A Businessman's View

Some time ago, my manager at the time was having 1-on-1 calls with each of his staff to do a routine temperature check.  During my call with him, he asked me a common question:  are you happy?  This is not an uncommon question, to be sure, but I wanted to use this blog entry to highlight the difference between being happy and being content in one's employment situation. You may accuse me of splitting hairs, but the answer I gave to my manager highlights the difference between the two states.  I said to him, "I am definitely happy in my job.  You are a great manager; you have earned my respect as a business professional; and you allow me some latitude to do things that are outside of the scope of my responsibilities, which keeps my job interesting."  And then I continued, "but am I content with my role?  No." Three parts to this recipe How is it possible for someone to be happy but not content?  You can look up the definition of the two wor...

(Originally published on www.servicevirtualization.com ) I've often felt that technologists are very good at thinking in terms of whites and blacks, since problems in the realm of IT are often expressed as one of two states:  either the server is responding, or it isn't; etc.  So it's unsurprising that executives with strong backgrounds in technology (vs. the CxO who is more business focused) think that success is often a good stopping point.  After all, if the server has an uptime of 99.9999% then you really can't do much better.  Can you? The answer depends on how you define "success."  It's easy enough to define a threshold and state that crossing that line is what success is.  But I would challenge you to justify the particular threshold that you have established.  For something like 99.9999% uptime that may be easy to do, but for something where the threshold is much lower (and, consequently, the potential upside is larger) you will have a muc...