What I find especially interesting is the possibility that various CIOs and IT managers are looking at opening their hardware offerings to more end-user choice, especially in mobile devices.

“If you believe demographic studies, the workforce in their 20s and 30s isn’t going to accept black corporate PCs with black corporate mobile phones and not be allowed to run Facebook or Angry Bird apps,” he said.

Loura was among many CIOs and IT managers at SNW who said they’re facing the same issue — employees want to use mobile technology at work, leaving IT with the job of ensuring that the devices and the data on them remain secure.

As a result, Loura refit Clorox’s employees with HP laptops to replace their old Windows 2k desktops and moved all mobile off of Blackberry and to the user’s choice of iOS, Android, or Windows 7 Phone. They provide these various options while maintaining the data security standards required by the enterprise.

I’ve worked in both large and small operations and my experience had always fallen in line with the stereotype: the big boys lock things down and don’t tolerate questions while small companies let their people choose their tools and keep access open when possible.

It looks like there are CIOs challenging that stereotype. What would really blow my mind is seeing full on Devops in larger enterprises.

That would be a world to live in.

Anderson brings up important points on balancing environmental protection and global costs of living. Are parts of our environmental protection effort creating unnecessary scarcity? Are countries’ economic protections driving prices up artificially?

I’d add some questions of my own. Are we pushing for or supporting government policies that are holding back the development of technologies that will free us from scarcity of energy or food? Are we selecting technologies without fully viewing their secondary effects (such as ethanol leading to scarcer food corn and driving up global food prices)? Are we allowing our preconceived notions about technologies rob us of their economic (or other) benefits?

I don’t agree with all of Anderson’s suggestions, but I agree with what I believe is the central thesis. We need to consider more carefully the decisions we’re making about what technologies we favor and which we discourage. We have to consider the secondary effects of these decisions if we’re to act wisely and achieve sustainable prosperity.

This last time was no exception, we had persistent rough air all through the flight, which presented a service problem.

Because turbulence is the #2 cause of injuries for flight attendants company policy prohibits flight attendants from providing drink or food service while going through turbulent air, so the flight attendants were unable to serve drinks or even leave their seating areas.

Not knowing why we weren’t getting drink service, folks started to get unhappy and complain.

When they saw people were displeased, the flight attendants moved to explain the situation, why they couldn’t provide service, and an estimate from the captain about how long it would be until we got out of the rough patch and they could start service.

Then the flight crew really impressed me. The captain got on the PA, apologized for the delay in drink service, and gave an estimate as to when we’d be through the rough air based on weather information from air traffic control.

The flight crew provided us information about why we weren’t getting service and estimates from multiple levels of authority as to when the service would begin. It didn’t magically change the circumstances, we still had to be patient, but their being so up front about the situation helped us to refill our reservoirs of goodwill.

A small effort to communicate status helped us feel like we were being properly cared for and curtailed the urge to criticize and complain.

Last year, TriWest Healthcare Alliance ran into a problem. Someone broke into their offices and ran off with hard drives containing the personal information of 550,000 customers, enough to steal the identities of customers “from privates in the military all the way up to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

Rather than hoping the story wouldn’t break, then notifying everyone after the press ferreted out the problem, TriWest CEO Dave McIntyre placed his customers’ interest first. He called a press conference to let his customers know their information had been stolen and spent between $1 and 2 million to provide fraud alerts and protection for their customers. Rather than pretending that the $@#% hadn’t hit the fan, he moved quickly to make things right.

What I found especially surprising were McIntyre’s comments about taking this kind of approach.

It’s what’s right for the customer. And I believe that if you keep your customer at the center, that things generally turn out right…

It’s a priviledge to have customers. Ultimately we’re all customers. And so we look at this from the standpoint of how would we want to be treated were we in their situation.

Since that incident, McIntyre has continued advocating for protecting customers’ personal information, testifying before congress and working with lawmakers to draft legislation requiring companies to notify customers of security breaches.

I’ve heard a lot of talk about placing customers first in different places I’ve worked, even more from companies with which I’ve been a customer. (Among them at least one bank who experienced a security breach like TriWest and didn’t notify me until the press and public pressure forced their hand.) I’m glad to see McIntyre step up to acknowledge problems and move quickly to protect customers rather than sit and wait to see if the other shoe drops.

One of the best companies I’ve worked with does their best to take a “2.0″ approach to running the business. In 2000, the principals took heavy shipments from the Cluetrain and from then on have done their best to run a shop that focused on employee community and conversation over organizational hierarchy.

The approach has served them well, but one problem comes up from time to time: for this kind of approach to really work, you’ve got to surround Manager 2.0 with enough Employee 2.0 to establish the kind of community of practice that Manager 2.0 thrives in. If you don’t, all the 2.0 management goodness gets lost to community destroying Employee 1.0 distrust, apathy, hierarchy building, and turf guarding.