Get Better

Get Better / Play Hard — Comments Off
22
Dec 15

Business Insider – How to train your brain to make better decisions

Overcoming obstacles is synonymous with entrepreneurship. The ability to engage with difficulties and stress in an empowering way is described as the biggest factor for success in life — more significant than your IQ, social networks, physical health, or socio-economic background.

When you encounter stressful situations, there are two basic ways your brain will respond: fight or flight. Whether you fight or flee can be boiled down to how you’ve been conditioned from past experiences. This negative pattern of responses is known as “learned helplessness.” If you’ve given a terrible presentation at a business meeting, you’ll have a stress-induced flight response in similar future scenarios.

If left unchecked, this pattern of “learned” avoidance behaviors will lead to passive and poor decisions. You cannot dominate in entrepreneurship and leadership if you have a pattern of unhealthy risk-averse decisions — always fleeing from challenges.

More of the Business Insider article from Thai Nguyen

CIO Strategy / Get Better / IT Strategy — Comments Off
15
Dec 15

CIOInsight – Why CIOs Are Losing Control of Technology

CIOs give themselves and their employees high marks for delivering upon needed business outcomes, but they also admit that they’re losing control over significant tech purchase decisions to the business side, according to a recent survey from Logicalis US. More than ever, finding reveal, line-of-business (LOB) managers circumvent CIOs and tech employees in acquiring tech apps and solutions, thus cultivating a shadow IT culture. This creates issues with respect to both tech governance and security assurance, and CIOs now feel pressured to transform their roles from that of technologist to what’s emerging as “internal service provider” to counter shadow IT.

More of the CIOInsight slideshow from Dennis McCafferty

CIO Strategy / Get Better / IT Strategy — Comments Off
11
Dec 15

Data Center Knowledge – Forget Hardware, Forget Software, Forget the Infrastructure

Enterprise IT has to forget about hardware, forget about the infrastructure, forget about software, and think more about getting their job done, which is delivering services or applications.

That’s according to David Cappuccio, a VP at Gartner who oversees research in enterprise data center strategies and trends. In the opening keynote at Gartner’s annual data center management summit here Monday, Cappuccio together with colleague Thomas Bittman outlined Gartner’s vision for the new role the IT organization has to play in the enterprise.

That new role has less to do with managing disparate bits of infrastructure and more to do with selecting the best infrastructure strategy to provide a specific service. The toolbox they can select from includes on-premise or colocation data centers and cloud – private, public, or hybrid, on-prem or outsourced.

More of the Data Center Knowledge article from Yevgeny Sverdlik

CIO Strategy / Get Better / IT Strategy — Comments Off
08
Dec 15

HBR – Executives Get the IT They Deserve

Here’s a concise article on why enterprise IT is so different from consumer IT. Business leaders, what’s your next move?

Many executives pine for their internal IT systems to give them a more consumer-friendly experience. They point to the simplicity, ease of use, and hassle-free nature of the digital services they use in their personal lives: the apps on their smart phone that make services available at the push of a button, software that can be installed and configured with the click of an icon, the ability to plug a printer into a laptop’s USB port and have it ready to print, a tablet that can be connected to the internet without any cautionary pop-ups warning about potential security risks or possible compatibility problems.

In the consumer IT world everything just seems to work, they lament. Why does corporate IT make things so complicated?

Unfortunately, most executives don’t recognize that consumer IT and enterprise IT are different animals. They don’t understand that they must play the pivotal role in the critical decisions that shape enterprise IT — decisions that they leave to the likes of Yahoo, Apple, Google, and Vodafone in the consumer world.

In the consumer world, all digital services are vanilla versions. Sometimes, you can opt for either cheaper or more expensive versions with less or more functionality. But as a customer, you have no input into what is offered; you either take it or leave it.

More of the Harvard Business Review post from Joe Peppard

CIO Strategy / Get Better — Comments Off
09
Nov 15

CIO.com – Enterprise IT appears to be going insane

Are we continually asking our users what they really need from IT?

Long may we have high-quality, capable, resilient, inexpensive IT. Unfortunately for CIOs and enterprise IT, these characteristics don’t equate to “value” in 2015 in the opinion of business users.

Increasingly, business users are less and less enchanted with IT consistently achieving its SLAs and KPIs and increasingly grouse about such things as a faster way to market, a better customer experience or a lower cost in the employee on-boarding process.

Business users are frustrated with the enterprise IT function because of its inability to meet their business needs in a timely fashion. This frustration is not new and has been around since organizations first centralized IT into a shared service. However, there’s no doubt that business users’ patience is running out; they are increasingly vocal and often more likely to go around the enterprise function to accomplish their goals.

More of the CIO.com article from Peter Bendor-Samuel

Cloud Computing / Get Better — Comments Off
05
Nov 15

CIO.com – Why companies are switching from Google Apps to Office 365

Microsoft’s increasingly strong Office 365 performance is coming partly at the expense of Google Apps. Motorola’s recent decision to move from an elderly version of Office to Google’s cloud service bucks the more common trend of companies who have been using Google Apps switching to Office 365.

It’s not just Microsoft saying that Office 365 is growing (COO Kevin Turner claims that four out of five Fortune 500 companies use the service). Last year, cloud security company Bitglass said traffic analysis gave Google twice the market share of Office 365 among its customers, with 16.3 percent of the market; that went up to 22.8 percent this year as more companies switched to cloud services. However, over the same year, Office 365 grew far faster, from 7.7 percent to 25.2 percent. Google has a slight advantage with small businesses (22.8 percent to Microsoft’s 21.4 percent) but in large, regulated businesses (over 1,000 employees), Microsoft’s 30 percent share is twice that of Google and growing fast.

Office 365 is even more popular with the 21 million customers of Skyhigh Network’s cloud security services, where 87.3 percent are using Office 365 services, with each organization uploading an average 1.37 terabytes of data to the service each month.

More of the CIO.com article from Mary Branscombe

Business Development / Get Better / Play Hard — Comments Off
03
Nov 15

Margaret Heffernan – The secret ingredient that makes some teams better than others

“The trust, knowledge, reciprocity and shared norms that create quality of life and make a group resilient. “Thanks, Emily Theis, for sharing this.

Culture defines any business, but it’s one of the hardest things to manage. In this extract from her new TED Book, Margaret Heffernan lays out the often-overlooked element necessary to build an effective, efficient organization: social capital.

Running a software company in Boston, I recognized — and my board told me — that we needed to reposition the business. Our product was too bland, too generic to stimulate excitement or loyalty. I needed a team to help me, and I ended up working through the problem with a motley crew: a young web developer, a seasoned and eccentric media executive, a visual artist, and me. We spent a week in the private room of a burger joint, exploring options, rejecting easy answers, pushing one another to find something none of us could see. Looking back, I recall that intense period as one of the most thought-provoking learning experiences I’ve ever had. The team was outstanding — and successful — but why? How did such an eclectic combination of people manage to work together so well? What made this experience of creative conflict so productive?

More of the Ted Idea from Margaret Heffernan

Get Better / Play Hard — Comments Off
30
Oct 15

ReadersRead.in – 9 Classic Books That Will Change Your Life And Career

The appetite for books that inspire us, move us forward, and give us practical guidance seems to be only increasing. The publication of new business books alone tops 11,000 every year — an overwhelming choice for readers.

The ones that tend do well these days seem to be grounded in humanity.

Perhaps that’s because creativity, innovation, leadership, entrepreneurship — they all begin within us; each is very much a human process.

So naturally, the more we humanize the way we think and work, the more progress we can make in these arenas. If we understand the mental and emotional drivers of innovation and creativity, we can be more innovative and creative.

Today’s authors and thinkers have the privilege of standing on the shoulders of giants. Their works, a diverse arrangement of titles and backgrounds, have inspired me to understand what’s behind things like mindfulness, creativity, innovation and leadership, and I believe they will inspire you, too:

More of the Readersread.in post from Faisal Hoque

Get Better — Comments Off
29
Oct 15

The Telegraph – Deleting genes could boost lifespan by 60 per cent, say scientists

Scientists have discovered more than 200 genes linked to ageing and have found switching them off extends life.

The secret of extending life by decades may lie in switching off certain genes, scientists believe, after showing that small genetic tweaks can make organisms live 60 per cent longer.

Ten years of research by the Buck Institute for Research on Ageing and the University of Washington has identified 238 genes that, when silenced, increase the lifespan of yeast cells.

Many of the genes are present in mammals, including humans, suggesting that switching them off could dramatically increase lifespan.

More of The Telegraph post by Sarah Knapton

Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.