A wise teacher told me once never to put my daughter at a hurdle she could not jump. Of course the hurdle might be difficult to jump and she might need to do some training to jump it, but make sure that it is a realistic possibility.  Find the things she is good at and set her up for success. Let her use her individual and unique strengths. Don’t be guided by what is good for everyone else. Be careful where you let her fail. Believing this to be good advice, I try to proactively seek hurdles where she can use her strengths and achieve results and occasionally by-pass hurdles which are best left for other children (maybe my other daughter) to try to jump.

It is hard though not to be sucked in to the peer pressure of parents around me. Maybe it is the circles I mix in but the pressure for our children to perform academically at the expense of everything else is overwhelming.  A  friend of mine with young children asked me if she should  pay  for extra tuition  to get her children into “best” senior school in the area?  Her current parent peers are all supposedly paying for extra tuition.  This question disappointed me on many levels. Do we only have one measure of success – our children have to be the best? Is the “best” school in the area best for my individual child? We all have strengths regardless of our age, gender or background that should be harnessed, nurtured and encouraged.  Recognising those strengths is perhaps the most important role of a parent. Whatever happened to variety being the spice of life?

I was at my daughter’s ice skating club this weekend and saw one of the children really upset off the ice talking with her mother. As you can imagine many injuries occur with this sport, so once her daughter was back on the ice I asked if she was ok. The mother answered “Oh yes she is just upset as I may stop her ice skating as she is not improving and she will never make it to the top!” Again she wanted her daughter to be the best and that was her only measure of success it seems. In fact her daughter is a happy, friendly child who connects easily with others – she may not be a top skater, but she is the top networker on the ice rink and that’s a skill that will be very valuable later on.  I really wish we could relax, appreciate and enjoy each other’s strengths much more -- especially in our children.

A few weeks ago I was in Turkey with around 200 colleagues from our “Emerging Theatre” – Middle East, Turkey, South Africa, Russian and African regions. I felt truly energised being surrounded by such a diverse group of people. Learning about the different cultures, experience, viewpoints and approaches but knowing we were all on the same team was exciting and added a new dimension to my day job. It was visibly clear we needed more women in the room but those present were highly valued and encouraged – a great environment!  The recognition of the delights of such diversity should be encouraged in our childhood and then maybe we will be more appreciative in adulthood?

Tags: diversity, Motivation, Strengths

Earlier this week on February 5, 2012, 50 high school students from 10 high schools in Japan and Korea participated in the final round of the Travel and Tourism Business Program (TTBiz) Competition via Cisco TelePresence.

TTBiz is an educational program offered by Junior Achievement, an international non-governmental organisation (NGO), and Accenture that provides high school students around the world with the opportunity to learn and demonstrate global business and leadership skills in the travel and tourism industry.  

The competition involved Korean and Japanese high school students teaming up to research, discuss and create travel proposals on “how to increase the number of Korean travelers to Japan.” This topic, which focused on promoting the Japanese tourism industry by attracting more Korean visitors to Japan, is aimed at helping tourism in Japan which has been greatly impacted by last year’s devastating earthquake and tsunami. Representatives of the Japan National Tourism Organization participated in the program as judges.

To provide an engaging environment for real-time dialogue and information sharing in the final competition, as the technology sponsor of TTBiz, Cisco provided its TelePresence and WebEx solutions to the high school students.

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Think cloud isn’t the next big thing in the evolution of IT? By 2015, experts predict cloud traffic will grow 12 times to reach 1.6 zettabytes—yes, zettabytes. That’s more than four days of business-class video for every single person on the planet.

So listen up, partners. Cisco is backing cloud 100 percent, and they’re ready to work with you to help enable the world of many clouds. Whether it’s planning, building, or running clouds, the opportunities are enormous. There’s also a great deal of complexity.

But not to worry. Cisco has you covered.

As part of its Cloud Partner Program, Cisco is offering Collaborative Professional Services (CPS) for Cloud. This Cisco Services offering shares intellectual capital, smart service innovation, demand generation, and a global delivery infrastructure with partners—all to help you develop profitable cloud solutions that will put a smile on every customer’s face.

Believe me. Your enterprise, service provider, small business, and government customers want a trusted cloud advisor. By transitioning to cloud, they’re likely to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and gain strategic advantage. Wonder who they’ll thank for the help? Read More »

Tags: channel partners, Cisco, cloud, services

Many companies today are jumping on the bandwagon to add custom social media accounts to their list of web properties. The Cisco Support Community team is one such group, but this team has done so particularly well and seen great successes with their endeavors.

In early 2010, they launched and revamped their social initiatives in hopes of staying connected with customers and extending the community beyond Cisco’s immediate reach. Just over a year afterward, the team was recognized as the winner of the 2011 Forrester Groundswell Award in the B2B Supporting Category. What’s more, Cisco estimates that the community-based support on Facebook and Twitter is saving the company more than $400K annually! Not everybody rises to fame with the fruits of their social media labor. I was curious to find out what the team did that led to such positive results, so I chatted with Pratibha Gupta and Mohan Rao, leads of the social media branch of the Support Community team.

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Tags: award, B2B, b2b supporting category, cisco support community, CSC, facebook, forrester groundswell, linkedin, social media, Technical Support, twitter, youtube

One of my favorite books is The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet, I’ve read it and reread it many times and each time I read it I get something new out of it.  With so many good books out there it seems silly to reread a book, especially a very long book. I think what it is, is that the story is so good, the characters so compelling that I don’t want to leave them and when I’m finished with the book I miss them.  Fortunately the book was made into a mini-series that I enjoyed and brought a nice visualization of the story.  I also think the mini-series may have attracted a new set of readers in the viewing audience.

New audiences come with new methods of distribution for the same, similar or different presentation of an already published work.  With the intent to reach a new audience I am republishing a UCS XML API focused blog from another blog site on Cisco Developer Network UCS Section.  I wrote this blog in April 2010, but the methods utilized seemed to flow from my prior entries on this site.The previously published blog has references to other blogs on the on the Cisco Developer Network site in the Cisco UCS section.

The previous blog…

Last time I wrote about using telnet to connect to the UCS Manager XML API as a way to introduce the API and show it’s lack of complexity. Now I don’t expect anyone to write an application that uses telnet to manage a UCS system, I just wanted to get across that if text, XML structured text, can be pushed across an open port to the listening API process on the UCS then it doesn’t matter how the push is done.

However telnet is not very practical, so I thought I would write about curl and xmlstarlet (xmlstarlet referred to as xml in this entry). curl is used to handle the request and response cycle with the UCS and xml is used to process the XML response. In some of my early scripts I used sed and awk to “parse” the output. I say parse but it was more pattern matching; by the way sed and awk are great tools, but maybe I’m partial to them because I’ve been around for a while. The reason I started with curl, sed and awk was not because I lacked XML experience but because I wanted to appeal to the administrators out there and show that XML experience, while beneficial, is not specifically needed.

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Tags: authentication, Cisco UCS, curl, query, XML API