Dave Hitz Webcast

Last week, Dave Hitz gave a webcast about management and he gave a lot of great advice. I recognized a lot of stuff from his book, but it was amazing to hear his words of wisdom from the voice of Dave Hitz himself.

First, How to Castrate a Bull is a metaphor for risk taking and, better, appropriate risk taking. As the interviewer says in the opening it's a "fun book to read with fascinating insights."

Dave Hitz: Is this your typical business book?
Interviewer: no... not at all... very entertaining. The book is full of excellent advice.

Here are some other great quotes from Dave Hitz that I typed out because I think they will really help some people:

After the crash, we went back with exactly the same story, interesting solution, different technology, can save you a lot of money, they were all over it. And I would say in general an economic downturn creates a whole new set of problems for people. And people when they have problems that's what they spend money on. There's a phrase that I think should guide people's strategy both when they're being a customer making decisions in this environment but also when they're trying to sell to customers and that phrase is "good enough considering." And here's what I mean by that. Just in your personal life, if you're thinking of buying a car right now and you're looking at the economy and you're thinking "that BMW's looking pretty nice, but maybe a Ford Fiesta would be good enough considering." I think certainly anybody in management needs to be asking that questions about the decisions they're making, but if you're trying to sell to other people, that should be your leading value proposition. You know, is there a way to do things that are maybe different than the way people are thinking about. Maybe it's not. Like in the computer world, I think server virtualization VMware as an example of what's going on with that or possibly cloud computing. These solutions may make you uncomfortable or nervous but you have to ask "are they good enough considering." But I'm repeating myself: both as a customer and a sales person, that's where you need to start.

I still think of myself as a programmer, but the computers I program now are people's brains. My programming language is powerpoint.

Dave Hitz spent a bunch of time talking about The Innovators Dilemma (totally my next read after HTCAB). I thought this was a particularly interesting:

Interviewer: What are the big companies that are already up market supposed to do?
Dave Hitz: You read this whole book and you kind of conclude, those guys are up a creek. At minimum, being aware of that situation is a good starting point.
Interviewer: absolutely.

I wouldn't want to be NetApp's competition, LOL!

The interview ended with, I think, the best advice from Dave Hitz: "have fun with life and don't be too serious." And Dave Hitz has a message for bigshots: "Get over yourself!"