First was his concept of up and to the right, the popular idea that careers only progress as people get more responsibility and more income. His take was that this idea isn’t valid and he describes his own switch which came at the height of the dot com boom. He broke to start a non-profit and — well, you can learn the rest on the podcast.

The reason it stuck out to me was my whole new gig at salesforce.com and the mix in of the Salesforce.com Foundation (side note: hey look the foundation site is running on Force.com Sites). The podcast suggests, to my listening anyway, that it’s a one or the other kind of choice. The SFDC Foundation (“SFDCF”?) suggests that it can to an extent be done in parallel.

Sure there are some if ands or buts here (he’s looking for organization leadership, etc) but I bring this up because one of the things percolating in the back of my brain is what to do with the six days I get for volunteer service. I don’t know just yet, but I want to do something worthwhile for sure.  Gotta figure out the right thing.

The second thing that stuck out was a comment Tierney made about strategic planning. He was talking about the need for people and capital and how a strategic plan was what got them marching in the right direction. And then he said something very interesting: if you hire the right people, and you give them capital, you don’t have to worry about the plan. The people will figure out how to move forward on their own.

Brilliant. At a course at the U of C last year, one of the lecturers stated something similar: if you have B players on the team but an A idea, odds are good you’ll fail. If you have A players but a B idea or better, the A players will make it succeed. That has definitely stuck with me. Coincidentally, a friend and I were talking about this at lunch as well, how nobody does five year plans any more since things change too fast.  Good stuff.

Listening to these social innovation podcasts has been interesting. They get me thinking outside of my normal ruts, and that definitely feels like a mental shift — up and to the right.

My old rhythm had it’s traditional components: train to the office, coffee, kickoff meetings early in the week, lunch, post lunch food coma, leave to make the train and then get on the train. This excludes all the extras: early (and I mean early) morning email processing, catch up in the evening, etc.

The new job will be missing the commute and the omnipresent coworkers. Since I’ll be working out of the house, I’ll need to have both “head to the basement” and “turn the computer off” times that I stick to without the external pressure of a train schedule. What about the rest of it?

Last time I worked from home — pre marriage, pre kid, pre dogs — the basic flow was get up, work until I noticed I was hungry, eat something and keep working until it was time to go to the gym. I’d like to get that gym thing back in but for the rest of that schedule, I don’t know that I’ll be able to be as singularly focused on it this go around.

All of this will shake out over the next few weeks. This in between time, these couple of weeks where I’m done with the old but haven’t yet started the new, there’s no real cadence to the days. This is good and bad. As much as I like the daily adventure of figuring out what I’m going to do, I’m eager to get back to the comfort of a predictable and productive rhythm.

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.

I’ll keep you posted.

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.

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.

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.”

Interesting stuff and good advice.

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.)

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.

I think I’ll now follow this advice.

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.