As they say — fools rush in.

Thankfully, that doesn’t describe you or me. We do our homework. We ask the right questions. We trust our intuition. Some of us even eat our vegetables.

I’d like to illustrate the point with a fictional tale – a management parable. Its basic premise: when it comes to making complex decisions, it’s best to go deep.

Five leaders of a small cloud storage company are on a small plane that encounters some turbulence.  The plane loses altitude quickly when one of the twin engines begins to sputter.  The CEO, who is piloting the aircraft, reveals a potential dilemma to his top executives:

Should they need them, there are only four parachutes for the five passengers.  Within seconds, the seasoned leaders devise a contingency plan.

The CEO decides he definitely needs a parachute – after all, he’ll deliver the five-year strategic plan to the company’s Board of Directors next week.

The CFO asserts that she’ll require a parachute to successfully lead the company’s investor call scheduled for Thursday.

The COO takes dibs on a parachute in order to continue his work transforming their operating model. He adds a playful jab “We’ll need someone to create efficiencies for the CFO to brag about!”

The CIO declares he should grab the final parachute, to maintain the company’s “cred” with the technical community.

Just before the plane’s second engine roars back to life, the CMO puts his smartphone in his pocket and proudly declares: “No problem. I’ll jump without a parachute. After all, isn’t our company motto Cloud: There’s nothing you can’t save in it?”

This month’s roundup on the Exchange helps you thoughtfully consider cloud transition from practical consideration, to surgical application. You’ll get the information you need to dig in, go deep, and make informed decisions.

Go Deep – Cloud Transition Resources

Point of View
Essential guidance to align cloud transitions to IT strategy, culture and operations
Top 10 Consideration for Cloud Computing

White Paper
The benefits of consolidating cloud services and SLAs through managed services
A Key to Cloud Efficiency: Aggregation

Case Study
Eating through terabytes? How one company satisfied an insatiable appetite for storage
Henry Ford Health System – Medical Imaging in the Cloud

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I drew Jim on my “phablet” on a Saturday morning at the moment I decided to try a more visual form of blog expression. It’s remarkable how our use of time has changed inexorably – the boundary between work and life having been dashed to smithereens.

According to a recent Nielsen study, 41% of tablet owners and 38% of smartphone owners use these devices while watching TV. And that time could entail relatively healthy proportions of work e-mail, professional network development, or simple distraction.  We no longer have down time, really.

It’s now upside-down time.

In what James Slavet so vividly describes as The Last Second Economy our mobile way of life is increasingly unbounded, especially when we aren’t on the couch.  We move frenetically from place to place, and context to context. Friction robs us of our ability to be productive during upside-down time on the move.  So the natural progression from being always connected is being effortlessly connected – so that we can jump from context to context and switch seamlessly between work and personal life.

Enabling dual personas on the device of your choice is a rational move on the path to productivity.  Essentially a client gets installed on your personal mobile phone.  That client provides a secure, encrypted container and gateway to your corporate applications. Your personal data and apps are walled off from the corporate suits.

Company data and apps are protected through passwords, encryption, and centrally managed IT-policy controls. But you are the toggle switch, with your smartphone providing a mirror to your complex personalities.  Less friction for you means the business can capture the upside of upside-down time.

Related Ideas

David Egger on BYOD

Amoroso on Security/BYOD

Customer Case Study

AT&T Mobile Device Management

AT&T Toggle (Dual Persona Service)

Anthony Gatto set a record by juggling 7 balls for more than 11 minutes.

Sometimes in business we feel like we have twice that many balls in the air at once. But at today’s pace, that might not be good enough.

The best jugglers not only know how to handle what’s thrown at them, but also choose actively what to put in motion or let drop.  In our January Exchange Monthly Newsletter, I shared some insightful ideas to help improve your juggling quotient (JQ for short) as you build your action plans for the coming year.

• Create competitive advantage when you manage content, context, and intelligence

Forrester Research, Inc. advises: Smartphones and tablets are transforming how businesses engage customers, and drive loyalty. They provide a great case for experiential innovation resulting from systematic integration of mobile into customer engagement frameworks.  Simple registration required.

• De-silo interactions that have pushed the juggling act to your customers

Whether customers engage with businesses through social, mobile, the Web, or in real life (IRL), they approach businesses with different needs at different times. Brian Solis challenges us to embrace holistic experience design, and to create better digital experience “glue” across customer moments of truth.

• Empower workers, manage risk, and free capacity to juggle bigger business issues

Learn how K-V-AT Food Stores  swapped out traditional approaches for a new BYOD model to provide managed and highly-secure access to company resources from employee devices — and as a result improved productivity through simplified access to corporate applications.

What are the challenges and opportunities you’re juggling as the New Year begins?

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Mobile Transformation: Jump Start your Plan

In the December Networking Exchange Newsletter, I presented the Mobile Do List - a collection of smart and practical insights for mobile transformation from top-notch industry analysts and AT&T mobility experts.  Check them out below to get a jump start on your 2013 mobility agenda.

• Embrace BYOD with better security. A top-tier industry analyst helps you contend with the challenge of securely managing critical data while enabling knowledge workers to choose their own gadgets to maximize their productivity. Simple registration is required.
• Enhance instant communication with smarter devices. AT&T’s Mobeen Khan explores how smarter devices, higher speed networks, and more flexible work group applications present the opportunity to transform work group productivity with enhanced push-to-talk capabilities.
• Create effective mobile device management policies. Gartner’s step-by-step methodology will help you balance mobile device choice and control, putting your device management policy blueprint on the fast track to done – in 7 thoughtful steps. Simple registration is required.
• Place mobility at the heart of your customer experience transformations. Maribel Lopez treats you to an inside look at how “Right Time Experiences” can directly translate into bottom line benefits, while increasing customer loyalty and employee productivity to boot.

These are just a few things at the top of our Mobile Do list.

What’s on the top of your mobile agenda in the upcoming year?

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It was time to rethink the AT&T Networking Exchange in a way that would better reflect our readers’ needs and expectations. I wondered:  What if the chocolate of deep insight was combined with the peanut butter of accessibility afforded by the social and mobile Web? Could they be stronger together? And why was I so hungry all of a sudden?

What resulted from answering these questions is a vibrant idea platform – the new Networking Exchange – built on 5 solid principles:

1. Smart: Create ideas that matter and help people get stuff done. This has been our ambition and our history, and we proudly carry it forward.  We regularly cover topics such as:

• Achieving radical breakthroughs with m2m sensors
• Building the case for cloud through business continuity
• Sharing best practices to improve application security
• Enabling network transformation 

2. Accessible: Make it easy for you to find smart ideas and put them to use. We’ve combined our ideas into a single resource, organized them under an expanded set of topics, and included smart filters to help you locate items by topic, author, and resource type.

3. Mobile: Enable ideas to display clearly on smartphones and tablets. We tried something called responsive design, which varies what you see in response to the size of the browser. If it works here, we hope to bring it to life in other experiences.

4. Human: In addition to showing that we have a pulse on the issues, we want you to know that we too have a pulse. Let’s face it, sometimes tech can seem dull, but it doesn’t have to be. Our authors share their knowledge with passion and personality.

• See how Catherine Scaramuzzi bridges her passion for running and creativity as she immerses herself  in learning how to code cloud apps.
• Treat yourself to Lon Hickman homespun wisdom as he helps us make sense of network transformation.

5. Exchange: We believe ideas are grown by the gifts of sharing, feedback, and conversation. We hope you’ll use the interactive social features to grow the value of the ideas.

Our hope in reimagining the Exchange is that you find it interesting enough to frequent, useful enough to build knowledge, and compelling enough for you to share insights with your peers.

Enjoy your visit to the Exchange. Let me know what we did right – and what we haven’t quite figured out.  Or if you prefer, suggest topics and issues of interest we should consider covering.

There are 6 traits.  It’s true.  I learned it by watching TV.

Well, NCIS to be precise.  If you’re not hooked on the series, set up your DVR to record a few episodes (feel free, like I did, to get your 7-year old to help) and you’ll see what I mean.

Without question, the NCIS team is high performing.  Its track record for solving crimes nears perfection.  Is your track record that good?  Have you ever stopped to wonder why it is, or why it isn’t?

Well, the secret sauce isn’t so secret after all.  As I reflect on my own experience, high performing teams are amazing integrators.  They crank out value as a team, a team that relies on, and transcends, the sum of individual efforts.

How I define a high performing team:

A high performing team is comprised of ordinary people who consistently achieve exceptional results by working brilliantly together.  They excel at orchestration.  They consciously create the multiplier effect.

How does the team at NCIS manage high performance? I credit 6 traits, each highlighted by an NCIS team member:

• Gibbs is naturally intuitive and never settles for anything less than “problem solved.”  He leads the team by a strong moral code and stoic demeanor, making him the perfect guiding compass.
• McGee knows how stuff works. His ability to distill information into logical conclusions sets the team down the right path.
• Abby is a master of visualization, blending science and curiosity in her diagnostic method.  Armed with a passion for discovering truth, she helps the team solve tough problems.
• Ducky’s deep understanding of the human psyche enables him to reveal motivation that underlies behavior.  Together, intent and evidence drive the team to narrow its focus.
• Ziva brings endurance to get things done.  She is mentally and physically conditioned to persevere to achieve the team’s goals.  She transforms the intellectual work of the team into concrete action.
• DiNozzo thinks heuristically, notably drawing on analogies from pop culture to create context.  Every bit the hedonist, he uses humor to bring laughter to challenging work.  This gives the team a very human way to manage stress.

If you’ve ever taken a psychological exam (I don’t mean the kind that requires orderlies in white jackets), you’ve probably discovered you possess one or two dominant traits, as well as others that are your Achilles heel.

Most of the time, I am Gibbs and Abby.  Sometimes I over-index on diagnostics and the thrill of solving a new problem.  So, I surround myself with Zivas who excel at getting stuff done.

Where do you see your strengths?  Who completes you?

Any traits I’ve overlooked? Feel free to mention them. It’s okay if you saw them on TV….

To Strawderman, who has an MBA from Rutgers Graduate School of Management, digital marketing is the perfect canvas to practice what he terms “constructive disruption”– a management philosophy that continuously seeks out improvement potential, even if things appear to be working right. He’s especially juiced by the opportunity social presents to constructively disrupt the relationship between customers and brands.

On a personal level, Bill has immersed himself in becoming a part of the digital landscape. Despite a slow start, he has enjoyed building his Marketing Bard persona through creative writing, connecting with smart and interesting people, and voraciously learning new things. While Bill pretends that he’s a digital native, he understands that social is not a sport that you can coach effectively from the sidelines.

Bill cites the AT&T Networking Exchange Blog as one of the “coolest” things he has had the privilege to lead in his professional career.  Besides giving his AT&T colleagues a rich tapestry on which to paint their expertise in a distinctly personal manner, he and his team are part of a vibrant social learning community known as the AT&T Networking Leaders Academy. When they aren’t doing their day jobs, Academy members are obsessed with becoming better bloggers.

Strawderman lives in New Jersey with a family life that revolves around school, athletic and church events.  An athlete in his own right, Strawderman likes to run short distances and is increasingly haunted by the knowledge that his sons will soon be fast enough to eclipse his better 5K race times.