Coté's Commonplace Book - Issue #39
I’ve been in Berlin at a quarterly sales meeting this week. It’s a big room of people, new and veterans. Traveling from Amsterdam to Berlin is just an hour, the old you spend longer in the airports than the actual flight thing. It proves out the whole reason for moving here though: business traveling in Europe is much easier if you’re in Europe. It’s even much easier than traveling around the US.
Berlin, 24 August 2018.
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A bunch of people who're doing software better
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Hey, we’ve got our big conference coming up in September. I draw a huge amount of my work from the customer talks at these events: they’re amazing detailed, more than I’ve ever encountered at a software vendor conference…or any conference, really. There’s videos you can see afterwards (see 2017’s and 2016’s), but being there is of course much better for all the hallway talk. Plus, it’s in Maryland, so I’m pretty sure there’ll be lots of crabs. If you end up coming, email me up and we’ll go have some.
I’ve got a discount code, $200 off, you can use: S1P200_Cote. Check out the sessions, and if you’re interested use the code S1P200_Cote when you sign-up. Hopefully, I’ll see you there.
Original programming
If a strategy is presented in the boardroom but employees never see, is it really a strategy? Another excerpt from making better software work, here, on figuring out “strategy and vision,” then communicating it to people. With a couple tiny examples.
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Computer maths
Targeted at design, but fits for any BigCo meeting. Another fine write-up of how we’d like meetings to go, which is exactly the way they never go.
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Some examples of whiz-bang computers changing how insurance is done: Fast, easy interactions are key for customers who have become accustomed to the ease of use and personalization of e-commerce. For example, Mr. Wilson says he won’t buy from a website that doesn’t make it easy to see as many reviews as he can on a product, and to quickly order and check the status of orders, he said. He’s “pleasantly surprised” when a company knows enough about his past purchase behavior to suggest a product or service he might like, he said…. The ability to automate mundane processes for employees through artificial intelligence so that they can spend time working on more complex problems is one area of interest, he says. Artificial intelligence and automation could help make the claims process quicker for customers and take out much of the routine work for its more than 10,000 claims employees, said Rehan Ashroff, director of innovation lab and new ventures at Farmers, in a previous interview.
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https://twitter.com/cote/status/1032147703772401664
This piece is, more or less, saying that “digital transforming” in government means doing more with the data you have. This makes sense, for sure. Most government that citizens encounter is basic case management (getting a new ID, filing for a zoning exception, etc.) or looking things up (data)…I think.
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https://twitter.com/cote/status/1032497545929531392
More than 70% of employees surveyed in tech do not trust HR, according to a new Blind survey. Only 26% of respondents said they do trust HR, and another 4% said their companies have no HR department. The survey, which Blind conducted through its mobile app, collected responses from more than 11,000 users…. In a previous poll, Blind found that 42% of users wouldn’t feel comfortable reporting cases of sexual harassment to HR, and 41% have witnessed or experienced retaliation.
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A brief description of Pivotal Labs work to improve customer’s agile capabilities.
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Knative is using the market momentum behind Kubernetes to provide an established platform on which to support serverless deployments that can run across different public clouds.
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i know where you can get one of those … https://t.co/Jg3NRYz0tE
— rita (@ritam) August 22, 2018
Trade is a delightfully complex, yet perfectly quotidian system: Ms Murphy’s own firm is a perfect example. It operates four refrigerated trucks that bring Irish meat to Italy and return with fresh herbs. “From the time the herbs come out of the ground to the supermarket shelf in Ireland it takes about five days, and you are then left with a shelf-life of three to five days,” she says. Making the trip longer reduces the shelf life. Beyond a certain point, it could render the whole enterprise unprofitable.
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Bare Metal nerd-fight. I don’t really know “bare metal,” but every year or two, the cloud nerds love debating about it. VMware’s Kendrick Coleman wrote something, and Pivotal’s Chad Sakac. I have Chad schedule for Pivotal Conversations. STAY TUNED!
AWS Lambda was too expensive for them.
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Reading
I’ve been thinking about the rhetorical tactics used in Stopping the Noise in Your Head. Much of the advice is embrace the thing you’re anxious about - flying, public speaking, whatever. There’re some good thought-technologies to do that: frame things as “signal” (something is happening, do what you will with it) versus “noise” (something is happening and it’s consuming all of your attention). And the metaphor of anxiety making you “run away” from things, getting out of the situation however you can. The mind-shaming that goes on there is that you’re letting anxiety be more powerful than you and take you over. Kind of a bravado approach to getting to mindfulness.
But, thus far, the book doesn’t address what to do when things actually do go wrong. How to recover. It’s one thing to not be owned by your anxiety, and it’s another to genuinely make a fool of yourself and ruin something, even just small moments. Adding these two things together, the book is basically saying, “hey, here’s how you stop being anxious. Are you ready for it? I’m about to tell you. Get out your pencils. OK. Here’s the trick. That trick being how to not be anxious. OK. Ready? Stop being anxious.”
A lot of self-help books (business and IRL) are really just telling you to just be better, but provide very little on how. There’s plenty that are just powerful nudges (Leading Change), some models that you can use to figure out what to actually do (Crossing the Chasm and The Innovator’s Dilemma), and, some actual tactics and life-plans to put into place (How to Measure Anything, paleo diet books). The first two are nice, and most common. So, of course, the third is all too rare.
But, there’s a whole other half of the book.
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A couple times a year I go back to the The Fun of It to read some 1920’s triviality. The style of these New Yorker “About Town” pieces is unique, and oddly comforting: the way they just end all of the sudden is amazing.
I read a tiny, 1934 James Thurber piece on Gertrude Stein. He covers a book signing, what some people say to Stein and her replies. Then, all of the sudden, the piece just ends with this: “This is probably all we’re going to tell you about Miss Stein.”
I’m not one much for “tight writing,” but the columns in this book - and that one particular - are master-pieces of the genre.
Out and about
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Somewhere in Schiphol. |
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Look! I'm working - even with sticky notes. |
And, finally...
