Management, technology, random thoughts
Inertia is tough to overcome. We become comfortable, and in becoming comfortable, we become less hungry, more steady state. Energy comes from uncertainty and instability- channeling the energy leads to movement, hopefully in the right direction.
To begin channeling the energy, we have to first take a step; we need to make a decision to start. Continue reading “Decision and Discipline”
It’s not news that Shakespeare had Marcus Brutus tell us that “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune…”, and that the failure to attend to the tide results in misery, and being forever doomed to the shoals of life. Anyone who passes their time on the sea also knows the advantage of making the tide for a journey, or even for the most productive times for sea angling.
It’s equally not news that “time and tide wait for no man” – a quote attributed to Chaucer in the 1300s, but believed to have older roots. There is a suggestion that the “tide” in the above quote refers to a season, rather than a nautical tide, but the intent is the same. We can’t hold back the progression of the tide, the seasons, or the clock.
It’s to be expected, really. You want to go out clubbing, and the object of your affections, who is significantly older than you, wants to get an early night because they have a parent-teacher meeting first thing in the morning.
Clearly, in this scenario, retail Public Cloud Providers (PCPs) are the younger member of the relationship – looking to move fast and break things, as it were. Large, regulated Enterprises are the older partner, looking to put their feet up at the end of a complicated and trying day. They can’t move as fast as the PCPs, because they have accumulated responsibilities in the form of regulatory and board oversight, and have less agility in their old bones than the more nimble PCPs. Continue reading “A May-December Romance – Public Cloud Providers & Large Enterprises”
I’ve just finished reading Derek Sivers “Anything you want“, and it reminded me of something really critical. Everything we do, in any business, should be in service of our customers. We forget that to our detriment.
KRIs, KPIs, KRAs, SLAs, OLAs, a smorgasbord of three letter acronyms, all intending to provide meaningful measurement of performance and delivery.
But have we reached the point of metrics madness? Continue reading “Metrics Madness”
I was trying to think what the collective term for fitness watches and trackers might be (akin to a murder of crows, or a sloth of bears) and what came to mind was “a frustration”.
Wearable technology is increasingly becoming part of the world we live in. From ingestible medical devices to AR headsets, from clothing with connectivity to gadgets to make your running smarter, we are buying more and more tech to generate more and more data about our lives. Allegedly at least, making us more productive, fitter and healthier. Continue reading “A tale of two (fitness) trackers”
Peter Drucker writes in his book that doing the right thing is one of the primary attributes of the “Effective Executive“. But how do we know that what we’re doing is the right thing at the right time?
In an ideal world, principles should inform and guide everything we do. We can think of principles as a sort of operating system, the context in which we execute for our organisations. To be principled has a moral, personal meaning, as in the OED definition: Continue reading “Where the right things get done – at the intersection of Principles, Mission and Goals.”
