Wednesday April 12, 2006

Financial Analysis As part of an MBA we all have to study Financial Analysis of course, and learn about corporate structure, principal agent problems, and other things financial. It's all good useful stuff, if sometimes a little intense. It is amazing though how many managers there are in corporations all over the world though who clearly know little or nothing about finance. They're everywhere in fact. Most managerial courses in corporations focus on how new people managers should manage people, and often spend little or not time whatsoever on what it means to be a fiduciary. If you are responsible for a team of employees, then you are directing the resources of the coroporation and that makes you a fiduiary of sorts. Most new managers who say get promoted from engineering roles for example, only figure this out when they have to submit their first appropriation request for some equipment or project and get nit picked to death because they didn't quite do enough diligence in the preparation of the request. This is the fiduciary in action. Their manager may also not be well versed in the financial process, but knows what kind of questions the boss aways asks and so the process goes on. Then eventually the request, depending on it's size eventually hits the desk of a real financial manager for processing. Imagine if every front line manager went through not only 5 days or more of critical people management skills, but the equivalent amount of financial skills training. Then from the get go new managers are brought into the picture as to the way the machine works, and make more informed decisions from day one. I guess that's why the rest of us go and get MBAs to learn this stuff in more detail, as we realise how critical it is to running a business. It's not required to be formally trained but knowing this stuff is critical whatever management role you're in. Well there you have it. (2006-04-12 21:53:24.0) Permalink

Wednesday March 01, 2006

Weird Weird, I've just noticed that all of blog entries have been randomised in time! Weird. There not in the correct order at all. Never mind though, I ain't going to fix it. (2006-03-01 21:54:27.0) Permalink

Burning Out Am I burning out? I'm accountable for product quality for the first 90 days in the field of Sun's entire Ultrasparc IV+ product line at Sun, and that's a significant chunk of revenue. While that is going well, I also have to introduce Sun's next generation of server we are producing with Fujitsu. Lots going on let me tell you. It's quite an undertaking I feel. But is it too much. I guess I just need a vacation. What with two gorgeous kids, a pregnant wife, an EMBA and a busy but stimulating job, there seems to be littel time to sit down and just relax.
I'm in CA on business for a couple of days, and am sitting down at a friend's house taking it easy and kicking back. My friend is learning to DJ on his new mixing gear he just bought. Later on we'll probably crank it up louder. Then we'll be forced to start dancing and then I'll know i'm beginning to step outside of the mad world of working for a company that is on the brink of recovery (I hope - no forward looking statements here).
Got to figure out, how not to burn out. (2006-03-01 21:49:43.0) Permalink

Friday January 06, 2006

Manager Bloggers? I wonder how many managers are out there Blogging at Sun? Mmm, perhaps I can take a tally by getting comments on my blog? Who knows?

Either way, managing at Sun is a pretty dynamic experience, with the business changing so fast, really passionate people (most of the time), and challenges gallore there is virtually never a quiet day. Except today perhaps.

I just spent 8 weeks integrating two previously separate teams together and have been through the process of dividing up the work, creating leads, setting goals for the coming year (if they last that long:-), and was sitting back with an empty calendar ahead of me when I realised I had nothing to do. I was done for the year of FY04. My team was off busy delivering on their work, supporting our production team through end of quarter (especially interesting in Q4), and I went 'WOW'! My team rocks! I then wrote them all an email about how well they were doing, how hard they had worked to consolidate two factories into one, how proud of them I was about how they delivered on many major projects in simply record time and without barely a hitch. I have done my job, I've allowed them to do theirs. Management can be so rewarding! The sense of accomplishment when your team can go forth without hinderance and succeed is something else. I hope other managers feel the same way.

I see very little written about management outside of the world of formal journals? I've seen very little in blogs! I mean, OK, I'm a front line manager, so I'm not an exec with bigger business initiatives on my mind (although I do have those too, I'm just no influential enough yet). I'm here because the poeple who work for me ge the work done. They're the ones saving the company money at the end of the day, because without them what would I have to do?

I had an experience this year with an employee that convinced me I was doing something useful and profound for the company. This chap was bored, demotivated, not delivering and generally getting himself a bad rep! So i decided I needed him on my team, as I knew from the past that he was a very capable chap, having integrated E10K into our California factory several years before. Anyway, I got a lot of feedback that I shouldn't bother, that he was a pain etc - I heard it all. I decided they had to be wrong. Withing two weeks of being on my team I received email praising his work, his enthusiasm, his motivation, his go get it attitude, his everything. What a turn around. I simply took the hardest project I had going at the time, made him the lead and told him to get his teeth stuck into it and gave him a couple of other guys to help him out! He recently completed that project and moved to another team where after only a few weeks I received feedback from the manager asking why I had let him go! Well he had found his path and so I let him go take it.

Well there you have it, that's my story, and that's why I like management, and that's why good management can make a difference at Sun. (2006-01-06 15:45:03.0) Permalink

Wednesday November 09, 2005

HPC for Sun in Oregon During Rainy Season Tomorrow Sun has a ribbon cutting ceremony on an HPC facility on the Sun Hillsboro campus in Oregon. Using our CRS manufacturing capability (Customer Ready Systems), we built, tested, cabled, labelled, installed, configured and deployed a large number of clustered racks of our new Opteron servers in a matter of a few short weeks. John Fowler is coming for the official opening and the site is all abuzz with the excitement. It's great for our campus and it's all the product of lots of hard work by our site management, manufacturing and engineering teams. It's a first for Sun and is sure to generate less heat from a thermal perspective than any of our competitors can do and also is sure to generate quite a bit of heat as our customers get excited and hot under the collar at this awesome and beautiful display of benchmark busting compute power. Sun is truly shining on an otherwise rainy day (most likely) in Oregon.
Oh by the way we've got a bunch of other kick ass products in the pipe too so, the competition is on. (2005-11-09 19:59:53.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Sunday November 06, 2005

Preparing to go "On The Road" In the final planning stages for out trip from Texas to Portland. Why Texas you may ask, well the motohome I bought is in Texas and needs to be driven home! So yes it's gonna be hot, but we get to check out all the cool sights in AZ,NM and UT along the way. Should be an awesome trip. What remains to be seen is how our 18 month old daughter deals with the time on the road, and the heat, fortunately we have aircon as you would expect for a 37 Ft Diesel pusher. It's nearly the end of Q4 and I can't wait for a break. (2005-11-06 20:28:24.0) Permalink

Thursday November 03, 2005

All Wired in a Wireless World Have any of you noticed how many wires wireless devices actually need? For example my recently acquired bluetooth and my new cell phone both have different battery chargers, in fact I now have a box full of old cell phone chargers. Why is this? Is putting power into a device really that specialised that every single one requires a unique adapter? Anyway suffice to say I have more wires than I need for my wireless devices. Now the wind up wireless radio is truly a statement about the future IMHO. When will there be standards in this arena of charging? (2005-11-03 19:14:46.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Sunday October 09, 2005

MBA So I started an MBA, , up here in Oregon after much deliberation and decision making about whether the time commitment would be worth it, and I'm 4 weeks in. Well is it worth it? So far yes, it's been great to have a good and genuine reason to read and read and read, as well as learn and apply some of the stuff we learn almost immediately. For example, the first two classes are Law and Economics, which are presented at an entry level, but very interesting nevertheless to go back over some old ground (econ) and some new ground (law). Our Economics professor is actually the Oregon state economist, which is a great deal, as he lives in the real world as opposed to an Ivory tower. Law is a strange subject for the most part, more about trying to apply rule based logic to vague linguistic constructs, but fascinating in it's own way. First exercise for the reader, define reasonable. It's used a lot and is a key to a lot of cases. Anyway, it's just great to be exercising different parts of grey matter again beyond the usual meanderings of a work week as a manager, which is full of challenges, and interesting problems, but for the most part of a different nature. I hope to be able to change that by bringing some of this academia to bear on the job and spice it up a little. That's not to say that i'm bored, far from it, in fact couldn't be further from the truth, but they're not all my decisions I'm implementing and I want to have more ownership and influence. Hopefully this will help start the ball rolling in that direction. If you;ve thought about one but shied away, I understand, it's a big commitment, and apparently everyone has one already, so I've been told, but there's still a lot of value to be gained, from broadening ones perspective, which often in the narrow confines of your job you don't get to do. (2005-10-09 13:24:14.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Tuesday August 16, 2005

Strange Blog Encounter So I have not blogged in quite a while, but it seems someone read my blog! Well not that shocking, but the coincidence is this. My parents flew over to the US from the UK last week and my Dad was sitting in Frankfurt airport chatting to someone who works for SAP, and it seems that the chap from SAP recognised the name after my Dad introduced himself and asked if his son worked for Sun. So my Dad said yes and then the SAP sales guy said that he had read my blog! So this blog is about nothing more than a totally random blogging encounter. Mr SAP if you read this then please post a note to complete the roudn robin! (2005-08-16 08:07:40.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Tuesday November 02, 2004

Late Adopter with Questions

I used to be an early adopter of technology until financial (read two children) constraints made it hard to keep up with the speed things were moving. Anyway I just moved into the digital music world, and packed all 200 CDs away in a box last night, after ripping them all and dumping them onto my new iPod (I just love the interface) using iTunes, something like 7 Gb of data! Yes a little spend therapy made a big difference to my general state of mind, and I now need to find a back up strategy for my lap top, whose 30Gb drive is full. I have all my photos burned to CD, but feel the need to keep a double back up, and am wondering how to tackle this next problem. Any suggestions?

Friday October 29, 2004

A Few Days Off

I was getting a little burned out, so I'm taking a few days off. I still don't understand why corporations in the US dish out so little vacation to their hard working employees. Having said that, after 7 years at Sun (Last 4 in the US) I now finally get as many days per year as when I joined Sun in the UK all those years ago. Anyway so what is my point? Well think of all the folks who only get 2 weeks per year plus holidays. I get 4, and it's just about acceptable now. I know it's expensive, and admittedly I think the amount doled out in Germany and France is beyond is probably counterproductive, but does getting it wrong at the low end hurt corporations in an unanticipated way? Ultimately I believe, people are not able perform (read - enjoy their work and kick butt as a result) as much unless they feel refreshed when they show up every day. Not only that but the average working day at Sun is bordering on 10 Hours average anyway. What is simply remarkable is that people do it. I do it (thinking about trying to be more efficient with managing email (for another blog), my team does it. Countless others do it. It's obviously more than just a job for people. Is it sustainable? Do we burn out our brightest too quickly?

So I am enjoying my day off and writing my Sun blog? Hang on, why am i doing that? Well because, I never seem get round to it when I am working, cos I'm darned busy as it is, and I feel the need to write about it. I am currently in the middle of a break from the other work that dominates my life most wonderfully, my two children. They are both napping, so I get some time online to relax. Mmmm, I had never thought of browsing the internet as relaxing before, it's just something I did, looking for interesting snippets of information is very relaxing. Today I found the answer to the Google Labs Challenge at Mathworld. Whilst browsing I also notice how many of the execs at Google used to work for Sun. I guess that's why they are so successful :-)

So back to my offline world I go. I wonder if other people feel the same way aboutvacations in the US as a whole. I'm not just talking about Sun.

Wednesday July 28, 2004

Deploying Solaris 10 We run our two internal factories infrastructures on Solaris - of course - and test all (except our linux products) our products using Solaris - of course - and are starting to plan our move from Solaris 9 to Solaris 10 - of course. Just looking at the list of features it's a no brainer for us to make this move a priority in our team. Just about all aspects of running a data center are tackled in some way and to some extent, and our factories are very large and dynamic data centers with products moving through them all the time. Since we perform testing here, I am particularly looking forward to the improved fault management features as these can only be beneficial to our customers as we improve the quality of our products as a result of improved diagnosis of failures during the manufacturing process. The software application and daemon monitoring will also play a key role for us as we manage the availability of not jsut the hardware but the services themselves that depend on the hardware. (2004-07-28 11:05:00.0) Permalink

Texas 2 Oregon in 16 Days - By RV I just returned from my vacation of two weeks during which time I drove my recently purchased diesel RV from Texas to Oregon. The first thing I will say is that 2800 miles is a little bit too far to go in two weeks. One more week would have been perfect. However along the way we saw and spent time in some of the most incredible countryside I've ever seen, between monument valley, Dead Horse State Park, Canyonlands, Canyon De Chelly, the Columbia Gorge and the roads in between. I experienced a sense of incredible awe to see the results of billions of years of earth activity and the results. Nowhere I have been before have I enjoyed that feeling quite so much.

That said, I also drove some of the most boring roads ever laid down; I10 from San Antonio to El Paso, I40 north into New Mexico, I 15 north out of Utah and some of the trip through Idaho.

Now I am back at work and feeling refreshed. (2004-07-28 09:00:00.0) Permalink

Tuesday July 27, 2004

Managers Blogging ? I wonder how many people managers are out there blogging? Not enough probably. So here is a pitch for more managers to blog. I certainly get one hell of kick out of managing my team and helping and then watching them deliver qrtr after qrtr on projects that are tougher, harder and more challenging than they have ever been. Certainly as a manager, it doesn't get any tougher than managing in a tough economy, need I say more. Either way, it's something I put a lot of passion into, I love helping people be productive and grow in their careers and look back at themselves every year and see how much they have moved forward.

I also believe that good managers are a key asset to Sun, I've had a couple of iffy ones in my career but many more good ones, who have done for me what I can now do for others.

Anyway, I though I would pay a public tribute to my team, in High End Operations Engineering who have just performed incredibly this last year, helping Sun back to get back on the path to profitability, in our small way. (2004-07-27 13:42:20.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Friday June 25, 2004

skype.com - internet phone I just heard about SkyPe. Sounds pretty interesting. Anybody out there tried it yet? SOunds like free phone conversations to me! I will have to install it over the weekend and give it a shot? I guess all I need is someone to call :-) (2004-06-25 13:31:31.0) Permalink Comments [1]