HTCAB: Legal Interlude

The interlude at the end of Chapter 5 reminded me of some recent conversations I had around the design of this blog. But as Dave Hitz writes:

My new slogan: Success breeds litigation.

While it's frustrating, it's just lawyers executing in the system.

To put it in computer terms, Congress is the programmer, laws are the program, and the courtroom - lawyers, judge, and jury - are the computer that runs the program.

I love that example. Also it helps me understand the changes I was asked to make. Dave Hitz, while I could never be mad at you I certainly forgive you now!

HTCAB: Chapter 5

Sorry for the long delay in getting back to HTCAB. I've been busy with other stuff, but fortunately, there's been the awesome NetApp rap and interview with Dave Hitz to keep everyone reading!

One of my favorite lines in Chapter 6 had to do with selling during the dot com boom. A standard practice was to give customers loans in exchange for stock. Here's what my new favorite NetApp blogger Kostadis Roussos calls his "all time NetApp moment":

Your job is to find people who have money and sell them something

That was something said by Tom Mendoza who Dave Hitz calls "one of the best public speakers I've ever seen." Dave Hitz saw him as a role model for speaking saying "I'm more of a writer myself." No kidding! The writing in HTCAB is great!

Put your hands up for N-E-T if you wanna De-Dupe say A-P-P

NetApp made a sweet video. In case you didn't figure it out, "E Squared" is supposed to be EMC and "Double D" is Data Domain. The crowd comes to the obvious conclusion: NetApp is the best!



Here's my favorite line:

Your whole process is sloppy
We save Zeta-bytes he save floppy’s
Lack reliability when you copy
This guy bought himself into the technology

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!"

HTCAB: Chapter 4

I'm going to start this chapter review with some advice from Dave Hitz in the interlude after the chapter:

Here is my advice: Always start with the conclusion. Somewhere in your presentation you have a conclusion slide that summarizes the proposal you hope to get approved. Put that slide first.

Well: Dave Hitz is awesome.

The next part of NetApp's development that Dave Hitz talks about is hypergrowth, doubling and doubling and doubling the size of the company without end. I can see why he said at the end of the last chapter that everything was broken (and that that was good news!) because if you're growing that fast I bet it's hard to keep everything running perfectly even for Dave Hitz!

Dave Hitz also provides a good tip for founders of a company or, I think, anyone working for a company:

VCs sent the technical founders of younger companies to ask: Why hadn't Dan fired James and me? The secret was simple: We valued our customers and our company more than we valued the technology we had developed.

It must be hard to always put the needs of your company and customers in front of the dedication to the technologies you develop, but I guess that's what a great engineer does. But a great engineer also has foresight as Dave Hitz writes:

We didn't invent the Web or even predict the Web, but we saw it coming and decided to catch it.

You don't have to invent everything or even predict it as long as you can see it coming and take advantage. What no one saw coming was the end of the dot-com bubble, but NetApp was able to come out of it in good shape because Dave Hitz had had the forethought to start selling to other strong industries like banks and phone companies.

I loved the story about Dave Hitz taking a friend's daughter to a piercing studio and recruiting the tattooed piercer with an interest in IT (information technology). I guess you really can find talent anywhere and you can't judge a book by its cover. But if you judged this book by its cover you'd be exactly right!