Many people working in large companies speak business-buzzwords as a second language. Business language is full of pretty meaningless words. I Don’t Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore article tells that the language of internet business models has made the problem even worse. There are several strains of this epidemic: We have forgotten how to use the real names of real things, acronymitis, and Meaningless Expressions (like “Our goal is to exceed the customer’s expectation”). This would all be funny if it weren’t true. Observe it, deconstruct it, and appreciate just how ridiculous most business conversation has become.
Check out this brilliant Web Economy Bullshit Generator page. It generates random bullshit text based on the often used words in business language. And most of the material it generates look something you would expect from IT executives and their speechwriters (those are randomly generated with Web Economy Bullshit Generator):
“scale viral web services”
“integrate holistic mindshare”
“transform back-end solutions”
“incentivize revolutionary portals”
“synergize out-of-the-box platforms”
“enhance world-class schemas”
“aggregate revolutionary paradigms”
“enable cross-media relationships”
How to talk like a CIO article tries to tell how do CIOs talk, and what do they talk about, and why they do it like they do it. It sometimes makes sense to analyze the speaking and comportment styles of the people who’ve already climbed the corporate ladder if you want to do the same.
The Most Annoying, Pretentious And Useless Business Jargon article tells that the stupid business talk is longer solely the province of consultants, investors and business-school types, this annoying gobbledygook has mesmerized the rank and file around the globe. The next time you feel the need to reach out, touch base, shift a paradigm, leverage a best practice or join a tiger team, by all means do it. Just don’t say you’re doing it. If you have to ask why, chances are you’ve fallen under the poisonous spell of business jargon. Jargon masks real meaning. The Most Annoying, Pretentious And Useless Business Jargon article has a cache of expressions to assiduously avoid (if you look out you will see those used way too many times in business documents and press releases).
Is Innovation the Most Abused Word In Business? article tells that most of what is called innovation today is mere distraction, according to a paper by economist Robert Gordon. Innovation is the most abused word in tech. The iPad is about as innovative as the toaster. You can still read books without an iPad, and you can still toast bread without a toaster. True innovation radically alters the way we interact with the world. But in tech, every little thing is called “innovative.” If you were to believe business grads then “innovation” includes their “ideas” along the lines of “a website like *only better*” or “that thing which everyone is already doing but which I think is my neat new idea” Whether or not the word “innovation” has become the most abused word in the business context, that remains to be seen. “Innovation” itself has already been abused by the patent trolls.
Using stories to catch ‘smart-talk’ article tells that smart-talk is information without understanding, theory without practice – ‘all mouth and no trousers’, as the old aphorism puts it. It’s all too common amongst would-be ‘experts’ – and likewise amongst ‘rising stars’ in management and elsewhere. He looks the part; he knows all the right buzzwords; he can quote chapter-and-verse from all the best-known pundits and practitioners. But is it all just empty ‘smart-talk’? Even if unintentional on their part, people who indulge in smart-talk can be genuinely dangerous. They’ll seem plausible enough at first, but in reality they’ll often know just enough to get everyone into real trouble, but not enough to get out of it again. Smart-talk is the bane of most business – and probably of most communities too. So what can we do to catch it?
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Do This, and You’ll Always Be the Most Popular Person in the Room
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/do-youll-always-most-popular-person-room-betty-liu
So how do you listen well? I find these three things go a long way in connecting with people:
1. Mirror people’s words. It sounds counterintuitive, because repeating other people’s words back to them makes it seem as if you’re not paying attention to them. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people’s eyes light up when you repeat their words back to them, as in: “This app is going to revolutionize the way people order local chickens from the farm,” to which you would say, “This is going to revolutionize the way people order local chickens from the farm? How?” to which the person would reply, “Yes! So glad you asked….” You’ve made an instant friend.
2. Ask questions. How many conversations have you been in where someone says something completely nonsensical and you just let it pass because it’s actually more work to make them explain their point than to let him or her talk on. Next time, make a point to stop the conversation and ask about the point of confusion. It will not only create a more dynamic connection, it will also signal to the person that you’re actually listening. Chances are, when you’re stuck with someone who’s talking endlessly, even he or she knows you’re not completely paying attention.
3. Stop looking around the room. One of the things I love about live television interviews is the intensity of it–two people are literally staring at each other for five minutes straight talking, sometimes tensely. The problem is, in real life, nobody talks to each other that way. Most of us are half engaged in our conversations, thinking about what we want to eat, our dinner plans, or the work on our desk. At cocktail parties, many of us find ourselves looking over the shoulder of the person in front of us to see who’s around. To which I say, stop. Stop looking around the room physically or looking around the room in your brain. Five minutes spent fully engaging with one person as if he or she is the only thing in the room at the moment is worth 10 times more than 15 minutes half-heartedly tittering on about the dullest subjects.
Try these three techniques and soon you’ll find yourself the life of the party, without having to don a toga.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Privacy Is Personal
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/privacy-personal
Try to nail two boards together with your bare hands.
Can’t be done. You need a hammer. But the power is not the hammer’s. It’s yours, because the hammer is your tool. As a tool, it becomes part of you. That’s what tools do: they enlarge your capacity for action and effect.
That capacity is called agency. To have agency is to operate with effect in the world. The range of that effect expands with the number and quality of our tools, and our expertise in using them.
This range is called scale, and it operates at two levels. The first is personal. The best tools work for many purposes in many places.
Organizations want scale too. Every new company these days talks about “scaling up.” But personal scale is different. It’s about expanding our capacities outward, beyond our bodies. We get scale as drivers when we speak about “my engine” and “my wheels,” because our senses extend through the whole car.
Now back to the two boards. Say one is the Net, and the other is a company you want to connect with through the Net. Your main hammer is a browser. What’s your nail?
Well, there’s the company’s website, which has a login system, a page where you can manage your account with them, and maybe a phone number or a chat thing so you can talk to a company agent. But none of those are yours. Those are tools that give the company scale, not you.
Worse, every company has its own tools for nailing you to their system. And those are different too, for every company.
In 1943, Friedrich Kessler, a law professor at Columbia, observed that freedom of contract, a feature of civilization for centuries (if not millennia), was abandoned by big business in the Industrial Age, for the sake of scale
He called these contracts of adhesion. With contracts of adhesion, the controlling party is held to terms by velcro, while the controlled party is held by cement. Agency for the controlling party is huge. For the controlled party it is limited to yes or no. The box you click says “accept”, not “negotiate”.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jaguar Land Rover calls it-and hostess more flexibility
Car manufacturer CTO keep the graying workforce biggest obstacle to the transition towards a supple IT-infrastructure.
The renowned British car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover Chief Technology Officer Anthony Headlam takes talks on your IT department workers to conservatism and resistance to change.
Last week in London in Cloud World Forum event occurred in Jaguar Land Rover’s CTO Anthony Headlam says report seeing every day the older it-people resistance to change.
This is especially true for the support functions of the business, the so-called back office -tasks.
“I want to accelerate the cycle of IT systems, so that the software is updated monthly Faster, more pliable IT systems are JLR. The lifeline, especially now that the company has moved its production for the first time in Great Britain outside.”
As with other car manufacturers, including Jaguar Land Rover to develop intelligent cars and their production methods in new mills.
“We have the IT department use up to 1 700 different software applications, the oldest of which are from the 1970s,”
In 2013, Jaguar Land Rover’s CTO appointed KSI Headlam says that in his first year as much as 90 percent of the time IT department took mere operation of existing systems maintenance. Today, the maintenance of the ratio has been reduced by quarter.
It-mindedness and hostess are required
The transfer of production abroad, and the new, intelligent vehicles related to manufacturing processes still require more and more flexible, suitable for industrial IT systems for the Internet.
“Today, all our cars are networked. This means that we are constantly customer data from the use of cars and the need for care in different parts of the world. In this kind of big-data and analytics needed for cloud services,” says Headlam.
“And the management of such amounts of data, we can not resort to the 1970s or from the technology, which may have been gradually updated in the 2000s, 80′s,” says Headlam shall go through the company’s IT renovation challenges.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/2015-07-03/Jaguar-Land-Rover-vaatii-it-v%C3%A4elt%C3%A4-enemm%C3%A4n-joustavuutta-3325126.html
Jaguar Land Rover: staff are biggest obstacle to IT transformation
http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/cloud-essentials/5175/jaguar-land-rover-staff-are-biggest-obstacle-to-it-transformation
CTO says greying IT workforce are stubborn in face of new agile approach
People are the biggest obstacle Jaguar Land Rover must overcome to implement an agile methodology that will help modernise its IT infrastructure.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Are Certifications Worth the Time and Money?
http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/07/09/2221211/are-certifications-worth-the-time-and-money
Having one or more certifications sounds pretty sensible in today’s world, doesn’t it? Many jobs demand proof that you’ve mastered a particular technology. But is the argument for spending lots of time and money to earn a certification as ironclad as it seems? In a new column, developer David Bolton argues ‘no.’ Most certifications just prove you can pass tests, he argues, not mastery of a particular language or platform; and given the speed at which technology evolves, most are at risk of becoming quickly outdated.
Comments:
I would never ever hire a programmer because of their certifications. I hire because of expertise, period. Certifications are a rip-off.
The problem is how to judge expertise on a resume.
So certifications get you past the HR filter.
Only then do you get to talk to someone who (in theory) knows programming/whatever enough to evaluate your actual expertise.
So, what is it worth to get past that first hurdle?
Not just resume. I talk to them. Ask them questions. Usually, I know if I’ll hire them within ten minutes. If they have a passion for programming. I never regretted hiring a programmer.
However to filter out on the fact they don’t have a certificate (or degree) means to lose out on some of the better programmers.
Certificates are _great_ for filtering. I’ve interviewed hundreds of people. The ones with certificates on their resume’s never got past the first few minutes of a phone screen. Now it’s even easier, they never get a call. I encourage everyone who isn’t sure their skills are strong enough to get certifications and put them on their resume.
5 Reasons Certifications Aren’t Worth It
http://insights.dice.com/2015/07/09/5-reasons-certifications-arent-worth/?CMPID=AF_SD_UP_JS_AV_OG_DNA_
If you’re attempting to master a subject or industry whose fundamentals don’t change much—medicine and engineering come to mind—then a test (or a series of tests) is a good way of verifying that you have the knowledge necessary to operate within that sphere.
But software is different. It evolves quickly, and knowledge that’s relevant today will seem hopelessly outdated sooner than you think.
Yes, I’m exaggerating for effect, but the principle holds: The evolution of technology makes many certificates obsolete pretty quickly (with some exceptions—some software, like the Linux kernel, doesn’t change all that rapidly).
The Certifiers Are… Who?
In theory, anyone can set up a certification business: Create a few online tests, charge x for taking a course online, pay for a little marketing, and—hey, presto—you’re ready to issue certificates. But what can online tests really verify?
I’m a little cynical of programmer tests that demand exact syntax knowledge, for example. Such things only test a small part of what programmers do—and with the increasing sophistication of IDEs, I’m betting that many programmers rely on automation and other tools to get the bulk of their work done. For example, iOS 8 added over 4,000 new APIs, and I certainly haven’t used more than a small fraction of them.
Employers Don’t Really Care
Recruiters sometimes have trouble determining a developer’s degree of technical experience, and so insist upon certificates or tests to judge abilities. If you manage to get past them to the job interview, the interviewer (provided they’re also a developer) can usually get a good feel for your actual programming ability and whether you’ll fit well with the group.
It’s a Rip-Off
there’s a whole certification-related ecosystem that seems designed solely to extract money for training and certificates
It Only Proves You Can Pass Tests
Certificates are only as good as the people who create the certificate tests.
Conclusion
I’m obviously not a fan of formal certification. While many jobs require one or more, lots of tech pros have forged perfectly fine careers without them. Don’t let the complicated world of certificates impede you from pursuing what you want.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Your business hub: why corporate calendar sharing is a good idea
By Melanie Baker – February 21, 2014
https://www.igloosoftware.com/blogs/inside-igloo/your_business_hub_why_corporate_calendar_sharing_is_a_good_idea?utm_source=techmeme&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=blog
Calendars can do much more than ensure you’re on time for meetings. They can be a central location for project and event materials and knowledge, inform best practices, even assist with corporate administration.
Tomi Engdahl says:
No good deed goes unpunished
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/tales-from-the-cube/4312217/No-good-deed-goes-unpunished?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_funfriday_20150724&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_funfriday_20150724&elq=63d82a40e22d4d7bb9dc31f4c5a58a1f&elqCampaignId=24089&elqaid=27212&elqat=1&elqTrackId=27aacd6a6ad44c718615d5a205940323
I learned that following proper procedures was more important than having a simulator that was working completely up to spec. I never made that mistake again.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Engineers can be attractive. Shocker.
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/now-hear-this/4440092/Engineers-can-be-attractive–Shocker–?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_funfriday_20150807&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_funfriday_20150807&elq=64aaba9c898648d5b026689445e051c6&elqCampaignId=24274&elqaid=27415&elqat=1&elqTrackId=08e4beeea9504eaa8afa34e1ffab2d72
Somewhere, Hedy Lammar is proud of a young engineer in San Francisco.
Here’s the deal: Back in Hedy’s day, circa 1940, she became a famous Hollywood actress. But what Hedy really wanted to be was an engineer. In fact, she had a workbench in her Hollywood home where she tinkered on a regular basis.
The beauty with brains had experimented with automated control of musical instruments, and, together with George Antheil, she submitted the idea of a secret communication system in June 1941, receiving US Patent 2,292,387 in 1942 under the name Hedy Kiesler Markey.
Hedy so very much wanted to be an engineer, not an actress. To simplify her story, she fell back on acting because no one took her (and her pin-up looks) seriously as an engineer. How could someone attractive be an engineer? Aren’t engineers always and only cube-dwelling Dilbert-like creatures?
Hell-a-no. Yet now, 75-plus years after Hedy’s struggle, there’s a new struggle showcased on Twitter. It started when 22-year-old software developer Isis Anchalee was asked by her employer, San Fran-based OneLogin, to appear in recruitment ads.
In response, Anchalee started a twitter hashtag #ILookLikeAnEngineer to which hundreds of women, men and children have posted their images and what they do as engineers.
The hashtag’s feed has become a beautiful display of diversity, challenging the preconceived concepts of who can work in tech.
And it’s not just women. Every engineer should be out there waving the #ILookLikeAnEngineer, be they a Dilbert clone or Hedy Lammar beauty or Mohawk sporting NASA engineer or whatever.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dennis Monticelli’s parting comments for engineers
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/anablog/4440081/Dennis-Monticelli-s-parting-comments-for-engineers?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_analog_20150806&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_analog_20150806&elq=617e5f570e234280b800e086578c3d25&elqCampaignId=24251&elqaid=27393&elqat=1&elqTrackId=43629508805249878f9c80abd7790588
Fifteen years ago Dennis Monticelli was named as a National Semiconductor Fellow and just recently has retired from Texas Instruments Silicon Valley (Formerly National Semiconductor) on July 31, 2015.
read his advice carefully and put it into action if you want a successful, thriving career as an engineer.
When it comes to career development I can offer a little advice.
Always treat people with respect. Your collaborations will bear more fruit and your relationships will be more pleasant, a welcome thing in any situation. Besides in the greater fraternity of engineers, paths will cross time and again….trust me.
Keep learning. It must be in our DNA
Be a leader, not a victim. I had this posted on my computer during some of the darker years. Victims have things happen unto them. They make excuses and feel sorry for themselves. Leaders make things happen and develop followers. Besides, leaders feel a whole lot better about themselves than victims.
Share successes. Be a “we” person.
Finally, follow your passion. Harnessing our internal energy is the key. Each of us has to find what strongly motivates us and leverage that to do great things.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Can new job titles upgrade engineers’ stature?
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/anablog/4439900/Can-new-job-titles-upgrade-engineers–stature-?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150715&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150715&elq=5b7289a9d0764c72ac2f8a4a888bf55d&elqCampaignId=23931&elqaid=27034&elqat=1&elqTrackId=7ee5108da42c43c1b96765d086cf9fa7
The relatively low respect and acknowledgment which engineers get from the public, despite the near-miraculous products they design and deliver at low cost, has always been a major irritant to me. A few years ago, for example, a Hollywood celebrity was lauded for “designing” a smart phone (sorry, I don’t remember who it was) when all he or she really did was decorate the case. The engineers who actually designed the phone and the invisible infrastructure were bypassed by the celebrity-crazed media and their audience.
The reality is that there’s a televised, overhyped award show almost every week, such as the Oscars, Grammies, various music awards (it’s easy to make your own list), but the few major engineering awards for genuine accomplishment get little attention. I won’t try to figure out why this is; there are many reasons and opinions ranging from the superficial nature of modern culture to the supposed introverted nature of engineers. Yes, I know, life is unfair, but still it’s a lousy situation.
Still, there is one low-cost, easy thing we can do to possibly improve the situation: enhance the job titles which engineers have. Most such titles in the engineering area are fairly clear and direct, such as project manager, designer, or chief technical officer, and so on. But while they are straightforward, they lack the “pizzazz” that might make them seem more dramatic and perhaps intriguing to the general public. While there have been exceptions such as “technology evangelist,” those are rare cases.
The non-technical world seems to have realized this. The job titles of not-so-long ago were fairly clear and meaningful (at least to me), centered on words such as marketing, sales, research, engineer, production, and customer support.
Now, instead, I see job titles which are both more dramatic and concealing. These include chief growth officer, chief revenue officer, audience engagement editor, and senior viral editor, to call out just a few; I am sure you can add to this list as well.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why the Freemium Business Model Isn’t What It Used To Be
http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/08/11/0147224/why-the-freemium-business-model-isnt-what-it-used-to-be
A few years ago, every enterprise software company was trying freemium — the idea of giving a product away to build users, then charging for additional features. Now, that model seems to be losing favor, except with open source software. Business Insider talks to enterprise founders and VCs to figure out why ‘freemium’ wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
A few years ago, everybody was giving business software away for ‘free’ — here’s why that’s no longer the case
The basic premise behind freemium in the enterprise is that business users would virally adopt your free software and pay for more robust features once they see the real value in your product.
That way, software makers can build a massive platform without spending much on salespeople — the classic textbook play Slack followed to become a $2.8 billion company in less than two years.
“We’d all love to do freemium because we don’t have to hire salespeople,” Storm Ventures’ Jason Lemkin told us. “But what we all kind of figured out is there just aren’t enough businesses in the entire world to get to a $100 million business at freemium.”
Lemkin argues at $10/month per paid user, and at an industry average 2% conversion rate, you would need at least 50 million organic, active users to get to $100 million in annual sales. That’s not impossible but extremely difficult, as only a handful of companies have been able to pull it off so far.
Instead, to reach scale, companies end up moving to the traditional enterprise sales model where freemium becomes less important, Lemkin pointed out.
Read more: http://uk.businessinsider.com/freemium-losing-favor-in-enterprise-software-2015-8?r=US&IR=T#ixzz3iVBO7mtJ
Tomi Engdahl says:
Techies! Shadow IT means you need to up your game
Employees are not rebelling, they just want things done
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/11/shadow_it_not_rebellion/
Shadow IT is not the result of “rogue employees looking to rebel” the research firm Frost and Sullivan has declared in a review of the hybrid cloud market.
However, IT chiefs can take little comfort from the report as it goes on to explain that lines of business’s installation and use of unauthorised applications is overwhelmingly due to tech departments’ inability to serve up the technology that users actually need.
F&S’s report The New Hybrid Cloud is based on a survey by the firm show that “49 per cent [of employees] are more familiar and comfortable with the unapproved application, so using it helps them get their job done more quickly and easily”.
Another 38 per cent of line of business employees fingered “slow or cumbersome IT approval processes for the needed service”, with almost a quarter stating “the unauthorised app met needs better than IT’s alternative.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the title of the IBM-sponsored report, Frost and Sullivan said the latest generation of hybrid cloud technology left IT departments better tooled up to face down these challenges.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Events Performance Monitor DoubleDutch Raises $45 Million In Series E Funding
http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/12/events-performance-monitor-doubledutch-raises-45-million-in-series-e-funding/
DoubleDutch is hoping to make measuring the success of your event as easy as skipping rope, and now they’ve got some more cash to make it happen.
The company announced Wednesday that they had raised $45 million in Series E funding. The round was led by KKR with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Index Ventures and Enspire Capital.
The events performance company has raised nearly $80 million to date.
DoubleDutch, started in 2011, has seen a lot of success in providing feedback to companies on the effectiveness and performance of their corporate events and trade shows. The mobile and web apps provide users with everything they need to set up and monitor a successful event, including an interactive event activity feed, post-event analytics reporting and registration system integration.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tim O’Reilly and the ‘WTF?!’ Economy (Video)
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/08/12/1844243/tim-oreilly-and-the-wtf-economy-video
This is a conversation Tim Lord had with Tim O’Reilly at OSCON. Tim O’Reilly wrote an article titled “The WTF Economy,”, which started with these words: “WTF?! In San Francisco, Uber has 3x the revenue of the entire prior taxi and limousine industry.” He talks about Uber and AirbnB and how, with real-time measurement of customer demand, “The algorithm is the new shift boss.” And then there is this question: “What is the future when more and more work can be done by intelligent machines instead of people, or only done by people in partnership with those machines?”
The WTF Economy
https://medium.com/the-wtf-economy/the-wtf-economy-a3bd5f52ef00
WTF?! In San Francisco, Uber has 3x the revenue of the entire prior taxi and limousine industry.
WTF?! Without owning a single room, Airbnb has more rooms on offer than some of the largest hotel groups in the world. Airbnb has 800 employees, while Hilton has 152,000.
WTF?! Top Kickstarters raise tens of millions of dollars from tens of thousands of individual backers, amounts of capital that once required top-tier investment firms.
WTF?! What happens to all those Uber drivers when the cars start driving themselves? AIs are flying planes, driving cars, advising doctors on the best treatments, writing sports and financial news, and telling us all, in real time, the fastest way to get to work. They are also telling human workers when to show up and when to go home, based on real-time measurement of demand. The algorithm is the new shift boss.
What do on-demand services, AI, and the $15 minimum wage movement have in common? They are telling us, loud and clear, that we’re in for massive changes in work, business, and the economy.
What is the future when more and more work can be done by intelligent machines instead of people, or only done by people in partnership with those machines? What happens to workers, and what happens to the companies that depend on their purchasing power? What’s the future of business when technology-enabled networks and marketplaces are better at deploying talent than traditional companies? What’s the future of education when on-demand learning outperforms traditional universities in keeping skills up to date?
Over the past few decades, the digital revolution has transformed the world of media, upending centuries-old companies and business models. Now, it is restructuring every business, every job, and every sector of society. No company, no job is immune to disruption.
Tomi Engdahl says:
3 takeaways for CIOs from Facebook CIO Tim Campos
https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2015/8/3-takeaways-cios-facebook-cio-tim-campos-0
A couple of days after presenting the idea, Campos said he received an email from Zuckerberg with the subject line “Will you resign?”
It was an email to the entire company.
The email came after an employee leaked destructive information, Campos said. In the email, Zuckerberg asked for whoever leaked the information to please resign, Campos said, saying that Facebook would figure out who it was eventually. Zuckerberg went on to write that the employee obviously didn’t share the same values of openness and transparency because they shared the confidential information in a way they were asked not to do.
Campos used the email as an example to emphasize three takeaways from his time at Facebook that he hoped other CIOs could take back to their organizations. The email, he said, emphasized the power of culture: “It serves to reinforce the point: We’re not going to solve this problem by locking down all the information, we’re not going to solve this problem by instituting a lot of bureaucracy, we’re going to solve this problem by embedding it into the culture.”
The three takeaways Campos shared from his time at Facebook are:
1) The Power of Culture: “At Facebook, culture is everything and it’s an incredible timesaver,”
2) The Power of Innovation: Campos cited two key ingredients to innovation that he believes leaders can reinforce – the power to fail and whitespace.
On failure, Campos said: “When failure is not an option, you basically encourage the workforce to do the tried and true. And the tried and true by definition is not innovative.”
On whitespace, Campos used Facebook’s famous hackathons as an example. Employees are basically given three days off to go build what they want, with no expectations on output and no required product focus that they must follow. “You never know how these things are going to evolve. And by giving people the ability to fail and giving them the time to fail then you have created the necessary ingredients for innovation,” he said.
3) The Power of Data: “We use data to make decisions on everything. If there’s a product modification that we need to make, if there’s a product launch that we do, you can bet that there is a ton of data behind it that reinforces that this is a good idea,”
The power of data-driven business models
“Data is a powerful model for technology organizations to create economic value,” Campos said. If you get it right, data can be a unique source of differentiation because you can’t easily replicate data.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apple, Intel cite gains in hiring women and minorities
http://www.cio.com/article/2971293/apple-intel-cite-gains-in-hiring-women-and-minorities.html
Apple and Intel are both making progress in their efforts to hire more women and minorities, according to figures released by the companies this week.
The lack of women and minorities in Silicon Valley has become a hot-button issue in the male-dominated technology industry. A sex discrimination lawsuit brought by former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao against her former employer has also brought attention to how women are treated in Silicon Valley.
Over the past year, other companies including Google and Facebook have started to share numbers around their hiring of women and minorities.
Companies have pledged to add more diversity to their ranks and expand their recruiting efforts. By 2020, Intel wants the diversity of its workforce to mirror the availability of workers by demographic.
Tomi Engdahl says:
New York Times:
Amazon tests how far to push white-collar workers to achieve its ever-expanding ambitions, creating a bruising, data-driven workplace — Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace — SEATTLE — On Monday mornings, fresh recruits line up for an orientation intended to catapult …
Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big
Ideas in a Bruising Workplace
The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push
white-collar workers to get them to achieve its ever-expanding ambitions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html?_r=0
On Monday mornings, fresh recruits line up for an orientation intended to catapult them into Amazon’s singular way of working.
They are told to forget the “poor habits” they learned at previous jobs, one employee recalled. When they “hit the wall” from the unrelenting pace, there is only one solution: “Climb the wall,” others reported. To be the best Amazonians they can be, they should be guided by the leadership principles, 14 rules inscribed on handy laminated cards. When quizzed days later, those with perfect scores earn a virtual award proclaiming, “I’m Peculiar” — the company’s proud phrase for overturning workplace conventions.
At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others.
Many of the newcomers filing in on Mondays may not be there in a few years. The company’s winners dream up innovations that they roll out to a quarter-billion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stock. Losers leave or are fired in annual cullings of the staff — “purposeful Darwinism,” one former Amazon human resources director said. Some workers who suffered from cancer, miscarriages and other personal crises said they had been evaluated unfairly or edged out rather than given time to recover.
Tomi Engdahl says:
John Cook / GeekWire:
Full memo: Jeff Bezos responds to brutal New York Times story, says it doesn’t represent the Amazon he leads
http://www.geekwire.com/2015/full-memo-jeff-bezos-responds-to-cutting-nyt-expose-says-tolerance-for-lack-of-empathy-needs-to-be-zero/
An Amazonian’s response to “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace”
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/amazonians-response-inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-nick-ciubotariu
Tomi Engdahl says:
Market Research, Horse Racing and Selling Insurance
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1327460&
Is predicting the weather more precise an art than market forecasting?
Every so often we are reminded that while market analysis may produce hard numbers, it is usually an exercise in hand-waving arguments and really not very precise at all.
The numbers that come out of market analysis may be hard but the assumptions that underlie them and even the definitions of what constitutes a market category are often uncertain and spongy. This is especially true for market forecasts. Anyone that claims to know what any market will be doing in three or four years’ time and is prepared to go to four or five significant digits to express that knowledge strikes me as likely to be either a fool or a charlatan.
In most areas of human endeavour predicting what will be happening next year is tough and should come with enormous error bars, but three or four years out becomes a rather futile exercise.
I rarely if ever see market research forecasts with error bars; presumably because a value plus of minus 50% doesn’t sell well. Occasionally I see forecasters try to address the issue with “optimistic, pessimistic and middle-way” forecasts. Good for them and their credibility.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Meetings Will Continue Until Morale Improves
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1327483&
Ask any engineer about the biggest timewasters at work, and odds are meetings will be near the top of his or her list.
Engineers are hardly alone – their feeling are widely shared across the broader workforce. Among the reasons given in a 2012 employee survey by Business New Daily were: meetings that don’t start on time, stay on track or finish on time; meetings with no clear purpose or objective; or meetings that are boring or provide no new or interesting information.
The number one annoyance, though, was allowing attendees to ramble on, repeating comments and thoughts.
If you’re caught in such a meeting, you might wonder whether you can find a way to skip the meeting entirely next time, without being seen as “not a team player”. Here are few suggestions – not that I ever tried these myself.
The Meetings Will Continue Until Morale Improves
http://www.planetanalog.com/author.asp?section_id=3322&doc_id=564017&mc=EDT_EET
Tomi Engdahl says:
Working life will be revolutionized – this is expected at school
Right now, Fennovoima’s majority shareholder of change President and CEO Read more
Working life will be revolutionized – this is expected at school
Kimmo Taskinen
Työelämä mullistuu – tätä odotetaan koululta
The new basic education curriculum emphasizes, among other things, entrepreneurship and interaction. Experts agree that tomorrow’s school must pay attention to better students’ own interests.
Working life is changing rapidly and is more difficult to predict which occupations will remain and how the nature of work is changing in the future.
How schools can prepare for the changing world of work? One answer is that you should focus on to teach those skills in which the machines and artificial intelligence are not able – as interaction and creativity, flexible thinking.
- Interaction is the last bastion, which is a safe artificial intelligence. It requires the skills that can not be algorithmically present. Another human understanding, emotional intelligence, empathy, Saarikivi says Taloussanomat.
The key interaction skills include the ability to understand their own and others’ feelings and empathy. These can be to learn at school, for example, by working groups.
- Emphasized the importance of empathy in working life. The better you can identify with, for example, the customer’s status, the more relevant services can be created.
Now, school education is emphasized good memory. Saarikivi feels more essential is to know where to find information and what information is relevant and know how to evaluate what kind of information is reliable.
- Digitalisation consequence is that the complexity is increasing, all the time there are more options, and things change more quickly than in the past. It requires flexible thinking that is ready to change quickly if the situation changes.
Basic education in the new curriculum (pdf) highlights, inter alia, working life skills and entrepreneurial spirit, thinking and learning skills, interaction and self-expression and self care.
The curriculum of the pupils, for example, important to have experiences that will help realize the work and the importance of entrepreneurship and enterprise opportunities.
Students can, for example, a school project to study in small groups, air pollution or other natural phenomenon, to look at the bike road conditions or give feedback theatrical performance. In this case, the study is not just a loose curricular content cramming.
- Many young motivation, and for what purpose, and is being studied in the school, is somehow missing. When making is relevant and the results of work can take advantage of a wider, thus learning becomes more meaningful, Kumpulainen says.
He believes that while learning from your own motivation, the student commits to a better and it is not just the exterior of learning and performance.
Young people find their passion
For the future of young people to become successful in the labor market, the school should clearly more than before to help young people find their own strengths.
- Finland problem is that we have a significant number of young people, school-leavers attitude that I do not have any good and I can not correct anything. The school has provided knowledge and skills in all kinds of things, but at the same time your talent and passion has remained undiscovered
- When the government talks about the reform of education, one point should be that the trained decisively to the labor market for creative people who are able to become self-employed, and perhaps others. The attitude that if I can not find a job, figured it would be self-taught.
Source: http://www.taloussanomat.fi/tyo-ja-koulutus/2015/08/21/tyoelama-mullistuu-tata-odotetaan-koululta/201510637/139?rss=4
Tomi Engdahl says:
Businesses Programming
Do Old Programmers Need To Keep Leaping Through New Hoops?
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/08/20/2242239/do-old-programmers-need-to-keep-leaping-through-new-hoops?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
n recent years, it seems as if tech has evolved into an industry that lionizes the young. Despite all the press about 21-year-old rock-star developers and 30-year-old CEOs, though, is there still a significant market for older programmers and developers, especially those with specialized knowledge? The answer is “yes,” of course, and sites like Dice suggest that older tech pros should take steps such as setting up social media accounts and spending a lot of time on Github if they want to attract interest from companies and recruiters.
Job-Seeking Tips for Older Tech Pros
http://insights.dice.com/2015/08/20/job-seeking-tips-older-tech-pros/?CMPID=AF_SD_UP_JS_AV_OG_DNA_
Learn New Stuff
The biggest threat to tech pros’ continued employment is letting their skills atrophy. You may already know the ins and outs of older-but-popular programming languages such as C++ and Java, but it doesn’t hurt to see how other programmers are pushing the boundaries of those platforms (websites such as Hacker News are a huge help with that), as well as explore the possibilities of new languages and technologies. If you’re skilled in Objective-C, for example, you can increase your job-earning potential by learning Swift, which will likely become the primary way of building iOS apps over the next several years.
With hardware, the need to learn new stuff is even more important, given the segment’s rapid evolution. What you know about servers or PCs will be ancient history sooner than you think; and with more businesses embracing the cloud over on-premises data centers, adapting to new methods of building and administrating is more important than ever.
Where do all the old programmers go?
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2617093/it-careers/it-careers-where-do-all-the-old-programmers-go.html
In search of the fabled elephants’ graveyard of software developers over 40
We all know that software development is a young man’s game. While hotshot young coders get fat raises and promotions to management, older programmers have an ever more difficult time finding work. Right?
In a recent editorial, Norman Matloff, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, describes software engineering as a career dead end. “Many programmers find that their employability starts to decline at about age 35,” Matloff writes.
If this were radio, here’s where I’d cue the sound of the needle skipping off the record. Age 35? I thought we were talking about older programmers. Since when is 35 old?
“Statistics show that most software developers are out of the field by age 40,” Matloff continues, and here my eyebrows really start to rise. Most programmers? As in the majority of them? Gone? (Matloff declines to mention which statistics he’s reading.)
If that’s true, where do they go?
Is the sky really falling?
Now, I’m not going to do an about-face and claim that age discrimination doesn’t exist in software development. It probably is more prevalent in tech fields than in other industries.
First, the anecdotal evidence: I know quite a lot of people, but I’m at an age when just about everyone in my social circle has reached or is fast approaching 40. That includes a number of software developers. What does it say about me, I wonder, that every single one of my programmer friends also happens to be a statistical outlier?
Hunkering down
For starters, some of them don’t go. They become highly specialized in a certain area, industry, tool, or company, and they carve out a lucrative niche sticking to what they do best. These are the coders who go on to become “distinguished engineers” at larger tech businesses. They’re also the true statistical outliers in Matloff’s data, so let’s forget about them.
Other programmers are inevitably promoted to management.
Forging new paths, under the radar
Other developers don’t leave the field, but they do quit their jobs. They go on to found startups, where their titles might be principal or CTO. Entrepreneurs have a way of slipping through the cracks of employment surveys — again, throwing off the statistics.
Employment surveys have a way of missing independent contractors, too. Yet consulting can be particularly lucrative for software developers, and it tends to favor mature programmers with extensive industry experience.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Unicorns Hunt for Talent Among Silicon Valley’s Giants
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/19/technology/unicorns-hunt-for-talent-among-silicon-valleys-giants.html?_r=0
For the last year, Google’s work force has increasingly been under attack from a herd of unicorns.
The unicorns, a class of hot start-ups valued at $1 billion or more, are all aggressively pursuing the best and brightest minds in Silicon Valley with promises of talked-about workplaces and eye-popping payouts. Amid a general scramble for talent, Google, the Internet search company, has undergone specific raids from unicorns for engineers who specialize in crucial technologies like mapping.
In particular, Uber — the largest unicorn, with a valuation of more than $50 billion — has plundered Google’s mapping unit over the last 12 months, aiming to bolster its own map research. Airbnb, the popular short-term rental start-up, has gone on a more general hiring spree, poaching more than 100 workers.
The recruiting is not confined to the best engineers; sometimes it spills over to nontechnical employees too
“It’s an employee’s market right now,” said Rodrigo Ipince, 28, a software engineer who recently left Google and was pursued by unicorns, but chose to join a mobile gaming video start-up
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why the US loves Indian tech CEOs
http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-the-us-loves-indian-born-tech-ceos/
Sundar Pichai’s appointment as the new head of Google underscores the American love affair with Indian CEOs. The reasons for this range from humble backgrounds to an understanding of emerging markets
Last week, Larrry Page, co-founder and CEO of Google announced that Sundar Pichai, the 43-year-old Googler responsible for the birth of the Chrome browser; the Chrome operating system for cloud-driven laptops and guiding the development and expansion of Android, was handed the reins of a restructured company.
Some would say that Pichai’s appointment was an inevitability. Apparently, in early 2014, Microsoft was in negotiations with Pichai for him to assume the throne at the software giant, but eventually appointed fellow south Indian Satya Nadella as its chief. So it’s no surprise that Google, sensing the risk of seeing its talent poached, decided to anoint Pichai as Page’s heir.
Yet, it is in the tech firmament that Indian CEOs truly proliferate.
Of course, the Valley is no stranger to Indians. In fact, it is over-run by them. According to a 2014 study by professor Vivek Wadhwa, as many as 15 percent of the Valley’s start-ups were birthed by people from the subcontinent. They make up the largest population of immigrant tech-company founders, greater in number than the next four groups (from Britain, China, Taiwan, and Japan) combined.
Still, starting a company is one thing, but assuming the reins of a global tech giant can be something else entirely, and this is where Indians have come into their own.
Most of today’s Indian tech-CEOs are engineers first and foremost, making them an ‘engineer’s manager’ and not just any ol’ MBA. They have emerged from many of India’s leading engineering colleges like the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) located across the country or from the plethora of regional engineering colleges that funnel talent to US graduate engineering programs in droves.
Almost all the Indian tech CEOs have been heads of product companies or have risen through the ranks by heading product divisions. Almost all were entrenched in a world where yesterday’s solutions could easily be discarded onto tomorrow’s dumps, necessitating a continuous search for cutting-edge innovation and risk-taking.
Tomi Engdahl says:
10 Differences Between A Boss And A Real Leader
http://www.lifehack.org/287785/10-differences-between-boss-and-real-leader
A boss is different from a leader. A boss can be a leader – but not necessarily.
A boss is your boss: the one with the nice, sleek room at the end of the corridor. A leader can be your supervisor or the colleague who sits next to you and shares your stapler.
There are two reasons why people don’t say “like a leader!” as a catchphrase.
A boss’ goal is to get things done, while a leader, not only gets things done, they empower and motivate their team. Real leaders make things better; they don’t just point out what’s wrong.
A boss is always the center of attention. A leader is someone who steps back and brings out the best in the team.
A boss’ goal is to get things done, while a leader, not only gets things done, they empower and motivate their team. Real leaders make things better; they don’t just point out what’s wrong.
A boss is always the center of attention. A leader is someone who steps back and brings out the best in the team.
People may respect the boss, but everyone loves the leader.
Good vs Bad Leadership
http://bensimonton.com/good-vs-bad-leadership/
Leadership in the workplace applies to managing people, not to managing things. And as I have previously defined leadership in the workplace, (watch and read here), leadership denotes the sending of value standard messages that most people then use to conduct their work. This means how industriously, cooperatively, openly, respectfully, caringly, honestly, neatly, cleanly, and the like to perform their work. Thus, we say that employees have been led in the direction of those standards.
How does an employee experience leadership? They experience it through the support provided by management and the quality of this support dictates the quality of their work. The support an employee uses comes in two forms: tangible and intangible.
Tangible support consists of training, tools, material, parts, discipline, direction, procedures, rules, technical advice, documentation, information, planning, etc.
Intangible support consists of feelings like confidence, morale, trust, respect, relatedness (or purpose), autonomy, ownership, engagement and empowerment.
Providing that support may or may not be clear to you, as the boss, but it is clear to whomever you manage, the majority of whom are followers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance
http://opensource.com/open-organization
The Open Organization aims to reshape the future of management and collaboration in companies and organizations who want to transform the way they do business.
This is similar to the the purpose of Opensource.com, with our mission to highlight how the principles of open source influence the world around us.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Building a Great Advisory Board
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1327522&
The difference between the board of directors and board of advisors sometimes is a matter of dollars and sense.
I’m often asked about advisory boards by executives from startups and the questions usually fall into two categories –– how they differ from a board of directors and their usefulness.
The difference between the board of directors and advisors is discernable. Directors elected to board have fiduciary duty to the company. That is, they work to optimize the return to the shareholders. Normally, they are appointed by shareholders –– typically, investors and founders who sit on the board.
As part of their obligations is their participation in board meetings and the expectation that they will be proactive in helping the company. Board members have a “stake in the game.” For investors and founders it is financial.
Conversely, the advisory board is informal and members typically are bound to the company by a simple services contract. They are chosen by the CEO and the executive staff. Their tasks are defined and expectations in terms of regular meetings are set by the executive staff.
The usefulness of the advisory board is dependent on the energy that the executive staff puts into selecting the right members and then engaging them in the culture of the company.
While the general perception of advisory board meetings is that they are a waste of time, individual engagements between advisors and board members can be useful.
What can a startup expect from a member of the advisory board? In general, advisors provide advice, make introductions to potential partners and customers, make an investment in the company (more on this later) and provide marketing value. What I mean by the latter is the credibility of the company is enhanced by getting a “big name” on the advisory board.
The compensation for advisory board members is usually stock options, about 0.25% to 0.5% vesting over two to four years.
Selecting advisory board members is another question that comes up. The best way to approach this is to make an inventory of the skills that the company needs to be successful and where more expertise is required. If there are gaps, they may be filled through coaching from the advisors.
If a company decides to create an advisory board, two elements are critical to its success. First, it is important to set expectations at the start of the relationship between the advisors and the company, including what is expected in terms of time commitment, on-site presence, travel and so forth.
Also, the company should keep the advisors engaged. If the advisors aren’t used on a regular basis, they lack the understanding of the company’s culture and when the company needs their advice
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ask Slashdot: Technical Resources For Non-Technical Disciplines?
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/08/25/1715249/ask-slashdot-technical-resources-for-non-technical-disciplines
He asked me if I could advise on how he could get knowledgeable in the relevant technologies, HTML and JavaScript, in order to better interact with their developers.
I haven’t found much I think would be suitable for his needs
Do you even agree that this is an appropriate approach or should he look to develop a working knowledge of these languages instead? Any other suggestions on how to approach this?
Comments:
He seems to have accounting skills and a business plan to develop. Focus on those skills — leave development decisions to the developers.
Take time to create some wire frame (pen on paper) mockups of workflows and business rules. Find similar layouts and “look & feel” from existing sites that he can give as examples to the dev team.
Account should not try to “get knowledgeable” in HTML and JavaScript. He will only seem more of an idiot.
1. Be a great accountant, and dominate your existing field. Teach developers how to make the products more profitable
2. Be a human and a user, and gain user and interface expertise, so you can say what you think about the product with authority and clarity. Tell the developers how to make a more usable product.
3. Can your expertise be used to improve the product? Accounting skills may be important for the platform to make money, and the financial analysis tools needed to understand the web platforms performance.
And on the technological side, get somebody that really knows this stuff, and in particular understands security aspects. Can be a consultant. The problem is that there is a ton of web-technology out there, and most of it is bad or at least not very good. Using the wrong tech can easily kill the project, either by never delivering or by delivering something that is not fit to be used.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Not an easy job – the director to yell for help
Digitalization common for successful businesses is that they have changed their operating model, strategy, culture, and leadership
Digitalization is, above all, leadership, and management determines the success. Basically, digitalization management is all about managing innovation.
This sign Kata Marielyst CEO Vesa Ilmarinen and CGI, the financial industry and digitalisation specialized service of the head of Kai Koskela new book Digitalization – company management handbook.
They wrote a business management book for the simple reason that it is the ordinary leader now needs a helping hand digitalization forward.
“We see that digitalisation is not a question of technology, but it is related to the fact that people’s behavior has changed, customers operate in a different way than before and companies are required to speed and transparency,”
If his view is considered digitalisation of successful companies, those in common is that they have changed their operating model, strategy, culture, and leadership to.
“The CEO and Executive Committee members are the key people who will make a difference.”
Source: http://summa.talentum.fi/article/tv/uutiset/ei-mikaan-helppo-homma-johtaja-huutaa-apua/212263
Tomi Engdahl says:
More meaningfulness of work – agile methods make good for coder
Agile software development methods can increase code base well-being. Occupational Health survey also indicated that the flow of information is improved.
Agile software development methods contribute to the code base well-being if they are applied as well. They can increase the intelligibility of the work, meaningfulness and manageability. Such results opting for Occupational Health and the University of Turku AgiES research project. Which ended in the spring project studied the impact of agile and lean methodologies, software developers wellbeing at work, especially in the design of embedded systems.
“The manner in which methods are applied to determine the significance of wellbeing. What more thorough methods are utilized, the more well-being and meaningfulness, ”
Source: http://summa.talentum.fi/article/tv/uutiset/lisaa-mielekkyytta-tyohon-ketterat-menetelmat-tekevat-koodarille-hyvaa/212308
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why Do So Many Tech Workers Dislike Their Jobs?
http://it.slashdot.org/story/15/09/02/1951206/why-do-so-many-tech-workers-dislike-their-jobs
So what if you work for a tech company that offers free lunch, in-house gym, and dry cleaning? A new survey suggests that a majority of software engineers, developers, and sysadmins are miserable.
it’s nonetheless insightful into the reasons why a lot of tech pros apparently dislike their jobs.
Why Tech Pros Aren’t Happy
http://insights.dice.com/2015/09/02/why-tech-pros-arent-happy/?CMPID=AF_SD_UP_JS_AV_OG_DNA_
In a bid to keep top tech talent in the building, some tech companies have resorted to extraordinary perks, from free sushi at lunch to in-house gyms and dry cleaning. But is the talent actually happy? According to a new survey, software engineers, developers, and sysadmins are pretty miserable in the office.
The company conducting the survey, TinyPulse, asked 5,000 employees in the tech space about their individual experience on the job, including overall happiness. Only 19 percent of respondents felt overwhelmingly positive about their work life; another 17 percent said they felt valued at work; and a mere 47 percent believed they had strong relationships with co-workers.
Compared with the responses from employees in marketing and finance (also surveyed by TinyPulse), those numbers are dismal. In addition to generalized unhappiness, only 36 percent of tech employees felt their promotion and career path were clear—compared to 50 percent of non-tech employees.
“There’s widespread workplace dissatisfaction in the tech space, and it’s undermining the happiness and engagement of these employees,” TinyPulse concluded. “The problem goes beyond workplace satisfaction—Gallup found that engagement is one of the key ingredients for employee innovation.”
THE STATE OF EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT IN TECH
4 Big Bad Trends That Are Hitting This Workforce Hard
https://www.tinypulse.com/resources/the-state-of-employee-engagement-in-tech
The answer is: not well. It was clear that there’s a significant disparity between the two groups, with tech employees falling behind on several areas of job satisfaction.
Here are the major areas of concern:
An unhappy work experience: The workplace is being dragged down by dissatisfaction. Only 19% of IT employees gave a strongly positive answer when asked how happy they were on the job.
Feeling trapped: Among non-IT employees, a solid 50% say their promotion and career path is clear to them. But for IT employees, that number drops to 36%. Employees don’t see any opportunity for professional growth, either because there aren’t options or they don’t have support from management to pursue them.
Thankless work: Only 17% of IT employees feel strongly valued at work. What’s more, there’s a strong relationship (r = 0.56) between how valued an employee feels at work and the likelihood that they would reapply to their job.
Alignment with the company: Only 28% of IT employees know their company’s vision, mission, and cultural values — 15% less than of all other employees. Worse, some of them do know the company values but disagree with them, or at least how they’re being put into practice.
Relationship with coworkers: Job dissatisfaction makes for poor teammates, at least according to our survey respondents. Only 47% of IT employees say they have strong relationships with their coworkers. In other industries, that number jumps to 56%.
All these roadblocks are holding IT employees back from doing their best work. This isn’t just bad news for the tech industry — it hurts everyone whose work relies on their innovation. If your business benefits from having newer and better technologies, then you should be paying attention.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Software Is Hiring, But Manufacturing Is Bleeding
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/09/08/1641237/software-is-hiring-but-manufacturing-is-bleeding
Which tech segment added the most jobs in August? According to new data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, tech consulting gained 7,000 positions in August, (Dice link) below July’s gains of 11,100, but enough to set it ahead of data processing, hosting, and related services (which added 1,600 jobs) and computer and electronic-product manufacturing (which lost 1,800 jobs).
The latest numbers reflect some longtime trends: The rise of cloud services and infrastructure has contributed to slackening demand for PCs and other hardware, eroding manufacturing jobs. At the same time, increased appetite for everything from Web developers to information-systems managers has kept employers adding positions in other technology segments.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Business
Well, what d’you know: Raising e-book prices doesn’t raise sales
Perhaps there is life in that dog of a neoclassical price system
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/09/e_books_sales_fall_harpercollins_news_corp/
One of the things those within economics think that the subject gets generally correct is microeonomics, which itself is generally a discussion of the price system. There are those who insist that this is all well, true, insisting that since we’re not all rational agents, don’t have perfect knowledge, then that standard neoclassical model is wrong.
This then means that the Fat Controller should be telling us all what to do, which doesn’t seem all that much better to be honest.
However, the real point here is not what is absolutely and exactly true down to the last detail, but what theoretical framework explains much of our world pretty well? At which point a quick peek at what’s been happening to e-books ever since publishers raised prices might be instructive:
When the world’s largest publishers struck e-book distribution deals with Amazon.com over the past several months, they seemed to get what they wanted: the right to set the prices of their titles and avoid the steep discounts the online retail giant often applies.
But in the early going, that strategy doesn’t appear to be paying off.
Three big publishers that signed new pacts with Amazon – Lagardere SCA’s Hachette Book Group, News Corp’s HarperCollins Publishers and CBS Corp’s Simon & Schuster – reported declining e-book revenue in their latest reporting periods.
It’s worth pointing out that over the same time scale Amazon showed increasing revenue: meaning that if the higher priced traditional publishers are getting less then the independents must be getting much more. It’s also instructive that the average price of an e-book from the big publishers is $10.81, while the average price of all non-big publisher e-books is $4.95.
Further, since the publishers regained from Amazon the ability to set prices they have raised them and this coincides with the fall in their general revenue from those products.
In detail there’s an interesting little pricing puzzle here. Selling a physical book comes with marginal costs per sale: there’s the cost of printing and distributing that last book that you’ve just sold. Thus one cannot adopt a pricing policy which aims to maximise gross revenue: to do so would lead to less profit than adopting one where the marginal book sold covered its marginal cost.
With an e-book the pricing policy should, to maximise profit, be to maximise that gross revenue received. For there’s only one set of fixed costs (getting the book written, proofed and uploaded, marketed, assuming that the writer is only ever on a profit share or royalty) and any revenue gained at all from the sale of that last marginal sale is an addition to profit.
All of which is remarkably like what the advice from the standard neoclassical pricing model would be. And we are seeing here that raising prices does lead to a fall off in sales. And, given the cost structure of producing e-books a subsequent falling off in profits.
Do note that the neoclassical model does not say that all firms immediately adopt this wondrous pricing model: only that after however many iterations of trying to maximise profits then that’s where the equilibrium will settle down (that this all happens immediately is something found only in the more extreme versions of the models).
Higher prices reduces sales. Who knew that demand curves slope downwards? Except, obviously, everyone who has ever cracked open page one of the Econ 101 course.
Demand curves slope downwards: as the price of fuel drops people are willing to consume more of it.
Yes, of course, there’s still large areas of controversy in economics.
Over in macroeconomics there’s still not one single major theorem that you could get every currently living Nobel Laureate to sign up to.
If and when prices rise people will buy less of that good and substitute out to something else. Meaning that those who have raised prices face falling profits and might be tempted to reverse course.
Tomi Engdahl says:
You Can’t Understand Business Without These Master Works
http://www.wired.com/2015/09/cant-understand-business-without-master-works/
There are seminal books, movies, articles, and more that you’ve been meaning to get to but just haven’t made the time for. Well, the time is now, so here’s some essential background material for helping you understand the world of business today.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Uber for Anything? Yawn. Meet Uber-for-Uber for Anything
http://www.wired.com/2015/09/uber-anything-yawn-meet-uber-uber-anything/
Uber has inspired countless new “on-demand” apps that promise to bring you what you want with just a tap of the screen. There’s an Uber for dog walkers, There’s an Uber for booze. There’s even Uber for cops. Now email marketing company Constant Contact is ready to unleash a hoard of new on-demand apps thanks to a tool that promises to make it dead simple to build your own Uber-style service.
The SmallBusinessAPI is a web-based service that app developers can use to automatically send orders to local businesses.
How It Works
A developer could use the SmallBusinessAPI to create an app that enables users to request a dry-cleaning pickup based on their current location. The app would bounce this request over to the SmallBusinessAPI, which would send it out to its network of nearby dry cleaners.
The Moonshot
The SmallBusinessAPI may seem like an odd thing to come out of an email marketing company, but Miller argues that it’s really just another way for Constant Contact to help its customers market themselves. “Imagine that you’re a dry cleaner and you’re already using us to send out newsletters and coupons,” he says. “They can just plug in to this to bring in this whole new channel to drive more business.”
The project was created by Constant Contact’s “Innovation Team,” which is tasked with creating new products for the company. And while Miller admits that the team won’t ever go as far into blue skies research as a company like Google, they’re interested in finding new ways to help their customers drum up new business, and they’re not limiting themselves to email.
Tomi Engdahl says:
What Hurricane Sandy taught IT about disaster preparedness
https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2015/9/it-continuity-eye-storm
What would you do if a hurricane swept through your town, disrupting electricity, mobile communications and roadways — and flooding your home? That’s what happened to Alphonzo Albright, global director of government at the videoconferencing provider, Polycom, when superstorm Sandy hit the Greater New York area in the fall of 2012. Albright was formerly CIO of the Office of Information Technology in New York City and was charged with working with city officials during the crisis. In this interview with The Enterprisers Project, he shares some lessons learned.
On Oct. 28, 2012, the sky was beautiful and clear. You wouldn’t believe a storm was on the way
starting to rain really hard and water was rushing down the stree
Then we lost communication — for five days.
The only thing anyone cares about in the first minutes following a crisis is safety. Immediately after, the ability to connect becomes a top priority. This is true on both a personal and a professional level, as families as well as companies of all sizes begin the process of putting their lives and businesses back together.
TEP: Once Sandy hit, I understand you were on Long Beach dealing with your flooded house. Did you have to work remotely? How did you make that work with limited communications and (I’m assuming) no electricity?
Albright: Indeed. In the aftermath, residents and businesses were out of power, and I was out of the office for 17 days. I spent that time working out of my car and driving near still-functioning cell towers to connect to the Internet through my cellphone. This way, I was still able to conduct videoconferencing meetings with co-workers through my mobile device, and stay productive despite the monumental obstacles Mother Nature was throwing at me.
TEP: What were your top priorities during the first days after the storm?
Albright: My first obligation was making sure my family was safe, having gotten a positive response regarding their safety and well-being. I then reached out to several of my solution team colleagues.
TEP: What advice would you pass along to other CIOs or tech leaders about disaster preparedness and recovery?
Albright: Instead of thinking of it as preparedness and recovery, it’s better for businesses to think of it as business continuity. Because businesses must be prepared ahead of time.
Have a Business Continuity Plan. This plan should include how to contact other families, employees, co-workers, and partners in case the office or home is not accessible. Give instructions to charge as many mobile devices as they can safely carry with them if they need to relocate.
Print lists of customer’s and partner’s contact info. You may need to contact customers or partners before power is restored to your office. If you cannot access your PC, Tablet, smartphone etc., or the system is lost, it may be vital that you have a hard copy of contact information.
Consider that disruptions can happen at any time — when people are in the office, children are at school, or a loved one is having a medical appointment.
TEP: Are there some things tech leaders should make sure not to do?
Albright: One of the biggest mistakes a tech leader can make is to put the development of a business continuity plan on their “to do” list and then fail to get it done. He/she who shuffles must deal — anything can happen at any time, and when you are cleaning up the clutter left behind when something unfortunate occurs, you still may not fully realize the potential long-term effects that losing productivity can have on any business, big or small.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Things you should know about the hard work of home working
Firstly, the family dining table ISN’T an office
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/22/work_from_home_perils/
Working from home is often seen as the Holy Grail of the IT worker. No more getting up early to get ready for work. No more spending thousands of pounds a year for a season pass only to get squished in a carriage like a sardine.
Things get no better when you’re boxed into your cubicle space for the entire day. Another bit of you dies inside.
The fact that IT work is one of the most portable professions helps facilitate working from home: you use a keyboard and screen in the office, you can (and probably are) set up with similar at home. You can also tap into the office hub via all manor of network pipes and collaboration mediums.
Working from home is on the rise in the UK as a whole and last year saw a record number of UK staff doing it. According to the Office for National Statistics, 13.9 per cent of all those employed in the UK in the first quarter, some 4.2 million people, were working from home.
But, yes, you’ve guessed it, there are down sides.
Working from home can see you actually toil for longer hours than if you were in the office. You can succumb to a creeping feeling that you have to be seen to do things not just better but as quick, if not quicker, than your colleagues on the mothership.
You will more than likely find yourself doing extra hours just to make sure you have done your “fair share”.
The lines between home and work life can become blurred.
Without defined boundaries as to when you can be disturbed, you may as well just not be at home. The last thing you want whilst on some super-urgent stressful project is for another family member to come along and trot out: “Oh, can you just do this for me?”
These “little” interruptions break concentration and also effectively grants permission for the instigator to carry on doing it.
A large downside that a lot of home workers have to contend with is when not in the office for several weeks, you lose touch with what is going on, and that can have an impact on professional and personal relationships
Yahoo! and Hewlett-Packard in recent years have reined in their work-form-home cultures to, they claim, facilitate a culture that pollinates ideas through informal meetings and conversations around the office.
Non-human distractions can also be very damaging. This is especially true if you have a man cave and acquired the latest box set of your favourite series.
Working from home is a two-way street and your employer needs to benefit from the arrangement, too.
So, you must ensure your work is already tiptop.
You have to have the perception of a self-motivated starter who can deliver. Perception is as important as reality. Asking at the wrong time is the death knell to working from home.
Most large companies have a written work-from-home policy.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How bimodal IT is helping companies hire and retain workers
http://www.cio.com/article/2985258/it-strategy/how-bimodal-it-is-helping-companies-hire-and-retain-workers.html
Bimodal IT is a fairly new concept, but if you embrace it you can empower your workforce. With the right employees in the right work environment, risk takers and more traditional IT pros are much less likely to butt heads.
The technology that helps run a successful business is no longer confined behind the walls of the IT department. It’s slowly seeped into nearly every department within a company. For example, your marketing department might deploy a new cloud technology, without consulting IT. As a result of this growing need for technology across departments, in many enterprises IT has been split into two entities — a trend that Gartner dubbed bimodal IT in 2014.
Bimodal IT breaks down into two camps and the first group resembles a traditional IT structure, with a stronger focus on the most critical aspects of technology in a business. This first group is more practical, and they ensure systems run smoothly and efficiently, while keeping the business safe and secure on the backend. They also keep an eye on the bottom line, cutting costs where necessary.
resume makeover executive
The second group is more focused on innovation and moving the company forward as new technology emerges. It focuses on new business applications, customer-facing software and technology that makes it easier for the business to meet goals and stay ahead of the curve. Unlike the first group, this second camp is not as interested in the bottom line and they are considered risk takers.
Peter Sondergaard of Gartner describes bimodal IT as “one organization operating at two speeds,” and notes that while the two groups may be focused on different aspects of the business, both maintain communication and work together to reach one common goal; increased productivity and innovation.
Part of the shift of bimodal IT stems from the fact that technology providers now target specific departments, rather than selling directly to IT and CIOs.
By defining the two separate camps of l IT, Hurley says it can help target the right hires for the job.
Consequently, by defining these roles, Hurley states it can lead to higher retention rates, since you won’t be unintentionally misleading new employees. “Employees who are more comfortable taking risks are not going to be happy in a job that doesn’t allow them time to explore new technologies. Conversely, those who like to manage and maintain systems aren’t going to be content in a role that requires them to also be visionaries,” says Hurley.
Another benefit of embracing bimodal IT is that it helps create a culture of innovation within the company, according to Hurley. Companies realize now more than ever how crucial it is to stay on top of the latest software and hardware in order to remain relevant in today’s market. Understanding your overall IT goals can help move innovation and empower employees by employing them on the right side of bimodal IT.
Since bimodal IT presents a clear delineation between the practical side of IT and the riskier side, neither one will have to spend much time negotiating with managers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why enterprise digital transformation efforts stall
http://www.itworld.com/article/2984790/it-management/why-enterprise-digital-transformation-efforts-stall.html
Most enterprises are likely to hit a roadblock after the initial stage of digital adoption. Everest Group calls this phenomenon the ‘digital trough.’
Digital transformation is the business buzzword of the year. But if you feel like you’ve come to a standstill in your digital transformation efforts, you are probably not alone.
Enterprises are likely to hit a roadblock after the initial stage of digital adoption, according to a recent survey by outsourcing consultancy and research firm Everest Group. In fact, 43 percent of organizations are going through what Everest has dubbed the “digital trough,” according to a survey of 120 business and IT leaders at North American companies that have embarked on significant digital adoption programs.
The ‘digital trough’
Most organizations experience a honeymoon period at the start of their digital journey. “Investments are flowing, everybody believes in this brave new world they are going to create together,” according to Chirajeet Sengupta, Everest Research vice president member of the IT services research team. “However, the second phase is when things change. Suddenly, everybody starts questioning the value of what they are doing. Investments tend to get constrained, organizational capabilities are stretched and tested, and traditional business processes and organizational behavior are challenged. This is the ‘digital trough’.”
The focus for most enterprises initially embarking on the digital journey is on enablement, according to Everest Group. For example, companies need appropriate storage and compute facilities in the cloud to be able to incorporate big data analytics or Internet of Things technologies into their business processes. They require new security capabilities to manage increased customer data. “At this stage, IT is still in the ‘business of IT’ and business is still in the ‘business of business’,” says Sengupta. “All these initiatives can be measured in terms of traditional IT metrics – unit costs, total cost of ownership, service level agreements. There is no misalignment. Nobody treads on anybody’s toes.”
But as organizations implement these new digital technologies, the challenges begin. Once an enterprise has rolled out an expensive digital project—a big data solution, for example, business leaders want to know what they’re getting for their money. However, “traditional IT metrics of cost-control do a singularly poor job of measuring digital ROI,” Sengupta says. “So everybody starts questioning technology teams.”
And that can land businesses in a digital ditch. And if they don’t overcome the issues that led them there, things will only get worse. “You can go down a spiral of sub-scale investments, sub-optimal returns, and enhanced doubt and scrutiny, until the whole ‘digital thing’ dies a stillborn death,” Sengupta warns. But there are steps IT can take to extricate the business from the digital trough—or avoid it altogether.
“The most important thing is to have a clear view of your strategic objectives,” says Sengupta. “Are you doing things for efficiency or are you doing things for growth?” Having that clarity makes is easier to identify appropriate metrics for digital efforts.
Tomi Engdahl says:
General Tech /
The case against non-technical managers
http://memeburn.com/2015/09/the-case-against-non-technical-managers/
Software development has an image of nerdy people with poor people skills. Whilst luckily not true in most cases, the stereotype probably contributes to companies often appointing non-technical managers to run IT departments.
Back to IT, and we have a critical company function that can also cost an organization a lot of money if it goes wrong. Software can go wrong in so many ways, and being over budget is almost the least of your worries.
How about data privacy – would you like your company to be getting the press that Ashley Madison is right now? Would your company survive a major hack of all your customers’ personal details?
IT is a very technical field, with a very broad range of required skills. A company’s IT department could be responsible for bespoke software, their web presence, possible online shopping carts, a call centre, customer billing, customer support, and a bunch of internal systems like email, payroll, and document storage, amongst others.
Within the bespoke software arena, we find software developers, database administrators, business analysts, and various managers such as Project Managers and Development Managers, and all the way up to the CIO.
At the bottom, are the nerdy guys and gals working overtime to meet the organization’s deadlines. Their problems seldom make it to the boardroom table. They are dealing with a myriad of issues, such as poor or incomplete specifications, legacy code which has become unmaintainable, and a fast-shifting technical landscape where the teams’ skills often lag behind what business has decided to implement.
Technical Training for Management Pays Dividends
The first thing to understand is that most short-course IT training only introduces a concept.
Don’t send your developers off into new waters without engaged and informed leaders! Too many technical decisions are made because a sales pitch was awesome, and not from a deep understanding of the technology. So if you’re an IT manager or leader, go and get a deeper understanding by learning the details of the new tech with your team.
Invest the two or three days, or even a week, to experience the challenges of the new tech in the class room. Know more than what the sales brochure says. This will assist in so many way
All technology has limitations, but it’s hard to admit that when you have invested a lot in the decision process. This is the best risk mitigation strategy you can possible implement!
Even when you have hired IT leaders with great technical skills, they will become non-technical managers over time as their specific skills are overtaken by newer technology, and they move further and further away from the development coal face.
Comments section:
“The major problem with non-technical managers is that they don’t know what they are doing. Vendors and consultants take advantage of them. And they have no clue on how to evaluate their staff. They treat the doers badly and reward the dead-woods. And when someone disagrees with them they take it as an insult.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
A strong IT workforce starts with training
http://www.cio.com/article/2986405/it-skills-training/a-strong-it-workforce-starts-with-training.html
As CIOs lead the charge for developing technology acumen across the entire organization, their talent strategy must include training as a priority, in addition to recruiting new talent, writes Accenture’s Diana Bersohn.
Today’s environment places new requirements on the workforce to meet the needs of a digitally enabled business. It is notgetting any easier to recruit and retain the right talent with the right skills. According to Accenture research, nearly a third (32 percent) of business leaders say it is getting harder to compete for the best people. And a majority of executives agree that people are one of the most valuable assets to an organization — 87 percent believe that organizations that win the war on talent will have a competitive advantage. But how do you win the war when every day seems to be its own battle?
Many business and technology leaders are rethinking their overall talent strategy and recognizing that they need to use a variety of approaches to find and keep the best talent; this includes both upskilling the current workforce as well as recruiting fresh talent. In fact, 60 percent of companies we surveyed are offering training to upskill employees.
CIOs, especially, require an ever-changing mix of skills among employees in order to keep pace with a constantly evolving industry.
Blend roles to manage blurring lines. Business and technology increasingly are overlapping. Digital marketing, cloud vendor management, customer experience design and ecosystem sourcing are among the roles one might see on an IT job website today. These new crossover jobs will require a different mix of skills. The key is to identify the right people within your organization, and then train them to close their skills gaps to meet the new roles of the future.
Finding and training the right IT talent will require thinking creatively about how to best upskill existing and future employees. But every step a CIO takes to cultivate top talent is one step closer to winning the war on talent and building a competitive advantage.
Tomi Engdahl says:
(Over-)Measuring the Working Man
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/09/29/132250/over-measuring-the-working-man
Tyler Cowen writes in MIT Technology Review that the improved measurement of worker performance through information technology is beginning to allow employers to measure value fairly precisely and as we get better at measuring who produces what, the pay gap between those who make more and those who make less grows. Insofar as workers type at a computer, everything they do is logged, recorded, and measured. Surveillance of workers continues to increase, and statistical analysis of large data sets makes it increasingly easy to evaluate individual productivity, even if the employer has a fairly noisy data set about what is going on in the workplace. Consider journalism. In the “good old days,” no one knew how many people were reading an article, or an individual columnist. Today a digital media company knows exactly how many people are reading which articles for how long
The Measured Working Man
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/541531/the-measured-working-man/
The technology that illuminates worker productivity and value also contributes to wage inequality, Tyler Cowen argues.
Discussions of income inequality typically focus on how information technology raises the return to skilled labor, or on the rise of global trade, or perhaps on the way that politics skews power toward the rich and well-connected. But there’s another fundamental driver of income inequality: the improved measurement of worker performance. As we get better at measuring who produces what, the pay gap between those who make more and those who make less grows.
Consider journalism. In the “good old days,” no one knew how many people were reading an article like this one, or an individual columnist. Today a digital media company knows exactly how many people are reading which articles for how long, and also whether they click through to other links. The exactness and the transparency offered by information technology allow us to measure value fairly precisely.
The result is that many journalists turn out to be not so valuable at all. Their wages fall or they lose their jobs, while the superstar journalists attract more Web traffic and become their own global brands. Some even start their own media companies, as did Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight and Ezra Klein at Vox. In this case better measurement boosts income inequality more or less permanently.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alistair Barr / Wall Street Journal:
Alphabet using Nest, with its own infrastructure, recruiters, marketing, legal teams, as a model for its other projects to maintain efficiency of a startup
At Google, Breathing Room for New Ideas
Nest Labs unit insisted on autonomy and is now a model for Alphabet Inc. reorganization
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/at-google-breathing-room-for-new-ideas-1443729244-lMyQjAxMTA1MjAwMTAwNDE0Wj
To see how Google Inc. Chief Executive Larry Page hopes to turbocharge a growing fleet of speculative projects under a new holding company, look at Nest Labs.
After Google acquired the maker of connected-home devices for $3.2 billion in 2014, Nest kept its own recruiters and its own system for vetting job candidates, skirting Google’s famously deliberate hiring process. Nest still rents computer servers from Amazon.com Inc., rather than use Google’s data centers. Nest co-founder and CEO Tony Fadell also curbed some Google perks, such as free food, to maintain Nest’s scrappy vibe.
The restructuring separates Google’s core businesses—including Internet search, the Android operating system and YouTube—from newer unrelated businesses such as Nest, Google Life Sciences and Fiber, the fast Internet service. Mr. Page will remain CEO of the Alphabet holding company, but step back from running Google’s core to oversee the other units, which will operate more independently.
“If Google can deliver more broadly what it gave Nest, that predicts success for the rest of the Alphabet projects,” said
“It gets a little faster, more efficient and a little more independent,” said Andy Conrad, CEO of Google Life Sciences, one of the bet companies. “I act as a CEO of an independent company instead of a senior executive within a large company.”
That might seem like splitting linguistic hairs, but former Google executives say new projects historically have struggled to get resources, which flow to larger divisions that generate more revenue. Business units within Google compete for talent, these people say, both in number of employees, and sometimes, for specific people.
In a 2012 conference call with analysts, Mr. Page said Google aspires to spend 70% of its time, money and other resources on core businesses like search, 20% on related new businesses and 10% on projects in new areas. But, he added, “We’ve really struggled to even have 10% on the speculative things.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alistair Barr / Wall Street Journal:
Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Becomes Alphabet’s ‘Do the Right Thing’
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/10/02/as-google-becomes-alphabet-dont-be-evil-vanishes/
“Don’t be evil” is so 2004.
Alphabet Inc. posted a new code of conduct for its employees Friday, after Google completed its transformation into a holding company. There were few substantive changes in more than 20 documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission; the Alphabet code of conduct, posted on its website, is among them.
Google’s code of conduct, of course, is best-known for its first line, which was also included in Google’s 2004 filing for its initial public offering: “Don’t be evil.”
Alphabet’s code doesn’t include that phrase. Instead, it says employees of Alphabet and its subsidiaries “should do the right thing – follow the law, act honorably, and treat each other with respect.”
“Don’t be evil” marked Google’s aspiration to be a different company. But the phrase also has been held up by critics who say Google has not always lived up to it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linux kernel dev who asked Linus Torvalds to stop verbal abuse quits over verbal abuse
Could not work with people who ‘spew vile words to maintain radical emotional honesty’
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/06/linix_kernel_dev_who_asked_linus_torvalds_to_stop_swearing_quits_over_swearing/
Sarah Sharp, the maintainer of USB 3.0 drivers in the Linux Kernel who in July 2013 urged Linux overlord Linus Torvalds to stop abusing fellow developers, has quit all Linux-related work.
Sharp has revealed she quit her role on the kernel last year and backed out of Linux entirely due to the abusive commentary she asked Linus Torvalds to address.
Sharp goes on to say she has “the utmost respect for the technical efforts of the Linux kernel community” because it has “scaled and grown a project that is focused on maintaining some of the highest coding standards out there.”
“The focus on technical excellence, in combination with overloaded maintainers, and people with different cultural and social norms, means that Linux kernel maintainers are often blunt, rude, or brutal to get their job done,” she writes. “Top Linux kernel developers often yell at each other in order to correct each other’s behavior.”
“That’s not a communication style that works for me,” Sharp writes, calling for “the communication style within the Linux kernel community to be more respectful.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Startups Without Borders
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1327990&
International expansion is no longer a long-range goal for a fledgling startup.
Today’s startup companies don’t have borders. Ten years ago or so, a Silicon Valley-based startup would stick close to home for its initial customer engagements during the first year or two. Proximity made it easy to drive to the customer’s office, get firsthand feedback and drive back to the corporate headquarters to debug the product. It was an almost ideal situation that tightened the interaction loop between users and developers.
International expansion is no longer a long-range goal for a fledgling startup. Instead, the team must be prepared to follow the customer’s project to remote locations. The reality is that all large multinational companies have offices worldwide and most projects straddle multiple sites.
It would seem that founding a startup means living on an airplane for a few years. International travel always is a possibility but distance has shrunk through better communications tools. More cost-effective options are available than hopping a flight to Beijing to interact with a distant project team. Fast Internet connections and Skype, Google Hangouts and WebEx have made it much easier to stay connected. The Internet doesn’t have borders, either.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Just what do real CIOs think a real strategy looks like?
‘I know it when I see it’
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/14/strategy_cio_roundtable/
Strategy is supposed to be what a top tech exec is paid for, so it’s not surprising our recent roundtable on the subject was rather over-subscribed, giving us a mix of financial services, leisure, startups, national government and a couple of sizeable charities. What we explored was how to actually go about building a strategy rather than simply a plan.
What is Strategy?
Without answering that question, you aren’t going to get very far, but our IT Decision Makers had a range of very different ideas. At the happy end of the table, strategy is a forward-looking process, implementing the vision of the CEO, with timescales that fit the structure of the business.
Some are working on what they called “Japanese” time, where we’re working towards a big goal that won’t be realized until years are past. So their strategy is about expansionary change, new products and services with adoption of new platforms a component. They referred to this as building for the next generation, which is a rare ideal.
At the other end is a brutal reality is that some have inherited dysfunctional infrastructures and the “strategy” reflects restoration of stability and even reliable logins.
Whose Strategy is it anyway?
Strategy is very much a function of the CEO’s vision, which makes life a bit tough when your firm goes through a series of CEOs in quick succession and personally quite tough when you are a “changer and grower” and the new strategy is “stability” or “cost reduction”.
Being able to hear the mood music is critical to getting buy-in from the CEO and the rest of the leadership team. If they see your role as basically just keeping the lights on, then upgrading the customer experience, sophisticated analytics or upgrading to Windows 10 will just annoy them and diminish your credibility.
Disruption
This is the most fashionable of the business buzzwords at the moment – by which I guess they mean the sort of disruption you get on purpose rather than the Volkswagen kind.
We talked of how futile ‘bold strokes’ would be in many types of organization, especially the larger multinationals, with one ITDM referring to them as foam cushions, which would simply spring back to their old shape. The ITDMs gave us a counsel of despair, giving a one-word answer to ‘how do you disrupt a multinational’, replying with variations on “acquisitions”.
What did we learn?
That plans are not strategies
That knowing the appetite for risk is critical to personal success as well as the firm
Tech is no different to any other part of the business in needing strategy
If you change your strategy every three months it ain’t a strategy, but change it too slowly it won’t work.
If you change your strategy every three months it ain’t a trategy, but change it too slowly it won’t work.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Chris Yeh / Medium:
Eric Schmidt talks running Google, scaling fast, managing chaos, hiring, Alphabet, more
CS183C Session 8: Eric Schmidt
https://medium.com/cs183c-blitzscaling-class-collection/cs183c-session-8-eric-schmidt-56c29b247998
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM: Modernize your business or risk being Uber-ized
http://fortune.com/2015/10/26/ibm-modernize-business-disruption/
Executives from Kohl’s department store, Urban Outfitters, and HSBC share how to avoid being passed by a new rival.
IBM has a stern warning for big old companies that fail to modernize their technology and business practices. You risk being disrupted by an Uber-like startup.
Big Blue executives took the stage at an IBM conference in Las Vegas on Monday to urge companies to undergo a so-called “digital transformation.” That usually involves using more software and data technology — preferably IBM’s — and paying closer attention to how customers shop online and use social media services like Twitter.
“You better figure it out, because there’s an Uber out there that’s already figured it out,” warned Glen Finch, IBM’s global leader of big data and analytics.
companies are worried about more nimble startups like Uber overtaking their business
“The bottom line is that the c-suite is staying up at night,” Finch said.
IBM is itself going through a challenging time with fourteen straight quarters of declining revenue. The company has been shifting its business to focus more on cloud computing and data analytics.
Meanwhile rivals like Amazon AMZN 1.60% and Microsoft MSFT 2.61% have generated a lot of interest with customers looking to use cloud computing services, much to the chagrin of IBM.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Businesses must embrace digital transformation
http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/business-intelligence/5488/businesses-must-embrace-digital-transformation
Hitachi Data Systems’ research revealed 81 per cent of companies aren’t set up with the digital age in mind
Hitachi Data Systems has revealed most businesses aren’t prepared for modern working, particularly when it comes to digital transformation and the use of cloud services.
The research, which questioned 200 IT decision-makers from UK organisations with more than 1,000 employees, revealed a staggering 81 per cent don’t think their companies are set up for the digital age, which puts cloud-based systems and services at the forefront of processes.
Additionally, 75 per cent of IT leaders are unable to make informed investment decisions, because the data is not available to show how investments should be made and business strategies are not clear enough.
However, nine out of ten IT leaders recognise that effectively storing, retrieving and analysing data can identify future revenue streams, yet 87 per cent said they are facing barriers to using big data.
“Technology plays an integral role in helping UK organisations transform to thrive in a digital economy, but only if there is consensus about which technologies are relevant to future growth and about the ability to adapt to these known priorities,” explained Richard Gadd, UK managing director at Hitachi Data Systems.
“This isn’t about innovating for innovation’s sake, it’s about UK organisations having the ability to garner valuable business insights to make informed technology investments that will drive future growth and enable [them] to redefine business agility.”
Another surprisingly high statistic from the research was that 90 per cent of IT leaders don’t think their organisation is agile enough to respond to the changes in the industry they work in, meaning they are likely to lag behind forward-thinking competitors.
Tomi Engdahl says:
CIOs Say New Talent and Old Tech Don’t Mix
http://it.slashdot.org/story/15/10/28/228252/cios-say-new-talent-and-old-tech-dont-mix
Usually when an article references “what keeps IT leaders up at night,” it’s a chance to talk about “shadow IT,” losing control of tech spending, hackers, or some other overly-hyped concept. Adam Dennison, publisher at IDG Enterprise, opposes this interview tactic and says that “reports of pain are greatly exaggerated.” IT leaders don’t mind shadow IT or sharing control of the IT budget (in fact, they want others in the business to have some skin in the game), and they understand that they are probably being hacked. What they DO care about is talent. Dennison points out gaps in data, security, and app development, based on IDG’s recent survey, and he says CIOs tell him that finding the right IT talent that is also able to articulate what the business needs to succeed with technology is very difficult.
Talent, not shadow IT or hackers, is what keeps CIOs up at night
https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2015/10/talent-not-shadow-it-or-hackers-what-keeps-cios-night
The Enterprisers Project (TEP): Shadow IT, hackers, losing control of tech spending – these are highly cited as top of mind concerns for CIOs today. How have your conversations with CIOs supported or contradicted those key pain points?
Dennison: I’ve spoken with a lot of CIOs in my role and at various events, and while those are indeed issues they deal with every day, I think the reports of “pain” are greatly exaggerated. For example, many of the CIOs I know have started referring to shadow IT as shadow innovation. Rather than staying awake from worry, CIOs are trying to figure out how they can adapt a cool technology project that someone is leading in marketing or in the retail arm, learn from it, and bring it across the whole organization. CIOs tell me that shadow IT happens, they expect it, and that it ebbs and flows. If it escalates into a problem, then CIOs take full responsibility
Increasingly fractured budgets is another pain point that is routinely touted to be plaguing IT leaders, often backed up by the three year-old Gartner prediction that by 2017 the CMO would be spending more on IT than the CIO.
You could say security and hackers are worrisome for CIOs, but again, I don’t think it’s keeping them up at night. They understand that they’re probably being hacked. And if they haven’t been yet, they’re going to be. More worrisome is how to find enough time in the day to get out in front of the issue and manage their overall risk profile so that when security issues do arise, they are fully prepared. But getting through the massive to-do list on any CIO’s desk in a given day is a problem that isn’t going to go away any time soon.
TEP: If these concerns aren’t keeping CIOs up at night, what is?
Dennison: There is one pain point that I hear from almost every CIO I speak with, and this one may in fact be keeping them up at night: talent. And I’m not just referring to talent shortages (our most recent CIO survey revealed talent gaps in the areas of data, security, and app development). The issues with talent go beyond hiring as CIOs struggle to build and retain teams that can handle the fast-moving, ever-changing needs of digital transformation.
I recently spoke with the CIO of an Ivy League institution who told me they have a firing problem, not a hiring problem. I’ve spoken with large organizations that have huge staffs, and they worry that they can’t move fast enough to adopt the technology they need because the new IT talent doesn’t want to work on the old stuff, and the old talent doesn’t understand the new stuff.
Finding the right IT talent that is also able to understand and articulate what the business needs to succeed with technology is very challenging. As the lines between business and IT continue to blur, I think resolving this pain point will be critical to a CIO’s digital transformation efforts.
2015 State of the CIO
http://www.cio.com/article/2862760/cio-role/2015-state-of-the-cio.html
Our 14th annual State of the CIO research, based on a survey of 558 IT chiefs, shows that compensation is up, but the job is super-challenging and business expectations are high. CIOs continue to struggle with balancing the need for innovation with the need to keep IT operations humming along efficiently and securely. Some CIOs are perceived as business leaders, or at least partners. But, candidly, some CIOs are falling short, as some business colleagues still see IT as an obstacle to business success.