Hurrah!!!!

Thanks to Bry my computer has been mended of its cantankerous ways and now actually works when I want it to, instead of when it wants to!!! And it is speeeeeeeeeeeedy! Thank you so much, Bry. In addition to getting my zippy computer back we had a spendiforous lasagna dinner! I am spoiled!!! Thanks to you both.

A bit disappointed

A couple of weekends a go we went on a new hike at Red top Mountain. I had my heart set on going again this weekend, had my camera all ready to go and when we got there it was closed for some unknown reason this week. I am obsessed with going again and yesterday when I went for a very hilly hike in our neighborhood and through some of the backroads, which is usually quite one of my favorite things to do, I just kept thinking about the new trail and how much I wanted to go on it. It is really a mountain bike trail. About 4 miles of rough gravel, BUT, it is relatively flat or at least small hills and it goes around the lake with gorgeous views most of the time. I've attached a map and if you look at the bottom you can see a little road that says Iron hill cove. That goes to the new trail which then goes around the peninsula there. It really was gorgeous and I can't wait to take pictures to show you all.

Moon Set

Last night Wood and Bry took some pictures of an eclipse of the moon. Not sure how they turned out. But this morning when I went out to get the paper, the moon was just setting and, I thought, gorgeous so I grabbed a couple of shots with my trusty little camera.

A wee bit of an update

I started my detail in Atlanta this past week and having been commuting to work in my new Ford EDGE Sel Plus. (its bright metallic red) I got the works and love love love the panoramic roof and even the sirius radio. I listen to music on the drive into work and usually a comedy channel on the way home. Sure makes for a much better drive... I have heard some hilarious routines this past week. Anyway I guess I would have to agree with Bryan that Atlanta drivers are definitely crazier than LA ones. They not only drive 80+ miles an hour but weave in and out of lanes at will. Crazy Crazy. For those of you that know I am a serious Saturn fan you may wonder why I traded mine in and went to Ford..... Let's just say I got the Saturn experience at Ford and vice versa. I definitely won't recommend that Saturn dealer to anyone ever. I did 4 leadership interviews a couple of weeks ago when I was in DC. Verrrrry interesting to get opinions from folks at the top of our organization. I'm still writing the reports up but will try to grab some of the better quotes for the next blog. I was and still am extremely impressed with how gracious and generous everyone was with their time for me, especially our COO.

Survivor

(This is the Broad award won by the HISD a couple of years ago. They are up for the award again this year)

Well I am in the last day of the 3rd week of 'all together' training for the EPP, better known as survivor. You'll be glad to know that I have not been kicked, nor taken myself off, the island ;-)

Seriously this Executive Potential Program is tough stuff but really really worth it I think. This was the week of visiting different business entities in the city of Houston. So we were put on new teams which met for the first time Sunday night (11 of us).

On Monday we had some training in the morning and then in the afternoon, we met together as a team to select a leader, decide who was going to do what on the visit, what questions we were going to ask to make sure that we got the material we needed to meet our deliverables- a 45 minute powerpoint presentation, a 5-7 page paper, and a thank you letter to the entity that we visited.

You would think that would be a somewhat easy task, but when you have 11 Type A personalities, all either very strong leaders or with leadership potential, the challenge becomes letting one person lead...i.e. too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the soup.

We we finally divided up the responsibilities and who would do what for our deliverables and got ready for our visit to the Houston Independent School District(HISD) on Tuesday morning.

What a really wonderful visit we all had - that we agreed on! If I had young children I would seriously consider moving to Houston to put them in one of their schools. There goal is to be the "choice in education" for all residents of Houston and they are taking very bold and innovative steps to reach this goal.

Anyway I have lots more details for anyone interested in hearing about the visit.

But now the hard part began. Two people 'volunteered' to take all of our notes and compile them into the beginning of a paper. Then 3 folks 'volunteered' to take that document and edit it to turn it into our final paper. There was one thing that we ALL agreed on.... we did not want to leave Houston with any of the deliverables from this project hanging over any of our heads! The rest of us were involved in putting together the powerpoint presentation and then delivering it to our fellow EPPers. To say the least Wednesday was a very stressful day, as everyone had lots of opinions about how to do every little piece of each deliverable, including the thank you letter that I wrote, which although folks said "just write it" then went through 4 revisions before it was sent (including a minor discussion about commas- it seems there is a fairly evenly divided camp about where and when they are needed.... imagine that :-) ) But it is good to have lots of eyes always on a document.

We made it through Wednesday (barely) and then faced a new day of decisions on Thursday. There are some really great presenters on my team and we all had some really good, but different ideas about how we should sit as a team and how the room should be arranged for the presentation. Doesn't this all seem so petty!!!!- believe me it is easy to focus on this minutia during the process and really hard to keep your focus on the real objectives.

Well that was the deliverable that meant the most to me.... the unstated and intangible one and really the only one that will mean anything to any of us 5-10 years from now - How to build and maintain a team to accomplish a specific task. The task is really secondary to the building the cohesiveness of the team. Every little contribution is important from body language and sighing, to carefully chosen words to build instead of tearing down, and choosing which battles to fight and how important they are. Although all decisions are not important, when one person starts making all of them without buy in from others, then the decision becomes to depose the dictator... and I am afraid that is an important decision.

Anyway all in all we did very well, I learned lots of team building skills and the visit to HISD was definitely a highlight of the "Good to Great" business model experience.

LOTS of of pictures from the plane

I spent most of the plane ride home from Portland taking pictures. It was sooooo gorgeous. Believe it or not this is just a small sampling.