Money and Prestige

How do you find good leaders? I was just watching last week's episode of "The West Wing", and it triggered an essay that I had read. A section of Paul Graham's How to Do What You Love talks about Money and Prestige.

Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like. ... The other big force leading people astray is money. ... The danger is when money is combined with prestige.

Now, take this, and apply it to executive compensation. There is a lot of money being thrown around in that area. I am not saying it is wrong, but it certainly isn't going to help find the right people for the job. It will attract a whole mess of ambitious people, though. For middle executives, this may not be a problem. For a top position, do you want to attract the most ambitious people? This doesn't always equate to good leadership. You really need to dig into a person's character to find that. Some of the best leader's I've known, did it naturally and sometimes even reluctantly. That being said... I still have no idea how to attract good leaders.

Boot Camp

For all the people out there speculating on when Apple is going to allow Windows apps too run natively inside Mac OS X, this is for you: OS/2 - A better Windows than Windows. .

Does no one remember this? Seriously, one of the big killers of OS/2 was that it's best apps were all Windows apps. I see Boot Camp as just an Apple sanctioned boot loader that won't stomp on OS X. People were doing it anyway, so why not sell a few more boxes?

It's nice to think of all the grand virtulization technologies, but I really don't find them that interesting. It is a new label on an otherwise old technology. All this hype so that you can run multiple virtual computers on a single box. Why the hype? Because they are mostly running an OS that needs some kind of backup OS to take over for it. It's a good robust solution, but let's not forget why it is there. It's taking up the slack for reliability from the OS. It happens to work a lot better now that we have all these CPUs to throw at it, but it's still a fairly old idea.

Inspired by www.theappleblog.com/20...