I woke this morning to the realization that I don’t have a job to go to on Monday. I have one less email account to check obsessively. I have one less team to lead. I have two fewer keys on my keyring. This is by design, but it still caught me off guard. I’m not used to not having anything to do for a couple of weeks.
Have I ever had this degree of confident lack of responsibility? In other words, have I ever had a period of time where I was free from the last thing and confident enough in the next thing that I wasn’t engaged in a pretty solid search? I don’t think so.
It’s not that I won’t have *anything* to do. I still have a wife, a kid and a couple of dogs, all of which come with a (pleasant) obligation (or seven). But two weeks should be enough to learn a programming language I have avoided, eat a burrito or two from a taqueria (or two) that I haven’t tried yet or maybe polish off a short story.
We’ll see. I don’t want to get to the end of these two weeks and simply be caught up on Jersey Shore. I don’t want it to be about consumption.
This is a success story about a guy I’ll call Bob. Bob and I met 2+ years ago and then connected via LinkedIn. We haven’t had a lot of contact since but during that time developed enough of a relationship that I was curious when I saw his update: ‘looking for technology leadership positions in Chicago’.
We’re always looking for top talent, so I sent him a note. We chatted on the phone. I connected him with a peer of mine and they chatted. We got together with our boss and invited him up. He came up again to meet with the CEO. And I just heard that he accepted a position with us.
Awesome. This is a clear demonstration that a short status message on a social networking site can result in great things. You never know where that Tweet, that Facebook post or that LinkedIn status update will lead. Great stuff.
Congrats, Bob — and thanks for posting that update. You’re going to love your new job.
I have only one foot in the present as I write this. The other is in the not too distant future–the end of month or so, just a week away–and my mind is wandering to about three weeks ahead. Why am I having this much trouble focusing? Simple: there’s lots of change afoot.
My last day with Model Metrics, where I’ve worked since 2007, is Friday and my first day with my new employer, salesforce.com, is February 15. I’m in career transition mode. This is an exciting and turbulent time for me, so my mind is doing what it does: wander.
Model has been a great place for me the last few years and it has been a pleasure to be a part of such a great team. Over the last few weeks, since I announced this change, everyone has been very supportive. This week, with the transition nearly complete, I’m (mostly) extra. Code is getting written, sales are being closed, and we’re continuing to recruit new people. All of the things I have been deeply involved with for years are now handled without me.
Which means I’m mentally free to wander a few weeks into the future, to my first week at salesforce.com. There’s a part of that work which will be very similar to my current job, and there’s a fair amount that will be new. One significant change will be that for the first time in about 15 years, I won’t be billing my time to a customer as part of a services business. There are several other changes — all of which I’m looking for and sought out — I’ll share more about my new role once it kicks off. These new items render the future fairly opaque from where I sit today, and so my mind wanders forward in time, this way and that, to try to suss it out.
This career border area is a time of great curiosity for me — I haven’t had that many of them. My challenge for this week is to see how I can provide value to a team now well suited to operating without me. Starting Friday and for the two weeks after that, I will attempt to truly disconnect. Once over the border, my challenge when starting the new job will be to be completely present and open to my new environment and responsibilities.
This is so exciting! No wonder my mind is wandering.
Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Sure Thing” (The New Yorker, 1/18/10) suggests that many business icons are substantially more risk averse than popular myth recalls. Gladwell gives several examples of what he means and then talks about business opportunities as a problem to be solved. Although I don’t think this was the point of his article, he’s got me thinking about business not as a collection of risks and probabilities but as a sudoku puzzle.
Sudoku is a great game. I don’t play it every day but each time I pick it up I remember why I like it. It has clear rules which — when combined with logic — make each move something I’m 100% confident in. I don’t guess in sudoku. I don’t have to. Each move builds on the last until your board is complete.
What Gladwell suggests — he adapts from another work, From Predators to Icons: Exposing the Myth of the Business Hero, which I haven’t read yet — is that the most successful entrepreneurs treat their businesses more like sudoku. They understand their playing field, they understand their position on it, and then they look for the next move that has the highest payoff and the least risk.
There’s more to the article than that, and I suspect there’s more to the original work than that, but this is what it’s got me thinking about. If you own a business, and you’re taking big risks that keep you up at night, maybe you’re doing it wrong. Perhaps you’re missing something in the market or possibly something in your assumptions is too far away from reality (either too rosy or too gloomy). Or perhaps you’ve missed some way of analyzing the situation.
I’m glad to have run across the article, both for the sudoku related thinking it spurred and for the profile of John Paulson. Paulson, a hedge fund manager, looked at the mortgage market and saw both the bubble and a way to capitalize on it’s burst: credit default swaps. In 2007, if the article is right, he personally pocketed $5 billion based on these. Wow. Gladwell includes a quote attributed to one of Paulson’s mentors, Marty Gruss: “Watch the downside; the upside will take care of itself.”
If Google can’t get rid of Internet Explorer, what chance do the rest of us have?
Let me explain: Internet Explorer is used over 60% of the time. Google produces their own alternative, Chrome, and has been not so quietly advertising the heck out of it (which even MS has noticed). Its market share has now surpassed that of the much more mature Safari. And to top things off people have been generally certain that IE is unsafe for quite a while.
So why is anyone, let alone anyone in a technology leadership position at Google, still using Internet Explorer?
I’m guessing it boils down to one main thing. Internet Explorer is so embedded in the dominant operating system (that’s Windows of course — and incidentally, in case you didn’t read the zero day link above — this bug exists in the brand new Windows 7 as well) that it’s ridiculously difficult to get people, even really smart people who get it, to switch.
Let’s leave aside for a second the idea that an Internet company should be using the same mix of browsers as their customers — that could be handled in a lab.
Then let’s all take a moment to re-read the history of The First Browser War (a name which I love, BTW). Be sure to read the consequences section. And if you’re interested (I was), you might also enjoy popping over to the article about the anti-trust case.
What now? That’s a hard question. And as security threats become more complex, so will the answer.
But maybe the best way to start is to use a different browser. Will that instantly solve all the problems? No, of course not. But it will increase the complexity for someone wanting to exploit a vulnerability. Heterogeneous environments make for more complex targets than homogeneous. And if you can use a browser that makes its source code available for inspection, even better. Firefox, Chrome and Safari all do this. Opera — I haven’t put my hands on it immediately. Internet Explorer — nope.
And now, for your listening and viewing enjoyment (and with a nod to L.) here’s Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”. (Infer from it whatever you wish in re: this post. Or, infer nothing and just enjoy it — it’s pretty entertaining.)
Just finished up Donald Westlake’s Get Real. (I bought it the other day). I haven’t read a caper novel before, but have enjoyed the various caper movies that were popular a few years back. (Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, etc.)
A big plus for this novel: it appears to have had a pretty good editor. The prose was tight and the plot moved along with all good haste. Perfect for the flight home from MAN.
The news is out: Google was hacked from China and lost intellectual property. That’s right: Google, arguably the smartest company in the world with arguably the best security on the internet was hacked. And this begs the question: what chance do the rest of us have?
I work with companies all the time as they are considering the move from local to cloud applications and security always comes up. Although salesforce.com, my cloud platform of choice, has gone to ridiculous lengths to secure their systems and talks a great deal about it, someone always pipes up and says, “Well I can trust my systems area secure because I’ve secured them.” As of today, all of those objections officially bunk and belong on the garbage heap.
Why? Well let’s say you run a small data center and that you’ve spent a few thousand dollars trying to lock it down. Have you tested it? When did you test it last? Are you testing it again tomorrow? Do you honestly think you’ve secured your data center better than Google? I doubt it. Sooner or later, you’ll doubt it too — hopefully you’ll doubt it before you’re proven [catastrophically] wrong. And if you’re in that 50% of data centers which are understaffed, you’re at even greater risk. It will never be easier for you to make the switch than it is today. What are you waiting for?
No, I don’t think you need to completely disconnect from the internet and I also don’t think you need to move absolutely everything to the cloud. But if you haven’t started to take advantage of the work done others, building on the shoulders of Internet giants instead of from the ground up, you’re behind. Your competitors are out innovating you, you’re spending too much money and sooner or later you’ll face a material loss.
What are you waiting for? It will never be easier or less expensive than it is today.
And now, for your enjoyment and to lighten the mood, here is a video of a little girl talking about kittens.
