How do you balance your professional life with your personal life? Do you have true friends? Do spend time with them? Are you there for your family whenever they need you? On the flip side, what are your achievements? Are you respected by your peer group? Not my...
An API is one of those words that us “tech bros” (can I say “tech sis”?) just throw around mindlessly, with disregard of the huge idea behind it. It stands for “Application Programming Interface’ and the formal definition of an API...
Sometimes, committing to do something daily, looks a lot more difficult than perhaps a few days a week. That may be true, but actually following through may be the problem. I’ll say it here. I am not really good at going to the gym. Part of it, is that I am...
My recent milestone of getting to 500 subscribers on LinkedIn got me thinking on something. It was quite humbling, because I never set out to get to it. I am not “humble bragging” here, I swear. One of the things that crossed my mind was, “What have...
The journey to anything worth getting to is never linear. When climbing a steep mountain, the trail turns into a switchback. On a sailboat, by going in a Zig-Zag, we can sail against the wind. And even though we understand these things, yet we expect things to go...
Digital media has a feature that is almost a paradox. Digital media can be the most fragile way of storing information ever invented. Not just because magnetic media can be erased by a magnetic field, and that bad actors can alter it, but because a perfectly...
Some time ago, I was listening to a Fresh Air episode about the global supply chain and while hearing about the extreme complexity of properly orchestrating trans-shipment and to efficiently store each container, it came to mind how this could be used to explain two...
This episode of PPILL brought to you courtesy of the tedious work of assembling IKEA furniture. When everything is commingled together, it takes us longer to find what we are looking for. So we have separated Large and Small eggs so they can be sold with different...
We’ve all been there before. We set a goal for ourselves, whether it’s to save money, lose weight, or quit smoking; but no matter how badly we want to achieve that goal, we just can’t seem to stick to it. That’s because we humans are...
In Miami, the rain is not just a rain, it is the rain of Miami. It is the sound of a thousand drums. It is universal flood level of water. It is as if the sky has opened up and poured out its contents on the city below it. But if you wait, just a few minutes, it will...
The Network effect is a term that describes technologies or trends that become more valuable as more people uses them. There are, of course, very recent examples of this like Facebook or Twitter, but there is also sort of a joke going around. Remember the Fax machine?...
The most common business ideas revolve in some way around scarcity. They either harness something and maintain its scarcity, which gives it tremendous value, and then sell it for high prices, or they identify something that is scarce, and satisfy that demand. But, How...
I have been involved quite a bit lately with mapping Customer Journeys. Just in case you don’t know what that is, it is a simple concept: Every customer goes through a number of steps before they purchase something, and this journey sometimes also continues long...
If you have ran, or have done any type of exercise, you’ll know what I am talking about. The hardest part of a five Km run, are the 100 feet that take you to the door. Once you have made the decision and committed to the point of getting out the door, the rest...
Digital Transformation is not just about using new technologies in a company’s operations, but also about adapting their business model and processes, changing their culture, operating models and management thinking. It is all about removing complexity. And if...
Belonging. Where is that in the Maslow hierarchy? Oh yeah, it is pretty basic and important, right after safety and just before “Esteem”. All of us want to belong to a group. There are even those who belong to the group that doesn’t belong to the...
I write quite a bit about innovation. The reason is that it really gets me excited, and I believe that innovation is at the center of every great organization, if it wouldn’t be for that big idea, that differentiator, there would be no massive value creation....
This is quite a nerdy one. One of the things used quite a lot in cryptography, is what are called “non invertible functions”. These are mathematical functions that by operating on something they give you a result, but the inverse function either doesn’t exist, or its...
People are often drawn to buying a new accessory, running shoes, electronics and other things when they feel like they need a change in their life. Buying a new accessory can be a great way to motivate oneself. It can be a good way to celebrate reaching a goal, or it...
From his Wikipedia page, “Massimo Bottura is an Italian restaurateur and the chef patron of Osteria Francescana, a three-Michelin-star restaurant based in Modena, Italy which has been listed in the top 5 at The World’s 50 Best Restaurants Awards since...
Important transformational work is often tied to doing away with the existing Status Quo. Incremental change, the kind that tweaks and optimizes the existing order, can be done without major upheaval. Adding a feature here, making something better there; that...
When I first heard about this, I was really struck. But it made all the sense. There are more than a million people just in the US living without at least one of their hands, and statistics say that this number will grow by 50,000 every year. It is sad and...
It is really hard, and quite a drag, to go 10, 15 floors up (or down). Two or four flights of stairs, not so much. So if you had the power to design a business building and determine where each of the occupants will reside, Who would you place on the ground floor,...
I am sort of ok with Chatbots, you know, the ones that now popup on websites. Especially if they are really good and provide me with the information that I need. Basically, this would be a chatbot that passes the “Turing test”. If you don’t know...
When you have good people around you, working for you, you want to keep them forever. But one of the most important roles of leaders is to mentor others, and with it, helping them to reach new heights that will some day take them somewhere else. In this process,...
