Last week I wrote about how much planning was plaguing me and started to write a little about how it is related to my Myers-Briggs type.  I thought I’d write more about Myers Briggs today.

Myers-Briggs is a personality test (“MBTI” Myers Briggs Type Indicator).  It rates you on four dimensions, described as follows on www.MyersBriggs.org:

Favorite world: Do you prefer to focus on the outer world or on your own inner world? This is called Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I).

Information: Do you prefer to focus on the basic information you take in or do you prefer to interpret and add meaning? This is called Sensing (S) or Intuition (N).

Decisions: When making decisions, do you prefer to first look at logic and consistency or first look at the people and special circumstances? This is called Thinking (T) or Feeling (F).

Structure: In dealing with the outside world, do you prefer to get things decided or do you prefer to stay open to new information and options? This is called Judging (J) or Perceiving (P).

I first took the MBTI in high school, otherwise obsessed with Cosmo’s “Are you a sexy librarian or a foxy teacher?”  I also took it a few times in college and in grad school.  Every time, I was always the same type: ESTJ.  And strongly ESTJ.  Not like, E, kinda S, T or N, J, but off-the-charts E.S.T.J.

An excerpt from the description of ESTJ (from the above site) reads “Practical, realistic, matter-of-fact. Decisive, quickly move to implement decisions…Have a clear set of logical standards, systematically follow them and want others to also.”  And that was me, for a long, long time.

Can I move the needle?

When I was in grad school, we took several different types of assessments to heighten our self-awareness to better interact with others.  When we took MBTI, we also read Type Talk at Work to get some coaching on how to use it as a framework for communicating at work.  Unsurprisingly, I was an ESTJ again.  But this time, I was going through some things outside of work and school that led me to believe that being so strongly an ESTJ was both an asset and a liability.  Though people’s MBTI type typically doesn’t change, I was determined to move the needle on some of my preferences.

In particular, I really wanted to allow myself to make some decisions using Feelings, not just Thinking, and to allow the structure of my world to have some uncertainty in it.  While I didn’t turn into an ESNP overnight, I did manage to incorporate N and P into my world more and over time those measurements became much less extreme.

I sometimes have to remind myself of this.  Not that I live exclusively in the MBTI world – I recognize it’s just one way to view the world, and a flawed one at that.  But it has been a useful framework to remember how to coach myself in a situation.   I have to remember that I can make a decision based on a “gut feeling” or “just because” rather than always needing data and analysis to do everything.

Am I really an “E”?

Fast forward to becoming a mom last January.  It has been surprisingly exhausting.  Sure, it’s also rewarding and sweet and wonderful, but it is also tiring.  Now, I’ve always been outgoing.  And when I say outgoing, I mean talk-to-strangers-on-the-T outgoing.  I didn’t mind being alone – in particular I love to read – but I’ve noticed that since the baby, I crave alone time and silence and quiet to recharge at a level I used to actively avoid at all costs.

I read this article on “Having an Outgoing Personality but actually being Introverted” hoping it would clarify this change for me, but (despite its being interesting) it doesn’t describe me very well.

I think that I’ve turned towards introversion because I put so much energy into babyDiva.  When I am with her I am constantly asking her questions, showing her things, reading her books, coming up with “jobs” for her to do around the house with me, taking her places, etc.  To me, this is being a good parent – engaging with her, teaching her things, sharing experiences – but I think I’m so focused on doing it “right” that I exhaust my extroversive capabilities with her by thinking I need to be “on” all the time.

I could stand to watch this Upworthy video now and then.  It’s a set of short questions with mothers where they critique their own parenting, then a set of questions with their kids about what they think of their moms.  It’s beautiful and shows that maybe I am aspiring to the wrong thing.

I don’t think being introverted is bad – I heard Susan Cain speak last year at the Mass Conference for Women about the power of introverts.  But I also don’t think being introverted is natural for me, I think that it’s just a coping mechanism for now.

I hate planning.  Until last week, I forgot how much.

Last week, I started writing Infinio’s content plan.  I assessed what content we had, put it into buckets, and started looking for the gaps that would define what whitepapers, videos, demos, infographics, and other assets we create before the end of the year.

I forgot that when I was at Dell, each quarter I’d write up a plan for the content my team was going to deliver.  It drove me crazy – I was full of self-doubt that I had good ideas, that the team could execute them, that we were doing too much / too little, that we were aligning with the right major initiatives.   My manager would spend a little time with me on it, make some suggestions, tell me it was great, then it would be done.

I forgot that I go crazy before vacations.  Before we had babyDiva, mrDiva and I used to go on all sorts of adventures – to the Azores, Iceland, Belize, Eastern Europe, Southern France.  I would spend months poring over TripAdvisor and the guidebooks and booking.com to schedule exactly the right itinerary.

Don’t get me wrong – I love *having* a plan.  I love executing against a plan.  And I love the success that comes with executing against a good plan.

I use a grocery list.  I book plane tickets months in advance.  I love maps, and public transportation.  I make all of babyDiva’s lunches for the week on Sunday.  I am what you would call “a planner.”  But I hate some of it.

I think it has to do with a part of me that’s best understood through the lens of Myers-Briggs.  The final letter in Myers-Briggs relates to Structure.

From The Myers and Briggs Foundation:

Structure: In dealing with the outside world, do you prefer to get things decided or do you prefer to stay open to new information and options? This is called Judging (J) or Perceiving (P).

I think I’ll write more about my Myers-Briggs type next week, but for now suffice it to say, I am an incredibly strong “J”.  I have very little tolerance for open-endedness.  I like things to be settled, to already have a plan, to have decided, rather than to have things in a state where I still have to decide.

I think that’s why I like having a plan…but hate making one.  The process of making one is all about uncertainty, while the process of having one is all about having decided.

Last week I posted about how a good slide about changes in the datacenter didn’t make it into a slide deck I was working on.

At the end of the post, I had evolved the slide to this, where the blue arrows indicate cause and effect for innovation, and the red arrows are indicating what is causing all the pressure on storage:

What’s really interesting to me about this is that the same things that are disrupting the datacenter and fueling all the growth in applications and virtualization are the same things that can solve the storage problem.

Call it a technical “hair of the dog” if you will – that which is causing the problem is also the solution.  Because if we take all the memory and CPU that is on the server-side (that is causing the growth in workloads that are taxing storage…) and start using those resources to process storage operations (and leverage the 10GbE networking to communicate across servers) VOILA! We have made major progress on solving storage performance issues.

[[And as an aside.  I never remember if it’s “tail of the dog” or “hair of the dog” just like I never remember if it’s “coming down the pipe” or “coming down the pike.”  Apparently it’s “hair of the dog” and “coming down the pike.” Anyway – this is the part of semi-technical blogging where you get to see my personality and learn exactly nothing technical.]]

In closing.  The best thing about technology marketing for a startup is that you are never “done.”  We’ll continue to have more opportunities to talk with prospects, press, analysts, and other members of the community.  Hopefully I can take some of this reflection and refinement and use it to better tell our story in the future.

After the crazy weeks leading up to VMworld, followed by the exhilarating show itself, followed by a long weekend off, I expected to come back to work yesterday raring to go.

But I wasn’t. I was at loose ends, attending meetings and answering emails but lacking in drive, direction.

It was as if the adrenaline and energy that had been propelling me the past several weeks was gone and nothing had taken its place. My typical instincts for how to prioritize and shape a set of projects was missing.

It’s not that I don’t know what to do; there’s plenty:
-fine-tune the messaging on the website
-write job descriptions for some new roles on the team
-update the company deck with new messaging from VMworld
-investigate our alliance programs for co-marketing opportunities
-map our content to our programs for the rest of the year and identify gaps
-create new content based on all the new things we created for VMworld

But yesterday, I had no motivation for any of it.

Let’s hope today is better.

It’s been a helluva summer.

I haven’t blogged in a few weeks – and I hope to get back to my regular cadence.  But here’s a tl;dr version of what I’ve been up to.

Outside of work

Staircase in our new home

At the end of June, my family and I closed on a new home, after a whirlwind of real estate transactions.  We love our neighborhood and street, so we bought our next door neighbor’s larger condo and sold ours.  Don’t kid yourself, a move next door is still a move.

We took a quick vacation to the Cape, then started on a small set of renovations in the new place.  mrDiva traveled for work in the weeks before and after vacation, while I shifted into heavy-duty prep-for-VMworld mode.

Family vacation on the Cape

We moved into our new home, spent a few days in the Adirondacks with mrDiva’s family, then he traveled again, while I managed a sick dog and leaky ceiling.  Oh, did I mention that at some point in there our car was damaged and in the shop for several weeks?  And that our favorite babysitter moved away to Denver, our dog stayed sick for weeks, and our fridge broke?

But it was a #firstworldproblems kind of summer – we are so lucky to have a beautiful new home, two amazing careers, and most importantly, a healthy babyDiva who is talking up a storm and learning by leaps and bounds.

At work

The work I put into prepping for VMworld was unlike anything I’ve ever done professionally.  VMworld is the biggest tradeshow my company participates in each year – 20,000+ attendees, all of our competitors and partners, and this year, our opportunity to launch version 2.0 of our product.

Leading up to VMworld here were the major projects I was involved in:

• Training the entire booth staff on our messaging, our product’s new features, and how to talk with prospects about common objections.
• Designing the demo of our product we were showing in the booth.  Fortunately, we have amazingly awesome (is there where I’d use the word “amazeballs”?) technical people who wrote the software and set up the demo systems, so all I had to do was determine how we wanted to tell the story.
• Working with our technical leaders to write our deck for Tech Field Day, a unique event during VMworld where we can present our story to top bloggers and customers.
• Writing new collateral to support our major use cases.
• Writing new messaging to describe our 2.0 product value.
• Writing content for our new website, launched to support our product launch.

Phew.  It was late nights, weekends, work on vacation, and more iterations than I care to remember.   And yes, I am going to the spa tomorrow.  But I would not have traded it for anything.  Having this level of impact is exactly why I went to a startup.  And coming out of VMworld with all this having executed successfully I am (#humblebrag) appreciating what I’m able to accomplish with hard work.

At VMworld show floor 

What I learned

I learned a lot and I’m sure that over time I’ll assimilate even more of it.  Here’s my first pass.

1. Events like this are a force function for articulating strategic direction.  Our senior technical leadership is unbelievably talented, and has a great vision for the company.  However, getting it out of each of their heads and creating a single message for the company’s direction isn’t something we’d have spent time on unless we needed it.  Having done it, there are so many derivative assets and projects we can follow-up with now that we have a clear, written articulation of where we are in the market and where we are going.

2. It’s really hard to switch between marketing for the broadest audience and marketing for the most sophisticated audience in short time.  Our booth staff training and our website marketing has to be accessible and educational.  Our marketing for TFD is predicated on having an audience who already has a strong baseline of the industry, the newest technologies, and even what we do.  Knowing one’s audience is necessary for great marketing, but that doesn’t make it easy to create content for two divergent audiences at the same time.

3. I am beginning to appreciate more dimensions of what it means to be at a startup.  My personal work is very visibly impacting our company’s success.   We are in a segment of the market that is definitely forming right now – we’re one of only two or three vendors who is successfully executing I/O optimization software, and customers and press are paying attention.  What we put on our website and say in the booth and put in our press releases is actually shaping this part of the industry.

4. Absolutely nothing is a substitute for a hard working team. I have never ever worked with a team who worked as hard as our staff did during VMworld.  We demoed until we were hoarse, kept going long after official show hours closed, pitched people in elevators and taxis.  Our salesguys were indefatigable – not looking at their watches, phones, or even breaking for lunch when there were customers around.  I was so proud to work for Infinio and so excited to see how busy our booth was and how many great conversations we had.

5.  Being a working mom is awesome.  babyDiva is just over a year and a half old, and I am so excited to see her grow up.  Nothing gives me perspective on a long day at work like discovering she’s learned new words (“plate” “stroller” “melon” “thankyou”) and can’t wait to use them.  Or grabbing a granola bar to stick in my bag and seeing her do a happy little ‘granola bar’ dance.  I don’t feel torn, I don’t wish I were home all the time, but I love having a life where I can have both.

My memory of this summer will be one where the stars of work and home life aligned.  I have no illusions that it will always feel this way, but I’m happy to enjoy it

Here we go! @UpLiftDesk #standingdesk #insoles

This is cool.  Are my ergonomics right?  Maybe @mjbrender knows.

Ok, I think it’s the right height.  #sweet #feelingproductive

Googling for an article on standing deck health benefiits.

Googling for an article on standing desk productivity benefits

Googling for an article on healthcare cost reduction for standing desk

RT @kimkardashian So sexy! My husband on the cover of GQ shot by Patrick Demarchelier!!! http://instagram.com/p/qnjpg5OS9L/ 

Back to work #lovemystandingdesk

.@vintageneel do you think we need Reebok ball for balance

I’m so short – @vmcarrie’s desk is the only one shorter than mine. @mjbrender and @alanwordguy keep their desks so high

Soooo productive on my new standing desk!

It’s only been 8 minutes?  Wow – shoulders hurt a little #pushingthrough #timeflies

OK, working on my #VMworld deck.  This is so cool to be standing.

Where’s everyone staying for #VMworld?  #vBeers anyone?

Will anyone notice if I take my shoes off?

Something about a standing desk makes me feel powerful – opening a few new windows on my desktop #productivity #GSD #workinghard

So easy to see @TweetDeck and @Feedly and email at the same time as Word and PowerPoint when I’m standing

.@vmcarrie back at her desk.  Wearing heels today.  How does she do #standingdesk with heels?  #power #betterwomanthanI

Should my desk be a little higher?

Should my desk be a little lower?

My back is starting to hurt #pushingthrough #standingdesk #productivity

Off to a staff meeting #firstdaystnadingdesk #productivity

Hey tweeps, anyone use a treadmill desk?