Last week we heard about Apple vs FBI in the fight over a locked iPhone containing presumably valuable data regarding the San Bernardino attackers who killed 14 innocent people. Last night we heard about a gunman who randomly shot people in Kalamazoo, MI who happens to be a driver for Uber. There is no direct connection between the topic of this blog and these two incidences though some indirect link exists and I will leave it to your imagination.
Regardless of our individual positions on Apple’s stand, I would be curious to know what they find in the iPhone that they cannot find elsewhere. In this so well connected and cloud driven world where every vendor seem to want you to sync all of your information with their cloud services, you must be pretty deliberate and careful about not syncing your data with other cloud based systems. A bigger question I have is, with such vast amounts of available data and sophisticated analysis tools, what prevented law enforcement from picking up something like this? Impure data? Inconclusive evidence?
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I am so excited that Dr Paula Johnson has been named the 14th president of Wellesley College. I was unable to be on campus today, so I just listened to her introduction and her brief speech through the livestream. As with all the changes, I am sure that the campus will be re-energized and I am looking forward to the changes that await us.
On a different note, I am happy to be able to publicly say that Wellesley College has decided to move to Workday as our ERP. As you can imagine, this is another huge change for us and there is both considerable enthusiasm and anxiety about this change.
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There are always new things to learn. Some lessons are so powerful and stick in your mind and you put them to work. Others such as Total Quality Management come and go. They don’t tend to be useful unless the context in which you go through this is clearly explained. You can then prepare yourself to learn from them and relate to that context. For example, in the early 90’s TQM was pretty hot in higher ed circles. The institution where I worked at that time asked the staff members from our technology support organization to devote 4 full days to TQM training. Except, no one bothered to tell us ahead of time why we are doing this.
During the introductory remarks by the guy who was going to train us it became clear that the senior administration is making us go through this because our organization was in trouble and the staff had no idea how bad things were. Long story short, I was pretty upset that the context was not explained and was not shy about expressing it (in a cvivil way, of course!). Frankly, many saw me in a completely different light during the TQM training and recommended to the next administration that I will be good in a leadership position! So, I owe TQM for paving the way for me to take on leadership positions.
Wellesley’s HR has a strong leadership development program which I participate in. Its goal is to help senior managers develop leadership skills through exchange of ideas amongst ourselves as well as by listening to experts. We learned about Open Space Technology (OST) last week, which was very interesting on several counts. According to the website “Open Space (Technology) is a simple way to run productive meetings, for five to 2000+ people, and a powerful approach to leadership in any kind of organization, in everyday practice and turbulent change.”
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