Skipping the Vendor/Analyst Pay to Play Dance

Observation:

The data center industry is part of the pay to play dance that exists between vendor and analyst organization.  ZDNet does a pretty good job of describing the situation.

One of the comments explains the dilemma of an analyst in the pay to play.

RE: Pay to play: The vendor / analyst mating dance

toppundit 24th Sep 2009

I was an analyst for many years at a pay-to-play analyst firm, and like many of my peers, I strove to maintain my personal integrity, despite the many, many pressures I felt to say the right thing. At the end of the day, I found it was impossible, and I quit doing that kind of work. 

It wasn't the overt stuff. Despite many, many suggestions, I never, ever wrote anything that I thought was untrue. But in this business, the nuances matter. You end up giving people the benefit of the doubt, when you shouldn't have.

You also found that it was impossible to call a spade a spade. If some poor guy plunked down $20,000 of his savings to get our firm to say that his nonsense software had some merit--this really happened, the company now long-gone--it was hard for me to look the guy in the eye and say, "No way," and as for my boss, well, he's the guy who negotiated the deal. So you try to thread your way through with phrases like "interesting" and "still some way to go." 

Many data center vendors feel compelled to be at all the trade shows as a lack of presence would indicate you are not commited to the market.  So, your marketing expenses grow as you "ante up" to play the game.  In addition to the trade shows, you pay the analysts to analyze your company.  You up your event sponsorship to get more leads.  Arghh!  This is so frustrating when it doesn't pay off.

It is so appealing to skip this dance.

Are you willing to be a little wild? Your brain can be 15-30% bigger than domesticated

I am reading an interesting book "Touchpoints: Creating Powerful Leadership Connections in the Smallest Moments."

And one of the points made is

research has found that the brains of domesticated animals are 15 to 30 percent smaller than those of their wild counterparts.

A comment I recently received is I am "loose cannon." Which can be bad if you are in large corporate environment where you want everyone to behave appropriately.  Luckily, I no longer work in a corporate environment, and being a loose cannon is not a bad thing.

Even data center events can be highly domesticated like a zoo where there is a program and routine you are expected to stick to.  Stay on message according to the event's marketing program.  At some events the presentation titles are written by the event staff for the speakers to stay in their cage, containing what they say.

The Touchpoint book continues

So if you want to thrive in a fiercely competitive global environment, you need to stay a little wild. You need to be alert and continuously update your skills. Today's organizations draw on the best talent from all over the world. This means that the standards keep going up, and you need to get better just to stay in place.

An example of being wild is Mike Manos. At last year's Uptiime Symposium Mike had a programmed talk.  And, thanks to some prodding from some data center thought leaders, Mike went a little wild and said what is wrong with so much of the industry is "we act like Donkeys."  Highly domesticated animals with days of gloom like Eeyore.  I don't think anyone who would call Eeyore talented, except to bring down the energy down in the room.

Mike's call to action is to be a Chaos Monkey.  Break things and see what happens.

Afterwards Mike's talk, Mike said he had dozens of people come up to him and admit they were donkeys.  The guy I was sitting next to said he is "chaos monkey." I am too, and it is more fun.

Do you favor being a domesticated donkey?  Most do, because you don't you lose your job in a risk averse culture which is most data center organizations.

Or are you a little wild with a brain that is 15-30% bigger than the domesticated crowd?

The nice thing about a smaller brain is you don't think about being a little wild. You get comfortable in your skin, like Eeyore.

Is your memory as real as you think, looking at photos change it

To run a data center requires hundreds of things to be done correctly.  Mistakes are made, and an assumption in people just forget.

An interesting different explanation is your memory is malleable.  You forgot, but then you saw images that made it seem like you did the task correctly.

A Photo is Worth a Thousand Ways to Change Your Memory

Most of us realize that memory is fallible. We forget things all the time–car keys, passwords, whether we turned off the oven, etc.  But how many of us would admit that our memory is susceptible to change from the outside? That’s different from simply forgetting–something everyone does on their own–because someone else changing our memory requires “getting in our heads” so to speak, right?

If you forget to work on one area out of many.  It is possible that your correct execution of the tasks mask your error.

Participants were presented with a series of objects on a table, and for each object were asked to either perform an action or imagine performing an action (i.e. “crack the walnut”).  One week later, the same participants were brought back and randomly presented with a series of photos on a computer screen, each of a completed action (i.e. a cracked walnut), either one, two or three times. Other participants were not shown any photos.

One week later, they were brought back to complete a memory test in which they were presented with action phrases (i.e. “I cracked a walnut”) and asked to answer whether they had performed the action, imagined performing it, or neither, and rate their confidence level for each answer on a scale of one to four.

The results: the more times people were exposed to a photo of a completed action, the more often they thought they’d completed the action, even though they had really only imagined doing it.  Those shown a photo of a completed action once were twice as likely to erroneously think they’d completed the action than those not shown a photo at all.   People shown a photo three times were almost three times as likely as those not shown a photo.