Lots of changes lately prompted this. It’s a new decade. I have more help at work and don’t feel like I have to be quite 24×7. I turned 50 and i’m out of shape. I still haven’t figured out how to work out consistently in Seatle. My doctor told me to cut back my saturated fat. My best buddy just resigned from Amazon and is going to Facebook, causing me to reconsider my relative dismissal of social networking. The company I grew up in just ceased to exist (time to scrape my old blog entries off and move them here).

All in all, it seemed like a good time to ask the question I posed, mostly to myself, four years ago next week. Is Life in Balance?

First, it seems to surprise people that an executive at Sun has a life. As a matter of fact one of the main reasons i’ve finished up my 16th year at Sun is because the people i’ve worked with are fun and interesting no matter what their level. True, it’s harder to carve out time the higher you go but not impossible, and not unusual – if you make it a priority.

I’ve always been a family first kind of guy. I always kept my family life separate from my work life – I would put in the requisite long hours at work but was really good at leaving it in the office. That’s what started to fray. Traveling a lot, having staff worldwide and needing to communicate with them during their day, simply having a lot to do – all made the separation i’d been proud of all these years increasingly difficult. Ultimately it led me to request a leave of absence from Sun – and to my great pleasure and gratitude Sun agreed.

One of the many things that I learned about myself during my time off was that the boundaries i’d created simply weren’t relevant anymore. Separating “work” and “life” was always somewhat artificial, but in a global economy it had become a real problem for me. My family is a passion. Good health and the ability to use it (running, skiing) is a passion. My avocation (woodturning) is a passion. And so was my vocation (Sun). Why couldn’t they co-exist? The answer, of course, is that they could. And since my return last November, they have.

I learned one other thing about myself during the leave – and that was that I really enjoyed gnarly, complex, challenging leadership roles that mattered not only in my company, but in the market.

It is part of what makes me tick.  And since my return there just hasn’t been a role at Sun that fit that bill.  In short – life hasn’t been in balance.

So the time has come to move on to a new adventure.  Sun is a fabulous company stocked to the gills with extremely talented individuals and i’m more bullish about Sun than I have been in years.  So to my friends I leave behind – keep putting out great products and services – i’m still an investor!

Unlike some of my buddies
who were rooting for the Dallas Cubans to win for non-basketball
reasons, I was rooting for good games and good backstories (when you
live in the Denver market that’s what you are left with when it’s not
Broncos season).  While I can rarely sit through an entire game
anymore what I did catch of this series was entertaining – other than
when Shaq was at the free throw line (an astounding 37% for the
postseason).  Dwayne Wade completes his ascendancy as he ownz0rs
the Mavs.  With LeBron I think we have our Magic and Bird for the
next decade.  And good backstories – Gary Payton gets his
ring.  Zo sips well earned champagne, 6 years after a kidney
transplant.  All in all, a good way to end the season.

Before you put away your NBA replica jerseys for the season and pull on
your baseball caps, be sure to tune in to the World Cup.  While
the US is not quite ready to challenge for the cup they have risen to a
legitimate top 10 team in world rankings.  They laid an egg
against the Czech Republic in their first game but followed with a
great effort against the Italians, keeping their chances alive of
making the knockout round despite losing 2 players to red cards.
Unless you’ve played the game it’s difficult to fathom how hard it is
to play with only 8 position players – it is a big pitch to
cover.  But they salvaged a draw against one of the best teams on
the planet.

The refs in the US/Italy game had a bad day.  The red card against
Eddie Pope was a yellow at best.  They continually called Italy
offsides, and replays showed at least 3 of the calls to be bad.
My biggest annoyance was that no cards were pulled on the Italians for diving
(melodramatically falling to the turf at the slightest bump) – an art
form Italy is known for, and that FIFA swore to crack down on.  Oh
well.  Thursday i’ll be rooting hard for them, because an Italy
win over the Czechs and a US win over Ghana puts the US is in the round
of 16.  Go Azzuri!

By this logic corporations should hire employees, co-locate them where
the boss can evaluate their performance and work ethic via
cognative skills which border on the psychic.  They shouldn’t
partner with other companies, unless they are sure those companies have
the same management by observation processes in place…. what?
You measure partners based upon their ability to meet spec?  You
trust them to get the job done and take corrective
action whenever necessary? What a novel concept.  Perhaps the next
step might be to trust your employees.

In any population there will be a subset that takes
advantage.  My high school used a modular system which allowed the
students to schedule their classes each day.  Econ or civics might
be offered 5 times per day, allowing us to schedule around “single
musts” (for me, it was band and track).  It was beneficial for the
vast majority of students.  But it was abused by a small but
visible minority of students who occasionally scheduled classes around
hours of
slacking and smoking pot – which ultimately was the end of the mod
system.  In similar fashion there will always employees
who abuse a privilege, as there will be
partners/suppliers that cut corners.

But this isn’t an iWork problem – it is a management problem.  We
live in a global economy with unprecedented linkage with supply chains,
markets, and employees.  None of the this is location
dependent.  Sure, people management/personnel development was
easier when everyone was down the hall.  We did get to know each
other better.  Spontaneous
conversations generated out of the box ideas and forward
progress.

On the other hand, we get a lot more done today. THe spontaneous
conversations happen on IM or wikis or email or social networks.
I am sure I put
in as many hours today as I ever have – they are just not all
sequential.  They fit around my life.  Both my work and my
family are the beneficiaries.  From a management perspective, i’ve
learned to evaluate output and not get wrapped around the axle on how
exactly that output is created.

There is no going back, which i’m presuming Randy Mott will figure out.  But more to the point – why would you want to?

Potential being the operative term, because often times that’s all it was.

A “paradigm” refers to the set of
practices that define a scientific discipline during a particular
period of time.  A paradigm shift
occurs when scientists encounter anomalies which cannot be explained by
the universally accepted paradigm within which scientific progress has
thereto been made.   My friends in marketing and in the
industry analyst community can (and do) paradigm shifts with
regularity, but it takes observation and the wisdom gained from
hindsight to really understand that a significant shift occured.
Within IT introducing great technology is simply not enough – though we
often convince ourselves that it is.  The shift occurs when the
technology is put to use.  Technology for business’ sake.
Increasingly, technology for society’s sake.

Sun continues to produce fantastic, innovative products.
Increasingly we are delivering them as networked services, so that
“assembly is not required” by our customers.  This will become
increasingly important as more and more non-technical businesses form
which rely completely on an internet storefront.

Ahh, but
innovation often happens during the assembly of a system by our
customer, for that
customer’s business, in ways that we can assist with but cannot
predict.   They are solving for their business; being a
part of such solutions is the most rewarding thing we
do.  And if you are a part of enough of them and squint your eyes
you might see the next paradigm shift forming.  It takes
technology and expertise and it’s not happening in a lab.  It’s
happening at a customer location near you.

Now it’s been nearly 3 years since my time running Sun’s IT Operations
but there is to this day nothing that gets me wound up more than Sun Rays.
While they are in increasingly wide scale use it befuddles me that they
haven’t taken the world completely by storm.  But we’ve
had them in place for quite some time now here at Sun, and it’s just a
part of how
we work.  I can’t imagine life without the sunray@home that i’m
typing this on.

For our visit with the congressman I looked specifically at the energy savings
from our sunray infrastructure.   Here’s just a few of the
facts I was able to share with my congressman:

Broomfield has just over 2500 SunRay1 thin clients (at 13 watts typical
power each) being served by a failover group of v880 servers.
When I added up the energy use to run this config (including the
servers) and compared it to the energy we would have consumed if we
were outfitted with typical 200w PCs we’re saving the planet 1,875
megawatts of electricity each and every year.  That’s 7,500 tons
of coal that doesn’t need to get burned annually, just in Colorado,
because we’re doing our jobs each day on Sunrays.  The story gets
even better when you look at the new 4-watt Sun Ray 2, and our new T2000 servers.
Based upon some early testing with the T2000 by the ITOPS team in
Broomfield it seems that we could support the same number of sunrays
with half the servers.  And given that the T2000 typically uses
275watts – the energy savings add up (hypothetically in Colorado it
would mean another 1,000 tons of coal not burned a year).

I wanted to keep the analysis simple so didn’t even look at cooling or
carbon.  Even without that we’re making a significant impact on
the planet – at corporate scale.  To put it into perspective, the
day we talked with Congressman Udall a 3.5kW solar photovoltaic system
was being installed at his house.
This is great citizenship by the congressman, personal leadership by
example.  But it would take 183 such systems operating at full
capacity 8 hours per day, every day, to equal the power savings we’re
getting from our choice of desktops.  Thankfully, it’s conceivable
that 183 home photovoltaic systems will be installed this year.
But how many corporations
are leading by example?  I’m glad I work for one of them, but the
planet needs more corporations, cities, and school districts making
energy conservation even more of a priority, because they have the
scale to make a positive impact quickly.

So if you are reading this on a thin client, thank you.  If not, contact us!

So it was with this perspective that I launched into an iWork
roadtrip. Back in August I drove out to Portland, OR with my daughter
Erin and dropped her off at UP. Tomorrow’s the end of her freshman year
so I headed out of Broomfield yesterday afternoon to load her up and
drive her home.

2500 miles in 3 1/2 days is not my idea of a vacation. So I
basically planned a work trip. Why not? i’m constantly reading blogs
like Dale’s
about the different places a person has been and connected. The web is
becoming pervasive, so why not keep me connected, productive and sane
while I drive x-country?

Day 1 didn’t start too well. I left the office just after lunch
and headed north on US287 and called into my meetings just fine until I
got just north of Fort Collins, CO. Bloop. No cell signal until
Laramie, WY; so much for that meeting. No problem, Interstate 80 is one
of the most heavily traveled truck routes in the country, it’ll be
wired, right? Well, sort of. If I was within 5 miles of a town, yes.
But Wyoming is a big place, and the towns are far apart. After calling
into one meeting 3 times and dropping after a couple of minutes each
time I decided I was being more disruptive than productive, and gave
up. I started thinking of a blog entry entitled “inotWork”. I got in
late to my hotel in Ogden, UT and had to park a block away from the
hotel due to construction. I was grumpy and tired and had 750 miles to
go. But they had free wireless at Hampton Inn, so I was able to catch
up on email before hitting the sack.

Day 2 was much better. I checked out early. The hotel had “to
go” bag breakfasts and coffee. I was on the road by 5:30am. The
Ogden-Logan valley was gorgeous as the sun rose. As I passed Corrinne,
UT I saw the exit for the Golden Spike National Monument. One of the
best books i’ve ever read was Ambrose’s Nothing Like It In The World
, about the buildout of the transcontinental railroad. Two efforts,
starting on either coast, paralleling each other in points, both racing
to be the first to complete and be the standard. Ultimately the golden
spike was where the two efforts joined into one, changing the
transportation industry and the US economy forever. Read it if you get
the chance. This was the Internet of the 19th century.

Cell coverage was great. No digital divide on I-84. I got as
much done on the road today as I would of in the office. The Red Lion
Inn in Portland had free wireless, too (why isn’t it free in all hotels
and airports?). I caught up on email, reviewed a presentation by phone
with Sara Gates,  had dinner in a Thai restaurant near campus with Erin, and spent the evening moving her out of her dorm.

Now I just have to turn around and drive back.  At least I know the path is wired!

Yesterday all I needed to do is look down at my shoe. Attached to the
lace was a thing called a ChampionChip. Let me digress, and i’ll come
back to this.

One of the things I did during my little break from Sun was get
myself back in shape. I’ve lived now in one of the most fit cities in
the world (Boulder, Colorado) for the past 7 years and during that time
have basically been a slug. One of the things I realized about myself
is that i’m competitive and goal oriented (duh) and during the last few
years I was “jogging” with no goal in mind rather that “training” for
something.

So now the creaky old body is in training for this year’s Bolder Boulder
on Memorial Day. I’ve run the race (using that term loosely) every year
since I moved to Colorado with the exception of last year, when I was
recovering from a back injury. But of the estimated 50,000 people who
will participate in the event this year, most will be happy just to
finish, and the majority will walk. So where’s the motivation to train?

It comes in two forms. First, if you don’t want to be behind
40,000 walkers you need to run a qualifying time to get into a seeded
wave and start in front of them. The second is having an 18 year old
daughter who has gotten herself into great shape running and playing
soccer at school this year, and whom has inherited dad’s competitive
gene. My motivation this year? Erin is going to be faster than me some
day, but not this year. Her goal? Beat dad. Simple.

So back to the
ChampionChip. It is an
RFID device that does one thing – transmit a unique id when it passes
through a magnetic field. At the 5k race I ran yesterday the runners
passed over mats at the start and finish lines that generated the
magnetic field, which activated the chips, which sent their ids, which
were captured and timestamped. Subtract the times and you get a very
accurate race time.

So Erin and I ran qualifying races 1000 miles apart, each with
an rfid chip tied to our shoes. Within a couple of hours I could see her time online, and she could see mine.  Twenty seconds separated our times.  26 more training days til Bolder Boulder, time to get to work!