In December I gave a training on Passion, Vision and Mission. (Dutch presentation)

To get an impression of the way I work, click through to see the Key Note presentation.

If you missed this, here’s your chance to make it up. If you were there, and like me, you need to rewatch it about six to eight times to try to understand everything that was presented, here’s your chance. Dr. DeWitt’s key note was probably the high point of the Summit or at least in the top 5. It’s not to be missed.

Photo: Stock.Xchng

Scared of Presentations?

5 Easy Steps Towards Better Presentation Skills

Everyone has heard the urban legend that states “more people are afraid of public speaking than death.”

Thanks to blogger and Toast Master Richard Garber, I was able to locate the well cited date in The 14 Worst Human Fears list in the 1977 Book of Lists. In the study, 41 percent of people feared speaking before a group, while only 19 percent feared death comparitively. This data was skewed into the “more people are afraid of public speaking than death” urban legend we hear today.

“Tirelessly, I looked for some data along these lines, but I was unable to find any such figures; however, I dug up an article in the Archives of General Psychology that claimed that one in three respondents reported “excessive anxiety” when they spoke to “large audiences. This study, conducted by three doctors with impressive acronyms, also reported that the onset of this fear appeared in half of the study by 13 years of age and that 90 percent of participants in the study were shaking at the podium by the age of 20.

I thought I’d do my part to relieve this anxiety by making presentations a little easier with these personal tips. These tips are loosely  based on George Mason University’s The Short Guide To Effective Presentations.

So here is the skinny.

1. Know your mission: Determine your purpose by establishing what you want your audience to know and how you would like them to act on this knowledge.

2. Establish your target: (target audience that is) Analyze your audience and tailor your message according to their age, education level, knowledge about your topic and attitude toward the topic.

3. Gather intelligence: Gather enough information to write an effective presentation, then adjust the information as to avoid overwhelming the audience with too much information. Remember, it’s better to recall all of some, than none of all.

4. Operational pictures: Add interest with relevant images. Never add a photo that doesn’t add to the message or embody the emphasis of the topic. Only use charts, graphs or illustrations if they are simple enough to understand and increase the audience’s understanding.

5. Train: Practice, practice, practice and then? Practice! Ideally, research your topic until you feel like an expert. When you feel comfortable with the content, run through the presentation. Preferably, practice out loud with your visuals. If at all possible, record your practice and make notes about eye contact, movements, uses of gestures, tone, enthusiasm, pace and voice projection.

Quicksprout blogger, Neil Pate, points out that this recorded practice run can be a great tool to catch errors because “You usually don’t notice when you say ‘uhm,’ ‘ah,’ or any other useless word frequently, but the audience does. It gets quite irritating.” Pate also recommends that you “Show some movement – People are more engaged with an animated speaker.”

A quick word on the visuals – I’ve never fancied myself as a great writer, but I’m a solid writer. More importantly, I’m good with visuals and drawing interest. I’m not saying that visuals will carry your presentation, but visuals can garner attention and carry interest through your content. For expert advice on your visual layout and slides, most specifically for PowerPoint and Keynote, I recommend that you check out Presentation Zen.

The visual rule of thumb is to keep it simple. Pate warns, “Whatever your visuals may be, keep them simple and don’t put too many words on them. The audience isn’t there to read your slides; they are there to listen to you present.”

If you need more insight, this You Tube video provides comical parody into the problems associated with, in this instance, PowerPoint presentations and zealous naivety.

More demos using Analysis Services from R2. They’re showing how you can refresh data & reports without having to write a bunch of SSIS packages. That’s pretty cool too. You can actually connect to Excel now and pull data into SSAS to manage the data like it was a database. You’re going to have to spend time managing these files like they were servers.

Analysis services is starting to manage itself? I hate to say this, but I’ve heard that kind of statement before from MS. It wasn’t true then. Is it true now? No idea yet, but the small part of me that doubts these things just fired up.

The reports can be animated. Data in motion is pretty darn slick to watch.

Powerpivot is a freebie that runs in Office 2010. You can put it to work in SharePoint through shared documents and it all runs on top of  SQL Server 2008 R2. It’s going to require a pretty major set of upgrades in peoples offices to get this stuff running. It’s going to be difficult when most of us are still running SQL Server 2000 systems.

And Microsoft is giving away an XBox. Go here.

Tom Casey of Microsoft on BI.

20% of people that are decision makers within organizations have the tools and information they need. That means that 80% don’t have it. I believe those numbers. Microsoft is very focused on getting BI built into the information platform. You can tell from the stuff released in SQL Server 2008.

Part of the proof he’s putting out is the PASS Summit itself. There’s 2 dedicated BI trackes, 50+ sessions, and 30% of attendees said they were interested in that track.

For some information Ron Vanzanten. He’s sporting identical clothing to Tom Casey. 4 million card holders and 3200 employees. They’ll be working through 600,000 credit card applications in a month. Woof. 24tb of customer data in a SQL Server BI environment. Woof X2.

Unfortunately, while all this information is accurate, it’s still just marketing. It’s true that there are people in the organization that are building data access through Excel & Access, unsupported by IT. I’d love to find those people and support them within our company, but how do you find them? MS isn’t letting us know that.

Amir Netz comes out for the demo’s of the new Excel 2010 utility, PowerPivot. It’s basically the old pivot tables, but they’ve pumped it up… a lot. It’s not on steroids, it’s on pure rage. We’re seeing structured and unstructured data coming in. That’s great. The differences in Excel are pretty amazing. 100,000,000 rows. That’s going to be tough to manage desktops when they’re getting that much data. It’s all live, connected directly to the database, but it’s doing SQL queries in the background. I wonder what that TSQL looks like when it hits the server? But they can really go to town with the data, putting together pretty amazing  reports right out of box, easy & quick.

In the demo they showed the new Windows 7 Touch screen computer. Sweet! Very pretty! But best of all, there was some excellent stuff from Sharepoint using PowerPivot. He showed how you can gesture your way through sets of reports and data using the touch screen. It’s really slick. It’s almost like the computers in Minority Report. I’m digging this new technology.

Nice phot montage, included so many friends. I love PASS.

Rushab Mehta launching the Wednesday key note. Unfortunately, this is the DULL, but important, stuff about finances. PASS is a non-profit, volunteer run organization. I’m not going to track this stuff. You can find the full financials on the PASS web site.

Celebrating volunteers. You do need to thank the people that make this thing run. I’m especially amazed by the work done by the Program Committee. The outstanding volunteers for the year are:

• Tim Ford – Program Committe, Quizbowl
• Me – SQL Server Standard, Editorial Committee
• Amy Lewis – Co-leader & Volunteer Coordinator for BI Virtual
• Jacob Sebastian – Chapter Regional Mentor

The PASSion Award is going to two people this year:

• Charley Hanania – International Recipient
• Allen Kinsel

I nominated Allen and I know several other people who nominated him as well. He’s one of the hardest working guys in this organization. That was well earned.

Now up is Ted Kummert of Microsoft.

He’s giving us a good overview of some of the technology coming up. He’s showing us his Top 5 reasons to be at PASS

1. You are part of the world’s largest gathering of SQL Server Professionals – way too true. why aren’t you here?
2. You can take your questions directly to the “Source” – Yes, this is very useful
3. We’ve got Wayne & Rushabh – Instead of Arnold Schwarzenneger at the Oracle conference. Eh
4. You can work hard & play hard at Gameworks – Oh lord, we’re in a DOT COM. Please no.
5. You will build skills & knowledge on the #1 Database in the world – Yes.

Most of these are pretty good reasons to be here. #1 and #5 especially.

The Information Platform Vision. Ah, it’s no longer called the Data Platform Vision. That’s the kind of change that get’s DBA’s worked up. However, it’s true.  The desktop, the servers (SQL Server), and the cloud (Azure). They’re still stating the SQL Server is the foundation for the information platform. IBM is now a FastTrack partner. R2 is going to scale to 256 processors. R2 is also going to go to 100’s of TB (yikes).

We’re hearing about one companies experience with upgrading to 2008.  They were very interested in partitioning and data compression. Data compression not only saves space, but you’ll see performance improvements. I’ve seen the most improvement in indexes, but I’ve talked to people who are also seeing a lot of enhancements on the data performance (fewer pages in memory means more data available in memory means better performance).  They went through a full production upgrade with lots of users, lots of data, lots of servers, over a weekend.

Now Mr. Kummert is going at EmpoweredIT with information about Application & Multi-Server Management.  Dan Jones is coming up for a demo on multi-server management. They’re going to show a feature complete build of the multi-server management system in R2. This should be good. He’s showing how it works, right out of the gate. Setting up instances for management right in front of us. Oops. Damn I hate that. The demo is tanking a bit. But they’re plowing through.  The servers validate ahead of time so that you know if it’s going to work ahead of time. The dashboardfor the control point looks good. So they’re going to enroll other instances. Kimberly Tripp talked about this last night. If you’re really interested in hearing about this, you should track her down. She’s got some good insights to the product (hardly a surpise, I realize). Setting the policies for monitoring and management are pretty easy. It’s slick and simple. Not bad. Now they’re moving into the application management.

I have to run though. Have to get ready for my session.

Bob Muglia opened with January 13, 1988, when the Microsoft Sybase Ashton-Tate SQL Server program was launched. Apparently Bill Gates was very nervous about the speech at the time, but Steve Ballmer jumped up and down like a chear-leader. WOW. He’s holding a box with 51/4 and 31/2 inch floppy disks (yeah, I’m old enough to know what he’s talking about, kids, ask your grand-dad). Mr. Muglia just said that there were limitations to the product. That’s an odd thing to hear from a software company. Nice to hear it though.

He’s showing how 128 differnt machines can be added to the system. They’ve got some kind of load generator that is maxing out 128 processors. Then they jumped it up to 192 processors. You’d be surprised how little space 192 processors takes up. Microsofts goal is to grow the product and make it available for BI applications. Good news for their future. They now hold the world record for TPC-E at 2012 tbsE AND the price performance record at the same time.

They’re announcing the CTP of SQL Server 2008 R2 to be delivered this month. They’re adding new versions of SQL Server too, SQL Server 2008 R2 Datacenter and SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse (formerly called “Madison”).

Mr. Muglia is showing how the data center is changing, largely through virtualization. The demo is on Live Migration through the Virtual Machine Manager. They’re migrating SQL Server from one node to another. They’re pretty insistent that HyperV can compete with VMWare in performance, especially in I/O.  They’re moving the virtual machine while under load, without losing connections. Ooooh, aaaaah, special. That really does make a change in how you can manage a system.

Mr. Muglia is now showing how private clouds are changing the environment. Windows Azure is now going to be displayed. He’s trying to differentiate between client/server, web and service oriented architectures. They’re all way to much the same. Now clouds… they’re different. But, not that different. Structured or unstructured data, is still data. You’re going to access & store a lot of it the same way as you did before. He’s also talking about public clouds and how they’re going to expand and change the environment. But, hey, Microsoft doesn’t care how you use the cloud, they’ve got something to sell you for it.  35 to 100 THOUSAND servers inside these clouds. Yes, you can defend running everything yourself when you’re running at a scale like that.

To say the least, all these changes in technology, even if the data is still roughly the same, are absolutely going to require you to grow and change within your role as a developer, DBA or sys admin.

Set up and and ready to go. Wayne Snyder is going to open the ceremonies and the key note will be from Bob Muglia and Ted Kummert of Microsoft. There are almost 3000 registrants here this year. They’re in from 46 different countries. It’s really an amazing collection of people. Between twitter, the blogs, the people, the show… it’s not good for anyone’s ADD.

Cool intro with the quick history of the previous locations of the PASS Summit. Wayne’s talking about newsgroups as the source of information “back in the day” of 1999 and SQL Server 7.o. Wayne’s showing the growth over the last three years. 1528 in 2007, 2445 in 2008 and 2200 this year. That’s pretty amazing since most conferences are running 50% down this year, PASS is only down 9%.  That’s great! To the 40 some-odd percent of new people, Wayne asked, “Where the heck have you been for 10 years.” 98 MVP’s at the conference this year. Wow! Again. 400 Microsoft employees are at teh summit. They’re a healthy percentage of the people in the room. That’s pretty wild.

Wayne’s showing the status of PASS as an organization. We’ve got chapters all over the world, up to 200 different chapters (please come see us at the Southern New England SQL Server Users Group). Ah, up to the death of the sigs and the birth of the Virtual Chapters. It’s funny how that name change has actually made a difference in the same things that were being done before. Wayne’s going on about the 24 hours of PASS now. It’s a VERY successful event. They’re doing it again next year. I hope I can take part again. 50,000 registries from 70 countries.

WOO HOO! SQL Server Standard is announced. First complaint. He should have spent more time on it. But maybe that’s just me.

Lots of sponsors, Dell, EMC, Microsoft, nuts, he moved the slide, there were more. They are EXTREMELY important to this event. At the least, you should go and talk to them.

Steve Jones is quick. That’s all I can say. He’s quick.

They met as young teenagers when she visited Mexico. Who would’ve thought they would meet down the road again, fall in love and marry as adults? After she got engaged, Ome – who lives in Peoria - found me through my blog last year and decided she wanted me as her photographer. I knew she was going to be a special bride when she talked about having a photo session incorporated as part of her wedding day with her and her new husband – a guy with whom she traveled to Las Vegas only a couple weeks before the wedding so they two could bring Javier’s family along for the occasion. Here’s a sneak peek of the day as it unfolded:

Ome got her hair done at a relative’s house in Viola before heading to her parents’ home in Aledo to get dressed.

They got married at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Davenport. In Mexican weddings, the couple is draped with a rosary for part of the ceremony to signify the man and woman’s commitment to each other.

After church, we headed to Vander Veer Botanical Park where Ome and Javier gave me and my assistant the luxury of photographing them for a significant amount of time. This was my favorite part of the day:

Then it was off to the Col Ballroom in Davenport for the reception, a place I’d shot many times last summer and fall. But I was BLOWN AWAY at the amount of planning Ome put into decorating the place. Simply incredible!!

These photos only represent a part of the entire cake ensemble.

Another tradition in Mexican weddings is when the groom holds onto the veil while all the guys run around him like crazy trying to push him away from his bride. Lucky for Ome, Javier managed to hold on. But that didn’t stop the guys later from doing the traditional “tossing of the groom”. A fun day for me, and much congrats to you both!

Wedding Key Notes

Ceremony: St. Mary’s Catholic Church, Davenport

Reception: Col Ballroom, Davenport

Photography: Accent Photographics (me!), Iowa & Illinois

Videography: Peralta Productions Video, Quad Cities

Cake: Irma Torrez, Moline

Flowers: Milan Flower & Gift Shop, Milan

Un extra que aprecio sobremanera en la edición de un buen cómic es la inclusión de bocetos de algunas de sus páginas, en los que se puede uno maravillar ante el proceso creativo del artista: cómo a partir de unos primeros bosquejos a lápiz, realiza después una primera versión también a lápiz que termina siendo entintada y pintada para aparecer como la versión final a todo color. ¡Fascinante! Uno comprende que antes de llegar al resultado final que todos vemos impreso, el artista ha ido pasando por distintas versiones a lápiz hasta que ha conseguido visualizar y plasmar la imagen de su cabeza.

¡Aléjate del ordenador!

Una de las cosas más importantes que puedes hacer en las fases embrionarias de la preparación de la presentación es mantenerte alejado del ordenador. Un error fundamental que la mayoría de la gente comete es pasar todo el tiempo pensando acerca de la presentación y preparando su contenido sentado delante del ordenador.

Los programas de slideware como PowerPoint, Keynote, Impress, etc. son la peor herramienta para empezar un proyecto de presentación. No se trata de una crítica a PowerPoint y al resto de programas. Los adoro y no podría vivir sin ellos. Pero debemos comprender que se trata de herramientas para terminar presentaciones, no para empezarlas. Estas herramientas no son adecuadas para esbozar y representar un concepto creativo.

Antes de diseñar la presentación, debes destilar la imagen global e identificar tu mensaje principal. Si no tienes claro tu mensaje, PowerPoint no te ayudará a aclararlo. ¡Aléjate del ordenador!

Las mejores herramientas a la hora de preparar una presentación son lápiz y papel o una gran pizarra. A pesar de lo maravillosa que es la tecnología, nada es tan fácil, rápido e inmediato como bosquejar una idea usando el humilde lápiz y papel y nada proporciona tanto espacio para expresar ideas como una gran pizarra.

La mayoría de personas realizan todo su trabajo de preparación directamente en slideware. Sin embargo, los diseñadores profesionales realizan la mayor parte de su planificación y torrentes de ideas sobre papel.

1) Lápiz y papel

Resulta útil para plasmar ideas, para explorarlas, hacer listas y, en general, aclarar nuestras ideas. El hecho de tener un lápiz en la mano parece establecer una conexión más natural y fluida con nuestra creatividad y permite un flujo y ritmo más espontáneos a la hora de visualizar y registrar las ideas. Su uso resulta mucho más potente que el ordenador.

2) Pizarra

La pizarra permite esbozar ideas a una escala mucho mayor. Una ventaja adicional es que puede utilizarse con pequeños grupos de gente para mejor compartir ideas. Facilita el dibujo de imágenes que luego se incluirán en la presentación y ayuda a estructurar con claridad el flujo de la misma. El mero hecho de utilizar estos elementos contribuye a que el mensaje se solidifique y simplifique en la cabeza. Posteriormente, resultará mucho más sencillo expresar esas mismas ideas en slideware.

3) Post-it

Los post-it pueden utilizarse a modo de slideware analógico, utilizando un papelito para cada transparencia. Los post-it pueden pegarse en la pared con pequeños dibujos y textos y luego reorganizarse. El hecho de que los post-it puedan permanecer en la pared durante días o semanas permite formarse mejor la imagen de conjunto de cómo será la presentación. También ayuda a decidir qué elementos pueden eliminarse de la presentación y cuáles resultan totalmente esenciales para transmitir el mensaje.

Para pensar mejor, apaga el ordenador. ¡Analogízate!

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ENTRADAS RELACIONADAS

Principios universales de diseño

Diez mandamientos del buen diseño

On my return visit to SELLEN (South East Local Learning & Employment Network) I discussed what I see ahead for business over the next 5 -10 years and got to overview the social media phenomenon, what it is, how to make sense of it, how to “do it”, how to make money out of it and how others are doing it.

Sit back and listen to this live unedited 1 hour 22 minute presentation and question time (the audio file below takes about 1 minute to load up before it starts – so it’s not you, it’s the computer – but as they say all good things come to he (or she) who waits).

Have you ever had a plan and something came up and got in the way of your plans? Sure you have. In my athletic carer I had two major set backs.

The first came less than a month before I was supposed to travel to Peru with the US Water Ski Team to compete in the Pan-American Championships. I was in Florida training, because of the warmer conditions in the winter compared to California. On the last day of training I was distance water ski jumping, which was my weakest of the three disciplines. I was making great strides, so much so that the then World Record Holder, Jimmy Siemers, was at the lake and commented on how good and strong my jumping looked. So there I was cutting towards the ramp to generate speed. I hit the ramp and came off the top of the ramp and began flying. It felt like a great jump. When everything comes together the skis actually act like wings and you do get a brief feeling of flying. Then at the apex of the flight the tip of the right ski lost its lift and fell down and behind me. All of a sudden I went from flying to hurling through the air. Unfortunately I hit the water in a very unfortunate position and instead of just taking a very hard crash, I shattered my right calcaneus (heel bone). So in the matter of seconds I went from being ranked number one in the US and less than a week away competing in an international competition representing the US team, to being unable to walk. In fact I had one surgeon tell me I would never walk again.

After a five hour surgery, a titanium plate and 7 screws, my calcaneus (heel bone) was reconstructed. It was a rough recovery and through the process I experienced a lot of personal growth. Through the clear setting of goals, belief in the possibilities, tremendous determination and commitment, and several years of rehabilitation not only did I learn to walk again, I returned to being ranked number one in the country. 

Then the second huge interruption in my career as a world class athlete occurred. This time I dislocated my knee. A severe injury involving tearing 3 of the 4 knee ligaments and multiple tears to the cartilage. This was not part of my dream, goal or plan for winning the world championships. Again after a 5 hour surgery, the reattachment of the MCL, the replacement of the ACL and PCL, 1o months of physical therapy at 15 hours a week I was back competing. Though I still had a long way to go to get back to where I was before the injury, again through applying the Gold Medal Mindset of goal setting, belief in the possibilities, and incredible focus and determination I was able to compete at the US Nationals and qualify to compete at the Sr. World Championships were I won the silver medal and bronze medal respectively.

The point is that in all areas of our life we often have plans and goals. Then out of no where, or so it seems, something comes along to derail our plans. It is in these moments and trying times of facing the unexpected that your success will be determined. Do you choose to give up on your dream or do you persevere through the challenging times and become the champion that you were destine to be?

To learn more from Forest Fisher on how to apply the Gold Medal Mindset and How to Master the Attitude of a Champion in order to obtain wealth, health and prosperity in your life contact Forest through http://www.ForestFisher.com. Forest is available for Key Note addresses, workshops and to speak to your group via live tele-seminar conference calls.

Xpeditions” is a NEW People Engagement concept designed by Matt McFadyen and Presentation Studio. It is a unique key note presentation designed to engage, inspire and motivate.

Based on internationally renowned explorer Matt McFadyen’s 5 record breaking expeditions to both Antarctica and the Arctic (see www.mattmcfadyen.com.au), your audience is taken on a fully interactive journey that shares real human experiences in leadership, teamwork and motivation.

We’ve combined learnings from Ernest Shackleton’s leadership methods used in his attempt to cross the Antarctic in 191 5 and we have Australia’s youngest polar explorer to help lead, unite and ignite your people through their very own expedition using the latest multi-media technology.

A choice of 2 Key Note Polar Xpeditions:
North Pole Xpedition
Join Matt on his expedition to become the youngest Australian to trek to the North Pole. Help make critical decisions : whether to brave the storm, emergency extraction due to frostbite, or what to do as a polar bear charges?

Southern Ocean Xpedition
In a tiny yacht facing 50 foot swells, engage with Matt as he unravels the deep troughs of despair, multiple capsizes, team camaraderie and euphoric elation.

“The most successful staff engagement event to date: 96% of people found the Polar Xpedition inspiring. 93% of people found the overall firm briefing valuable.” PWC Australia

For more information: Check out the video below:

To book Matt, contact Presentation Studio on 1300 699609 or go to www.presentationstudio.com.au

FoxBusiness.com published this deansguide article 12-23-08

Guy Kawasaki’s new book “Reality Check” has many brilliant, thought provoking, and important ideas to share. One of those ideas is from Garr Reynolds and it is called the Zen of Presentations. Presentation Zen “is about restraint, simplicity, and a natural approach to presentations that is appropriate for an age in which design thinking, story-telling, and right brain thinking are crucial complements to analysis, logic, and argument.

Reynolds goes on to identify PowerPoint as a crutch rather than a tool for presentations. My feeling is that powerpoint hinders the speakers ability to connect with the audience if used incorrectly; unfortunately the majority use it incorrectly.

The following from Marty Neumeier sums up my feelings quite well:

“PowerPoint has become a full-blown epidemic. Tragically, the victims are company values such as collaboration, innovation, passion, vision, and clarity. If you want smart buy-in, give PowerPoint a rest. Substitute more engaging techniques such as stories, demonstrations, drawings, prototypes, and brainstorming exercises. If a business is a decision factory, then the presentations that inform those decisions determine their quality: garbage in, garbage out.”

What makes a good presentation stick? According to the Health brothers, Chip and Dan, in their book “Made to Stick” sticky aka memorable messages share 6 common attributes:

1. Simplicity

2. Unexpectedness

3. Concreteness

4. Credibility

5. Emotions

6. Stories

Ein Bericht über das Ladies Lunch im Ring Hotel in der Winterausgabe der Vienna Deluxe:

“Gemeinsam mit dem Luxushotel “The Ring Vienna‘s Casual Luxury Hotel” veranstaltete Vienna Deluxe im Oktober zum ersten Mal einen von in Zukunft vierteljährlich stattfindenden exklusiven Ladies Lunchs in der luxuriösen Suite des Ring Hotels. Mit dabei waren neben den Gastgebern Nina Burgesmeir (Herausgeberin des Vienna Deluxe Magazins) und Carl-Peter Echtermeijer (The Ring Vienna’s Casual Luxury Hotel): Svetlana Egorova (International Trust Bank Moskau, Key Note Speaker), Mag. Birgit Bruckner (M&A Bank), Gina Goess (Credit Suisse), Sherrie Doyon de Thoma (UBS),
Mag. Vince-Bsteh (Raiffeisen Centro Bank), Anna Kelder (Rechtsanwältin), Ursula Oberhollenzer (Vienna Deluxe Magazin), Mag. Rammel (Raiffeisenholding NÖ), Mag. Karin Sorger (Skandia Austria Holding AG), Mag. Steinacker (Raiffeisen-Holding NÖ) und Alexandra Vogel (Wien Holding GmbH).”

Main Trends transforming software engineering development and these are Tectonic shifts

1. Client and cload computing . blend of both
2. Social Computing – profound connection thorugh theinernet. Humanity around you
3. Devices and destops. Major shift multi screen world

Mit Spannung habe ich Steve Jobs’ Key Note erwartet und dann auch die News über die neuartigen Laptops  in einem Guss erfahren. Obwohl grosser Mac-Fan war ich ewas enttäuscht. Erstens wird mit keinem Wort erwähnt, wie die Zukunft des 17″ Powerbooks aussieht, das immerhin von Vielen seiner grossen Bildschirmfläche wegen geschätzt wird. Zum zweiten sind jetzt alle Laptops nur noch mit der spiegelnden Bildschirmoberfläche zu haben, die wohl was die Farben betrifft eindrücklich sein mag, aber zum Arbeiten recht unpraktisch ist. Eine matte Oberfläche ist meines Erachtens ein viel edleres Design als die glänzende. Und bis jetzt konnte man bei den meisten Modellen wenigstens noch auswählen, welche Oberfläche man bevorzugt. Auch der schwarze Rand um den Bildschirm und die schwarze Tastatur sind wohl kontrastreicher im Design, aber weniger konsequent in der weissen bzw. silbrigen Präsentation, die bisher die Mac-Laptops von anderen Marken unterschieden hat. Was meint Ihr dazu?

I work in a field that allows me to observe public speakers frequently, unfortunately sometimes I get to be one of them, and I haven’t yet decided whether I like it or not. The last occasion was a 4 hour conference on a theme very different from any of my areas of interest. I am a linguist present to a conference on diabetes and drug delivery for that category. I couldn’t understand a thing and I didn’t take along something to read (I had thought about it, but it would have been very impolite, the speakers might have felt offended, and it was not their fault I was in the wrong place). So I stared at them, focusing on their presenter skills. First, learn the language in which you deliver your speech. There was a professor from Spain that the audience could hardly understand. I am talking about doctors whose English cannot be expected to be at such level that they understand different accents produced by non-native speakers. The Spanish professor spoke with great difficulty, his voice was low and his English poor. You draw the conclusions. That’s about it regarding the fashion in Romania nowadays and please correct me if I am wrong, but it is a must to bring along, at a national event, some foreign speaker, as he or she brings added value instantaneously, no matter the manner in which the speech is held, not to speak about the content. I’ll come back with other, very illustrative examples, there are plenty out there. Second lesson: this lady was facing the big screen at all times and her back was turned at the audience during the entire speech. Needless to say, most of the audience behaved like pupils whose teacher is not in the classroom: whispering, drinking water, reading, making all sorts of noises that demonstrated their boredom and freedom NOT to listen to somebody that doesn’t want to be heard. If you want to be heard and listened, learn a few things about what you want to say so that you don’t have to constantly turn your back at the audience in order to be able to read from the screen. If you think you will be able, during your presentation, to read and look at the audience, think again. A lot of amphitheaters settings do not allow you to do that and you well know that if something wrong can happen, it will happen.

As I mentioned in my previous post yesterday, I headed off to the ifs School of Finance Isle of Man lecture at the Manx Museum. I didnt’t know what to expect really and I was very pleasantly surprised.

The turnout was excellent and the quality of speakers was second to none.

The Flawless Execution key note was delivered by two ex US Airforce and RAF pilots highlighting how business’s could adopt the flawless execution model made up of 4 elements which are:

Plan

Brief

Execute

Debrief

What I particulary enjoyed was how they compared the objectives that a Thyphoon Fighter Pilot has to achieve with the business objectives that we have to meet in our day to day jobs.

The key themes that I will certainly take away and look at when project planning will be the debrief, something that virtually all organisations don’t do. They might be very good at the Plan, Brief and Execution stages but very rarely do they debrief and learn from any mistakes. Something that I really liked was the rankless debrief that these pilots undertake after every mission. Within the debrief session there is no hierarchy and everyones opinion and comments are as valuable as everyone elses, again something that I would consider needs to be addressed in many of todays organisations. How many of them could honestly say they value everyones views equally?

Which brings me on to my next point – mistakes. Mistakes can be good things and people in organisations that make mistakes are assets. If we just fired these people and moved on we would lose so much experience and we could make the same mistakes again – something that a fighter pilot in combat definitely could not make and I would hazard a guess that many business’s operating in todays highly competitive market place couldn’t afford to do either?

Another area that I found very interesting was on the subject of ‘task saturation’. During this talk we watched some video footage of pilots flying a commercial airline. During the flight they became almost obsessed with the fact that the landing gear light had failed and focussed all of their efforts and energy on trying to rectify the problem, whilst all this was going on they failed to notice the fact that the aeroplane had lost over 2000ft of altitude and it eventually crashed causing the death of over 90 people. I think the point that was being made here was that we can become saturated by a task or tasks during are daily working lives and we can lose sight of what is actually happening around us and need to react to in order to prevent a major problem.

The delivery was excellent, the two guys had done their homework on the Isle of Man, the audience and finance sector. They had obviously constructed a plan, undertaken a brief, executed this flawlessly and I have no doubt they will undertake a debrief with the ifs organisers after the event.

Afterburner – absolutely flawless

E se il keynote di oggi ci proponesse questo?

…non esiterei un solo istante a comprarlo. Oh no.