S Mentor Assessment

Mon Jul 22, 2019

1. Point 1.
   1. It seems that the main challenge is the number of things on the path.

Wed Jun 12, 2019

Reaction by S

1. How satisfied am I with the coaching process and/or student?
   1. Very satisfied. Only gap that I see at the moment is my struggle with how to get Marcin and I on the same page as to the ‘plan’ to proving the viability, as an alternative business model, of open source design for hard goods. We are consistent as to the key role the design challenge will/can play in the validation of our hypothesis that collaborative and open design can/will lead to superior products (better, faster, stronger...), and we’ve spent some productive, though not yet enough, time discussing elements of that contest that are important to incentivize the behavior we want and reward those who comply. My concern is that we have only scratched the surface on all that needs to be done to set up that contest for probable success. I own this as my shortcoming so far, but feel we were able to make some progress on this in our 6/12 session. My expectation is to focus more on us collaborating on a plan with goals and milestones that we agree have to be achieved in advance of executing the contest.
2. What do you like or dislike about the mentorship relationship?
   1. Nothing I don’t like. I’m fascinated by the possibility of a community committed to a collaborative design/build economy.
3. What changes would I like to make?
   1. Time has been and will continue to be a challenge for me. It’s not the time I spend with Marcin that’s my challenge, it’s all the time I know I need to put into preparing for our sessions and that I have been putting in to prepare. While Marcin is immersed in this idea and the work associated with it, I’m very new to all of it and, to be effective as a mentor, I know I need to put in a lot of time understanding the assumptions at the basis of his beliefs. While this has been stimulating and enjoyable, I have struggled finding the time to do this and feel I’ve only barely been able to do so to date. To that end, I will be terming off of one of the not-for-profit boards I Chair on June 30th and will not take on another board assignment or external coaching/mentor relationship until my commitment to Marcin is complete.
4. How do I plan to apply outcomes from mentoring in life or work?
   1. I’m honestly not sure yet, but Marcin thinks about problems differently than I do and that’s been a good experience for me. While I’m very comfortable in the ‘big picture’ planning process, Marcin is very quick to identify logistic challenges we’ll encounter in the execution phase based on ideas we’re discussing which has been very helpful in allowing for us to rethink design portions of what we’re creating before we’ve committed to a course of action. This type of adjusted thinking can likely be very helpful for me in how I approach business challenges my clients are facing.
5. Learning Goals: To what extent am I showing new skills or knowledge?
   1. My talent has always been rooted in not coming up with big ideas but in making big ideas more impactful and likely to succeed. Building on the ideas versus developing them. Marcin is pushing me to help co-create the big idea here of how to prove open source design build potential as both a superior way to develop products as well as a means of creating an efficient and virtual supply chain yielding long term financial independence to those who participate in the OSE community. This is not the role I would traditionally play and its been both a challenging and rewarding to develop these new muscles.
6. What new awareness or insight has emerged from the coaching process?
   1. As simple is this sounds, scaling my business is completely dependent on a culture of collaborative partnership and communal success, however, with offices and employees in 8 offices across two continents and many time zones, this is really challenging. I’m gaining insight into the challenge of making this level of cooperation a reality and how ingrained in business culture the economy of scarcity is and how hard it is to shift that to a growth mindset culture.
7. To what extent has coaching had an impact on the client’s level of capability?
   1. A partnership not necessarily a mentorship relationship is my comfortable place to collaborate. I’ve been struggling with making sure Marcin is not seeing me as the one with the answers, however, seeing how Marcin is taking my questions and suggestions and making those into something different is helping me feel more comfortable being bold and taking chances. I attribute this to Marcin making me feel like he’s looking for my strengths to compliment his, not looking for me to give him answers and tell him what he should do.
8. What specific skill set do I require to move forward?
   1. I need to function more as a consultant than a stake holder. I have developed such a fascination and enthusiasm for what we’re working on together, that I find that I’m inserting myself into ‘the work’ while that isn’t where I should be. I need to become comfortable being a consultant to Marcin and an outside resource for guidance, feedback, and holding him accountable.
9. Application -How have new skills or ways of interacting been used in real work situations?
   1. I’m not sure they have yet. I’ve always been someone who prepares thoroughly for collaborative partnerships with my clients and that’s the skill I’ve found I’m using the most with Marcin. If I’m able to function as a consultant to Marcin, I’m hopeful I’ll be able to feel more comfortable adding that to my skill set in my business.
10. To what extent has behavior change occurred on the job as a result of coaching? In my career, I’m seen by those I’m coaching or mentoring as one of the foremost authorities on Performance Marketing and therefore, I find myself assuming my answers or ideas are more likely to be right than the ideas or answers of those I’m coaching. Working with Marcin, I’m learning how to be comfortable guiding and challenging vs. teaching.
11. Impact -What difference has the coaching process made in actual organizational results (e.g. sales, errors, retention, morale, creativity, time-to-market etc.)?
    1. None to date, but I expect that to change
12. What is the return-on-investment realized through coaching for the organization?
    1. It’s helping me develop skills as a coach (discussed above) that will help me have a better context around how I coach within my own organization

Wed Jun 12, 2019 - Marcin Feedback

Reaction by Marcin

1. How satisfied am I with the coaching process and/or coach?
   1. Very much satisfied because the relationship appears to be one of mutual learning. At the same time, this is all ground-work laying time where we are still at the vision level, and I am hoping that the apparent progress will be just as great when we transition to the execution.
2. What do you like or dislike about the mentorship relationship?
   1. I like the collaborative nature, I don't like that there is some discontinuity between meetings.
3. What changes would I like to make?
   1. More discussion of failure points. This is too easy right now. Or maybe it should be easy? Also, more specific feedback from S on development/planning points that I submit for review - including this feedback:) Also, more insight on how I can help S in his learning goals and what his pain points are.
4. How do I plan to apply outcomes from coaching in life or work?
   1. I am applying the learnings to raise the bar on the Incentive Challenge doing by gaining clarity and integration.

Learning Goals: Goals for Marcin

Specific feedback requested. How can S help me in terms of skill sets that I require. If I see anything that I could share with S about what he could help with.

1. To what extent am I showing new skills or knowledge?
   1. Gaining tighter planning ability: for example, I hired temp workers for the first time to meet some of the goals for the STEAM Camp.
2. What new awareness or insight has emerged from the coaching process?
   1. I am gaining clarity on big vision thinking, attaching more realistic execution plans to my visions of progress. For the first time since the post-TED Talk era when I learned the difference between vision and execution - I am getting back to closing that gap while not reducing the scope of the vision. I feel I am getting the enterprise skills that were missing - and mainly that is about defining viable business models. We have gained much proof-of-concept on the productivity required for enterprises - now it's time to actually execute on those enterprises.
3. To what extent has coaching had an impact on the client’s level of capability?
   1. Being mentored by a high performer simply raises the bar for me by diffusion - just opening up new ways of thinking and possibility in the execution phase. Just hearing reinforcement - and forward-moving ideas on the Incentive Challenge - makes success more realistic for me. I am back to grand-visioning, and now for the first time with much more specific ideas on execution. For example, I could outline a budget for the Summer 2020 with 24 students at one time and $150k revenue and 3-4 support staff. This example shows that we can make significant forward motion on prototyping in a sustainable way, and if the program succeeds, we can clearly scale it further and finally attain a scalable open source product development process that can scale to branch sites and to classrooms. This combined with the virtual Incentive Challenge program can become a significant way to develop open source enterprise and thus have a tangible impact on creating the open source economy. I see a clear vision of transitioning global culture from the scarcity-mindset to collaboration.

What specific skill set do I require to move forward?

• My main pain point is defining and executing a support/organization/team infrastructure to allow the Incentive Challenge to turn into a sustainable program and business. This is to address my historical difficulty of funding/resourcing a support team. I may have some practical lessons to learn regarding incentive structures to align team members with the critical path - as we negotiate between right livelihood and the current economy.
• I need help in defining what is the granular set of functions/roles required to execute - primarily with the end goal of establishing a program that does not require my day-to-day effort - but just executive direction.
• Help in defining the specific process and operations that is required to execute on the above
• Team functions and staff required to support the program - so that no details are left behind
• Help in defining a budget and business plan for the above implementation, and assistance in strategy for securing the budget, and possibly help in securing the budget
• Insights into management protocols that foster collaborative, accountable, transparent, correctly-incentivized contributions - both from the core team and our new clan of Development Collaborators (people who produce the drills)
• Insights into leadership style that can or soft skills that I need to manage a high performing team.
• What do we learn from the operations of HE Inc that applies to effective management of people and program?
• Feedback on questions that I appear not to be asking at this point but should be?
• Feedback on the Marketing Ecology for the Incentive challenge - how all the elements reinforce effective marketing for the Incentive Challenge

• Incorporating 3 month Summer of Extreme Design/Build that includes Incentive Challenge Hands-on Skills Crash course
• Integrating OSE Design Guides as an essential rallying point for training a development community
• Driving online and Amazon sales
• Demonstrating a sustainable distributed production business model with the 3D Printer
• Allowing time for Filament Maker and Shredder infrastructure to be built
• Integrating the Book and resulting World Book Tour as the next-phase rallying for OSE development, also paving the way for the next TED Talk where people then have a clear guide for how to get involved
• Incorporating Teacher Training for starting Student Clubs in many locations
• Integrating the upvoting Stack Exchange platform into our work
• Building a second Workshop/Multipurpose building for the Incentive Challenge - meeting space/auditorium/fairgrounds that can house an audience of 200. Intent to invite 200 participants to the Design Challenge Build - for the 100-200 enterpreneurs who begin building the cordless drill. Final judging of winners, development and meeting in the form of the first OSE Distributive Enterprise conference.

Application

1. How have new skills or ways of interacting been used in real work situations?
   1. Hired temp workers for site work. Began on specific revenue models for integrating all of OSE work. Started thinking more about proper incentive structures for performance.
2. To what extent has behavior change occurred on the job as a result of coaching?
   1. This is my first relationship where I am motivated to put time into its various aspects from feedback to planning and preparation - as all of the work seems to be on-critical-path. It seems like no time is wasted on non-essential things, and all is converging to a focused execution. I can't tell which part of that is due to my increased focus vs S's guidance.

Impact

1. What difference has the coaching process made in actual organizational results (e.g. sales, errors, retention, morale, creativity, time-to-market etc.)?
   1. Ability to formulate a clear goal for 2020 during release: adding a 3 month Summer of Extreme Design Build that includes training for potential contest collaborators.
2. What is the return-on-investment realized through coaching for the organization?
   1. I have been able to define a clear goal and economic transformation milestone: distributed market substitution of the cordless drill industry on a 3 year time scale from Challenge completion - to demonstrate that collaboration, not greed, can drive an industry sector - which has profound implications for the economy as a whole.

Sat Mar 23, 2019

Reaction

1. How satisfied is the client with the coaching process and/or coach? (Seems that there are two distinct questions here.)
   1. Extremely satisfied. Empathy, listening skills, unassuming humility of coach are exceptional. Relationship appears to be mutually constructive.
2. What does the client like or dislike about coaching?
   1. Love the flood of new possibility that was opened as with a magical key. No dislikes yet.
3. What changes would the client like to make?
   1. No changes as of yet.
4. How does the client plan to apply outcomes from coaching in life or work?
   1. I would like to use the learnings to transform a select multi-billion dollar industry to open source product development and distributed production on a time scale of 3 years.
5. How does the client think that coaching outcomes can impact the organization?
   1. The coach's skillset inserted into this relationship can provide the necessary tools to succeed, thereby demonstrating the first clearly-visible and noteworthy case of industry transformation to open source, paving the way for a cascade of such transformation in other industries.

Learning - goals for Steve, and Goals for Marcin

Specific feedback requested. How can Steve help me in terms of skill sets that I require. If I see anything that I could share with S about what he could.

1. To what extent is the client showing new skills or knowledge?
   1. Tactical approach proposed by coach is initial validation of the right direction. The second conversation opened up my perspective on the role of collaborators (as potential long term developers as opposed to just incentive challenge contributors) - which can potentially shift the outcomes of this work in a significant way in the positive direction.
2. What new awareness or insight has emerged from the coaching process?
   1. That the possibility of Distributed Market Substitution can be validated on the grounds of economic efficiency - ie - that a distributed, open source approach to economics can be made to work if the incentives are structured properly.
3. To what extent has coaching had an impact on the client’s level of capability?
   1. The shift so far has been conceptual inspiration.

Application

1. How have new skills or ways of interacting been used in real work situations?
   1. I have already shared the insights with our development team with positive feedback, and team is already seeing new possibilities here. To be continued.
2. To what extent has behavior change occurred on the job as a result of coaching?
   1. As a result, now I can speak more authoritatively about the feasibility of what we are trying to do.

Impact

1. What difference has the coaching process made in actual organizational results (e.g. sales, errors, retention, morale, creativity, time-to-market etc.)?
   1. Team morale shot through the roof. To be continued.
2. What is the return-on-investment realized through coaching for the organization?
   1. The potential return on investment may be quantified as the revenue (livelihoods) created, which I would like to be $5B in 5 years.