Matthew Barzun, the old CEO of TechRepublic, gave a RaRa speech to us once and in it he mentioned the phrase "Hard Fun". In short, Hard Fun is, at the end of the day, what some jobs reward you with. The work is hard, but enjoyable, and in the end gives you an extreme sense of accomplishment. It's like when you work your @ss off and put in crazy hours - ultimately to launch a product on time and flawlessly (or as close as one can expect).
At TechRepublic, while this all sounded nice, it didn't really apply. CNET was a sweat shop. The work was never-ending. The business folks were ambiguous in their project requests, imbecilic in their testing, and showed zero gratitude towards a job well done. No, Hard Fun did not exist there. It was just hard - an no fun. And oddly enough, Barzun left nearly immediately after his speech to work on Jerry Kerry's failed presidential bid in 2004. Imagine that!
HOWEVER... (and you knew I was going to get to a point eventually) my work at Genscape is very much HARD FUN. The work is very difficult. The deadlines are laughable. But we get it done. And we rock! We launched a major product, Gulf Coast Refineries, in a little over 2 weeks last Friday. We soft-launched another major product, Midland Oil Storage, in about a week today. We are rocking and rolling right now. There is no doubt in my mind - this is the Hard Fun Barzun was talking about.
No comments:
Post a Comment