A Toast Through Time

Tonight I attended the Cape Coral Toastmasters Club. Toastmasters International is a nonprofit educational organization that operates clubs worldwide for the purpose of helping members improve their communication, public speaking and leadership skills.¹

I’ve heard the good benefits of getting involved in this type of organization. Aside from the opportunity to socialize, meet potential business clients and partners, and build my list of contacts, I hope to learn and improve the art of speaking, listening, and thinking.

The members were friendly, receptive, smart, and fun. Though the meeting was professional, the feel around the room was relaxed, positive, and quite immersing. One definitely has to be interested in the art of public speaking to enjoy this type of meeting. There were several guests present tonight, and I think we all had a positive experience.

It was great to meet, chat, and briefly introduce myself to several members. I went in there with a positive attitude and even participated on my very first day! It has been a long time since I’ve been involved in any type of organization in the professional realm. Showing up to tonight’s Toastmasters meeting felt great. I felt like my good old self again.

Just to give you an idea, several years ago I was very involved in the community around me. Back then it was the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s student community. I served in the Senate, was Vice President of the Society for Hispanic Professional Engineers, was a Resident Assistant several terms, wrote for the campus newsletter, and served in other organizations inside and outside of campus.

Since moving to Florida I sort of fell off the map. After a chain of disappointments, I sort of fell into a depression and lost touch of my talents. I even picked up on a little enemy called fear and self-doubt. Yuk!

But it’s all good now. I’m fighting back. This fisherman ain’t finished yet. With God all things are possible! Plus God will not be done with me until his work is accomplished in me. I look forward to joining the next Toastmaster session, and God willing, people can say once again… Look out world, here comes JCruz! as I work in my vocation and share with others the limitless love of God. Make it a wonderful week!

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

1. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toastmasters_International [↩]

Adding Instant Messaging to Any Site Rated! 3 Stars

The MIX 2008 Internet presentation Adding Instant Messaging to Any Site, by Keiji Kanazawa and Nikhil Kothari, was Rated! 3 Stars.

Rated! Value Scores™ (5 being the highest)

• Price: 5
• Educational: 4
• Evangelizing: 0
• Originality: 4
• Relevance: 2
• Usefulness: 3
• User Experience: 2
• Replay/Lasting Appeal: 2

The New Business Language of IT and How Using It Can Help Change Your Organization’s Culture

I took the opportunity to check out a few CIO Executive Council Outlook videos the other day and ran across a very interesting “conversation” with Mary Hall Gregg, CIO of Quest Diagnostics. What I found most interesting was how the use of language helped change an IT culture. Today I wanted to share some of this language with you.

The idea is to stop using the old IT language and use the new business language. From what I understand the CIO Executive Council put this together for the beneficial use of all businesses and their IT organizations. Check it out:

I really liked the example of changing the language used to describe internal customers to business partners. Mary Hall Gregg made a great point when she explained the conscious decision her organization made to never use the word customer to refer to colleagues (the people inside the organization) and instead refer to them as as business partners.

Our colleagues — they are our business partners and together we are trying to drive growth for the company, and IT is a tool and a technology to drive growth. Our customers are the people that we serve, so patients are our customers and the patients are first in everything that we do. Physicians are our customers, health plans are our customers, employers are our customers. The people who use our services, who pay the bills — those are our customers. The employees of Quest Diagnostics, they’re either our business partners or, in some cases we refer to them as users, if they are using a service of IT, but we don’t allow anyone in IT to talk about our partners as being customers because it changes the dialogue and it sets a different expectation. If you think you’re my customer, you’re less willing to engage in a dialogue about how we can improve things and work together and collaborate. You just expect that I’m going to deliver a service, and when I don’t get it right, you don’t want to engage in a discussion about how we improve and move forward, so the use of the word partner versus customer I think is very essential for a company and an IT organization, that is about the growth of the company.

Language is important in the corporate culture. Every business and industry defines its culture by their use of language. I have worked for some of the best companies in their industries and each had their own language for industry-specific terms and for general terms, like employees. In my businesses I call employees team members and partners and consider all divisions to be groups, in order to discourage silos and invisible walls and to promote collaboration and a sense of family - an association of people who share common beliefs or activities. I am amazed at how powerful language is.

Kudos to the CIO Executive Council for their fine work on the Outlook series. It was very educational to watch the videos and read the transcripts. I cannot wait to put this information to good use. How about you?

Top 10 Schools for Latinos

If you are a student who wants to know what the top schools for Latinos [1] are, or a parent looking at a child who’s off to college in a about a year or so, check out the September 2007 issue of Hispanic Business Magazine. They came out with the top 10 business, engineering, law, and medical schools.

When you look at ratings, no matter who they are from, do your research. Take the propaganda, marketing, and biases out the door. I’m not saying Hispanic Business necessarily did that, nevertheless be smart about the information presented to you, don’t take it as fact and “that’s that”. For starters find out what their criteria was and how they arrived at their top ten. See who the people and company(ies) behind the magazine are, sponsors and stuff. Then, compare their choices with other well respected publications. In the end it is going to be a matter of personal choice what school you go to. Unless, of course, you have strict parents

For example, Hildy Medina wrote on page 34 of the issue,

Most college rankings, including our Top 10 Business, Law, Engineering, and Medical schools lists, take into account a school’s academic excellence. But the Hispanic Business lists go beyond the straight curriculum questions to look at enrollment by U.S. citizens, faculty, student services, and retention rates.

Kudos to the magazine’s leadership for going above and beyond to bring us their list of top 10 business, engineering, law, and medical schools for universities around the United States. Read up and let me know if this was helpful.

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