3 Lessons Learned From My Philippine Failure
What happens when you bet your career on an illusion, and lose. In December 2016, my family and I packed away our Washington, DC lives, sold everything, said goodbye to everyone, and embarked on a grand adventure: moving to the Philippines for a dream ICT4D job. Less than 4 months later, we were back in the […]
Read MorePlanting a Future in Philippine ICT4Rice
I am honored and humbled to announce that in January 2017, I will start a new job as the ICT4D lead at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI, pronounced “eerie”) in Los Baños, Philippines. This is an awesome opportunity for me to: Innovate with cutting-edge research that impacts more than 3 billion people worldwide who […]
Read MoreThe Frequent Flyer vs Quality of Life Tradeoff
This is the business travel frequent flyer lifecycle graphed, illistrating the tradeoff between miles flown versus your overall quality of life. You start off in your first business travel with the excitement of flying to a new country, but after yet another long flight followed by a long day of meetings in a confusing city, […]
Read MoreMy Work Here is Done
When I started at Development Gateway in late 2012, it was, well, stuffy. Its heritage as a World Bank spinoff was clear and present as the high cubicle walls. Then we went OpenGov Hub and blew away all the physical barriers. Open plan for everyone, including the CEO. That put a zap to the bureaucratic […]
Read MoreWhat is your 20% project?
We are all busy. But you should never be too busy to experiment, explore, and build something new, especially something new that could be a new income stream or professional achievement. I call this the 20% project. Yes, that implies you should be spending 20% of your time on new projects, be they for work […]
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