Leland's Blog

There are many terms that have become common in "Corporate America" today; Nothing Personal...It's Just Business Servant Leadership We Owe It To Our Investors/Owners Our Employees Make The Difference Customer Service Some of these terms are completely valid and appropriate, but others fall short of being productive to an organization or to humanity at large. One of the terms that has I personally have come to dislike is "Nothing Personal...It's Just Business". Those who use the term have completely forgotten or never understand that business is completely and absolutely about relationships. Relationships with your customers. Relationships with your employees. Relationships with your partners. Relationships with your community. The best businesses work to ensure that all of these relationships are a win-win. Over the years I have had a chance to talk to many people about this very thing, and individually most agree. But I have also seen those same indiv...

Recently I have had a number of conversations with people surrounding the following: “ Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are .”  - John Wooden The reactions to the statement are mixed. Some think that reputation (the perception that others have about you) is very important, while some believe that perception is overrated. Is there a difference between the two? From my point of view character is the more important. Your character, or core beliefs, dictate how you act  and those visible actions will result in a reputation. It is very possible that individuals without a full understanding of a situation will have a negative perception of you and/or your actions, but in the end that is really a battle for them to resolve. I submit to you that: To remain righteous an individual must do the right thing, without regard for what others will think or how t...

Recently I had an email dialog with a colleague that I have a great deal of respect for. The general topic was on accessing data within a database by know/constant values. Basically we needed to retrieve data from a table with one value, and cross reference it to a second value. Everyone is thinking, "Okay...What's the big deal? We do that every day.", and I agree. At first blush this is something software developers do all of the time. But in this specific case the lookup value was going to be persisted within XML, and at the same time the persisted value is visible to end-users. One more point. Within our system there is no place that the end-user can change the lookup value, they can only see it. We want the lookup value to be immutable because there is no way to ensure that if one of the values changes, we will remember to change the other. The end-user cannot change it, and the software application don’t change it. So let’s get to the point. Immutable data is inf...