and some analysis together quickly and needed information from a few different folks to make it happen. Each of them just had to (more or less) tell me things they already knew or point me to folks on their teams who had exactly what I needed. All of them were ~peers. These three people showcased the three kinds of helpers I've generally found in big companies. The "Here you go":  This is my favorite kind of colleague. This person (let's call him/her Person A) gave me what I needed a minute after I'd asked them, asked me if it was useful and if they could do anything else. They sent me two other related links a minute later. A couple of minutes after that Person A asked me what I needed this information for, and I was happy to tell them. Person A then told me of one other thing that they thought might have been relevant. I'm definitely going to ping Person A the next time I have a question, and I hope I get t...

So caveat emptor: this has the potential to be a depressing post. :-) But death and mortality has been on my mind a lot over the last month. First, within the space of a week I heard about 3 former colleagues passing away. And then I heard about another from his family for whom the end was near. All of them were far too young and with young families.  For reasons I don't understand and I'm sure would make fascinating psycho-analytical material, I had a couple of dreams last week about my father who passed away three years ago. Each ending with my waking up because I tried to call him in the dream and finally realizing I couldn't. And then yesterday I read the poignant note that Sheryl Sandberg wrote about coping with the death of her husband. Any of these (but particularly the first) will make you think of your own mortality and how fragile life is. My wife and I hugged each other and our son particularly tight because of these.  Most people regret the sam...