Posts from — January 2010

I started at ThoughtWorks a couple of weeks ago. Once upon a time, I would have been in India for immersion now – but that’s changed. I have mixed feelings about this – on the one hand, getting right into work is exciting for me and more profitable for all, but on the other, I don’t get the deeper experience and bonds of learning side-by-side with a ton of other Thoughtworkers. I did have a couple of lovely people in my orientation group, but it didn’t feel as absorbed in the culture as I would like.

That, by the way, is clearly going to be the most difficult part of itinerant consulting: making and keeping connections with the people I don’t work with every day. There are a ton of brilliant people at TW, a couple of them working with me now, and that’s part of the appeal of this company: getting to absorb some of these brilliant, different perspectives. I’ll be working on that, looking for people and projects that can help feed that sense of tribe.

The travel isn’t hard. Well, the travel might be hard, if I weren’t someone who really enjoys new places. And airports. I’m working in Boston for the next several weeks, and it’s a good city full of good people, far as I can tell. I’m home this weekend in Richmond feeling a bit homesick for Boston (Richmond can’t handle snow and is getting a lot; Boston is highly competent at snow). The travel’s fun: new food, new vistas, new people, tiny towels. I like it all.

Working on a project also feels like jumping into the other awesome thing about working with ThoughtWorks: changing the world. We’re totally doing it.

How much do people, on average, think about their communication style? Over time, I’ve interacted with a lot of different personality and style assessments, and it’s fairly common for the people I know to have some assessment result they use to describe themselves – whether that’s MBTI, Personalysis, DiSc, or whatever they’ve experienced. Horoscopes, even (though those have nothing to do with your actual responses to questions or situations, they can color your understanding of self, right?).
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