SuccessfulWorkplace

At the weekend we visited Bletchley Park, home of the famous World War II cryptanalysts. This group intercepted Morse Code radio transmissions between the German High Command and their air force, troops and ships. The German transmissions were encoded by Enigma machines, electro-mechanical devices that transposed one letter to another. Type in ‘Q” and you […]

Companies can reduce risk and allow organizational learning by breaking major process improvements into a series of small, reversible experiments. But when the change involves a new information technology, it’s harder to make incremental updates. This approach reduces risks and allows people to learn from each, and make adjustments as they go. But when the […]

Don’t do it. Don’t approve that budget for $1.5 million for that 18-month effort. Don’t book the meeting to start the functional requirements. Don’t start the data dictionary. Just stop. Catch your break and think. Everything has changed just in the past two years. Bespoke (‘custom’, for the non-English) application development is so 2009 unless you […]

My Navy career involved flying over many parts of the world. In those long hours without much else to do I occupied my mind looking for the patterns of houses, roads, farms and nature. Still today I watch out the aircraft window and try to make sense of the patterns that I see from miles […]

Organizational speed is ever more important, as I wrote last week in Making your organization faster. As things happen faster, the organization needs to change more quickly. And size matters. One of my favorite quotes on change came from a very senior leader at UPS, “There is one of me and thousands of them.” We’ve […]

Informatica’s (INFA) stock took a serious nose dive, falling nearly 28% last Friday as the company warned that they would have revenues well below expectations. This doesn’t come as a surprise. The market for traditional databases and their associated applications should be expected to drop in the age of the Internet, Big Data, Cloud and […]