Leadership: A Name and A Principle

Professional Development
I'm actively working to put together the leadership course that I talked about here and here. No, not full time. I still have to pay the bills with real work. But progress is going forward. I have an initial name and the principle around which we're going to do this thing: The Data Community Leadership Program will deliver a world-class platform designed to teach technology and thought leadership through direct training and mentoring in order to better grow and develop new leaders within our community. Watch this space for more about the Data Community Leadership Program. Also, this is going to be community driven and run (eventually). Feel free to provide feedback on the name and the principle.
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Grant’s Fly-by-night Leadership Course – The Plan

Professional Development
Get a better name Define my personal goals for the course I won’t be sharing these with you. I may share them with my Inner Circle (defined below). I’m thinking this is a 2-3 year commitment I’m making. I need to have my own set of measurements to ensure that this will be worth the time and effort that I’m putting into it. Define a set of principles and goals for the course I want this course to have meaningful aim. It’s not, absolutely not, about management. Management and Leadership are two different things. This is about being a leader. It must have a purpose. The goals defined here, and like everything else, subject to change over time, will set the tone for each of the other choices. Here's another…
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Leadership Training Possibility

Professional Development
I know a few people in the SQL Server community who have been involved in Scouting. A couple of them have taken or helped lead Scoutings leadership training program known as Wood Badge. It's an amazing program. I won't even attempt to tell you what Wood Badge has done for me and what it does for Scouting. Suffice to say, Wood Badge helped to make me a better person and in return, I helped make Scouting better. What's this have to do with SQL Server? Not much really. But, what does it have to do with you and your career? Tons. It was pointed out to me that there's an Oracle users group that actually runs a leadership program. You can read about it here. It strikes me that, maybe this…
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Approachable? Sometimes.

DevOps, Professional Development
Deservedly so, I got called out for a bit of attitude I displayed in a recent blog post: Time for a Quick Rant. Steve Hood took the general attitude of "Do this or I will beat you" to task in his blog post The Approachable DBA. Granted, my little rant was primarily done tongue wedged immovably in cheek. But I was reflecting an attitude that the gods know I'm guilty of and that I think way too many DBAs are guilty of. Actually, I think developers are just as guilty. And sysadmins, san admins, support desk people, QA, the report writing team, those people supporting the data warehouse certainly, the SharePoint team, and that poor lady who got stuck being the Deployment manager. That attitude? I don't think you heard…
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