Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.

Andrew Tahvildary joined Cloudscaling last month as Vice President of Engineering. He joins us most recently from newScale, where he led the engineering team for more than six years as the company effected a successful exit via acquisition by Cisco. He was a member of the executive leadership team, responsible for product development and architecture, quality assurance, support, release management, program management and lifecycle budgeting for the engineering organization.

Before newScale, Andrew was engineering VP for Primavera Systems, prior to its acquisition by Oracle. In total, his engineering leadership experience stretches back nearly 20 years, covering a range of technical roles.

I spent a few minutes with Andrew discussing his experience and his philosophy of leading high-performing engineering organizations.

RC: Let’s start with your experiences at newScale, Primavera and Evolve. What did those technical leadership roles teach you about building engineering teams at high-growth startups?

AT: The key thing to any engineering team – startups or non-startups – is the people. If you don’t have the right people with the right level of skills, the right attitude and the right desire, you’re not going to be successful.

More of the CloudScaling article from Robert Cathney

Continuous monitoring is enough for compliance, but ISN’T enough for securing data

Every 4,000 miles or so I bring my car into have the oil changed, the brakes checked and tires rotated. Why? Because I know if I leave it to chance, at some point down the road something much more devastating will affect the car. Many of us follow this simple preventive best practice.

Then why is it major corporations and modest enterprises alike wait until their security is breached to address growing concerns of data theft, private information leakage or worse? Many of these companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in various security initiatives (especially those bound by a regulatory compliance agency), but still succumb to breaches that cost on average 3.8 million dollars (Ponemon Institute figure) per occurrence to address.

Two instances dropped into my in box this week, a medical center in Long Beach, California and a Medicaid office in New York State both experienced similar types of breaches that, in my opinion, were completely preventable.

It boils down to continuous monitoring…and that practice doesn’t go far enough.

More of the Cloud Computing Journal article

Lying to yourself—or self-deception, as psychologists call it—can actually have benefits. And nearly everybody does it, based on a growing body of research using new experimental techniques.

Lying to yourself — or self-deception, as psychologists call it — actually has benefits sometimes. Based on a growing body of research using new experimental techniques to induce and analyze self-deception, researchers are finding that most people lie to themselves at least some of the time. Sue Shellenbarger explains on Lunch Break.

Self-deception isn’t just lying or faking, but is deeper and more complicated, says Del Paulhus, psychology professor at University of British Columbia and author of a widely used scale to measure self-deceptive tendencies. It involves strong psychological forces that keep us from acknowledging a threatening truth about ourselves, he says.

Believing we are more talented or intelligent than we really are can help us influence and win over others, says Robert Trivers, an anthropology professor at Rutgers University and author of “The Folly of Fools,” a 2011 book on the subject. An executive who talks himself into believing he is a great public speaker may not only feel better as he performs, but increase “how much he fools people, by having a confident style that persuades them that he’s good,” he says.

The Case for Lying to Yourself – WSJ.com