Pangborn Business 101 “You have something I want, and I’m willing to pay you for it.”

“Taking a risk is very important. Being able to make that decision to jump in, if you fail, you better learn how now to do it again.”

 

The simple wisdom of Dominic Pangborn was phenomenal. Pangborn brought something uniquely different to the table than any of the other speakers we’ve had so far in Business Wisdom as well as in our other classes. Pangborn was simple.

 

In no way is calling Pangborn simple meant to be misconstrued for being dumb or obvious. He was a genius in my opinion. His all encompassing message in appeared as simple as Nike in stating “just do it”. We talk about how Quicken says there’s no secret sauce, Pangborn more than anyone seemed to embody that.

 

For a designer, at its essence a technical artist, I’d expect a lot of out of the box power of creativity and positive thinking kind of talk. He very simply seemed to be just the opposite. It seemed even at times when entrepreneurs in the class tried to take him in that direction he seemed two steps close to the area of confused in offering flowery advice.

 

At the age of 10, his mother asked him if he wanted to go to America, he answered yes and went. When college came around he didn’t want to do any English so he took art and now he’s the head of an international empire. When asked if he could do outrageous assignments in an unrealistic amount of time he did it. And when confrontation came in his way he told confrontation it better back down because he was going to be its boss very soon.

 

Pangborn’s simplicity seemed to encompass everything he said. I loved his passion for improving Detroit. One thing he simply stated that seemed absent from what I hear about Detroit’s future is how biotechnology isn’t necessarily the way. At every conversation I hear about new industries in Detroit, I always hear about biotech. Pangborn states, this doesn’t help the people living in the city. The people without high level degrees and even at times high school degrees aren’t benefiting from biotech. They might get a job as a janitor, and is that what we’re trying to do to improve Detroit?

 

All and all, it seems that as of lately certain isms are starting to drive in dearer and dearer to me, and the ism of simplicity being genius is one that Pangborn has helped to drive even deeper within me.

You’ve Got Mail…

372 words that don’t seem to mean too much is how the RFC code 2821 read, and that’s all before the introduction. I thought maybe I was tough enough to read the RFC code that established the rules for email, but I quickly found out I was wrong. There wasn’t too much I got from the RFC code, and in a way I felt the same about this edition of Gizmo’s as well.

Let me explain that in no way am I attempting to blast the presenter or the class in this blog. Possibly it was simply a problem with me, but the overall time spent on this didn’t exactly make sense to me. I’ll start with what I did like first. Nearly all of his talk on email security seemed helpful and interesting. In all honesty, this class may have been more effective had that been the only focus. Knowing that 95% of all the incoming messages at Quicken Loans are spam shocked me. I knew spam was prevalent, but I had no idea it was that overbearing.

 

I also found it helpful in the area of email security when he spoke on the importance of not using email for anything even mildly important. I had no idea that all emails with social security numbers or credit card numbers were blocked, but I think that is boldly important especially with all the sensitive information that Quicken carries.

 

At the same time it was interesting to know the legalities of email. I had heard around from individuals I would in no way call experts on the law or the internet about the legalities of work email. This was the first time I had ever heard a definitive answer on those legalities and I found that useful. I found it useful to know that the establishment that and individual works at owns the emails sent and received on that computer. I also did not know that work email is saved for a predetermined amount of time set by the employer. On this note, I liked how he tied this in with the current lawsuit that is going on with Quicken Loans and the former, disgruntle team members.

 

Now to my criticism. I eluded it to it early, but all in all my only gripe with this session of Gizmos was the lack of direction and clarity. This is to say, I didn’t really need to know how contact between servers happened, and things such as that, and if that’s what the class was on then we should have gone deeper on that. More and more I’m starting to believe the tighter any idea is focused the better it will do. I used to be a shot gun type of guy. I’d throw anything out there and hope something stuck; now I’m beginning to realize that aiming for the target with eagle like vision is much more deadly.