2003/07/17

Just done a great dinner with Helen and Jay -- 2 very capable mangers in our engineering team, I invited them to a small tiny Japanese restaurant, Ho-Shing, the restaurant which I heard a lot but been there only once recently; this little neat restaurant provide so called " Home made Japanese food " which means they are not cook with rare material such as Shark's Fin, Abalone, but using simple and easy to find materials then produce delicious dishes. the restaurant do accept early booking -- you can't book the restaurant one week or even 2 weeks before , they open for reservation on the date of your schedule dinning date. ( I thought this statement describe before ), tonight, we had the BBQ chicken wings. chess roast with fish cake, steam clam, Japanese salad, eel egg roll, cool rice noodle, we enjoyed it so much, Jay didn't know why he is invited, only Helen knew.
few weeks ago, Helen send out an email to all managers and accuse the inefficiency and not well planned project impact on our business operation and challenged all the mangers involved in this cross-dept. activity, it rose some concerns, COO send everyone mail to reiterate the importance of cross-dept. process management and as the same time, advise managers not to send mail like this to increase the tension between depts. I took Helen to Starbucks and try to find out why an emotional letter comes out suddenly without consult with her superior? to my surprise, her direct report knows and have no objection to her action, but when the issue break out, her superior didn't show up or to defense together with her, this make her very disappointed, so , I urge her to make appointment with COO and to clarify this awful situation and don't let the misunderstanding turn to liability to her , this is not easy, in return, I promise her, if she had the courage to make such an appointment, I will treat her a good meal. so we are here tonight.

Lead and work with talent , we need to be sincere, need to show the empathy and be honest, why we can walk until now for a new start up, is what I called , the good people effect, we don't create enemy internally, even we are a little bit slow. Don’t befit from the learning curve, but it paid off. to keep this momentum, we need everyone in the company do what they say, do what they think; service your colleague before service your customer.

posted by Roger @ 7/17/2003 10:59:00 下午