Some good lessons from Pixar CEO, Ed Cutmull

I just got the book Creativity Inc to read which is the story of developing Creativity at Pixar by the CEO Ed Catmull.

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From Ed Catmull, co-founder (with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter) of Pixar Animation Studios, comes an incisive book about creativity in business—sure to appeal to readers of Daniel Pink, Tom Peters, and Chip and Dan Heath.

Creativity, Inc. is a book for managers who want to lead their employees to new heights, a manual for anyone who strives for originality, and the first-ever, all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation—into the meetings, postmortems, and “Braintrust” sessions where some of the most successful films in history are made. It is, at heart, a book about how to build a creative culture—but it is also, as Pixar co-founder and president Ed Catmull writes, “an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible.”

WSJ wrote a review with some good lessons.

Here is a good one on why many technologies fail.  The technology is not embraced by the users.

Recruited in 1979 by George Lucas to help work special-effects images into live-action footage, Mr. Catmull, who had studied computer graphics in graduate school, soon found himself up against a problem that would yield one of his early lessons. The film editors at Lucasfilm resisted working with a computer. They didn't think it would do much more than what could already be done by snipping filmstrips with razor blades and gluing them together. The editors didn't realize that, for a new level of creativity to happen, they would have to embrace change. Relatedly, Mr. Catmull realized that a transformative idea, no matter how good, was useless unless the people who had to implement it fully embraced the concept.

Google has 60 Data Center Job Openings, need more proof Google's expansion?

There can be a lot of misleading information on how much capacity is being added in a company data centers.  One way to look at the growth is job openings.  Went up to Google’s career site and there are 60 job openings around the world - Chile, Singapore, Brazil, Ireland, Taiwan, Finland, USA (Reston, Council Bluffs, Mountain View (HQ), Mayes County, Berkeley County, Lenoir, The Dalles)

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Data Center Facilities Technician
 
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Operate, monitor, maintain and respond to abnormal conditions in facilities systems. Areas include Electrical, Mechanical and Building Monitoring and Control. Track and trend operational characte
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Data Center Facilities Technician
 
 
Operate, monitor, maintain, and respond to abnormal conditions in facilities systems. Areas include: Electrical, Mechanical, Building Monitoring and Control. Tracking and trending operational
Data Center & Network
 
Data Center Facilities Technician
 
 
Operate, monitor, maintain, and respond to abnormal conditions in facilities systems. Areas include: Electrical, Mechanical and Building Monitoring and Control Track and trend operational charact
Data Center & Network
 
Data Center Hardware Operations Engineer
 
 
Contribute to the team in the deployment, projects and support of new data center infrastructure as our Linux cluster grows. Fix broken servers: replace hard drives, replace bad sticks of RAM, et
Data Center & Network
 
Hardware Operations Manager
 
 
Oversee the day to day management of teams within data center operations Work with others to identify problems and create solutions for computing and network architecture. Take responsibility f
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Hardware Engineering
 
Data Center Facilities Technician (Engineer)
 
 
Take responsibility for the uptime and maintenance of water pumps and treatment systems, HVAC, UPS, generators, electrical distribution and Control and Monitoring Systems. Develop creative approa
Data Center & Network
 
Data Center Facilities Technician
 
 
Operate, monitor, maintain, and respond to abnormal conditions in facilities systems. Areas include: Electrical, Mechanical, Building Monitoring and Control. Tracking and trending operational
Data Center & Network
 
Data Center Facilities Technician
 
 
Operate, monitor, maintain, and respond to abnormal conditions in facilities systems. Areas include: Electrical, Mechanical, Building Monitoring and Control. Tracking and trending operational cha
Data Center & Network

Social Media gives a loud voice to something as small as a tweet, Teen Arrested for Terrorist Tweet Joke

What people don’t get putting their words or images on social media is their posts can be a loud voice.  And part of the broadcast can get you in trouble.  CNET posts on teenager who got arrested for a terrorist threat tweet.

Twittering teen arrested after 'joke' terror threat to American Airlines

A teen tweets at American Airlines that she's from Afghanistan, a member of al-Qaeda, and is "gonna do something really big." The airline responds forcefully. The teen is frightened, then arrested.

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sarah1.pngPerhaps not the wisest tweet.Screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET

Some people have not learned the lesson that falsely shouting fire in a movie theater is not protected by the freedom of speech.

The Schenck case[edit]

Holmes, writing for a unanimous Court, ruled that it was a violation of the Espionage Act of 1917 (amended with the Sedition Act of 1918), to distribute flyers opposing the draft during World War I. Holmes argued this abridgment of free speech was permissible because it presented a "clear and present danger" to the government's recruitment efforts for the war. Holmes wrote:

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

Holmes wrote of falsely shouting fire, because, of course, if there were a fire in a crowded theater, one may rightly indeed shout "Fire!"; one may, depending on the law in operation, even be obliged to. Falsely shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater, i.e. shouting "Fire!" when one believes there to be no fire in order to cause panic, was interpreted not to be protected by the First Amendment.

 

Watch out for the do-it-yourself Wordpress Designer, It is tough to be a security expert and Designer

Wordpress comes up regularly when people think about hosting a website or blog.  It’s popular what is the problem?  Netcraft has some data that will show you the problem.  Security.

WordPress is the most common blogging platform and content management system in the world: Netcraft's latest survey found nearly 27 million websites running WordPress, spread across 1.4 million different IP addresses and 12 million distinct domain names. Many of these blogs are vulnerable to brute-force password guessing attacks by virtue of the predictable location of the administrative interface and the still widespread use of the default "admin" username.

But remarkably, not a single phishing site was hosted on Automattic's own WordPress.com service in February. WordPress.com hosts millions of blogs powered by the open source WordPress software. Customers can purchase custom domain names to use for their blogs, or choose to register free blogs with hostnames likeusername.wordpress.com.

If you are going to use wordpress try hard to use wordpress.com.

Vulnerable WordPress blogs can also be used for other nefarious purposes. A botnet of more than 162,000 WordPress blogs (less than 1% of all WordPress blogs) was recently involved in a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a single website. Attackers exploited the Pingback feature in these WordPress blogs (which is enabled by default) to flood the target site with junk HTTP requests, causing it to be shut down by its hosting company.

Do you have good project stories to tell? Most likely not

I have been studying storytelling, trying to figure out how stories can be used to better communicate.  Here is a Pixar story during the production of Toy Story 2 they lost all the files when a command was run to delete files mistakenly.

The above video was posted on June 30, 2011.    The next web posted a story of the Toy Story 2 files deleted May 12, 2012 that goes into more detail.

When listening to this story it reminds me of the Back-up Disaster that killer the Sidekick.  The Toy Story 2 story had a better message.

“I’ll never forget ever being a part of Toy Story two. I was very lucky,” says Jacob. “I had that chance to work on a level of impact that helped keep Buzz and Woody, and “Toy Story” and the franchise, and Pixar all be a thing we talk about today.”

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The thing about  a disaster like this one is that the technical directors and staff at Pixar had to trust one another to fix the issue, even though there were several mistakes made and one of them was responsible. “If you can’t sit down and calmly engage that meeting, you can’t be in that meeting with them,” says Jacob. ”Because the circumstances were so incredibly unusual. Black Swan events do occur.”

Instead of dwelling on pinning the blame or lamenting the loss of time and effort, the team made sure to alter the backup strategy so that something like that didn’t happen again, and it went about making up for lost time.