Thanksgiving Leaves

Eat. Relax. Be with Family.

One of my strongest memories from my early work years is when I was an intern-of-sorts at IBM. It was my first day of work, and we were working on improvements in the Lempel-Ziv compression algorithm (very cool). Five o’clock rolled around and I was packing up my stuff: reading materials, notes, pads & pens, etc. Then suddenly I realized: my work day was over. I didn’t actually have to bring anything home! I could just leave, and start again tomorrow.

I’m embarrassed to admit that may have been one of the last jobs where I truly stuck to a regular work schedule like that. The jobs I’ve held since then have been mostly excellent: generally enjoyable, intellectually stimulating, and goal-oriented rather than hours-oriented. But sometimes those same attributes makes it harder to leave off work when I should.

Which, I suppose, is now. Today is Thanksgiving, and I’m about to head over to the in-laws for the big meal. Soft Crow is closed, and will be tomorrow. Here’s hoping you and yours have a good time off; we’ll see you Monday.

Only the beginning…

At Soft Crow Solutions, we partner with research teams and non-profits to build websites and mobile apps to strengthen proposals, improve data collection, and enhance analysis.

As anyone who’s been on a committee to draft one knows, coming up with a “mission statement” can be an arduous process. They tell us it’s an important thing to do for your organization, but it often feels like “they” haven’t spent time arguing whether a 20-word sentence is too long or too short, or whether “synthesize” sounds too “jargon-y”.

Which is why I was pleasantly surprised to find that coming up with Soft Crow’s mission statement, as seen at the top of this post, was actually pretty easy. We went through a few drafts of course, but in the end what we do (and why we do it) was straightforward.

Still, it’s only a sentence. And a sentence can’t tell you everything you need to know about the values and principles and processes of a group of people who have worked on many projects over many years. Which is why I’m writing this blog post; in fact, it’s why we’ve got the whole blog.

Our goal for the Soft Crow blog is to bring you some of that extra information about our company: what we do, what we’ve learned, what we value. Honestly, I don’t quite know what that will look like yet. But here’s hoping it’s fun and interesting… at least more fun and interesting than a mission statement committee.