As a father of girls, I’ve always liked “Take Your Daughter to Work Day” and have even tried to participate a few times over the years. Since the pandemic, I feel like the entire “Take your Kids to Work” industry has taken bit of a hit. It has gotten trickier to execute for sure. My children are all adults now with their own jobs and lives, so they’ve eased up a little on asking me to take them into the office all the time. In a twist of fate, they’re more interesting now and if they asked, I would be more likely to take them just because some days I just like hanging out with them. Anyways, I now have a granddaughter that would be a perfect candidate to sit next to me while I try to explain the less than fascinating world of IT distribution. Except, much like a good deal of the world, I now work primarily remote. Undaunted, this past April, I decided to have my eldest grandchild join me for our own little celebration of “Take Your Daughter to Work Day” at my house.
In general, it went fine. Well, if I’m honest, the morning was nice, but we were both glad to be at home, so she had other things to do. The thing is distribution isn’t as super exciting and glamorous as everyone thinks it is. Also, judging by the blank look on her face as I went through my presentation (yes, there was a presentation), I think it may potentially be time to refresh the material a little.
Without taking you through my entire slide deck, I work for TD SYNNEX on the Cisco team and have done so for a while now. I usually like to include a few impressive facts about my vendor and then proceed to show how complicated working with them can be at times. I’m setting her up a little so I can demonstrate complex to simple, but I’m not exaggerating. Being a Cisco Reseller and trying to figure out how to grow your Cisco practice from the ground up is not an easy thing. With more than 10,000 landing pages, I don’t know that starting at Cisco’s website always helps bring clarity to the journey. I have been in IT for more than 20 years, and for the first part of my career, I was on the reseller side of things. Seeing our world from the perspective of both a small local IT shop as well as what we used to call a big box mover has really helped me see the value in what my team has to offer. It provides me the context to appreciate the real value in having a distribution partner. Once a VAR figures that out, they begin to unlock all the things we can do to help them. Once they engage with us, it’s like having someone in your corner, genuinely interested in your success. I like to make that point by comparing the difficulty in figuring Cisco out alone akin to long division. Naturally, the obvious conclusion being the converse of that: partnering with my TD SYNNEX Cisco Team is short division. I juxtapose easy versus hard by comparing short to long division. It’s long been one of my favorite metaphors and a part of my presentation for quite a while. Except this time was a total miss because the audience had no idea what long division was.
The rest of the day went fine and, as I said, it was nice being home. This whole idea of not even knowing about long division, however, had me concerned. She’s 10 already; how can she not know what long division is? Then, I heard myself become an old person by genuinely asking what they are teaching kids in the classrooms these days. To be fair, no one ever taught us long division so that we could actually use it. They only showed us the long way to get there so that they could immediately turn around and teach us the shorter way of doing things. It was like a little combo lesson. In “division” as in “life”, there is going to be an easy way and a hard way for everything. Everyone has an opinion on which road to take but for sure there is the short path and there is the long path. Always. A near perfect metaphor right there in math class. I would put that one in my pocket to use many times in the coming years. Now I just need to know my audience before trotting that one out again.
As it turns out, the world has decided to move on, and no one gave me notice or even a courtesy heads-up. It just so happens that my eldest daughter (mother of the ten-year-old) is a math teacher of all things, so I decided to bother her. She’s used to my rants by now, so this wouldn’t be too alarming. She also might be able to actually tell me what happened to teaching long division. Not that I’m married to it, but as a metaphor, it was a tried and true way of getting a point across. She gently explained to me that I was allowed to use any process I wanted to get to the right answer but today, the kids are being taught to divide using partial quotients. She gave me an overview and I understand the concept, but I was a little focused on needing a short versus long way of executing it. Just like anything else, it’s neither better nor worse; the newer way is just another process to get to the same answer. She even said it like there was a life lesson in there but I’m not sure it really works anymore with my “Take Your Child to Work” presentation. Moving forward, I think I’m going to have to re-work a few slides to get my point across. Not that I plan to change my metaphor. Leveraging the TD SYNNEX Cisco Team to grow their Cisco business instead of trying to figure that world out themselves is still very much the difference between the long and short way of doing things. It’s just that now, if I want to continue to use math to juxtapose easy versus hard, I am going to need a few extra slides, mostly dedicated to teaching my audience long division.
Reach out to the TD SYNNEX Cisco team here to learn more.
