I spent my morning with a potential partner going over key aspects of their business model for which we will be adding support in our application.  It was a very typical software requirements meeting: it started out with a group of people looking across the table at each other wondering how to start.

I suggested we start with four or five goals and work our way into the details of each in succession.  Pretty soon we were drawing like cavemen on whiteboards, talking compensation matrices and other minutiae of the HR world.

Some of the items we indentified would be tough to implement and at one point the statement was made that “maybe this isn’t a solvable problem”.  Huh uh.  No way.  Not going to happen.  All problems can be solved.  Sometimes the cost or the time or the effort required exceed our means, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.  It just has to be rethought.  We left the meeting with scads of notes, a number of great ideas and the general feeling that we’d had a productive morning.

When I got back to the office I found a news article about Time Magazine’s Top 100 Influential People in the world.  It was an interesting read.  One story in particular reverberated with me after the morning’s meeting:  if Mary Lou Jespen can bring a computer to children around the world who don’t even have physical classrooms I can create an enhanced performance management and  compensation management tool that can morph and evolve to meet almost any client’s needs.

Challenges arise, problems happen and all too often I see people give up.  I hate that attitude.  With creative thinking, some strategic compromises and hard work a lot can be done with a little.

My hope is that after each such meeting, whether with a client, a potential partner, or our own staff people leave with the feeling that by working together, by pursuing the goal we can get to wherever it is we want to go.