Thursday November 18, 2004

Solaris 10 Squabbles, Conversation and Synchronization

My mind is scattered this morning. So many different ideas going in so many different directions. Here are a couple of them.

Solaris 10 and Squabbling
I'm sure I am just stating the obvious but it seems that HP pretty much played into Sun's hands by starting a debate about Solaris 10. The debate between Martin Fink of HP , and a lot of the Sun blogs, and some non Sun blogs is entertaining to watch and has to be good for Solaris 10. On the other hand Mr. Fink is obviously a smart man and maybe a public squabble is really his way of drawing attention to HP Linux. Isn't that what the under dog does to point to himself against the clear winner?

Conversation, Alignment, and Change Acceleration
I've replied to every comment/question that has come over the JDS Preview Comments alias. It has been a great way to learn about what is going on. It has also been a great way to identify issues and engage resistance. And last but not least it has been a great way to build acceptance and accelerate the change to JDS. I don't have an exact count but I think I've had email conversations with at least 200 people. It has been a really powerful change acceptance/acceleration tool.

Listening to the Sun leadership conference over the last two days I heard a discussion about building synchronization within Sun and about employee frustration when we appear to be working at cross purposes. One of the suggestions was to have a place or a person to whom employees could go to to get these kinds of questions answered. What is really good is that Sun employees care and are not quiet about raising issues. Someone once told me that you really need to start worrying when a vocal employee goes quiet. It means they have given up and are actively looking for another job. I have always liked it that most Sun employees are in the vocal category. It is an demonstration of how much we care. Anyway I like the idea of a person answering employees questions about synchronousness and direction. Engaging employees in conversation can be really powerful.