Obama will never write this kind of book after becoming the President of United States.

His politically-incorrect view on black nationalism, black-white relationship, and poverty in the inner city, will certainly raise a lot of fierce criticisms from mainstream America, if he had wrote the book after becoming the President of the United States.

Yet, since he was still in a limelight while authoring this book, he could express his view truthfully, without any embellishment, on the taboo subject of race in America, and touched the sentiment of other visible minorities, including myself.

The main theme is about Obama’s search for his own identity. He was an African-born boy, his mother was a white liberal, his father a tribal member in Kenya, who were married at a time when segregation had just began to diminish in United States. After his parent divorced, he was then raised in the jungles of rural Indonesia, instilled with ‘macho-manhood’ values from his step-father. Then after another divorce, his mother, sister along with himself moved into Hawaii, a state with sparse black population, to settle with his grand-parents.

Yet throughout his much traveled youth, he always maintained his deep connection to his roots of being African. Many times he described how he felt offended when people made even the most subtle derogatory against blacks, and along the way made several politically incorrect statements; how blacks were treated as second class citizens by whites; that he was one of the few minorities when working in a wall street firm, with most other minorities working at the low-end jobs; why Blacks will continue to struggle in the inner city, regardless of education, because of their treatment by whites.

After graduating from University, Obama described extensively his experiences of community organization in Chicago’s housing projects in Altgeld. He worked at street level and community hall level, dealt with various people with different agendas in their mind. Perhaps he experienced more set-backs than triumphs during his tenure there, but those are precious experiences that I believe help shaped and strengthened him, (and he probably learned about the dark side of political skills along the way.)

From his organizing experience, we observed how his insecurity of his skin color fueled his passion for helping those who struggled in the inner city, and laid the foundation for Obama’s sense of social justice, and probably his future aspiration to run as the Senator, then the President.

The latter section of the book finally came to a full circle as he searched for his root in Kenya, where Obama attempts to find his sense of belonging from a trip to his ancestors. He learned more about his father and great-father. His father was the first man in his tribe to travel abroad and study in Harvard. He had success when he returned to Kenya but struggled towards the latter part of his life, while still felt obligated to use his dwindling wealth to help his tribe people At the end, after learning more about his father and grand-father, he made this reflection to echo the memoir’s title ‘All my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost.’

Obama is also a lyrical writer. In an example describing how he recounted his memories;

‘But at night, lying in bed, I would let the slogans drift away, to be replaced with a series of images, romantic images of a past I had never known… They were of the civil rights movement, mostly, the grainy black-and-white footage that appears every February during Black History Month … A county jail bursting with children, their hands clasped together, singing freedom songs.’

I can only plagiarize such poetic descriptions, I don’t have the imagination and literary skills to write something as elegant the above. That’s why he’s a Harvard-graduated lawyer, Senator, and then the President, while I’m just a regular guy.

P.S. Readers might be surprised to realized he’s a chain smoker and even smoked pot before. Instilling bad influence to teenagers by the President of United States; this is yet another reason why Obama would never be able to write this book again.

The staples of English classes at high school, “To Kill a Mockingbird” is more than 50 years old, and it is one of the best selling novels of all time. What gives its enduring appeal?

I, for some reason, have not been assigned to read this novel during high school, and I’ve decided to read it myself to understand.

I’m sure others can find the book’s plot summary, background and the major themes of racial tension and inequality in various study guides, so not worth adding here

What exactly was this universal appeal?

First of all, readers from different cultures can relate to the story’s inequality background. Like American history where it is full of such injustice where innocent blacks were killed, injustice is a common occurrence in the history of other cultures, such as Jews, Asians in North America, etc. Often racists give no mercy to the weak who could expect no justice from the courts.

Yet, what separates this story from a tragedy was because of the character Atticus.

Atticus lived in a racist society but he was not corrupted by it. He had the courage to make changes to his society Maycomb by sacrificing himself. “There are some men in the world who were born to do unpleasant jobs for us. Atticus is one of them.”

Finally, the title of the story is an analogy for saying it is sinful to kill the innocent and harmless, exemplified with characters such as Boo Radley/Tom Robinson. “The mocking bird makes music for us to enjoy. They don’t do anything but sing their hearts out to us and that’s why it is a sin to kill them.”

Memorable quotes

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.

There are some men in the world who were born to do unpleasant jobs for us. Atticus is one of them

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view–until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.

The list of articles and redbooks needed to prepare for the exam are located at here

Here are a few sample questions below from various training sites.

Question: 1
The SOA reference architecture identifies core services including Interaction, Process,
Information, Partner, Access, and Infrastructure. What is one valid reason for excluding one or
more of these services in an SOA?
A. The application is predominantly middleware in nature, eliminating the need for presentation
services.
B. The consumer and the provider belong to different companies.
C. The business sponsor has set budget constraints on solution architecture and the architectural
components to be included have to be prioritized.
D. The customer’s internal politics make the specification too difficult.
Answer: A

Question: 2
The IBM SOA Foundation includes services that support business innovation and optimization.
What should be found in an SOA deployment compliant with the SOA Foundation?
A. Automatic recognition of marketplace trends and dynamic reconfiguration of services in
support
B. Tools to help simulate business design and to predict the effect that design changes might
have on the business
C. Alerts generated whenever business efficiency drops below a predefined threshold
D. An SOA dashboard for executives showing new business opportunities categorized by Return
on Investment (ROI)
Answer: B

Question: 3
What is the next step while architecting an SOA solution after having just completed documenting
the business processes?
A. Determine the operations required to realize each process
B. Select a business steward for each process and instruct the steward to identify re-usable
services
C. Identify the services needed to realize each business process and group them into logical
components
D. Identify core and non-core business components
Answer: C

Question: 4
A mortgage loan provider currently has legacy applications utilized by a network of branches and
franchised agents. They want to expand by adding a new channel to allow independent mortgage
brokers to submit mortgage loan applications. They realize they must provide a differentiating
offering to the independent mortgage brokers to attract participants and grow the new channel.
How can SOA benefit their requirement?
A. By building an SOA with a secure connectivity layer, they could quickly enable the mortgage
broker channel to use their applications without any changes to the legacy system.
B. They could reduce the cost to develop new applications needed for each independent broker
by reusing services as integration code that is written for each broker’s system to expedite
development.

Eventually Neptune (aka the US government) laid its hand on Big Blue. It broke up Big Blue’s dominance to allow competition. Nevertheless, after enduring years of pain and struggles, it had learnt how to survive under the new rules, and managed to grow healthily.

Today, Big Blue is a multi-faceted behemoth. Its annual revenue of almost $100 Billion US and its strength in research and development makes others envy. Only a few creatures in the world, can match the size and power. Nonetheless, it also faces complex challenges specific for its overwhelming size.
Therefore, the purpose of this speech is to illustrate Big Blue (aka IBM)’s strategy, describe its present major issues, and finally outline its possible future directions.

As we all know, IBM has a three pillar strategy, software, services and hardware which cater to the customer. Key to the recipe for success is to optimize clients’ IT investment value by providing an end-to-end solution. Just to recall, back in the early 90s, customers were so frustrated with IBM’s monolithic approach that they think IBM is a slow maneuvering elephant. Nevertheless, who says an elephant can’t dance, and we all know about Lou Gerstner’s historic turnaround from IBM’s near-death spiral, and how a culture was instituted to inspire employees to drive toward customer-defined success.

Today IBM still garners most of its revenue from services and consulting, but software now contributes more to earnings than consulting. Why software? The simple answer, it has a greater profit margin. The 80-90% margin it gets on software is double what they achieve elsewhere. In the last decade alone, IBM has acquired over 100 software companies to steer itself towards that direction, and in 2010 the software group has revenues of $22.5 billion and 70,000 employees. To put this in perspective, the group alone is almost the same size as the evil empire (aka Oracle).

Look at the big-name acquisition in the past decade, PWC Consulting in 2002, Rational in 2003, FileNet in 2006, DataMirror in 2007, Cognos in 2008, Lombardi in 2009. The list goes on and on. Did you know prior to the acquisition made in March 2011, IBM had its longest acquisition drought for almost 8 years, and guess how long that period was: 5 months.

In a sense IBM is trying to fuel its revenue growth via acquisition with its stockpiled $11 billion of cash. An analogy is a high-jumper who already holds the world record, and is trying to squeeze as much as possible to break its own record. If he can’t break the record fast enough, then he injects human growth hormones. Now, I’m not comparing IBM to Barry Bonds, who claims he never “knowingly” took steroids. I’m just saying it is using acquisition to fuel revenue growth.

However, the stomach of its customer might be suffering from digestive problems from all these acquisitions. One general negative feedback from the customers is: IBM has too many products. Even worst, they think IBM is trying to generate more revenue by selling them more product licenses. Given the burden it will place on them to figure out which product to use, they think they also have to pay more to IBM global services. Customers should not have these views on IBM. Therefore in my opinion, the measure of success for acquisition is on how easy it is for acquired customers to adopt and then ‘grow into’ the IBM products, and prevent technical complexity that prolong the customer’s solution selection. Duplicate offerings will also be consolidated.

Finally, we have all heard about the four ambitious strategies of IBM: provide sophisticated data-crunching to allow clients to see patterns in data, pepper the world with sensors in the Smarter Planet initiative, migrate customer’s IT assets and services to heaven, otherwise known as cloud, and capitalize on every last corner of the emerging world. The question is, if you don’t work on any of those four strategies directly, how can you embrace them? What will it mean if you don’t work on those areas, when the wave of consolidation comes? Frankly, I don’t know what to say. If you have an answer, please let me know. Thank you.

As a people manager, you need to understand each of your employee’s personality, strengths and weaknesses in order to manage them effectively. I read the best selling book “Now, Discover Your Strengths” and below are some great tips from the book.

Also, keep in mind these management skills are diminished if the manager is not meeting regularly and predictably with each of their people. These meetings are a core regimen of strong organizations.

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN ACHIEVER
Help him measure what he gets done.
If promoting to a higher role isn’t available, pinpoint him to other themes and strengths, and look for opportunities for him to do more of what he does well.

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN ACTIVATOR (person who strives for action)
Let her know that you know she is a person who can make things happen. Your expectations will energize her.
Assign her to a team that is bogged down and talks more than it performs. She will stir them into action.

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN ADAPTABILITY
He will be most productive on short-term assignments that require immediate action.
With his flexible nature, he’s good at adjusting to the new circumstances and try to make progress.

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN ANALYTICAL
If you are explaining a decision that has already been made, always remember to lay out the logic of the decision very clearly.
Getting a task done correctly may be more important to her than meeting a deadline. Therefore, as the deadline draws near, keep checking with her to ensure that she has the necessary time to do it right.

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN ARRANGER
This person will thrive on responsibility, so give him as much as you are able, according to his knowledge and skill levels.
When you are launching a project, give him the opportunity to choose and position the members of the project team.
He is excited by complex, multifaceted assignments.

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN BELIEF
This person will have a passion about something. Discover her passion and tie it to the work to be done.
Learn about her family and community. You will need to understand, appreciate, and honor these commitments, and she will respect you for it.
Realize that she may place more value on opportunities to provide greater levels of service than on opportunities to make more money

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN COMMAND
Always ask him for evaluations of what is happening in your organization. He is most likely to give you a straight answer.
This person may intimidate others with his up-front, assertive style. Rather than pushing him to learn how to be empathic and polite, your time may be better spent helping his colleagues understand that his assertiveness

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN COMMUNICATION
Discuss your plans with her for your organization’s social events. She is likely to have good ideas both for entertainment and for what should be communicated at the event.
Take the time to hear about her life and experiences. She will enjoy the telling. You will enjoy the listening. And your relationship will be closer because of it.

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN COMPETITION
Talk about talents with him. Like all competitors he knows that it takes talent to be a winner. Name his talents.
Use competitive language with this person. For example, achieving a goal is winning and missing a goal is losing. When you need to engage him in planning or problem solving, use the competitive word “outsmart.”

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN CONNECTEDNESS
Properly positioned, she can be a team builder in your company.
She may be very receptive to thinking about the mission for your organization. She likes to feel part of something larger than herself.
She is likely to have a spiritual orientation and perhaps a strong faith. Acknowledge it.

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN CONTEXT
When you ask this person to do something, take time to explain the thinking that led to this action. He needs to understand the background for a course of action before he can commit to it.
He thinks in terms of case studies, that is, when did we meet a similar situation, what did we do, what happened, what did we learn? You can expect him to use this talent to help others learn

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN DELIBERATIVE
Do not position this person in a role that requires snap judgments.
She is likely to be a rigorous thinker, and cautious. She excels in situations such as legal or contract negotiation.
Do not ask her to be a greeter

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN DEVELOPER
Position him so that he can help others within the organization grow. He is a candidate for supervisor, team lead.
Be aware that he may protect a struggling performer long past the time when she should have been moved or terminated

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN DISCIPLINE
Give this person the opportunity to bring structure to a haphazard or chaotic situation
Always give her advance notice of deadlines. Don’t surprise her with sudden changes in plan and priority. Surprises are distressing to her.

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN EMPATHY
He is sensitive to the emotions of others. Before securing his commitment to a particular course of action, ask him how he feels and how other people feel about the issues involved.
Ask this person to help you know how certain people within your organization are feeling.

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN FAIRNESS
When it comes time to recognize the team after the completion of a project, ask this person to pinpoint each person’s contribution
She has a practical bent and thus will tend to prefer getting tasks accomplished and decisions made rather than more abstract work such as brainstorming or long-range planning.

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN FOCUS
Set goals with timelines and then let this person figure out how to achieve them. He will work best in an environment where he can control his work events.
Do not always expect him to be sensitive to the feelings of others because getting his work done often takes priority over feelings
He does not revel in situations of constant change. To manage this, use language that he can understand when describing the change. For example, talk about change in terms of “new goals” and “new measures of success.” Terms like this give the change trajectory and purpose.

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN FUTURISTIC
Put her on the organization’s planning committee. Stimulate her by talking with her often about what could be. Ask lots of questions.
When the organization needs its people to embrace change, ask her to put these changes in the context of the organization’s future needs. Have her make a presentation or write an internal article that puts these changes in perspective

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN HARMONY
Don’t waste your time discussing controversial subjects with this person. He will not enjoy the debate for its own sake.
But when others are locked in disagreement, he can unlock them.
He wants to feel sure about what he is doing. Help him find expert opinion for the actions he takes.

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN IDEATION
She will be particularly effective as a designer. Since she thrives on ideas, try to feed her new ideas that lie within the focus of your organization.
She needs to know that everything fits together. When decisions are made, take time to show her how each decision is rooted in the same theory or concept.
On those few occasions when a particular decision does not fit, explain to her that this decision is an exception or an experiment.

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN INCLUSIVENESS
This person is interested in making everyone feel part of the team. Ask him to work on an orientation program for new employees
Ask him to lead a task force to recruit minority persons into your organization.

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN INDIVIDUALIZATION
She will probably be a very good judge of each candidate’s strengths and weaknesses.

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN INPUT
Position him in roles with a heavy research component. He enjoys the knowledge that comes from research.

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN INTELLECTION
Have a detailed discussion with her regarding her strengths. She will probably enjoy the introspection and self-discovery.
Give her pure thinking time. For some people pure thinking time is not productive behavior, but for her it is. She will have more clarity and self-confidence as a result.

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN LEARNER
Position this person in roles that require him to stay current in a fast-changing field. He will enjoy the challenge of maintaining his competency.

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN MAXIMIZER
This person is interested in taking something that works and figuring out ways to maximize its performance. She may not be particularly interested in fixing things that are broken.
Avoid positioning her in roles that demand continual problem solving.
Ask her to lead a task force to investigate the best practices within your organization

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN POSITIVITY
This person brings drama and energy to the workplace. Find ways to position him as close to your customers as possible

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN RELATOR (relates to people, generous)
Ask her to build genuine trusting relationships with the critical people that you want to retain. She can be one of the human ties that bind good people to your organization.

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN RESPONSIBILITY
This person defines himself by his ability to live up to his commitments. It will be intensely frustrating for him to work around people who don’t.
He dislikes sacrificing quality for speed.
He may well impress you with his ability to deliver time and again. You may be so impressed that you decide to promote him to management. Be careful. He may much prefer to do a job himself than be responsible for someone else’s work, in which case he will find management frustrating

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN RESTORATIVE
Position her where she is paid to solve problems for your best customers. She enjoys the challenge of discovering and removing the obstacles.
Regularly ask her in what ways she would like to improve.

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN SELF-ASSURANCE
Help him know that his decisions and actions do produce outcomes. He is at his most effective when he believes he is in control of his world.

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN SIGNIFICANCE
Be aware of this person’s need for independence. Do not overmanage her.
Give her the opportunity to stand out, to be known. She enjoys the pressure of being the focal point of attention. Arrange for her to stand out for the right reasons,

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN STRATEGIC
Position this person on the leading edge of your organization. His ability to anticipate problems and their solutions will be valuable.
This person is likely to have a strength for putting his ideas and thoughts into words.

HOW TO MANAGE A PERSON STRONG IN WOO (to dazzle other people)
Position this person in a role where she has a chance to meet new people every day. Strangers energize her.
Do not expect her to enjoy a role where she is asked to build close relationships with your customers. Instead, she may well prefer to meet and greet, win over, and move on to the next.

Below is a summary of key findings from the book

Level 5 vs. Level 4 leadership.

A key difference between “good” and “great” leadership is that “great” leadership builds enduring success that can be pass along to future generations, whereas in “good” leadership, the leaders has a compelling vision to lead to success, but the company falters once the leader steps down. Essentially, “great” leadership establishes a discipline, a culture, a process, for producing success, and it is not owned by one person.

Humility + Will = Level 5

Strong determination to do whatever must be done to produce the best long-term results, no matter how difficult or how personal it is.
Acts with quiet, calm determination; relies principally on inspired standards, not inspiring charisma, to motivate.
Looks into the mirror, not out the window, to apportion responsibility for poor results, never blaming other people, external factors, or bad luck.
Looks out the window, not in the mirror, to apportion credit for the success of the company – to other people, external factors, and good luck.

First Who … then What

Get the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) before you figure out where to drive it. Great vision without great people is irrelevant.
There’s no need to “motivate” the right behaviors from the wrong people. You just need to get and keep the right people in the first place.
When in doubt, don’t hire – keep looking.
When you know you need to make a people change, act.
Put your best people on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems. (Corollary: If you sell off your problems, don’t sell off your best people.)

The Stockdale Paradox

Retrain faith that you will prevail in the end, AND at the same time Confront the most brutal facts of your current reality

1. Lead with questions, not answers
2. Conduct autopsies, without blame.
3. Build red flag mechanisms that turn information into information that cannot be ignored.

The hedgehog concept

Make sure your vision fits in the three circles of:

1. What you can be the best in the world at
2. What is the biggest economic denominator
3. What you are deeply passionate about

You need to understand what you can be the best, something you’ve talent and passionate about, before setting a vision

A culture of discipline

Build a consistent system with clear constraints, but give people freedom and responsibility within the framework of that system.
Hire self-disciplined people. They don’t need to be managed. You just need to manage the system, not the people.

Technology Accelerators

Technology is an accelerator of momentum, not a creator of it. Don’t blindly follow the latest technology trend. Make sure they fit in the hedgehog concept.

Flywheel

Like pushing on a giant, heavy flywheel, it takes a lot of effort to get the thing moving at all, but with persistent pushing in a consistent direction over a long period of time, the flywheel builds momentum, eventually hitting a point of breakthrough.

Jordan may the best ever on the court, but I believe Stern, with his marketing skills and business acumen that grew NBA into a globally recognized brand, is the true MVP of NBA.

Lessons learnt here from Friendster’s demise
A company must have an aligned vision. In Friendster’s case, each high profile executive has their own agenda (i.e. deals with AOL, VoIP, Internet Radio, etc.), resulting in poorly integrated features, and more importantly unnecessary rewrite of code that tormented the development team.

Don’t assumed that with enough money and the talented people, the technical / employee morale problems would solve themselves. Friendster was suffering from performance problems with its constant connection calculation, which can be fixed by a compromise solution, but the founder assumed the experienced VCs (which had little experience with Friendster) will take charge and resolve the issue. Friendster made massive hardware / software upgrade but that halted business development for 6 months

Mr. Chambers has put together a practical book that dissects many of the basic concepts of communication, and provides some insights about technical professionals.

There is nothing more important in the workplace than being able to get your point across and making sure you understand what is being said to you. The basic philosophy is, “all communication failures are your fault.” It is your responsibility to make sure that what you are saying is understood, and it is your responsibility to make sure that you understand what you are being told.

The best chapter in this book is chapter 4 “giving and receiving criticism”. In the past I had difficulties to convey my critical comments
to technical experts and software developer. As they are very proud of their own work you need to take a lot of care not hurt them. The best way is to explicity state what they have done good before you say what they could do better to even improve their work. I am sure that I can apply these tipps in my work place