Darrin Johnson's Weblog: Need for speed...

“Never take a person's dignity: it is worth everything to them, and nothing to you.” - Frank Barron

Recently a colleague made a comment to the effect that "We didn't layoff the person, we just eliminated their position" which got me to reflect on all too frequent occurrence of RIFs - reduction in force. We see it in the headlines, we hear it from friends and family, we see it in our own companies and sometimes we are affected directly. It is most often driven by economic necessity and sometimes due to a shift in corporate strategy or investment. Corporate retrenchment is a reality that has become all too real.

The reality of RIFs also comes with the challenge of needing to deal with the trauma of impacting someone's life and/or being impacted which inevitably leads to feelings of guilt, disbelief, fear, anger, frustration, relief, etc. Also the more often it occurs, the stronger the desire to insulate oneself from the trauma and emotions. Having lived through more than 20 RIFs in my 16+ year career, I feel it is very important to not be insulated and go through the cycle of loss each and every time.

Becoming desensitized to the trauma can have serious consequences. First on an emotional level bottling up the issues can have a longer term emotional impact. Second it results in avoiding contingency planning especially for ones own career. Third, the strategic and investment decisions aren't guided by the lessons learned. Most importantly it makes it too easy to diminish the real impact on the individual(s) being laid off. The euphemistic comment made by the colleague might make it easier accept the action but diminishes the impact on the individual and in some sense dehumanizes them.

As an individual, and especially as a manager, it is critical to understand the impact of a RIF on an individual including their career, livelihood, family, etc. to at the very least empathize and hopefully be supportive in whatever way possible. Giving them the understanding and respect they deserve is the least I can do to preserve their dignity.

I haven't figured out why I like this picture of Damien Farnham. In some sense it it is classical head shot in terms of composition but then again not. It was taken while I was fooling around with my camera as he was working on his laptop. The light of the display brightens his expression of mirth which captures Damien's nature. Also it feels more natural since he isn't staring into the camera. The graininess (caused by taking the picture at a high ISO) also seems to enhance the picture.

Photo of a lion cub was taken at the Wild Animal Park park in San Diego. The picture was taken with a Nikon D300 and Nikkor 18-200mm AF VR lens. Minor cropping was done to improve the composition slightly and the colors were sharpened a bit.

As a manager it is far too easy to focus on "meeting the numbers" -- finishing up that critical presentation, making sure every engineer is delivering on their deadlines, overcoming the never ending stream of email or voicemail, confronting customer escalations, squeezing in that last meeting of the day, etc. Employee morale all too often becomes an after thought or simply not a thought at all with the weight of the "world" on our management shoulders. However in my experience sacrificing the investment in the morale of employees is a significant impediment to "meeting the numbers" and diminishes the perceived and real value of managers. Additionally bad morale has a tendency to spread even though only one person started with an issue.

Simply put, managers can't solve all the issues that can cause morale problems -- bad economic conditions, corporate layoffs, death in a family, etc. However we can and should do what we can within the areas that can be influenced, often times needing to be a bit creative. There are numerous ways to help morale -- say "Great job" on a job well done, wish somebody a Happy Birthday, comment on their blog/microblog, ask them how their family is doing, learn about what interests them beyond working, give them a day (or more) off in recognition of a major achievement, buy them lunch, publicly recognize their achievements, be flexible on hours of work or working from home, wander the halls (or call them up) to have informal chats, reduce the number of meetings, etc. The great thing is that for the most part these are zero cost efforts, can be done even if there isn't a morale issue, and are simply good management practices.

“The best morale exist when you never hear the word mentioned. When you hear a lot of talk about it, it's usually lousy.” -- Dwight D Eisenhower.

I was recently reminded of the importance of helping employees to set their priorities. I am not talking about how to prioritize specific work or deliverables, but more general life priorities which often get lost in the drive to deliver, survive life events, etc. The issue of life priorities has recently arisen on several fronts - general economic pressures, family members dying, babies being born, and generally working too hard.

The priorities are simple - self first, family second and work third - in that order. Although these priorities can be switched it is in my experience that there is a price to be paid, and a potentially high one at that. Nobody on their death bed will ever say "I should have worked more" or "I should have spent less time with my kids." Barack Obama did the right thing to visit his grandmother before she died. I did the same thing recently.

There is a real benefit for me as a manager and benefit to company. Employees who share these priorities tend to have better morale, tend to work hard, and are much more receptive to stepping up to extraordinary challenges. Having work-life balance in ones life and family makes it much easier to achieve balance at work and in turn be a more valuable employee.

I have been an avid gamer all the way back to playing the original Oregon Trail from MECC via a "dumb" terminal connected to a central mainframe using an acoustic coupled modem. Fortunately gaming has come a long way especially playing on my Xbox 360 consoles (Standard and Elite thanks to my wife!). Here are my favorite Xbox 360 games (in order):

1. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - The ultimate console RPG with hundreds of hours of game play.
2. Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (GRAW) 2 - This game turned me into a huge fan of tactical shooters.
3. Halo 3 - An outstanding first person shooter and likely the first to get me into online play.
4. Bioshock - An immersive first person shooter like no other. Who's your Big Daddy?
5. Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars - Best darn RTS available on a console with easy to use controls.
6. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas - Another worthy tactical shooter.

How did these games get on my favorites list? Mostly because they are easy to learn (sorry I am not of the "combos" generation), immersive (it helps in HD), and allows with lots of interruptions with out penalizing the player.

There are others (e.g. Call of Duty 3, GRAW, Gears of War, FEAR, Crackdown, Lost Planet, etc.) which I own but haven't gotten around to playing so I can't rank them as of yet. However there are a number of cool games on the horizon that might keep me from getting around to the older games:

• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
• Blacksite: Area 51
• Tom Clancy's EndWar
• Grand Theft Auto IV

So many cool games and so little time to play.

While cleaning out my office (see previous blog) I came across a stack of periodicals that I haven't gotten around to, nor will ever get around to, reading. It was pretty clear to me that from an eco-responsibility perspective that it didn't make sense for me to get "hard copy" versions of these because I had clearly demonstrated that I wasn't going to read them. Additionally they are a relatively inefficient (e.g. low signal to noise ratio) way to get the information that I am interested in. So instead it makes much more sense to get e-subscriptions via RSS/XML feeds (see previous blog) to stop wasting paper while tailoring the information to my needs. Network World is a great example of a weekly periodical (fortunately they went to smaller magazine size) that also has a robust set of available RSS feeds to select from. Channel Reseller News is another example of a weekly magazine that has very good selection of RSS/XML feeds at http://crn.com/rss/rssSignup.jhtml. The updside is less clutter, less wasted paper, and better tailored information. The downside though is that diameter of the information fire hose only gets bigger.

The blog action day on the environment earlier this week got me thinking about my work office which is, as my mother would say, a "pigsty". The clutter is largely a result of giving higher priority to working (e.g. meeting with people, dealing with email, etc.) rather than taking the time to sort through the mess to clean it out. However I have taken a different look at my office by putting on my eco-responsibility hat and thinking in terms of the eco opportunity cost of not cleaning it. What outdated and unused documents sitting there could be recycled for a better use? What piece of equipment could be passed to somebody who could actually use it rather than it gathering dust and eventually being e-waste? These are some of the simple questions I asked myself.

Although it is a work in progress here is what I have done so far:

• Recycled an equivalent of two reams of paper
• Returned five or so VPN Token Cards to be refurbed/recycled
• Passed a set of Solaris Internals books to an engineer who could use it
• Gave an Intel Developer Forum backpack from a recent conference to a colleague whose son could use it
• Gave away a fiction book that I will never get around to reading
• Cleaned out partially filled boxes to recycle/reuse the boxes and distribute the equipment in the boxes to team members to use
• Took home eight or so lunch bags to reuse (Note: Starbuck's bags are great for this)
• ...

There is no need to calculate carbon offsets, watts per hour saved, etc. to see the obvious eco-benefit of taking the time to do something as simple as cleaning your office.

Today, October 15, is Blog Action Day with the focus being on the environment. Click on the banner for more information:



My contribution to Blog Action Day was the blog titled "Watt's Up...Component Power Consumption...". Enjoy!

Eco-responsibility is a hot topic (pun intended :)) at Sun and certainly worldwide with the recent announcement of Nobel Peace prize. One of the questions that comes up often is "What really consumes power in a system?", so here is a good table that I found on tomshwardware.com for desktop power consumption:

Component	Best Case	Worst Case
Power Supply	5-15 W	40-60 W
Motherboard	10-15 W	30-50 W
Processor	12-30 W	60-120 W
RAM	5-15 W	30-50 W
Hard Drive	3-5 W (2.5")	10-15 W (3.5")
Graphics Card	3-10 W (integrated)	25-180 W (PCI Express)
Total	38-90 W	195-475 W

The information above gives are really good starting point for understanding power consumption in a system.

I say "staring point" because components like CPUs, video cards, and memory are increasingly becoming power pigs. An Intel Dual Core Xeon Processor (5080) consumes up to 130 watts per processor and an AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ consumes 125 watts per processor with multipe processors per motherboard being a common option (reference). NVIDIA's flagship GeForce 8000 GTX graphics card consumes 277 watts loaded and other cards measure up to 387 watts (reference). New fully buffered DIMMs (FB-DIMMs) are now pushing over 10 watts per DIMM (and remember you generally have 2-4 DIMMs in a desktop).

As part of being eco-responsible it is important to consider "Watt's in your system?". :) Seriously though, the next time your decide to buy a new system, or upgrade an existing one, consider the philosophy "less is more" by asking what do you really need. Getting a GeForce 8000 GTX may be cool but unless you are a hard core gamer it will likely be a waste of money and power. Maybe getting one 2 GB DIMM instead of two 1 GB DIMMs or getting two 1 TB hard drives instead four 500 Gig drives will give you the same capacity with less power consumption.

Tivo, and DVRs in general, have been both a boon and bane to society. On one hand they do a great job recording the shows you want to see and other hand they record ALL the shows you want to see. The consequence is that you end up watching more television than ever before. Google Reader (www.google.com/reader) is also both a boon and bane. Gone are the days of trying to memorize websites and RSS feeds, having bookmark lists the length of your arm, custom links on your desktop, etc. Google Reader creates a fire hose of information with a remarkably easy to use interface and even provides easy to add bundles on a variety of topics including news, sports, technology, video, etc. What you don't find in the bundles can easily be added manually or by clicking on any RSS feed icon. Once you have your feeds in place it is trivial to scan them to either ignore them (and the counter automatically decrements) or clicking on them for more information. Google Reader even gives you trends to show how addicted you are:

From your 81 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 15,280 items, starred 1 items, shared 0 items, and emailed 0 items.

Ironically one of my feeds is Zen Habits which recommends to simplify your life and shy away from such foolish tools. What can I say I am addicted! Those of you who still rely on memorization, bookmarks, custom links, etc. should give Google Reader (or similar tool) a try.

W. Edwards Deming has been quoted as saying, "Whenever there is fear, you will get wrong figures." I would like to propose the corollary of "Don't fear figures because they may be wrong." Often it seems we are presented with facts, figures, metrics, etc. which we automatically assume they are accurate and (re)act accordingly. However there are some basic questions that should be asked to critically analyze such data: What was the methodology used to generate the numbers?, Is the underlying data reliable that was used to generate the numbers (e.g. bad data in, bad data out)?, Does the intent of the numbers match up with the data?, etc. Understanding the intent of the numbers is particularly important because it can have a direct impact on both the methodology and the accuracy of the underlying data.

For example, bug metrics are often used to imply the quality of a product from a customer perspective. However in reality most bug databases include bugs that will never been seen by customers or have bugs that are seen by a repeated number of customers. When looking at the data it is important ask the question of whether or not the former should be excluded and the later should be given extra significance. This is particularly important for the downstream use of the data including prioritizing and resourcing which bugs to work on. A priority 2 hit by several customers should probably get resourced before a priority 1 bug that a customer is unlikely to ever see. Again the key is to always have a critical eye for any facts, figures, metrics, etc. that come your way because through validating them you will make better decisions.

I recently came across the term "heterarchy." The contemporary definition is "a form of institutional organization based on distributed intelligence and collaborative decisions rather than hierarchical structures. A heterarchy is an organizational structure resembling a network rather than the top-down tree of a hierarchy (www.yourdictionary.com)." Within a heterarchy the decision-making (e.g. power and authority) is distributed horizontally rather than vertically in a hierarchal organization. Some would consider a heterarchy to be the opposite of hierarchy but generally a hierarchical organization is constructed of vertically connected heterarchical elements with each of the elements having bounded decision-making authority (wikipedia.org).

Can a pure heterarchy (e.g. lacking the hierarchical framework) exist in a corporate environment? Or more importantly what conditions need to exist to make it successful without the loss of efficiency? If it can be made to work, it would seem that there is a tremendous value in leveraging this type organizational structure as a means to adapt to the often often dynamic nature of some business environments. Having the ability to dynamically connect a network of experts, empowering them to make the decisions, delivering on the objective(s) and then dissolving the organization for reuse for the next objectives seems like a powerful tool. Do any of you have pointers or anecdotal information where heterachical structures have worked?

My wife and I decided to take the long way home after a weekend in Half Moon Bay to have lunch at Zelda's in Capitola, CA. Right as you enter Santa Cruz is Donnelly Chocolates in an unassuming building (1509 Mission Street, Santa Cruz, CA) that is easy to miss. However you certainly don't want to miss and is worth making a frequent pilgrimage to get some of the best chocolates (better than Pierre Marcolini, Woodhouse Chocolate, Joseph Schmidt, etc.). Truffles, bar chocolate, baking products, liquor bombs, toffee, etc. are all superb. The huge variety of flavors can appease any taste and make it nearly impossible to pick. What I particularly appreciate is the high quality and consistency of the chocolates which makes it even easier to go back again and again.

Donnelly Chocolates
1509 Mission Street
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Phone: (831) 458-4214
Toll Free: (888) 685-1871
www.donnellychocolates.com

Here are some of the cool RSS feeds (and websites) that I use to track new gadgets:

• Engadget (website)
• Everything USB News, Reviews, Tips (website)
• Gear & Gadgets Section - Ars Technica (website)
• Ubergizmo (website)
• Wired Gadgets (website)
• Woot! - One Day, One Deal (website)

Anybody have any other suggestions?