A Test of How Connected you are in the DC Industry, when do you find out

Mike Manos has a post on a new job opening at big tech firm.

Mike Manos ‏@mjmanos6 Sep

#DCRumors Will not name who, but a Big Tech firm just created an opening for a new Infrastructure/Ops guru. Lord knows they need a good one!

I will also not name who.

In the old days you would go where those who know hang out.

The Old London Coffee House

Opened by William Bradford in 1754, the London Coffee House was built with funds provided by more than 200 Philadelphia merchants, and it soon became their meeting place. Here merchants, ship masters and others talked business and made deals that they often sealed with nothing more than a simple handshake. The governor and other officials also frequented the coffee house, where they held court in their own private booths. City residents came to get the latest news and to buy tickets for concerts, lectures and other public events. The coffee house was also a destination for weary travelers from other colonies, and countries, and for the businessmen and curious onlookers attending the auctions held regularly outside its front doors.

Now, friends talk, share information, don't use company e-mail, don't use full names.  This isn't the type of stuff the CIA would worry to break the encrypted content.  There is common sense of what you have on company e-mail and what you don't.

For the DC industry this gossip is much more relevant than Steve Ballmer leaving Microsoft.  Why the person is leaving, who the successor will be is much more interesting to talk about.  Who would be good at the job is speculated.  What will happen?  Will the Big Tech Firm executives figure out who the best in the industry are?  As people interview more data will show up.

Many of us will be at 7x24 Exchange San Antonio in November.  

It was interesting to see how quickly the news moved, and people were contacting those who should know.

There have been other executive changes that have occurred over the past couple of months from within the Big Tech Firms it is better the media doesn't know what is going on.

BTW, #DCRumors probably won't work too well as a Twitter hashtag as there are others who are using DC to mean DC Comics. :-)

Do people change when they get promoted? Does Power go to their head? Yes

Being around a long time, over 30 years in the tech industry many coworkers and friends have risen the executive ranks.  Some people change little, some people change more.  And, after a while it is not so much fun talking to the executive as they care more about their agenda.

NPR has a study that provides some data on this topic.

When Power Goes To Your Head, It May Shut Out Your Heart

by CHRIS BENDEREV

August 10, 2013 7:41 AM

...

Even the smallest dose of power can change a person. You've probably seen it. Someone gets a promotion or a bit of fame and then, suddenly, they're a little less friendly to the people beneath them.

So here's a question that may seem too simple: Why?

The point made is power changes how the brain operates.

But if you ask Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, he might give you another explanation: Power fundamentally changes how the brain operates.

Obhi and his colleagues, Jeremy Hogeveen and Michael Inzlicht, have a new study showing evidence to support that claim.

I have always resisted being an executive.  

So when people felt power, they really did have more trouble getting inside another person's head.

The paper cited is here.  The conclusion from the paper is as follows.

 Conclusion

Despite these possible limitations, the main results we report are

robust, and strongly suggest that power is negatively related to

motor resonance. Indeed, anecdotes abound about the worker on

the shop floor whose boss seems oblivious to his existence, or the

junior sales associate whose regional manager never remembers

her name and seems to look straight through her in meetings.

Perhaps the pattern of activity within the motor resonance system

that we observed in the present study can begin to explain how

these occurrences take place and, more generally, can shed light

on the tendency for the powerful to neglect the powerless, and the

tendency for the powerless to expend effort in understanding the

powerful.

Jeff Bezos invests in reinventing the Physics of the newspaper business buying Washington Post

Jeff Bezos has spent $250 mil of his own money to buy the Washington Post.

The LA Times discusses the possibility of Jeff Bezos creating a new business model for newspapers.

Washington Post buy: Can Jeff Bezos fix newspapers' business model?

Amazon's Jeff Bezos, buyer of the Washington Post, has shown success at experimentation and great patience about turning a profit.

I've worked on Publishing technologies way too long, starting in 1987 on displays, printers, fonts at Apple, then continued working on the publishing technologies at Microsoft.  Back in 1997 Bill Gates was focused on winning the battle for publishing vs. Apple.  Microsoft didn't win that battle.  Google changed the game sucking the air out of print advertising model.

Jeff Bezos in 1994 started Amazon.com and has seen the transition of Books and DVDs to digital. While this all going on Jeff has got an insider's look at the business models of media companies.  Jeff Bezos started college as a physicists and switched to computer science.

Bezos often showed intense scientific interests. He rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger siblings out of his room.^{[citation needed]} The family moved toMiami, Florida, where Bezos attended Miami Palmetto Senior High School. While in high school, he attended the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida, receiving a Silver Knight Award in 1982.^[9] He was high school valedictorian.^[10] He attended Princeton University, with an intention to study physics, but soon returned to his love of computers and graduated summa cum laude, with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in electrical engineering and computer science. While at Princeton, he was elected to the honor societies Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. He also served as the President of the Princeton chapter of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space.^[11]

Jeff's love to understand how things work and make them better is what he did to retail.  Why can't he do the same with newspapers.  Once he figures out newspapers he can move on to other things that shape human perception.

Here is a progressive view of journalism.

So then what the hell is journalism?

It is a service. It is a service whose end, again, is an informed public. For my entrepreneurial journalism students, I give them a broad umbrella of a definition: Journalism helps communities organize their knowledge so they can better organize themselves.

Thus anything that reliably serves the end of an informed community is journalism. Anyone can help do that. The true journalist should want anyone to join the task. That, in the end, is why I wrote Public Parts: because I celebrate the value that rises from publicness, from the ability of anyone to share what he or she knows with everyone and the ethic that says sharing is a generous and social act and transparency should be the default for our institutions.

Is there a role for people to help in that process? Absolutely. I say that organizations can first help enable the flow and collection of information, which can now occur without them, by offering platforms for communities to share what they know. Next, I say that someone is often needed to add value to that process by:
* asking the questions that are not answered in the flow,
* verifying facts,
* debunking rumors,
* adding context, explanation, and background,
* providing functionality that enables sharing,
* organizing efforts to collaborate by communities, witnesses, experts.

The most important truth in your career, who are you surrounded by

I've been staring at this post on Forbes on career truths.

I’ve also come to learn that in business sometimes it’s strategically (and monetarily) beneficial to remain under the radar.

As I sat down to write, I began looking over interviewing and career articles that I’ve written in the past as well as some content that was written by others.

Both fail to mention some very pertinent career truths or distort reality. Here are 7 that pieces of career truths that you don’t normally read about.

The one truth that resonated as the most important is the choice of who you surround yourself with.

3. You are who you surround yourself with – Be careful whom you associate with. Choose colleagues and friends carefully.

Surround yourself with sincere, honest, optimistic, kind, resilient and hard working people. Your potential will far exceed that of someone who associates themselves with highly controlling, jealous and pessimistic individuals.

Ferrari makes bold move, Limits email to three addresses, Encouraged to talk more, write less

It's been 7 years since I walked out of a corporate environment and one of the things I don't miss is the corporate e-mail system.  

NBCNews covered the move by Ferrari to limit email use in the company.  One of the things I find frustrating reading articles like this is where is the Ferrari statement referenced?  Many times journalists will make it appear like they talked to the company and have access to exclusive content. 

WSJ blog has a ahttp://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2013/07/05/ferraris-new-strategy-make-fewer-cars-send-fewer-emails/ that references Ferrari's statement.

In a bid to make them work more efficiently and effectively, the Italian maker of luxury sports cars and Formula 1 racers has a new email policy. Aimed at limiting the endless chain of reply-all emails that are a curse of office life, the new rule is pretty simple: An internal email can only be sent to a maximum of three people. According to a statement by the company:

“The injudicious sending of emails with dozens of recipients often on subjects with no relevance to most of the latter is one of the main causes of time wastage and inefficiency in the average working day in business.

Ferrari has therefore decided to nip the problem in the bud by issuing a very clear and simple instruction to its employees: talk to each other more and write less.”

The Ferrari web site looks so much cooler too.

The Ferrari statement closes with the main point.

Ferrari has therefore decided to nip the problem in the bud by issuing a very clear and simple instruction to its employees: talk to each other more and write less.

I would bet that Ferrari management is tired of resolving issues between departments where the groups don't talk to each other.  I would agree that writing is over rated.