Business

History creates the illusion of predictability once outcomes are already known. Only after events converge do patterns become obvious, narratives become clean, and parallels feel inevitable. Before that point, history is far less useful than most executives, investors, and commentators would like to believe. In theory, history can help us avoid repeating known failures. But even then, it only works when we extract constrained rules grounded in structural invariants - the underlying forces that actually shape outcomes, like capital availability, incentive alignment, and physical constraints. Everything else is pattern matching dressed up as wisdom. And this is problematic, because we often use that dressed-up wisdom to both constrain our choices (“history says that’s a bad idea”) and to make foolish choices (“when in history has this failed?”). ...

This decade will see the rise of carbon-neutral supply chains which will impact businesses everywhere - even those far removed from serving tech firms in Silicon Valley. As more Fortune 500 companies join this trend carbon-neutral requirements will be pushed deep down the supply chain to the point that companies many layers deep in the supply chain will need to be carbon-neutral (or forgo significant business opportunities.) Source: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsofts-plan-to-go-carbon-negative-raises-bar-for-tech-rivals?shared=a0ca6f346c3fb947 We’ll see the rise of auditing & certification for carbon-neutral suppliers. It won’t be much different than ISO quality standards for manufacturers with one HUGE exception: ISO standards only impacted the manufacturing and operations part of a business - the ISO registered plant only cared about ISO for raw material/part suppliers. ...

2020 is going to be the year that Kubernetes (which really means containers) becomes fully ingrained in the enterprise. DevOps becomes the default model for building and deploying enterprise applications (full code, low code, and no code). Enterprise customers will increasingly want both custom apps and COTS products to fit to a Kubernetes and DevOps test/deployment/implementation model. Cybersecurity continues to grow and is a critical part of every conversation, it will be required that security is baked into every layer. ...

What is the Power platform all about? I get this question a lot. The reality is that the Power platform is more than one thing and it can be “about” a lot of different things. PowerApps is a pixel-perfect mobile-first UX app creation for the enterprise. Common Data Service is a ready-to-go no-limits data service for building an application backend. PowerApps is the ability to rapidly build forms and views over that data service with minimal effort. Dynamics 365 is a series of commercial applications ready to run your business processes. Power BI is about analyzing and visualizing data from anywhere. Flow is integrating data from multiple services and automating business processes across those services. ...

Protest filing by Oracle regarding the JEDI RFP issued by the Department of Defense. Software giant Oracle is challenging the Pentagon’s decision to choose just one company for a not-yet-awarded $10 billion cloud computing contract, according to a bid protest document reviewed by The Washington Post, firing off a salvo in what is shaping up to be a heated competition among tech giants for one of the biggest government software contracts in years. ...

Interesting original research by Maria Droganova on the historical differences in pay in the US Federal Government (civilian) workforce and how it is impacted by the gender of leadership. I found the significant impact of supervisor gender to be most interesting. From a manager/leader side it is a strong indicator that unconscious bias is real, and we must actively manage against it in how we manage. From the worker side, it might indicate that you should target having a same-gender manager to maximize rewards. I find that in offices where all supervisors are men, male wages are on average 10.6% higher than female wages. In contrast, in offices where all supervisors are women, the wage gap in favor of men disappears and becomes 3.2% in favor of women due to a 7.1% increase in female wages and a 6.7% decline in male wages. Also, the gender of an executive (a higher level supervisor) has a lesser impact on wages than the gender of regular supervisors. However, the gender of an executive has a greater impact on wages of supervisors than on wages of non-supervisors, which is consistent with the theory of mentorship. On a personal note, I’ve not found this to be my experience. Having had significant time under both male and female direct managers. My experience is just anecdotal and anecdotal doesn’t mean much, always look to the research. ...

I saw this tweet from the Tom Peters (@tom_peters), the management guru, the other day and it really struck a cord with me. https://twitter.com/tom_peters/status/914155487595245569 I can’t say I always felt that way, there was a time I would have put “nice person” lower down on my criteria for hiring someone. My younger self would have said nice is nice but smarts are way smarter. I still believe smarts are important (as is drive, motivation, passion) but I have come to firmly believe nice matters a lot. ...

Almost every B2C (Business to Consumer) organization knows that high-quality customer service is critical in today’s market. But many B2B (Business to Business) and B2G (Business to Government) firms fail to pay enough attention to customer service, this is a critical mistake. The B2B/B2G customer is also a B2C customer and expects the same service from their business partners - technology partners, marketing firms, real estate, consultants, etc. - as they get at Nordstrom. ...

This evening I was at a major national electronics retailer to purchase a new television. I recently moved into a new place and needed a television sized appropriately for the room (and, my old television being plasma, something that would run cooler to save money on air conditioning.) There was a very nice sales person - not too much pressure (and, being honest, didn’t know much about televisions) but there to help when I needed it. I had already done some research and really just needed to see a few models side-by-side to make a final decision. It probably didn’t take me more than thirty minutes to decide which television I wanted, at which point the sales person sprung into action. ...

This is a product idea I have for Uber. I’m hopeful they will, one day, implement it. Intent Allow users to better understand and communicate pick-up locations at complex locations (stadiums, airports, conference centers, etc.) and special events (Super Bowl, Golf Tournament, etc.) Reason In many of these instances it is very difficult for a requestor to understand and communicate their location to the driver in a manner that is consistent with the vehicle pick-up regulations. ...