The Merchant Stand a blog by Bob Williams

Technology Athletes

Posted on April 12, 2014 217 by Bob Williams 234 Posted in Business and IT Alignment, Career, Ideas, Technology Leave a comment

The athlete. “We are recruiting him as an athlete” is a statement that football fans often read. It means the football coach wants a player on the team not because he is skilled at any-one position, but because he is talented enough to play a variety of positions. This type of athlete has a core base of athleticism that makes it possible for him to be successful at a variety of positions. But what the coach may not know,until after assessing a player more thoroughly, is if the player has the head knowledge to play a specific position. Do they understand the role within the team? Do they understand how to make reads on the opposing team’s formation? Do they understand where to go on the field and when? The athlete in academia. When I entered Georgia Tech as a freshman computer science student I remember an academic advisor telling

Are you all in?

Posted on April 4, 2014 211 by Bob Williams 234 Posted in Career Leave a comment

Do you know them? Think about a person you know that is completely dedicated to their work. The kind of dedication that does not equate to a work-a-holic, but rather someone that is completely immersed in meeting the requirements of their job with unwavering enthusiasm and resolve. Yes, that person. The one who may have even annoyed you at times because of their dogged persistence. But the one who has earned your utmost respect. In a workplace conversation this week one of my co-workers remarked about another employee, “You know him by now right, he’s all in.” The words stopped me for a moment to think and then stayed with me through the evening. What defines the employee that is “all in”? It’s built-in to the mentality, attitude, and drive of the professional. Going “all in” is for those that believe in their odds of succeeding. The employee that is

Velocity

Posted on March 21, 2014 206 by Bob Williams 234 Posted in Business Process Management, Ideas Leave a comment

We spent time this week in strategic planning discussions. One challenge is how to separate the vision for the future from the desire to get better at existing services. That is to separate the transformational changes from the incremental changes. Both are needed. The factor that sticks out to me in both conversations is velocity. The rate at which a company can change and with what purpose will often dictate the how successful or unsuccessful it is in growing business or even surviving. Blockbuster comes to mind. In 2004, this home entertainment company had over 9,000 retail store locations. In 2010 the company filed for bankruptcy and in 2013 the last store was closed. Home videos didn’t go away. In fact home videos are more popular than ever. But the format and methods by which consumers receive home videos changed quickly and BlockBuster didn’t react with the velocity to stay

Fix Microsoft Office programs crashing – disable bluetooth add-in

Posted on March 15, 2014 261 by Bob Williams 234 Posted in Technology Leave a comment

A few years ago I had a problem with Microsoft Excel crashing when I was working with graphs. I don’t remember the exact function I worked with, but I remember the fix. I disabled the “Send to Bluetooth” add-in to solve the problem. The program wasn’t playing well with some other features in Excel and I didn’t use the send-to bluetooth feature so it was an easy fix. The send to bluetooth feature is used when you want to transfer files to a bluetooth device that is paired with your computer. A common example would be a smart phone. You could transfer documents and spreadsheets to the phone without a cable using bluetooth wireless feature. I don’t use bluetooth transfers so I chose to disable this add-in from each office application as a precautionary measure to fix other crashes and to possibly gain a little speed during startup. By disabling the add-in