Leadership

by James L. Walker, Jr. Editor Note:  This is a reprint from my friend and colleague James L. Walker.  I felt it warranted a larger audience. So I am reposting here on my blog: WANTED 100 Men! As we go thru this Lent Season and prepare for Easter and just simply seek to grow in all ways, I am asking as Many Men Who Can And Will to be Transparent With Me And Repeat this Prayer and Pledge With Me – “Lord, I Thank You For This Day and I Thank You for this Season and for being in My Life! I Ask you to Make Me A Better Man, Father, Husband, Brother, Uncle, Son, Grandfather, Nephew, God Father, Step-Son, Step-Dad, Mentor, and Person Period! Lord You Know My Struggles and Insecurities and what hinders my transformation to be what you have called and...

Today I continued cleaning out my old server. As a hosting company, I had several hundreds of accounts I that I maintained for clients. Well a few years ago, I moved 90 percent of my accounts to a faster and better server. I only kept a few active accounts on that old server. As I went through the server this morning, I realized that I never deleted the old accounts from the old server. Here was the kicker,  I am still paying the leasing fees for that server with all of those accounts. Some are still clients, but most have been terminated or moved. Can you believe that!!! For years I have been carrying dead weight. For years I have been paying for the dead weight. What was I afraid of? I was afraid of losing some things. I was afraid to admit that these accounts...

Just finished the morning – Deleting 170 Gigs of duplicate, misplaced, and extraneous files.   Just like in life, you never know how much extra you pick up in the hard drive of your mind, your heart, and just your space. Misplaced -  Over the years I have dealt with feelings that, although not detrimental to me, were in the wrong place.  Misplaced feelings or emotions will devastate your effectiveness.  Not because they are bad, but because they are misplaced.  Many times you get frustrated at your family only to find out later that the frustration was related to your job – and you were taking it out on your family.  This is an example of being misplaced. Duplicate -  As a result of having misplaced files, I would often find myself downloading...

This morning I woke up for the first time in along while, with no other project on mind but my own. I was scared, but yet calm all at the same time. Imagine this late in life, changing business models. You see, I have been so successful in past ventures, that I have lost my hunger. Now being successful doesn’t mean there were no hard times or no failures, just I have played it relatively safe. I realized in order to really push myself to my next level I had to deconstruct and start to think like a start-up. Let me confess, this might become a blog post itself, I am a serial entrepreneur. I like starting businesses. I like helping business get started. I love the point when the light bulb goes off, and you see that a client gets it. I love the art of the...

This morning I read a post featuring Mark Zuckerberg and his take on whether he wanted to build a Facebook Phone. What was interesting is the nugget I gleaned from it. It is the reason, I shuttered my graphics and web-development company. First look at what Zuckerberg had to say. In terms of new experiences, I think the big theme that we are going to push on mobile is that people keep on asking if we’re going to build a phone, and we are not going to build a phone, right, because it’s not the right strategy for us to build one integrated system where — so let’s say we sold 10 million units, that’d be 1 percent of users, who cares for us, right? The big thing for us is that we have 1 billion people using our products, and we need to make Facebook...