Martin Mendez @ tumblr
In this place I primarily write in English.
I hope you enjoy your visit. I also have a blog at http://martinmendez.com where I used to publish longest thoughts (but I write in Spanish there)...
Commodity based, e.g. Gold
Politically based, e.g. Dollar
Math based, e.g. Bitcoin
The other day one guy asked me how I keep updated regarding so many things. Immediately only one answer come to my mind: Twitter.
When I was a child (something that happened around the 70’s), my father used to told me that books will give me general or particular knowledge about an specific matter, but if I actually wanted to keep me updated the best material to read were magazines. Those were the days with no Internet. He also explained me that this happens due the long cycle needed to write and publish a book compared with the short cycle related to the same on a magazine. So If I read magazines, they could keep me updated in any fact that will appear published in books several months or years later.
Twitter has replaced magazines. If you are following the right person, Twitter becomes an awesome source of knowledge and news to keep you updated in your area of interest.
In some specifics areas like Information Technology, it is hard to understand why a smart IT guy is not actively using Twitter (meaning the right way of Twitter using, not only for fragile chats with friends or sports stars). There is no possible way nowadays of keep updated regarding the exponential rhythm of technology change if you are not watching through Twitter what is other doing, what’s new, how they have resolved the same problem that you have.
Keep this on mind, Twitter is a mind blowing radar to watch what is happening around you and understand why are we not being as awesome as them.
Lean methodology: Building a product company with the lessons of Steve Blank & Eric Ries
Guest Author, tech.coWe started Modify Watches in 2010, after graduating from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. During school, I had worked on a sustainability business, Refill Revolution, which is …
Staff who repeatedly violate the change management process are quickly assigned to roles where they cannot make changes. This is all part of having a true culture of change management.
All the high performers had a culture of causality, especially when resolving problems and repairing outages. This ensures that change is ruled out first in the repair cycle, and consequently, issues are resolved much more quickly. Furthermore, they were spending less than 5% of their time on unplanned work and service restoration, spending more time early in the IT lifecycle.
In each of the high performing IT organizations, the way that the staff implemented changes was not to first log into the infrastructure. Instead, it was to go to some change management board and ask whether the change should be made. Surprisingly, this process was not viewed as bureaucratic, needlessly slowing things down and decreasing the quality of life. Instead, it was viewed as absolutely critical to the organization maintaining its high performance.
“You guys in the business are punch drunk on projects, taking on new work that doesn’t have a prayer of succeeding. Why? Because you have no idea what capacity you actually have. You’re like the guy who is always writing checks that bounce, because you don’t know how much money you have and never bother opening your mail.”
50% of what we’ll sell in five years doesn’t exist now.
If you’re still doing what you did 5 years ago please stop. You’ll break the company.
When you put two great people together, the result is far great than 1+1=2.
Excerpts from the book In the Company of Giants: Candid Conversations with the Visionaries of the Digital World, 1997, published in BusinessWeek in 1998.
What talent do you think you consistently brought to Apple and bring to NeXT and Pixar?
I think that I’ve consistently figured out who really smart people were to hang around with. No major work that I have been involved with has been work that can be done by a single person or two people, or even three or four people. Some people can do one thing magnificently, like Michelangelo, and others make things like semiconductors or build 747 airplanes — that type of work requires legions of people. In order to do things well, that can’t be done by one person, you must find extraordinary people.
The key observation is that, in most things in life, the dynamic range between average quality and the best quality is, at most, two-to-one. For example, if you were in New York and compared the best taxi to an average taxi, you might get there 20 percent faster. In terms of computers, the best PC is perhaps 30 percent better than the average PC. There is not that much difference in magnitude. Rarely you find a difference of two-to-one. Pick anything.
But, in the field that I was interested in — originally, hardware design — I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to 1. Given that, you’re well advised to go after the cream of the cream. That’s what we’ve done. You can then build a team that pursues the A+ players. A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. That’s what I’ve tried to do.
So you think your talent is in recruiting?
It’s not just recruiting. After recruiting, it’s building an environment that makes people feel they are surrounded by equally talented people and their work is bigger than they are. The feeling that the work will have tremendous influence and is part of a strong, clear vision — all those things. Recruiting usually requires more than you alone can do, so I’ve found that collaborative recruiting and having a culture that recruits the A players is the best way. Any interviewee will speak with at least a dozen people in several areas of this company, not just those in the area that he would work in. That way a lot of your A employees get broad exposure to the company, and — by having a company culture that supports them if they feel strongly enough — the current employees can veto a candidate.That seems very time-consuming.
Yes, it is. We’ve interviewed people where nine out of ten employees thought the candidate was terrific, one employee really had a problem with the candidate, and therefore we didn’t hire him. The process is very hard, very time-consuming, and can lead to real problems if not managed right. But it’s a very good way, all in all.Yet, in a typical startup, a manager may not always have the time to spend recruiting other people.
I disagree totally. I think it’s the most important job. Assume you’re by yourself in a startup and you want a partner. You’d take a lot of time finding the partner, right? He would be half of your company. Why should you take any less time finding a third of your company or a fourth of your company or a fifth of your company? When you’re in a startup, the first ten people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. Each is 10 percent of the company. So why wouldn’t you take as much time as necessary to find all the A players? If three were not so great, why would you want a company where 30 percent of your people are not so great? A small company depends on great people much more than a big company does.
…Good-to-great leaders understand three simple truths.
First, if you begin with “who,” you can more easily adapt to a fast-changing world. If people get on your bus because of where they think it’s going, you’ll be in trouble when you get 10 miles down the road and discover that you need to change direction because the world has changed. But if people board the bus principally because of all the other great people on the bus, you’ll be much faster and smarter in responding to changing conditions.
Second, if you have the right people on your bus, you don’t need to worry about motivating them. The right people are self-motivated: Nothing beats being part of a team that is expected to produce great results.
And third, if you have the wrong people on the bus, nothing else matters. You may be headed in the right direction, but you still won’t achieve greatness. Great vision with mediocre people still produces mediocre results.
From this post in Oracle.com, March 3rd, 2006, I read:
“Like most of our customers, you probably already have a corporate identity management system in place. And, you’ve probably not been enjoying the experience of redundantly administering the same user in your corporate identity management system as well as the E-Business Suite.”
Yes Larry !!!, it’s true. How do you guess that ???, I understand why you are such rich man…
Ok, let’s go…
Now, I read this post from August 3rd., 2011:
“Some organisations have third-party user authentication systems in place. These include CA Netegrity SiteMinder, Windows Kerberos, and others. These organisations frequently use third-party LDAP directory solutions such as Microsoft Active Directory, OpenLDAP, and others.
We don’t certify the E-Business Suite with those third-party products directly, and we don’t have any plans to do so.“
Disappointing Larry… you are enough rich… why do you want charge me with another product (Oracle Internet Directory) to authenticate user in my corporate directory ?…
Absurd.
Motivation
When I’m interviewing candidates for a job, I use a different approach. First, I try to get a feel for the person’s motivation, because motivation is what ultimately is going to make the person successful. I like it when I see people who want to work because they’re curious or because they sincerely want to solve problems or make things better for others. I avoid people who consider their work “just a job” and give signs that they’ll walk away in the middle of solving a critical problem just because it’s dinner time (I’m not advocating long hours as a requirement, but I don’t like clock watchers). And I quickly rule out people who are in it for the money. They’re welcome to use money as a scorecard, but truly successful people don’t have money as their primary motivator. If money is your motivator, then how ethical will you be?
How do you assess motivation in an interview? Ask what they enjoy about a job. But don’t listen to the words of their answer; listen to the “music” instead. Listen to the emotion (or lack of it) that they have in their voice. Listen for someone who still has the energy and drive to be truly great, and who isn’t burned out or jaded. Many people will be reluctant to answer the question honestly – they’ll still be acting – so you may have to approach the question indirectly. Ask what they enjoy doing when they’re not working. Ask what caused them to pick their major in school. You’ll begin to get a feel for their real motivation in spite of any acting attempts.