I’m finally taking the leap to stick my toe in the water of the Tweeting ocean that is all around me now. Everywhere I turn there is a tweet there and tweet here in terms of someone saying it, referencing it, asking me about it or just plain seeing it on every website I visit. The twittering branding noise has become deafening to me, like Hitchcock’s famous picture The Birds.
The question for me has been whether to join the craze or just stand by in awe of it and continue to wonder what I’m missing. The turning point came this week over lunch with a friend of mine who is a fellow entrepreneur working to grow her business like me and attributes the lion share of her success to her Twitter usage. I asked her all the naïve type questions I had and shared with her my idea of what I was thinking about doing with Twitter and she said, “you just have to go for it.”
At the conclusion of the meeting I walked back out to my car, which I had parked under a tree because we were having another rare sunshine day here in the Northwest, only to find it was ceremoniously covered in bird____. I started to laugh at the final and perfectly timed sign to me that the birds had it out for me and this was the universes way of saying you have to do this now or literally pay the consequences.
So being the experiential learner I am and someone who is constantly curious, just like the monkey I share the name with, I decided there and then it is time to join the fun in order to try to figure Twitter out by just doing it. I’m clearly a late adapter to the craze, but here is what I’m hoping to learn about by using it.
To me Gimbal Systems, my company name and logo, is a real world metaphor for business and life. Perhaps a little background to help you understand why I think this will help. A single gimbal is just a circle, a gimbal system consists of many circles mounted at ninety degrees of one another. The result of having four or more gimbals nestled into a system is that you achieve “unlimited degrees of freedom” for whatever is held in the center of the system. In other words, regardless of forces at work against the gimbals and their direction, the item in the center of a gimbaled system stays grounded and directional regardless of the forces against them.
If you have ever been on a boat then you can appreciate the common application of a gimbal system. When you look at a compass, cook water on a stove or use an old lantern for light while jostling about in the seas all of those items stay in balance due to Gimbals. You can take a look at my website for more on this if you are interested and want to learn more.
Since starting my business, I have been curious about finding out what people and businesses think their Gimbals are. Life and business have their storms that come along and I’m fascinated by how companies and individuals weather them. For me there have been many storms along the way like the unexpected news that my wife and I were having twins, Washington Mutual’s collapse, both of my parent’s cancer diagnosis, to name a few. The question for me then is how do I, you, the company you work for or with, navigate and move through the challenging storms that life throws all of us.
It is that question that I’m starting to ask and tweet about at GotGimbals. My hunch is that many companies may refer to their strategic plan, (Vision, Mission and Values), if they have one. However, in my experience the company may have them, but the better question is does the individual I’m speaking with who works at the company own those professional gimbals for their self and live them on a regular basis. It has proven to be a very difficult task for large companies. Just look at what happened to WaMu as highlighted by Mark Crowley’s recent Seattle Times editorial piece.
As for the personal answers regarding someone’s own gimbals, I look forward to finding out what I learn. I believe we are all truly unique individuals. Therefore, asking individuals about what they rely on to stay grounded and directional in their own life when they are under duress and trying to make decisions and maintain relationships should provide a wide array of answers.
So I invite you to follow GotGimbals and learn with me as I seek to explore individual and organizational metaphorical gimbals. Better yet, chime in about your own metaphorical gimbals so that you can have unlimited degrees of freedom to absorb the next storm that invariably comes along in life trying to knock you off course.