… nice article forwarded via LinkedIn. See http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/01/02/the-seven-habits-of-spectacularly-unsuccessful-executives/.
By referring to research done by Prof. Sydney Finkelstein, Eric Jackson argues for the following seven habits that CEOs of unsuccessful companies did have
- Habit # 1: They see themselves and their companies as dominating their environment: “Pride will have a fall”, one could say.
- Habit #2: They identify so completely with the company that there is no clear boundary between their personal interests and their corporation’s interests: this one is interesting, as one would have expected that the more one identifies with one’s company, the better it is. The danger apparently is that a “private empire” mentality may take place.
- Habit #3: They think they have all the answers: the danger here IMHO is more obvious: one would not listen to other opinions or perspectives.
- Habit #4: They ruthlessly eliminate anyone who isn’t completely behind them: you loose excellent people in your team …
- Habit #5: They are consummate spokespersons, obsessed with the company image … and focus too much on the media.
- Habit #6: They underestimate obstacles: that is an interesting one again. Because, if you are too cautious or cowardly that’s no good either …
- Habit #7: They stubbornly rely on what worked for them in the past: this may be a classic …
IMHO the difficulty with all of these it that to some degree we want CEOs to have these habits. The tricky thing is to have sufficient but not to much of these properties. The question is how to measure …
January 6th, 2012
Sigi Reich
By the end of October 2011, the earth’s population was estimated to reach 7 Billion people. There were some amazing data and figures communicated with this – artificial – border that had been passed:
- per second, there is an increase by 2.5 people, that is 150 per minute, 9.000 per hour and 216 every day – the error-rate is apparently up to 5 %
- there is quite a number of countries/areas where there exists no official statistics. So areas are being flown over with airplanes and estimates are made; or, from the number of cattle, the number of people in a certain area is inferred.
And I came across two pretty nice live counters/tools:
One is a live counter available at http://www.umrechnung.org/weltbevoelkerung-aktuelle-momentane/weltbevoelkerungs-zaehler.htm:
.
The other one is breathingearth.net:
and a truly impressive animation!
November 2nd, 2011
Sigi Reich
This week, the official opening of a high performance computing centre at the University of Linz took place. The machine is called Mach.
For many reasons, this is an interesting event.
- Firstly, with the cloud being a part of everyday computing infrastructure, one would have thought that high performance computer clusters (at a single location) are somewhat outdated (or only for niche markets). But given the fact that in many scientific disciplines computing power for simulating processes, analysing data, etc. are necessary, there is an increasing need of HPC power. Dieter Kranzlmüller reported that they could “sell” three times the computing power of the Leibnitz computer centre infrastructure in Munich.
- Secondly, three universities unite in order to make this happen: Linz and Innsbruck as key driver with Salzburg as associated player. It is not typical that universities unite!
- Thirdly, in a keynote by Eng Lim Goh (Senior VP Engineering, CTO – SGI), I learned that the Altix UV 1 sells well to scientists as it basically behaves like a “normal” Unix system. Just with really a lot of memory and high performance. Why is this important? The reason is that many researchers – obviously – are experts in their respective fields but not necessarily in computer science and/or in formulating their research models in a parallel way, i.e., a way that is suitable for HPC architectures
- Fourthly, Eng Lim Goh reported that the increased density of integrated circuits makes high performance computers very heavy. So heavy in fact that standard buildings will in the near future not be able to accommodate HPCs!
- Fifthly, if you plan your next HPC investment, you should think about a partner that would be able to collect the enormous heat that is generated by the processors.
The official press release for Mach is available here.
October 19th, 2011
Sigi Reich
Together with Michael Mürling, I organised a workshop on behalf of Forschung Austria at the Alpbach Technology Forum. It’s theme was “Digital Cities of Tomorrow“.
The workshop was motivated by the fact that we are living in the age of cities: estimations suggest that by the year 2050 over 70 % of the world’s population will be living in cities (BTW: in many countries in Europe we had the moment of urbanisation already in the 1950s). There are many open issues and research questions related to this development, from urban development, transportation and economic development to social services, healthcare, energy, public safety, education and more.
In general the participants (30 overall) agreed that overall the objectives towards smart cities are driven by factors such as sustainability, energy efficiency, high quality of life, safety & security, etc. and that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) will (only) serve as enabling technology. Amongst the services that ICT could offer several aspects were mentioned:
- visualization as a communication tool between different parties
- geographic information systems for handling spatio-temporal data
- semantic interoperability of the various data sources to allow a standardized processing
- open data policies enabling communities to create low-cost services
- real-time systems for managing and monitoring huge data volumes in a near real-time manner
- simulation and prediction to enable decisions by stakeholders in a timely manner
- as well as the possibility for new business models enabled by digitized processes.
At the same time the participants pointed out the need to address the vulnerability of connected services e.g. smart meters and to consider the privacy of customers and to take into account the threats post by decentralized autonomous systems.
As a conclusion there was a consensus that technology-only approaches towards smarter cities will not be sufficient to realize these cities. As a basis a holistic approach is needed, considering the different cultures, the willingness to experiment – especially at the level of decision makers -, the constraints in public funding and most prominently the interaction with the citizens (e.g. crowd intelligence, inclusion of local knowledge, open innovation, modern lifestyles of digital natives).
Further details at www.forschungaustria.ac.at
August 26th, 2011
Sigi Reich
Published today (Aug. 24, 2011): Andreas Meier and myself edited an HMD issue on “Communitys im Web” (in German).
It includes an objection by Matias Roskos who critically comments on crowdsourcing and the contribution by “others” (where we all benefit from).
And: besides technical and research papers it also addresses the issue of the knowledge society and how we can deal with relevant issues such as privacy, etc. IMHO the issue of a knowledge policy is a crucial one: we need to define rules, principles, guidelines, legislation, infrastructure, etc. for dealing with knowledge.
Some pointers
August 23rd, 2011
Sigi Reich
Yet another booklet on “mega trends 2020+” has been published. This one is by Roland Berger Strategy Consultants and it describes 7 mega trends (1. changing demographics; 2. globalization and future markets; 3. scarcity of resources; 4. the challenge of climate change; 5. dynamic technology and innovation; 6. global knowledge society; 7. sharing global responsibility) and 21 subtrends (too many to name them explicitly here).
What I personally like about this publication: it is well argued which methodology they use and how they derive the trends; they refer to urbanisation (on the global level – here in Europe we are mostly urbanised since the 1950s) – this is in line with many other scenarios, e.g. also Matthias Horx; also, they explicitly name the “war for talent” as an issue; and furthermore, there is an argumentation which corporate actions are to be taken to address the individual trends.
But still: it is just another (mega) trend publication. So, if you need other arguments for your lecture, for arguing specific business cases, your personal scenarios, etc. have a look for instance at
I am sure your there is mega trend or at least subtrend that fits your purposes …
August 23rd, 2011
Sigi Reich
Some guys, mainly from Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany, founded the Journal of unsolved questions.
What I like about it: they also except research papers that describe research that has “failed”, i.e., did not (yet) lead to the results expected. I think we need more of this! Why? Because most (all?) of the research projects we do are doomed to success. But how can that be, given the fact that all research activities include risk and that risk is typically taken over by the public. We call that “funding” and sometimes we receive 75 % funding (see for instance the current European Framework Programme). Consequently, a certain percentage of research projects would need to fail – if research were so perfectly calculable, one could go to the next bank office and ask one’s bank of choice to provide the money (at least for applied research that would be the case).
I am not arguing for inferior project management. This has to be top/professional! But the research activities as such are risky and sometimes risk factors will apply. We – as a research community and also the funding agencies – need to be more honest. So: let your research project fail!
August 11th, 2011
Sigi Reich
The University of Salzburg, Dept. of Computer Science, organised the 2nd Austrian High Performance Computing Workshop (May 30-31, 2011). There were almost 60 people registered, mostly Austrian, but also including participants from Germany and the U.S.
I think that recent advances in computation enable new methodological approaches in many disciplines. Computer science is a tool for many other disciplines, e.g. physicists, astrologist, and many more. They all are provided with better problem solving capabilities. Exciting times!
And also: the more we establish procedures for simulation, the more we create a corpus of data and results of various methodologies approaches. Cool stuff.
And finally: In his keynote, Esmond G. NG, from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory mentioned that GPU will have a great future. At least for the next five years ;-!
June 1st, 2011
Sigi Reich
Excellent talk by Manfred Bortenschlager (Samsung mobile research, London and “ex” Salzburg Research) on Samsung Bada – an ecosystem for mobile apps (the talk was given this afternoon at the ICT forum of FHSalzburg).
Why yet another eco system?
Some really good links
May 19th, 2011
Sigi Reich
The K1 Centre “Secure Business Austria” (SBA) had a meeting of the scientific board and get-together this afternoon. SBA focuses on various aspects of security, including (1) governance, risk and compliance, (2) data security and privacy, (3) secure coding and code analysis and (4) hardware and network security.
I think the centre does extremely well in creating critical mass by clustering research institutes at TU-Vienna, Vienna economic University, University of Vienna, and TU-Graz.
The agenda of the public event can be found here.
May 16th, 2011
Sigi Reich
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