Frohe Weihnachten!

Frohe Weihnachten an alle perbit'ler und einen guten Start ins neue Jahr mit der Cloud und Azure.

Jeff Bezos, Firmenkultur

A word about corporate cultures: for better or for worse, they are enduring, stable, hard to change. They can be a source of advantage or disadvantage. You can write down your corporate culture, but when you do so, you’re discovering it, uncovering it – not creating it. It is created slowly over time by the people and by events – by the stories of past success and failure that become a deep part of the company lore.

If it’s a distinctive culture, it will fit certain people like a custom-made glove. The reason cultures are so stable in time is because people self-select. Someone energized by competitive zeal may select and be happy in one culture, while someone who loves to pioneer and invent may choose another. The world, thankfully, is full of many high-performing, highly distinctive corporate cultures.

We never claim that our approach is the right one – just that it’s ours – and over the last two decades, we’ve collected a large group of like-minded people. Folks who find our approach

energizing and meaningful. One area where I think we are especially distinctive is failure. I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins.

To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there.

Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right. Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you’re still going to be wrong nine times out of ten. We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs. 

The difference between baseball and business, however, is that

baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold.

Big winners pay for so many experiments.

Amazon’s energy internally comes from its desire to impress its customers. This means reinventing normal and delivering products before customers even know they want them. Some companies may rely on customer surveys and market research to understand their users. This is especially dangerous when designing and inventing new products. 

“Good inventors and designers deeply understand their customer. They spend tremendous energy developing that intuition.”

“A remarkable customer experience starts with the heart, intuition, curiosity, play, guts, taste.

You won’t find any of it in a survey.”

-Jeff Bezos.

Empty Happy Brain

“When I walk, I have an empty, happy brain and I see things.”
– Maira Kalman

More about her here.

It's all about the song

It's nearly time for the Christmas parties once again and what would be the point of parties without music and songs. Thinking about my favourites on the walk home yesterday one of the best ever suddenly popped into my mind again. Everybody's Talkin', the Nilsson tune, the theme for Midnight Cowboy, the Oscar winner for best picture in 1969. My, my, that was some time ago. 

It's a very short but powerful song.

"Everybody's talking at me! I don't hear a word they're saying. Only the echoes of my mind. People stopping, staring. I can't see their faces. Only the shadows of their eyes."

What a beautiful song! Makes me smile everytime. 

"He's going where the sun keeps shining, thru the pouring rain. He's going where the weather suits his clothes. Backing off the northeast wind, sailing on a summer breeze, and skipping over the ocean like a stone."



And what a unique talent Harry Nilsson was.

Inch by Inch

Motivation for all in 2018, "Any Given Sunday" with good old AL!



Starts off with "I don't know what to say...", like most of my speeches.

I gave this speech to my dog and he turned into a wolf!
Now what are you gonna do!

Customers 2017

Amazon’s energy internally comes from its desire to impress its customers. This means reinventing normal and delivering products before customers even know they want them. Some companies may rely on customer surveys and market research to understand their users. This is especially dangerous when designing and inventing new products. 

“Good inventors and designers deeply understand their customer. They spend tremendous energy developing that intuition.”

“A remarkable customer experience starts with the heart, intuition, curiosity, play, guts, taste. You won’t find any of it in a survey.”

Been done before

What percentage of the work you do each day is work where the process (the 'right answer') is known? Jobs where you replicate a process instead of inventing one...

The place where we can create the most value is when we do a job where exploration and a new solution is what's needed. Not routine, but exploration. Which means we're doing something that's not been done before, something that might not work. 

This isn't something to avoid, it's the work we need to seek out.
-Seth Godin again.

The work not yet done

It could be...

1. That you don't know what needs to be done.
2. That you don't know how to do what needs to be done.
3. That you're afraid to do what needs to be done.

It's frustrating. We want to move up, we want our project to make more of an impact, we want to deliver -but the undone work hangs over us. 

If you care enough, the path forward is clear, isn't it?

You can model what needs to be done, basing your next steps on what others have done before you. You can ask your boss or your clients for an agenda. You can test and test again. You can leap.

You can learn how to do what you don't know how to do. You can improve your skills, get better tools and do the hard work of actually getting better at the work.

But most of all, you can realize that the most urgent work is the work of dancing with our fear, because the fear is the real reason the work isn't getting done.
-Seth Godin.

Saisonende

Der Laufsaison 2017 ging für mich gestern in Gosheim auf der Lemberg bei strahlender Sonnenschein zu Ende. Erfolgreich!

Silberdistelalbcup, Sieger Altersklasse M65.

I like Programming

It’s one of the most satisfying occupations man has discovered yet, because you never can quite do it as well as you want to, so there’s always something to wake up tomorrow morning to do.

Talent is an advantage but I know a lot of talented failures. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.

No commitment

I just happened to read a very good sermon today on the subject of cohabitation (living together, with sexual intimacy, without marriage).

The key points were:

(1) Christian morality on this point hasn't changed.

(2) Sociological and economic data show that cohabitation is a bad deal.

"Trial marriages" don't prevent divorce; they increase it. And couples who won't make a commitment together can't in honesty plan their future together.

So what would I ask a couple who decide to live together and perhaps have children without getting married? My question for any cohabiting couple would be, "Where do you expect to be in ten years?"

Almost invariably, one of the two does expect to be married, and the other expects not to be married — in effect, expects to break up.

And when you break up, you will be turning someone loose on the world after having used up a good bit of her or his life. Will that give your ex-partner a good life in the future?

But maybe, when you break up, you expect to be tired of your partner, and angry, and not to care about the other person's future.

You see the underlying theme of exploitation rather than love.

Cohabitation = lack of agreement = taking advantage of someone, getting them to give what you won't give.

Married in 1971, still together and still smiling!

 

Neil Diamond, 50 Year Anniversary

SAP Arena, Samstag 16.09. Neil Diamond nahm die 7000 Zuschauer mit auf eine Reise in die Vergangenheit, dorthin, wo die Erinnerung an die eigene Jugend wohnt, fest eingebettet in nostalgische Videoaufnahmen. 26 Stücke inklusive Zugaben präsentierte er mit seiner virtuosen elfköpfigen Band.

Angefangen hat er 1966 in New York mit seiner ersten Komposition "Solitary Man". Er hat so viele Welthits geschrieben, dass die Qualität von "Solitary Man" in den Hintergrund trat. Es ist nichts weniger als ein amerikanisches Liederbuch: "Cherry, Cherry", "I'm A Believer", "Cracklin' Rosie", "Sweet Caroline", "Beautiful Noise", "Holly Holy", "Red Red Wine" "Song Sung Blue" und natürlich das grandiose "I Am ... I Said". Alle Stücke sind auf "Hot August Night" verewigt, und er hat sie auch in dieser Mannheimer Samstagnacht gespielt.

Rund 130 Millionen Platten hat er verkauft, damit zählt er zu den erfolgreichsten Musikern des Planeten. 37 Top-10-Singles, 16 Top-10-Alben, Grammys, Golden Globes und andere Ehrungen.

Wie hier so auch in Mannheim die Höhepunkt (So good, So good.....):

On Microsoft missing the boat

Despite Microsoft’s remarkable financial performance, CEO Steve Ballmer failed to understand and execute on the five most important technology trends of the 21st century: in search – losing to Google; in smartphones – losing to Apple; in mobile operating systems – losing to Google/Apple; in media – losing to Apple/Netflix; and in the cloud – losing to Amazon.

Microsoft left the 20th century owning over 95% of the operating systems that ran on computers (almost all on desktops). Fifteen years and 2 billion smartphones shipped in the 21st century and Microsoft’s mobile OS share is 1%. These misses weren’t in minor market areas – missing search, mobile and the cloud were directly where Microsoft users were heading.  Yet a very smart CEO missed all of these.

It wasn’t that Microsoft didn’t have smart engineers working on search, media, mobile and cloud. They had lots of these projects. The problem was that Ballmer organized the company around execution of its current strengths – Windows and Office businesses. Projects not directly related to those activities never got serious management attention and/or resources.

For Microsoft to have tackled the areas they missed – cloud, music, mobile, apps – would have required an organizational transformation to a services company. Services (Cloud, ads, music) have a very different business model. 

They are hard to do in a company that excels at products.

Wise words

Still programming!

Programming still gets me excited even after doing it for over 40 years. I still learn new stuff, reach new heights, and know much less than I thought I did, all the time. It requires incredible concentration and memory and creativity to think of ways to do things that you can kind of describe in words but have no experience making work with ones and zeros.

People who haven't programmed think it's just coding. You just code it up like a Morse Code message. Other people think up the ideas, coders do the coding. Well it doesn't work that way. Not even slightly. 

U2 in Croke Park

posted: July 22, 2017
By: Sherry Lawrence

It was an Irish who’s who at Croke Park tonight as U2 brought The Joshua Tree 2017 tour home to Dublin. Among those spotted were musicians Imelda May and Glen Hansard, tennis star Johanna Konta, footballer Robbie Keane, and Ireland’s President Michael D. Higgins (just to name a few).

A special flyover by the Irish Air Corps accompanying “Where The Streets Have No Name” was a highlight.

There were several trips down memory lane during the night as Bono recalled the band's early days, including when Reggie Manuel brought Bono to Larry’s house in 1976. Bono said he was asked what instrument he could play. Tonight he joked he told Larry the harmonica. “I lied,” he said.

1987.

2017.

U2 in Barcelona

Posted: July 18, 2017
By: Sherry Lawrence of @U2
Tonight's Barcelona show is the half-way point in The Joshua Tree 2017 Tour's European leg: 6 down, 6 to go. The sold-out show at Estadi Olimpic de Montjuic celebrated David Bowie's influence on the band. During the intro to "Bad," Bono said he had visited the Bowie exhibit at The Barcelona Design Museum before coming to the stadium. "David Bowie was a friend of ours. He called us friends, really we were fans. ... We feel him very close," he said. 

Bono said that long-time friend of the band, Reggie "The Dog" Manuel, was at the show. He explained that if it wasn't for him, he wouldn't have gone to Larry's kitchen in September 1976. Reggie not only encouraged Bono to go, but also gave him a lift on his motorcycle. We all have Reggie to thank for that.

-yes, that worked out well all right!

Reg also provides the glasses.

 

Busy to Death?

There’s a famous story about an executive that hired Edward W. Deming to spend a week with his team and offer recommendations on how to improve both their own performance and the performance of the organization they led. Word has it that Deming arrived on the first day, said “Hello,” and then walked straight to the corner of the executive’s office to sit down. He stayed there, sitting silently for the entire day as the executive went about his daily activities.

At the end of the day, the executive approach Deming and asked “Do you have any thoughts?” All Deming said was, “I’ll be back tomorrow,” and he walked out the door.

The next day—just as he had the day before—Deming walked into the executive’s office, sat in the corner, and said nothing. He did scribble a few notes from time to time as the executive went about his daily activities. Again, at the end of the day, the executive asked Deming for his thoughts. Again, Deming simply said, “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

This cycle continued throughout the entire week until Friday evening, when the executive lost patience and pushed Deming for a more informative answer. Deming asked him one question: “What are the top-three priorities for the business?” The executive rolled them off like a shot.

“Well,” said Deming, “you’ve spent the entire week working on none of them, yet your time has been entirely booked, and every conversation with you and every conversation with every individual that walks into your office starts with how busy you are. Can you guess why?”

We all love being busy. 

AWS still best for IaaS

AWS ahead in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for the 7th consecutive year, earning highest placement for ability to execute and furthest for completeness of vision.

• AWS remains the dominant market leader, not only in IaaS, but also in integrated IaaS+PaaS, with an end-of-2016 revenue run rate of more than $14 billion.
• 
  
• Microsoft Azure is second in market share, not only in IaaS, but also in integrated IaaS+PaaS. It has sustained a very high growth rate over multiple years, and Gartner estimates its end-of-2016 revenue run rate as approximately $3 billion. 

Within you and without you

A musicl analysis of Sgt Pepper on BBC last night, after a chance meeting with Steve Engelkind and talking of Arun Gandhi prompted me to listen to Within you and Without you again after more than 30 years. George Harrison was much cleverer than he appeared to be, as illustrated by the songtext below, particularly the last verse.

    

Turn off your mind

Relax and float downstream

It is not dying

It is not dying

We were talking, about the space between us all

And the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion

Never glimpse the truth, then it's far too late

When they pass away

We were talking, about the love we all could share

When we find it, to try our best to hold it there with our love

With our love, we could save the world

If they only knew

Try to realize it's all within yourself

No one else can make you change

And to see you're really only very small

And life flows on within you and without you

Good ideas are rare?

The myth that good ideas are rare is just that!

If you watch any 6 year old child they will invent dozens of things in an hour. 

We are built for creativity. The problem is the conventions of adult life demand conformity and we sacrifice our creative instincts in favour of social status.

Unlike a child, adults are supremely and instantly judgmental, killing ideas before they’ve had even a moment to prove their worth. It’s easy to rediscover creativity, which is why brainstorming rarely helps much. We’re already creative. 

The challenge is ideas don’t come with the courage to invest in them. Good ideas are everywhere: what’s uncommon is people with the conviction to put their reputation behind ideas.

Back in the high life

Wolterdingen after a year's break from competition running, back on the podium again.
Feels good too!
  

Unicorn or horse?

A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until – “My God,” says the second man, “I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn.”

At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are, the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience… 

“Look, look” recites the crowd. “A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.”

-Tom Stoppard.

If I only had words

After nearly sixty years with words, a competence has developed in providing appropriate sentences, and even paragraphs for birthdays, anniversaries and other occasions. Words for public occasions can be provided in an adequate, if not expert manner.

The most difficult words are those needed for personal moments. Walking to work this morning I remembered a heated conversation with Silke in January and then later on the car radio they played an old Madness song, “My girl’s mad at me:”

My girl’s mad at me

Been on the telephone for an hour

We hardly said a word

I tried and tried but I could not be heard

Why can’t I explain?

Why do I feel this pain?

‘Cause everything I say

She doesn’t understand

She doesn’t realise

She takes it all the wrong way.

From 1980. The passage of nearly four decades has not lessened the sense of being inarticulate in important moments, the sense of not having words that properly express the feelings inside. Sometimes, the words serve only to cause pain. Sometimes, the wrong words are used in the wrong way with the wrong results. Sometimes the words just won’t do.

There is a sense of knowing that this is not how it should be; knowing that it could be done better, knowing that it should be done better. Sorry Silke.

Days

Philip Larkin was afraid of death.  However this did not prevent him from creating poems that are full of Beauty and Truth, and which celebrate the wonder and joy of being alive -- in their own Larkinesque way, of course.  Do not believe those who caricature Larkin as a dour, cranky misanthrope.  Anybody who holds this view has not taken the time to actually read Larkin's poems.

            Days
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
-Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings (Faber & Faber 1964).

Larkin being Larkin, the second verse is required.  But consider the first verse. Some may say that the line "They are to be happy in" is intended to be morbid or ironic.  It is not.  Others may say that the entire poem is nothing more than a cliché.  In fact, it is a simple statement of truth.

The modern urge to over-complicate life puzzles me.  "Days are where we live." Look around.  Everything is right there in front of you.

What I am part 2

Back from two weeks holiday in Ireland I realized something this morning, and I don't know why it escaped me for so long, it's one of those things that's just plain obvious, maybe everyone else can see it, but it's about me, so I couldn't.

Here's the thing I realized. No one knows what I do now.

Maybe with one exception, possibly I know what I do. Or perhaps I know what I'm trying to do. What I'm trying to do since 2013 looks more and more hopeless, I guess. Because a big part of what I do involves other people using what I create. There needs to be a lot of them for it to work.

Here's what I think I am.

I am an old software developer, a programmer.

I make software because it pleases me to do that, the way a potter makes pots, or a gardener tends a garden, or a cook prepares meals, or an architect designs buildings. That's it. That's what I do.

It's not my imagination. There's real software out there that I created that companies and people use.

PS: Of course I also blog, but that's part of being a software developer and a human being.

PPS: Don't cry for me Argentina. I have had it pretty good. I share my observations here. This is just one more.

Continuity

“Anything that ever happened to me is happening to other people,” says

Clarence. “Somewhere in the world right now, a kid is looking at something and thinking, ‘I’m going to remember this for the rest of my life.’ And it’s the same thing that I looked at forty years ago, whatever it was.”

If that is true and our lives are being lived over and over by others, I don’t know if I should laugh or cry. If that is true, somewhere a boy sits next to his father in a car, his eyes level with the top of the dashboard, and pulls back slightly on the window handle which lowers the wing flaps and makes the car rise toward the clouds. He tests this principle with his right hand out the window, feeling the lift. He sees that the clouds are following this car; so is the sun. The car is under his power and is the center of the world”.
-Garrison Keillor’s fictional world of Lake Wobegon.

There is a continuity in human experience:  are there not countless children who had such thoughts, or similar ones? Their world is a magical place where reality has not yet crushed the power of imagination, where a car can become an airplane soaring through the sky, and where a little girl can walk through a scene of suspended animation. Anything is possible in the realms of the imagination; the unexpected, the unlikely, the absurd, they are all acceptable.

“It’s the same thing I looked at forty years ago”, says Clarence Bunsen. There is a continuity in childhood experience. All around the world there are children whose imaginations can take them on flights, or on walks up beaches like Tramore Bay.

Ray Bradbury's advice

In his lifetime, Ray Bradbury wrote over 400 short stories and 11 novels — including Fahrenheit 451, his most famous work. Ray wasn’t always a good writer. I took him ten years to write his first good story.

To be successfull Ray tells us to make work our partner:

WORK. It is, above all, the word about which your career will revolve for a lifetime. Beginning now you should become not its slave, which is too mean a term, but its partner. Once you are really a co-sharer of existence with your work, that word will lose its repellent aspects. It won’t be easy, of course. You might get a hundred rejection slips. 

But your failures are not your failures:
So we should not look down on work nor look down on the forty-five out of fifty-two stories written in our first year as failures. To fail is to give up. But you are in the midst of a moving process. Nothing fails then. All goes on. Work is done. 

If good, you learn from it. If bad, you learn even more. Work done and behind you is a lesson to be studied. There is no failure unless one stops. Not to work is to cease, tighten up, become nervous and therefore destructive of the creative process.

Do. Learn. Grow.

Lazy but talented

That's most of us.

You can work really hard to get a little more talented.

And you can also work to get a little less lazy.

It turns out that getting less lazy, more brave—more clear about your fears, your work and your mission—are all easier than getting more talented.

That's why I still envy George Best.

"With feet as sensitive as a pickpocket's hands, his control of the ball under the most violent pressure was astonishing. The bewildering repertoire of feints and swerves... and balance that would have made Isaac Newton decide he might as well have eaten the apple."

— Sports writer Hugh McIlvanney.
In November 2006 for the first anniversary of his death, Ulster Bank issued one million commemorative five pound notes. The notes sold out in five days. The notes sold on the online auction site eBay for up to £30.
I have one, thank you again Peter Geffroy. 

69

and 46 years married today ! Another notch on the milepost of life. The years are passing so quickly that it really is quite scary.

It seems like no time ago since I left full time work, but that was over five years ago. I have been a pensioner now for four years.

How many times have I seen a report in the papers where some old goat was involved in an accident, where his age was given as 70 and my immediate thought was that he was too old to drive anyway?

I’m not 70.  I’m not sure quite what I am, but it’s somewhere in my thirties.  No older than that anyway.

It really is time I decided what I really want to be when I grow up?

Überlebensstrategie für die digitale Transformation

Kleinere Unternehmen haben große Chancen in der digitalen Ära – vorausgesetzt sie gehen sie mit der richtigen Einstellung an. Gewinnen kann aber nur, wer das eigene Geschäft durch die Augen des Kunden betrachtet und versteht, dass hohes Innovationstempo der Schlüssel zu nachhaltigem Wachstum ist. 

Die digitale Ära hat längst begonnen. Unternehmen, die das noch nicht erkannt haben, werden zurückfallen. Wir haben gesehen, dass Startups oder Nischenanbieter in vielen Branchen eine Revolution losgetreten haben. Man braucht sich nur die Unterhaltungs- und die Musikindustrie anzusehen, wo Streaming Services den Produzenten physischer Produkte den Rang abgelaufen haben.

Die Digitalisierung ermöglicht es auch den Kleinsten, groß zu denken, weil sie ihnen Technologien in die Hände legt, die früher zu teuer und schwer zu bekommen waren. Der Einsatz moderner Technologien alleine differenziert jedoch noch nicht. Man muss sie mit der Leidenschaft kombinieren, die Interessen seiner Kunden konsequent in den Fokus zu rücken.

Digitalisierung beginnt mit der richtigen Einstellung – nämlich einer, die darauf abzielt, innovative digitale Erlebnisse zu schaffen. Im Interesse des Kunden kontinuierlich zu experimentieren war das Grundprinzip damals bei Pers-Info, als auch heute bei Insight.

 

Showing vs Telling

All the promises, explanations and asides in the world pale in comparison with what you do. Too often, we forget that jargon and narrative exist to help shape our actions, not to replace them.

Words keep getting cheaper, which makes action more valuable than ever.

Insight Release 1.2.200 Januar 2017.

Happy New Year