Archive for December, 2010
Ten Years On: Semi-random Reflections from a Decade of Coaching December 1 2010 10 responses
Ten years ago today, December 1, 2000, my wife and I started our business, The Eblin Group. In a commencement speech at Stanford a few years ago, Steve Jobs made the point that you can never connect the dots prospectively. You can only connect them retrospectively. It's only by looking back that we see how things developed and how one thing led to another. A ten year anniversary seems like a good time to look back.
Take a look at the U.S. and the world for example. Ten years ago, Bill Clinton was president and not many people had even heard of Barack Obama. There weren't many people beyond intelligence agents who knew who Osama bin Laden was. In the past ten years, we've had two major wars and a near meltdown of the global economy. Who would have guessed any of that at the end of 2000? Mark Zuckerberg was in middle school and hadn't gotten around to inventing Facebook. Hard to say if Steve Jobs had the iPhone in mind back then but I doubt even he had a vision of someone like me typing this post on their iPad.
In our family, like yours, there have been a lot of changes in the past 10 years. Births, deaths, graduations, health challenges, recoveries, joys and setbacks, friends gained and lost.
In our business, we've grown from landing our first coaching client on December 15, 2000 to having coached hundreds of leaders in individual and group programs over the last 10 years. I've given something north of 300 speeches and presentations on leading at the next level and the second edition of my book on that subject just came out last month. This is my 463rd blog post and I've probably written close to 300,000 words on my blog over the past two years. I'm not writing any of that as a horn tooting exercise. My point is who knew? I certainly didn't back in 2000. It's been a time of great learning for me and a time of great good fortune. All of that comes down to the good fortune of the people I've had the opportunity to learn from, work with and become friends with.
As I look back and connect the dots, there are a lot of things I notice. Here are a few of them.
Scott Eblin is an executive coach, speaker and author of 
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