Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar
I just had to say no to someone. I didn’t want to say no. But the timing wasn’t right for everyone else. I’ve got someone here with some leadership ability but we’re going to have to sit on it for a little while longer. I don’t like that much. The other person doing the waiting really doesn’t like that much.
I think I liked things better when I had a mentor, and my mentor was the one who made the decisions and delivered the bad news. Now I don’t have a mentor, I still don’t make the decisions (because I refuse to unilaterally make decisions that affect dozens of people just because some outsider decided it would be a good idea to make me a de facto leader), and I deliver the bad news.
I like my Washington-style approach of getting tons of conflicting opinions, sorting through them, and then trusting that I have more wisdom than a garden-variety guinea pig and calling it a decision. It empowers people and it minimizes my lunkhead moves. It’s not the best approach for everyone but it works well for me. So I won’t change that.
I think I need a mentor, and the first thing I want to learn from that mentor is how to deliver bad news.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.