Not including this post, I posted 50 blogs this year, which received 67 comments. Clearly, I’m not prolific (!), but I’m happy to see more comments than posts, and I’m content with roughly a post-a-week average for 2008. (For those with a young, active families and with jobs that aren’t centrally about blogging, I’d love to know how pull-off a higher posting average without impacting your quality of life and quality of work. 
)
Blogging is a discipline, and it’s something I intend to continue pursuing in the coming year. So, with that in mind, here is how things online ranked here in 2008:
Top 10 posts written in 2008
- DFS tutorial
- CMIS - Content Management Interoperability Services - received the most comments this year
- DFS best practices
- Download PDC2008 presentations - i.e. essentially a public service post
- Blue Ocean Strategy - i.e. one of my book reviews (and not the one I expected either)
- Documentum 6.5 with services in mind
- DFS Object service consumer #1
- DFS Object service consumer #2a - second most comments this year
- DFS Object service consumer #2b
- DFC, Microsoft developers, .NET and DFC PIA - i.e. a post about pre-DFS development using Documentum in a Microsoft environment
Top 10 posts (ever)
- Documentum Foundation Services (DFS)
- DFS tutorial (see above)
- CMIS - Content Management Interoperability Services (see above)
- Ruby coding conventions, standards and best practices
- Spell checking Java source code
- Great NASA observatories
- DFS best practices (see above)
- Download PDC2008 presentations (see above)
- The Starbucks Experience- i.e. another book review of mine
- What’s new in DFS 6.0 SP1
Top three pages in 2008
- Music - i.e. over 3x the number of visits versus #2
- About
- Books
As 2008 comes to a close, I hope that you have a safe and hopeful new year.
Since reading Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, I’ve been looking forward to Malcolm Gladwell’s next book. Outliers: The Story of Success
didn’t disappoint, and I recommend reading it yourself.
As the book’s title suggests, Gladwell’s text is about success and outliers; however, he engages the reader from the get-go by starting with a definition of outlier expressly to follow-up by quickly suggesting a concrete redefinition of what is truly an outlier and what determines success. Gladwell challenges the reader to think in less-conventional terms (e.g. thinking about health in terms of community–beyond just the individual): “…there is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success.”
Outliers has two parts, focused on opportunity and legacy, respectively. Part one emphasizes “from-ness” (i.e. from where (e.g. birthplace), from when (e.g. time, era, norms), from how (e.g. culture, legacy), etc.). In doing so, part one indicates by one example after another why merely personal explanations of success don’t work.
Where are you from?
Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of the those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play–and by ‘we’ I mean society–in determining who makes it and who doesn’t.
Gladwell states, “Achievement is talent plus preparation.” He then goes on to uncover patterns of achievement and underachievement as well as patterns of encouragement and discouragement. He focuses on the work ethic of those who are purposeful, single-minded, intentional–who achieve success by working much, much harder.
- Adversity presenting itself as opportunity
- Developing skills amidst obscurity
- Meaningful - complexity, autonomy and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work
- “Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.”
For example, the “10,000 hour rule” is discussed (i.e. its typically takes 10K hours of deliberate practice to develop true expertise and world-class mastery). The point of the discussion is not to admire those who earn such mastery as much as it is to understand the kinds of obstacles most of us encounter in the pursuit of such commitment. Furthermore, it concerns the creation of (more) equal opportunities for practicing in order to reach greater common potential: “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”
Are you regularly practicing what your core profession requires
(e.g. modeling, design, coding, testing, writing)?
“Success arises out of a steady accumulation of advantages.”
“Extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity.”
Talent: intellect, “general intelligence,” innate ability
Opportunity: imagination, savvy, “practical intelligence,” surrounding
community, family background, demographics, virtues and values
(e.g. frugality, initiative, sacrifice)
“General intelligence” and “practical intelligence” are orthogonal (i.e. presence of one doesn’t imply the presence of the other); therefore, keep clear and separate (i.e. don’t confuse one for the other).
Part two, moves from opportunity to legacy and starts by focusing on cultural legacies (e.g. a culture of honor, where reputation is of foremost concern). The focus becomes about teamwork and communication (e.g. “mitigated speech”). For example, understanding cultural legacy as a way to effectively combat mitigation (i.e. developing clearer and more assertive communication where both transmitter and receiver are not a afraid to speak up or to speak straight).
To bring cultural legacy into better focus, Gladwell leverages the Cultural Dimensions work of Geert Hofstede (e.g. IDV - Individualism (i.e. what Gladwell refers to as the individualism-collectivism scale), UAI - Uncertainty Avoidance Index, PDI - Power Distance Index). For example, the United States has the highest IDV score and the fifth-lowest PDI score.
Mitigated speech and high PDI influence communication, especially when the person speaking (transmitter) and the person listening (receiver) have different orientation. In Western cultures, communication tends to be transmitter-oriented (i.e. speaker is responsible to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously). However, in Asian cultures, communication tends to be receiver-oriented (i.e. listener is responsible to make sense of what is being said). For this reason, I believe that communication is both my responsibility and also a two-way discipline (i.e. if you don’t understand something speak up–I’m trying my best to be clear). It’s why I prefer more interactive sessions at conferences, etc.
As a mathematician by training, I was fascinated to learn that, as human beings, we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. When you compare the fairly transparent Asian number system with the highly irregular number system in English, it starts to become clearer how English-speaking (English-thinking) student accumulate a disadvantage. Stowe Boyd goes into more detail of Gladwell’s treatment of this cultural legacy. (I need to start thinking si instead of four, qi instead of seven, etc. )
Cultural legacy suggests to me that it would be naive to apply an American timeline to the future development of, for example, China. Rice paddies aren’t fields of corn or wheat (i.e. skill-oriented versus mechanically-oriented farming tradition). So why should it take the Chinese the same amount of time to “modernize” as it did take Americans?
You’ve likely heard or seen the business cliché “Your attitude determines your altitude.” Well, Outliers posits that success is not much about ability as it is about attitude. That is, success is a function of persistence, doggedness and willingness to work hard. Success is more about out-learning than it is about being smarter. School works, but there just isn’t enough of it (e.g. 180 days versus 243 days–American versus Japanese school year). Or said another way, school isn’t the problem as much as summer vacation may be.
In closing:
- “Outliers are those who have been given opportunities–and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”
- Success is a gift.
- “To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success–the fortunate birth date and the happy accidents of history–with a society that provides opportunities for all.”
P.S. I recently began a major revision of my Books page. You can now more easily see other book reviews I’ve posted herein. Soon you’ll be able to see what else is in my book library (i.e. just the business-related or software-related non-fiction therein). Why? Well, if you’re nearby and you see something of interest, please ask to borrow books of interest. If you’re not (i.e. regardless of your location to me), I’m hoping that opening up my library will help to solicit feedback as to what the especially good reads are (and why). I typically have multiple books queued up to read; so, knowing what should be top-of-list from my readers would be welcome feedback. Cheers…
Update 12/26/2008: Today I was able to get to watching the second part of Charlie Rose’s show on performance where, after interviewing Malcolm Gladwell in the first half, he interviewed the author of Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else
, Geoff Colvin. Mr. Colvin referenced the little known body of scientific work concerning deliberate practice, much like Mr. Gladwell drew upon it in Outliers. I appreciated Mr. Colvin’s belief, based on conversation with this scientific community, that the research frontier here is parenting.
While I’ve been saying “see em eye ess” for CMIS up to this point, I’ve discovered that others are pronouncing CMIS “see miss” instead.
- One’s pronunciation of SQL has been offered in support of pronouncing CMIS (i.e. “see qul” versus “ess queue el”). (I say “see qul;” so perhaps I should be saying “see miss.”)
- Using the shortest pronunciation possible as measured by number of syllables has been offered in support of “see miss” (i.e. two versus four syllables).
- Conjunctives like CMIS-enabled, CMIS-ready, etc. has been offered in consideration of “see miss.” On other hand, “see em eye ess” may be better in conversation with someone not yet familiar with the standards effort.
- One’s locale and native language has also been offered in support of “see em eye ess” (e.g. easier to understand in conversation with non-native speakers by avoiding use of two common English words, which can be hard to parse in the middle of a sentence for someone not already used to the meaning).
- Pop culture features shows like CSI, SVU and NCIS. Initialism applies to these shows (e.g. you don’t hear “see sci” or “en sis”). Therefore, …
So, how do you say CMIS?
P.S. Yes, this is completely unimportant in every technical aspect where the standards effort around CMIS is concerned. Nevertheless, consistent identity, including pronunciation matters, and the standards effort is just getting started…
P.P.S. Happy Thanksgiving!
Today, EMC announced new releases of EMC Captiva products (i.e. EMC Captiva InputAccel 6.0 and EMC Captiva Dispatcher 6.0). I want to address the benefits of service-oriented infrastructure related to capture as embodied by these new releases.
The big deal with SOA and InputAccel 6.0 (IA6) is the connectivity it enables with other enterprise applications.
Capture depends heavily on validation of the captured data so access to systems that can supply information based on an extracted value or can perform the validation of extracted values is necessary. Service-orientation in IA6 lets capture be part of a company’s composite TCM applications.
Prior to the release of IA6, capture systems “connectivity” was restricted to ODBC, dropping files on file shares, and/or duplicating validation rules in software.
Another potentially big deal is the exposure of Captiva’s capture functionality to other applications (e.g. a web service for importing data into Captiva).
Today Captiva takes (captures) data from scanners, email, fax machines and legacy systems using specialty importers and file shares. Using web services will reduce complexity by allowing for a single method to be used to take in data from all kinds of systems.
Capture processing tends to occur in large batches; so, the “queue” behavior of a file share is useful. However, it lacks a handshake when the data has been picked up.
A web service would be more likely to be used by an interactive process or could be used as a call-back with the file share method to give a handshake.
It will be interesting to see how service-orientation within capture takes hold.
I want to thank my colleague, Clay Mayers, Captiva CTO, for contributing to this post. (Ah, another potential CMA blogger target… )
