Thanks to Chris Thomason for pointing out today’s leadership quotation via Twitter (@christhomason):

“If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.”
Thomas A. Edison

Thanks to Thomas Edison for inspiring us and inventing all that stuff (1,093 U.S. Patents)!
Technorati Tags: Edison, Potential, Leadership

This morning, my Sun Microsystems colleague Rakesh Radhakrishnan published a blog post that proposed an “Integrated Identity Infrastructure acting as the Common Service Building Block” that provides foundation Identity services for multiple areas in the communications and media markets, including the flowing use case areas:

• Immersive Collaboration Services
  
• Interactive Media Services
  
• Individualized Personal Service
• Innovative Data Services
• Intrinsic Object Services

I am intrigued with this concept of an Integrated Identity Infrastructure enabling a wide ranging set of business and consumer functions.  I look forward to more good discussion in this area.

Technorati Tags: Sun Microsystems, Identity, Identity Management, Digital Identity

Creative: Characterized by originality and expressiveness; imaginative.

Synergy:  The interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects.

The most exciting and satisfying part of my career is best labeled “Creative Synergy,” where the interaction between two or more people yields more creative results than any of the participants could deliver individually.

This is something that can’t be forced, but is exciting when it happens.  I just experienced it again this afternoon at an adhoc meeting here at Sun’s Customer Engineering Conference in Las Vegas.  Not a huge flash, not a ground-breaking innovation, but a creative bit of terminology that may make a big difference in how an important concept can be communicated.

And I’m not even going to tell you what we discovered.  I’ll leave this to my colleague who’ll blog about it soon.  Stay tuned!

Technorati Tags: creativity, synergy, idea

At Sun Microsystem’s Customer Engineering Conference, Sun Vice President Hal Stern proposed that courage was essential for innovation. His challenge seemed particularly relevant as we seek to thrive amidst challenging times.

I enjoy exploring the meanings of words, so I turned to Dictionary.com for assistance as I pondered this concept:

• Innovate: “to begin or introduce something new”
• New: “of a kind now existing or appearing for the first time”
• First: “being before all others with respect to time”

Basically, innovation demands that we do something before anyone else does it – before “best practices” are known, before markets are proven, before all the “gotchas” have been experienced. To those who try to innovate, there always seems to be an abundance of people who point out potential pitfalls, pose a host of reasons things won’t work and warn of impending doom.

In a Sun sales training conference last August, a featured speaker, Robert Kriegel, called this oppressive phenomena the “firehose principle” – where naysayers always seem to appear with virtual fire hoses to douse the emerging flame of any new idea … which brings us to a second essential word – Courage.

• Courage: “the quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to face difficulty, danger, pain, etc., without fear”
• Danger: “liability or exposure to harm or injury; risk; peril”
• Fear: “a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc., whether the threat is real or imagined”

Because fire hosers seem always to emerge in opposition to new ideas, we must cultivate a courageous quality of mind or spirit that will enable us to face opposition without fear.  Then we can innovate.

In another recent dictionary discovery session, I found that “Valiant” means “boldly courageous”.  I think that is the type of courage Hal Stern challenged us to foster.  This is not a call for rose-colored glasses or intellectual dishonesty, but it is the type of courage that drives us to overcome obstacles, find answers to tough questions, fight the opposition and persevere to win.

In these troubled times, we at Sun need that type of bold courage.  We need to leverage our culture of innovation, not just in technology, but in business practice and personal performance, to conquer the fire hoses and deliver results.

Technorati Tags: Courage, Innovation, Leadership

Today is the official release date of Sun’s OpenSSO Enterprise product, the 8.0 version of the product set formerly known as the “Access Manager/Federation Manager”, which was publicly announced on September 30th.

 

• The Fedlet – a lightweight way for service providers to quickly federate with a SAML 2.0 identity provider
• Multi-Protocol Hub – allows companies that are members of a circle of trust to speak different federation protocols
• Identity Services – invoke AAA services using your IDE of choice or any programming language (e.g. Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby, etc.)
• Express Builds – deploy next-generation features from the OpenSSO community with the same support and indemnification provided with commercial releases
• Ease of Use – new task-based UI for common federation-related operations
• Ease of Install – just drop the WAR file into your servlet-container of choice, hit it with a browser and, in the simplest case, supply admin passwords
• Much more, including: centralized server configuration (no more AMConfig.properties text file), centralized agent configuration (no more AMAgent.properties text files).

Give it a whirl – download it here today!

Technorati Tags: Sun Microsystems, Identity, Identity Management, Digital Identity, OpenSSO