Thimbles & Care

There’s a lot that could be said about Steve Jobs stepping down as Apple’s CEO, but this article brings up a point I think is relevant to us: Steve Jobs: America’s Greatest Failure.

Jobs failed better than anyone else in Silicon Valley, maybe better than anyone in corporate America. By that I mean Jobs did what only the greatest entrepreneurs can do: learn from their failures. I don’t mean learn from their mistakes. I mean learn from their abject, humiliating, bonehead, epic fails.

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Steve Jobs is a reminder that failure is a good and necessary thing. And that sometimes the greatest glories are born of catastrophe.

If I could go back in time and pick one of the changes that’s happened since I started here to not happen, I think it would be our loss of willingness to take risks. If you’re not free to fail, you’re not really free, and your chances of success are very small.

Want to Be the Next Apple? Lose the Bafflegab

Strategy is not what many people think it is. It is not a fill-in-the-blanks mission statement blathering about how XYZ Corp. will ethically serve its stakeholders by implementing best-in-class integrated sustainable practices to grow as a global leader while maximizing shareholder value. Such bafflegab is “Dilbert“-fodder that generates cynicism and contempt. It is, at best, a big waste of time.

Neither is strategy a declaration that the ABC Co. will increase sales by 20 percent a year for the next five years, with a profit margin of at least 20 percent. Strategy is not the resolve to hunker down and try harder — what Kenichi Ohmae of McKinsey criticized in a 1989 Harvard Business Review article as “do more better.” Effort is not strategy. Neither are financial projections. And neither are wishes.

A strategy “is a way of dealing with a high-stakes challenge,” Rumelt told me in an interview. “It’s a way around the obstacles or problems in a difficult situation.”

Every good strategy, he writes, includes what he calls the kernel: a “diagnosis” of the challenge (“What’s going on here?”), a “guiding policy” for dealing with that challenge (the core idea often called a strategy), and a set of “coherent actions” to carry out that policy (the implementation).

Is this what the Administrative Master Plan will give us?

An attack has been found for the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm: AES crypto compromised by ‘groundbreaking’ attack. The new attack cuts the time to about half what a brute force attack would take, which means it would still take trillions of years, so this this isn’t a reason to stop using AES. (There’s really nothing more secure.) This might motivate people to look into developing newer algorithms.

I guess all I have to blog about these days is computer history: The IBM PC is 30 today.

Yesterday I attended the Southwest regional Computer Measurement Group meeting. Barry Merrill started his talk by recounting how he got started in computers as a sophomore at Notre Dame in 1959. One of the things I like about CMG meetings is they make me feel like a youngster.