The Battles won with a Team, Hollywood changing to tell the story of teams - Navy Seal Movie

The following is a bunch of ideas that I find interesting in that it illustrates a point that “the team” is more important than individuals.  And, the data center teams that will beat the others are the ones who operate better as a team.  A better data center team will enable businesses to beat others.

WSJ has an article about Hollywood’s change in battle plan in creating military movies.  Here is a video that introduces the concept.

After 10 years of the same story, Hollywood realize they have a problem telling the war story.

Ten years after the Sept. 11 attacks opened an ongoing chapter of U.S. military action, Hollywood’s long history of depicting fighters at war is entering a new phase. The grinding wars in Afghanistan and Iraq spawned films that highlighted characters in uniform who were disillusioned with their missions and scarred in their homecomings. With the conflicted protagonists of movies such as “Green Zone” and “Stop-Loss,” filmmakers tried to tap into the public’s ambivalence about the conflicts, but their movies mostly sank at the box office. Now that deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq are tapering down, filmmakers are homing in on the more clear-cut job of battling terrorists. And they’re finding heroes in the elite—and now famous—special-operations forces leading the hunt. Projects in the pipeline focus on the armed heroics, high-tech tactics and teamwork involved in getting the bad guys.

The US Navy was changing their tune as well.

COVER_Seals
Courtesy of ‘Act of Valor’

Director Scott Waugh films the SEALs.

In 2008, Navy Special Warfare invited a handful of production companies to submit proposals for a film project, possibly a documentary, that would flesh out the role of the SEALs. The goals: bolster recruiting efforts, honor fallen team members and offer a corrective to misleading fare such as “Navy Seals,” the 1990 shoot-em-up starring Charlie Sheen as a cocky lone wolf. “In the SEAL ethos, the superman myth does not apply. It’s a lifestyle of teamwork, hard work and academic discipline,” said Capt. Duncan Smith, a SEAL who initiated the project and essentially served as producer within the military.

A reoccurring theme is “the team.”

After they made a group decision to participate, deciding the project served the SEALs’ greater good, the Navy made the film a formal task for the sailors, who were between deployments. Their names won’t appear in the “Act of Valor” credits; instead, the film will list Naval Special Warfare members killed since Sept. 11.

And what happens when the studio focuses on the team?  The action is better than they have ever shot.

By contrast, in the movie’s many battle scenes, the sailors move with a fluid precision that makes typical Hollywood action movies look bogus. When the SEALs picked off enemies and moved through buildings in a tight snaking column, some footage was captured by helmet-mounted cameras. Certain plot points were based on true stories from the field, including a scene in which a sailor takes a rocket-propelled grenade to the chest at close range and lives.

 

 

Think your boss is killing you, guess what, your co-workers affect you more

I usually spend over a year getting to know people before I start a project with them.  Why so cautious?  I've learned life is too short to spend time working with people who you don't enjoy spending time and trust.  It is hard to be creative when your co-workers are looking out for their own interests and don't have your back.  One of the best guys to work with was my departed friend Olivier Sanche, and I wrote about the concept of a wingman watching your back.

Data Center Wingman, who has your back? One of the best Olivier Sanche

Olivier and I spent a lot of time together and one of the ways you could describe our relationship is we were wingman for each other.

A common assumption is a bad boss can be bad for your health, but what about your co-workers.  WSJ has an article that discusses how your co-workers can affect your health.

Your Co-Workers Might Be Killing You

Hours don't affect health much—but unsupportive colleagues do

...

Instead, the Israeli scientists found that the factor most closely linked to health was the support of co-workers: Less-kind colleagues were associated with a higher risk of dying. While this correlation might not be surprising, the magnitude of the effect is unsettling. According to the data, middle-age workers with little or no "peer social support" in the workplace were 2.4 times more likely to die during the study.

But, you know what can be worse than your co-workers.  How about the computer system that treats the individual as a cog.

But that wasn't the only noteworthy finding. The researchers also complicated longstanding ideas about the relationship between the amount of control experienced by employees and their long-term health. Numerous studies have found that the worst kind of workplace stress occurs when people have little say over their day. These employees can't choose their own projects or even decide which tasks to focus on first. Instead, they must always follow the orders of someone else. They feel like tiny cogs in a vast corporate machine.

The things that you may think affect your health long hours and the boss were not shown to worsen your health.

The first thing the researchers discovered is that a lot of the variables they assumed would matter had no measurable impact. The number of hours a person spent at the office didn't affect his or her longevity, nor did the niceness of the boss.

 

Three Rules for Writing Blog Posts - build relationships, tell me why, be different

One of my friends is starting a technical blog and he sent me a draft of his first post.   I made a few comments and I found this post that had same good ideas buried down towards the end of the post.  I could try to paraphrase this, but the author made some good points to consider and he didn't a good job explaining three good rules to post on.

I'll insert some comments in his text.

Impact on your writing: three critical concepts you must adhere to

This is why most press releases fail to be viral, and quite dull, and in general the more corporate PR gets involved in the messages the less people read it.

1.  Build relationships with your audience

Social networks like a personal approach.  They want to see your personality.  They want you to share. They want you to evoke emotions.  These elements are key to creating engagement not just with your content, but with you.  Social networks make you more accessible to your potential readers and can play a significant role in growing your reach.

Think of this point as what do people want vs. what do you want?  You may want to be viewed as an authority and trusted advisor, but do people trust someone they do not know?  People want to feel like they can trust the information.  People trust people.  People get suspicious of information they cannot look up where the information came from.  Ahh, the information came from this person.

I remember when I first began publishing sites on the Web, the approach I used was dry and academic.  This was the strategy I used to communicate authority and trust.  I am beginning to think that this is no longer the right approach.  Do you trust the advice of a university professor that you have never spoken to?  Or does the combined opinions of your friends count for more?

This is why being a blogger is part of the social web.

The wisdom of the crowd is very much upon us and it is only going to get stronger.  As a writer, you need to accept the notion that trust comes from familiarity with you, and your ability to be approachable will enable you to communicate your message.

I totally agree with this point and from the day I started blogging,  I was frustrated with blogs that pointed to things, but didn't say why I should care about this post and what was in it.

2.  Tell me why I care

The other big factor that emerges from the ability to get all the world’s information online is that there is too much information. We are more impatient than ever.  If I am going to spend the time reading your article, whether or not I trust you, tell me why I should read this article in the first paragraph.  Get to the point.

Do you want to a thought leader or a follower?  Who reads the followers?  Think of stuff no one else does.  Or at least try.

3.  Strive for uniqueness, not “me too”

Lastly, don’t waste your time writing “me too” content.

Top Mistake in Social Networking, not investing in Command and Control Technology like Telligent

I was able to meet with an ex-Microsoft employee Rob Howard who is founder and CTO of Telligent.

ABOUT US

Telligent is dedicated to being the most trusted and innovative enterprise collaboration and community software company. We were founded in 2004 by technology visionary Rob Howard around his fundamental beliefs that information should be independent of tools, and communities – social and business – contain vast amounts of untapped, unshared knowledge.

After I watched Rob's presentation on World Class Communities.   I was thinking about this graphic.  You can get a PDF of the presentation here.

image

And then it hit me.  Almost everybody focuses on throwing resources at the participation on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc., but few think about the ownership of the community.  How can you own your community when you use Facebook and Twitter?

If you think about Facebook and Twitter as your distribution channel, then you need to have something at the core of your social networking strategy.  You need command and control (C2) technology.

Command and control, or C2, in a military organization can be defined as the exercise of authority and direction by a properly designated commanding officer over assigned and attached forces in the accomplishment of the mission.[1][2]

The DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms defines it as "[t]he exercise of authority and direction by a properly designated commander over assigned and attached forces in the accomplishment of the mission. Command and control functions are performed through an arrangement of personnel, equipment, communications, facilities, and procedures employed by a commander in planning, directing, coordinating, and controlling forces and operations in the accomplishment of the mission. Also called C2." [3]

Rob has the idea of Command and Control is his paper.

To truly become world class, leaders will invest not only in the technology to run the community, but the people and resources to support the community. The community must be an integral part of the entire experience and culture of the organization.

It's so clear now.  The top mistake people make in social networking is they don't have command and control technology as part of their social networking strategy.

I am looking forward to more conversations with Rob on this topic and the use of Telligent SW in social networking solutions.

If you really want to go further you think about Command and Control Intelligence and Telligent does that as well with Analytics.

  • Monitor key decisions and community buzz.Evaluate brand awareness, sentiment and customer loyalty to enhance your interactive marketing strategy.
  • Get a handle on service performance. Monitor trends and identify the most valuable people and information to deliver on your support commitments.
  • Understand your community network. Track what your customers and employees are thinking, how they’re connected and what they contribute to your community.
  • Build a sustainable community. Mine community data and assess the impact of your community via community health indicators.

Twitter makes major investment in IT infrastructure, hires eBay VP of Technical Ops Mazen Rawashdeh

Twitter’s VP of Engineering of Mike Abbott has tweeted the hiring of Mazen Rawashdeh from eBay as VP of Technical Operations.  TechCrunch covers the announcement.

eBay VP Of Ops Mazen Rawashdeh Moves To Twitter As VP Of Ops

17 hours ago

Twitter has confirmed that seven year eBay veteran Mazen Rawashdeh will be replacing Nick Heyman as VP of Operations at the 400 person strong company. In true Twitter fashion, the move was announced in a tweet by Twitter VP of Engineering Michael Abbott.

There are a couple of comments in this article.

All Things Digital also posts.

Twitter recently completed two data center migrations, with Abbott saying yesterday that the company could now look beyond its stability problems.

The company had let go of its previous Manager of Operations, Nick Heyman, in December. Heyman was a veteran of Facebook, Playdom and Zazzle.

For those of you who don’t know Mazen here is information you can read to find out what he has done at eBay.

Mazen gave a keynote presentation in Dec 2010 at Gartner’s Data Center Conference where he discussed eBay’s accomplishments.

Mazen Rawashdeh

Vice president of Technology Operations
eBay Marketplaces

Mazen is a technology executive with both Fortune 500 and internet startup experience. Mazen has been with eBay for 6.5 years and is responsible for eBay Marketplaces technology Operations. In his role,Mazen is responsible for the day to day operations of the eBay Marketplaces technology platform in addition to technology operations strategy, data centers, servers, databases, storage, data warehousing, and global network technologies.

In the past few years, Mr. Rawashdeh has led multiple technology initiatives at eBay which provided a significant reduction in data center power, footprint and up-lift in the eBay site capacity while driving the TCO "Total cost of ownership" down.

I was at Gartner’s Data Center conference and posted a blog entry with a video of Mazen.

eBay VP of IT Operations, Mazen Rawashdeh keynote at Gartner DC LV

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2010 AT 2:51AM

I ran into Mazen before he presented his keynote at Gartner DC LV, and we caught up as we hadn’t chatted for a while.  I sat up front and created a video of Mazen discussing the process change that eBay made to improve the performance per watt for eBay systems.  Sitting with the eBay team we were also able to catch up a bit discussing Olivier Sanche passing away.

Mazen does a good job of explaining what eBay did to change the behaviors in IT to be greener in the data center and reduce watts per transaction by 70%.

Enter video caption here

image

Here is an interview with Mazen by TriplePundit regarding eBay’s Green Data Center.

eBay Builds State-of-the-art Green Data Center in Utah
By Kathryn Siranosian | November 13th, 2009 5 Comments

green-data-centers-bannerWelcome to UtahOnline auction site eBay is building a $334 million state-of-the-art, environmentally responsible data center in the suburbs of Salt Lake City, Utah.

eBay says this data center will showcase the best and most innovative thinking in green data center design, technology, construction and operation, and Triple Pundit asked Mazen Rawashdeh, VP Technology Operations, eBay Inc., to fill us in on all the details.

Triple Pundit: Does this new data center represent new capacity, or will it consolidate other eBay data centers?

Mazen Rawashdeh: The new center is being opened as part of a corporate-level, four-year  data center consolidation strategy that is moving us from a handful of co-located data center facilities – largely space that we rent from data center providers – to space that we own and can manage to the highest standards in both cost and environmental efficiency. In short, it’s a consolidation strategy. Our business model is unique; we know the rhythms and availability requirements that are specific to eBay’s platform. By designing an environment for our data and compute power – both in terms of physical data center, hardware and software infrastructure that goes into it – we can innovate and manage it in the most efficient way possible. The facility in Utah will host the core technology that runs our business – including the eBay.com marketplace, PayPal and some of our adjacencies, including StubHub.com and Shopping.com.