Burnout and Openwashing Fluff
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Luis Villa: Book Notes: Summer 2022 (burnout and the good life) [Ed: Tidelift is connected to Microsoft]
Those of you who have emailed my work address lately will have noticed I’m also on sabbatical this summer, because after five years of focus on Tidelift I’m feeling pretty burnt out. This is not a criticism of Tidelift: it’s a great team; I’m very proud of what we are doing; and I will be going back shortly. But a big theme of the summer has been to think about what I want to do, and how that intersects with Tidelift—so that when I come back I’ll be both a strong contributor, and a happy and healthy contributor.
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Good: it helped me ask “what the hell am I doing” in much better ways. Two key tricks to this: asking it in a ten year timeframe, and using a bunch of neat futurist-y brainstorming techniques to help think genuinely outside of the box. For this reason I think it might end up being, in ten years, the most influential “self-help” book I ever read.
Bad: it’s a classic “this book should have been an article”, and it is the first time I’ve thought “this book should have been an app”—the structured brainstorming exercises could have been much more impactful if guided with even minimal software. There actually is a companion(?) pay-to-enter community, which so far I’ve really enjoyed—if I stick with it, and find value, I suspect in the future I’ll recommend joining that community rather than reading the book.
Other big failure(?): it focuses a lot on What Is Going On In The World and How You Can Change It, when one of my takeaways from Malesic’s burnout book was to focus less on The World and more on the concrete people and places around me. The book’s techniques are still helpful for this, which is why I think it’ll be impactful for me, but I think it’d be a better book if its examples and analysis also drilled down on the personal.
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Cloudify partners with ServiceNow for business cloud automation [Ed: The coin-operated SJVN is writing spammy ads now. How low he has sunk.]
Clouds can really help your business. If, and it's a big if, you can get it to work for you. That's where companies such as Cloudify, with its open source business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce platform, come in. Now, to make it more powerful, you can use the Cloudify infrastructure automation platform with ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM), part of the digital workflow of its Now Platform.