August, 2011

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Leadership and Blame

N2Growth Blog

By Mike Myatt , Chief Strategy Officer, N2growth. In the world of leadership where the traits of accountability and personal responsibility are so highly regarded, I have one question? What’s with all the finger pointing? One of my pet peeves is coming across leaders who think they’re always right, and that any problem or challenge that arises must clearly be the fault of someone else.

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32 Questions Developers May Have Forgot to Ask a Startup Founder

SoCal CTO

Almost every day I'm talking to early stage startup founders (see Free Startup CTO Consulting Sessions ) about what they plan to do. I tend to ask a lot of questions, challenge aspects, make suggestions. But I've often been very surprised by one aspect of these conversations. Many of these founders have talked with several developers or development firms about their plans.

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10 Sticky Note Reminders For The Busy Leader (Plus One from the Heart)

Terry Starbucker

For many leaders out there (myself included), sometimes there just aren’t enough hours in a day. Work piles up, deadlines loom, milestones are passing, folks are tugging at you from all different directions- and guess what suffers. Our leadership. Unless we give ourselves enough time to climb back up to 10,000 feet from ground level, all those things we’ve learned about great leadership can get pushed into the recesses of our conscious mind, and thus, we become very task orientated,

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Radio Show: Lessons Learned From A Change Derailed

Change Starts Here

An experienced change leader, Supriya Desai landed an exciting new ‘dream’ job – implementing change across a global function undergoing major transformation – only to be gone less than 6 months later. Listen to hear her story – plus the warning signs and lessons she learned so you can benefit from her experience. Listen to the show here (30 minutes): Be sure to visit the radio show page to listen to past episodes and subscribe to the show.

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Peak Performance: Continuous Testing & Evaluation of LLM-Based Applications

Speaker: Aarushi Kansal, AI Leader & Author and Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO at Aggregage

Software leaders who are building applications based on Large Language Models (LLMs) often find it a challenge to achieve reliability. It’s no surprise given the non-deterministic nature of LLMs. To effectively create reliable LLM-based (often with RAG) applications, extensive testing and evaluation processes are crucial. This often ends up involving meticulous adjustments to prompts.

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Five Signs That Your HR Chief is Trouble

Next Level Blog

With a shout out to the folks at SmartBrief on Leadership for pointing it out, I recommend to you a deeply reported article in Fortune magazine about how and why Pfizer CEO Jeff Kindler was pushed. Please click the headline to read the whole story.

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Leadership & Perception

N2Growth Blog

By Mike Myatt , Chief Strategy Officer, N2growth. Does perception matter? We’ve all heard the saying “perception is reality,” but is it true? Does perception never, rarely, sometimes, or always equal reality? While I long ago reached the conclusion that perception does in fact matter, it may not be for the reasons that you might think. I have found that the majority of people tend to be myopic with regard to perception…they understand their own perceptions, but are quite often either ignorant o

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32 Questions Developers May Have Forgot to Ask a Startup Founder

SoCal CTO

Almost every day I'm talking to early stage startup founders (see Free Startup CTO Consulting Sessions ) about what they plan to do. I tend to ask a lot of questions, challenge aspects, make suggestions. But I've often been very surprised by one aspect of these conversations. Many of these founders have talked with several developers or development firms about their plans.

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Why You Should Treat A Business Problem Like Horse Manure

Terry Starbucker

My first real “boss&# was a cantankerous 75-year old man who happened to be worth many hundreds of millions of dollars, all earned from a starting base of zero. In other words, they guy knew how to make a business successful. And yet, of all the lessons he gave me, it was a simple little story he used to tell me about every month or so that has left the biggest mark on me.

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Behind the Mask of Resistance

Change Starts Here

Anyone who has implemented change in an organization has encountered it: the feeling that you are dragging a heavy weight, or pushing a boulder uphill, or swimming upstream, or banging your head against the wall. The label we put on the sense of being slowed down or stuck is resistance. Taking the resistance label at face value causes us to blame others for not immediately changing, and gives the impression that there are people in the organization who are either rising up or using subversive m

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Top 5 Challenges in Designing a Data Warehouse for Multi-Tenant Analytics

Multi-tenant architecture allows software vendors to realize tremendous efficiencies by maintaining a single application stack instead of separate database instances while meeting data privacy needs. When you use a data warehouse to power your multi-tenant analytics, the proper approach is vital. Multi-tenant analytics is NOT the primary use case with traditional data warehouses, causing data security challenges.

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What I Learned on a Coast Guard Cutter

Next Level Blog

For the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity each Fall to talk leadership with the newly promoted admirals of the U.S. Coast Guard and their Senior Executive Service counterparts from the. Please click the headline to read the whole story.

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One Way to Head Off a Conflict: Manage Expectations

The Recovering Engineer

A little over a week ago, my wife and I drove my daughter from Indiana to Texas to begin her freshman year of college. On the return trip, we drove through Oklahoma. As is common this time of year, we encountered road construction marked with a sign similar to the one above, and I felt frustrated as I thought about the coming delay. We then saw another sign with additional information.

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Greatness & Tragedy

N2Growth Blog

By Mike Myat t , Chief Strategy Officer, N2growth. Few things highlight great acts of selflessness and heroism more than tragedy. This weekend’s helicopter crash in Afghanistan was a horrific loss for the families of our fallen warriors, but also for our nation as a whole. The men who perished in the crash were in fact our nation’s best.

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Wearing Yoga Pants to Business Meetings (and Other Style Tips for Women)

Women on Business

Guest Post by Natalie Peace. Personal style and business savvy: it can be tough to walk the line between both. If your own style is bold, flashy and unique, the last thing you want to do is break out the grey polyester 2-piece skirt suit and sensible low-heeled pumps. Unfortunately, this is exactly what many women do, advised by people who say you need to dress like a female version of a bland male executive, if you want to succeed in the business world.

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7 Pitfalls for Apache Cassandra in Production

Apache Cassandra is an open-source distributed database that boasts an architecture that delivers high scalability, near 100% availability, and powerful read-and-write performance required for many data-heavy use cases. However, many developers and administrators who are new to this NoSQL database often encounter several challenges that can impact its performance.

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My Interview With Yoda, Social Media Guru and Jedi Warrior

Terry Starbucker

Somewhere, in a galaxy far, far away, I had a rare chance to chat with Yoda, who, it can now be revealed, has been one of my favorite Social Media mentors. It’s a little known fact that in addition to his important duties as a Jedi Master, Yoda has been behind the scenes training many of us in the ways of Social Media. It’s a treat to be able to share with you just a little of his wisdom here.

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How to respond to questions when you can’t provide the answer

Change Starts Here

Last week, I hosted a Q&A session in which participants could ask any question they wanted about change and together we would come up with options for solutions. One of the attendees, a manager for a large retail chain, is in the loop when it comes to changes coming down the pike, but has not been given the go ahead to provide the details. Employees know that changes are coming and are asking questions.

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Connecting Agile Business with Social Business

Dion Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 Blog

When Jim Highsmith graciously invited me to give the opening keynote at the inaugural Agile Executive Forum in Salt Lake City this week, I had to really sit down and think about what I’ve been working on the last few years, namely social business , as compared the conference theme, agility and business. While agile methods have had many separate and distinct threads within the business and technical worlds over the last 20 years, one of the most active areas has been in software developmen

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Three Signs It’s Time to Shut Up

Next Level Blog

If you’re a sports fan (guilty as charged), you’ve likely heard by now about golf caddie Stevie Williams’ interview after his new boss, Adam Scott, won the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational last weekend. Please click the headline to read the whole story.

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Entity Resolution Checklist: What to Consider When Evaluating Options

Are you trying to decide which entity resolution capabilities you need? It can be confusing to determine which features are most important for your project. And sometimes key features are overlooked. Get the Entity Resolution Evaluation Checklist to make sure you’ve thought of everything to make your project a success! The list was created by Senzing’s team of leading entity resolution experts, based on their real-world experience.

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10 Steps to Creating a Talent Advantage

N2Growth Blog

By Mike Myatt , Chief Strategy Officer, N2growth. Creating a talent advantage begins with smart hiring. That said, it never ceases to amaze me at the number of people who are charged with hiring who possess absolutely no skill at doing so. While I rarely meet a CEO who is completely comfortable with turning the hiring process over to HR, most of them still seem to acquiesce and do exactly that…&# Who should do the hiring?

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IT Overinvesting – Is it Better to be Safe than Sorry?

Women on Business

While I haven’t read the book, an article on Reuters suggests that the book Aligning Technology with Strategy by Harvard Business Review advises companies evaluate their IT costs to prevent overinvesting. Specifically, companies should: “Spend less. Evaluate expected returns from IT investments. What’s essential spending versus discretionary or unnecessary?

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So What Makes You Think You Can Be A Leader?

Terry Starbucker

I was 27 when I got a call from an executive search company about a job in Los Angeles. “Would you be interested in the chief operating job for a cable company with 400,000 customers?&#. Huh? I was an Audit Manager at a public accounting firm. I managed several jobs, and oversaw 5-10 staff accountants, but that was the extent of my leadership experience.

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Five ways change is seen as a threat

Change Starts Here

This past weekend, I chaired a meeting of Organization Change Alliance, a local group of change practitioners which hosts presentations every month in Atlanta. The speaker was Jackie Sherman, and the topic was “Working With the Brain in Mind.&# (I also interviewed Jackie on The Change Agent’s Dilemma last year.). One of the key takeaways was that our brains are wired to process threats automatically.

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The Big Payoff of Application Analytics

Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business. That’s what drove the five companies in this e-book to change their approach to analytics. Download this e-book to learn about the unique problems each company faced and how they achieved huge returns beyond expectation by embedding analytics into applications.

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The Love Practicum

Steve Farber

UBM TechWeb CEO, Tony Uphoff , has a must-read blog called Uphoff On Media: Dispatches from the front lines of Media, Marketing, and Technology. I’m an on-going contributor to his site, and this post first appeared over there: The idea that love is “just damn good business” (as I suggested in my previous post ) is equally easy to embrace or dismiss, depending on your personal bias or point of view.

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Three Things The Coast Guard Does to Prepare for Emergencies

Next Level Blog

The turmoil and damage caused in the Northeast last weekend by Hurricane Irene is just the latest reminder of how much we rely on first responders like the U.S. Coast Guard in times of emergencies. Please click the headline to read the whole story.

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10 Steps to Productive Meetings

N2Growth Blog

By Mike Myatt , Chief Strategy Officer, N2growth. If you’ve ever watched an episode of NBC’s “The Office” you know exactly what unproductive meetings look like. The tragic news is many real world meetings too closely resemble a fictional Michael Scott get together. Stories of “death by meeting&# are a well represented part of corporate folklore for good reason – unplanned, unnecessary, uninspired, or otherwise unproductive meetings are a colossal waste of time and resources.

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You Are What You Say You Are….

Women on Business

Leadership is an elusive quality and few people ever really get it, but as the figurehead of a company you are supposed to know what it means to be a leader and a motivator even if it wasn’t taught to you. In my industry I see a lot of individuals who were really good at their chosen profession and that skill got them thrust into the management arena.

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Revolutionizing Contact Centers: Next-Gen Tech for Enhanced CX

Speaker: Liran Meir Frenkel, Performance Management and RPA Sr Product Marketing Manager at NICE; Harpreet Makan, Practice Director at Everest Group; & Santhosh Kumar, Practice Director at Everest Group

As contact centers navigate the challenges of delivering excellence within budget constraints and adapting to evolving employee expectations, optimizing agent tasks becomes crucial. Discover a holistic approach across three pillars - people, process, and technology - that is essential to excel in this dynamic landscape, and explore how next-gen technologies such as generative AI, performance analytics, and process intelligence play a pivotal role in transforming contact centers into advanced CX

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The 4 Keys To Creating The Beautiful Music Of Great Leadership

Terry Starbucker

Before you start reading this post, I’d like you to listen to one of your favorite uplifting songs, one that, in your estimation, was a great marriage of lyric, melody, tone, and rhythm. (Go ahead, I’ll wait… ). Let’s think about what you just heard for a second or two – how did it make you feel uplifted? Were you, like I do so often, mouthing or singing the words out loud, especially the chorus?

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Feeling stuck? Wondering what to do? Just ask!

Change Starts Here

Facing challenges as you implement change in your organization? Feeling a little bit stuck? Sometimes all it takes is a new insight that you didn’t see before. Or one more thing to try. Or even a little reassurance that what you think you should do really will work. Join me for an Open Q&A Session on Tuesday, August 23 at 1:00 p.m. Eastern and get an outside perspective and fresh ideas to move your change initiative forward.

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Enduring success

Lead on Purpose

One of the key traits of great leaders is their ability to move forward despite the difficulties they face. They not only find ways for their own progress, but also find ways to help others along the way. Enduring success happens over time, bit by bit, day by day. The true definition of success is duration. Finding the will and the inner strength to keep going is crucial to progress.