Corny Work Email

Since I've been so busy at work lately, I've had no time to post new blog stories. So, I sent this message to my team this morning, bragging about Isaac. I think you might be interested.

I had an experience last night with my son, Isaac, which I think could provide some relevance to our task here at work.

Each week, the teacher sends home a review of what they are going to cover during the coming week. This week, they are going to learn graphing. Since Maersk has helped me become very efficient at creating graphs, I created an Excel worksheet which we converted to a graph, so that we could discuss the subject.

Our worksheet analyzed people in our family, and their ages. Relative age seems to be a difficult subject in my child's mind, and I was thinking a graph would help his understanding. So we reviewed bar graphs, noting that the older someone was, the taller their line was. Then we converted it to a pie graph, noting that the older person always had the larger piece of pie.

Then came the $60,000 question at the end of our informal lesson, "What if both people have the same sized pie piece." His unaided response brought tears to my eyes, "They would be the same age." A budding critical thinker, I'm so proud.

Driving into work this morning, I thought this lesson gave an analogy to our work here. Not to say that our customers have the technical understanding of a 5 year old; however, we have a great deal of knowledge to share with our customers. Maersk has given us skills which other parts of our organization have little to no understanding. We should take advantage of these skills to provide our customers insight to their own business units, which they never thought possible.

I realize it’s a little corny for Monday morning, but I wanted to brag. Have a good Monday!