Is Your Team Like Rocks in a Tumbler?

Akins IT • August 10, 2017

I am part of a fantastic key executive Vistage group who brings in speakers from all over the world to promote professional growth and our speaker yesterday (Dave Nelsen) presented on the lost interview from Steve Jobs. All Akins employees are encouraged to engage in continuing education and learning and one of our core values is to “Humbly Pursue Excellence.” You can see all of our core values here.

There is no denying that Steve Jobs was a phenomenal leader and there are so many great ideas and strategies that we can learn from and apply to our own businesses. In particular, he had a lot of ideas on A teams and why and how they work. He talked about this in “The Lost Interview”- an interview he gave in 1995 that was lost in transit until it was found in a garage a couple of days after Jobs died.

The idea is this: Great teams of A players are like rocks in a rock tumbler. These individual rocks go into the tumbler and through the process of bumping up against each other with friction, noise, and conflict, they become beautifully polished rocks. Ideas and people are made better through having disagreements and conflict. Ideas and people that go unchallenged are never as good as they could be. Many people are uncomfortable with conflict and avoid it at all cost, but Jobs would say this: Pursue truth over harmony.

Jobs had another idea here. When he returned to Apple for the second time it was 90 days from bankruptcy. He looked at all of the open projects there and cut 70% of them- 70%! His reasoning was that to truly polish an idea, you need to focus on it. He met with his leadership team every year to ask, “What are the next 10 things we should be doing?” From that list, he would then cross the bottom 7 off so that the company would only focus on 3.

Our leadership team meets once a month and this month we will be discussing a couple of questions:

How can we polish our products and services? How can we polish new ideas?
What are the next 10 things we should be doing? Which are our top 3?

The full lost interview is available on Netflix and Amazon or you can watch the clip with the rock tumbler analogy here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-Yv-UdsmSo

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AWS stumbled this morning. Here’s why multi‑cloud keeps you moving.

By Shawn Akins • October 20, 2025

October 20, 2025 — Early today, Amazon Web Services experienced a major incident centered in its US‑EAST‑1 (N. Virginia) region. AWS reports the event began around 12:11 a.m. PT and tied back to DNS resolution affecting DynamoDB , with mitigation within a couple of hours and recovery continuing thereafter. As the outage rippled, popular services like Snapchat, Venmo, Ring, Roblox, Fortnite , and even some Amazon properties saw disruptions before recovering. If your apps or data are anchored to a single cloud, a morning like this can turn into a help‑desk fire drill. A multi‑cloud or cloud‑smart approach helps you ride through these moments with minimal end‑user impact. What happened (and why it matters) Single‑region fragility: US‑EAST‑1 is massive—and when it sneezes, the internet catches a cold. Incidents here have a history of wide blast radius. Shared dependencies: DNS issues to core services (like DynamoDB endpoints) can cascade across workloads that never directly “touch” that service. Multi‑cloud: practical resilience, not buzzwords For mid‑sized orgs, schools, and local government, multi‑cloud doesn’t have to mean “every app in every cloud.” It means thoughtful redundancy where it counts : Multi‑region or multi‑provider failover for critical apps Run active/standby across AWS and Azure (or another provider), or at least across two AWS regions with automated failover. Start with citizen‑facing portals, SIS/LMS access, emergency comms, and payment gateways. Portable platforms Use Kubernetes and containers, keep state externalized, and standardize infra with Terraform/Ansible so you can redeploy fast when a region (or a provider) wobbles. (Today’s DNS hiccup is exactly the kind of scenario this protects against.) Resilient data layers Replicate data asynchronously across clouds/regions; choose databases with cross‑region failover and test RPO/RTO quarterly. If you rely on a managed database tied to one region, design an escape hatch. Traffic and identity that float Use global traffic managers/DNS to shift users automatically; keep identity (MFA/SSO) highly available and not hard‑wired to a single provider’s control plane. Run the playbook Document health checks, automated cutover, and comms templates. Then practice —tabletops and live failovers. Many services today recovered within hours, but only teams with rehearsed playbooks avoided user‑visible downtime. The bottom line Cloud concentration risk is real. Outages will happen—what matters is whether your constituents, students, and staff feel it. A pragmatic multi‑cloud stance limits the blast radius and keeps your mission‑critical services online when one provider has a bad day. Need a resilience check? Akins IT can help you prioritize which systems should be multi‑cloud, design the right level of redundancy, and validate your failover plan—without overspending. Let’s start with a quick, 30‑minute review of your most critical services and RPO/RTO targets. (No slideware, just actionable next steps.)