From Where I Sit
The Value of Diversity

by Larry Eiss

Recently I had the opportunity to travel to Brussels, Belgium, and Halmstad, Sweden. While there I made some presentations about WebFOCUS for the IBM System i (iSeries, AS/400) platform and assisted with some sales enablement training IBM was conducting for its partners in the area.

International travel always changes my perspective on things.  In Belgium, for example, it is not uncommon to see horse as an entrée on a restaurant menu.  In other countries, you might even find dog. Here in the United States, that would be met with shock and disgust. It’s not that horse or dog meat isn’t tasty, but in this country there is an aversion to eating animals we often keep as pets. Oddly, though some keep Vietnamese Potbellied Pigs, cows, or even chickens as pets, there is little stigma attached to consuming pork, beef or chicken. Perhaps that’s because these are not common pets in most households.

Halmstad is on the western coast of southern Sweden. About six kilometers from town is a resort area known as Tylösand, which is known as the Hamptons of Sweden, a vacation spot for the wealthy. The small conference at which I was to speak was held at a resort hotel there. The hotel is owned by Per Gessle the lead singer of the pop group Roxette and it’s filled with modern art and photographic prints.

Per Gessle is famous bordering on legendary in Sweden, but here in the United States he is a relative unknown. The best known work he has done here is the main song from the movie Pretty Woman, “It Must Have Been Love.”

Like most conferences, this one included an evening of entertainment. A strong man by the name of Magnus Samuelsson was there and performed some amazing feats of strength. Mr. Samuelsson stands six-feet, six-and-three-quarters inches tall and weighs about 343 pounds. His demonstration left no doubt that that none of that is fat. We desk gnomes watched as he rolled up a small frying pan, bent a three-foot section of half-inch re-rod, opened a beer can by squeezing it, and lifted a concrete ball weighing more than 600 pounds some five or six feet into the air and placed it on a specially constructed stand. 

Perhaps most amazing was his ability to grasp a 30-pound stylized battle axe in each hand and hold them at arm’s length for over a minute! After the show, several of us tried holding one of these at arm’s length, and the one person I saw actually do it was able to hold it there for less than a second.

Magnus Samuelsson is a hero in Sweden and one of only five men in the world to have successfully closed the No. 4 Captains of Crush hand gripper under official conditions. It’s likely that this means little to most readers, but when I returned home I remembered that Tony, one of the directors in our customer support organization, uses hand grippers as part of his personal workout regimen, so I mentioned that I had met Mr. Samuelsson. Tony knew immediately of whom I was speaking, and also knew of the Captains of Crush hand gripper line, as he uses them himself, albeit not the No. 4 model.

Sometimes I find myself caught up in a very U.S.-centric mindset. I tend to think the way I approach problems or tasks is the best -- maybe even the only -- way to do it. Traveling overseas reminds me that there are a lot of different ways to live, work, play, or accomplish a goal.
Sometimes people ask us why it is that the WebFOCUS solution set provides several different ways to accomplish a particular task. Some of the tools seem to provide overlapping functionality. 

For example, there are many different ways to create a basic report using WebFOCUS: There is a Report Painter in WebFOCUS Developer Studio, browser-based tools for report creation include the Power Painter and the Report Assistant, and reports can be coded in the text editor by hand.

From where I sit, this is as it should be. Different people approach tasks in different ways. There are a lot of ways to think about any given concept. WebFOCUS makes it possible to take the route that best fits your particular way of thinking and working. Diversity has great value.