October, 2012

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No Excuses = Real Leadership

N2Growth Blog

By Mike Myatt , Chief Strategy Officer, N2growth . Leaders don’t offer, nor do they accept excuses. True leadership demands the character to demonstrate personal responsibility for one’s actions, and the courage to hold others accountable for theirs. Excuses attempt to conceal personal or professional insecurities, laziness, and/or lack of ability.

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Bring It: 7 Keys To A Great 3 Minute Startup Pitch

Terry Starbucker

For the last 10 months I’ve been an investor in the Oregon Angel Fund (OAF). We invest in startups and early-stage growth companies in the Pacific Northwest, and as you can imagine, we hear a lot of pitches. Because there are many interested companies and applicants, and only a small number of actual annual investments (just a handful), that first 3 minute summation of “ why you should invest in us ” is absolutely critical.

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Get Real: Take Your Developmental Conversations to the Next Level

Let's Grow Leaders

For a variety of reasons, many manager/employee relationships stay formal, cordial, and don’t realize their full potential. The conversation stays focused on the work at hand, and hopefully there is some discussion of strengths and development needs, along with a plan to improve on them. There is often real reluctance to go deeper. Why? Choices, [.

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Ten Ways Change Gets Stuck

Change Starts Here

Note: This article is a summary of the points covered in the Enclaria teleclass by the same name. To listen to the teleclass recording, click here. The path to implementing change in an organization isn’t always smooth. On the way, you run into frequent speed bumps, wrong way signs, and even concrete barriers. These road hazards on the way to change act as obstacles that prevent you from moving forward.

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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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Luigi: complex pipelines of tasks in Python

Erik Bernhardsson

I’m shamelessly promoting my first major open source project. Luigi is a Python module that helps you build complex pipelines of batch jobs, handle dependency resolution, and create visualizations to help manage multiple workflows. It also comes with Hadoop support built in (because that’s where really where its strength becomes clear). We use Luigi internally at Spotify to run thousands of tasks every day, organized in complex dependency graphs.

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Qualities of a Good Business Leader

Lead on Purpose

Guest post by William Lewis. A sound education in business is just one component of being a good leader; to truly take your company to the next level, you must also possess certain qualities that come from within. Think about some of the business leaders you admire – maybe it’s someone famous who has changed the world with their product or service; maybe it’s your own father or mother, someone you’ve grown up with in close proximity and had years to study.

Education 107
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The Truth About “If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Manage It”

Terry Starbucker

“How did you KNOW it was a success?” I asked that question several times last week in a forum that I participated in with a group of business people. We were trading best practices about process and training initiatives that had been considered “successful” I have a problem with using that kind of word without some facts to back it up.

Coaching 125
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A Question of Intimidation: Questions that Shut People Down

Let's Grow Leaders

Questions are powerful. They can motivate, and inspire deeper thinking. Great questions empower. Questions can also intimidate, frustrate and shut down people down. The most dangerous are those where the leader already ”knows” the answer… and is looking to see if the person will “get it right.” Closed ended questions can have a similar impact, [.

Coaching 143
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You Have to Speak for the Work

Next Level Blog

Lots of us grew up believing in the idea that if you just do good work, the work will speak for itself. That’s one of those beliefs that’s true until it isn’t. When it isn’t is that when so much is going on that top management probably won’t notice good work unless you speak for it. The more senior top management is, the more likely this is to be true They simply have too many things to pay attention to to recognize or acknowledge all the things that are going right.

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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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Luigi: complex pipelines of tasks in Python

Erik Bernhardsson

I’m shamelessly promoting my first major open source project. Luigi is a Python module that helps you build complex pipelines of batch jobs, handle dependency resolution, and create visualizations to help manage multiple workflows. It also comes with Hadoop support built in (because that’s where really where its strength becomes clear). We use Luigi internally at Spotify to run thousands of tasks every day, organized in complex dependency graphs.

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50 Inspiring Startup Quotes from Successful Entrepreneurs Includes Women

Women on Business

NEWS AND INSIGHTS UPDATE: A number of women entrepreneurs are included in the list of 50 of the most inspiring startup quotes from successful entrepreneurs that was published on Lifed.com. However, all of the quotes are worth reading. Some of the quotes from business women are: “Having a partner definitely allows you to take more risks.” - Arianna Huffington, Co-founder, The Huffington Post. “Don’t limit yourself.

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Interview: How to Get Things Done When You’re Not in Charge

Change Starts Here

This month on The Change Agent’s Dilemma, my guest is Nan Russell, author of The Titleless Leader: How to Get Things Done When You’re Not in Charge. Nan shares how to lead without a title, and provides tips for how to get results when you’re not the one in charge. Listen in to hear how to get started if you want to make a difference but don’t seem to be in a position to do so.

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The Tie That Binds: Why Leaders Need a Proxy For Profit

Terry Starbucker

In just about every business situation that involves more than a handful of people, there’s always going to be one big disconnect. In one corner, there are the business owners and executives. They are focused primarily on one goal: profit. In the other corner are the rank and file employees who enable that profit through their work. The disconnect is this – those employees are not focused on the profit of the business.

Metrics 102
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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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The 3 Gifts: Grateful for Growing

Let's Grow Leaders

They say “feedback is a gift,” but much of the time it does not feel that way. So, what was different this time? It was a cool, crisp night. The warmth of the make-shift spotlight was both frightening and friendly as I stood ready to give my final speech at the SCORRE conference. Frightening because [.] The post The 3 Gifts: Grateful for Growing appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

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Five Things Leaders Can Learn from Mayor Bloomberg About Crisis Communications

Next Level Blog

While the impact of Hurricane Sandy in the U.S. spread far and wide, the New York/New Jersey area definitely took the worst hit. The scenes of flooding, fires and dangling construction cranes on Monday night and Tuesday morning were truly stunning. In the run-up to the storm, a friend of mine wrote that we were likely to see lots of. Click headline to continue.

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Leadership and Teamwork

Lead on Purpose

Sports metaphors are everywhere in the workplace, but there’s no denying that the leadership and teamwork skills found in the sports setting teach important lessons. One approach to coaching that is rapidly gaining popularity is what is known as the Double-Goal Coaching Philosophy : emphasis is placed not only on winning, but also on team members’ learning and self-improvement.

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Laws of Attraction – Attracting the People You Want

Women on Business

What kind of people are you attracting? Are you attracting the kind of people you want to work with? Or the contractors you want working for you? When writing on your website, twitter, help wanted ads, whatever it may be; it’s important to write for the people you want to read it. If you have everything written in very professional language with a very professional website, those are the sort of people that will be attracted to your ad, or website etc.

Media 106
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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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The Biggest Mistake Change Agents Make

Change Starts Here

Last week I participated in an author panel for the Association for Strategic Planning Atlanta chapter. I shared insights and answered questions about writing both 99 Ways to Influence Change and Irresistible: The Change Agent’s Guide to Design and Influence Change Without Getting Stuck. One of the questions they sent us to prepare was: “What is the biggest mistake you see people make?

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Can Every Conflict Be Resolved?

The Recovering Engineer

I often get asked if every conflict can be resolved. Since I work with leaders and teams to resolve workplace conflicts and to build the confidence people have to address conflicts, I think it’s a really good question. The short answer is: yes, every conflict can be resolved. The question does have one problem though — it is incomplete. It is incomplete in that people often ask the question with an unspoken assumption about the outcome of the resolution process.

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A Matter of Trust: Why I Trust You, Why I Don’t

Let's Grow Leaders

Developing real trust takes time. The people we lead come to us with history, memories, and experiences–they recall times of trust inspired and trust betrayed. When we are in a new gig, our teams watch even more closely. “Can I trust you?” “Are you like the last guy?” When we have been with a [.] The post A Matter of Trust: Why I Trust You, Why I Don’t appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

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What Leaders Can Learn from How Romney Won the Debate

Next Level Blog

Almost immediately after the first U.S. presidential debate on Wednesday, practically every major news outlet from Fox News to MSNBC to the Financial Times of London declared Mitt Romney the outright winner over Barack Obama. Having watched it myself, I have to agree. Romney cleaned Obama’s clock. As I was watching it, I thought of that scene in The Untouchables where Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness says to Sean Connery’s Malone, “I want to get Capone.

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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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Imagining the Future of the Enterprise

Dion Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 Blog

This afternoon at a workshop in Stuttgart, Germany at the KnowTech conference I explored our latest conception of the many transformative technology changes happening within our organizations today. The majority, if not most of these trends, are now being driven by the so-called “big shifts” — and our response to them as people, organizations, and society — that are largely being imposed from outside the walls of the enterprise.

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Everything you need to know about leadership, you learned in Kindergarten

Women on Business

Yesterday as I watched an old episode of ‘How I Met Your Mother’ the story line was about how the kindergarten teacher enacted lessons in kindness using lessons from her Kindergarten class resonated with me. Leadership lessons at their core are taught in Kindergarten and here’s what I mean. Say Please and Thank You. When asking for cooperation, which is a key part of every entrepreneur’s life, saying please and thank you should go without saying.

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Sidelining Those Who Don’t Play Nice With Change

Change Starts Here

During the course of any change initiative, you may come across those whom you prefer to keep at arm’s length from the change. Some are too busy to fully commit the personal energy required to participate. Some are too far from the situation to make a useful contribution. And then there are those people in the organization that you wish would just stay out of the way because you know they are going to cause trouble.

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Flexible With People and Rigid With Timelines

The Recovering Engineer

At different times and in different roles, I have had the opportunity to observe, work on, plan, and implement projects of various sizes and types. They include construction, computer system, computer software, marketing, web development, book writing, process improvement, and plant expansion projects. I have also attended workshops and read books on project management.

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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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Cheer in the Next Gear: How to Make Your Support Count

Let's Grow Leaders

Each time a cyclist peddled past our corner at the Ironman triathlon , the woman sitting next to me on the curb would clang her large cowbell. No words. No sign of emotion. This went on for hours. It was almost a Pavlovian response. See bike, ring bell. She was committed. She never missed an [.] The post Cheer in the Next Gear: How to Make Your Support Count appeared first on Let's Grow Leaders.

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What the Lance Armstrong Story Teaches About Sustainable Leadership

Next Level Blog

Anyone in the market for a 24” by 36” signed color portrait of Lance Armstrong leading the Tour de France? I’ve had one on my office wall for four or five years but I’ll be taking it down now. Over the past several weeks, Armstrong has experienced one of the most dramatic self induced falls from grace ever. The guy who thrilled and inspired millions of people and raised millions of dollars for cancer research has been stripped of his seven Tour titles, lost his endorsement deal with Nike and for

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In 100 Words: Generosity and Growing Others

QAspire

Photograph by Tanmay Vora. The best way to grow is to help others grow. In process of elevating others, you have to elevate yourself. However, you have to adopt a posture of generosity and abundance. In school, I heard a story of a farmer who was known for producing best crops and sharing his best seeds with other farmers in the vicinity. When asked why, he said, “It is a selfish act.