I wish I still believed in Santa Claus

As I watched my children get excited about Christmas this year it brought back memories of my own over excited anticipation when I was young, and how magical it was to believe in something like Santa Claus. Of course as you get older the experience changes and whilst Christmas is still a wonderful time it is not for the same mystical reasons as when you were a child.

That also got me thinking about my experiences as a manager and how when I first started out I had similar idealistic views about the senior managers and executives I worked for. They always seemed to be so knowledgeable about the company and the industry in which it operated, inspiring such confidence and self belief that you felt you were a part of something great. Sure there were set backs but that was never anyone’s fault and still you felt that the companies destiny was in the hands of what appeared to be these management gods.

But as I progressed in my career and climbed the management ladder, I gradually started to feel like the magicians assistant - privy to the sleight of hand that was sold to the audience as magic. The excuses became familiar and upon closer inspection were often more about protecting thier position than the success of the company. This was both a wonderful and sad realization. It was great learn that the path to senior management was not so herculean a task and indeed was even reachable for mere mortals like myself. But at the same time some sense of wonder was forever lost. Sometimes it is nicer to suspend reality and to hope that great managers really do inhabit a different world. But when you finally find out that they are little different to us mere mortals you realize just how slim the margins are for success, and that the secret is less a mystical ability and more practically down to honest hard work.

At times like that it is nice to reflect on more magical times when reindeer could fly and all I had to do was not be naughy.

Beware Free WiFi!

The release last week of the Firefox plug-in Firesheep has reignited the debate over the safety of using unsecured WiFI networks for accessing the internet.  Firesheep is a Firefox extension that makes it simple for users to scan connections to an open Wireless router, and then highjack the connection.  Whilst this technology has been around for a while, Firesheep simplifies it to the “point and click” level of use, meaning even the most remedial web user now has the capability to hack your Facebook account.

Firesheep works by monitoring all traffic between the wireless device and port 80 on the web site you are accessing.  It captures the userID and session ID of the web connection and then spoofs it allowing the user to access the site as the other person.  Whilst this access is only for the length of the session it would still allow the user to post comments, and or send tweets and emails.  More seriously if the change password function is not designed securely the user could change the password and hijack the account entirely.

One way around this is to ensure you only ever access websites via HTTPS (port 443) which will prevent Firesheep from being able to read the traffic.  But many website do not support HTTPS, even less as a default.  Facebook for example allows access to the login and home pages via HTTPS, but this is not the default access – you physically have to ensure you type it in to your browser window.  Even then when you navigate to other pages e.g. the profile page, it reverts to HTTP.  Mobile web applications e.g. the iPhone Facebook app, are of equal concern since most use unencrypted web services making them equally vulnerable.

The good news is that at present Firesheep only contains the keys to unlock about 26 of the most popular web sites and web mails services. But this is only round one, and more applications like Firesheep will soon be released with even greater access levels.  So until the website providers respond forcing all access via SSL or something similar my advice is to stay off public wi-fi networks if possible, and where you have no choice ensure you always access via a secure connection such as HTTPS.

Apple is currently the ultimate in cool. But can it last this time?

Last month I had the pleasure of giving a lecture to some post-graduate design students at the Pratt Institute in New York.  During a discussion about sustainability I was suddenly conscious that out of around 20 students, all of whom had their laptops open, only 2 had PCs whilst the rest had Macs.

Elastic People

Have you ever been in the situation when you introduce a new way of doing things to someone who seems to embrace the change, only to discover that the next week or month they are back doing things the previous way?    I have previously posted about how change management is difficult but it is important to understand that people avoid change in many different ways.  The most common is a general reluctance to accept the new way forward because they do not agree with it - what I call inelastic behavior.  This is understandable because people get comfortable the way things are.  When you present a new situation to them they resist it initially until they gradually get used to the idea and over time the new situation replaces the established baseline.

Too small to succeed

"Too big to fail" is the popular term of the moment but sometimes managers can make the mistake of thinking the opposite is true i.e. that their business or department is too small to succeed.  This particular manifestation is when companies put off common best practices using the excuse that they are for big companies only.  Implementing processes and procedures is a great example of this where managers will cite they do not have time or that they do not want to be slowed down by needless bureaucracy.  This is simply an excuse for poor planning because the reality is that the difference between big companies and small companies should not be whether they have processes and procedures - they both need them to survive -  it is at what level of detail those procedures should be written.

Metrics versus atmospherics

As the political world reacts to the 'stunning' upset of Scott Brown's senate election in Massachusetts the media is full of talking heads saying "the people have spoken" and this marks the turn around point for Republicans. They say it is the beginning of the end for the Obama presidency. But on closer inspection Scott Brown won his senate seat with a majority of little more than 100,000 votes. That equates to 1.7% of the Massachusetts population or 0.04% of the US population. Does such a marginal change in the political landscape merit such hype?

Planning for the New Year

"Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump,  bump on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin.  It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it, and then he feels that perhaps there isn’t."

A. A. Milne

As we start a new year invariably our thoughts turn to New Year resolutions and how we are going to make this year better than the last.  In management if you have not already started working on your 2010 plan (most large organizations will have started this process in September of the previous year) then it is not something you should put off for much longer as the window of influence for the year is rapidly shrinking.