We've all been there...where we either offended someone or were offended. Recently in a team meeting, I made a passive aggressive comment as a joke that was received as disrespectful and hurtful. When a team member corrected me on the offense, I did exactly what many of us are tempted to do and began to try and build consensus among other employees that I wasn't out of line. However, that plan backfired when they all agreed that I was out of line. So my plan to build an army of people who saw my viewpoint didn't exist.

Anytime I've offended or been offended, a trap is set. I have two choices:

1 - to step into the trap and go deeper down a path of anger, resentment and bitterness

2 - to recognize the trap and avoid it all together, but rather proceed down a path of forgiveness and reconciliation

In the case above, I made the wrong decision and instead of accepting the advice and asking for reconciliation, I proceeded down a path of deeper frustration and gossip. This is affecting our culture and businesses across the country. In a culture of easily offended people, we often find ourselves on one of the two sides of the same "offense" coin.

At CentreSource, we envision a culture of openness, transparency and honesty. On one hand, we strive to give each other the benefit of the doubt and avoid being "over-sensitive." However, on the other hand, we seek to quickly resolve offenses when they've happened. Because when you step into a trap what begins to happen is that all the characteristics of the offense begin to show up in other relationships. We almost begin looking for the signs of the offense in situations where there isn't an offense at all.

By this, we limit ourselves from progress and because of an offense we are still carrying around, we miss opportunities for personal and professional growth. So I've been working diligently to quickly resolve my conflicts with others and to let those from the past off the hook. Because in many cases, I've found it amazing that my resentment and bitterness isn't even hurting the person who offended me...it's only hurting me. They aren't even probably aware of the offense. That, by definition, is a trap.

• Ignore job descriptions - They adapt quickly to shifting priorities by doing what it takes, regardless of their job role.
• Eccentric - They stand out and are comfortable enough in their own skin to be confident
• Know when to dial it back - They know when something is serious and when it's funny
• Publicly praise - They recognize the contributions of others in public forums
• Privately complain - They come to you before and after a meeting to discuss sensitive topics rather than lead the group astray
• Speak when others won't - They have an innate feel for the issues and concerns of those around them
• Prove others wrong - They are driven by something deeper and more personal than just a desire to do a good job
• Always fiddling - They make existing progresses better all the time.

If you scored your team individually on each one of these attributes (1-5) how would they score? If there are areas that are low, focus on those within your organization and tell your leaders that they have to model these attributes. As they model, others will emulate.

For those of you unfamiliar, the Minnie Pearl team focuses on removing barriers for people living with cancer diagnosis, provides one-on-one guidance and counseling. We are proud to work along side such philanthropic professionals. Make sure to check out the Minnie Moments site to read the stories of those impacted and share your story. Or keep up with everything on Minnie's Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Also don't forget to join the Minnie Pearl Cancer Foundation at the upcoming Hats Across the Row on April 17th at 3pm on Music Row. The event is a campaign honoring Minnie's legacy and the connection between Music Row and The Minnie Pearl Cancer Foundation. It is just another celebration of the organization's 25 years of service.

This week Vanderbilt in conjunction with CentreSource launched a site dedicated to the timeless work of Robert Penn Warren. We are so excited! This was a major undertaking for both our staff and the Robert Penn Warren team at Vanderbilt.

In 1965, Random House published Robert Penn Warren’s book titled Who Speaks for the Negro? In preparation for writing the volume, Warren traveled throughout the United States in early 1964 and spoke with large numbers of men and women who were involved in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. He interviewed nationally-known figures as well as people working in the trenches of the movement whose names might otherwise be lost to history.  In each case, he recorded their conversations on a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

The portal provides searchable audio interviews that will be invaluable to researchers, scholars and students. All of the contents from those interviews have been digitized and compiled and are finally available to public. Content organization was a critical goal during this initiative and this site presents a large volume of content in a highly useable format. Check out more at whospeaks.library.vanderbilt.edu.

You can read the article on the Tennessean.

The way that ROWE plays out at Centresource is that each employee has a certain metric that he or she is required to meet, such as a certain number of billable hours tracked each week, and as long as that goal is met, when or where it is done doesn’t matter. In order to ensure that employees could still do their job, team members must be reachable on weekdays between 8am and 6pm, either by phone or instant message.

So, now, after a year of ROWE, we thought it appropriate to stop and take stock of what the staff and leadership of Centresource think, with a year of ROWE experience behind them. We asked the team to share some of their initial fears, what unexpected benefits were realized, and in general, their thoughts on one year of ROWE. Here’s what the team had to say:

Centresource President and Founder, Nicholas Holland, commented that on “...the first day of ROWE, the office was a ghost town. Actually, it was a ghost town the whole week.” It stressed him out. “Everyone kept encouraging me to sweat through it and deal with it, and sure enough: the metrics were being met.”

CEO Evan Owens -- “I was nervous about the morale / unity of the team. With team members in various locations I feared that we might lose some camaraderie. However, it's improved as we now have very clear expectations of ‘what matters’ for each other rather than potentially getting frustrated by the smallest things.”

COO Chris Wage -- “The flexibility it gives is amazing. Getting sick is no longer an existential dilemma of whether or not I want to sacrifice a half-vacation day to sleep in. I merely sleep in, medicate myself, and then work late. The separation between your home and work life can get even foggier, so you have to be diligent in keeping it separated. We were concerned that our ability to stay on top of metrics and performance might be difficult, but so far so good.”

CIO Chip Hayner -- “ROWE has removed all traces of guilt that used to exist around the office: guilt that traffic (or one too many times hitting the sleep button) caused you to be 5 minutes late, guilt that you had to run an afternoon errand (so you worked through lunch), guilt that your lunch break took 10 minutes longer than expected... Instead, these feelings have been replaced with an expectation that a) you're reachable if needed, and b) your work will get done -- something that everyone has easily stepped up to reach.”

Manager of strategic consulting Will Acuff -- “ROWE has been phenomenal. I love the flexibility it has allowed me and my family. I've noticed a few communication gaps but nothing that has been anywhere close to my worst case scenarios. All in all I think it has been a great success for CS.”

Strategic consultant Patrick Quicci -- “ROWE was one of the deciding factors for me in taking a job with CentreSource. I love having the ability to work remotely and on my own time depending on what my schedule entails.”

Strategic consultant Matt Phillips -- “I have loved working under ROWE. The biggest shift in my normal 8-5 mode has been avoiding peak traffic times. I live 40 minutes away on a good day, but its taken up to 90 minutes to drive home on certain days. With ROWE, I can anticipate the weather issues and come in late or leave early. That’s time I get back in my life which was always lost. Its been huge.”

Manager of interactive consulting Katy Ludington -- “ROWE has been amazing. It has meant less stress and more productivity which has been the key to my success. If I'm up late working, I don't feel like I have to rush in the office as soon as I get up in the morning. I honestly think I work more since ROWE was introduced because I feel like the metrics we have to hit are more closely monitored and I want to keep the system going.”

Strategic consultant Jon Arnold -- “Having come from the corporate world, ROWE is like a breath of fresh air. I'm used to being nagged for not showing up on time. I've enjoyed this team's approach to working together: there is no condescension for not being in the office, and working remotely is actually encouraged. I have found working from home or remote to be so inspiring and productive (although our office and team is pretty awesome).”

Developer David Calhoun -- “ROWE is great. It negates a lot of stress about work. I love the ability to just take a break in the middle of the day, if things just aren't rolling or I can't focus. I can always just pick work back up later in evening.”

And for more inspiration on ROWE, here’s what inspired Nick Holland to make the change in the first place. First, Nick found this thoughtful blog post on dealing with late employees. The post impacted him, but what really changed his mind was the comments. They took the blog post to task and really suggested a new way of dealing with employees and their time.

And if you have time, dig into this amazing presentation on Netflix’s corporate culture. Nick found it incredibly inspirational for our ROWE implementation. It’s massive, complex, and full of amazing thoughts on how a corporation should treat it’s employees.

Some may wonder what Pinterest actually is and why it is so 'Pinteresting'.  Sorry, I can't help myself.  Pinterest is a vision board-styled social photo sharing site especially popular among women.  The site and iPhone app allow users to create and manage theme-based image collections.

The site's mission statement is to 'connect everyone in the world through the 'things' they find interesting.'  So how can, yet another, social media platform help your brand, you ask?  Brands and companies can host contests with competitors for 'best boards' while getting their consumers' involvement.  Got a new product that hasn't launched?  Post it to Pinterest to see what type of reaction people have.  It's like a social media focus group.

Another way to use Pinterest is for showcasing brand personality.  In this case, you may be a business that is more focused on services rather than products.  Businesses have a way to connect audiences with its story, mission and/or future plans.  If you haven't signed up yet, get to www.pinterest.com and do it!  If you need an invite, send me an email at vanessafrye@gmail.com and I'll be sure to invite you.  Get out there and start pinning!

It's that time again: the FIRST #CSMixer of 2012!  Come on out to catch up, network and generally geek out!  We'll have great finger foods and beer graciously provided by our friends at Blackstone.

So be sure you RSVP, and we'll see you all on Thursday!

So what's all the fuss about?  Each month, statistics pour in that reveal a heavy increase of mobile users over traditional desktop web platforms.  In response to this, designers and developers have begun to focus on building websites and applications that work appropriately on all sorts of screens, regardless on the device type.  The official definition:  Responsive Web design is a way of organizing page layout and information to ensure that a web page responds to the device in which it's viewed.  While the same content is being displayed regardless of the device, the content is set to display differently depending on the device's screen size.

Have you ever gone to a website from Safari on your phone (I'm an Apple fan girl, obviously) and were disappointed at all the pinching and squeezing required just to get a phone number?  Or an address?  Responsive Web will alleviate that pain by displaying the same content you would see on your laptop, just in a better and easier to read format.  Still not convinced?  Check out some of these examples:  www.knowshelter.com, www.morehazards.com and www.forefathersgroup.com

Now, while I'm totally guilty of bandying around big scary terms like "asymptotic notation" (I'm a notorious stickler for nomenclature), what this boils down to is the following mathematical notation (and its related brothers, which we'll get to later):

Most typically, you'll see this used and referred to not as , which doesn't serve much purpose unless we know already what is, but rather in terms of a specific , say, :

Moreover, for the purposes of this discussion, we're going to look primarily at the following notation style:

So what on earth does this mean? Well, let's think about algorithms. What is an algorithm? Simply a series of instructions for performing some task, right? In computing specifically an algorithm is implemented as an actual, written program in your language of choice. But under the hood, mathematically, an algorithm is a function (sometimes pure, sometimes not): it takes some input(s) and delivers some output. In the above block o' math, let us equate with some algorithm we would like to implement, say, sorting an array of integers from least to greatest. With an algorithm such as that, you would give it an array of dubiously sorted values, and it would give you back an array containing exactly the same elements but in sorted order. Represented mathematically, we have:

where is the algorithm function itself, and is the array to be sorted. Now, let's keep in mind that there are many different ways of going about sorting an array - naturally, we would like to pick the fastest one for the task at hand. So in order to know anything about the performance of an algorithm, we should probably come up with some way to represent how long it takes to run. To wit:

represents the "time" it takes to run algorithm on input . OK. So, how can we begin to reason about what the range of this function might be? Actually, perhaps that's jumping the gun - what would really be the domain of this function? What measurement of your general work-a-day sorting algorithm would dictate how long it takes to run? The answer, my friend, is the size of the input: it should make sense to anybody who's actually had to do it that sorting a 10-element array is a heck of a lot faster than sorting a 10,000,000-element array. So, really, our function can be abstracted further as a function of , where is the size of the array to be sorted:

Since the value of will grow as grows (presumably), this seems like a solid footing to start our thinking upon.

Alrighty. Now that we've got some notation to start thinking about how we'll build this bad boy, let's actually pick a real, concrete algorithm and think through it. For the purposes of simplicity and succinctness (cue laughter), I'm going to go with Bubble Sort. If you want to learn more about the actual algorithm, I suggest you read the wikipedia article linked to above, because I'm gonna skip over a fat exposition on what it actually does and how it does it in favor of thinking about how long it takes to do it, and specifically how long it takes to do it to the worse possible case of input: an array that's already been sorted, but reversed. Please note I have copied the following pseudocode directly from wikipedia, and credit therefor is due directly to the author of the page linked to above.

OK, so that's the algorithm from wikipedia - but what's all that nasty-looking business on the right? Put quite simply, that's our best guess as to how long that line of code takes to execute! Note that each line is some function of and some constant . Now if we wanted to figure out exactly how long this algorithm takes to run, we'd need to know the value of those contants, e.g. or something. You'll notice that some lines only seem to take a constant time to run; that's because those lines are only executed once regardless of how big the input is. Other lines are the associated constant multiplied by - those lines will execute once for every unit of input. Still others are multiplied by - these lines are executed times for each input. Now, handily, we can figure out our overall formula by just adding all these things together:

But it turns out that the precise value of each constant is practically useless - the constants in question represent such complex matters and concrete facts of the real world as language of implementation, hardware specs, how many other processes are fighting for CPU time, etc. Remember that we only really care about the performance of the algorithm - not the performance of the hardware or implementation thereof, which is not affected by the algorithm itself. So we can happily simplify our job by just getting rid of all those pesky constants!

Wow, much nicer! But guess what: it gets even simpler. Since, for large enough inputs, the contribution of the lower-order term makes virtually no difference to the output number, we can happily drop that too:

And voilá! Unfortunately, we've boiled this timing function down so far and stripped so much from it that we can't really say that is exactly , just that (in the worst case) it follows a similar curve. More precisely, we have virtually guaranteed that, for large enough inputs, it can never be bigger than some constant times . This is the crux of asymptotic notation - specifically what is referred to as "Big-O notation". As such, when we say that:

What we mean is that there are some constants and , such that for all where , we know that .

It should also be pointed out that the notation's use of the "equals sign" is a little unusual - we're not saying that is equal to , but that it is of equal or lesser order to . This might be a bit of a trick to wrap your head around at first (it certainly was to me). If I'd have written the notation myself, I'd have tried to use some symbol that didn't already carry all the connotations and denotations the "equals sign" itself does; but c'est la vie - this is the way it's done. Another way (in fact, the proper way) to think of it is to think of being some set of functions that follow the above definition, and for the notation

to in fact mean

i.e. that is an element of the set .

OK, so we've been able to put an upper bound on some hypothetical order of our function , but what does that really tell us? Not a whole lot, in isolation. But it really comes into play when you consider other algorithms, such as, say Merge Sort, which is bounded on top not by , but by ! Graph those two functions and here's what you get ( is in black, is in red):

This is a bit of an oversimplification, but sufficient to demonstrate the idea - notice that very quickly, begins to overtake , and continues to do so, the gap getting ever wider as n gets ever bigger; and just like in golf, the lower score is the one you want.

So, in what I hope was nutshell-ish if not perfectly so, that's the basics of asymptotic notation! There are other, related notations like "Big Theta" , "Big Omega" , and the lower-case versions of omega and o, but I'll leave those to you to explore.

Finally, as a disclaimer, I have tried to make the math herein as simple as possible for the purposes of the demonstration, and I could easily have borked something up terribly (I'm still getting the hang of LaTeX). If you spot an error, comment and I'll see that it's corrected. Thanks!