Merry Christmas 2017

I hope everyone is having a wonderful time with friends and family this holiday season!

It's been a year of growth and (thankfully) stability for me in 2017. I've been busy in my role as Director of Learning & Organizational Development for Aimco, a nationwide apartment management company. It wasn't without its drama - there were layoffs that impacted my team early in the year - but as we continue to stabilize and leave the Great Recession behind (finally, after waaaaaay too long), I feel very good about last year's decision to join up with this culturally-aware company.

A big part of the year for me was to rekindle my years-long relationship with the Ken Blanchard Companies. Ken is one of a very few true leadership gurus in the world, and his philosophies about how leaders can serve others from anywhere in a company structure resonate with me nearly perfectly. At Aimco, I've partnered with KBC to create a company-wide leadership development program called Leading For Impact.

The previous progam, Leading Edge, brought about 35 of the 500+ leaders in Aimco together for several live, classic experiences throughout a year. Yep, that meant bringing in people from all around the US to a focus city for 3-4 days...away from their roles and homes...in a hotel...with all the expensive meeting room, lodging, and F&B expenses associated with it.

My great colleagues at Aimco agreed with me that this was terribly inefficient in 2017. As you may know from my career, I am always looking at ways to leverage technology to better allow leaders to self-actualize and take personal responsibility for their own growth. In this case, I wanted us to stop offering leadership skills to only 35 or so leaders a year, and offer them to everyone who took positive action to acquire them.

So our test of Leading For Impact is more like a college course setup. There is an opening webinar to introduce participants to the concepts of great leadership, followed by 4-6 weeks of each individual performing their own self-study tasks using Blanchard Exchange, an organizing site with videos, activities, and assignments. Participants report on how they are using skills on the job via our internal Yammer site, and then they come together at the end for a best practices sharing webinar.   Our initial "climbs" in Leading For Impact are based on Aimco's five cultural pillars, and all of the key critical leadership skills will be offered over the course of 12-18 months.

So far, so good. Reaction has been positive and we'll be launching the full suite in 2018. It's keeping me busy and fulfilled!

With the stability, I again found myself in need of a house, so I grabbed one in the summer of 2017! It's very similar to homes I've owned in Denver and Las Vegas, and getting back into the inevitable projects around the house has been fun.

In June, I jetted over to New Orleans to see nephew Aaron graduate from Tulane. Aaron has his own blog now - mapamericana.com - check it out! He's far better at blog content than me; I haven't penned anything except the annual Christmas letter for years. :)

Nephew Dewey was in town just last week, and we were able to catch up with a great dinner at Yia Yias (try the lasagne). I realized as we were chatting that it was the first time ever that Dewey and I had ever had a one-on-one conversation as adults. Dewey's family is remarkable and I hope to see them in 2018.

All the other O'Neills are doing well, scattered as we are across the country. It's heartening to know that as another year passes, we are all leveraging our strengths and showing our resiliency and virtues in a way that I think Dad and Mom would be very proud of.

I've always got about 1% of my sight reserved for surprises. My life and career have had enough sharp turns and odd situations for me to know that absolutely nothing in this world is guaranteed. Still, it's been a good year, and I feel very good about the next. Despite what I think is some of the greatest political turmoil of the last 150 years, I think we will all weather the storms and come out the other side.

My best wishes to all of you - friends, colleagues, supporting members of my business world, bosses, partners, and neighbors. May you have a happy and peaceful holiday season and come out raring to go in 2018!