I took this picture last weekend on the long grinding climb (10 miles, 3500ft) in the Pisgah National Forrest. No perfectly straight lines, right angles, edges or uniformity.
Thoughts
Fortune favors the brave …
Personal Development = Professional Development
I rarely post personal objectives or goals, but personal development, hobbies or passions often spill over and impact your professional objectives and goals in a very positive way. Here is my most recent event which had a positive impact on my professional development.



1 + 1 > 2 … Plaid
The SAP Community
Reminiscing and looking back on this, its strange tho think that I have had a SAP Community or Forum account since my late teens … Multiple TechEd events, talks, blogs, being a SAP Mentor, a job at SAP, friends, colleagues, and most recently a part of the SAP Champion program has been a personally rewarding commitment over the last 20 odd years … #timeflies
https://people.sap.com/paul.aschmann
A small token goes a long way …
Enterprise Mobility @ SAP
Edward Tufte: An excellent collection, with thoughtful analysis, of quirky maps
GE Healthcare: Design Thinking in the NICU
I have been exposed to design thinking in a variety of ways over the past 13 odd years. From conferences, startups and projects – I have used the framework to develop and build services, software and hardware which incorporates one of the most important elements in the design: empathy.
Empathy ensures that the designers, developers and creators of these products “walk a mile in their shoes” and put the users at the center of the development lifecycle rather than technology, limitations or costs.
This TedX talk is a nice example of empathy in something critical that all of us can in some shape or form relate to, which is being born. The video centers around the design thinking process which went into the design and development of Neonatal Intensive Care Units and the equipment which nurses and parents have to deal with when a child is born prematurely. It is a great example of how empathy was an integral part of the process from start to finish.
Pierre Deligne
I have also learned not to take glory in the difficulty of a proof: difficulty means we have not understood. The idea is to be able to paint a landscape in which the proof is obvious.”