What management values

This is a pointer to an article on my sun/oracle blog, originally called Geeks & Suits. A you can see, I have changed the title. I made a video with the Sun’s EMEA head of pre-sales together with a Chris Gerhard. I used my and Chris’s dress code as an excuse to segue onto the dichotomy of style, knowledge and power in modern business. The original article is not well written. I was able to quote a recent poll in Management Today and reviews of Nick Carr’s “IT doesn’t matter”, both suggesting that the tradition that management values …. itself has and will continue. This means that in a modern knowledge based business they will under value the geeks, those with the knowledge. …

Once a ravine, now a ditch

I also discovered that Enron experimented with trading in weather and I’m not sure what they did, but its reminiscent of some ideas expressed in James Surowiecki’s “Wisdom of Crowds” where he explored the remarkable prescience of the University of Iowa’s Electronic Markets for the prediction of political events, most obviously elections but also other political futures. I read somewhere, during the last general election, that the most effective forecast for the result was the bookmaker’s odds, this must be very disappointing to the polling organisations, but it seems a financial interest sharpens the mind.  …

Enron: The smartest guys in the room

I returned to California again and while scrabbling to find a film I hadn’t seen, watched this documentary about the fall of Enron. (I’ve not seen it reviewed in Empire either, but that’s my fault; they gave it 5 stars. ) Well made, very informative, mixing interview with recorded material from both Enron’s corporate archives and the congressional investigating committees. The failings summed up by the ex-trader who states, the Enron tag line was “ask why?”, …

Evangelising Opensource in Edinburgh

I was stood in for Simon Phipps at www2006 in Edinburgh, and paid Edinburgh a visit. I wrote up my notes on my sun/oracle blog. AS with other posts originally made there, I copied them to this blog in March 2016, but in this case, I have merged them into a single post.  I The conference was opened by John McConnel, Scotland’s first minister who spoke of a Scotland’s e-University, and was followed by Sir David Browne, (Chairman of Motorola) who told an interesting story about mobility and the network, from movable devices, via luggable laptops to today’s phones, although the fashion for Zoolander style tiny phones was probably on the wane by then. His story provoked the though that the critical technology for mobile computing was the development of the portable (and rechargable) battery. …

About ITV

I have been catching up on my reading over the last few days and was browsing the March copy of Management Today, in which Chris Allen, the CEO of ITV was interviewed. In the interview he boasted that ITV2 is now the most watched digital channel in the UK, eclipsing Sky One. Its an illustration that something other than channel is important. …

McKinsey on strategy, services and product

On my sun/oracle blog I wrote a note/précis of an issue of the McKinsey Quarterly. The keynote article, “Distortions & deceptions in strategic decisions” looks at the flawed human values often inserted into major business decisions. They quote a major acquisition decision taken by a dominant player and suggest that the major advocate of the merger wanted it for personal political gain. They look at ways in which these human factors can be brought into the open and evaluated in the decision making process. Despite identifying over-optimism as a frequent occurrence once a proposal has been made, the decision not to proceed is often taken in private and so collaborative decision making cannot neutralise these human shortcomings. One suggestion is to ask the proposer, what their next best proposal is. …