Tag Archives: technology

Leadership Thoughts On The Even-More-Digital World: Part 3

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Because collaboration is so important to creating value, a leader needs to be able to create support, negotiate, find partnerships and get through resistance to achieve the goal. But to make this work a leader needs integrity and cannot survive as pure politician. Customers and clients will only interact and make desire exchanges when they can trust an organization.

Organizations are also falling under increased regulatory scrutiny, here to a leader’s integrity is extremely important. In a data-based society trust must be part of the foundation of many relationships.

Because it is so easy to reach clients and customers across the world organizations have been held hostage and the ransom to conduct business is that they must think globally. “Locally” is anywhere one is doing business and understand the needs and values of each locality is an absolute must.

Specialized interactions that take into consideration even the most niche’ needs of potential partner or customer is no longer a marker of excellence but an expectation.

While the ideas here are generalized and certainly not exhaustive it is a solid base on which to build a new way to think about leading.

Leadership Thoughts On The Even-More-Digital World: Part 2

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This new and digitized age also asks leaders to be hero whose superpower is both decisiveness and humility. They are needed in times of crisis to make bold decisions but they are also need to bring in people with, perhaps, very different backgrounds, skills and personalities. They need to be willing to learn from those who have less experience leading. They need to be inclusive; to be a good listener. They need to understand new technology but also how that new technology will touch and change all aspects of our society.

Continuing from this idea, it used to be that a leader could delegate away responsibilities concerning technology. New technologies can change the way an organization does everything. Therefore, a leader needs to understand how the technology will benefit the company.

Simultaneously a leader now needs to understand and care about people, how new technologies impact their lives. A great leader would bring his team together in such a way everyone walks away having a significant and far-reaching understanding of how something new will change everything, both in business and in their personal lives.

The purpose and value of an organization are very important in a world where disruption and change are constants.

Inside uncertainty, leaders who know very specifically what the purpose and values of the organization are can use them to guide the organization toward meaningful value creation. As the organization changes, the leader needs to be grounded in what its purpose and values. While purpose and values do change, they can serve as a foundation for everything else.

Leaders more than ever need to be willing to quickly and effectively try new things. But these experiments cannot come without limits Purpose and value provide those limits.

Leadership Thoughts On The Even-More-Digital World: Part 1

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While the world has become more digital and more complex that simple statement doesn’t encapsulate the far-reaching implications of digital technology. Unlike other technologies before it, the changes to our social ecosystem caused by digitization have touched and changed almost everything.

To survive as a value-creator, a leader needs a new set of skills.  This new set of skills include things like rely not only on one’s strengths but an ever-expanding skill set. Leaders learned to work with people who think different and come from many backgrounds. They put an emphasis on collaboration, especially in instances of serious differences.

Leaders more than ever have to think about what the future is going to look like and what their organization’s role in that future is going to be. Leaders need to be highly strategic and have the ability disassociate from day-to-day concerns to look into the horizon. They should always be looking for a way to create value.

However, being strategic isn’t enough. The new leader also needs to be able to execute plans to find new ways of making value. Usually, these decisions and putting them into action has to be done quickly as our world moves more and more rapidly.

Working from Home Part 1: Technology

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Working from home for the first time can be a challenge but here are some tips to get you going.

First, get your technology sorted. This means hardware and software. Your IT department may or may not have guides written to get you started. If you are working with any kind of sensitive information, especially the kind a company can be legally liable for, you’ll want to know for certain that information stays secure. If you aren’t provided with any specific IT instructions, guidelines or help make sure to inquire on your own.

Make sure you’ve got your home WiFi and work computer talking to each other and getting along before the first day of work. Make sure all your software functions as it should and that you can log into whatever you need to just as you do at work.

If you are going be relying heavily on video conferencing, make sure your internet connection has enough bandwidth to handle the calls. You’ll want to make some test calls, maybe with a peer from work, to check this.

If your connection is too slow, don’t immediately upgrade your service. There are several things to look into to open up some bandwidth on your current connection. If you don’t absolutely require video, making an audio only conference call takes far less bandwidth. Other users, like kids, may be using a ton of bandwidth if many of them are accessing the internet from different devices at once. You may need to set ground rules for when children can use the WiFi.tech

John Presper Eckert: a computer pioneer

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Jody loves technology so he wanted to share some information about John Presper Eckert.

Computers have become one of the most important technological advances for our time thanks to some special individuals…

John Presper Eckert was born on April 9, 1919 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He attended the William Penn Charter School, graduating in 1937. He then entered the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and graduated in 1941. Eckert was an outstanding electrical engineering student and was given a post as an instructor at the Moore School soon after his graduation.

The Moore School was involved with research directed towards the war effort. Eckert taught a defense course and one of his students was John Mauchly, who was twelve years older than Eckert. Mauchly was already an established academic who taught physics. He signed up for Eckert’s defense training course as a way to contribute to the war effort. Both men were interested in the development of computers and discussed their ideas frequently.

Eckert moved on to undertake other military work at the Moore School. He was involved with work on ultraviolet light. He helped develop the means to measure metal fatigue. Later he developed a method for measuring small magnetic fields for use in detecting marine mines. From there he moved on to work on the electronics of radar and target location. His devices played a decisive part in weaponry and were considered to be of the highest priority.

Eckert and Mauchly collaborated again in May of 1943 on a secret US Military project to construct the Electronic Integrator and Computer (ENIAC/E-knee-ac). Eckert had almost completed his Masters Degree and was appointed chief engineer on the project with the specific task of designing the electronic circuits. The project was aimed at helping win World War ll. The ENIAC was 10 feet tall, occupied 1,000 square feet of floor space, and weighed more that 30 tons. The ENIAC used more than 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 6,000 switches, and 18,000 vacuum tubes.

One of the major problems Eckert had to solve was how a machine with 18,000 valves could function when the valves were unreliable. Ninety percent of ENIAC’s downtime was attributed to locating and replacing burnt-out tubes. Approximately 19,000 vacuum tubes were replaced every year, averaging 50 tubes a day. Eventually Eckert achieved a lifetime of 2500 hours for each individual valve, which made the operation of the computer viable.

Completed in February of 1946, the ENIAC was the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. The creators of the ENIAC, Eckert and Mauchly, had no idea at the time that they were about to change the way the world operated. The machine was more than 1000 times faster than its electromechanical predecessors and could execute up to 5000 additions per second, which was astounding at the time. The mathematician John von Neumann used the ENIAC to solve complicated partial differential equations in his work on atomic weapons at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The ENIAC is still located at the University of Pennsylvania, where it can be seen by special arrangement.

Eckert and Mauchly left the Moore School in October of 1946. Together they started up the Electronic Control Company and received an order from Northrop Aircraft Company to build the Binary Automatic Computer (BINAC). One of the major advances of BINAC was that data was stored on magnetic tape instead of punched cards.

The Electronic Control Company became the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and it received an order from the National Bureau of Standards to build the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC). The UNIVAC was the first computer to be produced commercially in the United States with 46 UNIVACs being built. One of the UNIVAC’s major advances was an ability to handle both numerical and alphabetical information with equal success.

Between 1948 and 1966 Eckert took out patents on 85 inventions, most electronic in nature. He received many awards for his pioneering work in computers including the Harry M. Goode Memorial Award from the Computer Society. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1967 and was awarded the US National Medal of Science in 1969.

Jody Victor® Shares about Steve Jobs

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Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
Steve Jobs

Steven Paul Jobs was born Feb 24, 1955 in San Francisco, CA. He was put up for adoption by his unwed parents and was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs. A couple years after he was adopted, his family moved to Mountain View.

Steve grew up in a neighborhood of engineers in what became known as the Silicon Valley in the early 1950s. He tinkered with electronics in their garages on weekends. He met 18-year-old Steve Wozniak when he was 15.

Steve spent 1 year at Reed College in Oregon before dropping out. He moved to a hippie commune to cultivate apples before returning to California to seek employment. He was hired by Atari.

His friend Woz joined the Homebrew Computer Club and Steve took an interest in a computer Woz was building. Together, they started Apple Computer April 1, 1976.

In 1985, Steve Jobs left Apple on bad terms and started NeXT. He created NeXT Cube but it didn’t sell as it was overpriced.

When he left Apple and cashed in his Apple stocks, he used bought a group of scientists and incorporated them as Pixar. By 1995, NeXT tanked but Pixar continued to succeed (he owned 80% of the company).

In 1996, Apple bought NeXTSTEP, NeXT’s operating system and he convinced them to buy the whole company. Steve was back at the company he founded. By 1997, he was Apple’s interim CEO.

In 1998, Steve introduced the iMac. In 2000, he introduced Mac OS X based on NeXTSTEP. He became CEO and also remained CEO at Pixar.

In 2000, Steve decided to branch out from movies into music and started to develop the iPod.

In 2006, Disney announced it’s acquisition of Pixar.

In 2003, he started to develop a tablet in secret but realized touch-screen technology could be important to a phone as well. He changed the world with his iPhone – an mp3 player and phone in one.

Late 2003, Steve Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He refused surgery for 9 months.

He announced the iCloud in 2011. He resigned as Apple CEO August 24, 2011. He died October 5, 2011.

Jody remembers Steve Jobs as a true visionary.