Geeking/Flexing, not Breaking the Workplace

Geeking

I did some good work today, got a thumbs up from my manager on my first pieces of work, and attended a not very exciting project manager's forum.

The highlight of the day, however, was my tour of the Laws R Us data center. I think you have to be a geek to be excited about something like this but I was really impressed. Our group was taken downstairs to a huge complex of room containing numerous mainframes, thousands of Unix and Windows servers, rows of routers, many terabytes of storage and some of those cool robotic tape silos (that one is for you, Soccer Girl). There was a battery room with a frightening number of huge batteries and a room with generators that can produce a couple of megawatts each. The amazing thing is that there is a twin data center one quarter of a mile away in an underground bunker.

Top acronyms during the tour:
CRAC - Computer Room Air Conditioner
NAG - Network Assistance Group

Flex, Don't Break

Wow, this is a great essay. In "Making the Workplace Flex, Not Break" Ken Murrell sees the problem this way

"The roadsides of business growth will be littered with the husks of organizations that once enjoyed success but then couldn't change. Often the failure will have occurred because in the process of building success the organizations broke their people. In the past this breakage was most often a matter of physical breakdown; now more often the breakdown is in the spirit of the work force. Sadly, this also creates a disintegration of the workplace community often to an irrevocable degree."

What to do? Build a flexible workplace by doing the following:

"- Align work priorities with a clear vision.
- Involve everyone in deciding those priorities.
- Define and publicly state how people will work with one another.
- Promote the idea of the whole person at work
- Reward risk-taking to enhance experimentation and discovery.
- Boost performance by boosting learning."