Over the years, we have struggled to find and hire good people. A very real part of this struggle was that we lacked the maturity or awareness to know what we really needed and the discipline to hold to what we knew we needed and choose to not hire people that weren’t a good fit. Now that we have a solid grasp on the kinds of people that are a good fit for us, another part of that struggle is emerging…finding those kinds of people.

One of the many areas where IT concepts dovetail well with the rest of the world is a conversation about whether you should use Best-of-Breed products or use a suite of products that optimally integrate with each other. This is similar to decisions we make in the rest of our life where we decide if we want the best possible individual product or if we want to pick the best collection of products that will work together optimally.

In our last blog, we defined IoT and talked a bit about its history. In this post, we will tie that together and talk about the pros and cons of using IoT along with some of the risks and concerns to be aware of when evaluating and/or using IoT in your business.

Everywhere you turn, it seems like everything has the potential to connect to everything. This, often, gets referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT) but that title just seems to confuse many. So, what is IoT, what is the big deal about it and does it matter to you? This blog is the first part of a two part blog where we dig into these questions.

Back in June, I talked about how we celebrate failure in Here’s to the Crazy Ones. But, is changing our perspective on failure enough? Can we survive, emotionally or practically, in a state of constant failure?

In the last blog, we defined the cloud and talked about what it was and wasn’t, various types of the cloud and so on. In this blog, let’s build on that and talk about the kinds of metrics and considerations you should make when considering whether or not to go into the cloud.

There has been quite a bit of talk and hype around a concept called the cloud that, I have found, really leaves people more confused than informed. The promise of low cost, rapid scalability, no CapEx costs, and no liability to maintain a system are very promising indeed. The question to ask is how much of this is hype and how much is actually real…I believe the reality is that there is a healthy blend of both.

When I am in the middle of buying something, sometimes I back up and look at the experience from an existential perspective. I enjoy looking at the process that is taking place to see how the different parties are interacting and their overall posture in the exchange. While there are exceptions, I have been disappointed to see how often the process involves lies and manipulation just to get the sale. It sometimes leaves me wondering if there is such a thing as ethical sales. Then, however, I remember good sales…ones where both parties were looking out for each other and were collectively trying to create a positive outcome for each party.

There is something amazing about the people and things that aren’t normal in our world. Consistently, we find that great dreamers, innovators and inspirations aren’t normal. We can even take that further to say that quite a few people that have done amazing things in our world were labeled as highly abnormal. If this is the case, maybe it is worthwhile to evaluate how normal we actually want to be.

As we added team members, many other business leaders and friends counseled me that I needed to make sure that I didn’t hamstring them. I was counseled to be sure that I actually delegated well and empowered my team members to run with things and, also, fail. Because I don’t tend to do things halfway, I set out to make sure I properly and fully delegated. While failing to delegate is damaging to a team, I found something that is similarly, if not more, damaging…abdication.