The Secret of Managing Your Advisory Board & Board of Directors for Success

Long title, but another great topic hosted by the Entrepreneurs Forum where I again had the honor of serving as a panelist.

Along with Philadelphia lawyer (and jazzman) extraordinaire Steve Goodman, Neil Vogel (Recognition Media CEO and producer of the Webby Awards), Irv Safra (moderator and high tech speaker) and Marc Sinkow (Vistage Chairman and co-chair of the Philly 100) – we spoke about the nuances of Boards: how to use them, when to get started, issues to watch out for, how to find & keep the right members, and other related topics.

One of the great things about a room full of entrepreneurs is the incredible buzz of ideas and optimism. Pair them with information about how boards can potentially help them be more successful in funding, growth, strategizing, and even exiting – and we’ve got a plan for liftoff.

I spent some time discussing the concept of a “personal advisory board” which I’ve used throughout my career. To the audience’s surprise (as well as mine when I first began that board) was how easy it is to put together such an advisory group. There are a lot of really smart people who find great joy in helping cultivate talent. Many of them are very successful business executives who have learned a lot about what works, and perhaps even more importantly, what doesn’t work.

You can read all the great business and leadership books in the world (and there are plenty of them), but nothing will help you grow faster than real experience and hands-on guidance from and accountability to a personal advisory board. If you’d like more details on how I manage my board, reach out to me in email.

Radio Ga Ga

Check out BlogTalkRadio’s Frugal Friday. It’s a great show that focuses on “all things Linux and Open Source”. I have the honor of speaking on this week’s show. It is hosted by Ken Hess and Jason Perlow (Linux superstar who I’ve worked with in the past), and airs from 6:30-7:30 pm (eastern) on Friday evenings.

Sign of the times?

I receive unsolicited resumes all the time, and I’ve yet to see one that really impressed me. As a matter of fact, not even a single email has yet lured me to open the attached resume.

Why is that?

It certainly isn’t through lack of purported “hard skills”

• Generated 107% of $7.4 million quota in my first year with XXX
• Closed many high-profile customers
• One of the world’s best rainmakers
  

Nor is it lack of “schmooze tact”

• Dear esteemed colleague
• Anthony, you won’t be disappointed by what you read below
• I’m the strategic sales ace you are looking for
  

I think I’ve seen and heard it all. Unfortunately, it misses the point.

Do I want rainmakers or sales aces? You bet. But, if you can’t blow me away with your first entree into me, then you really aren’t either of those.

What do employers really care about? Themselves and their businesses. So, while you may have generated a gazillion dollars in revenue for company XXX, tell me how that is relevant to me and my business. Show that you understand my challenges and directly correlate that to what you’ve done.

And, in this incredibly interconnected world in which we live, you have no excuse for not getting an introduction from someone who knows the employer. Who are they connected to in LinkedIn? What organizations do they belong to or what interests to they have? Find the overlap with your network and take it from there.

Are you following them on Twitter and working your way into that “circle”? When is that employer presenting their next webinar, and how can you ask the right questions there to get “noticed”?

Everyone I know is so inundated by email. There is no way you are going to cut through the clutter without it being extremely relevant to the reader.

So, to Mr. Strategic Sales Ace and Ms. Rainmaker, while you’ve succeeded in leading me to write this post, I doubt that was the outcome you were seeking.

Blood and Entrepreneurs

Ever heard of the Entrepreneurs Forum or the American Society of Inventors? I hadn’t until last night, when I spoke on a panel session at their monthly meeting held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Both are great organizations that I plan to get more involved with.

Our panel’s topic: Commercializing Your Intellectual Property. The session was moderated by Frank Taney of Buchanan Ingersoll (friend, and now famous lawyer for his unusual Second Life prosecution case) and I was joined on the panel by Adam Rosen (CEO of k-Technology Corp) and Marilyn Montross (VP at QVC).

So, how do you commercialize your IP, and what are some of the “tips of the trade”, so-to-speak? Below are a few of my talking points from last night’s engaging session.

Important factors to consider:

• Understand what your core strengths are and find others who can help you with the other important pieces. Don’t try to do it all yourself – you’ll likely drive yourself crazy. There are plenty of online resources that can help.
• Find good legal counsel. You don’t have to spend a lot to get basic guidance, and the best lawyers are very well connected.
• Regarding patents, start the provisional route. It is far cheaper, and gives you time to really get your business going. BUT (and this is a big but), it’s probably best to have legal counsel help write your provisional. Why? Because if you improperly write a provisional application, it may be worthless. And, it is not too expensive having legal help with a provisional. I know a few firms that will do one for under $500.

Lessons learned (the hard way):

• Don’t be too over-protective nor under-protective of your intellectual property. There’s a fine-line you need to walk there.
• Just because you can patent something doesn’t mean you can make money from it – and not just because of market limitations, but because of legal issues.
• If you have a “great” idea for which there is absolutely no competition, then be wary, be very wary.

Resources that might help:

• uspto.gov is a must to learn who is doing what related to your (potential) invention. While reading patents can be incredibly boring, there are some great nuggets to be gleaned. I’ve yet to read someone else’s patent application that didn’t lead me to think of a potential “spin off” ideas.
• Innocentive.com – great for people who want to create solutions for challenges that others pose – and make some money from it.
• Social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) can be great resources. Lots of noise? Yes. Value of cutting through the noise and reaching lots of people very inexpensively? Priceless.
• Great books: The Art of the Start (Guy Kawasaki); The Adweek Copyrighting Handbook (Joe Sugarman); The 4-Hour Workweek (Tim Ferriss – please note that I’m not a fan of the author or his self-aggrandizing methods, but there are some really good nuggets in that particular book).

Closing thoughts:

• Good marketing trumps even great products.
• Pay no attention to the “naysayers” – and there are plenty of them. Yes, you want to be sensitive to market trends, product viability, barriers to entry, and all those sorts of things. But at the end of the day, it will be your passion/drive coupled with your network that will get your through.
• Baron Rothschild: “The time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets.” Well, there’s plenty of blood out there. Use this opportunity to make your mark.

The end of an era

Open source and new beginnings: it was obviously a very tough decision to make, having spent so much time there. But after 24 years, I’ve made the decision to leave Unisys and spend more time working with non-profits, doing some writing, and advising for startups.

ebizQ posted my “Unisys story” on their site.

The Open Solutions Alliance, a non-profit dedicated to furthering the reach of open source and open solutions in the enterprise, remains one of my top priorities. And, in this economy, open source is being looked upon even more aggressively for its ability to offer substantial infrastructure cost savings.

But another component of open source that isn’t talked about as often (yet) is how its model of self-selection and mass collaboration is changing all facets of society. I plan to further study and write on this topic.

Other non-profits that are close to my heart include organizations that focus on individuals with learning disabilities and other such challenges.

Hello, new world!

Open letter to President Obama

Perhaps you heard about the open letter we sent President Obama urging the consideration of open source, where appropriate, in government. With signatures from many of the thought leaders in the open source world, the response was terrific.

While such a position will generally attract comments from all extremes, the feedback was very positive. Interesting, in one interview, I was asked why the need for such a letter given that the US government has traditionally been receptive to open source.

While it is true that many sectors are receptive, including organizations like DISA and the great work of folks like John Garing (CIO), there are many others where that’s not the case. But perhaps more significantly, the current economic conditions warrant a renewed focus on open source. It shocks me how few people appreciate how much money can be saved in infrastructure costs alone with open source software. But, those that “get it” are certainly reaping the benefits.

Furthermore, Obama has made it quite clear that he and his administration are seeking input on how best to build and execute on key pieces of their strategy. And with IT a key piece of the administration’s focus, the time couldn’t be better for such a stance. What do you think?

Unleashing Potential – Part 2

The age-old business challenge: how to get the most out of people? We all know the different kinds of leaders from the coercive drivers, authoritarian rulers, coaching/affiliative partners, and so forth. A lot of good material is written on these archetypes and how to become a better leader. What I’d like to briefly share, however, is a slightly different twist: How to become a better follower.

Not in a passive sheep-like sort of way, of course. In this context, I use the term “follower” to mean one observing and being attentive. The most successful leaders are, in fact, the most adroit followers. And in addition to being very good at following the various characteristics and potential opportunities of their particular market segment(s), they are extremely effective at following (observing) people, especially themselves.

What does it mean to “follow oneself”? Self-awareness. As Daniel Goleman eloquently puts:

Self-awareness means having a deep understanding of one’s emotions, as well as one’s strengths and limitations and one’s values and motives. People with strong self-awareness are realistic – neither overly self-critical nor naively hopeful. Rather, they are honest with themselves about themselves. And they are honest about themselves with others, even to the point of being able to laugh at their own foibles.(1)

But another key characteristic of self-aware people is the ability to tune into others. And tuning in to others gives us the ability to understand them – which of course leads to the opportunity to empathize, motivate, and enthuse.

How do you get started becoming self-aware? It starts by honestly looking inward. It also helps to have what I call a “personal advisory board”. I liken this to a board of directors, where the company is You, Inc. These directors have “joined” because of what they can offer, and they have a vested interest in the success of the company (you).

Your personal advisory board can obviously help you vet ideas, provide advice and guidance, create connections, etc. But, the board’s real power lies in its capability to help you grow you. We all have our obvious strengths and developmental opportunities. But we also all have what are known as hidden strengths and invisible blind spots. These “don’t know what we don’t know” areas provide the fertile ground for substantial growth.

Once you’ve begun tapping into the unlimited potential of You, Inc., the ability to help grow others flourishes by design. And when you can get an entire organization of people who are excited, motivated, and driven to realize the vision you help articulate, you’ve not only unleashed incredible potential, but you’ve also become a world-class follower that others want to access.

(1) Goleman, Daniel; Boyatzis, Richard; McKee, Annie; Primal Leadership – Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence; Harvard Business School Press; 2002; pg 40.

Unleashing Potential

Have you ever witnessed the hidden potential suddenly unleashed inside of someone? It can be life transforming, as exemplified in this true story.

As a committee board member for People’s Light and Theatre Company, I was invited to attend a play that was being performed by neurologically challenged kids at a local school. The theatre director had been working with these children for several weeks preparing for the “big show”. One boy, with the most severe autism, sat non-participative through every practice and rehearsal, never uttering a single word.

As the parents, teachers, and board members sat watching the play unfold, smiles abound as the costumed children did their best to remember lines, manipulate the hand-made props, and sing little songs about the planets in the solar system. Of course, the autistic boy sat off to the side watching it all unfold around him.

The play had intended to reach its climax with all the children from each act singing, in unison, a piece about the Earth being the most important planet. And just as this “final act” was about to start, the autistic boy shocked us all.

He stood up and walked to center stage.

No one knew what to expect, and the entire audience as well as all the other children fell completely silent. It wasn’t just an “awkward silence” where we were waiting to see what would happen; it was more of a “concerned silence” along the lines of “is this boy OK?”

After about five or six seconds, this boy, standing alone on center stage, lifted his eyes from the floor to the audience, and began singing. And not just mumbling words, but true, choral singing! Something immediately stirred in the other children, and they joined this boy and began singing along with him. Goosebumps ran down everyone’s spine, and of course there wasn’t a dry eye in the school. It couldn’t have been scripted any more dramatically, yet this was real life.

Something had been awakened in this little boy, however momentarily, that enabled him to reach that achievement. Yet how many of us allow potential and passion to remain locked away deep within us? And what can we do to tap into that hidden reservoir?

In my next posting, I’ll share what I’ve learned over a few decades of cultivating talent and unleashing potential, including topics such as:

• Personal development plans (based on unique personality traits and skills)
• Self-awareness and the role of a healthy ego
• Personal advisory boards (and other components of encouragement and compliance)

Has social networking reduced our "degrees of separation"?

I’m curious as to how much more accessible everyone is from everyone else in our modern day Web 2.0 age.

Stanley Milgram conducted the first such experiment in the 1960s, which came to be known as the “small world hypothesis”. In the experiment, he sent letters to 160 randomly selected people in Nebraska and Kansas. In the letter was the name and both the home and work address of a stockbroker in Massachusetts. The 160 people were asked to forward their letter such that it eventually reached the stockbroker, either at his home or office. The caveat: send the letter to someone you know on a first-name basis who you think would be more likely to know the stockbroker (or know someone who may know the stockbroker) than you yourself. Each person along the “chain” was asked to add their name prior to forwarding the letter. And, it turned out that the letters reached the stockbroker in an average of six steps, hence the “six degrees of separation” concept. Actually, the term seems to be shared by both Milgram and Fringyes Karinthy, who in 1929, postulated that the world was growing “smaller” due to the amount of networking and social connections such that there were probably at most 5 connections between any two individuals.

Other experiments have since been done tracing emails between randomly selected subjects and a “destination contact”, which also seem to support the six degrees theory. In all the email experiments I’ve come across, the participants are only “allowed” to forward the email to someone they know … no “cold calling” or web searching allowed. So, in a sense, this isn’t much different than the Milgram experiment, so it doesn’t surprise me that the six degrees still holds.

Another interesting concept suggested by Malcolm Gladwell, in his fantastic book The Tipping Point, is that not all degrees of separation are equal because there are some people who are extremely well connected, a term Gladwell calls “connectors”. As a matter of fact, over half of the letters in the Milgram experiment reached their destination through the same three individuals. Gladwell’s conclusion: “A very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.”

However, if we take into account the social fabric that has been weaved together over the past few years with the rise of Web 2.0, perhaps the number of connection points between any two people has dropped. Perhaps the “need” for these super connectors is no longer required to get from any person to another. Of course, I’m certainly raising the specter of doubt over the definition of “know”. In an earlier post, I speculated that we don’t know ourselves as well as we think. How well can we really know someone else, particularly those people we’ve never met in person but only know online? Furthermore, can one argue that a username or avatar is the equivalent of first name / last name?

Interesting thoughts to be sure. So, what I’d like to propose is a new type of experiment that measures the connectedness of our current world as well as the “requirement” for super connectors to draw us together. Perhaps a “starter experiment” would be to see what the average degree of separation is between any two randomly selected people on Facebook or MySpace. In other words, if person S (sample) has n-number of friends registered on Facebook and person D (destination) has m-number of friends (that presumably differ from S’s friends) registered on Facebook, how many “connections” or “degrees” do you need to traverse between S and D? Do this for a large enough sample size and average out the number. I’m sure these sites have the internal information (and technical infrastructure) already in place to perform this experiment. So, two key questions to answer: 1)is it still six degrees?, and 2)is there still a need for “super connectors” to pull us all together?

What are your thoughts?

How well do we really know ourselves?

Probably not as well as we think. And yet, truly understanding oneself is perhaps one of the most significant differentiators of great leaders from merely good or even poor leaders. This is the realm of emotional intelligence (EI or EQ), a term popularized by Daniel Goleman in his published books from the late 1990s.

Components of EI include empathy, organizational awareness, inspirational leadership, influence, developing others, collaboration, conflict management, optimism, and the like. However, at the core, and perhaps most fundamental to EI is self-awareness. Being truly in touch with ourselves, our emotions, and how we process information is not a simple task. As Aristotle once said, “Anyone can become angry – that is easy. But, to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not easy.”

When I first started my professional career, I quickly learned that the skills possessed by the most successful employees were not purely intelligence-based (everyone was very smart in the field I worked – electrical engineering), but rather what I called “soft skills”. The people who were full of passion, energy, and enthusiasm … the ones who worked very well in teams, had good personalities, and had a great sense of humor (whether overt or not) – these were the people who did very well. These people rarely, if ever, lost their temper and were able to easily resonate with others.

To this day, when I interview people for a role in my company, I am much more concerned with their soft-skills than their IQ, grades, or particular degree. Of course raw intelligence matters, but only to a degree … it’s the soft skills that really tip the scale.

But, in order to really hone those soft skills (which, by the way, can be learned and developed to a large degree), one needs to first understand their current baseline. And, the best way I’ve found to establish such a baseline is to “get a 360”. Getting a 360 is the process by which feedback is obtained from your peers, your bosses, your subordinates, and even your clients/customers (a 360 degree view of your world).

Best if the feedback:

• Is solicited from a broad range of individuals (not your best friends)
• Asks the right set of questions to derive the essential characteristics
• Is collected by a 3rd party organization that can effectively process all the data and “anonymize” the results

I’ve had great success with both the Clark-Wilson types of surveys and most recently with the Telios Leadership Institute in Philadelphia, for which the managing director is Annie McKee, co-author of Resonant Leadership. But a word of caution is in order: the first time you see your processed 360 results, you may have a negatively defensive reaction. We tend to be unaware of many of our developmental opportunities (a term I much prefer to “weaknesses”), at least consciously. But, working with an experienced coach who can help build and monitor a personalized development plan is a huge step toward leadership greatness.

Cultural biases and our unconscious proclivities

I’ve written on this topic before and recently revisited the Project Implicit study at Harvard. They’ve built a virtual laboratory where “visitors can examine their own hidden biases.” The web tests measure which direction we subconsciously lean when it comes to certain “pairs” of traits. For instance, some of the pairings include fat-thin, native-American white, light-dark skin, and many more.

A lot of people probably want to believe they don’t have a strong bias one way or the other. Unfortunately, the facts reveal otherwise. Now that nearly 5 million people have taken the test, here are some sad “truths”: over 80% of the experimenters subconsciously demonstrate negativity toward the elderly versus younger people. The same statistics apply for black skin to white skin. And, not surprisingly, most of the people who took the tests were initially unaware of their biases.

So what is it about so many people’s thoughts and feelings that cause such disparities? Our heritage and upbringing? The media? And perhaps an even more significant question is, “How can we narrow the gap?”

The deeply contemplative Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote: "Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone but only his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind."

Do you have any ideas on how we as a global society and massively interconnected populace can improve this state? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

The Nature of Learning (and Remembering)

For the past several months, I’ve been serving as an Algebra tutor for my friend’s child. This kid is very gifted intellectually, but he suffers from pretty severe ADHD, and unfortunately Algebra is his last class of the day, right about the time when his lack of attentiveness and patience reach their peak. Couple that with an Algebra teacher who will be retiring at the end of the school year without much “student cultivation” interest left in him, and you have a recipe for failure … literally.

What makes Algebra such a perfect study in learning is that you have the two fundamental brain concepts required for knowledge attainment – memorization and reasoning. The first getting the right bits of data stored in the brain, the second creating the logical (neural) connections between them. It’s fairly easy to remember (memorize) the equations such as the quadratic formula, but how you derive it and apply it is another matter entirely. And while I’ve long held that most education systems (the ones I’m familiar with) teach kids how to memorize and not really how to learn, I’ve never spent much time thinking about how to more effectively teach learning.

The other day I was reading Josh Kopelman’s wonderful blog and I came across a Wired Magazine article entitled “Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm”. The article discusses the SuperMemo (super memory) program and its creator Piotr Wozniak (no connection noted to the Apple Computer co-founder). The concept is based on the scientific theory called The Spacing Effect that the essentially says that the ideal time to practice what you’ve learned is right at the time you are about to forget it. Any earlier than that is essentially a waste of time and energy, and any later is too late and you’ll be starting over. How to know when is the right time – that’s the engine behind SuperMemo. Supposedly by following SuperMemo’s techniques, you’ll retain information astoundingly better than by any other means. And there are plenty of people (both users and scientists) who are proponents of this technique.

As for my tutoring sessions, the spacing effect is built in by default. It’s whenever I have time to meet with the kid since he doesn’t do any studying or practicing of Algebra between our sessions, and as noted earlier, there is no way he is paying attention in class. The question is, is it the right amount of spacing? I meet with him the night before every test and quiz, and any other times in between when I am available. The coefficients for the spacing effect are different for each person, and probably unique for each bit of information. But, so far, I’m happy to report that my student has aced every test since we’ve started. The big question is how much is being learned versus appropriately regurgitated during test time.

SOA as a Business Strategy

Below is the beginning of an article Jim Irwin and myself wrote for SOA World on how the “real” play with SOA is business agility. Although you may not have heard of Jim Irwin, he is one of the brightest minds in the SOA world … quietly behind the scenes helping my team develop some amazing solutions.

>>
If you had to pick a single business benefit that service-oriented architecture (SOA) can provide, it is the ability to respond to change. Change occurs continually in a multitude of places that affect the enterprise: the market, the supply chain, strategic processes, regulations, and so forth. SOA can enable the creation of an agile environment that creates stability in the face of change because it restructures automated functions into reusable pieces that can be quickly reconfigured into new or modified processes.

… for the rest of the article, check out http://virtualization.sys-con.com/read/492583.htm

$1,000,000,000 acquisition

Sun's purchase of MySQL for a cool $1 billion is all the buzz today and rightfully so. I think this news goes to show the power, visibility and growth in adoption of open source. And in this particular case MySQL.

As enterprises continually seek competitive advantages they find their way to open source solutions. Sun has certainly recognized this with Jonathan Schwartz at the helm, but today's news takes another step towards ensuring they are going to be a major player in offering such solutions. It will be interesting to see how this purchase affects Sun as the inherent value proposition of MySQL is that it is an open, potentially low cost alternative to Oracle. The other potential hitch is that companies want best-of-breed solutions for their needs and Sun just might be becoming a monolithic vendor offering one set of solutions.

I am thrilled to see the increased adoption of open source and the excitement of my friends over at MySQL, but also see this news as an opportunity for system integrators (SI's). With IT spending and acquisitions on the rise, it furthers the need for technology agnostic SI's (Unisys, Cap Gemini, Accenture and others) in this space to play significant roles in customer IT implementations. Companies are looking for the best independent solution for their needs, not for one monolithic vendor to lock them into an IT environment of their choosing. The OSA’s common-customer view reference architecture, as one example, demonstrates interoperability across multiple vendor products to achieve best-of-breed functionality.

Another piece of big news today (other than the continued economic impact in the Financial Services sector as a result of the sub-prime lending fallout) is Oracle’s purported acquisition of BEA. Obviously this would further position Oracle against IBM in the middleware space and further Oracle's goal to dominate that market. But this also creates another “integrated stack” that possibly precludes clients from choosing best of breed product, hence furthering the need for large Systems Integrators to help fulfill that gap.

Web 2.0 and Generational Uptake

Are there generational differences in business that result in operational challenges? You bet! Let me explain.

I recently attended a wonderful seminar hosted by Kim Huggins, Owner and President of K HR Solutions on the subject of Generations at Work. Since the event was sponsored and promoted by my friends at the Eastern Technology Council and Tracey Welson-Rossman of Chariot Solutions, I was eager to attend. What I saw on the reception table when I walked in was quite amusing.

Four large face pictures on display appropriately set the stage for our discussion. The first was of a gentleman in his 60s with a quote under his photo reading “Hello.” The second face shot was a woman in her late 40s saying, “Hi.” The third was a man in his 30s saying “Hey there.” And the last was a “young man” in his early 20s with orange spiked hair with a caption that read, “Wazzup.”

They are referred to as the Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Gen XY-ers, and Millennials respectively. And, we had a lot of fun discussing topics like personality, expectations, and preferences of each group in the work force. Everyone smirked discussing the tone of emails across the generations and particularly the grammatical dumbing-down influence of instant messaging. LOL. (Sorry, had to throw that in. One woman reported that one of her employees often used the phrase, “IDK”.) Don’t know what that means? Ask a Millennial.

But, I began thinking about the inhibitors to more rapid uptake of Web 2.0 technologies in the workforce, particularly large companies, and it hit me that these generational “diversities” played a very large part. I immediately recalled a comment a gentleman from a very large financial services company on Wall Street said to me following a seminar there in June hosted by myself and Don Tapscott. The financial services VP told me that they love Web 2.0 technologies because they allowed so many more people in their company to collaborate, but, those technologies weren’t being used that much – the primary users were only the new hires and more junior personnel.

Millennials grew up with technology. There was never a pre-Internet for them. Instant access to information anywhere is “normal” to these folks. Furthermore, they (along with their younger GenXY peers) have a much more “flat world” view of life, including organizational “hierarchies”. Their view of management is not hierarchical and their style and tone is not necessarily adjusted based on the level or title of others in the company.

One woman spoke about a CEO who toured one of his engineering labs to greet the “troops”. During his walk-through, the CEO stopped to say hello to one of the junior engineers. After casual “greetings” the junior engineer asked the CEO where he lived. After the CEO responded, the engineer genuinely responded with, “Hey, that’s the same town I live in. Maybe we can car pool to work some days.”

The way the different generations “expect” to collaborate is diverse. Is that good or bad? Depends on who you ask. But, if you are a company that employs (or engages with) multiple generations and you’d like to collaborate more with them, you need to think through how best to make that happen.

I know many companies who think, “OK, we’ve got this blog or wiki set up. Now we can start engaging more with our suppliers and employees.” Or, “If we install this SharePoint environment, we’ll really be able to start collaborating much more effectively.” But, it doesn’t work that way.

The technology that is out there around Web 2.0 is spectacular. There are so many great tools for collaborating including SharePoint as well as many open source solutions like SuiteTwo and Jive to name just a couple. But the tools alone aren’t enough. It’s the culture that makes the biggest difference. And, since culture can’t be mandated but must rather be lived, this challenge is one that takes some time, cultivation, and visible support from all levels.

Certainly the generational gaps are not the only factor influencing the uptake of Web 2.0 and more “globalized” collaboration in companies. But, I’m convinced it does play a large part. And, the most successful companies are those that can tap into the collective wisdom of all their employees, partners, suppliers, and other constituencies.

Sun is a very open blogging company, including their CEO Jonathan Schwartz who publishes his own blog and freely accepts public comments (sometimes harsh and quite critical). That may seem like an amazingly open position for such a “high-ranking” person to take, but if I’m not mistaken, Jonathan is 42 years old – which puts him at the tail end of Gen XY range and not quite a Baby Boomer. So, perhaps it isn’t so surprising that he is on the front line of CEOs who blog.

The companies who can create such a culture will have a huge advantage over those who can’t. So, to close this blog entry with another set of face shot comments from Kim Huggins’ seminar:

Traditionalist – “Thank you very much.”
Baby Boomer – “Thank you.”
Gen XY-er – “Thanx.”
Millennial – “Cool.”

Amusing footnote: Generational differences were not the only diversity component that was discussed during that seminar. Besides seeing the four “generational” face pictures when I walked in the room, it became quite apparent that I was the only male in a room of about 50 or so women. Yep, the event was also part of the Women’s Leadership Networking Group. Hmm, guess I should have paid more attention to that little detail.

The Ultimate in Customer Service

How can you not be impressed with the way Apple packages their products? It’s obvious they put a lot of effort into the “user experience” all the way through to the opening of the boxes and the packaging of the components. But now I’ve personally experienced an even more remarkable touch.

Today Apple offered a one-day holiday shopping sale, both online and in the stores. If you’ve ever been to an Apple Store, you know that you don’t want to be there around holiday time. They are packed with people on “off days” … imagine what it’s like around the holidays.

As an iPhone customer, I had my $100 store credit to use and decided to buy iWork ’08 to build some newsletters I’ve been roughing out. So, while shopping online, sure enough it was on sale “today” (great marketing tactic), but I couldn’t easily figure out how to use my iPhone credit pay for it. They obviously wanted my credit card information.

At the top of the screen was an “Apple Store Chat” link. I thought I’d click the link and just see what happened, this being Black Friday at 5:30 pm (prime shopping time). Within one second of hitting that link, I get a message that reads, “Hi, my name is David G. Welcome to Apple! How can I help you?” This has got to be a standard form reply, right?

So, I fire off “How can I use my $100 iPhone credit for this purchase I want to make online?” Immediate on my “chat window” I see that “David G is typing a message”. Now I know I will be met with a barrage of questions like what am I trying to do, what page was I on, and so forth. What I see 20 seconds later takes me completely by surprise.

From David G: “To use the credit, on your screen you should see a button Change Payment Method. Click on that. It will bring you to a page where you can enter your iPhone credit info.”

Wow. So, I thank “David G.”. He responds with, “You’re welcome. I will keep the chat window open in case you have further questions about your order.” Turns out I do have a further question. On the final confirmation page, I can’t see where it indicates that my payment method is via the store credit and not my credit card. So, I reply a minute or so later that I do have another question. David must surely be busy with another customer now. Nope, within 1 second, he responds with “Sure, what’s up?”

I ask my question, he tells me exactly where I missed it, and I go on to complete my order. I thank him again, and he concludes with “Thank you for visiting the Apple Store. We appreciate your business.” Truly impressive. Well done Apple.

Hybrid environments – the realm of Open Source

It is very rare that I come across a datacenter environment that is purely one technology. By that, I mean that most infrastructures are composed of some hybrid mix of legacy (old proprietary), commercial, and open source components. Why is that?

Well, for one, most of the companies I deal with are very large companies (Fortune 500), so chances are they have been around for a while, have probably gone through at least one M&A event, and have evolved over time. I know that many new, small startup companies rely heavily on open source components, but even they have some elements of “commercial” software … even if it is only the BIOS supporting the chipsets in their workstations/servers.

But perhaps even more significantly is that businesses have unique requirements that must be met in totality, which can rarely be done by any one software vendor or “class” of software products. People want to leverage the “best-fit” products to solve their business challenges and are increasingly evaluating the plethora of opportunities prior to making their enterprise selections. As such, the (software/solution) world is becoming more of a hybrid environment.

At every layer of the computing stack, organizations have a choice of very good components to choose from. Whether it is an Oracle, SQL, or MySQL/PostgreSQL database, Alfresco, Documentum, or FileNet content management system, Windows or Linux operating system, and so forth, are all choices that companies are considering. And, there is no one solution that fits all. Furthermore, much of the old legacy stuff in place in large organizations actually works well and doesn’t make a lot of sense to “rip out”. [NB: No doubt some of that old legacy stuff is limiting from a new-feature or support perspective and does need to be “modernized”.]

The beauty of open source is that it offers so many opportunities to complement existing environments with a solution that can help reduce cost or add flexibility, usually with little to no restructuring costs. So, it comes as no surprise that Novell is choosing to “bundle” IBM’s Websphere with its SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) product. This certainly represents one package that can work in certain environments. Of course, so is JBoss on top of Linux, a play obviously more “logical” to Red Hat than Novell. Although, it is ironic that IBM took an equity position in Red Hat as far back as 1999 to promote its open source software model.

Bottom line: the world is becoming more “intermixed”. That is true of population distributions, project teams, and yes, software environments. As much as any software vendor (particularly the giant ones) would love to “own” your entire environment, those days are waning. The new world is a hybrid one. Hybrid cars, hybrid species, and hybrid software. So, as you choose which components are right for your environment, look at the entire ecosystem of software solutions (commercial and open source) to meet your most demanding needs.

GTC East 2007 – Business & Technology for Government

It’s been awhile since I traveled to Albany. And, this time of the year, seeing the leaves changing colors along the Hudson was absolutely spectacular. This is the 19th year for the event, obviously highlighting New York’s leading-edge efforts at studying emerging technology and its implication for government.

I had the honor of presenting a seminar session entitled “Open Source – Ready for Prime Time?” I co-presented with Ross Brunson, one of the solutions experts at Novell. My pitch focused on how big open source has grown in government, how we got here, and what hurdles remain impeding even faster growth ... including discussing how the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) is working to drive interoperability standards across open solutions. If you’d like a copy of my presentation, just comment here and I’ll send it to you.

As I walked the show floor, it seemed like all the big players in government were at this show, but one company that surprised me was Apple. They were there not to showcase the iPhone (nor were they particularly interested in my complaint of receiving only a $100 store credit when they dropped the price of the iPhone by $200). Apple was there showing off a server … what looked like a bunch of 2U-3U blades in a small rack. The rep indicated that this had been somewhat of a stealth product for Apple. So, an Apple server, presumably tuned and configured with government-related applications. It will be interested to see what sort of traction they get.

Another honor for me was receiving (along with RedHat) an award at the show for “Best Solution” for our New York State Courts’ Family Case Management System. Shown in the photo is (L to R) Mary Sharp, Unisys GOIS; Dr. Melody Mayberry-Stewart, NYS CIO, Joseph Lynch, Unisys Account Executive and also Advisory Board member for GTC; Naren Paten, Unisys Sales Executive Head for NY, and Garry Russell, Unisys sales executive. [Click on the photo to see a much clearer version.] As the state migrated to RedHat’s JBoss application server, some issues remained with web service enablement. According to Project Manager Carol Champitto and Technical Services Manager Jason Hill, the system is the court system’s most mission-critical application, processing close to 700,000 cases per year. Once we completed our efforts, the new JBoss cluster was comparable to the previous proprietary solution in terms of performance and scalability, but with much faster build and deployment cycles. Furthermore, by migrating to open source software, New York State Courts saved tax payers over $75,000 annually in maintenance fees and $500,000 in licensing fees over time.

Enterprise Open Source Magazine article

Enterprise Open Source magazine just published an article I wrote on business adoption of open source solutions for mission-critical applications. The article analyzes the results of a study that Unisys commissioned from Forrester Consulting. Based on interviews with nearly 500 IT decision-makers worldwide, the research shows that adoption of open source isn't driven primarily by cost, as many might suppose, but by freedom -- freedom to use this powerful technology to solve their most pressing business problems the way they need to, without arbitrary restrictions imposed by any one vendor or self-appointed regulatory body. What are your experiences? I look forward to hearing your feedback.

Model of Mass-Collaboration

Many of my blog posts have focused on the business benefits of open source. But perhaps even more significant is how the open source model of “mass collaboration” is changing the way the world works. Some of you know that I’m working on a book on this topic. I’ll reveal the title as soon as the publisher is locked down. In the meantime, I’d like to share some of my thoughts around this topic in various blog entries. I welcome your feedback and continued discussion.

Of course, everyone is familiar with Wikipedia – the “open source encyclopedia”. And, many people have heard about the famous MIT experiment where obscenities were randomly inserted into various Wikipedia entries to see how long it would take the Wikipedia community to “self-police” itself. On average: 1.7 minutes. That's it! Under two minutes to remove randomly inserted obscenities. It’s the model of mass collaboration where people self-select based on their passions and skills. OK, some may argue that skills don’t play enough of a role, but you’ve got to admit that on average, the “wisdom of crowds” prevails such that the cream rises to the top and the crap gets filtered out. At my last count, there was something close to 6 million articles in Wikipedia. I remember reading a story in Nature a couple years ago that carried out an “expert led” investigation to compare scientific entries in Wikipedia to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Their findings? Factual errors existed in both sources, but “the difference in accuracy was not particularly great.”

Speaking of science, InnoCentive has emerged as an innovative solution to solve scientific conundrums faced by organizations. Established in 2001 (same time as Wikipedia), InnoCentive bills itself as “the first online, incentive-based initiative created specifically for the global R&D community”. It is built on a unique ‘Seeker’ and ‘Solver’ model that brings together scientists from over 175 countries to solve scientific problems. ‘Seekers’ such as Procter & Gamble, Boeing, Pittsburgh Plate & Glass and the Rockefeller Foundation pay annual fees to access InnoCentive's network of scientists. Scientists (or ‘Solvers’), offer solutions … and the winning solvers are rewarded. A current InnoCentive seeker is Prize4Life, a non-profit group focused on research for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease), offering $1 million for a biomarker measuring progression of the disease. The InnoCentive advantage is that it opens problem-solving to a global scientific workforce and fuels collaborative problem solving. The power is in numbers – thousands of scientists can participate in the problem solving process, a scale that any one organization can hardly reach with its in-house R&D environment.