Life after Dell? Me @ Bizcamp Limerick

I was one of the many speakers at the recent Bizcamp Limerick. My talk was entitled “Life after Dell?”. My talk was aimed at those who have lost their job recently or about to lose their job and may be consideing starting a business. In November 2007 I left Dell after 11 years as part of a Voluntary Separation Programme. I had a choice as I applied for redundancy, whereas the with current climate for many there is no choice. Either way, whether you choose to go, or are pushed, the emotions are still the same. This emotional process consists of the 7 stages of grief, which I covered in my slides.

The main point about this process is that you have to go through it but, you can get through it. Next, I talked about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and how I use it as a barometer to check on myself. In order to be effective in Business and Life you need to be at the Self Actualisation level. Another point I made was that after a redundancy situation you are in danger of dropping to the bottom of this pyramid. You should make a point of regularly checking in on yourself by using Maslow hierarchy and take corrective action if necessary.

I then gave some basic steps on what to do next, these steps are steps taken by me and are therefore tried, tested and they work. Subsequently, I moved onto how to educate yourself as part of the reconstruction stage, I share some 3 books that I found extremely useful:

• Who moved my Cheese? -  by Spencer Johnson
• Purple Cow – Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable – by Seth Godin
• The Art of the Start  -by Guy Kawasaki

Furthermore, in the educate yourself section, I talked about blogs, Podcast and you network as sources. Finally, as part of the networking section I gave tips on how to build you network both online and offline, and how they should complement each other. I gave benefits of building and maintaining a network as it is very relevant to the Entrepreneur.

You can view the slides here via slideshare.