Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Calling All Thought Leaders

I was giving heavy consideration this weekend to if I could step forward leaving a world full of slackers and sheep behind to answer the call of thought leadership. I am not referring simply to thoughts in general or extensive knowledge for that matter. If this were the case I would quickly make my way to the front if the topic for discussion were College Football, Gilmore Girls, or Jane Austin novels. As I mentioned however trivia buffs need not apply to this one because knowledge is meerly the first step in forward thinking.

This is the world I have found myself in as a technical recruiter for a provider of Service Oriented Enterprise consulting. Our practice managers have set the bar at gurus and evangelists and show no signs of adjusting the limbo poll. It gets really interesting when they add on a side of 75% travel, coupled with excellent communication, and spoon on some humility for good measure. Humble thought leader? I am checking now if Webster gives that phrase as an example under the over used word "oxymoron." I can confirm they don't.

So are these managers being unrealistic? I used to think so, but I have found some pretty close contenders. Service Oriented Architecture is doing amazing things to bridge the gap between business and technology services, but where I get excited is realizing the impact it is making on business and technology CANDIDATES. No longer are MBA's concerned solely with dollar signs and profitability and developers and architects are now right in the middle of a heated discussion concerning bugets and profitability. Hopefull this means there are less boardroom duals where 20 paces and two drawn pistols are what seperates business and technology from productivity. But how did we get here you ask?

I have thought quite a bit about what it was that caused these individuals to break out of their molds that college degrees had long cast. Perhaps Big Bang... or what some like to call the .com bust. Did the techies realize they needed to start placing eggs in other baskets in order to support their families and their new acquired expensive taste? What about the business and financial analysts? What got them to cross the boundaries of supply and demand into the unknown of C++ and Java? I have no idea. You tell me! I suppose that's what a blog is for.

Bottom Line... candidates continue to amaze and impress me. More amazing than anything are the number of candidates who give themselves a 10 out of possible 10 for SOA during my phone screens. I never realized there were so many "Fathers of SOA." For those of you who I have screened and are reading my blog wondering if you rated yourself 10, don't worry I more than likely gave you a 9 regardless of what you said to help your chances... that is if I liked you. In all seriousness I am encouraged by the quality of candidate I am seeing and look forward to the continued evolution of the IT candidate.

By the way if you're interested in applying for a job with MomentumSI we simply ask that you prove your membership in Mensa as well as provide us with a tape of your appearance on Jeopardy (don't bother unless you were atleast runner up).

1 comment:

Bethany Pirttima said...

Thanks Lon for being my first meaningful comment. I say meaningful because I had a guy respond to my blog soliciting his business to me, but gave no details about what his business is. Good strategy for someone selling something who anticipated a whole lot of objections. As you articulated, this would not be a stratgy for selling SOA because SOA flat out makes sense to businesses. The difficult part is the delivery and integration it seems... taking the old "chops" for a spin and see how they do.