Awais Bin Khalid

Any corporate enterprise that succeeds by developing a certain set of products, that target needs of customer of that time, usually tend to loose an eye for change that is happening around. Things that bring success at first, with time become legacy. A certain layer of satisfied bureaucracy takes over the enthusiastic employees ( who are leaving anyway after being disappointed by politicians, whose failure is being hidden in overall success of company). Success of past allows the corporate to easily be blindfolded and ignore it's present failures.

A great example of above, is IBM. IBM was an enterprise, which after witnessing skyrocketing success, started suffering from disease, disease of arrogance, legacy, politics. In 1993, Lou Gerstner took over IBM and brought IBM back from a near death of old-age arrogant corporate, and transformed into agile, customer-focused company.

Few Excerpts from book 'Saving Big Blue' about 'Leadership Lessons & Turnaround Tactics of IBM's Lou Gerstner' by 'Robert Slater'. This book clearly outlines above problems and how Gerstner dealt with them.

1. Entrepreneurship is a relationship. Someone has to generate ideas, someone has to support those ideas, and someone has to develop them and sell them.
2. When you are a leader of the turnaround, change starts with you. Turnaround is an inexact science. You can’t make people more entrepreneurial, more
   aggressive, or more productive.What you can do is maintain momentum.Once things get going, keep them moving.
3. Activity does not necessarily breed productivity. Only productive activity breeds productivity.
4. You’re never done. And when you think you’re done, you’re in trouble.
5. Urgency sets the tone, but without execution all your business plans will sit on the desk where you dreamed them up, and all your hard-earned customers will fi nd other places to
   shop.
6. You’ve got to be out there creating an atmosphere of ‘can do’.
7. Get rid of incurable politicians.
8. If you can’t let your employees act without your consent, you’ll spend too much time checking up on them. To succeed, you need employees who care.
9. Keep your people a little bit hungry and a little bit unsatisfied, so your organization never becomes complacent. An employee who’s a little bit hungry is better than an employee who’s a little
   bit full.
10. The most brilliantly complex software in the world is worthless if you can’t explain it to your customers.
11. Your future is only as bright as your risk-takers, if your hierarchy is too rigid, the right people might never get to
    talk.
12. Nurture your creative people. Encourage them to do what they do best. They might not always act like everybody else, but neither did Einstein.

This book is a must read, for those who are becoming aware of stagnance in his life, whoever wants to get out of SES circle (shit, eat, sleep).
Simply put, If your vision of tomorow is similar to today, then universe will not bother if you die today instead of tomorow. Your insignificance is sad.

More details of the book here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alchemist_(book).

I am quoting few lines from the book, that really touched me. Hopefully you will not only enjoy the book, but learn from it as well.

1. Principle of favoribility = When you play cards the first time, you are almost sure to win. Beginner's luck.
2. Sometimes, there is just no way to hold the river.
3. it was a good thing for the boy to clean the crystal pieces, so that he could free himself from negative thoughts.
4. "I'm alive," he said to the boy, as they ate a bunch of dates one night, with no fires and no moon. "When I'm eating, that's all I think about. If I'm on the march, I just concentrate on marching. If I have to fight, it will be just as good a day to die as any other.Because I don't live in either my past or my future. I'm interested only in the present. If you can concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man.
5. Maybe God created the desert so that man could appreciate the date trees.
6. The secret is here in the present. If you pay attention to the present, you can improve upon it. And, if you improve on the present, what comes later will also be better. Forget about the future, and live each day according to the teachings, confident that God loves his children. Each day, in itself, brings with it an eternity.
7. Unfortunately, very few follow the path laid out for them—the path to their destinies, and to happiness. Most people see the world as a threatening place, and, because they do, the world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place
8. Darkest hour of the night came just before the dawn.
9. Anyone who interferes with the destiny of another thing never will discover his own."
10. "Well, what good would it be to you if you had to die?" the alchemist answered. "Your money saved us for three days. It's not often that money saves a person's life."
11. Usually the threat of death makes people a lot more aware of their lives.
12. Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.

This model of change detection in property objects is being heavily used in new frameworks of .Net, such as WCF/ Linq.

Following code check if objects are changed, if not then nothing happens.

[DataMemberAttribute()]
        public string currencyCode
        {
            get
            {
                return this.currencyCodeField;
            }
            set
            {
                if ((object.ReferenceEquals(this.currencyCodeField, value) != true))
                {
                    this.currencyCodeField = value;
                    this.RaisePropertyChanged("CurrencyCode");
                }
            }
        }

Offcourse, when you raise event, you need to have a mechanism to catch it, and take action. Add following statements to your class, to allow it to allow other classes to subscribe to this events, usually parent class will do that.

public event System.ComponentModel.PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged;

        protected void RaisePropertyChanged(string propertyName)
        {
            System.ComponentModel.PropertyChangedEventHandler propertyChanged = this.PropertyChanged;
            if ((propertyChanged != null))
            {
                propertyChanged(this, new System.ComponentModel.PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName));
            }
        }

A lot of developers, have been depending upon tools like SQL Prompt by Red Gate, to use intellisense in sql server. Sql server's editor is no doubt a big pain in the @$$. Most of the times, it fails on execution of queries, which it claims are syntactically correct, and ironically half of errors you see on execution are related to syntax, i.e. non-existing columns in a table etc.

As Sql server 2008 is coming up, not sure how many of you have upgraded to Sql server 2005 version yet. But it seems like Microsoft is finally realizing that they need to give level of attention to development part of Sql server suite, as they did by bring up .NET for Windows platform. Starting with Sql Integration services, they are adding more features with every release, and 2008 version is coming with intellisense.

SQL prompt is not free, it comes with a prices, but since sql server is now being released in CTP 6. The expiry on the suite is only the sql services, not on client tools. Therefore you can download the client tools now, and use them even for release versions later as well. As Microsoft claims, current release is feature complete, meaning most of what they are doing now, is testing. So far, i have witnessed no crash.

The speed of built-in intellisense is much better than SQL Prompt.

Preview for those who want to sneak peak.

1. Intellisense on fly:

2. Syntax Error Checkup: