A Polish Conference, Ego and Feedback

Hi all,

I hope you've had an excellent week. It's been somewhat chaotic in my world as we ran our very own Agile conference in Wroclaw, Poland last Saturday!

It was amazing. If I say so myself.

The conference was so well run by our team in Poland that it felt like the conference had been around forever. Sure, the main projectors only just started working about ten minutes before the event, but it all came together in the end!

The event was the first big scale agile gathering in Wroclaw and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. The tickets went on sale and sold within 15 minutes. People were trading tickets and if they couldn't make it, they gave them to friends. We had around 87 people out of the 100 turn up, which is pretty good given the event was free and on a Saturday!

A lot of fun. I'd recommend that if you're hiring, you run something similar. We primarily wanted to give back to the community so all of the talks were focused on sharing our knowledge. But of course, we were also raising awareness of our brand and the fact we are hiring in our Poland office.
 

Feedback and community

I listened to you. I originally wanted the Cultivated Management community to be on Google+ as I have a strange liking for G+, but it's not a very popular platform with many.

So before the community really kicked off I made the snap decision to move the community to LinkedIn where it appears more of you are hanging out.

I will start adding content and discussions next week. It is a private community. I want to keep it small and intimate. Saying that, do invite people who are keen to improve their management skills. I will only talk about the community on my mailing list to keep the numbers small.

Do please join the community and share your views, thoughts and ideas about management.

The community is here: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8573457

Book of the week

I have an ego.

We all do. I try to keep mine in check. I know most of us do. But after reading Ego is the Enemy I know I still have some work to do.

The book is by Ryan Holiday who also wrote my favourite all time personal development book - The Obstacle is the Way. His writing style is great. He weaves in stories and tells interest tales to re-enforce his message. He keeps his books very focused.

In the Ego is the Enemy he tells stories of famous people whose egos ruined what they had built, he explains why ego is bad and needs keeping in check and thankfully, he provides some ideas on how to control your ego.

It's a really good book.

3 times a week

Starting next week, I will be trying to blog to Cultivated Management three times a week.

I struggle to write long form posts given time constraints and my goal to write another book this year/early next year. But I have over 290 posts in draft that should be shared and hopefully helping others. They are shorter posts. More snippets of insights rather than deep dives, but I aim to get them out there for you.

It's partly therapy for me, but my main goal is to share what I've learned and observed with you all. There will still be some deep dive, long form posts, but on the whole I aim to keep them short, but increase the frequency.

I doubt I will achieve 3 every week, but I'll give it a good go.

I've also stopped all SEO tactics, creating supporting images and building social links around my blog. It was taking away from writing and sharing. It was becoming bigger than it needed to be. Sure, it brought more traffic but it took away the joy of writing content for other people. I hope by stopping these things the quality of my posts will increase and more insights will get shared. Watch this space :)

Anyhow, have a fab weekend and go forth and control that ego :)

Until next time.
Rob