Alumni Author J.A. Rodriguez Asks "Opportunities: Can You See Them?"
By J.A. Rodriguez Jr. ’83, CSP, SGE
Be an alert driver on the road towards excellence.
High-performing teams redefine excellence at the point where realization and achievement intersect. It is at this juncture where opportunity is at its peak and readily accessible for those who can see it and diligently work hard to make it their own.
Opportunity is the delta between optimism by chance thinking and optimism by design action. Seeing opportunities is about adopting a mindset powered by objectivity, positivity, openness, and the realization that there are gaps, often significant, in every process, every situation, and in everything we do or do not do.
The road towards excellence starts with acting on those opportunities by implementing the four “B”s of business: be brief, be prepared, be inspiring, and be gone. Be brief means get to the point, effectively communicate and demonstrate that you understand and respect the value of time. Be prepared means do the research, get the right facts at the right time, learn the language of your organization and speak it, and understand the value and art of perspective discovery and expectation management. Be inspiring means being pumped about your career, your project, your team because if you are not, no one else will be either—passion is highly contagious. Be gone means go sell your idea, proposal or improvement plan. Get it done! Make commitments and deliver on those commitments. Be gone means being invisible as you work towards achieving your organization’s mission. Let your work do the talking.
The journey continues with building an amazing reputation, one driven by superior performance and trust. Pave this road with powerful partnerships empowered by collaboration as a gateway to sustainable success. Learn the language of finance as it is the universal language of business. Invest in yourself, and learn to understand and converse in your organization’s financial terms.
In the end, there is a solution to everything; simply find it (see it) and make it happen because you are the driver on the road towards excellence.
Dare to think differently: J.A. Rodriguez Jr. ‘83, CSP, SGE
J.A. Rodriguez Jr. ‘83, CSP, SGE is a global senior leader for Raytheon Company’s $6+ billion Intelligence, Information and Services (IIS) business. He leads the Environmental, Health, Safety and Sustainability (EHSS) organization for Raytheon IIS at 550+ sites in 100 countries. Rodriguez develops and implements enterprise-wide, solution-focused EHSS strategies that capitalize on performance excellence. He has been elected as the new chairman of the Voluntary Protection Programs Participants’ Association (VPPPA) Board of Directors. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Western New England University.
