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Welcome to the Foresight Newsletter, a free monthly publication of Prevoyance Group Inc. This newsletter shares tips for high performance IT organizations and observations that we hope will prove informative and enjoyable.
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Contents
CONTENTS
Foresight is published by the Prevoyance Group, and this month contains four sections:
Work
Life
Heard in the Hallways
Travels with Patrick
Work
I have been reading some of the works of the famous business guru Peter Drucker lately, and one of his conclusions greatly impressed me. Ever a visionary, in the late 1960’s Drucker contended that management was becoming obsessed with facts, and despite popular belief, fact-based decision making was not the key to corporate effectiveness. To paraphrase, Drucker noted that facts were historical in nature. To become a fact, an event must be completed, documented and proven. Fact-based decision making was reactionary, steering the ship based on yesterday’s maps.
Rather than facts, trends should be the source of executive decision making. Companies that have spotted trends, and reacted before those trends entered the realm of the factual have blown away the competition. The iconic iPod has faced a slew of challengers, yet none have been able to challenge its dominance. Apple reacted to a trend, its competitors based their products on the facts left in the wake of the iPod’s success.
Extensive databases and data gathering activities have not assuaged this trend. Many of us become buried under reams of reports and data, searching for that one key fact to support a decision, while trends are forming and being shaped by others. A surfeit of data does little to help fact-based decision making. Rather than searching for the fact, strive to find the trends that will shape the future, and base your decision making on those trends rather than the historical record presented by facts.
Life
As I write this, the Eliot Spitzer case in the US has recently broken. For those unfamiliar with the story, Spitzer was the Attorney General of New York State, essentially the State’s highest prosecutor. He made a name for himself as a crusader against Wall Street excess, launching investigations against alleged infringements of corporate executives, and claiming himself as the champion of the “little guy.” He eventually built a successful gubernatorial campaign that presented him as the knight in shining armor in the fight against right and wrong.
Unfortunately, the notion of the unassailable good guy rarely works beyond comic books and action movies, and the more one builds an image of moral invincibility, the harder one falls when a chink in the moral armor is exposed. Spitzer’s involvement in a prostitution ring was discovered, and while criminal charges are unlikely, there was nearly universal celebration on Wall Street that the unassailable morals of Mr. Spitzer, the entire foundation of his political career, has come crashing down in spectacular fashion.
While the gloating and celebration by many of his former targets is classless and unfounded, there is an important lesson. Many of us are naturally aware that there are no absolutes, yet we build our careers or persona around absolutes anyway. Presenting yourself as the world’s foremost expert invites others to attempt a duel of expertise, and dance on your proverbial grave should you fail or falter. Defining yourself in absolute terms in a few areas also limits your appeal, turning you from a complex human being into a comic book character. In Mr. Spitzer’s case, building his political persona around moral absolutes turned a scandal that likely would have blown over with another politician into a career-ending disaster.
Heard in the Hallways
In one more note for the “conversation is a lost art” file, I recently spoke with a colleague who told me about a new system for creating text messages. Text messages or SMS are the short missives that inspired a new derivative of the English language, as teens and slow typists spouted profundities like “OMG Q4U N00B” rather than making a voice call.
This “innovation” would allow you to dial a machine somewhere, speak a sentence or two and then provide the recipient’s phone number. The machine would then use speech recognition to turn your voice into a text message and fire it at the recipient, allowing you to converse with a machine rather than the person you supposedly wish to communicate with.
I am truly hopeful that this process will be taken to the next logical step in the coming years, and I look forward to the day when I can speak with a machine, that translates my message to text, which is forwarded to another machine, that calls the recipient and reads my missive in a delightfully bland, robotic voice. The day that happens, I am packing my bags for a deserted island and telling the world C U L8R!
Travels with Patrick
Earlier this month we were supposed to attend a convention for my wife’s school network. The convention was scheduled to be held at a the “Embassy Suites Outdoor World,” a hotel connected to one of the world’s largest outdoor supply stores. Why a bunch of young fun-loving teachers decided to hold their convention next to a hunting and fishing supply store I am not entirely sure. For once, I was going to play the role of "tag along spouse," and set to planning the weekend in earnest.
Excited to have a day to myself in Dallas, I arranged meetings with current and future clients and visits to favorite restaurants. Living up to the old saying about the best laid plans, ours began to unravel once we heard it was snowing in Dallas. Our departing flight from Charlotte was several hours late, pushing our slated 7PM arrival in Dallas to an actual 9PM; not too bad for a snowed-in airport that was not used to dealing with the white stuff.
After a few false starts, we located the Embassy Suites where we were promptly told there was no room at the inn, and we were being sent to the "Great Wolf Lodge." I have a policy about never staying at a chain with "Inn" in the name, but Lodges were uncharted territory. We rolled into the drive and were greeted with a strange combination of casino-like theme, and a gigantic greenhouse-looking structure. With a bit more investigation, I discovered the greenhouse was actually an indoor water park!
We walked to our room in a state of general confusion, especially once Meghan presented me with my room key. Rather than the traditional key card, the room key was a yellow wristband, much like one you would get at a nightclub. The plot thickened when we saw "Kids Club" bodily noted on the door to our room. The "Kids Club" feature ended up consisting of a large log cabin-like structure in the middle of the room, with three bunk beds and appropriately tacky wolf and bear decor. Our window overlooked the outdoor portion of the water park, now accented with snow.
While trying to find a listing for an open restaurant, we found a listing of magic shows and other activities targeted a bit outside our demographic. Doing a quick email check before adjourning for the night, I discovered both my appointments were cancelled, one due to a viral infection and one due to the snow. I bid adieu to the carved bear that decorated our room and contemplated the joys of travel as I drifted off to sleep in my log cabin.