1341 vs 3100 words, Gassee response to Satya's email, Seems like 300 words should have been enough

One of my friends asked if I had read Jean-Louis Gassee’s post in response to Satya Nadella’s 3,100 word e-mail to employees.  

Microsoft’s New CEO Needs An Editor

Satya Nadella’s latest message to the troops – and to the world – is disquieting. It lacks focus, specifics, and, if not soon sharpened, his words will worry employees, developers, customers, and even shareholders.

As I puzzled over the public email Microsoft’s new CEO sent to his troops,Nicolas Boileau’s immortal dictum came to mind:

Whatever is well conceived is clearly said,
And the words to say it flow with ease.

Clarity and ease are sorely missing from Satya Nadella’s 3,100 plodding words, which were supposed to paint a clear, motivating future for 127,000 Microsoftians anxious to know where the new boss is leading them.

Now what is a bit ironic is Gassee says brevity is advised.  But, don’t you think Jean-Louis could have made his point in 300 words?

One of the most interesting points is Gassee analyzing explanations for the e-mail.

Two possible explanations come to mind.

First, because he’s intelligent and literate, he forgot to use an unforgiving editor. ‘Chief, you really want to email that?’ Or, if he used an editor, he was victimized by a sycophantic one. ‘Satya, you nailed it!’

Second, and more likely, Nadella speaks in code. He’s making cryptic statements that are meant to prepare the troops for painful changes. Seemingly bland, obligatory statements about the future will decrypt into wrenching decisions:

“Organizations will change. Mergers and acquisitions will occur. Job responsibilities will evolve. New partnerships will be formed. Tired traditions will be questioned. Our priorities will be adjusted. New skills will be built. New ideas will be heard. New hires will be made. Processes will be simplified. And if you want to thrive at Microsoft and make a world impact, you and your team must add numerous more changes to this list that you will be enthusiastic about driving.”

In plainer English: Shape up or ship out.

Tortured statements from CEOs, politicians, coworkers, spouses, or suppliers, in no hierarchical order, mean one thing: I have something to hide, but I want to be able to say I told you the facts.

Now, Gassse does include a 200 word version of what Satya’s e-mail says.

BTW, I ran a word count on this post and it is less than 400, but most of the words are what Gassee said, not mine. :-)

Innovation is great if you are the creator, sucks if you are the victim

If you conduct a poll on how important it is to be innovative, you would get resounding support for the idea.

This assumes you are in the position of creating the innovation.  If you look at the opposite, there is innovation going on and you are the victim, the one who is being disrupted by the change.  Innovation sucks.  If you don’t want to change, the best hope you have for survival is your competitors don’t innovate.

Can you move your Perspective according to what you see? A Meditation Technique

Meditation can teach you many things.  Here is one technique to ask whether you practice.

Meditation is neither shutting things out nor off. It is seeing things clearly, and deliberately positioning yourself differently in relationship to them.

Kabat-Zinn, Jon (2010-02-06). Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation In Everyday Life (p. 30). Hyperion. Kindle Edition.

Predicting the future data center by taking Seven Steps back before leaping Seven Steps forward 2006 - 2020

Imagining the future of what data centers will be like in 2020 is hard.  Here is a blog post by LSI’s Rob Ober that takes a look 7 years ago, then predicts 7 years ahead.

Here is a snipped of the 7 years in the past.

And 7 years ago, our forefathers…
It was a very different world. Facebook barely existed, and had just barely passed the “university only” membership. Google was using Velcro, Amazon didn’t have its services, cloud was a non-existent term. In fact DAS (direct attach storage) was on the decline because everyone was moving to SAN/NAS. 10GE networking was in the future (1GE was still in growth mode). Linux was not nearly as widely accepted in enterprise – Amazon was in the vanguard of making it usable at scale (with Werner Vogels saying “it’s terrible, but it’s free, as in free beer”). Servers were individual – no “PODs,” and VMware was not standard practice yet. SATA drives were nowhere in datacenters.

An enterprise disk drive topped out at around 200GB in capacity. Nobody used the term petabyte. People, including me, were just starting to think about flash in datacenters, and it was several years later that solutions became available. Big data did not even exist. Not as a term or as a technology, definitely not Hadoop or graph search. In fact, Google’s seminal paper on MapReduce had just been published, and it would become the inspiration for Hadoop – something that would take many years before Yahoo picked it up and helped make it real.

Which then nicely sets up 7 years out.

7 years from now
So – 7 years from now? That’s hard to predict, so take this with a grain of salt… There are many ways things could play out, especially when global legal, privacy, energy, hazardous waste recycling, and data retention requirements come into play, not to mention random chaos and invention along the way.

Enjoy the post to get you thinking about what could be.

Netflix's approach to innovation, get out of the way

Isn't it funny how many company's answer to innovation is to make it an objective and goal of the company.  IBM has even created an event called Innovate.

An entertaining post on innovation is by Netflix's Adrian Cockcroft where he uses Netflix streaming media shows as slides.

How Netflix gets out of the way of innovation

 

#defrag 2011 presentation script.

I'm the cloud architect for Netflix, but rather than tell you about why we moved Netflix to a cloud architecture or how we built our cloud architecture, I'm going to tell you what we do differently at Netflix to create a culture that supports innovation.

What is it that lets us get things done very quickly. Sometimes a bit too qwikly…. but how did we keep making big strategic moves, from DVD to streaming, from Datacenter to Public Cloud, from USA only to International, all in very short timescales with a fairly small team of engineers.

My presentation slides are just box-shots of movies and TV shows that are available on Netflix streaming. This script is based on the notes I made to figure out what I was going to say for each box shot. If some of you see a show you didn't know we had and want to watch that would make me happy, you can click on the box shot to visit that movie at Netflix, they were all available for streaming in the USA at the time of writing.

The post is long, so let me help you to the part I found useful.

What I found out over the next few years is that the culture is what enables innovation, so that Netflix can get things done quickly that other companies are too scared or too slow to try. The rest of this talk is about the key things that we do differently at Netflix.

And Andrian's warns this guidance is most likely not useful for a large established company.

Before I get into them I want to warn you that even with a roadmap and a guide, you probably won't be able to follow this path if you are in a large established company. Your existing culture won't let you. However if you are creating a new company from scratch, I hope you can join me in what I hope is the future of cool places to work.

Here's the key insight. It's the things you don't do that make the difference. You don't add innovation to a company culture, you get out of its way.