Orrin Edenfield

STEPHEN HOOVER: 

Compared to big companies, startups have the advantage of no "legacy," which means you don't have to worry about disrupting your own business model or changing skillsets. So when big companies can--and some do--create the space for new opportunities that challenge the legacy, they can do incredible things!

Great ideas are just ideas until they are put into action. Without action they are just ideas.

IBM's BYOD program "really is about supporting employees in the way they want to work," Horan said. "They will find the most appropriate tool to get their job done. I want to make sure I can enable them to do that, but in a way that safeguards the integrity of our business.

This is IT telling the business: we're not going to tell you how to work, we are going to let you dictate how business should be done and we will follow up, support what you are doing and help make it secure and help it to work better. I believe this is the correct approach for IT to take.

If you're a manager, here are three policies worth promoting:

1. Maintain meeting discipline. Schedule meetings for 45 minutes, rather than an hour or longer, so participants can stay focused, take time afterward to reflect on what's been discussed, and recover before the next obligation. Start all meetings at a precise time, end at a precise time, and insist that all digital devices be turned off throughout the meeting.

2. Stop demanding or expecting instant responsiveness at every moment of the day. It forces your people into reactive mode, fractures their attention, and makes it difficult for them to sustain attention on their priorities. Let them turn off their email at certain times. If it's urgent, you can call them — but that won't happen very often.

3. Encourage renewal. Create at least one time during the day when you encourage your people to stop working and take a break. Offer a midafternoon class in yoga, or meditation, organize a group walk or workout, or consider creating a renewal room where people can relax, or take a nap.

It's also up to individuals to set their own boundaries. Consider these three behaviors for yourself:

1. Do the most important thing first in the morning, preferably without interruption, for 60 to 90 minutes, with a clear start and stop time. If possible, work in a private space during this period, or with sound-reducing earphones. Finally, resist every impulse to distraction, knowing that you have a designated stopping point. The more absorbed you can get, the more productive you'll be. When you're done, take at least a few minutes to renew.

2. Establish regular, scheduled times to think more long term, creatively, or strategically. If you don't, you'll constantly succumb to the tyranny of the urgent. Also, find a different environment in which to do this activity — preferably one that's relaxed and conducive to open-ended thinking.

3. Take real and regular vacations. Real means that when you're off, you're truly disconnecting from work. Regular means several times a year if possible, even if some are only two or three days added to a weekend. The research strongly suggests that you'll be far healthier if you take all of your vacation time, and more productive overall.

Yet again something great on the HBR blog.

There’s a large amount of untapped data sitting in CRM, ERP and other enterprise systems, ripe with possibilities. Big Data solutions like Hadoop will allow businesses and software vendors to put that data to use. Nucleus Research predicts we’ll soon see enterprise applications with embedded analytics, integration of role-based interfaces, and a push-model for information, which is already available with some collaborative applications such as Salesforce.com’s Chatter

The possibilities are endless. Many times today we see HDFS and other Hadoop-technologies used to store messages (think Facebook) or log/analytics files (think Google search) but ERP and accounting data can also be stored there and the business intelligence world is just starting to see the possibilities here. This is going to be fun!

What China does better than any place else in the world is to innovate by commercialization, as opposed to constant research and perfecting the theory, like the West. When the Chinese get an idea, they test it in the marketplace. They’re happy to do three to four rounds of commercialization to get an idea right, whereas in the West companies spend the same amount of time on research, testing, and validation before trying to take products to market. The electric vehicle is a good example. The Chinese view is that it’s not going to be perfect, and they’re not trying to make it perfect from day one. They’ve got a few more series of improvements to go, and they’ll work on them in parallel with finding out what the customer really likes and adapting to that. That’s an innovative way of doing innovation, something that the rest of the world is struggling to understand. In our business in China, if we don’t innovate through or with commercialization, we’re going to lag behind our competitors.

I try to take this approach when looking at a large project. If you don't focus on small wins and learning as you go, you end up getting lost in the big picture. Start with something is 60-70% to where you want to be and then go through an iterative process to get to 100%.

Instead of leading with new technology, the studios lead with litigation, legislation and lobbying. (Imagine if the $110 million/year spent on lobbying went to disruptive innovation.)

Great read on the history of the movie/music industry's fight with technology and how Congress has gotten pulled into the middle of it.

But there isn’t a clear path in increasing analytical capacity, and that’s what goes wanting.

This goes right along with something seen for years. IT for the sake of IT rather than IT investment for the sake of returning value to the business. There is little point in setting up a Hadoop cluster and storing 200 TB of data if there is no plan on using that 200 TB of data for a business use and you have the appropriate man-power (however little or much is required) to extract the value.

If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.