Trinity High School: Thank You!

What is the toughest obstacle you have ever faced in business, and how did you deal with it?
 
~Student at Trinity High School
 River Forest, IL, USA

 
Trinity High School invited me to speak to two of their student groups this morning. The first, Information Technology in the Greater Society (ITGS), is a project-based class where students explore multiple facets of the information technology industry: Web development, digital editing, open source, and related areas. The second group, Students Working to Advance Trinity’s Technology (SWAT), lives up to its name by ensuring that students and faculty make full use of the technology deployed by the school.

Massively Parallel Parallella

Supercomputer.io is the first technical conference for Parallella, to be held May 30, 2015 in Tokyo, Japan.

You can participate even if you’re not in Tokyo. Parallella owners around the world will connect their boards via the Internet to create the most efficient supercomputer on the planet. Resin.io has built a special micro-SD-card image (using Docker) so adding your Parallella to the mix is relatively quick.

This article includes detailed steps plus a few gotchas.

Be Courageous About Your Ideas

Things that get you fired when you’re young are the same things you win awards for when you’re old. You have to be courageous about your ideas. When you come up with something good, that means it’s different from what they expect so they’re likely to fire you. Years later (if you survive) they’ll bring it out as one of the great things that you did.
~Francis Ford Coppola, Director
 The Godfather

Building a Great Company

Good is the enemy of great. If a company faces dire circumstances, managers must change because the alternative is death. But if circumstances are good (or even okay) managers can coast along indefinitely. A good company can be lulled into a state of complacency instead of achieving greatness.

So how does a good company become great?

Muhammad Ali and the Hightower Brothers

These photos were taken in 1972 or ‘73 with an old Polaroid camera. During a family road trip, my parents arranged a visit to Muhammad Ali’s training camp in Deer Lake, Pennsylvania. Dad was a big boxing fan. Mom… tolerated the three males in our household.

How fast was Ali in his prime? Very fast. The photo on the left shows Ali evading a punch from my brother, Edward, who was about seven at the time. I distracted the Champ with a handshake. Hightowers always work together.