spikes

Adam B and George K launch Keas

In an interesting turn of events Adam Bosworth and George Kassabgi are starting a company together Keas.

It's a health care related company, here is the summary from Adam's blog:

"What is the Keas vision? If you are one of the many at risk of losing your health, Keas will help you keep healthy. If you’re recovering from an illness Keas will help you to recover and stay well. If you suffer from a chronic disease Keas will help you be as well as you can be. Today no one helps you. You can’t assemble your health data to get the best care possible. Even if you can, your doctors rarely help because the system doesn’t pay them to keep you healthy. You don’t have tools that work online to help in these situations, partly because insurance doesn’t pay for them. Because of these problems people suffer both personal hardship and fear and economic deprivation, sometimes irreversibly. What is more we all pay enormous medical costs for this, and there are costs to society and to the competitiveness of our companies in lost productivity. It is our mission at Keas to fix this for you. Clearly it isn’t an easy mission or a short-term one. While we think we have some great ideas about how to make this possible, we have a lot to learn in the course of this adventure."

Jobs at Salesforce

We are hiring at Salesforce. Drop me a line if you are interested in either a Dev Manager position or an Software Engineer position.

In search of excellence

I just finished "In Search of Excellence," by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman a very good book on building a flexible business:

The main points are:

* Managing ambiguity and paradox
* A bias for action
* Close to the customer
* Autonomy and entrepeneurship
* Productivity through people
* Hands on, value driven
* Back to the basics
* Simple form, lean staff
* Loose - tight properties

The recommend creating "clubby, campus-like environments, flexible organizational structures, volunteers, zealous champions, maximized autonomy for individuals, teams and divisions, regular and extensive experimentation, feedback emphasising the positive, and strong social networks."

Organizational Change

At work this year I've had the pleasure of rebuilding our development process. This has essentially been an organizational change program. I've learned a ton but a recent HBR article pointed out why org changes fail and I've found that this helped me refocus on completing the change.

Error 1: Not Establishing a Great Enough Sense of Urgency
Error 2: Not Creating a Powerful enough Guiding Coalition
Error 3: Lacking a Vision
Error 4: Undercommunicating the Vision by a Factor of Ten
Error 5: Not Removing Obstacles to the New Vision
Error 6: Not Systematically Planning for, and Creating, Short-Term Wins
Error 7: Declaring Victory Too Soon
Error 8: Not Anchoring Changes in the Corporation's Culture

Drucker, Drucker, Drucker

I love Drucker, I think the best thing you can do is go back to the original source and this guy is it. The first book on this list is for executives. The second two books are collections of his writings. If you are a new manager you could do a lot worse than reading these three books.

1) The Effective Executive

2) The Essential Drucker

3) Classic Drucker

What makes an effective executive?

I'm reading another Drucker book. I love Drucker. He's a great writer and deep thinker about people. Here is his advice for being an effective executive:

Ask what needs to be done?
Ask what is right for the organization?
Develop an action plan.
Take responsibility for decisions.
Take responsibility for communicating.
Focus on opportunities not on problems.
Run productive meetings.
Think and say we not I.

WoW work references are getting scary

OK, so Joi Ito started it all by saying WoW qualified you for work with his post.

Then we have a wired article:

A Wired article by John Seely Brown about World of Warcraft and what you learn when you play it.

And that's exactly what Gillett is doing. He accepted Yahoo!'s offer and now works there as senior director of engineering operations. "I used to worry about not having what I needed to get a job done," he says. "Now I think of it like a quest; by being willing to improvise, I can usually find the people and resources I need to accomplish the task." His story - translating experience in the virtual world into success in the real one - is bound to become more common as the gaming audience explodes and gameplay becomes more sophisticated. The day may not be far off when companies receive résumés that include a line reading "level 60 tauren shaman in World of Warcraft."

Now we have the final list of resume builder activities from Ross Mayfield:

As an employer I'm starting to look for some extracurricular qualifiers:

* Wiki use, of course
* Playing a role in World of Warcraft
* Blogging as context that goes beyond the resume and a sign of a good communicator
* Participation in ad-hoc events like BarCamp and Wiki Wednesday
* A basic level of connectivity in LinkedIn, but more importantly a pattern that shows valued connections, not trying to connect with everyone
* I actually think interests listed at the bottom of a resume like international travel or the outdoors still count for something

How funny that WoW, LinkedIn, wiki use, etc. are becoming part of the work lexicon.

If you like football and innovators

Read this article. It's how the Texas tech coach has created a new kind of football offense, that kills the competition by doing things that seem so clear in retrospect.

Non-linear managers

There is a theory in neural networks: Any number of linear layers has the same computational power as a single layer of linear processing nodes. Basically, introducing a linear function in between two linear processing layers doesn't increase the computational power of the network. If you are interested see the classic work Pereceptrons by Minsky and Pappert. Now what later researchers showed is that a non-linear processing layer increases the computational power of the system. So we have Input -> Linear Layer -> Output == Input -> Output != Input -> Non-linear layer -> Output. For example a linear network cannot solve the XOR problem but a non-linear one can.

Now organizations with managers can be thought of as a layered processing system with Inputs, middle management layers and outputs. If you are a manager in this type of system your goal should be to be a non-linear manager. This means don't simply summarize the results of the layer before you and pass it on. If you do you haven't increased the computational power of the system, and your manager could simply sum the results. You should be a non-linear function, increasing the computational power of the system and creating an organization that is more powerful with you than without you.

Interviewing for a Programming Job

I do a lot of technical interviewing for my job. If I was going to give advice to people doing interviews it would be the following.

Read the following three books:

	How Would You Move Mount Fuji? : Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle -- How the World's Smartest Companies Select the Most Creative Thinkers William Poundstone Little, Brown 2004-04-02 Sales Rank : 7510 See details at Amazon
	Algorithms in C, Parts 1-5 (Bundle): Fundamentals, Data Structures, Sorting, Searching, and Graph Algorithms (3rd Edition) Robert Sedgewick Addison-Wesley Professional 2001-08-31 Sales Rank : 82661 See details at Amazon
	Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job John Mongan Noah Suojanen Wiley 2000-05-15 Sales Rank : 1306 See details at Amazon

After you read these books:

Be preparted to write code on the board, discuss quicksort and know how it works, do anything with a linked list or a binary tree someone might ask you, discuss the running times of algorithms.

Have good answers prepared for questions about your background, especially anything that stands out.

Do research on the company where you are interviewing and come in with ideas for how to improve things.

DataPower acquired by IBM

IBM just acquired an XML acceleration hardware company the orginal post is here.

IBM acquired DataPower to help companies improve the performance, security and management of business processes built of reusable, open-standards-based software components, which operate independently from the applications and computing platforms on which they run. This increasingly popular approach, called Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), combines business operations with information technology. According to Gartner, an IT industry research firm, SOA will provide the basis for 80 percent of new software development projects by 2008. IBM plans to introduce a family of SOA appliances based on DataPower technology.

Net advertising on the rise

Internet advertising is on the rise, read more here:

"Internet advertising revenue, as a share of the approximately $256 billion spent on ads annually in the United States, is still a minor percentage of the whole. But Internet advertising is growing dramatically.

Revenue from online ads for the first six months of the year was approximately $5.8 billion, a new record and a 26 percent increase over the same period in 2004, according to a report issued Monday by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade association with about 200 members selling Internet advertising."

It's official, I work for a long tail company.

Just a few weeks ago Chris Anderson (the orginator of the long tail analysis of web companies) spoke at Salesforce.com's user conference. He extended long tail framework was extended to the software business with the basic idea being that an online application framework can allow software companies to make money in the niche application market. His analysis is here.

DreamForce

I just got out of my second day of DreamForce where my new leader Mark Benioff just got done presenting the App Exchange and I saw a presentation on the long tail of software by Chris Anderson and saw Adam Bosworth talk about intelligent evolution of software.

I was just struck by how much customers love the Salesforce App and am really motivated to build out the e-bay of online applications. Looks like a couple fun years are ahead at Salesforce. The basic idea is to create small applications that target the long tail of users. The quote from the talk, paraphrased here, was to go from a few applications serving millions of people to a million applications each serving a few people.

Four interesting companies

This is more a note to myself, but these are three interesting companies that have technology that I am working with currently.

SXIP

Sxip provides SSO solutions for websites using web services.

GROUNDWORK

Provides add-ons to the commodity network monitoring solution nagios.

IRONPORT

Provides email security and scalibility solutions in a device.

MYSPACE

The most successful social network founded to talk about music.