Showing posts with label About Me. Show all posts
Showing posts with label About Me. Show all posts

Monday 18 March 2024

My 2024 Clifton Strengths Assessment

I took the CliftonStrengths assessment on Gallup this morning (20th Feb-24, 6am). I'm having my leadership team complete the assessment as part of my team building. As usual, I have no qualms sharing my psychometrics online as I feel it will help save people time in getting to know me (my teammates) as well as potential headhunters searching for executive candidates. I was as awake as I could be for this assessment, it was a little tricky having to make a judgement call in less than 20 seconds to choose my responses to statements as part of the assessment. 

Reflecting on these results - I think these assessments reflect a period or stage one is going through. For the last four years, I decided to disrupt myself professionally and also personally - and I'm still transitioning from this big change: Relocating to a new city with no friends or family, taking a new job in a new area I knew nothing about and having to start from scratch building a network, earning trust and social credibility (during covid remote working), wrestling with the ramifications of my decision to walk-away from a domain I was expert in, to being a newbie in a very large global company with its own unique norms and culture, etc. So these results took me a little by surprise. In another post I will share what ChatGPT analysed and recommendations offered from the history of all my psychometrics to map how my strengths/motivations profile changed over the years.

Looking at the providers terms and conditions, there isn't anything preventing me from sharing this content as long as I link to the original documents with the copyright notice: 

Any reference whatsoever to this document, in whole or in part, on any webpage must provide a link back to the original document in its entirety.

So here's my results:

Here are my reports:

The rest of this post includes content from ChatGPT

The CliftonStrengths model, formerly known as StrengthsFinder, is a psychological tool developed by Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D., along with Gallup researchers. It's designed to help individuals identify, understand, and maximize their unique strengths. In essence, the model is built on the premise that every person possesses a distinct combination of talents, knowledge, and skills (referred to as "strengths") that can be leveraged to achieve success and fulfillment in both personal and professional life.

Purpose of the CliftonStrengths Model

The primary purpose of the CliftonStrengths model is to facilitate personal and professional development by shifting the focus from remediation of weaknesses to the enhancement of natural talents. The model posits that individuals can achieve more, be more engaged, and feel more fulfilled when they understand and apply their strengths. It encourages a strengths-based approach to development, where individuals and teams invest time and energy in what they naturally do best, rather than trying to improve areas of weakness.

Usefulness of the CliftonStrengths Model

  1. Personal Development: By identifying their unique strengths, individuals can tailor their personal growth efforts towards areas where they have natural potential, leading to more efficient and effective development.

  2. Career Advancement: Understanding one's strengths allows for better alignment with roles or tasks that match an individual's natural talents, leading to increased job satisfaction, performance, and career progression.

  3. Team Dynamics and Performance: Teams that understand and leverage the diverse strengths of their members can improve collaboration, innovation, and productivity. The model helps in assigning roles and responsibilities that align with each member's strengths, enhancing overall team effectiveness.

  4. Leadership Development: For leaders, the CliftonStrengths model provides insights into how to motivate and develop their team members by recognizing and cultivating each individual's strengths, rather than focusing solely on addressing weaknesses.

  5. Organizational Culture: Adopting a strengths-based approach can foster a positive organizational culture that values diversity, encourages continuous learning, and promotes well-being by allowing employees to do what they do best every day.

Implementation

Implementing the CliftonStrengths model involves individuals taking an assessment that measures their natural patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving, resulting in the identification of their top strengths from a list of 34 themes. These themes are categorized into four domains: Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building, and Strategic Thinking. Understanding these themes and domains helps individuals and teams to strategize and execute tasks more effectively, capitalizing on the natural talents present within the group.

I asked ChatGPT to analyse my CliftonStrength reports for criteria like next level roles I believe I'm ready for: Group CTO, CIO, VP or Director of Technology.

Your CliftonStrengths report highlights a unique combination of talents that are highly beneficial for leadership roles in technology and innovation, especially as you aspire to Group CTO, CIO, VP, or Director positions. Here's an analysis based on the strengths identified:

  1. Learner: Your innate desire to continuously improve and embrace the process of learning is crucial for staying ahead in the fast-evolving tech sector. This trait enables you to quickly adapt to new technologies and methodologies, ensuring your organization remains competitive.

  2. Arranger: The ability to organize and optimize resources for maximum productivity is essential for executing complex projects and managing cross-functional teams. Your flexibility complements your organizational skills, allowing you to effectively adapt to changing priorities and challenges.

  3. Restorative: Your knack for problem-solving is invaluable in technology leadership. The ability to identify and resolve issues swiftly can enhance system reliability and innovation, contributing to the overall success of your organization.

  4. Strategic: The capacity to spot relevant patterns and issues and to think several steps ahead is critical for strategic planning and decision-making. This strength supports the development of forward-thinking strategies that can steer your organization towards long-term success.

  5. Individualization: Recognizing and leveraging the unique qualities of each team member can foster a more productive and collaborative work environment. This strength is key to building diverse teams that can innovate and operate efficiently.

Recommendations for Job Roles:

Given your strengths, roles that require continuous learning, strategic thinking, and the ability to manage and optimize resources effectively would be ideal. Positions such as Group CTO, CIO, VP of Engineering, or Director of Technology Innovation would suit your profile. These roles demand a leader who can not only envision the future of technology within the organization but also inspire and orchestrate teams to achieve these visions through innovative solutions and strategic planning.

Your profile suggests that you possess the qualities needed for these high-level roles, with a strong foundation in both problem-solving and team management. Focusing on positions that leverage your ability to learn, adapt, and strategize will not only align with your strengths but also position you to make significant impacts within your organization.

Sunday 14 January 2024

My experiment with ChatGPT as a recommendations engine using Netflix data

As some readers might have learnt about me by now, is that I enjoy data analytics, and more recently been curious about the capabilities of ChatGPT. So I decided to take my Netflix data and give it to ChatGPT code interpreter to see what it comes up with.

If you didn't know, as a Netflix user, you can get access to all your data by requesting it from under account management on the web site:


After a couple of days, you will receive an email from Netflix with a zipped file "netflix-report". Here's what my archive looks like:

The section that's important is CONTENT_INTERACTION. Recommendation engines are all about understanding a user's viewing behaviour: their content preferences, search history, viewing history, events that happen during playback, viewing activity - all inputs into what is called "viewer engagement". 

For 20 years I worked as a software professional building video technology systems. In 2004, I joined a research team building video recommendation engines. At the time, we focused on rules-based engines and used Amazon as the general poster-child, north-star - even then, Amazon's retail recommeder system was making headwaves. In 2004, it was still the early days of the internet. Set Top Boxes, the devices that enabled you access to satellite TV, were not always online. So the scope of our work was constrained to the embedded world of this device: limited compute, memory and storage power. We knew there needed to be a multi-pronged approach to video recommendations back then, with the bulk processing intelligence being done in the "back end" - headend - and recommendations eventually broadcast to the set top box over the air. Anyway, building software that learns viewing behaviours of users was an art back then - and even almost two decades later - remains still an art - although with the proliferation of many software-as-a-services providers, we now have so many options available "Recommendation engines-as-a-service". In my previous role as CTO for Africa's largest video entertainment company, over the years built our own stack, leverage open source recommendation engines. With new capabilities like Amazon Sagemaker and other services, I got our team to start thinking differently and transform to out-of-the-box recommender systems. Don't reinvent the wheel. Build flywheels instead. I left that team in 2020, 4 years later, I'm told the team's completed their transformation and using almost all their recommendation components off-the-shelf instead of building their own.

So what happens to content recommenders now that we have tools like ChatGPT, code interpreters and powerful data analysis? Could video recommendation engines be further disrupted - i.e. democratizing content recommendations to the new world of personal intelligent agents?

Experiment: ChatGPT as a content recommendation expert - Epic Fail

First, I asked ChatGPT to analyse the Netflix data set, then provide an analysis as a video recommendations expert. I've shared my Netflix data. Act as an expert video recommendations engine, recommender system, using all the state-of-the-art concepts for understanding viewer behaviour. Analyse the datasets and produce a detailed analysis and insights report into my viewing habits. What are my preferences? If you were a video content expert, how would you categorise me? What content will you recommend to me? Etc.

Feedback - Results, much better luck with DeepNote
A bit disappointing - ChatGPT struggles to analyse consistently, without errors. Too many errors, load failures and errors analyzing. It starts strong and then bombs out. I find it to be rather inconsistent. Had to wait a while and create a few sessions to get going. A bit of a time waster. It's a shame that ChatGPT has to restart its chain of analysis everytime there's a failure. "Regenerate" kicks off the process all over again. 3 sessions later, then I get bombed out as I've exhausted my time window - come back later. I pay for ChatGPT and still have to accept limited time-based usage. Crazy times. Switched over to Claude to see if it gave better results. Nope, Claude has severe limitations in file size uploads. Waste of time. Google Bard, equally useless. 

I then switched to Deepnote (an alternative to Noteable which is now dead), my experience was much better there. It turns out the Netflix data is sparse enough, missing vital data attributes like content genre classifications (like action, comedy, drama, romance, history, etc.) which makes it difficult to draw conclusions on viewing behaviour. This means we need to find a content database like TMDB to map my Netflix data to (i.e. complete the dataset by appending vital content attributes like genre, actor, director, studio, etc.), then we can build up a complete profile view of my usage, the content my household is inclined to and the for the last phase of the experiment, get the AI to recommend content from another catalog to surface recommendations for me. To get a glimpse of the potential power of an AI-coPilot used in DeepNote, I've shared my project as public here.

I'm not investing more time going down this rabbit hole today! However, it is certainly food for thought on potential new GPT-agents one can build now that OpenAI have released its GPT store. I suspect it's only a matter of time that someone builds a content recommender-gpt on ChatGPT's store, that can provide more diverse recommendations outside the closed walls of a streaming provider. I suspect we will have a resurgence in Content-Aggregator Wars in 2024!

Friday 5 January 2024

46 today



I asked ChatGPT to write a poem, I turned 46 today.  

In honor of your journey and the resilience you've shown, here's a poem that weaves in elements of your life story:

From Natal's fields to corporate climbs,
In the land where the sugar cane twines,
A boy with a dream, in apartheid's times,
Grew with a flame that brightly shines.

Hitching a ride, 600km through the night,
To an interview held in morning's light,
Persistence his creed, ambition his might,
Against all odds, he would take flight.

Engineering called, though medicine's voice was clear,
Yet no regret, for tech was near.
In computers found, a passion so dear,
Self-taught, self-made, amidst career.

Mo, at forty-six, your story's just begun,
The lion's roar can't be undone.
Your flame rekindled, the past is spun,
Into a future brightly won.

On this day, let's not be remiss,
Celebrate the life that is Mo's bliss,
Forty-six years, it's hit or miss,
But Mo's tale, is one of grit and wist.

So happy birthday, with a cheer so loud,
For Mo stands out, in any crowd.
At forty-six, be humbly proud,
For your life’s story speaks volumes, unbowed 
————

At forty-six, the heart still ticks,
A journey through life’s blend and mix.
Not young nor old, but squarely mid,
With years of wisdom, no longer a kid.

Each wrinkle earned, a tale to tell,
Of laughs and tears, and times we fell.
At forty-six, life’s sweet refrain,
Plays on in joy, despite the pain.

So raise a toast to all those days,
The quiet growth in subtle ways.
At forty-six, still much to do,
Another year of being true.

For in the mirror, the truth’s not stark,
It’s just a number; light a spark.
Embrace the day, let’s not be brisk,
Life’s rich at the age of forty-six.

———

At forty-six, not just a number, but a force,
Rekindling fires from a powerful source.
A story of grit, hard work, and might,
From Natal's fields to tech's soaring heights.

A father's legacy, a machinist's son,
To a leader of tech, second to none.
In every challenge, a lion's heart,
Against life's storms, a steadfast part.

So rise, be bold, reclaim your flame,
In this year's chapter, make your name.
Forge ahead with courage, let passion dictate,
At forty-six, it's your story to create.



Tuesday 19 December 2023

Wrap up '23 with my Personal Scorecard RAGE / Wheel of Life review

In 2016 I started to be more intentional with designing my lifestyle across my personal and professional streams. Without studying deeply the literature or taking personal development training courses, I used my  own work experience as a professional engineer to guide me in designing the framework, which I've called "RAGE" that stands for Reality Aspirations Goals Expectations. At the time, I treated myself as a product I'm building, using similes from agile software development, using the concept of Personas (typically products are designed to meet the needs of different user types, i.e. "personas"). Bringing these concepts into personal lifestyle design, I described my aspirations, goals and expectations in the form of agile user stories. 

This helped me in framing my goals to realise tangible outcomes. Almost eight years later, I've maintained discipline in applying the RAGE framework, year-on-year in my pursuit of the various aspirations defined in each persona, i.e. as a Husband, Father,  Professional, Friend, Individual, etc. Coming from an engineering background, I dived deep into prioritising these streams of life, first starting with 20+ personas, having stabilized on a handful of core personas from 2020 onwards.

Interestingly enough, this post, led me to learning about something called "The Wheel of Life". It so happened, according to ChatGPT, the exact date of the creation of the "Wheel of Life" model by Paul J. Meyer is not well documented in public sources -- but it is known that Paul J. Meyer founded the Success Motivation Institute, Inc. in 1960. Honestly, I'm not sure how I missed Meyer's model all this time, but I'm also comforted by the fact that I've created my own model from scratch through my own attempts in crafting a better version of myself through my RAGE model. Anyway, ChatGPT has helped summarize the differences between Meyer's model and Mo Khan's RAGE model in this post. I do like the radial diagram, which is something I hadn't included in my personametry insights as yet.

I'm writing this post in December 2023, the last post for the year - as I break away from the world and embark on a journey making the minor pilgrimage to Mecca (Makkah) for the first time in my life. I've waited a long time to save up for this journey, I made intention at the start of 2023 to do the Umrah, and by the grace of Allah (God), it is about to come true, finishing off 2023 with my most important '23 goal realised - Subhanallah (Glory be to Allah)! And aiming for Hajj (the major pilgrimage) in 4 years time insha Allah (God willing).

Work-wise, my last week was spent completing end of year performance reviews. At Amazon, we treat performance reviews with such seriousness, due care and attention to detail -- that I've never seen done before in other companies I worked with (a post for another day).  For some time now, I have taken mechanisms from my work life and adopted to my personal life. Just as in my RAGE model, breaking down the different domains of life-work streams, I've used business performance scorecards in my tracking progress through the year of my personal performance. If we maintain work logs, performance cards, "baseball cards" for our jobs, is not more important to track our all our streams of life?

Why should we only focus on professional performance reviews and not spare a moment to deeply reflect our performance as a human on this earth? How are we doing personally? How are we performing across the various dimensions of our life? If we live by a value system, how do we know how we're measuring up to that value system? When the year has come and gone, how do you measure progress? Is it only career that matters? Surely not? If not, then why don't we spend as much time, if not more time, doing our own self-assessment and scorecards?? Are we afraid of the reality check? How serious are we in terms of changing ourselves for the better? How are we improving? Do we need to improve? When someone asks you "How's life? How you're doing?" - what's your frame of reference for answering that question? What's the first thing that comes to mind? Is it our work, career? If we're going through a bad patch at work, does this mean our whole life is negative? Often this is exactly what happens. People anchor on the immediate negatives, closest, most recent experiences because without a holistic value system to reference, how should one respond to "How are you doing, really?"

So how am I doing, really - what's my 2023 Performance Scorecard like?
I am sharing my own personal tracking here, not as a means to show off - but as a means to help people, providing an example of how I've managed to use a system that is working for me. This system, called RAGE, may not work for you - but it should give you an idea of the kind of work you need to do, the kind of thinking you need to apply, and the kind of discipline your should consider -- if you are indeed determined to make a concerted effort at changing your current situation, and creating a new trajectory you can aim for to improve the quality, outcome and other aspirations you desire. 

Inspired by Vaugan from Scary Management Playbook's LinkedIn post, here is my Wheel of Life, unpacked in detail, according to my RAGE model. In January '24, I will follow up with the data analytics on time spent in my personas. Given my RAG status, it looks like my wheel of life pretty balanced and aligned with my life-work-stream choices.

Sunday 5 March 2023

How I switched from Program Manager to CTO

During the first quarter of 2017, I was wrapping up a massive digital transformation project "VOD Wars" in its second year of running and nearing completion. A program that I led from inception in the capacity of Chief Program Director (for Multichoice Group) as some classic corporates call this role, Amazon has a similar role called the  Single Threaded Leader (STL). 

I was responsible for co-ordinating multiple programs and workstreams  that cross-cut multiple businesses. Each business had their their own heads of technology, engineering, program & project offices, operations & support functions. Each business also had their their our business goals & KPIs and in addition, had to support group-wide goals (Group-wide goals are akin to Amazon's S-Team goals). Whilst my primary stakeholders were CEOs of the various business units, I had to not only keep my eye on the high level (managing upwards and indirectly influencing across businesses that I had no positional hierarchy at all (as I was doing my own thing as an independent senior management consultant), I also had to stay close to the technical engineering, operations, support, marketing and customer experience details on the ground. The program was a great opportunity for me since I'd always wanted to experience every piece of the Video Entertainment value chain puzzle as much as possible. 

Prior to VOD Wars, I'd further strengthened my exposure to all domains of the media Video Entertainment business, by being the chief program director for launching a new video streaming business "Showmax" to Africa, in 2015. This too, was a wonderful experience, launching a business start-up from zero to launch in under ten months, co-ordinating every business (legal, finance, marketing, strategy), technology (buying a new tech stack, integrating new offshore development team, building & customising product features, integrating payment vendors, 3rd party integrators, etc.) and operations (content workflows, infrastructure & customer support). 

And before Showmax, I'd been leading major group-wide initiatives for advanced and internet-connected devices (I was lead end-to-end program manager for DStv Explora, for a small stint delved with the then nascent DStv Mobile), and before that, spent my time as technical program & product manager for advanced set top box middleware software, NDS Mediahighway/Videoguard platforms.

In fact, the last time I was engineering-focused, strictly speaking was in 2010 - when I'd taken up the role of Principal Engineer after inventing a Speaking TV/EPG - a role change, after being involved in project, program and product management before then. And the years 2011-2013, when I'd helped transform the consumer devices division of Multichoice, to use modern software engineering methods of planning, product development and end-to-end systems integration, in getting them to launch their first version of DStv Explora.

Being a rock-star program manager consultant in a niche industry in Africa, did come with its perks! I billed by the hour, and was mostly in control of my time. I had back then in 2014-2017, experimented with 4-day work-weeks, I took personal time off (PTO) for long periods of time (sometimes 2 months unpaid or more). It was around this time that I had started working on my RAGE model for personal development. As I dived deeper into my professional self-reflections, the following realisations about my aspirations started to really gnaw at me:

  • I was getting bored of being a program manager, I felt there was no challenge left and I was no learning anything new any more. I'd been reading, studying, applying and mastering the many forms of project & program management since 2008 and by 2017, I think I'd arrived and was feeling satisfied with my craft, as an expert program manager, a project leader at the top of PM hierarchy as explained here.
  • I felt I reached my goals of understanding how to run a full blown video entertainment business as I had experienced by then, every single aspect of business, technology & operations of the Pay-TV value chain.
  • I had my program management work mechanics down to an art form: I had a repeatable process, had built templates for structuring program charters, communicating progress, etc. There wasn't much more I could learn from the mechanisms needed in program management and was operating at the highest level of project leadership. A lot came naturally to me, operating on instinct most of the time.
  • I felt could run a Project Management Office (PMO) with my eyes closed. I'd started mentoring and coaching other project & program managers but I was not interested in specialising in PMOs.
  • I learnt the secrets of engaging and managing high-powered senior executives, I was confident in discussions, meetings, presentations and contractual negotiations.
  • I was not sure I could continue being a consultant without having skin-in-the-game, or having a seat-at-the-table. 
  • I had failed to land other consulting engagements outside the scope of Video / Media - so my "business" AS3 (Africa Systems & Software Services) was a one-man show, tied to one big corporate without hope of branching out of video - so why remain a consultant when I could have a seat at the table if I wanted to?
  • As a consultant, I'd developed my own prime directives of knowing when to offer advice, opinion or put a proposal together. Consultants serve a purpose, they can lead through indirect influence but also need to remain humble and fully aware, that they don't really have any clout or say in strategic decision making. Something, if I'm completely honest with myself, I wanted to influence directly, I wanted my ideas to be heard, I wanted to be directly responsible for change, and influence strategy and change the status quo, if given the chance. I could sit on the sides and offer advice and witness slower pace of change, or get in the ring, get my hands dirty and experience true ownership, accountability and responsibility. I yearned for an opportunity to experience being a senior executive, responsible for a big organisation.
  • I felt I'd drifted too far from the technology domain - and needed to get back to the core. After all, I built software myself in the early days, and have degrees in Engineering and a masters in Computer Science. I wanted to get closer to the tech teams building modern apps, internet scale. 
  • I wondered if a Program Manager could switch back to being a Technology Leader - looking at people around me in executive roles, I felt I had more than the requisite experience and technical know-how to adapt and do the job.
  • I needed to experience what it meant to be a manager with direct responsibility for people and bottom-line P&L. No more assisting from the sides.
With those reflections in mind, I explored new opportunities in the tech space, landing first an Interim CTO/GM (fractional CTO) role, still as a consultant for the first year which then later converted into a permanent role as Head of Technology/CTO for DStv Digital Media, Online Video Platforms, which then later became Multichoice Connected Video. I would spend the next 3.5 years intensely immersed in the role of CTO, learning new skills and soaking the experience all in: VUCA, big organisation of 150+ people, handling large budgets to the tune of R1.5 billion, growing people, making decisions with the seat at the table, navigating and surviving corporate politics and most importantly, getting my hands dirty with technology development again, turning around a distressed platform and reviving an engineering team...I decided to leave again as soon as I felt it was time for another change...however, I'd like to think I'd left the place looking better than I first found it. I'm going to share some of my experiences of this journey as and when I feel inspired to do so, like today. 

Getting to apply for a CTO role was nerve-wrecking at first, even though the job advertised was a General Manager - Technology & Platforms.  I felt like an imposter, full of doubt - classic imposter syndrome. I was vocally self critical so much so that I analysed and critiqued the original role guidelines advertised and provided a deep dive of my self assessment with regards to the role's expectations, benchmarking myself against what I assumed was the high bar for the role. I wanted the hiring manager to be fully aware of who I was, what my experiences were, and what my aspirations were as well before going into the interview. 

Looking back, I was only able to gain this trust based on my previous work as a program manager with a reputation for getting the job done, delivering results by earning trust, that the executives entrusted me with the role. 

One executive who is now the CEO of a large business, once stopped me in the hall-way and said "Mo, I don't know how you do it - but you have a remarkable way of making the complex look so simple!" 

Below is the original self-assessment I shared with the hiring manager for the role. I remain truly grateful to him for the opportunity and trust afforded to me. Here is the doc with my self-assessment. I'm sharing this with you because I believe it could be useful for your own professional review. When applying for a new role, even if it's outside your immediate comfort zone, it helps to take the time to analyse, commenting and rationalising how your present or past experiences can help you delivering in the new role. You don't necessarily have to lay all your cards open to the hiring manager as I did (because I'd already built up the trust relationships over previous years, so people knew me as a program manager but they weren't necessarily aware of my tech background). The prevailing advice you'd find in most career counseling is understand your current reality (be brutally honest about your current reality whilst being positive about your future aspirations) and look for ways your past skills and experiences can speak to the gaps in the role you seek. Every job spec asks for more than what's realistic, so don't give up without at first trying. Every new role comes with an opportunity to learn and acquire new skills, why else does one seek to level up, if not to learn? 

Tuesday 10 January 2023

2022 Personametry Tracking - Work/Life Balance & Harmony Update

Image Courtesy
Courtesy
It is time for my yearly ritual of analysing my time spent the previous year. This ritual is one of analysis and reflection, setting up the stage for planning & making new intentions for the upcoming year, 2023! 

I've been doing this exercise consistently over the last eight years! Am I crazy? Maybe?! I've become quite the data junkie, and I'm loving it! 

I know that tracking every activity and accounting for every minute of one's life might seem like overkill to most people. I on the other hand, actually quite enjoy doing so! :-) Primarily because having insights into how I spend my time has really helped me be more conscious and intentional about my aspirations, goals and expectations covering all dimensions of my life, seeking balance and harmony in my personal and professional streams. My methods allow me to focus and maintain discipline with my time...

This is my value system that describes my streams:

Muslim | Individual | Professional (Work) | Husband | Family-Man | Social/Friend

When someone asks me the following: Mo, how's life? Mo, how are you doing work-wise? Mo, how's things? Are you happy? Are you meeting your aspirations? Mo, what consumes most of your time these days? I can have a sincere and authentic conversation about it.

Yes, as some of my friends have argued that you "just know" instinctively where your time is being spent, on what and you just know the areas you need to improve on. Sure, I get that and agree. I find it much more useful to validate my instincts, verify anecdotes with quantifiable data & metrics to help me answer such questions: Where am I spending my time? Am I spending time in the right areas according to my priorities? Am I heading in the right direction? How am I growing? Where am I in my stages of growth across all my personas? How do I measure success? Am I growing holistically as a person?

In 2015, I researched productivity and personal development methods extensively, culminating to me creating my own frameworks:

  1. RAGE (Reality Aspirations Goals Expectations). Knowing yourself, i.e. what you stand for, your value system, by identifying Personas. For each Persona, define Aspirations/Goals that becomes your long term personal roadmap. What emerges from this is a scorecard that you can track your progress, see example from 2020.
  2. PERSONAMETRY is another concept I created that essentially captures key metrics about yourself, TIME being our most valuable resource. If time is our most valuable resource, do we not owe it to ourselves to account for it? For each Persona you identify with, Personametry is your personal telemetry. It can be extended to a variety of use cases, including overall happiness/stress sentiment analysis. If you're keen to learn more, check out this product specification document I created years ago, but alas, haven't developed the app for it as yet (alas, no time, wasn't a priority!)
Personametry complements RAGE by providing data insights, that I use to analyse if I'm trending in the right direction or not. Keeping a personal RAGE scorecard helps me keep track of how I'm progressing against my personal roadmap. In the last eight years alone, these frameworks have helped me reach my highest potential in climbing up the career ladder (making CTO, executive role), becoming debt free and remaining debt-free for 7 years and-running, improve my marriage enhancing the foundations (insha Allah), and rekindled relationship with family members, including long lost friendships, develop a more consciously confident identity as a Muslim in the workplace, make big bold decisions of starting over in my career (like walking away from CTO and big financial incentives rewards, take a pay-cut and step down in role) or start my own consulting, also make time to focus on paying it forward by offering my time to coach/mentor for free, etc. RAGE/Personametry has also helped me in being critically selective of where/what/whom I spend time with, I've learnt to say "NO" more often guarding my personas and setting boundaries, even with my own family and dearest loved ones.

Emerging from this experience so far are some interesting learning experiences, such as how one's goals and aspirations can change with time, depending on one's stage of life. For instance, where I'm at right now in 2023, is my profession is no longer what drives me (I'm consciously not seeking out the next promotion or level up because I've been there already and experienced the life of an executive), as I'm now seeking new experiences centred on creating more purpose, meaning and fulfilment...Having said this, I remain a pragmatist and so am open to new job opportunities that more closely align with my value system (example: NGOs/NPOs looking for CTO/CIO expertise, Africa-friendly timezone working hours is also being considered). If you know of any opportunities in this area, do get in touch!

Analysing 2022 v 2021 - Data Analysis & Insights

Since 2016 I've tracked 24,983 (±25K) activities as data points, tracking my life streams as: Muslim | Individual | Professional (Work) | Husband | Family-Man | Social/Friend - thus logging 60,572 (±60K) hours with an error tolerance of ±0.5% (99.5% capturing accuracy). In 2022 alone, I logged 8,715 hours, of which: Professional Work consumed 23%,  Personal Life 43% with the physical constraint of Sleeping accounting for 34%. Yep, we sleep for a third of our lives, and I have the data to back that up!

Suffice to say, I've made some good gains in 2022 that I hope to carry through into 2023. Check the slide show for the rest...

P.S. If you'd like to have a coffee/virtual chat about my RAGE/Personametry concepts, or you're curious to learn more, or seeking a mentor/coaching/networking opportunity or you simply want to learn about my workflows, then please get in touch!


Friday 30 September 2022

My Amazon/AWS Work of Leaders Profile


The last time I had a detailed psychometric assessment done was in 2015 as I was stepping up to executive management (C-Suite) roles, the Enneagram report, seven years ago.

It's now 2022 and I'm working at Amazon Web Services in a leadership position where the focus is on scaling myself, my team and my business. As part this journey of leading to scale, I completed a new kind of psychometric based on the DiscProfile focused on the "Work of Leaders". 

This Work of Leaders psychometric is different because unlike other DiSC reports, which emphasize understanding the differences between people (like the Enneagram model), Work of Leaders focuses on understanding how your tendencies influence your effectiveness in specific leadership situations.

Here's is decent walkthrough of the assessment:


My Assessment Results
My dot style is Di
My shading style includes Pioneering, Commanding, Energizing and Affirming (which isn't characteristic of the Di style(!)\

My Reflections on my Disc Report as shared with my Manager

Monday 15 August 2022

My wall art graffiti project from 2020, just before covid


So this post is a long time coming. Back in early 2020, just before lockdown hit us, my wife and I decided to take on a bold project by transforming our property's boundary wall into an art project. Our house was on the edge of a park, frequented by weekend warrior cyclists riding the Braamfontein spruit to Alberts Farm in Gauteng, which I used to ride as often as I could. 

So my wife and I thought it would be cool to show our appreciation for the spruit and cyclists by creating a mural using our property's boundary wall as the canvas. 


We contracted a cool graffiti artist, Nic, who goes by @dekor_one, check his work out!

Here's the journey that was, became and still is.... alas we moved to Cape Town the same year, and only got to spend 9 months appreciating the project...two years on and the artwork is still fresh!


Tuesday 17 May 2022

Sharing Ramadan Itikaf Snippets

Ramadan is known as the Muslim month of fasting, one of the five pillars of Islam. The last ten days of Ramadan, especially the last odd nights in this period, are considered very blessed. As was the practice of the prophet Muhammad (May God's Peace and blessings be upon Muhammad and his family & descendents), he would spend the last 10 days in seclusion in the Masjid, immersed in various acts of devotionals. We commonly refer to this tradition as "sitting for Itikaf". This became part of his Sunnah, which the vast majority of Muslims include as part of their belief system (i.e. to follow both the Qur'an and Prophet Muhammad's Sunnah).
I sat my first Itikaf in 2018, at the age of 40. Since then, I vowed to sit every year until my death, no matter what the situation is at work, going as far as taking unpaid leave if needed (which I've done). Alas, during Covid-19 Masjids were either closed or not allowing Itikaf in 2020 and 2021, so I missed those two years. This year, 2022 was open so I maintained my commitment to continue my vow. Even though I'd recently switched jobs, starting a new career, with new bosses and new teams, with critical projects in motion and notwithstanding the fact I've not earned much credibility yet, I still wasn't going to let me pass up my Itikaf opportunity again!

Nothing was deemed more important, even if it portrayed me as being a weak leader or not-committed to the company, I put my faith firmly in God's hands and my resolution to remain steadfast to my value system priorities: My spiritual well-being Islam is first. There is no separation of identities. 

I wasn't always like this though, since growing up I'd focused on my profession (my job) putting it ahead of everything else.  Now, I view the world with a much broader lens. My job is absolutely still very important. In fact, as a Muslim, we treat our work very seriously, with great responsibility to account for halal income and maintain our work contracts in the strictest manner possible, strictly accounting for the time sincerely because we will be answerable for our time to God. So work is still a key component but not at the expense of my personal spirituality, mental well-being and family responsibilities. 

With enough up-front planning and expectation management, I was able to complete my Itikaf successfully this year.  

I find the workplaces have really started to embrace diversity and inclusion, which is quite awesome. My current company, is by far the best workplace I've experienced that promotes IDE, truly raising the bar. 

So what do I get up to in Itikaf then? 

When I sit for Itikaf, I try to cut myself out from the world as much as possible. I'm unreachable if there's a work emergency, sorry. I limit my interactions with immediate family. And a total black out of digital devices, social media, etc. digital detox. I also limit my interactions with fellow guests. 

A large part is private and personal of course. Maybe I'll share some of my journal insights in future posts? In this post, what I can share is that I don't spend all my time doing devotionals. I journal, meditate and also take time to explore my artistic side with freehand sketching things that catch my attention: Islamic art, calligraphy, poetry, etc. If you've ever ventured into a typical Masjid (Mosque, Muslim place of worship) you will have likely come across the most beautiful Arabic scripts of calligraphy, tile work, frames, etc.

So there is at least one day in my 10 days of seclusion where I spend a few hours sketching in my journal. This helps me process my thoughts, reflect on the beauty of Islam's art form, thus reflection in God's beauty and love inspired, is a form of remembrance in its own right. 

I'm not great at sketching though, so I'm sharing at risk. Hoping I can make more time for this as a regular hobby outside of just once a year:

Tuesday 10 May 2022

On making the mid-career Switch


When I started my career as an engineer, I was keen on experiencing as many roles in the end-to-end software stack as possible. I switched teams, projects and even organisations. I even made the cast of the "Switcher" video that our HR careers team produced to promote growth opportunities through switching jobs! I once switched roles just before being promoted too, starting over as a junior engineer in a different part of the org build a tech stack I had zero prior experience in. Even after switching tracks between management-and-technical to becoming Principal Engineer, thinking I would remain firmly technical - I switched to back management for practical lifestyle reasons. But even within management, I switched between management roles just so that I could experience as many facets of business as possible, so that I could one day maybe run my own company! I also switched from a tech platform product service provider to big corporates & also was lucky enough to experience start-ups from concept to business launch. 

I once switched jobs by exiting permanent to freelancing the month before my bonus was due. My last switch forfeited share options and a retention bonus to boot!

So I was very intentional about becoming a "Jack of All trades, Master of some!" general biztech manager.  I am mostly self-taught & experienced my MBA by learning on-the-job, so switching careers was natural and pretty easy, I'm an adaptable guy! 

Or so I thought ... Until now…until my current Switch-in-progress ...

I've started to view switching as a function of tenure, so my assertion is thus: That it actually gets harder to switch as the years go by. If you've left the technical track for some time, an experienced manager for example, switching back to technical engineering gets much harder. When you see yourself as in the"experienced 21+ years" category, you best be ready for a little discomfort...

So my most recent switch from executive leadership into operational management as an engineering manager - is the hardest switch I've made to date! I suppose it was expected - having spent the last decade executing strategically and delivering through others primarily, occassionally rolling up my sleeves by necessity. Whenever I got in the trenches, it was usually short-lived - to lead from the frontlines, setting-up frameworks, run rehearsals, entrenching new processes & instilling new behaviours, coaching then handing over the reigns to managers and then watching those upcoming leaders grow. That was the most rewarding part of leadership for me, one could call that my superpower (i.e. growing leaders).

As my story goes, in 2020 I made a conscious decision to leave behind an industry I knew like the-back-of-my-hand (video) & start over anew in cloud native platforms, back in the "engine room" of software development so to speak. From enjoying big strategic planning and owning a technology roadmap with 200 people responsibility, working on commercial contracts and negotiations, spending big money and having direct bottom-line impact to P&L – to going back into the engine room, building small software teams, with the opportunity of having massive impact on a global scale with the biggest tech company on the planet, working with the best and brightest minds - sparked the Switcher in me to start a new adventure!

Forceably disrupting, reinventing myself so that I could at least add two more domains before retiring. A lot of folks told me I was bloody crazy, others called me brave (being a little "late" in my career after landing relatively respectable senior posts). I personally, wanted to rekindle the flame of adventure that was on its way out!

Man, what was I thinking!! :-) 

Reinventing myself has been hard, very hard! With 15 months into this journey, I still have some miles+++ to go to becoming comfortable in my new (humble) shoes. Not a good feeling for someone tenured with loads of experience, says the ego!

For those folks thinking about making a similar lateral/downward move to a new domain/company, be prepared for a journey of ups and downs! 

Expect constant battles with your ego! Mind your hubris! Let go of past successes! Come to terms with Imposter Syndrome! Let the resistance pass through. Be like water, my friend. Empty your cup...Leave your ego at the door...

Here's some reflections I use regularly to re-calibrate when I feel the force of resistance is strong (i.e. the desire to pack up and leave because I've seen better):

1. Think back to the core driver of why you've made the switch, why weren't you satisfied & what drove the change?
2. Welcome your new critics - don't be too defensive by bringing up your past accolades (they just don't matter, what matters is what are you bringing to the table right now).
3. Think about your biggest vulnerabilities in the new role. How do you plan to compensate for them?
4. What can you do to gain more control over your local environment? [Think: Circle of control/influence]
5. What are you avoiding?
6. Why are you avoiding? Why...5 Whys...
7. How are you helping your colleagues achieve their goals?
8. How are you NOT helping or even hindering their progress?
9. How might you be contributing to your least enjoyable relationship at work?
10. How could you have been more effective in a recent meeting?
11. Ask "What haven't I considered?"
12. Ask "Why is this thing the way it is?" 
13. Ask "Am I part of the problem here or the solution?"
14. Ask "Could I be wrong here?"
15. Practice silence & patience. Before raising something, Ask: Does it need to be said? Does it need to be said, by me? Does it need to be said, by me, right now?

The learning never really ends - to achieve personal mastery is a journey that has no end.

Having said that, reinvention is not for everyone! Switching careers can be hard. It can be daunting. It can also be quite lonely. Be sure you're up for the challenges ahead. Seek counsel from folks who've walked the path before.

#personaldevelopment #careeradvice