Last week, I posted a story that shaped my career. If you haven’t read the four-installment series, I encourage you to do so starting with “The Internet” .
The primary way that my career was shaped by the event retold in these blog posts was the obvious one. The event opened my eyes to the power of the Internet. From that moment forward, I focused on learning the Internet. Even today, I use this story to push myself to use the latest and greatest Internet applications. My prior posts on Google Groups and Salesforce.com are a window into this. The work we have done with Envysion, creating a Managed Video as a Service company, is also a real-world example. Bearonbusiness.com was started, to a large degree, out of my desire to explore how blogging is shaping business.
But the story offers another important career lesson. How do you get a group of business people to embrace change? Jim brought a group together, showed them that he was learning the Internet, and then challenged them to follow suit. Please appreciate that he was taking risk in doing this. Would he look silly? Would he seem detached? Was this even an appropriate behavior for an executive in 1995 corporate America? Put simply, few executives would put themselves in this position.
To emphasize how serious he was, Jim offered a choice: “Resist change and leave” or “Embrace change and perhaps keep your job.” Maybe I am the only one who walked away with this stark message imprinted on my brain. But I am convinced Jim was deliberate in conveying this message.
I place great value in employees who adapt to change. I look for leaders who have a natural inclination to stay on the leading edge of the Internet. I filter out those who seem uninterested or ill-equipped to embrace the Internet. Today, we all know what the Internet is and we have all used search engines. But what about Social Networking? Software as Service business tools? Cloud computing? Group Collaboration? Blogging?
At Zayo and Envysion, embracing the Internet is a minimum qualification for employment.
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