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| Volume 6, Issue 5 |
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In This Issue:
 Taming the Alpha Exec
Is your boss a psychopath?
 IT Stats, IT Salaries
Longhorn beta 2 is an impressive package
 Microsoft looks ahead, hoping to avoid others’ mistakes
Wndows, Mac OS to run side-by-side
Gates’, Ballmar’s emails to employees
 Apple’s growing bite of the market
The search for talent in Silicon Valley
Top 10 desktop diversions, 2006
 Peter Drucker on managerial courage
 How I make decisions
 Don’t send an email – Listen!
Want to kill a project? Keep quiet about problems, study finds
10 ways to protect yourself with ‘pragmatic network security’
Finding the right keywords to get your resume noticed
Search strategies: Easy ways to investigate a company’s office culture
 Most common resume lies
The two-hour work-life balance solution
 Microsoft moving desktop into virtualization fold
Exchange 2007 will shake up messaging
 The truth about SOA
Those incredible shrinking servers
 10th annual RoboCup
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Taming the Alpha Exec
Alpha Phyla
Alpha males and females come in four high-achieving flavors,
each with dangerous weaknesses that can overpower its strengths.
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Ambition, self-confidence, even a little bloodlust--all can be part of a great
biz leader. They can also wreak havoc on an organization. Now, for the executive
from hell, help is on the way. His name is George.
He's a vice president at Cleveland's Eaton Corp. And he's a recovering alpha exec.
It took him three years at Eaton to admit that he had a problem. It took another
year for him to commit to doing something about it. Months of professional probing
and coaching later, George T. Nguyen is learning how big a jerk he
has been--autocratically dispensing orders through his administrative assistant,
for example--and how little loyalty he has inspired. That psychic hurdle cleared,
he's starting down the path to becoming a guy you'd actually want to hang out
with--and a more effective executive. Says Nguyen now: "I have to work at this
every day, every week, every month, because it's not a natural tendency for me.
I'm 45 years old. If I don't make the change now, I won't have the incentive
to change." You may be wondering when being an alpha exec became enough to warrant
an intervention. For generations, after all, alpha characteristics have pretty
much been prerequisites for success in American business--and most other endeavors.
Are ambition, self-confidence, and competitiveness really so bad, especially when
there are billions of dollars and thousands of careers at stake? The trouble
is, there's a dark side to those traits we revere in bosses, a side that many
just can't resist...
Read the article. Back to top
Is Your Boss a Psychopath?
Odds are you've run across one of these characters in your career. They're
glib, charming, manipulative, deceitful, ruthless -- and very, very destructive.
And there may be lots of them in America's corner offices.
The Factor 1 psychopathic traits seem like the playbook of many corporate power
brokers through the decades. Manipulative? Louis B. Mayer was said to be a better
actor than any of the stars he employed at MGM, able to turn on the tears at will
to evoke sympathy during salary negotiations with his actors. Callous? Henry Ford
hired thugs to crush union organizers, deployed machine guns at his plants,
and stockpiled tear gas. He cheated on his wife with his teenage personal assistant
and then had the younger woman marry his chauffeur as a cover. Lacking empathy?
Hotel magnate Leona Helmsley shouted profanities at and summarily fired hundreds
of employees allegedly for trivialities, like a maid missing a piece of lint.
Remorseless? Soon after Martin Davis ascended to the top position at Gulf & Western,
a visitor asked why half the offices were empty on the top floor of the
company's Manhattan skyscraper. "Those were my enemies," Davis said. "I got rid
of them." Deceitful? Oil baron Armand Hammer laundered money to pay for
Soviet espionage. Grandiosity? Thy name is Trump...
Read the article. Back to top
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IT stats, IT salaries
Pay is up across the board, but the numbers tell only part of the story.
We dress it up with a fancy title, the InfoWorld 2006 Compensation Survey, and
gussy it up with pages of trend analysis and cross-indexed data. But the bottom
line — the first thing almost all of you are jonesing to know — is whether
you’re making as much as the next guy. So feel free to jump ahead and check
out “Salaries by the Numbers.” Then come back here for some info that the numbers
alone won’t provide...
Read the article. Back to top
Longhorn Beta 2 is an impressive package
Improved server OS offers simplified admin, client security boost for Windows enterprises.
Enterprise IT folks aren't exactly champing at the bit to get Vista into their
shops; many are only now distributing Windows XP Service Pack 2, and there are
plenty of copies of Windows 2000 Professional still around. But Windows Server
2003 and Windows Server 2003 R2 didn’t need to sell their way into most
Windows Enterprise server rooms: They were anticipated and welcomed because
they rounded out Windows Servers’ growing strengths in distributed
applications, Terminal Services, directory services, centralized
administration, collaboration, failure recovery, and networked storage. In
much the same vein, Windows Longhorn Server should be an easy sell in Windows
shops. For one thing, it shares none
of much-delayed Vista’s
very public search
for identity. Now in its second beta release, Longhorn Server rolls in the
innumerable new features one expects in a major release. But Longhorn Server’s
overall emphasis on consolidating and simplifying deployment and administration
and on making key features accessible to developers and admins at scales greater
and smaller than those offered by Windows 2003 Server, stand out as impressive...
Read the article. Back to top
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Microsoft looks ahead, hoping to avoid others' mistakes
Microsoft stands astride the computing world much as another corporate giant,
IBM, once did. Now its task is to avoid repeating IBM's mistakes.
As the PC era wanes and the Internet era gathers force, Microsoft's revenues have
never been higher and its quarterly profits remain in the billions. But it has yet
to find profitability in an array of businesses that it has entered beyond those
it has dominated, operating systems and office applications. Finding the company's
way in the new era will largely fall to the successors to Bill Gates, who announced
on Thursday that he would leave his day-to-day role at Microsoft in two years. But
in an interview on Friday in his office on the Microsoft campus, Mr. Gates said...
Read the article. Back to top
Windows, Mac OS to run side-by-side
Parallels, a start-up whose software enables Macs to run Microsoft Windows and the Mac OS at the same time, says it is ready with a final version of its product.
Apple Computer made headlines back in April when it said it would offer its
own software--Boot Camp--for
loading Windows onto Macs. However, Boot Camp
permits people to run only one operating system at a time, meaning either Windows
or the Mac OS can be in use, but not both at once. Around the same time,
Parallels started testing for its Parallels Desktop program, which uses
virtualization technology to have Windows programs operate alongside Mac
applications. The Windows programs open in a separate window within the Mac OS.
Unlike past software that allowed Windows programs to run on a Mac, Parallels
Desktop does not need to emulate the hardware that's inside a PC. That's because
Macs and PCs now use the same Intel-based chips. As a result, the speed of
Parallels is...
Read the article. Back to top
Gates', Ballmer's e-mails to employees
In e-mails to Microsoft employees, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer shared some of
their thoughts on the leadership changes at the software giant after more than
three decades. The following are excerpts from that e-mail...
Read the article. Back to top
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Apple’s Growing Bite of the Market
Windows PC users cite plenty of reasons for not wanting to own a Mac. One of
the biggest has historically been the inability to run Windows applications—many
of them needed for business—on an Apple computer. But that and other reasons
are becoming less valid, and evidence is mounting that a potentially tectonic
shift in Apple's place in the PC market could be coming in the next few years.
In case you hadn't heard, Apple's (AAPL) Macs can now run Microsoft's (MSFT)
Windows. Also, by the end of the year—with luck, by the end of the summer—all
Macs will be built with microprocessors from Intel (INTC). That, combined with
the runaway success of the iPod music player, augurs a considerably brighter
picture for Mac sales and worldwide market share starting about 2008.
LOTS MORE INTEREST? Charles Wolf of Needham and Co. says Apple could end up
with a global PC market share north of...
Read the article. Back to top
The Search for Talent in Silicon Valley
A year ago, as Highland Capital Partners Vice-President of Marketing Michael
Gaiss prepared the annual newsletter, he put a last-minute call out to the 50
companies who provide job listings.
Within 48 hours, he received 60 listings. The large number of openings was a
wake-up call that the days when startups could cherry-pick from the postboom
glut of talented workers were over. Says Gaiss, "We have flipped a switch here,
and all of a sudden our companies can't fill open positions." Gaiss took
the newsletter's full help-wanted page as a firmwide call to action. To help
companies address the talent scarcity, he proposed Highland CareerNet, a Web-based
tool that hosts job openings. Highland Capital then markets the openings through
deals with job search engines, professional organizations, and even through
small investments in keyword searches via Google's AdWords. Less than a year
after launch, the tool has brought in 2,600 applicants, for an average 180
positions, and led to dozens of placements, saving startups more than $250,000
in recruitment fees. What's more...
Read the article. Back to top
Top Ten Desktop Diversions, 2006
Take a break from the daily grind by scoping out your house in satellite view or sending a friend a monkey message or...
This time last year, we shared with readers a set of 10 amusing or instructive
online diversions, and we've been hearing about it ever since (as copies of our
Top Ten Time-Wasters list get passed from office drone to office drone). So this
year, we've come up with a new list of 10 ways (all free) to take a mental
break -- notice we didn't say goof off -- and recharge your batteries.
Supervisors, take note: Recharging one's batteries is a good thing. In the long
run, it makes employees more productive...
Read the article. Back to top
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Peter Drucker on Managerial Courage
| Each product, operation, and activity should be justified every two or three years, wrote Peter F. Drucker in 1963. But that's a hard step for managers to take. A Harvard Business Review classic. | |
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Unfortunately I know of no procedure or checklist for managerial courage.
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I do not propose to give here a full-blown "science of management economics," if only because I have none to give.
Even less do I intend to present a magic formula, a "checklist" or "procedure"
which will do the job for the manager. For his job is work—very hard,
demanding, risk-taking work. And while there is plenty of laborsaving machinery
around, no one has yet invented a "work-saving" machine, let alone a "think-saving"
one. But I do claim that we know how to organize the job of managing for
economic effectiveness and how to do it with both direction and results. The
answers to the [following] three key questions . . . are known, and have been
known for such a long time that they should not surprise anyone.
1. What is the manager's job? It is to direct the resources and efforts
of the business toward opportunities for economically significant results. This
sounds trite—and it is. But every analysis of actual allocation of resources and
efforts in business that I have ever seen or made showed clearly that the bulk of
time, work, attention, and money first goes to "problems" rather than to
opportunities, and, secondly, to areas where even extraordinarily successful
performance will have minimum impact on results.
2. What is the major problem?...
Read the article. Back to top
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How I make decisions
FORTUNE asked eight bold, creative people - from the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to the man who found Harry Potter, to the woman who picks next year's hip colors - to describe what guides their decision-making. Here is what they said...
Read the article. Back to top
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Don't Send an E-mail -- Listen!
I was mentoring Sam, my IT manager.
He wanted to send a lengthy e-mail to everybody in the organization explaining why
their complaints about spam were unfounded and unfair. I suggested that he instead
ask everyone interested in spam infestation to stay after the next weekly staff
meeting. "Why?" he asked. "I can get the facts out better through an e-mail."
"Yes," I said, "but you can't listen through an email." I explained that
service providers, such as IT, live or die by their ability to listen to their
customers and react as personally as possible to what they hear. He was skeptical
but agreed to participate in the meeting if I would facilitate. Following the
staff meeting, I asked all those who had been having spam problems or were
just interested in the subject to stay for 20 to 30 minutes. Most of the staff
did so. For the first five minutes...
Read the article. Back to top
Want to kill a project? Keep quiet about problems, study finds
Project managers' failure to confront five negative situations yields project failure.
Failing to initiate "crucial conversations" may be the single biggest cause of
project failure, according to preliminary findings of an ongoing study on
project management. The study, being conducted by Vital Smarts Inc., a Provo,
Utah-based training firm, found that project managers' inability to talk to
people about five often-occurring negative situations frequently leads to failure.
The preliminary findings were made public here yesterday at Delivering
Project Excellence, a conference for project managers.According to David
Maxfield, director of research at Vital Smarts, the five situations include
the following...
Read the article. Back to top
10 ways to protect yourself with 'pragmatic network security'
Perimeter security alone won't protect a company's secrets.
In the increasingly federated, network-based IT environment, perimeter security
is important but not sufficient by itself to protect a company's secrets, warns
Mike Rothman, president and principal analyst of Security Incite and former Meta
Group Inc. security analyst. Firewalls, demilitarized zones and similar
boundary security technologies and methodologies certainly are still important
for protecting your network from Internet-based attacks. "The problem with
depending totally on perimeter security is that it is based on the idea that all
enemies are outside, and that is not always a good presumption," Rothman says.
"There is a growing recognition that employees do not always do the right thing,
either through malice or by accident. And as companies increasingly partner to
meet the demands of a fast-evolving, worldwide marketplace, they need to let
employees of partner companies -- which may also be competitors in other
areas -- access specific applications and data inside the corporate firewall.
Based on these realities, Rothman recommends what he calls "pragmatic security,"
which arranges security according to different domains. The first of these
is infrastructure, which focuses on the traditional areas of perimeter and
physical security. The second level is data security, which includes the following...
Read the article. Back to top
Finding the Right Keywords to Get Your Resume Noticed
You've probably heard the advice from a friend, a career counselor, or maybe
you read it online: "Make sure your resume has strong keywords."
In a world where resumes are often scanned by computers hunting for certain words
and phrases, the right keyword could land your resume at the top a recruiter's pile.
But how, exactly, is one to know just which keywords to use? Read on for some tips.
1. Use the job posting to your advantage. The advertisement for the
position you're interested in is an excellent place to find keywords, says Jay Block,
an executive career coach in West Palm Beach, Fla., and co-author of 2500 Keywords
to Get You Hired (McGraw-Hill, 2002). If the ad says candidates need to have
a bachelor's degree, "bachelor's degree" had better show up somewhere in your
resume. Block also recommends that job hunters look at...
Read the article. Back to top
Search Strategies: Easy Ways to Investigate a Company's Office Culture
June 13, 2006 (CareerJournal) -- Beyond using Google, how can you investigate
a company's office culture?
Here's a trove of tips and tricks from people who know how to size up a prospective employer.
Background Check: "Ask the interviewer or the company representative about
her own background, and compare the responses among individuals. Does the company
bring in people from eclectic backgrounds? That says a lot about what you're likely
to find at the firm."
-- Gerry Bollman, director of university recruiting, Booz Allen Hamilton Inc,, Cleveland
Canvas: "Tell the interviewer you'd like to speak with someone in a
different department than the one you're interviewing in -- customer service,
for example, or distribution. Look for common threads."
-- Kim Ratto, recruiter, Birkenstock USA, Novato, Calif.
More strategies...
Read the article. Back to top
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Most Common Resume Lies
From foolish fibs to full-on fraud, lying on your résumé is one of the most common ways that people stretch the truth.
But think twice before you ship off your next half-baked job application. Even
if your moral compass doesn't keep you from deceit, the fact that human resources
is on to the game should.The percentage of people who lie to potential employers
is substantial, says Sunny Bates, CEO of New York-based executive recruitment
firm Sunny Bates Associates. She estimates that 40% of all résumés aren't
altogether aboveboard. And this game of employment Russian roulette is getting
riskier and riskier. Almost 40% of human resources professionals surveyed last year
by the Society for Human Resource Management reported they've increased the amount
of time they spend checking references over the past three years...
Read the article. Back to top
The Two-Hour Work-Life Balance Solution
In my book, Life 2.0, I wrote about professional refugees from the
urban coasts--places such as Manhattan and Silicon Valley, with their
obscenely high costs of living. I wrote about a couple from Silicon Valley,
two engineers working at Cisco Systems.
They traded their 800-square-foot Palo Alto, Calif., condo for two acres and
a 5,200-square-foot farmhouse in Iowa. She had a baby and stopped working. He
kept working, for Cisco, implausibly out there in the Iowa boonies, thanks
to high-speed Internet and teleconferencing. Take this job and ... move it. That
was my message. To the farm, the mountains, the beach--yes, even the beach. One
of my favorite stories in the book was of a couple who moved their high-tech
public relations business from San Francisco to...
Read the article. Back to top
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Microsoft moving desktop into virtualization fold
Softricity buyout key to software management plan.
Microsoft’s virtualization plans for the desktop are getting strong reviews, as
users and analysts alike say that the benefits for IT should be reduced costs
for deploying and managing devices and migrating between versions of software. Microsoft’s plan for the desktop is centered on its pending acquisition of
Softricity, a 7-year-old company with more than 500 customers, including Merrill
Lynch, Prudential Financial and Motorola. The vendor’s SoftGrid software is used
for application virtualization and the support of on-demand delivery of
software, including patches and upgrades. Microsoft will bring SoftGrid’s
capabilities under its Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), which is a plan to
create a management platform for Windows. The company has a three-tiered
virtualization plan that covers servers, applications and system services.
While the server strategy is nearly in full-flight, Microsoft has said nothing
about application virtualization until last month and says it won’t dive into
system service virtualization, which is designed to help hosted platforms, until
after 2007. SoftGrid, which includes a server and a client agent, lets users
package applications into “containers,” store them on a server where they can
be centrally managed and then stream those containers to desktops, devices, shared
PCs while allowing users to open the application before the entire container
is delivered. The applications are delivered as data files stored in a cache and
are not converted to applications until the user clicks on an icon. The
applications are not installed on the operating system but run in the container
using the local PC resource...
Read the article. Back to top
Exchange 2007 will shake up messaging
Corporate users who migrate to Exchange 2007 will face mandatory
infrastructure changes that, while advancing security and management,
could add complexity and costs to their networks.
The major changes beyond the 64-bit-only platform include a new role-based
architecture that has the potential to require users to roll out up to five
types of Exchange servers to support functions such as remote client
access, transport/routing, mailboxes and unified messaging. The current
versions of Exchange give users two deployment options, front-end servers
and back-end servers. Users also will face new clustering limitations and will
have to eliminate all Exchange 5.5 servers from their environments. In addition,
they will not be able to do in-place upgrades between Exchange 2000/2003 and
Exchange 2007. And Exchange no longer will have its own site topology but will
run on top of Active Directory topology. In addition...
Read the article. Back to top
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The Truth About SOA
In which we pour some cold water on the hype and answer your questions about why,
how and when you should (or should not) start thinking about implementing
a service-oriented architecture.
Team-Building and Teamwork. CIOs are chasing a distant dot on the horizon called
agility (the ability to change IT quickly to fit business needs) and the dot
is receding. Fast. A recent survey by the Business Performance Management
Institute found that only 11 percent of executives say they're able to keep up
with business demand to change technology-enabled processes—40 percent of
which, according to the survey, are currently in need of IT attention. Worse,
36 percent report that their company's IT departments are having either
"significant difficulties" (27 percent) or "can't keep up at all"
(9 percent). Service-oriented architecture, or SOA, is the latest in a long
line of highly hyped strategies designed to bring that disappearing dot back
into view. By mirroring in technology important chunks of business processes
("credit check" or "customer record," for example), SOA promises to give
companies a portfolio of services that can be mixed quickly and matched
expeditiously to create automated business processes, thereby reducing
application development time and costs by as much as 50 percent. CIOs, usually
a skeptical crowd, are helping drive these expectations. According to a recent
Forrester Research survey, 46 percent of large-enterprise SOA users (and about
27 percent of SOA users at midsize and smaller enterprises) said they're using
SOA to "achieve strategic business transformation...
Read the article. Back to top
Those Incredible Shrinking Servers
Done well, consolidation and virtualization can cut computing costs while improving performance.
You may be installing virtualization tools so that one server can do the job of
five. You might be using configuration management tools to swap applications from
one machine to another, depending on load. You may simply be looking to retire
old hardware in order to run apps on new, more energy-efficient multicore systems.
But no matter what your strategy, your goals or your tactics, you still have a
problem. How the heck do you even know what's out there to consolidate? In
large, dispersed environments, identifying consolidation opportunities can be
a time-consuming job, requiring the combined efforts of engineers and systems
architects working with everything from asset management tools to network
discovery applications, to performance monitoring utilities, to homegrown
spreadsheets, to big, old-fashioned whiteboards in order to determine what
pieces of your hardware and software infrastructure might be better off someplace
else. But a new segment of products—sometimes called data center intelligence
or consolidation management tools—are...
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10th Annual RoboCup
Aryabhata writes "As soccer fever continues the 10th RoboCup also got to a start.
400 teams fight it out in 11 different leagues including onces designed for humanoid
to four legged robots. "The organizers of the tournament hope that in 2050 the
winners of the RoboCup will be able to beat the human World Cup champions".
Beyond the novelty value, the cup enables 2,500 experts in artificial intelligence
and robot engineering to meet and test their latest ideas. The championships is
followed by a 2 day conference where the teams can dissect their play and work."...
Read the article. Back to top
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