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)...
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.
A failure is a project that doesn’t work, an initiative that teaches you something at the same time the outcome doesn’t move you directly closer to your goal.
A mistake is either a failure repeated, doing something for the second time when you should have known better, or a misguided attempt (because of carelessness, selfishness or hubris) that hindsight reminds you is worth avoiding.
We need a lot more failures, I think. Failures that don’t kill us make us bolder, and teach us one more way that won’t work, while opening the door to things that might.
School confuses us, so do bosses and families. Go ahead, fail. Try to avoid mistakes, though.
The secret of packing a suit coat is not to avoid wrinkles, as you might think. Instead, the secret is to make sure the wrinkles end up in places where wrinkles won’t be noticed.
Why does this relate to IT? Because it’s a lesson in perfectionism and prioritization. We all want our systems to be perfect, but we know that we don’t have the time or the budget to make that possible. So the secret of having our systems appear to be more successful is to make sure that the system limitations end up in places where the limitations won’t be noticed.
Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? Then why don’t we do it? Think about the typical everyday user of one of your systems. For online systems (web or not), what screens does that person spend most of their day using? For batch systems, what reports does the person use the most? Have you focused the majority of your systems improvement effort on making things better for these most common uses of your systems? On improving their usability? On improving their system performance and reliability? That’s where the productivity payback is, because that’s where most of the business labor goes: into the systems that are used the most.
But a common trap in IT is to get distracted by the so-called “corner cases,” the very uncommon situations where due to a certain combination of variables, weird buggy things happen in software. We tend to spend an inordinate amount of IT dollars on fixing these problems, “removing the wrinkles,” when we might be better off in some cases just moving the wrinkles to where they won’t be noticed.
Sprint.ly = dev project management + kanban board + github, everything in a wonderful interface
I’ve been founding and helping run technology companies since 1999. My latest company is fabulis.com. Here are 57 lessons I’ve learned along the way. I could have listed 100+ but I didn’t want to bore you.
1. Build something you are personally passionate about. You are your best focus group.
Linda Rottenberg, of Endeavor, shared a relevant story that had been passed on to her by one of her advisors, about two students fighter pilots who got together to share what they had learned from their respective instructors. The first pilot said, “I was given a thousand rules for flying my plane.” The second pilot said, “I was only given three rules.” The first pilot gloated, thinking he was given many more options, until his friend said, “My instructor told me the three things I should never do. All else is up to me.”
This story captures the idea that it is better to know the few things that are really against the rules than to focus on the many things you think you should do. This is also a reminder of the big difference between rules and recommendations. Once you whittle away the recommendations, there are often many fewer rules than you imagined.
Excerpted and adapted from:
What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World - Tina Seeling
Average people push great people out of a company.
- Jason Calacanis
Frans Johansson: The Secret Truth About Executing Great Ideas