Platt Perspective at three years

This is my third anniversary posting to Platt Perspective and it is posting 1129 in a still actively ongoing process. And I find myself thinking back to the beginning of this endeavor as I write this posting. Three years is a long time; these past three years have seemed at least in retrospect to have flown by. I look over my directory pages and at what I have added here up to now and I find myself thinking of what I still have to add. So I enter my fourth year with mixed thoughts and feelings. Over the past three years this blog and maintaining it have become a pretty basic part of what I do and of my routine, but at the same time I am constantly struck by the newness and novelty of what I write, as I strive to always add something completely new to this blog and with every posting.

I find myself thinking more specifically about the separate directories and how they are organized and in how they connect together. One of my primary ongoing goals of this blog is that everything in it connect together as a single, hopefully relatively complete and seamless whole and as a single overall narrative. But with that in mind I find myself focusing here on one of those directories, now spread out over two pages – my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development and its Part 2 continuation page.

I began with a general goal of outlining most if not all of the major career stages and steps that we face, and I began that with job search with all of its complexities, and both in general and in the context of a high overall unemployment rate and a difficult jobs market. I ended up adding some 100 postings to address that part of the overall jobs and careers topic area and then I transitioned over to consider on-the-job situations, opportunities and challenges, beginning with starting a new job and from day one through the first performance review at the end of the probationary period. And I advanced from there: working on a team and with colleagues, taking a first, entry level management position, advancing into middle management and then into senior management and more.

I finished what might be seen as a first pass at this overall topic area when I completed my series on boards of directors and then I circled back to start addressing significant gaps beginning with committees and committee participation, and projects and project management. My thinking was that they can and do involve participation from all levels of the table of organization so it would make sense to delve into them after at least touching on issues that arise at the various stages and levels of the table of organization per se. And after finishing my projects series, I have several more already planned to follow. But I am already fast approaching 300 postings in that directory and topic area so I have much of the basic framework I would cover in this directory at least touched upon. I have covered a lot of ground; I have barely scratched the surface and with significant gaps still left and with much still to address and discuss.

Some of my directories are perhaps less clearly organized into an overall pattern, and I cite my Business Strategy and Operations and its continuation page: Business Strategy and Operations – 2 as an example of that. But I would argue the case that even for areas of the blog like that, I do seek to address topic areas in a relatively systematic manner. And I leaven my writing and how I determine what to address next in it with the ongoing lessons of current events and ongoing business world and personal professional experience.

And I have to add that I have a few directories that I have set up but never really gotten around to populating – yet. I set up my Macroeconomics and Business directory very early in this blog with its first entry: Internet Companies, the New-Old Economy and the Mainstreaming of Innovation going live September 27, 2009. But I have only recently been adding to that directory at a more raid ongoing rate, with that mostly in the past year or so. I have also only recently started actively adding to my Outsourcing and Globalization directory – though I add in that case, I have also reconsidered what I would post to it too. My plan is to get to my still less active directories too and to more actively post to them as well.

This blog at three years is still an active work in progress. And I am just starting year four of that with much to go. And I finish this meta-posting – this posting about postings on that note. Meanwhile, you can find this and my other benchmark postings at Blogs and Marketing and at About this Blog.

Timothy Platt, PhD.