Nan Palmero, MBA

The Alamo City Rollergirls Taught Me A Lesson

Sunday night, Ashley and I attended our first roller derby bout with the Alamo City Rollergirls – Las Tejanas (@acrollergirls) against the Beaumont Spindletops with a number of our good friends from BMPR. The Rollercade looks as if it has been the same for the past forty or so years, with a new coat of paint here and there and some neon lights added for additional effect. The design was classic roller skating facility and the feel of the building was stale.

Magically, though, the air was electric. There was a line of people waiting to get in the door while the teams greeted fans outside. As the track was prepped with tape to denote the boundaries on the rink, fans poured in to take their places. The announcers took their places, with one of them dressed as a skeleton and making her voice sound like a cross between Dave Chappelle as Rick James and one of the barbers from Coming to America.

The teams are wildly passionate about winning – they train numerous times per week for two to three hours per day all while holding down a day job as well. Each has their roller derby name and persona. These women are dedicated to their sport and their fans are dedicated to them. The gasps, “oooohs” and “aaaahhhhs” when they make a great hit, take a tough tumble or the cheers when they score are incredible.

For these tough ladies it’s not about the money, the great office, the fancy titles (the cool names help), the logos and anything else that seems to be what matters in the rest of the world. Here, these women are duking it out for the love of the game. They can only win if they play together, because if they don’t, there won’t be a person to block nor a person to score. The passion to move forward as a group allows them to take on the toughest challenges with direction from there coach. Can you look at your office and say they work as well as these women? Are you doing enough to coach them all to a victory? Try focusing on your people this week to move them all in the same direction at the same time together and see what you can accomplish.

A big thank you to the Alamo City Rollergirls – Las Tejanas for hosting us and congratulations on their first home bout win of the season!

Sprint | Blaze Across America with 4G Contest – HTC EVO

Sprint launched a 4G contest to win an android powered HTC EVO smartphone. Here’s my contest entry.

Today, I read about Sprint’s newest contest “Blaze Across America with 4G” on Engadget. They’re looking for the most humorous, creative and original essay on why you’re fast, to win the new HTC EVO, cash and a 4G trip to either Houston, Chicago, Maui or Vegas. I thought I’d share my entry to the contest:

caused Usaine Bolt to change his name to Usaine Thunder after following my lightning speeds.

tweet faster than @Scobleizer.

play a faster fiddle than the devil down in Georgia.

hit 88 mph faster than Doc Brown’s DeLorean.

drink a gallon of milk in 36 seconds (it takes Chuck Norris 37).

do a 101 hand slap in the time E. Honda can do a 100 hand slap.

beat out Speedy Gonzales as the fastest mouse in all of Mexico, then came back to Texas.

have a measurement of time named after me – NANoseconds.

won the 24 hour race at Daytona in 23 hours.

move so fast, I use black holes as treadmills.

speak faster than the Micro Machine man.

walked so fast around Vegas that I was #1 on Foursquare in the city during CES.

I’m already in the “choppa” faster than Arnold knows to say the words.

get the bell rung on me in 7 seconds when I ride a bull instead of 8.

Lance Armstrong doesn’t know what the front of my jersey looks like.

caused a reshoot of the video of the moon landing. Neil’s first words were “WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE!?”

Share your entry in the comments section.

You’re the Worst, I Have Proof

Have you ever been told “that person can do no wrong in your eyes” or “give the guy another chance, he’s a really nice person”? This past week I found out that those preconceived notions have a name: Hypothesis Bias or Confirmation Bias. In the case of someone you may not like, you’ll look for comments, actions and intonations to help support your reason for not liking that said person. On the other hand, for a person that you’re fond of, you’ll easily gloss over flaws and mistakes simply because that person is held in high esteem.

The trouble comes when there are people with whom you deal with at the office (and at home, but that’s for a different blog) that may have made a mistake or gotten cross ways with you in the past. You’re now carrying your Hypothesis Bias with you and potentially pre-punishing that employee or coworker for past grievances. Today, determine who that person is that is receiving the effects of your negative Hypothesis Bias, grab the mental sheet of paper where you’re keeping a list of all the things you don’t like and why you’re entitled to those feelings, fold it up as a paper airplane and toss it out. Now, whip out a bright white sheet of blank paper and start over with that person.

Your Hypothesis Bias may have been preventing you from a great associate and *gasp* potentially a friend whom you had previously dismissed. Come back and share how it’s going!

Jesus and the iPad

The past few weekends have been brilliant in proving that audiences vary all over the world. Two different events with which I had a personal experience painted a vivid picture. First, the iPad launch. I’ve read a number of tweets, blogs and even a clip on Modern Family asking why someone needs an iPad. It’s not really a computer, ebook reader or netbook. It’s just…different and it’s at $500 in it’s least expensive form. But you can read books on it! You know where else you can read books? In books. Consider Luis Soriano, who has a “biblioburro” or a “library donkey” in Magdalena, Colombia. Children in his part of Colombia will walk up to 40 minutes to get to school. He’ll ride 5 to 8 hours to get books to kids. The iPad’s price, need for electricity and web seem preposterous in those terms. Think of all the books we could buy in developing countries! Nonetheless, Apple raked in about $150 million in sales the first weekend.

Easter weekend, Bay Area Fellowship in Corpus Christi decided to turn the funnel around on their congregation. Instead of just asking for tithes, Bay Area Fellowship had their congregation donate goods such as luxury cars, furniture and HDTVs and gave it away to attendees on Easter Sunday – $2 million worth, actually. The giveaway was so large that Pastor Bil Cornelius was interviewed on CNN, Fox, MSNBC and a number of other national outlets. Critics came out denouncing the church for giving unnecessary items to people who weren’t in need. The church’s response? A saved soul is a saved soul. We give away food and medicine in developing countries to entice people to come to church and we give away gadgets and other items of interest to a developed country to entice them to come to church, the goal in both being eternal salvation.

In both of these cases, the general population could make arguments against both Apple and Bay Area Fellowship. Each, though, decided to ignore the naysayers and move forward with their mission. Apple with their plan to build a closed platform that hasn’t existed as a notable device in it’s size and capabilities (other tablets already exist but mostly nobody cares) when people need books in the far reaches of the world and Bay Area Fellowship who gave $2 million in expensive goods to move people closer to God when others could argue that should be done in developing countries with food.

Can you look at what you and your company are working on, power through the dip, and push out what really matters? It’s tough to ignore the crowd, you won’t ALWAYS succeed, but when you do, folks will notice.

The Best Annual Reviews

I received a call this week from a close friend regarding her annual review. She described how her boss explained to her that they really liked how dependable and trustworthy she was in her position. The quality of her work is of the highest caliber. Her boss then explained that he felt that she needed to do more work – she needed to take on more projects and more responsibilities. He felt as if she hadn’t been doing enough. Cue the sinking feeling.

The issue is one that Aubrey C. Daniels, Ph.D., knows well. Dr. Daniels is the author of OOPS!

13 Management Practices That Waste Time & Money (and what to do instead). As he describes, the annual performance review is loathed by both employees and managers who have to perform them. He further finds that taking the annual review, a bad process, and turning it into a quarterly review just makes it four times worse per year! Instead, Dr. Daniels suggests that you create measures for the team around what you’d like for them to do, then have a way of continuously measuring against those metrics so they know how well they’re doing.

These constant adjustments and comparisons to the metrics will help you manage your team and maximize their productivity. Dr. Daniels suggests that at the same time, the surprises of not meeting expectations or goals will be minimized because of the communications the manager is having with his or her employees.

Consider the way you and/or your managers communicate their goals and the frequency in which they do so. A more frequent communication with your team will likely help both you and them achieve the right goals in the proper timeline. Additionally, changing course won’t be quite as painful because the communications have been happening along the way. See more about what Dr. Daniels has to say about annual reviews below.

SXSW 2010 – DONE!

Well, @alanweinkrantz and I survived SXSW 2010 and produced an astounding 55 posts between us over the course of a week. It was fun, exciting, exhausting and there are stories I won’t write down. 🙂 Interested in recapping some of the fun, such as interviews with internet famous folks like Sloane Berrent (@sloane), Ramon De Leon (@ramon_deleon), Jeff Pulver (@jeffpulver) and some of the good folks from Foursquare.com (@foursquare)? Hop over to the MySA site with the posts. Alan and I look forward to serving up more tasty content together, that is, if MySA.com permits!

Oh, and if you’re interested in just seeing the photos, hit up the SXSW Flickr Group.

Photo by San Antonio Wedding Photographer | Ashley Palmero!

A Test of Fortitude – Reporting from SXSW

It’s true. @alanweinkrantz and I will be seeing how little we can sleep in Austin during SXSW 2010. Alan is a machine…sent from the future and I’m going to do my best to keep up with him. Don’t let his dapper silver hair fool you, he’ll out walk you all day long. Interested in following our antics? Cool, we’ll be reporting all the goings on through the following channels:

MySA SXSW Live with Alan and Nan

Alan’s Site

@alanweinkrantz on Twitter

@nanpalmero on Twitter

See you in the ATX!

Photo by the beautiful and awesome @AshleyPalmero – San Antonio Photography

Pause The Music

My mornings usually start the same way; with me sleepily stepping into the gym. I turn on my music, put one foot in front of the other on the “dreadmill,” lift weights, get cleaned up and head to work. I’ve met a few people at the gym, but chat rarely. You can count on a “good morning” or “hello” and a warm smile as I rest during reps, while the headphones blare. I may be guilty of yelling my greetings due to the volume (don’t judge me). Today, though, I plopped down on a machine, started my exercise and a friend came and sat beside me, so I pulled the headphones off. After we exchanged pleasantries, I kept the music off. I noticed something. The sounds of people breathing, the weights clanging, more huffing, sighing and grunting from those people around me. The silence and the sounds between those seemingly random noises affected me.

You typically hear people talking about cutting through all the noise and getting clarity. I think sometimes it’s more than noise. It’s music. The music is made up of the things we love, things we’re passionate about, and activities that we enjoy. It’s not noise, it’s the music of our individual life and it may just sound awful to others, so they call it noise.

I think my experience impacted me this morning because I read an interview about Tachi Yamada, M.D., president of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program. The title was Talk to Me. I’ll Turn Off My Phone. I’m fantastically guilty of NOT doing that and I’m usually doing three things at once and leave people feeling less than special. And I’m sorry. I don’t want to be that guy anymore. Technology, connectedness and being in social situations is my music. It’s time to pause the music from time to time. I’ll fail, because I enjoy my music, and I’ll try to pause it again. I’m starting today.

16 New foursquare Badges for SXSW

Being an avid @foursquare player, I was tinkering on the website when I stumbled onto the page with a foursquare party, 16 new badges, foursquare swag and temporary tattoos. Track down the right people at the Sobe Lounge, Microsoft Bing Booth, IFC Crossroads House and SXSW Web Awards. Needless to say, I can’t wait to unlock these goodies and hopefully meet the folks from foursquare in Austin. Just a few more days, so we’ll see you in the ATX!

foursquare @ SXSW