Interesting recap of an event we spoke at earlier in the week… I agree with his observation that:

I found the discussion interesting, especially as an indication that the IT conversation is changing. This was the second huge IT-focused company that I’ve heard speak in the last few weeks about server consolidation and portfolio management.  (Mark Hurd of HP talked about it at Gartner last week.)

For a long time, IT seemed to be about ever more servers and more applications. We now seem to be instead focused on how to get the most benefit out of a smaller amount of both hardware and software. That certainly makes sense in a time of financial uncertainty. But all the speakers agreed that an efficient IT infrastructure is important not just for saving money, but also for freeing resources, so IT can create new applications that will drive strategic growth in the future.

Some good advice here on staying abreast of everything out there…

PC World ranks the Latitude Z as one of the best…

Tim at Ideo in the NYT … love the emphasis on ideas…

Q. And how does that manifest itself in the way that you run IDEO?

A. I’ve gone to great lengths to try to encourage what I call an emergent culture at IDEO, where people understand that it’s essentially their responsibility to have good ideas. Not about the work they do every day — we all have to do that — but about new ideas for the company. What are we going to do next? What fields are we going to work in? What are our new big things?

And… on asking the right questions… “It’s very easy in business to get sucked into being reactive to the problems and questions that are right in front of you. And it doesn’t matter how creative you are as a leader, it doesn’t matter how good the answers you come up with. If you’re focusing on the wrong questions, you’re not really providing the leadership you should.

Q. Can you talk more about that?

A. I do think that’s something that we forget — as leaders, probably the most important role we can play is asking the right questions. But the bit we forget is that it is in itself a creative process. Those right questions aren’t just kind of lying around on the ground to be picked up and asked.