Lotus Rock Star

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Wow, this is a hard blog entry to write. I personally never thought it would happen. But people change, and so do companies.

You may know that I've been on the road much of the summer - four Collaboration University conferences, Advisor, GCPC, client engagements, and more. In this time out of the office, I've had the opportunity to reflect on the kind of work we do, the impact we're making, and the ways we communicate. I've also been able to grant a lot of autonomy and freedom to the staff back at the office (when they were not with me), a somewhat liberating exercise. And, we have found new ways to communicate about our projects, about clients, and about work in general.

But even with the success of this year (our best year ever, and there's still 3 months left), we have all felt that there was something missing. It was as if we were a one-trick pony, but with so much more talent and so much more to offer. So we decided to try something new, and it really got us hooked.

Last week I was in Miami in pretty much a typhoon. Viktor joined me and Liz there for the Advisor conference, and told me what had gone on back at the office the previous week (when I had been in Boston, wishing for a laundromat). Apparently, Jerald, one of the other senior consultants, had come in to the office alone one day, and was greeted by a new occupant of the office - a spider.

The spider, staring him down across the hallway, was 3" long, had eight eyes and fangs the size of my first laptop. It was a wolf spider, one of the largest spiders in North America besides the turantula. He captured it, did some research, placed it in a container designed for such things, and started feeding it a steady diet of crickets, which it would run down and devour, leaving nothing but tentacles.

So - to recap - we found a massive, hairy, evil monster that can cause pain and most definitely fear in most human beings, especially around the office. So naturally, we named it SharePoint. Here is an actual photo of the beast, taken just this weekend.

Sadly this week, we're going to kick SharePoint out. Turns out it's too expensive to keep feeding it, and it really needs a bigger box (probably more than one) and more attention than anybody originally thought. It keeps getting bigger and bigger, and we're honestly getting more afraid of it every day.

Had you going, didn't I?

And yes, you can have my Quickr when you can pry it from my cold, dead hands.