The company I'm currently working for has an incredible spectrum of interesting jobs and unbelievable people. Three examples of co-workers I met during yesterday's conference of the Management Excellence Community:

• Auditor. Yeah, close to accounting, right?. Assuming that this may be a relative boring job - compared to the interesting stuff my company normally works on, I wondered what he really does, and why he was attending a session about managing global operations. And while chatting a little about his actual role, the person disclosed to manage a global SWAT team of former federal agents, working on 'compliance-related matters'. I must admit that Cyber CSI sounds much more interesting than just looking into accounting.
• Leadership development consultant. Another also doesn't sound really compelling. One writes one (or many books) about a management topic and easily claims the subject matter expertise in that topic. , and typically start by somehow building credibility for overcoming the objection that you know what you're talking about - but have never actually done it. This person was somehow different: A former SERF instructor and co-worker of former Cisco CEO John Chambers, now coaching our Senior Executives. One of his boardroom war stories: "Being just four months around here it wouldn't have been career-driving to tell a senor executive what's wrong in his business. SO I rephrased it a little: 'You know why the average tenure of a VP in your organization here is less than two years? Every leader should shoot an elephant from time to time. You and your leaders consider every aunt to be an elephant, and are very busy with killing several of these elephants a day. That is pretty exhausting. Maybe you want to have your management take care of the aunts, and rest while waiting for the real elephant.'"
• Director Learning Solutions. Before I had met this person I believed to be a global citizen. Not even close: With master degrees in psychology, math, applied physics, and computer science, having lived in 33 countries, and speaking 16 languages, other people might qualify much better for that title. And these attributes seem somehow essential pre-requisites if you impact learning of several hundred million people, and influence education system in more than 150 countries. And closing a session, which was opened by a 'normal' Russian, by stating ".. and I'm from St. Petersburg, which, as everybody knows, was supposed to be capital of Russia" showed her sense of humor.

Great people. Getting them together into one conference for jointly working on excelling in the subject matter expertise of 'management' will surely result in great performance over time.

Oh well, and I took Beau Parnell's advise, and Bob Kelly's ask by heart, and took the typical risk of an optimistic leader, heading his troops up the hill. We'll see where this will take me.

Bill Gates' retirement seems a good opportunity for many authors to capitalize on this mile stone, and consequently the number of "unauthorized" publications about Microsoft increases. One of these authors yesterday shared some insight on "authorization", and follow-up conversations with her publisher's lawyers on using unauthorized and non-public information. Not being a lawyer and regularly taking on bold challenges, I just wonder how anybody could assume a journalist would ever accept "authorization" of his or her work, and what value a reader could gain from an authorized (co-authored?) story, but that's a different discussion topic.

Anyway: Yesterday evening Microsoft Watchdog Mary Jo Foley presented her new book on Microsoft's future, assisted by equally famous Todd Bishop. Admittedly being biased, I was more impressed with Todd's questions than with Mary Jo's answers. Still noteworthy are two of her conclusions that astounded me:

With Microsoft's enterprise and consumer businesses diverging more and more, she believes that the two businesses should be separated. And she shared her impression, that the reigning higher ranks at Microsoft seem to act on the assumption, that innovation is originating from the consumer business, not from the enterprise business.

If forced to bet her assets on either Google or Microsoft, she'd choose Microsoft, sharing her belief that Google is only a one-trick pony. At the same time, she thinks Microsoft's executives being obsessed (unnecessarily?) by Google. Considering Google an important competitor to Microsoft, like IBM, or Sony, she's more concerned by the number of competitors given the diversity of Microsoft's businesses.

She's got two good points there, although I'm have a different point of view concerning the rationale.

Some colleagues (previous SAP Basis guys) recently pinged me with the question on how to get up to speed with SAP's Netweaver.

Here's an interesting article describing the commonalities between ABAP and Netweaver - none - and recommending the most obvious training method: Training on the job. A brief extract:

"I find the easiest way is to download either NetWeaver 7.0 or 7.1 from the SAP Developer Network (SDN). You can get a 90-day trial version of the Java AS, or you can get a NetWeaver subscription. If you are a contractor, I recommend downloading NetWeaver 7.0 and Composition Environment (CE) 7.1 to get acquainted with both flavors of NetWeaver. I have CE 7.1 on my laptop, and though it takes a long time to load, it gets the job done. You'll need Windows XP SP2 and at least 2GB of RAM. If you run Vista, as I do, you'll need a virtual machine to run NetWeaver. I haven't been able to get NetWeaver to install on Vista. You can download a trial version of VMWare Workstation."

How can you transfer Basis skills to NetWeaver?

Based-upon the last statement, I wonder if there's anybody out there who has 7.1 installed on a Vista machine. Most people I know run it with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (or 2008) and Microsoft Virtual Server on their laptops.