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The first principle of war is deception.

In a business setting, deception can be misconstrued to be synonymous with loosened integrity; but on the contrary, the interpretation is rather corrupt. Sun Tzu himself was very particular with the moral standards of the sovereign and its leaders – whereby maintaining truthfulness and political correctness all the time is the right way to go. No way can you inspire the multitudes with power alone; it must be supplemented with balanced magnanimity, benevolence and the truth.

Deception is as to a decoy which must be hidden with artistry, while integrity is to truthfulness which must be revealed for all to see.

The masterful use of deception or stealth can be applied in many ways in business, but I will only attempt to cite with two which both incidentally happened in recent history.

Competing corporations are always at odds with the products that they produce and eventually at least one will always surface to out-class the other in the end. For instance, one may publish their innovation ahead of everybody else in the race, hoping that the early pronouncement will give them a significant lead in the market. The other decides to counter the innovation and declares the solution to be leading in the wrong direction and thus will not follow their technology and will instead introduce innovation overtime. Meanwhile, the former corporation is picking-up in the market rather slowly. The market is reluctant to invest on the product of the former because the latter have produced a successful product in the past and so they wait in patience. Meanwhile, the former corporation scrambles to allocate another substantial funding to their R&D to come-up with another probable (guess) solution that the latter may also be working on. After several months, the latter corporation announces their new efficiently and better product but it uses exactly the same technology as that of the former. The market reacted positively and bought more of the latter’s product than that from the former.

Another infamous but successful use of deception was when a relatively unknown software maker bluffed its way into making a giant computer company believe that they have the software that the latter needs which consequently made the former become the wealthiest software corporation in the World today.
Take a break story…

After writing The Art of War, Sun Wu was given an audience with the king of Wu. The king invited him to demonstrate his skill by training the court concubines. Sun Tzu accepted the challenge.
Sun Tzu explained the commands for marching, but when the drum signals were given, the women burst out laughing. Sun Tzu teaches that if the orders are not clear, the general is at fault. So he repeated his explanation, but the women only laughed again. Sun Tzu teaches that when the orders are clear but not followed, the officers are at fault. So Sun Tzu ordered the women’s commanders, the king’s two favorite concubines, beheaded.

After the two were executed and replaced, the remaining women obeyed the orders precisely. The king was too sickened by the deaths to watch the demonstrations, but he gave Sun Tzu command of his army.
Sun Tzu had a dramatic impact on Chinese history. After his hiring, the kingdom of Wu went on to become the most powerful state of the period.

An ineffective leader can always be replaced if he/she fails to meet the objectives of the corporate employer. This also applies to those resources that are under his/her domain.

“…the true object of war is peace.”

“… The main goal of business is winning (in terms of profits, gains, sales, etc.) Order and contentment is always the key objective.”

The art of war is of vital importance to the state. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence under no circumstance can it be neglected.

The business stratagem or tactic is also an art of winning is of vital importance to any corporation. It is a matter of success and failure, a path that can lead either to profit or loss. Hence under no circumstance can it be neglected.
Hence it is only the enlightened ruler and the wise general who will use the highest intelligence of the army for purposes of spying, and thereby they achieve great results. Spies are a most important element in war, because upon them depends an army’s ability to move.

Hence it is only the enlightened Executive and the wise Manager who will use the highest intelligence of the employees for purposes of research and learning new skills, techniques, and thereby they achieve great results. Researchers are a most singular element in business, because upon them depends a corporation’s ability to decide what move to make.

Some executive of late even take lengths to hire private investigators in order to spy on their employees, tap on their telecommunication lines and devices. Information technology is at any corporation’s disposal nowadays, for even a mere simple post of a resume in the Web can now be easily sensed or detected. It is however myopic on their part as they fail to see that it is every lowly resource’s right to dream of affluence.

Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.

Supreme excellence consists in overcoming the challenges and delivering results without having to create conflict or make undue premature pronouncements.

If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

If you are skillful with your job and know your limits you need not worry the result of a hundred new challenges, project initiatives or opportunities.

An enlightened corporation, who understands its existence, knows and trusts their resources’ capabilities, empowers them, lives in the highest moral values, will with certainty succeed and need not fear the challenges that lie ahead.

References:

1. Sun Tzu’s Art of War as interpreted by James Clavell the author of Taipan and Shogun.

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JAVAERO — Part of the current phase for the Javaero community is the realization and reflection that they have to undergo skills and knowledge sharing break-ins by way of conducting informal, lightweight, and ad-hoc presentation sessions. The objective is to evaluate the readiness to share and measure the depth of its bench with regards to skill-set and knowledge.

Last October 26, 2006, a Thursday, about half of the founding members, organized such a meet and went ahead by assigning two resources to conduct the following topics:

1. Web Services presented by Aurelio Pascual …

Web Services, the core motivation for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is driven by 3 underlying technologies, namely SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL also known as WUST.

The presenter gave a brief description of Web Services and then he gave us a live walk-through of how to setup a SOAP stub on one among the many Web Services available in the Internet, in this particular case, he showed us how to interface with the “Who wants to be a millionaire” web service.

Using the Eclipse Open Source IDE for Java made by IBM, on-the-fly he showed his audience how simple it was to plug-in a Eclipse Web Service tool which automatically loaded all the libraries necessary to instantiate the service and use it right away without undergoing low-level plumbing.

The convenience provided by the elegant simplicity of the process was surprising because to do the same thing in PHP it would require the developer to understand and tweak the XML-based envelop — nothing like that was ever observed. Amazing as the technology was, we were already playing the game in no time.

See this link to see more details about this lecture.

2. Performance 101 presented by Bobby Corpus

The second act was a theoretical presentation on how to compute the cost of performance. The simple yet elegant lecture showed that given the rate of an entity, the cost to maintain it and the expected ideal rate how it can impact cost-affectivity and ultimately be used to compare performances between entities. Without the statistical tools in the form of equations (), the analyst would have resorted to guessing the better performing entity.

See article posting of Performanace 101 to appreciate its context.

The ad-hoc break-in presentation session was not without problems. We original agreed to meet at Figaro in Robinsons Galleria where a hot spot is made available free as a marketing come-on, unfortunately their WIFI service was not available at that time. Luckily, one of the founding members, Wendell Encomienda, then volunteered his home where he has a SmartBro subscription and also operating a WIFI service within his premises. This kind of persistence for the group paid-off as we come to realize the value of the presentations to us which made the core Javaero members decide this ad-hoc sessions will be formalized as a regular every Thursday break-in sessions.

Next topic presenter will be Edison Macabebe and Wendell Encomienda.

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JAVAERO - Performance spells the difference between success and failure of a software
project. Since the internet age, the average attention span of
internet users has been decreasing. A web site that does not deliver
its pages within 10 seconds is doomed to be forgotten by a potential
client.

In this article, we are going to introduce the basics of performance
theory using a simple example.

The Ice Cream Stand

Suppose you are manager of an ice cream stand and you want to hire a
ice cream vendor. Two persons applied for the position namely Oliver
and Gemma. However, since Gemma is more experienced in ice cream
vending, she is asking for a higher pay then Oliver. You discovered
that Gemma can complete a transaction ( take the order, prepare the
ice cream, take payment and make change ) in 20 secs. Here is a table
of the performance and salary of the vendors:

Name	Speed	Salary
Gemma	20	50
Oliver	30	25

As you can see from the table, the speed of oliver is 30
secs/transaction and is only asking half of what Gemma is
asking.

Market study

As a manager, you have conducted market research and have shown that,
on the average, you can expect that one customer will come per minute.
Since you are not the only ice cream stand in the area, customers are
only willing to go to you when the number of people in line is 3 or
less. Otherwise, they will go the the nearest ice cream stand operated
by Clint.

Which of them will you hire?

Analogy to computer systems.

You can think of this example as having a choice between a faster but
more expensive processor and a slower but more economical
processor. As a manager, your task is to maximize your profit, which
is the difference between extra money earned by having a faster
processor and the cost of having it. A little back of the envelope
calculation will show that Gemma
is 33% faster than Oliver but to employ Gemma would take 100% more
than to employ Oliver. The amount of money made while Gemma is on the
stand minus the her pay is less than the amount of money made while
Oliver operates the stand minus his pay. Therefore, Oliver is the
better choice!

In operating systems theory, the improved throughput with a faster
processor does not offset the extra cost of that processor.

If exactly one customer arrives per minute, on the minute, and Oliver
can service each customer in exactly 30 seconds, then the line will
never grow longer than one person. Therefore, Oliver is the better
choice.

With these assumptions, the throughput using either CPU would be the
same. That is, the CPU is not the bottleneck and it would be best to
select the cheaper and slower CPU.

However, real life is not a simple as this. It is very unlikely that
the amount of time between when one customer walks up and when the
next customer walks in is exactly the same for all customers.

Also it is highly unlikely that the attendant takes exactly the same
amount of time to prepare the ice cream for each customer.

There are variations between the arrival of one customer and the next
and the service time is not the same in all customers. In fact, the
amount of time between customer arrivals is random. What we are doing
is just taking the average of all those random times.

There is a big difference between what is average and what is usual.

Exponential distribution

The exponential distribution is a statistical distribution that does a
good job in describing phenomenon where observed times are shorter
than the average time.

The exponential distribution is given by the expression

Performance Metrics

Let us define the following:

The throughput is the average number of customers processed per minute. At any minute, there can be zero, one ,two, or three people at the stand. We can think of these as four states of the ice cream stand operation.

Let be the probability of the system in state 1, be the probability of the system in state 2, etc. The quantity is called the flow of the system from state 1 to state 0, likewise, the quantity is the flow of the system out of state 0 to state 1. At steady state, these flows are equals

This is called the balance equation for State 0. Likewise, the balance equation for State 1 is

Continuing in this manner, we get the balance equation for the entire system:

It only needs elementary algebra to solve for the probabilities:

After substituting all values of the parameters, we get the results tabulated below:

The rest follows.

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“Open sesame!” is the united toast of a group of IT professionals who recently had a meeting of minds to pitch into the cauldron their individual IT relevant skills and knowledge in order to cook a recipe of Java language and cutting-edge Computer or Information Science topics that can be taught in an open community setting.

The singular follow-through is this publicity page that conveys the obvious semantics of the classic C programming language’s typical first step statement that instructs to display into the standard output device the simple sentence “Hello World!”

And hello World indeed! This very simple yet compelling greeting sends a profound message that we are formally announcing this first step to kickoff our serious intent to carry out our mission statement.

The mission to educate the under-privileged in pro bono fashion within the short horizon is just one side of the coin, the other side is to develop a World class product in the far horizon that everyone will need or is compelled to have.

While still currently moored in safe harbor, JAVAERO is surreptitiously making strategic moves to ensure that when the full sails journey begins, there will be no turning back; our preparations are adequate, our way point plans are detailed to precision, our supplies sufficient for sustainability, and finally our human power capabilities sharpened and up-to-date.

In the mean time, moving forward with the group’s vision of running the entity as a self-sustaining Non-Government Organization (NGO), it will initially solicit funds and an assortment of skills from amongst its original founders while simultaneously looking for a worthy benefactor. Other funding sources are also currently being discussed.

The primary goal is simple; to educate the under-privileged youth in depressed preferably rural areas that plans or are interested to build their career in IT practice. In the longer term, scholarships and apprenticeships from donor/sponsor institutions may also be granted to deserving and promising candidates. And a pool of these resources can be processed for employment on allied IT institutions.

But the ultimate goal is to come up with an innovative project that will be developed as a useful product that is of World class quality. It may also solicit or even generate funds in order to fund technology projects for incubation and probably for commercial venture.

The organization’s name JAVAERO was coined to mean individuals who love the Java language. This term came from a Tagalog or Pilipino word “babaero” meaning men who likes women. It may also mean aero-dynamic Java or Java in the air.

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