Are You Leading on the Balls of Your Feet - or on Your Heels?

As a leader, you can either be reactive or proactive - you can either respond to things as they happen to you, or be the one making things happen. If you’re reacting, you’re on your heels, leaning back, a victim to what’s happening. But if you’re initiating, you’re on the balls of your feet, initiating what happens.

Max Wideman illustrates it this way: “consider this unlikely but quite possible situation - you are at risk of getting shot at. … You can:

• Reactive response:




• Avoid the bullet


• Deflect the bullet


• Repair the damage done by the bullet




• Proactive response:




• You can take steps to avoid being confronted by the person with the gun in the first place”

Our client, href="http://www.costco.com" target="_blank">Costco, decided to get proactive, and turned to DBI for help. With hundreds of locations worldwide, Costco provides a wide selection of merchandise with total sales in recent fiscal years exceeding $64 billion. Their ecommerce goal has been to serve more users, process more searches, and deliver results quickly with a maximum of convenience, speed, and customer satisfaction.

When David Sherran, Database Analyst IV for Costco, first started working for Costco in 2011, he was spending days researching and solving problems in their data center. “I had no way of being proactive. I was just handling problems as they occurred.” Using a DB2 LUW database as the foundation for the Costco ecommerce engine was a good start. However, David had to make a concerted effort to get the information he needed to identify and solve issues, always feeling like he was in reaction mode.

He knew he needed a tool to help him proactively plan, measure, and control performance so that Costco.com could serve more users, perform faster searches, and provide a seamless customer shopping and buying experience, and so he turned to DBI Software’s pureFeat™ suite of tools.

Before using the pureFeat suite of tools, David was constantly hunting down suspect pieces of code and searching for bottlenecks. Often times he spent days working on one issue. Now with just a few clicks, DBI software does the heavy lifting for him, showing him the hot spots, pain points, and troublemakers - and helping him quickly solve them - often with a single click. “It’s too late once we are in holiday mode. It’s imperative to already be fast.” Using DBI Software’s performance tuning tools, David was able to proactively make the effort upfront to ensure holiday shopping flowed flawlessly.

If you’d like to learn more about our work with Costco, click here to download a case study.

What You Must Know

In business as in life, proactive is better.

Success Stories by Industry Leaders Find real examples and insights from our Customer Success Stories with you on how leading companies within their industry are using faster data to increase profits, knowing that slower data results in business failure. Read Here.

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