Heringer's Rules

In the early 1980's, I started keeping two lists in my Franklin Planner that were revised and rewritten over the years. The first was a list of operating principles for running the business. The second was a summary of how I viewed myself. Both of these became very important during the 1987 to 1992 period when I found myself as the IT Executive leading for the first time some difficult large scale IT implementations involving multiple customers. Over the last few months as we have been starting up some major projects and as I have been participating in some panel interviews, I have pulled the lists back out for the first time in several years and put them back on my desk. The operating principles included:

• Persevere;
• Don't Panic;
• Good Faith Effort;
• Plan Ahead - Think Ahead (This important both in the context of thinking about where you want to be, but also the possible results from taking certain actions.);
• Be Honest;
• Follow-up Promptly;
• Get Upset at important things, not little things; and,
• Maintain Life Balance (something that I failed miserably at doing in the late 80's and early 90's).

I have distilled how I view my work persona down into:

• Quick Study;
• Pragmatic;
• Will not Die; and,
• Lead by Example.