From Executive Book Summaries

A Leadership Fable About Destroying the Barriers That Turn Colleagues Into Competitors

By Patrick Lencioni

SUMMARY The concept of “silos” has become synonymous with the barriers that separate work teams, departments and divisions — causing people who are supposed to be on the same team to work against one another. These maddening factions breed the office politics and in-fighting which ultimately kill productivity, squash profits and push the best people out the door. Silos cause stress, exasperation and disappointment by forcing employees to fight unwinnable battles with people who should be teammates. In this summary, New York Times’ bestselling author and acclaimed management expert Patrick Lencioni presents a dynamic leadership fable that reveals how organizations can overcome the “silos” that divide work units and paralyze performance. This summary also offers solutions to a key leadership issue — the impact of turf wars and political infighting on organizational effectiveness. Written in the form of a realistic but fictional story, this summary tackles a tough business issue in both an entertaining and instructive way.

In addition, this summary will also show you:

First America – Owns Grey Hound, several trains, and 50,000 school buses

Talked to Michael Gross CTO 513-967-7406 Cincinnati OH.  They lost their secondary data center in Plano Texas last week to fire.  They will be completely down for 3+ weeks, and then in 45 days will need to migrate to a replacement permanent location.  The data center had one critical production system that had its own private UPS and when the fire alarm started and shutdown the main UPS and power to the room that UPS was still powering the critical system, when the water dumped it fried the system.  This was a large data center with no isolation so all the systems got wet.  Most of the tapes on site could be dried out.  This many of the servers are currently drying and in a week they can test power them to see how many can be saved.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/18/politics/cdc-coronavirus-testing-contamination/index.html

(CNN)Contamination in manufacturing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention test for the coronavirus caused weeks of delays that slowed the US response to the pandemic, multiple health officials have told CNN, a problem that stemmed in part from the CDC not adhering to its own protocols, according to a US Food and Drug Administration spokesperson.

"CDC made its test in one of its laboratories, rather than in its manufacturing facilities," the FDA spokesperson told CNN on Saturday. "CDC did not manufacture its test consistent with its own protocol."

The government has never fully explained what stalled the rollout of a crucial test needed to begin measuring the extent of the spread of Covid-19. It would take until the end of February to correct and the US continues to lack extensive testing capability even as some states prepare ease up on restriction and reopen to a degree.

A summary from The First Step Towards Zero Trust

By Wiggs Civitillo

Zero trust embodies the idea that instead of relying on trust-based perimeter defenses (e.g., firewalls, DMZs), companies need interlinked security measures spanning their ecosystems that can enforce policies based on user context, data access controls, and device postures. Simply put, zero trust is a framework that facilitates a, “Never trust, always verify,” approach to cybersecurity.

When deployed effectively, the zero trust framework can provide companies the ability to monitor and defend against the lateral movement of malicious actors and code that has rendered perimeter defenses inadequate. Sophisticated cybercriminal attacks like denial-of-service, command-and-control, cryptojacking, phishing, ransomware, and even social engineering—to name a few— could be more readily addressed and prevented, saving companies an average of $2.3 million per incident.

Mapping COVID-19 Outbreak

As of Nov 10, 2020. Source 

Social Distancing Scorecard - Utah

Utah COVID-19 cases for residents and visitors

July 27, 2020. Source

Google advises all North America employees to work from home due to coronavirus

Google sent a memo to all of its North America-based employees recommending they work from until at least April 10th due to coronavirus, the company confirmed to Business Insider. Google had previously told employees in the San Francisco Bay Area, Dublin, and Seattle to work from home in recent days.

Google offices will remain open to workers if they have to be physically present for their job, according to Business Insider. CEO Sundar Pichai also urged people to “contribute” to social distancing in a Tuesday evening tweet: 

Contributing to social distancing if you are able to, helps the overall community spread and most importantly, will help offset the peak loads through critical healthcare systems and also saves it for people in need. (based on expert advice). Please contribute if you are able to.

What are we so scared about?  Lets compare the coronavirus to the influenza.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates at least 20,000 deaths this season from influenza.

There have been an estimated 34 million flu illnesses so far and 350,000 hospitalizations.

“I think a big part of it is fear of the unknown,” said Dr. Otto Yang, an infectious disease expert at UCLA. “The enemy you don’t know is much scarier than the enemy you know.”

“In general 80 percent of influenza activity each season tends to occur in January, February and March,” he said. “However, this flu season began early and certainly can continue well into April and even into May.”

by Steve Petryschuk | March 19, 2019   Network management  Network monitoring

To fully understand what NetFlow is and why it’s used for network monitoring, we first need to know what a flow is.

When computers need to talk to one another they establish communication channels, commonly referred to as connections. (Technically speaking, these communication channels can only be called connections when the TCP protocol is involved.) A flow refers to any connection or connection-like communication channel.

In more technical terms, a flow is defined by its 5-tuple, a collection of five data points:

• Source and destination IP addresses exchanging information
• Source and destination ports, if any (ICMP, for example, doesn’t use ports)
• The protocol

Flow identifies a communication channel, and all packets sharing the same 5-tuple fields belong to the same flow.

Social distancing measures aim to reduce the frequency of contact and increase physical distance between persons, thereby reducing the risks of person-to-person transmission.

Posted on February 28, 2020 | 2 Comments

I just reached out to the CEOs I work with with on this topic and figured I should also do a quick post to speak to the CEOs who follow Kellblog as well.

The primary purpose of this post is to remind busy startup CEOs that an important part of your job is to be out ahead of things. Usually that means customer needs, market trends, and competitors. I’d argue it also includes potential epidemics, such as the one threatened by COVID-19.

Nobody wants to work for a CEO who’s panicking. But nobody wants to work for a CEO without a plan, either. You owe it to your employees, customers, and (yes) shareholders to start thinking about the impact of the Coronavirus on your business. That starts with your first action item: having a conversation about it at your next weekly e-staff meeting, if you’ve not done so already.