After 10 years of business travel, this is how I cope at the airport: You’ll get there, even if you’re late. Don’t worry about lines, just wait in them. Few people know what they’re doing here, don’t let their stress stress you out. There are no special snowflakes, unless you have a doctor’s note. The word of airline staff is law, you can’t argue against the agent of the FAA.

The premise of this book, for most anyone, is painfully boring: planning out and project managing the installation of COTS software. This is mostly lumbering, on-premises ERP applications: those huge, multi-year installs of software that run the back office and systems of record for organizations. While this market is huge, touches almost every company, and has software that is directly or indirectly touched by almost everyone each day (anytime you buy something or interact with a company)…it’s no iPhone.

I get all ants-in-pants about this whole bi-modal discussion because I feel like it’s a lot of energy spent talking about the wrong things. This came up recently when I was asked about “MVP”, in a way that basically was saying “our stuff is dangerous [oil drilling], so ‘minimal’ sounds like it’d be less safe.” I tried to focus them on the “V” and figure out what “viable” was for their situation.

I have a larger piece on common objections to “cloud native” that I’ve encountered over the last year. Put more positive, “how to get your digital transformation started with a agile, DevOps, and cloud native” or some such platitudinal title like that. Here’s a draft of the dread-ROI section. The most annoying buzzkill for changing how IT operates (doing agile, DevOps, taking “the cloud native journey,” or whatever you think is the opposite of “waterfall”) is the ROI counter-measure.

Most of what we do as white-collar workers is help our organization come to a decision. What new geographies to sell our enterprise software and toothpaste in, what pricing to make our electric razors and cranes, which people to fire and which to promote, or how much budget is needed according to the new corporate strategy. Even in the most cynical corporate environment, asking questions — and getting answers! — is the best, primary way to set the stage for making a decision.

One of the more eye-rolling tactics of white collar workers is what I call “fence painting”: an employee somehow gets someone else to do work for them. This can be as simple as coasting off budget, but the more insidious practice is to get other outside your chain of command to do work for you. Most of us have experienced this: days after The Big Meeting you suddenly think “why am I up at 11am working on this report for Scopentholler?

In corporate meetings, oftentimes one person figures out a problem and comes up with a solution. Equally often, multiple people in the meeting like the re-iterate the point in their own words, adding 5–10 minutes more to the meeting. Once the epiphany and decision is made, everyone should just close the issue, and move on. No need for people to comment on it more. For example, in one company I worked for we were discussing a software product name.

A kingmaker in the making. I’ve talked with an old colleague about pitching a developer-based strategy recently. They’re trying to convince their management chain to pay attention to developers to move their infrastructure sales. There’s a huge amount of “proof” an arguments you can make to do this, but my experience in these kinds of projects has taught me that, eventually, the executive in charge just has to take a leap of faith.

Hey, I’ve not only seen this movie before, I did some script treatments: Chief Executive Officer John Chambers is aggressively pursuing software takeovers as he seeks to turn a company once known for Internet plumbing products such as routers into the world’s No. 1 information-technology company. … Cisco is primarily targeting developers of security, data-analysis and collaboration tools, as well as cloud-related technology, Chambers said in an interview last month.

Figuring out the market for PaaS has always been difficult. At the moment, I tend to estimate it at $20–25bn sometime in the future (5–10 years from now?) based on the model of converting the existing middleware and application development market. Sizing this market has been something of an annual bug-bear for me across my time at Dell doing cloud strategy, at 451 Research covering cloud, and now at Pivotal.