Doctor’s Tech Toolbox Infographic | The Infographics Showcase.

Here’s the thing – pursuit leads to attainment. What you pursue will determine the paths you travel, the people you associate with, the character you develop, and ultimately, what you do or don’t achieve. Having a mindset focused on pursuit is so critical to leadership that lacking this one quality can sentence you to mediocrity or even obsolescence. The manner, method, and motivation behind any pursuit is what sets truly great leaders apart from the masses. If you want to become a great leader, become a great pursuer.

A failure to embrace pursuit is to cede opportunity to others. A leader’s failure to pursue clarity leaves them amidst the fog. Their failure to pursue creativity relegates them to the routine and mundane. Their failure to pursue talent sentences them to a world of isolation.  Their failure to pursue change approves apathy. Their failure to pursue wisdom and discernment subjects them to distraction and folly. Their failure to pursue character leaves a question mark on their integrity. Let me put this as simply as I can – you cannot attain what you do not pursue.

Smart leaders understand it’s not just enough to pursue, but pursuit must be intentional, focused, consistent, aggressive, and unyielding. You must pursue the right things, for the right reasons, and at the right times. Perhaps most of all, the best forms of pursuit enlist others in the chase. Pursuit in its purest form is highly collaborative, very inclusive and easily transferable. Pursuit operates at greatest strength when it leverages velocity and scale.

I also want to caution you against trivial pursuits – don’t confuse pursuit with simple goal setting. Outcomes are clearly important, but as a leader, it’s what happens after the outcome that you need to be in pursuit of. Pursue discovery, seek dissenting opinions, develop your ability unlearn by embracing how much you don’t know, and find the kind of vision that truly does see around corners. Don’t use your pursuits to shift paradigms, pursue breaking them. Knowing what not to pursue is just as important as knowing what to pursue.

It’s important to keep in mind that nothing tells the world more about a leader than what or who they pursue – that which you pursue is that which you value. If you message to your organization you value talent, but don’t treat people well and don’t spend time developing the talent around you, then I would suggest you value rhetoric more than talent. Put simply, you can wax eloquent all you like, but your actions will ultimately reveal what you truly value.

Lastly, the best leaders pursue being better leaders. They know to fail in this pursuit is nothing short of a guarantee they’ll be replaced by those who don’t.

This One Leadership Quality Will Make or Break You – Forbes.

• A whopping 97.09% of respondents said that an online experience has influenced whether or not they bought a product or service from a brand.
• The number 1 reason for following a brand is access to special offers and deals (36.9% of Facebook/Myspace users, 43.5% of Twitter users).  The runners up for top reasons people follow brands are that they are current customers or that they are following because of interesting and entertaining content.
• Most admit that when they are following a brand they are more likely to consider the brand when in the market for the product, buy the product from the brand and recommend the brand to others.
• On average, people follow between 2 and 5 brands on Facebook.  How many are you following?

Check out the full infographic below.  Why do you follow brands on Facebook and Twitter?

Consumers Prefer Brand Updates Via Facebook Over Email & Traditional Ads [Infographic] – SocialTimes.com.

Practicing good micro technology stewardship is not always about making the right technology decisions (as discussed in prior blogs), it’s almost always more, let’s look at the definition again:

“Micro Technology Stewardship is the use of people with enough experience of the workings of a business or department to understand its technology needs, and enough experience with technology to take leadership in addressing those needs.”

Good Micro Technology Stewardship also includes “looking inside” at your self to make sure you are using your “experience” to understand the needs of others and properly addressing those needs. When you over promise and underdeliver you are really saying “I understand what you want, I know it can be done, but I am not a strong enough leader to make sure you are educated on why it can’t be done in the manner or timeline you expect.”

I have seen so many bad product executions that could have been avoided if the technologist had only educated the business leader on the realities of delivery.  What about you, are you in a company where your leader over promises?  Have you ever found yourself having to over promise because you felt you had no choice but to “comply”

If over promising and under delivering is so bad, what about the “formula for success” of under promising and  overdelivering?  Will your customers catch on? Will they then set expectations high, or worse yet, raise them each time you exceed your own self-set commitment?

ComScore has data out on the US phone market and Asymco breaks it down on the evolution of the US phone platform install base.  It highlights a few key points, some of which are already known, but some of which don’t get talked about enough:

• The Blue Ocean is still HUGE.  Apple, Google, RIM, Microsoft et al. is winning in smartphones, the biggest opportunity remains the Blue Ocean of getting smartphones in the hands of non-smartphone users. 

• Android! —the other thing that jumps out is how big and how fast growing Android is. Google’s open-source, broad distribution strategy is textbook disruptive innovation, and at least so far, seems to be working just like it should: i.e., it is eating the market.

• Yes, Apple should be worried; but no, it’s not over, far from it. First of all, Apple is huge and still growing very nicely. Second of all, because the mobile wars are platform wars, smartphone marketshare undercounts iOS marketshare because of the enormous successes of the iPad and iPod Touch, which aren’t phones but are still mobile iOS devices. And thirdly, this chart doesn’t count the two big potential gamechangers Apple has recently introduced: the iPhone 4S, which looks like an excellent device and could be a record-breaking seller; and, less flashy but at least as important, the FREE iPhone 3GS, which allows Apple to have an offering for the bottom of the market and be competitive with Android. How these devices perform could make things look very different three months from now.

Cearley offered the following as examples of the way the tech world is changing:

1. 30 billion pieces of content were added to Facebook this past month.
2. Worldwide IP traffic will quadruple by 2015.
3. More than 2 billion videos were watched on YouTube … yesterday.
4. The average teenager sends 4,762 text messages per month.
5. 32 billion searches were performed last month … on Twitter.

So what issues need to be on IT’s radar screen for 2012? Here’s a look at the Top 10 Tech Trends and the implications of those issues according to Gartner:

1. Media tablets and beyond: Bring-your-own-technology at work has become the norm, not the exception. With that come security and management challenges that IT needs to address. By 2015 media tablet shipments will reach around 50% of laptop shipments and Windows 8 will likely be in third place behind Android and Apple.

2. Mobile-centric applications and interfaces: Here touch, gesture and voice search is going to change the way mobile apps work in the future, Cearley says. By 2014, there will be more than 70 billion mobile application downloads from app stores every year.

3. Social and contextual user experience: According to Gartner, context-aware computing uses information about an end user’s or object’s environment, activities connections and preferences to improve the quality of interaction with that end user or object. A contextually aware system anticipates the user’s needs and proactively serves up the most appropriate and customized content, product or service. The tipping point here could be technology such as near-field communications getting into more and more devices. Some interesting facts here: By 2015, 40% of the world’s smartphone users will opt in to context service providers that track their activities with Google, Microsoft, Nokia and Apple continuously tracking daily journeys and digital habits for 10% of the world population by 2015, Cearley says.

4. Application stores and marketplace: The key here is the rise of enterprise application stores that can develop specific apps for users. This will let IT manage and control certain apps. But embracing the idea of user choice might be a difficult concept for enterprise IT to embrace, Cearley says. Enterprises should use a managed diversity approach to focus app store efforts and segment apps by risk and value. Where the business value of an app is low and the potential risk, such as the loss of sensitive data, is high, apps might be blocked entirely.

5. The Internet of everything: The idea here is that we are building on pervasive computing where cameras, sensors, microphones, image recognition — everything — is now part of the environment. Remote sensing of everything from electricity to air conditioning use is now part of the network. In addition, increasingly intelligent devices create issues such as privacy concerns. Eventually IT will need some central unified management of all these devices, Cearley says.

6. Next-generation analytics: Most enterprises have reached the point in the improvement of performance and costs where Cearley says they can afford to perform analytics and simulation for every action taken in the business. Not only will data center systems be able to do this, but mobile devices will have access to data and enough capability to perform analytics themselves, potentially enabling use of optimization and simulation everywhere. Going forward, IT can focus on developing analytics that enable and track collaborative decision making.

7. Big data: Big data has quickly emerged as a significant challenge for IT leaders. The term only became popular in 2009. By February 2011, a Google search on “big data” yielded 2.9 million hits, and vendors now advertise their products as solutions to the big data challenge. The key thing enterprises have to realize is that they just can’t store it all. There are new techniques to handle extreme data, such as Apache Hadoop, but companies will have to develop new skills to effectively use these technologies, Cearley says.

8. In-memory computing: We will see huge use of flash memory in consumer devices, entertainment devices, equipment and other embedded IT systems. In addition, flash offers a new layer of the memory hierarchy in servers and client computers that has key advantages — space, heat, performance and ruggedness among them. Unlike RAM, the main memory in servers and PCs, flash memory is persistent even when power is removed. In that way, it looks more like disk drives where we place information that must survive power-downs and reboots, yet it has much of the speed of memory, far faster than a disk drive. As lower-cost — and lower-quality — flash is used in the data center, software that can optimize the use of flash and minimize the endurance cycles becomes critical. Users and IT providers should look at in-memory computing as a long-term technology trend that could have a disruptive impact comparable to that of cloud computing, Cearley says.

9. Extreme low-energy servers: What if you could turn 10 virtual machines in one box into 40 slow physical servers that are tiny and use very low amounts of energy? There is a call for this type of computing to handle big data. For example, thousands of these little processors could work on a Hadoop process, Cearley says. Gartner says that 10%-15% of enterprise workloads are good for this. Moving the application from 10 images to 40 slower, less capable machines will only deliver on that promise if the software will perform the same. Server technologies are going to change to handle big data.

10. Cloud computing: This topic went from No. 1 last year to No. 10 this year, but it’s still an important trend. It will become the next-generation battleground for the likes of Google and Amazon. Going forward, enterprise IT will be concerned with developing hybrid private/public cloud apps, improving security and governance, Cearley says.

GARTNER: 10 key IT trends for 2012