In Support of Management Excellence
Over the past couple months, I finally reached out to the Management Excellence crowd and decided to participate. Within weeks, I was snapped up as the new Evangelism Chair, helping to build out the ME experience here at Microsoft. There are three primary initiatives which I hope to drive in FY09:
- The Monthly MEC Mixer Monday (Mmmm): Launched this past month and to be expanded in September, the goal of this monthly event is networking. There was an effort underway to schedule recurring group lunch meetings, but I’m not sure that it went anywhere. Besides, some people don’t want to commit to an entire lunch — sometimes you just need to have the flexibility of a quick, stand up, greet-and-meet event that allows people to flow in, flow out. The goal is to have multiple sessions happening at the same time, same day, different buildings, so that no matter where you are on that last Monday of each month, you know there is a networking event with other MEC (Management Excellence Community) members nearby. The event is up and running in Redmond Town Center (last Monday of the month from 11:30a to 1pm in B5/3rd floor lounge). Looking for more sponsors.
- Channel M: Are you a fan of Channel9 or Channel10? My idea is to create something similar around management excellence. We’re now discussing benefits of internal versus external, platform (SharePoint, WordPress, Typepad, or custom), and participation from the MELT (Management Excellence Leadership Team). My hope is to have this up off the ground this month, if possible.
- M-SIG: This one has the least to do with ME, but does tie into our goals of ongoing management education. What I’d like to do is to recreate eBIG.org or SDForum.org within Microsoft, hence my temporary name M-SIG (Microsoft Special Interest Groups). Think of it as a monthly product faire — recurring sessions, open to all employees, around products, technology areas, CSPs, management topics, and so forth. More opportunities for people to interact with teams, to cross-pollinate ideas, and just to ask questions. I spent about an hour at the Live Mesh table at the MS Product Faire asking questions, wanting to learn more. A Live Mesh SIG could feature devs one month, a product manager another month, partner or customer successes another.
As with everything the MEC does, we need people to participate. If you have attended the ME Foundation event and are not yet participating in the community, but are interested in helping out with one or more of these ideas, please let me know. You can reach me at cbuck@
