ROBERT J.R. GRAHAM: CTO

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Thursday, 28 August 2014

Achievements or Education?

Achievements Outweigh Education and Experience

by: Tim Knox

QUESTION:

When it comes to succeeding in business, which is more important: education or experience? — Regina M.

ANSWER:

Regina, have you seen the television show, Fear Factor ? If you haven’t seen it you’ve probably heard about it. Fear Factor is the show where they put contestants through all sorts of pseudo-death defying feats like bungee jumping off a bridge over a pool of crocodiles and driving a car through a wall of fire (you know, the stuff we did for fun in high school). The contestant who overcomes their personal fear factor wins the cash and prizes (usually at the cost of their dignity, but I digress).

The highlight of Fear Factor is the eating competition. That’s when contestants are invited to partake of all sorts of culinary fare. Yummy stuff like monkey brains, all manner of live bugs and spiders, moose intestines, old fruitcake (the horror!), and my personal favorite, live giant worms. At this point the competition becomes not so much who can overcome their fear factor, but who has the lowest gag reflex.

Your question makes me feel a little like those contestants, Regina, because no matter how I answer I am opening a can of giant worms that I will undoubtedly be forced to eat later. My highly educated peers will argue that education is much more important than experience, while my highly experienced peers will argue that experience is more important. Either way, it’s worms ala carte for me.

Oh well, I’ve eaten more than my share of crow over the years. How much worse can worms be?

It’s important to understand that the success of an entrepreneur is not measured by how much education he or she has or how many years of experience are under his or her belt. An entrepreneur’s success is measured by achievements, not words on a resume.

By definition, an entrepreneur is a risk-taking businessperson: someone who sets up and finances new commercial enterprises to make a profit. Entrepreneurs start businesses. The smart ones then hire MBAs to run them.

Let’s start with education. Is a Bachelor’s degree or better required to succeed in business? Of course not. An MBA from Harvard might give you a leg up in a job interview, but it certainly doesn’t guarantee that you will succeed in business. Nor does it automatically mean that you will be a better business person than someone who didn’t finish high school. Knowledge is a good thing – if you know what to do with it.

Perhaps it is the academic environment itself that turns mere mortal nerds into budding entrepreneurs. The late ‘90s proved that college students with no experience beyond organizing a frat keg party could start businesses that would exceed all expectations. Many would argue that the key to success for most of these ventures was that the founders (or the VC financing them) were smart enough to know that while they had an abundance of education, they needed experienced managers to really run the show.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin were college students when they started the company that would become Google. They were smart enough to bring in Eric Schmidt to be chairman and CEO when the business took off. Schmidt was the former CEO of Novell and CTO of Sun Microsystems. A PhD, Schmidt is a man of education and experience.

Jerry Yang and David Filo were candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford when they started YAHOO (Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle) in 1994. They brought in Tim Koogle from Motorola to run things shortly thereafter and now the company is led by Terry Semel, who previously spent 24 years running Warner Bros.

Now on to experience. Is experience a prerequisite of business success? Again, not at all. Many experienced entrepreneurs gained their experience in failed businesses, so experience does not instantly translate to success.

So, when it comes to succeeding in business, which is more important: education or experience? While neither is as helpful as a rich relative, here’s the answer that will hopefully help me avoid those worms: Both education and experience can play a large part in business success. The more important question is can you succeed in business without one or the other, or even without both? And the answer to that one is: yes. Can I get ketchup with those worms?

Many successful businesses were started by first time entrepreneurs who never went to college. Natural talent, ambition, drive, determination, and good old dumb luck have fueled many success entrepreneurs, myself included. I don’t have a degree (I drove past a college once. It looked hard, so I kept going). Would a degree have helped make my business trek easier? Perhaps. Then again, I know people with advanced degrees who are flipping burgers at McDonalds. It’s good experience, I suppose.

A combination of education and experience (and a variety of other things) is the best recipe for success. As the old saying goes, “There is no better education than that which comes from experience.”

In the end, it really doesn’t matter how much education, experience, talent, luck or money you have. It’s what you do with it that matters.

Source

Breakthrough Business Book Now Available on Amazon.com

Advice for Women Seeking an MBA Today

Build Entrepreneur Credentials Early and Wisely

Can School Make You a Better Entrepreneur?

What are the Secrets of Successful Entrepreneurs?

Nisha Chittal: Three Reasons Why Startups Are the New MBA

A matter of age: Is the startup scene only for baby-faced founders?

Accidental entrepreneurs find purpose, and success

Author Kerri Salls to Baby Boomer Business Owners, Read This Book to Harvest Your Wealth or Leave Money on the Table

Pete Gilfillan Among Finalists for Entrepreneur of the Year Award

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The post Achievements or Education? appeared first on Robert JR Graham.

Tuesday, 6 May 2014

Virtualization – What is the ‘true’ cloud journey?

The adoption of cloud computing is happening today, or so say a wide variety of analysts, vendors, and even journalists. The surveys show greatly increased interest in cloud computing concepts, and even increased usage of both public and private cloud models by developers of new application systems.

But does your IT organization really understand its cloud journey?

Friend, colleague, and cloud blogger Chris Hoff wrote a really insightful post today that digs into the reality–worldwide–of where most companies are with cloud adoption today…at least in terms of internal “private cloud” infrastructure. In it, he describes the difficult options that are on the table for such deployments:

There is, however, a recurring theme across geography, market segment, culture, and technology adoption appetites; everyone is seriously weighing their options regarding where, how and with whom to make their investments in terms of building cloud computing infrastructure (and often platform) as-a-service strategy. The two options, often discussed in parallel but ultimately bifurcated based upon explored use cases, come down simply to this:

Take any number of available open core or open-source software-driven cloud stacks, commodity hardware and essentially engineer your own Amazon, or

Use proprietary or closed source virtualization-nee-cloud software stacks, high-end “enterprise” or “carrier-class” converged compute/network/storage fabrics and ride the roadmap of the vendors

One option means you expect to commit to an intense amount of engineering and development from a software perspective. The other means you expect to focus on integration of other companies’ solutions. Depending upon geography, it’s very, very unclear to enterprises [and] service providers what is the most cost-effective and risk-balanced route when use cases, viability of solution providers, and the ultimate consumers of these use-cases are conflated.

Hoff is pointing out that there are no “quick and easy” solutions out there. Even if, say, a vendor solution is a “drop in” technology initially, the complexity and tradeoffs of a long-term dependency on the vendor adds greatly to the cost and complexity.

On the other hand, open-source cloud stacks enable cheaper acquisition and more ways to implement the features that best suit your company’s needs, but only at the cost of requiring additional development, engineering, and operations skills to get it working–and keep it working.

All of which leads to the likelihood that, as a whole, global IT will take some time to take private cloud “mainstream.” So that means cloud computing isn’t as disruptive as it was made out to be, right?

Wrong. Bernard Golden, CEO of Hyperstratus and a leading cloud blogger in his own right, pointed out today that it isn’t the CIO or CTO that will control the pace of cloud adoption, but software developers:

The implication for organizations…is that decisions made by developers create commitments for the organizations they are part of–commitments that the organization does not recognize at the time they are made by the developer and may, in fact, be decisions that, had the organization understood them at the time they were made by the developer, it would have eschewed them. The result is that two or three years down the road, these organizations “discover” technology decisions and applications that are based on choices made by developers without organizational review.

This may account for the curious lack of respect given Amazon on the part of IT organizations and vendors. O’Grady addresses this in a second post titled “Hiding in Plain Sight: The Rise of Amazon Web Services.” In it, he primarily addresses the fact that most technology vendors evince little fear of Amazon, preferring to focus on private cloud computing environments. He attributes this, in part, to the vendors’ desire to keep traditional margins rather than descending into a pricing battle with Amazon.

Golden goes on to point out that, in his opinion, the reason many vendors aren’t seeing Amazon as direct competition in many deals is that they aren’t talking to the same people:

I might attribute it to a different factor: Vendors primarily seek to talk to senior management, those who control budgets that pay for the vendors’ products–and, as we’ve just noted, those managers often miss the reality of what developers are actually doing. Consequently, they won’t be telling vendors how much public cloud is being used, and the vendors will respond with the time-honored “we don’t really see them much in competitive situations” (I used to hear this a lot from proprietary software vendors about the open source alternatives to their products).

This, then, gets around to the point I made about the future of IT operations in my last post. If, indeed, cloud computing is an applications-driven operations model, and if application operations is managed separately from service or infrastructure operations, then application operations will almost certainly be developed/configured/whatever on an application-by-application basis.

If that is true, then the operations automation for applications will be:

Created as part of the software development process, therefore influenced much more by development decisions than by IT operations decisions, and

Will target specific deployment environments (clouds or cloud ecosystems), thereby predestining their ongoing operations requirements.

This is why I have said so many times on this blog that, though I believe that the short-medium term will see slow public cloud adoption, especially for critical workloads with legal compliance consequences, the long term will see an IT landscape in which hybrid IT rules, but public cloud will be a dominant deployment model (or acquisition model, in the case of software as a service).

The economics are just too compelling, and the technical issues just too solvable. Solving the legal issues remains to be seen, but there have been signs in the last year that both the courts and various legislative bodies are understanding the importance of protecting data in third-party environments. The corporate lawyers I’ve spoken to are reasonably sure that legal issues between cloud providers and their customers will be worked out in the next two to three years.

In the end, the journey to cloud computing won’t be a planned one. It will be, as disruptions often are, evolutionary and happen in often unexpected ways. The question is, can your IT culture handle that?

Read more: http://ift.tt/1fP4813