When someone asks to meet one of your friends, do you fire off an e-mail right away with both parties on it or do you contact your friend and ask for permission to introduce you to a person? It kind of depends on the circumstances. Where things get most sensitive is one party could be a buyer and the other is a seller. I would say you definitely want to get permission from both parties to connect before you make an introduction.
Happy Father's Day, a day to celebrate your kids
Foxnews has a post on what Father’s day is really about - cherishing your sons and daughters.
Father’s Day has always been a special day for me. But today, as with the previous seven Father’s Days, the feelings of pride and satisfaction over my son Travis and daughter Ryan will be mixed with a void in my heart that can never be replaced.
That is because Travis will not be with us.
In April of 2007, he was serving as a Marine first lieutenant when he was killed in action in Iraq’s Al Anbar Province, cut down by a sniper’s armor-piercing bullet after his unit was ambushed while searching a suspected insurgent house. He had just helped save two wounded comrades when the bullet struck him in the heart. He was 26.
I am one of thousands of fathers whose thoughts will turn today to a son or daughter lost serving our country.
My kids are the reason why I celebrate Father’s day. Hope all of you get to spend a special day with yours.
Monday, Mar 26, 2014 Memorial Day, Veterans + Data Centers -> Salute Inc
Most of you are looking forward to a three day weekend I am too. Monday is a Memorial Day to honor men and women who died serving in US Armed Forces. My first thought goes to my cousin who died in Vietnam so long ago.
Memorial Day is a US federal holiday wherein the men and women who died while serving in theUnited States Armed Forces are remembered.[1] The holiday, which is celebrated every year on the final Monday of May,[2] was formerly known as Decoration Day and originated after the American Civil Warto commemorate the Union and Confederate soldiers who died in the Civil War. By the 20th century, Memorial Day had been extended to honor all Americans who have died while in the military service.[3]It typically marks the start of the summer vacation season, while Labor Day marks its end.
Thinking of the US Armed Services what also comes to mind is Salute Mission Critical.
Salute Incorporated specializes in utilizing highly trained American military veterans for data center owners and operators of all sizes. Our personnel have the distinction of having honorably served their country with the skills they obtained through the rigorous training programs offered by our armed forces. The scope of our efforts is focused on data center project requirements that can be satisfied with disciplined labor. Our project experience includes sub-floor energy assessments/remediation, data center cleaning, containment installation, cage build outs and general logistics support.
OUR MISSION
To provide the highest quality services for our customers while providing a gateway to the data center industry for those who have served our country.
Take a of bit time to remember those in the armed forces.
The Tough Question for the Titans of Cloud, How is Your Team Better than the Competition?
Gigaom’s Barb Darrow asks for a question you would ask the Titans of the Cloud - Amazon, Google, HP, IBM, Rackspace, Red Hat, VMware, and Microsoft.
Top 5 questions for the titans of cloud
bySUMMARY:If you had Amazon’s Werner Vogels, Google’s Urs Hölzle, IBM/SoftLayer’s Lance Crosby, Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie, Rackspace’s Taylor Rhodes in one room, what would you ask?
There are 5 questions listed. Being an insider and seeing how stuff works behind the scenes I have a tougher question than the readers sent in.
Tell me how your team is better than the Competition?
Anyone who knows how things work know there are teams of people who work on the Cloud infrastructure. If you trace cause of outages the human factor is hard to miss. The Cloud automation is created by teams of people as well.
HBR has a post on The New Science of Building Great Teams.
The New Science of Building Great Teams
by Alex “Sandy” PentlandIf you were looking for teams to rig for success, a call center would be a good place to start. The skills required for call center work are easy to identify and hire for. The tasks involved are clear-cut and easy to monitor. Just about every aspect of team performance is easy to measure: number of issues resolved, customer satisfaction, average handling time (AHT, the golden standard of call center efficiency). And the list goes on.
Why, then, did the manager at a major bank’s call center have such trouble figuring out why some of his teams got excellent results, while other, seemingly similar, teams struggled? Indeed, none of the metrics that poured in hinted at the reason for the performance gaps. This mystery reinforced his assumption that team building was an art, not a science.
And one of the insights on team performance.
Patterns of communication, for example, explained why performance varied so widely among the seemingly identical teams in that bank’s call center. Several teams there wore our badges for six weeks. When my fellow researchers (my colleagues at Sociometric Solutions—Taemie Kim, Daniel Olguin, and Ben Waber) and I analyzed the data collected, we found that the best predictors of productivity were a team’s energy and engagement outside formal meetings. Together those two factors explained one-third of the variations in dollar productivity among groups.
Here is the HBR video on Team Performance.
Here are Barb’s 5 question from readers.
1: When will all the major clouds support the same set of APIs?
2: When will they support migration of data/workloads from one cloud to another natively?
3: What comes after the race to the bottom in cloud storage prices plays out?
4: When will we see a true cloud exchange?
5: How can we be sure our data is safe in your cloud from prying eyes?
A Metric for Friendship, # of Shared LinkedIn Connections - 191, 165, 138
When I make a new connection through LinkedIn I often go to see the shared connections which tells you a bit about the other person, and allows you to have conversation on how you both got to know a shared connection.
I decided to do the opposite and went to LinkedIn did a quick search of my well connected data center friends. I have 944 connections, and the three unnamed friends have more than than I have. Here is a surprise. For each of my three uber connected friends I have 191, 165, and 138 shared connections.
Metrics for a friendship may sound silly. You know who your good friends are.