http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/11/authentic_presentations_take_p.html
Great post from the HBR blog yesterday. Whether you are an introvert or an extrovert, you need to be authentic and practice your personal style and comfort zone.
Steve Ballmer going crazy:
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/11/google-spanner-time/all/
The fascinating description of Google’s Spanner, arguably the single largest “known” database in the World leads me to wonder about the National Security Administration and the Defense Intelligence Agency, as much as Big Data and data mining. Clearly, Spanner is a giant leap forward to a truly global database architecture that does not overload global network communication, and is essentially immune from replication latency or outages. The novel application of “time” is probably the key element. It also porttends further advances in massive data mining. Andrew Fikes’ paper on Spanner essentially makes it available to the World, which if you carefully consider the point of the architecture, it makes sense… It also seems a bit spooky.
Very impressed with HootSuite after playing around for a couple of hours. I like pretty much everything about, most importantly the working business model. No need to say more. http://ow.ly/fyYSt
Assistant Deputy Speaker of the Canadian House of Commons, MP Bruce Stanton, and Deputy Chair of the Committee of the Whole, will participate in a video conference with University of British Columbia Management students, Wednesday, November 28th, at 2PM in the EME 050 Lecture Hall. Local MP Ron Cannan, representing Kelowna and Lake Country has been instrumental in making this event a reality. All Faculty of Management students are welcome to attend, listen and learn.
This live video conference event will be held Wednesday, November 28th, at 2PM in the EME 050 Lecture Hall on the UBC Okanagan campus
This morning’s New York Times published an article on the frothy boom in “app development” for Apple IOS and Google Android devices. The four page in-depth analysis of the “app industry,” paints a very depressing picture. For all of the hoopla about this area, the statistics suggest that it is little more than a bubble about to burst. More depressing it adds to the chorus of concern from leading thinkers on entrepreneurship, innovation and technology: ” Where Have All The Big Ideas Gone?” We have lost our way with innovation and the need to solve big problems. Angry Birds is not solving any big problem, and leading people like the couple in this article, to chase the ephemeral rainbow. This morning’s story will likely ignite a vigorous online debate, as it should.
The Washington Post published an article last year with the title, “Moral Decline and the End of Big Ideas.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-innovations/moral-decline-and-the-end-of-big-ideas/2011/09/14/gIQAQntJwK_story.html The author’s point is that it is a sense of moral duty to make the world a better place that drives someone to change the World. Or at least it should be..
Another opinion piece in the New York Times by Neal Gabler, also last year, asks where are the Big Ideas? http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/opinion/sunday/the-elusive-big-idea.html?pagewanted=all The Atlantic magazine had published a list of the ” 14 biggest ideas of the year,” the biggest of which, ironically was “The Rise of the Middle Class – Just Not Ours,” describing the rise of broad prosperity in the BRIC nations. The Atlantic list stimulated Gabler to predict a future of Big Data, but not Big Thought.. The implication I hear in Gabler’s editorial is that we are in a post Enlightenment time, a period of anti-intellectualism. I hope not, but I fear it may be true.
The list of luminaries who bemoan this situation keeps growing. It includes Max Marmer, founder of Startup Genome, whose Harvard Business Review blog post, “Reversing the Decline of Big Ideas,” has probably been reblogged and emailed around the World hundreds of times, and has stimulated millions of comments. http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/reversing_the_decline_in_big_i.html. No less than Marc Andreesen, founder of Netscape and now a venture capitalist himself, Vinod Khosla, founder of Sun Microsystems, and John Doerr, my former Intel colleague, have also spoken out forcefully on the need for a deep rethink on the state of innovation in America. They are already on record that they aren’t interested in the next iPhone app.
We need more Big Thought on Big Ideas like the problem of heat dissipation and energy loss, being addressed by startups like Trajectory Design Automation, and water conservation technology, an area where Israel is the world leader. We need to regain our lead in the World of innovation by refusing to accept mediocrity and greed as the drivers of our economy.
My LinkedIn post this morning, “Code Literacy: A 21st Century Requirement,” led me to read this article from the New York Times, and to consider just how complex the cyber world has become for all of us.
Managing your internal IT environment is becoming a thing of the past, passe’ and utterly inadequate in the face of the new cyber world. Privacy is dead in the realm of Big Data, and this week’s investigation of General Petraeus‘ emails only underscore the issue. So-called “bots” troll the Internet, pinging here and there, looking for security holes to exploit. The ingenious “stuxnet bot” may have been the first sophisticated cyber warfare weapon, and it surely will not be the last. Designed exclusively to find and infect a very specific and very small Siemens industrial controller module, it appears to have set back the Iranian nuclear program by as much as five years. The global search engines send out their own “bots” to scan Web pages. Created by armies of Ph.D mathematicians employed by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others, they are designed to “optimize” your search results, with each company employing a slightly different set of algorithms. Cookies have been around for ever, and are the currency of e-commerce. Try blocking cookies and see what happens. Spyware and malware have replaced old-fashioned viruses. The global war on SPAM has reduced the amount of it making its way into your inbox. But as cyber security experts remind us, in any covert war each new defense creates a new offense, and so on ad infinitum. Facebook, perhaps due to its own popularity (rather like the well-known security problems with Windows and Internet Explorer), is now targeted by humans and “bots” with false pages, posts and “likes.”
SAN FRANCISCO — The Facebook page for Gaston Memorial Hospital, in Gastonia, N.C., offers a chicken salad recipe to encourage healthy eating, tips on avoiding injuries at Zumba class, and pictures of staff members dressed up at Halloween. Typical stuff for a hospital in a small town.
But in October, another Facebook page for the hospital popped up. This one posted denunciations of President Obama and what it derided as “Obamacare.” It swiftly gathered hundreds of followers, and the anti-Obama screeds picked up “likes.” Officials at the hospital, scrambling to get it taken down, turned to their real Facebook page for damage control. “We apologize for any confusion,” they posted on Oct. 8, “and appreciate the support of our followers.”
The fake page came down 11 days later, as mysteriously as it had come up. The hospital says it has no clue who was behind it.
Fakery is all over the Internet. Twitter, which allows pseudonyms, is rife with fake followers, and has been used to spread false rumors, as it was during Hurricane Sandy. False reviews are a constant problem on consumer Web sites. Fakery also can ruin the credibility of search results for the social search engine that Facebook says it is building.
Gaston Memorial’s experience is an object lesson in the problem of fakery on Facebook. For the world’s largest social network, it is an especially acute problem, because it calls into question its basic premise. Facebook has sought to distinguish itself as a place for real identity on the Web. As the company tells its users: “Facebook is a community where people use their real identities.” It goes on to advise: “The name you use should be your real name as it would be listed on your credit card, student ID, etc.”
Fraudulent “likes” damage the trust of advertisers, who want clicks from real people they can sell to and whom Facebook now relies on to make money. Fakery also can ruin the credibility of search results for the social search engine that Facebook says it is building.
Facebook says it has always taken the problem seriously, and recently stepped up efforts to cull fakes from the site. “It’s pretty much one of the top priorities for the company all the time,” said Joe Sullivan, who is in charge of security at Facebook.
The fakery problem on Facebook comes in many shapes. False profiles are fairly easy to create; hundreds can pop up simultaneously, sometimes with the help of robots, and often they persuade real users into friending them in a bid to spread malware. Fake Facebook friends and likes are sold on the Web like trinkets at a bazaar, directed at those who want to enhance their image. Fake coupons for meals and gadgets can appear on Facebook newsfeeds, aimed at tricking the unwitting into revealing their personal information.
Somewhat more benignly, some college students use fake names in an effort to protect their Facebook content from the eyes of future employers.
Mr. Sullivan declined to say what portion of the company’s now one billion plus users were fake. The company quantified the problem last June, in responding to an inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission. At that time, the company said that of its 855 million active users, 8.7 percent, or 83 million, were duplicates, false or “undesirable,” for instance, because they spread spam.
Mr. Sullivan said that since August, the company had put in place a new automated system to purge fake “likes.” The company said it has 150 to 300 staff members to weed out fraud.
Flags are raised if a user sends out hundreds of friend requests at a time, Mr. Sullivan explained, or likes hundreds of pages simultaneously, or most obvious of all, posts a link to a site that is known to contain a virus. Those suspected of being fakes are warned. Depending on what they do on the site, accounts can be suspended.
In October, Facebook announced new partnerships with antivirus companies. Facebook users can now download free or paid antivirus coverage to guard against malware.
“It’s something we have been pretty effective at all along,” Mr. Sullivan said.
Facebook’s new aggressiveness toward fake “likes” became noticeable in September, when brand pages started seeing their fan numbers dip noticeably. An average brand page, Facebook said at the time, would lose less than 1 percent of its fans.
But the thriving market for fakery makes it hard to keep up with the problem. Gaston Memorial, for instance, first detected a fake page in its name in August; three days later, it vanished. The fake page popped up again on Oct. 4, and this time filled up quickly with the loud denunciations of the Obama administration. Dallas P. Wilborn, the hospital’s public relations manager, said her office tried to leave a voice-mail message for Facebook but was disconnected; an e-mail response from the social network ruled that the fake page did not violate its terms of service. The hospital submitted more evidence, saying that the impostor was using its company logo.
Eleven days later, the hospital said, Facebook found in its favor. But by then, the local newspaper, The Gaston Gazette, had written about the matter, and the fake page had disappeared.
Facebook declined to comment on the incident, and pointed only to its general Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.
The election season seems to have increased the fakery….
http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2012/07/29/sarbanes-oxley-10-years-later-boards-are-still-the-problem/ This post on Forbes.com makes the point that corporate governance is still a major problem…and twigged me about the much broader implications of the failure to enforce Sarbanes Oxley.
The Sarbanes Oxley legislation was passed by Congress with great fanfare over 10 years ago in the wake of the Enron scandal. The potential penalties were significant for Board member malfeasance or even passive failure to investigate apparent corporate problems. The only problem is that Sarbanes Oxley has languished essentially unenforced, even in the aftermath of the 2008 Wall Street financial markets collapse. Rumors persist that as many as 200 Wall Street executives remain under government investigation and yet there has been no mention of Sarbanes Oxley, and to the best of my knowledge, no one, not one sitting member of a Board of Directors has been investigated or threatened with prosecution under the terms of Sarbanes Oxley.
Now we learn that in the wake of the massive $1.7 Billion Olympus losses and coverup by its Board, the Japanese prefer not to prosecute the wrong doers.
Michael Woodford was sacked as president of Olympus last year after he revealed the $1.7 billion accounting cover-up. The board of the Japanese cameramaker lied about the mystery for weeks. When the truth at last came out, the board kept their jobs and the whistleblowing boss lost his. Mr Woodford called it a “black comedy”. In no other developed market, he lamented, could this happen. Well, not exactly Mr. Woodford, as we now see a global pattern. Companies in Japan now have price-to-book ratios roughly half of the ratio in the rest of the World, Apparently, investors are voting with their money that there may be many more Olympus’ out there.
Other outrages following the global financial meltdown include the LIBOR scandal which has largely gone quiet, and the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by Wall Street to neutralize the Dodd Frank consumer protection act, designed to prevent abuses in the mortgage business and with credit cards.
My eyes were opened by watching the PBS Frontline documentary on Occupy Wall Street. I was flabbergasted to learn that many of the young MBA types who had participated in the unethical practices in derivative trading that led to the Euro meltdown, bravely walked out and joined Occupy. Their stated purpose was to confound the Wall Street law firms, by identifying all of the loopholes being proposed, and proposing changes to Dodd Frank to close them.
MARK YOUR CALENDARS AND SHARE IN YOUR CLASSES PLEASE!
Wednesday, November 14
2-3PM
EME 0050 (Lecture Theatre), UBC Okanagan
All students and faculty members are invited to learn more about how University of British Columbia and various partnering agencies, Alacrity Foundation, and Entrepreneurship@UBC are working to provide members of the UBC community (people with great ideas) with resources, advice, mentorship, funding, and even office space. Learn about the Mock Pitch Competition being planned for our students and hear Peter van der Gracht from Alacrity Foundation explain their program, and the opportunities for new graduates to join an entrepreneurial team
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Carey McBeth, will be on the UBC Okanagan campus to conduct business etiquette seminars for all Faculty of Management students. Her workshop will be held Wednesday, November 7th, at 2:00PM, in the EME 050 Lecture Hall, Level 0. All undergraduate Management students are invited. A separate event is scheduled for Master of Management students only.
Carey McBeth is a nationally recognized business professionalism & etiquette expert. Since graduating from The Protocol School of Washington® in 2002, She has delivered high-energy, high-impact training programs, keynotes and individual coaching to organizations looking to increase employee professionalism, improve their people skills, and enhance the company brand.
She currently delivers training programs at BC’s two largest universities: the University of British Columbia (Sauder School of Business) and Simon Fraser University (Beedie School of Business) along with Douglas College and Vancouver Community College.
Professionally trained in broadcast and media communications, Carey has appeared on CBC Newsworld, Global News, CTV, Breakfast Television and Shaw Media. She has also been featured or quoted in the top national publications including The Globe and Mail and The National Post, along with local publications The Toronto Star, The Montreal Gazette, The Toronto Star, The Vancouver Sun, The Province, Business in Vancouver and BC Business Magazine.
Born and raised in Vancouver, Carey has contributed her time and energy to many local charitable organizations. She is currently chairing the 1st Annual Canadian Bark Ball, a black-tie fundraiser for Canada’s police, military, and search & rescue dogs. She is also a past board member of BC Pets & Friends, and a retired pet therapy dog handler where she enjoyed weekly visits to The BC Cancer Agency with her Golden Retriever, Oakley.
mayo615 