This morning, Paul Maritz sent mail to all of VMware talking about where we’re going in 2012.  There’s a lot in it, and I really like seeing this kind of honesty and transparency from my CEO.  In it, he added a core VMware value: giving more than we take.

In my year-plus at VMware, I’ve been doing a lot of that.  I’ve spent a lot of time mentoring others on my team to help them improve their research skills.  I also created VMware’s first internal user experience conference, vUE.  I’ve also just started a series of UX tech talks (which probably deserves a post of its own), the first of which happens at the end of this month.

My goal is to help my organization exemplify user experience excellence for the whole company.  In short, I’m doing two things: modelling user research excellence for my team, and helping our user experience team come together to share expertise and identify areas where we can collaborate and build a better VMware-wide user experience.  As a side effect of these efforts, I want to create a community for our user experience professionals across the company.  This is also part of giving back: I want to build a lasting user experience community where awesome user experience people want to work.

There was a lot for me to like in Paul’s memo.  This particular piece resonated with me because I feel like I’m ahead of the curve.  It’s awesome to see our CEO recognize the importance of efforts like mine.