3. Summer 2024

Training, Sharing & Declarative Statements

“Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.” - David Foster Wallace

Over lunch the other day I got to talking with someone I consider quite successful about what I want next in my career. Stating what I want has always been tough for me. I didn’t have Laurence Fishburne telling me that the rules of leadership include never being afraid to ask for something. So I looked this person I respect a lot in the eye and Declared what I wanted. More on that soon.

This year marks my 10th anniversary of launching CRM Analytics (aka Wave/Einstein/Tableau) at Dreamforce. To commemorate this I started to refresh my engineering skills and renew credentials. I shared this with a friend who overlapped with me at Salesforce and his perspective helped me realize something. The way I used to build solutions relied on Imperative engineering.

Using the work lunch above as an analogy: For a particular set of job opportunities, if an opportunity improves my career, and does not worsen things with family, then go for it, or else, etc., etc. That’s Imperative engineering. Here’s what that looks like using a Declarative statement: I want to advance my career while being a great parent. Don’t focus on controlling the step-by-step How. Start with What is the problem and What is the outcome you want. The hard part about the paradigm shift from Imperative engineering to Declarative statements isn’t the technology. It’s being clear about What you want.

I’ve been getting other similar advice lately. As part of a recent leadership development program at my work I got some immersive coaching. We agreed to follow Chuck Palahniuk’s first rule. He got the idea while struggling to talk about his private life with co-workers. What I’ll say is the advice I got during the immersion was to stay focused on What problem we were solving and less on the step-by-step of How to solve it.

While I’ve been getting all this advice I’ve still found time to give some to others and take my own advice too. I just concluded some pro bono advising with a couple ParentTech founders and I was excited to help one launch her newsletter. This inspired me to more broadly share my newsletter. I helped another founder rebrand her website and go on to win an investor pitch competition. This encouraged me to open my website to the public.

Without spoiling all the easter eggs on the website I’m sharing what it symbolizes. The name random forest comes from machine learning where multiple learning methods combine to create a better outcome. The writing on the CD-RW image is a Linux command that creates a symbolic link between things. The AI I used to generate the image couldn’t handle my prompt to make the the background look like Doogie Howser’s journal.