Issue #2 - February 2008
We're in the midst of winter now, although things have warmed up somewhat here in the Calgary area lately. It's amazing how
warm 5 degrees Celsius can feel after a couple of weeks near -30C. Feels like spring's just around the corner...
Our economy seems to be experiencing some very strange times these days. On the one hand, you have the oilsands development which has
been going great guns for two years, driving home prices through the roof (along with the cost of everything else), and on the
other you have the slowdown in oil & gas exploration coupled with the uncertainty of royalty reviews and a provincial election
on the horizon which could stir the pot even more. While anyone that doesn't live in Alberta thinks that perhaps the streets
are paved with gold, judging by the number of people moving to the province and the media, my experience has led me to think
that the 'boom' is a very spikey one, with some people on the peaks and many others in the valleys. There don't seem to be too
many in-betweens.
I've been told there's an old Chinese curse that says 'may you live in interesting times'. We certainly do right now and I think
the best we can do is to keep our eyes open, have confidence in our own abilities, keep the tools sharpened, and don't expect
anyone else to 'save' us. I've learned from experience that you can survive just about anything, and the learning that you get
will provide you leverage to move forward even faster as long as you don't give in to the temptation to feel sorry for yourself.
-- Shawn Rose
BE Conference 2008
As I mentioned in my last newsletter, the annual Bentley Empowered conference is coming up from May 28-30, 2008 in Baltimore, Maryland.
The theme of the conference this year is 'Best Practices for Sustaining Infrastructure'. The issue that was addressed by Greg Bentley during
last year's keynote address dealt with the fact that, as the average age of the infrastructure professional is increasing, North America (and
probably the whole of Western culture) will be facing shortages of experienced personnel necessary to sustain the level of infrastructure
that we currently have and will need in future. Bentley feels that it becomes necessary for companies that design software solutions for
infrastructure to step in and fill the gap with better, more productive tools.
Go to http://www.be.org/en-US/BE+Conference/ for the complete information.
Thoughts on Leadership
There's another great book called 'Good to Great', by author Jim Collins (ISBN 0066620996). It compiles the data that Collins and 25 research students
gathered over a five year period as they followed a number of public companies that performed at a steady and average level within their
respective markets, and then took off with success for an extended period of time (>15 years, so as to indicate success beyond the term
of any one CEO).
Collins and his team examined everything they could about these companies, the management teams and their styles, and identified five similar
characteristics of these highly successful companies, regardless of the differences in what the companies produced or who they served. The
results were in some ways quite astonishing... here are some of the publisher's comments:
The Findings
The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:
- Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.
- The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.
- A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.
- The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.
The study was performed on large public companies so that business history and data could be confirmed, but the concepts of the book would apply to any size of business. Well worth reading.
Tips & Tricks
This month, I'm going to give a plug for one of the really cool tools that are available on the Downloads page. Since they're free,
this qualifies as a productivity tip.
The featured application this month is called LinkMan, and I've had this tool for quite some time. I've given it to a few people that use MicroStation with a linked database and it's been very popular, almost to the point that they get panicky if it's not available.
At startup, it automatically reads the list of tables and related entitynums in the current MSCATALOG table and populates a dropdown menu with the values found. This lets you search on a specific table. Select a table from the dropdown list and the listbox below then shows all of the column names in that table.
Select a column name and then choose a qualifier from the next dropdown menu. Options for qualifier are:
- equal to
- not equal to
- less than
- less than or equal to
- greater than
- greater than or equal to
- between
- similar to (like)
- in
3 and material in ('CI','DI','PVC')
effectively giving you a query that says:
select * from pipes where feature_type=3 and material in ('CI','DI','PVC')
Hit Run Query and the application will tell you how many instances it was able to find. You can then cycle through them, one by one, by using the Find First and Find Next buttons (the view will zoom in on them and they'll highlight). If you check the Create Selection Set checkbox, the application will create a Selection Set of the found items, which you can then manipulate with the standard MicroStation tools.