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Video is assumed to be the way to provide feedback on the performance of athletes. I find that many times though a good photo can work to freeze a point of time.
Here are a bunch of pictures from this year’s Buddy Werner 2014 U14 Girl’s championship GS race at Crystal Mountain. https://www.facebook.com/BWC2014
There are a bunch of little details the coaches and parents can point out to how their kids race tuck looks.
FYI - the fastest girl out of the group was the 1st picture.
St Patrick’s Day is a day to celebrate for the Irish, and Google even changes for today.
So many people have thought I am Irish, and my name is spelled like in this family crest.
I always spell my name - Dave Ohara, but people will sneak an apostrophe in. Recently I was visiting AT&T and an admin escorted me to a meeting. I told her, I bet you thought I was an Irishman. (embarrassingly) Yes. How’d you know? Because when you came down you talked to the security guard and she pointed at me. You were looking for a red haired Irishman and couldn’t find me in the lobby.. I then told her various stories of how others thought I was Irish. The best is when I worked at Apple and a tooling engineer was in Japan visiting Mitsubishi, and he was telling them a new person joined the team, Dave O’Hara. The Japanese were telling him that Dave Ohara is a Japanese person. No, O’Hara is a popular Irish name and I was Irish.
Maybe if people could read this 小原 which is Ohara in Kanji (Japanese Writing) they would think I was Japanese.
Doesn’t really bother me that people think I am Irish. I had some Irish Stew for lunch and a Guinness is in fridge.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
The Economist has a post on how Facility Operations companies are attempting to expand beyond their current markets. This market is huge.
Facilities management
Service elevators
Big outsourcing firms find that escaping the crowd is not so easy
Mar 15th 2014 | PARIS | From the print edition
IT IS a sprawling, unseen, unglamorous industry that is hard to define and harder still to measure. Outsourced facilities-management firms clean offices, guard premises, feed students, manage heating and lighting, move prisoners from cell to workshop, and so on, for customers who prefer to focus on their core activities.
Employing millions, outsourcing firms have combined revenues that some put as high as $1 trillion a year. The market is most established in Europe and North America, though it is on the rise in Asia too (see chart). Now the structure of the business is changing, as firms that used to specialise in one sort of outsourced service increasingly aim to be all things to all men, and trip over each other in the process.
One company that caught my eye is Sodexo because a friend works in the food service business andI was curious if their company does any work in data centers.
ISS’s larger main rival, Sodexo, sees the market in much the same light. The family-controlled French firm was originally known for running canteens in offices, hospitals and schools, diversifying into lucrative luncheon vouchers and employee benefits. It grew big in the 1980s as more businesses joined the outsourcing trend and bigger still when governments, beginning with Britain’s, started setting up public-private partnerships to build and run facilities. When “soft” services like catering and cleaning showed signs of becoming commodities, Sodexo expanded into “hard” services such as building maintenance and energy management. Acquisitions came thick and fast, helping Sodexo increase its foreign operations too.
Digging a bit I found there are 24 data centers the company lists, but I don’t know of any of data center friends who use Sodexo.
Many more friends have been switching to Norland Managed Services.
How would you like to be faced with the challenge of turning around Ford in 2006. Alan Mulally took the challenge and succeeded.
Barron’s has a post on the turn around
1) Internal fighting makes the company stronger.
2) Bend the truth to fit your view of the situation.
3) To make 1) and 2) easier everyone should have their own numbers.
4) Be like Teflon and let your actions slide pointing to others.
5) Look busy, doing more is most important.
OK, you know these can’t be the list. I wrote the opposite on purpose. The real list is:
1) Stop fighting with each other.
2) Tell the truth about the situation.
3) Agree on one set of numbers.
4) Be accountable for your actions.
5) Do less, better.
The change included a weekly meeting for the immediate subordinates to know the #’s.
Mulally directed his immediate subordinates, from the chief financial officer to the general counsel, to attend a weekly business-plan review. They were to bring real numbers for their responsibilities. Few of the top guys knew them. They had subordinates to do those presentations. That was no longer allowed.
In most companies, such accountability -- up close and personal -- is rare at high levels, and it almost had never been seen at Ford. It now was required every seven days.
Results?
What caused this success? Ford, a company in which the top executives really knew their numbers, committed to take a high-risk leap forward with their whole product line. They did this knowing full well that their quality ratings would tank until factories and workers climbed the learning curve and customers climbed the confidence curve about its products.
Environmentalist cheered Japan’s decision to shut down all its nuclear reactors, but a 40% increase in power costs has Japan going in reverse.
Technology Review reports on the change. Why? Because Nuclear has been replaced by Coal, Oil and Natural Gas
The hole made by shuttering the nuclear industry has been filled with coal, natural gas, and oil.
