links for 2008-08-05 [delicious.com]

Is your focus on picking the right tools, or your purpose & outcomes?  "If you want to do something worth doing, you’ll need two things: passion and architecture. The tools will take care of themselves. (Knowledge of tools matters, of course, but it pales in comparison to the other two.)  Sure, picking the wrong tools will really cripple your launch. Picking the wrong software (or the wrong hammer) is a hassle. But nothing great gets built just because you have the right tools."

Good list of considerations before entering the cloud, beyond standard stuff (backup, ownership), questions on data content, data storage location & applicable regulations, privacy & competition by cloud provider

Do you work an environment that spurs or impedes creativity?  "After spending decades growing and merging themselves into their behemoth proportions, big businesses are rediscovering the charms –€” and the innovative side effects — of thinking small…break apart the bureaucratic hierarchies now smothering it. Optimizing a company for creativity involves helping individual employees of every rank develop an entrepreneurial spirit. In Mr. Rosedale’s view, the most creative work environment is one where every employee, regardless of job title, has enough freedom to develop that sense of personal initiative." … "Most companies erroneously focus on competition and on differentiation from their competitors," he contends. "The business opportunity lies in turning creativity into productivity."€…"The idea,"€ he says, "€œis to enable a creative environment where there’s a good degree of experimentation."€"

"Drucker noted: "There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all…"Drucker asserted that when a valid theory of the business is "clear, consistent, and focused," it’s bound to be "extraordinarily powerful."… Drucker pointed out that it’s not uncommon for a company to slip in this way, to take its theory of the business for granted as time passes. Management grows "less and less conscious of it," Drucker wrote. "Then the organization becomes sloppy. It begins to cut corners. It begins to pursue what is expedient rather than what is right. It stops thinking. It stops questioning. It remembers the answers but has forgotten the questions.""

interesting piece on why Amazon is investing in Elastra, to make Amazon’s cloud more enterprise friendly – supporting enterprise application architectures and portfolios…