Leaders and Legacy

For an internal thingie, I was asked to write a short bio, define what I think a “leader” is, describe my target legacy and list my biggest source of price. This is what I came up with:

I’ve been pretty much everything you can be in the IT industry including author, speaker, consultant, conference organizer, grunt in a start-up, CEO in a start-up, developer, tester, documenter, etc. I’m currently a content strategist for MSDN in the areas of WinFX/Longhorn and smart clients. I’m passionate about building products to make people happier, whether that’s because they’re more productive or because I’ve solved some hard problem or just because they lean back and say “cool!” My biggest regret is that I’ve never yet been on a product team at Microsoft; to get the full experience, someday I need to do that! After that, I can retire and write novels from coffee shops around the world. : )

A great leader is someone that inspires you to do things you didn’t even know you were capable of doing.

The legacy I’d like to leave behind is that people can look back at their interactions with me and think that I helped make their lives better, whether it was an answer to a tough question or an insight that they hadn’t had before or a comment that tickled their funny bone.

The biggest source of pride in my life is the family I’ve built with my wife and two sons (the Sells brothers, whence the name of my web site came: www.sellsbrothers.com).