Jay Littlepage: Life In Balance?

Life in Balance?

I named my blog "Life in Balance?" for a number of reasons, but
mostly as a question to regularly ask myself.  Today is a good day
to finally explain it.

First, it seems to surprise people that an executive at Sun has a
life. As a matter of fact one of the main reasons i've finished up my 16th year
at Sun is because the people i've worked with are fun and interesting no
matter what their level. True, it's harder to carve out time the higher
you go but not impossible, and not unusual - if you make it a priority.


I've always been a family first kind of guy. I always kept my family
life separate from my work life - I would put in the requisite long
hours at work but was really good at leaving it in the office. That's
what started to fray. Traveling a lot, having staff worldwide and
needing to communicate with them during their day, simply having a lot
to do - all made the separation i'd been proud of all these years
increasingly difficult. Ultimately it led me to request a leave of
absence from Sun - and to my great pleasure and gratitude Sun
agreed. 

One of the many things that I learned about myself during
my time off was that the boundaries i'd created simply weren't relevant
anymore. Separating "work" and "life" was always somewhat artificial, but in a
global economy it had become a real problem for me. My family is a
passion. Good health and the ability to use it (running, skiing) is a
passion. My avocation (woodturning) is a passion. And so was my
vocation (Sun). Why couldn't they co-exist? The answer, of course, is that they
could. And since my return last November, they have.

I learned one other thing about myself during the leave - and that was
that I really enjoyed gnarly, complex, challenging leadership roles
that mattered not only in my company, but in the market. 
It is part of what makes me tick.  And since my return
there just hasn't been a role at Sun that fit that bill.  In short
- life hasn't been in balance. 

So the time has come to move on to a new adventure.  Sun is a
fabulous company stocked to the gills with extremely talented
individuals and i'm more bullish about Sun than I have been in
years.  So to my friends I leave behind - keep putting out great
products and services - i'm still an investor!

iwork and the new workforce I've read with interest some of the recent backlash against telecommuting.  The most visible has been Randy Mott eliminating telework as an option for HP's IT workforce, citing the productivity gains from having everyone in the office.  But there have been plenty of others, including criticism of Sun's iwork program by current and former employees (a representive example here) citing slackers, abusers of the process, and assorted other ills.

By this logic corporations should hire employees, co-locate them where the boss can evaluate their performance and work ethic via cognative skills which border on the psychic.  They shouldn't partner with other companies, unless they are sure those companies have the same management by observation processes in place.... what?  You measure partners based upon their ability to meet spec?  You trust them to get the job done and take corrective action whenever necessary? What a novel concept.  Perhaps the next step might be to trust your employees.

In any population there will be a subset that takes advantage.  My high school used a modular system which allowed the students to schedule their classes each day.  Econ or civics might be offered 5 times per day, allowing us to schedule around "single musts" (for me, it was band and track).  It was beneficial for the vast majority of students.  But it was abused by a small but visible minority of students who occasionally scheduled classes around hours of slacking and smoking pot - which ultimately was the end of the mod system.  In similar fashion there will always employees who abuse a privilege, as there will be partners/suppliers that cut corners.

But this isn't an iWork problem - it is a management problem.  We live in a global economy with unprecedented linkage with supply chains, markets, and employees.  None of the this is location dependent.  Sure, people management/personnel development was easier when everyone was down the hall.  We did get to know each other better.  Spontaneous conversations generated out of the box ideas and forward progress.

On the other hand, we get a lot more done today. THe spontaneous conversations happen on IM or wikis or email or social networks.  I am sure I put in as many hours today as I ever have - they are just not all sequential.  They fit around my life.  Both my work and my family are the beneficiaries.  From a management perspective, i've learned to evaluate output and not get wrapped around the axle on how exactly that output is created.

There is no going back, which i'm presuming Randy Mott will figure out.  But more to the point - why would you want to?

Posted by jaylittlepage ( Jun 19 2006, 06:03:26 PM MDT ) Permalink Comments [2]

How paradigms shift
One of my favorite aspects of the roles i've played at Sun has been meeting with our customers.  This stems from the fact that I spent the formulative years of my career (defined as the years prior to my day-to-day activities being more influenced by Ram Charan than by James Gosling) as an IT customer myself.  During that time I tended to gravitate towards the application of new technologies  to solve whatever business problem or opportunity that was top of mind for the company.  Besides just being a heck of a lot of fun it was a constant challenge being an early adopter, but the payoff often had the potential to enable significant business change, ranging from productivity improvements that went right to the bottom line to disruptors that built share.

Potential being the operative term, because often times that's all it was.  

A "paradigm" refers to the set of practices that define a scientific discipline during a particular period of time.  A paradigm shift occurs when scientists encounter anomalies which cannot be explained by the universally accepted paradigm within which scientific progress has thereto been made.   My friends in marketing and in the industry analyst community can (and do) paradigm shifts with regularity, but it takes observation and the wisdom gained from hindsight to really understand that a significant shift occured.  Within IT introducing great technology is simply not enough - though we often convince ourselves that it is.  The shift occurs when the technology is put to use.  Technology for business' sake.  Increasingly, technology for society's sake.

Sun continues to produce fantastic, innovative products.  Increasingly we are delivering them as networked services, so that "assembly is not required" by our customers.  This will become increasingly important as more and more non-technical businesses form which rely completely on an internet storefront. 

Ahh, but innovation often happens during the assembly of a system by our customer, for that customer's business, in ways that we can assist with but cannot predict.   They are solving for their business; being a part of such solutions is the most rewarding thing we do.  And if you are a part of enough of them and squint your eyes you might see the next paradigm shift forming.  It takes technology and expertise and it's not happening in a lab.  It's happening at a customer location near you.
Posted by jaylittlepage ( Jun 06 2006, 06:22:03 PM MDT ) Permalink

Corporate scale, corporate eco-responsibility
Yesterday I had the pleasure of partnering with Sun VP of Eco-Responsibility Dave Douglas on a Broomfield campus visit by Congressman Mark Udall on the subject of eco-responsibility.  Dave did what Dave does - I can't wait to see him in action after he's been in the job for more than 3 weeks.  My job was to present thin clients.

Now it's been nearly 3 years since my time running Sun's IT Operations but there is to this day nothing that gets me wound up more than Sun Rays.  While they are in increasingly wide scale use it befuddles me that they haven't taken the world completely by storm.  But we've had them in place for quite some time now here at Sun, and it's just a part of how we work.  I can't imagine life without the sunray@home that i'm typing this on.

For our visit with the congressman I looked specifically at the energy savings from our sunray infrastructure.   Here's just a few of the facts I was able to share with my congressman:

Broomfield has just over 2500 SunRay1 thin clients (at 13 watts typical power each) being served by a failover group of v880 servers.  When I added up the energy use to run this config (including the servers) and compared it to the energy we would have consumed if we were outfitted with typical 200w PCs we're saving the planet 1,875 megawatts of electricity each and every year.  That's 7,500 tons of coal that doesn't need to get burned annually, just in Colorado, because we're doing our jobs each day on Sunrays.  The story gets even better when you look at the new 4-watt Sun Ray 2, and our new T2000 servers.  Based upon some early testing with the T2000 by the ITOPS team in Broomfield it seems that we could support the same number of sunrays with half the servers.  And given that the T2000 typically uses 275watts - the energy savings add up (hypothetically in Colorado it would mean another 1,000 tons of coal not burned a year).

I wanted to keep the analysis simple so didn't even look at cooling or carbon.  Even without that we're making a significant impact on the planet - at corporate scale.  To put it into perspective, the day we talked with Congressman Udall a 3.5kW solar photovoltaic system was being installed at his house.  This is great citizenship by the congressman, personal leadership by example.  But it would take 183 such systems operating at full capacity 8 hours per day, every day, to equal the power savings we're getting from our choice of desktops.  Thankfully, it's conceivable that 183 home photovoltaic systems will be installed this year.  But how many corporations are leading by example?  I'm glad I work for one of them, but the planet needs more corporations, cities, and school districts making energy conservation even more of a priority, because they have the scale to make a positive impact quickly.

So if you are reading this on a thin client, thank you.  If not, contact us!


Posted by jaylittlepage ( May 31 2006, 05:38:41 PM MDT ) Permalink

iWork road trip

I have been a big fan of iWork for a long time. One of my early jobs at Sun was as IT's first nomadic computing architect, back when the gypsy was our portable sparc workstation and interactive unix was being incorporated into Sun as our x86 offering. Laptops changes components so fast that it was a race to release a version of x86 solaris before Toshiba moved to a new video chip, etc. I'm not an official WFM-er but I probably put in 10-15% of my hours on my sunray at home and love it.

So it was with this perspective that I launched into an iWork roadtrip. Back in August I drove out to Portland, OR with my daughter Erin and dropped her off at UP. Tomorrow's the end of her freshman year so I headed out of Broomfield yesterday afternoon to load her up and drive her home.

2500 miles in 3 1/2 days is not my idea of a vacation. So I basically planned a work trip. Why not? i'm constantly reading blogs like Dale's about the different places a person has been and connected. The web is becoming pervasive, so why not keep me connected, productive and sane while I drive x-country?

Day 1 didn't start too well. I left the office just after lunch and headed north on US287 and called into my meetings just fine until I got just north of Fort Collins, CO. Bloop. No cell signal until Laramie, WY; so much for that meeting. No problem, Interstate 80 is one of the most heavily traveled truck routes in the country, it'll be wired, right? Well, sort of. If I was within 5 miles of a town, yes. But Wyoming is a big place, and the towns are far apart. After calling into one meeting 3 times and dropping after a couple of minutes each time I decided I was being more disruptive than productive, and gave up. I started thinking of a blog entry entitled "inotWork". I got in late to my hotel in Ogden, UT and had to park a block away from the hotel due to construction. I was grumpy and tired and had 750 miles to go. But they had free wireless at Hampton Inn, so I was able to catch up on email before hitting the sack.

Day 2 was much better. I checked out early. The hotel had "to go" bag breakfasts and coffee. I was on the road by 5:30am. The Ogden-Logan valley was gorgeous as the sun rose. As I passed Corrinne, UT I saw the exit for the Golden Spike National Monument. One of the best books i've ever read was Ambrose's Nothing Like It In The World , about the buildout of the transcontinental railroad. Two efforts, starting on either coast, paralleling each other in points, both racing to be the first to complete and be the standard. Ultimately the golden spike was where the two efforts joined into one, changing the transportation industry and the US economy forever. Read it if you get the chance. This was the Internet of the 19th century.

Cell coverage was great. No digital divide on I-84. I got as much done on the road today as I would of in the office. The Red Lion Inn in Portland had free wireless, too (why isn't it free in all hotels and airports?). I caught up on email, reviewed a presentation by phone with Sara Gates, had dinner in a Thai restaurant near campus with Erin, and spent the evening moving her out of her dorm.

Now I just have to turn around and drive back. At least I know the path is wired!

sensors where you least expect them

Inspired by Mike's pictures of the sensors being placed in Devil's Slide i've been trying to be more observant of just how ubiquitous network devices are in the world around us.

Yesterday all I needed to do is look down at my shoe. Attached to the lace was a thing called a ChampionChip. Let me digress, and i'll come back to this.

One of the things I did during my little break from Sun was get myself back in shape. I've lived now in one of the most fit cities in the world (Boulder, Colorado) for the past 7 years and during that time have basically been a slug. One of the things I realized about myself is that i'm competitive and goal oriented (duh) and during the last few years I was "jogging" with no goal in mind rather that "training" for something.

So now the creaky old body is in training for this year's Bolder Boulder on Memorial Day. I've run the race (using that term loosely) every year since I moved to Colorado with the exception of last year, when I was recovering from a back injury. But of the estimated 50,000 people who will participate in the event this year, most will be happy just to finish, and the majority will walk. So where's the motivation to train?

It comes in two forms. First, if you don't want to be behind 40,000 walkers you need to run a qualifying time to get into a seeded wave and start in front of them. The second is having an 18 year old daughter who has gotten herself into great shape running and playing soccer at school this year, and whom has inherited dad's competitive gene. My motivation this year? Erin is going to be faster than me some day, but not this year. Her goal? Beat dad. Simple.

So back to the ChampionChip. It is an RFID device that does one thing - transmit a unique id when it passes through a magnetic field. At the 5k race I ran yesterday the runners passed over mats at the start and finish lines that generated the magnetic field, which activated the chips, which sent their ids, which were captured and timestamped. Subtract the times and you get a very accurate race time.

So Erin and I ran qualifying races 1000 miles apart, each with an rfid chip tied to our shoes. Within a couple of hours I could see her time online, and she could see mine. Twenty seconds separated our times. 26 more training days til Bolder Boulder, time to get to work!

passing the baton

We just finished the SMI Leadership Conference today in Santa Clara. I've been at Sun since 1990 and an executive here since 1994 - I haven't been really counting, but I believe this is the 22nd leadership conference i've been to. That gives me some perspective to look back from, in order to look forward.

Over the years the meetings have really taken two basic forms - back pats or butt kicks. In both cases usually deserved. I'm not saying this to diminish the need for the meetings, or the value of the alignment and networking that takes place at them - but with time they tend to blur a bit.

Only three of the 22 meetings really stand out for me, even if the exact dates of the meetings don't.

The first one was the meeting where Scott McNealy told us all that we were not going to follow the herd and move to Windows. We were doubling down on our commitment to Solaris and would compete head on with what seemed to be an unstoppable force. If Sun had been a democracy we would have done what our competitors were in the process of doing - and we would have stopped innovating. The majority of the leadership team thought this was a mistake - but Scott's was the only vote that mattered. Good thing. Not only did that singular decision save the company but in retrospect provided choice and forced the adoption of open standards for the developing public internet. While many of Scott's leaders in that meeting disagreed, we committed. I truly believe this was one of the pivotal moments in the the history of the computing industry.

The second meeting that really sticks was the retirement meeting for some of the key leaders that brought us through this growth period and enabled us to be the "dot in dot-com". Shoemaker. Lehman. Hambly. Zander. This was pretty emotional for all of us - Larry Hambly was my boss, he gave me my first VP shot, and I learned a ton from him - and it felt like we were just trying to put the best face possible on a tough, but understandable, situation. Scott asked us all to re-up, and these guys had all earned the right to move on to the next step in their lives.

The third memorable meeting just ended. This meeting is not going to blend into the rest. My kids know I tear up in sentimental movies and part of this meeting was like that. Hearing Crawford Beveridge and Jonathan speak not only about what Scott meant to the industry but to them, and their careers - well... i'm just glad I was there (read
Jonathan's blog entry to get a feel for it).

If the story ended there, it would be a great testimonial to Scott (which it was). But the story just starts there. Unlike the previous transition meeting, this was a new beginning. Jonathan's already earned the respect of his team - all of us. The transparency the financial analysts heard on the earnings call was there in the meeting. We have a ton of work to do - with a great team, healthy growing market, and incredible set of products and services to do it with. Unlike last time, this wasn't spin.

I grew up running track. And perhaps the only thing I enjoy better than watching a relay race is being a part of a relay race. Watching a runner leave everything they have on the track and hand off to a teammate just as strong, just as fit, just as capable, but fresh - and watching that person take the baton and explode out of the passing lane at full speed, in full stride - there's nothing like it.

Nice handoff, Scott. Watch us run!

picking up where I left off

After being prodded to start a blog (in particular, about Services - an important part of Sun's present and future as the network that is the computer continues to grow in size, complexity, and importance to the planet). I suspect a lot of people do exactly what I did - get excited about it, start blogging, get a few entries in and realize that if you don't have the extrovert gene (for you Myers-Briggs fans i'm an ISTP) blogging is pretty hard, and you slow to a crawl.

I made the added mistake of prodding Mike Harding into moving his internal blog to the outside world. Mike is both prolific and interesting and both raised the bar on me and gave me a subtle kick in the pants for going dark.

So it's back on the airwaves for me, hopefully more consistently. Posted by jaylittlepage ( Apr 26 2006, 07:16:27 PM MDT ) Permalink

Where was SOA when I needed it?

There was an interesting package of stories in Network World today, one of which featured Sun's own Greg Papadopoulos, on "the future of software. All are quick reads. All 5 stories talk about the move to software as a service, and 3 of the five hone in on SOA as the means to that end.

Which made me think back to my IT career. I spent the first 20 years of my professional career (as opposed to my pre-professional career pitting peaches and tending bar, among other things) in IT, starting in in aerospace. I was part of the industry as we progressed from batch to client server to n-tier, from mainframes to minis to workstations to PCs to thin clients. One of my first jobs was writing an interface to the Aerospace firm's MRPII system, written 15 years earlier in RPGII. "Interface" is probably too strong of a term - no one really understood the core of the code (we did not have source nor documentation for large portions of it) so what I really did was carefully determine what could be fed into the beast as input to get the output we needed for a new set of systems - without breaking anything. As far as I know some recent college graduate is still doing the same.

While in IT at Sun a considerable investment in time and architecture was invested in the information highway, a publish and subscribe mechanism which was ahead of it's time - preceding helpful web service standards such as xml, uddi and bpel, and preceding the enabling capabilities gained from solutions such as Sun's Composite Application Platform Suite. The information highway did keep us from writing point to point interfaces between what was then hundreds of systems but it was complex to maintain, and because it was proprietary it was eventually abandoned.

In both examples the IT organization I was in was dealing with the tension between a dynamic business, static systems, and limited resources. Rewriting everything was a non-starter. Integrating proprietary interface methods into the core of our ERP system made it very difficult and expensive to upgrade. IT is never "done". An IT organization taking more of a "pac-man" approach to component change, replacing applications exposed only through web services, is going to have the flexibility to stay up with the needs of their business - whether the systems are internally facing or external facing - while avoiding the upheavals of large, "big bang" systems migrations.

IT could be a fun place to be again...

Does the world need another blog? Well, yes - according to James

I just got back from Sun's analyst conference - as always it was invigorating, fun, stressful, illuminating, informational, and exhausting. It was great to spend time with interesting folks that I communicate with throughout the year but don't necessarily get to see much, other than events like this.

So what does this have to do with blogging, you ask? Well, i've been asked to blog before and was really resistant to the idea. Last year at this time I was running Sun's Customer Networked Services group and had been strongly encouraged to start a blog by my communications manager. Frankly, an executive blogging just because it is another comms medium is a really bad reason to do so. The blogs that interest me personally are written by people that are blogging because they want to, and have consistently interesting things to say. I didn't want to blog, and didn't think I could be very interesting on a regular basis.

The second time blogging was suggested by my friend Hal Stern last summer, just before I headed out on a four and a half month escape from the business world. I was planning on doing a lot of traveling and Hal wanted to see a blog from the road. While it was a little more appealing this time, it would have required me to interact with a computer on a regular basis during my leave. I've spent my entire career in the IT industry. Getting away meant getting away. The most advanced technology I used last summer was a 2002 Bobcat MT50.

Third time is the charm. I spent time at the conference yesterday with James Governor of Redmonk. James was suggesting in his usual subtle, understated, nuanced manner that the Services business within Sun (of which I am a part) was doing some really interesting things but was doing a consistently poor job of getting the message out. He asked how many bloggers we had in Services, and I could only name a few - reinforcing his point. While Services has always been an important part of Sun and is integral to our future direction there are many ways to get the word out - blogging being an important and underutilized one.

Message received. And it will be a lot easier to convince others to blog if i'm doing it myself. Thanks, James.