Un-consulting

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My friend and business colleague, Hal Richman, and I have worked on a couple of projects and have submitted various proposals over the past few years.  We are always looking at how we can do meaningful work but sometimes feel like we’re just submitting one more report that will gather dust.

Hal sent me this explanation of his new work offer, which significantly differs from the traditional “deliver & disappear” consulting strategy. I like it.

Kurt Lewin (1890 – 1947) was a German-born psychologist who earned the title the father of social psychology.

Lewin was one of the first researchers to study group dynamics and organizational development in practical settings. His vision about what people could become in their lives has always impressed me. This vision is threaded in his dense academic writings, as well as his work as a problem solver and founder.

During WWII, Lewin worked with Margaret Mead on the National Research Council’s Committee on Food Habits to determine how the government could prevent hoarding, make rationing work, and feed the Allies during and after the war. Following the war Lewin was involved, along with Dr Jacob Fine at Harvard Medical School, in the psychological rehabilitation of former occupants of displaced persons camps and was requested by the Connecticut State Inter Racial Commission to find an effective way to combat racial and religious prejudices. In 1947 he established the National Training Laboratories in Bethel, Maine.

Lewin had an insatiable curiosity and refused to be pigeon-holed. People came to him with diverse problems because of his diverse background when conventional solutions to problems either do not work or simply did not exist. They didn’t know what to do; however, they did know they needed someone who could look at the problem with a new set of eyes, from several perspectives, and come up with a practical, innovative solution.

Lewin has been one of my most constant role-models for the past 35 years. I haven’t been satisfied to have one career, one challenge in life. And, I’ve found that my diverse background has helped me help myself and others.

Like Lewin, I’ve had many people come to me to solve things, start things, to run things.

Perhaps you are frustrated that the lack of time may mean passing up on a great opportunity. Maybe your firm (or one you have acquired) needs a turn-around, has a great team but can’t get them coordinated or needs a new strategy and direction. Or, maybe you’re temporarily over your head, slogging through a swamp and looking for a way out.

That’s when my company is most welcome. I’ve got some time and I’m an excellent swamp navigator.

A few months ago I was thinking of investing in an ecotourism firm but decided that it needed a turn-around first. As I stood up to leave the table, the owner jumped up from his seat and said “You can’t go,  I need you!” I am now providing hands-on management services for financial planning and control, strategy and metrics, systems selection and implementation and marketing communications.

Tell me about your challenge, your opportunity. Let me jump in with you – not as a disinterested consultant but in the trenches with you – excited, adrenalin pumping, burning the midnight oil.

I have over 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur and a problem solver for small and large organizations. Let me bring a new perspective to a problem, different experiences to bear on the objective.

As a free-agent, this model is viable. You have the option of committing totally to a project or a client without the overhead and billable hours concerns of consulting workshops.

I also know several others who have this perspective, much experience, and are willing to commit. Does this interest you? Need committed help with a thorny problem? Give us a call.

Business Quote of the Week

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Patents and copyrights were conceived as individual rights, not corporate goods. And open source proves that inventions can be even grander than before if rights to the work are held in common.To some people this still sounds like revolution, like a peasant’s revolt. It’s not. It’s just a new market reality, one which has no use for Kings.

Dana Blakenhorn on ZDNet.

The difference between revolution and evolution is a matter of perspective.

Update: On second thought, perhaps this decision from the Supreme Court of Canada (2002) would be a better quote:

Excessive control by holders of copyrights and other forms of intellectual property may unduly limit the ability of the public domain to incorporate and embellish creative innovation in the long-term interests of society as a whole, or create practical obstacles to proper utilization.

Social Networking Advice for Educators

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The latest issue of Australia’s The Knowledge Tree leads with Social Networks Sites: Public, Private, or What? by danah boyd. It’s just the right length and covers the major issues around teenagers and web social networks (MySpace, Facebook) that should interest most educators. The article discusses how mediated social networks have changed all the rules:

Social network sites are yet another form of public space. Yet, while mediated and unmediated publics play similar roles in people’s lives, the mediated publics have four properties that are quite unique to them.

  1. Persistence. What you say sticks around. This is great for asynchronous communication, but it also means that what you said at 15 is still accessible when you are 30 and have purportedly outgrown those childish days.
  2. Searchability. My mother would’ve loved the ability to scream “Find” into the ether and determine where I was hanging out with my friends. She couldn’t, and I’m thankful. Today’s teens’ parents have found their hangouts with the flick of a few keystrokes.
  3. Replicability. Digital bits are copyable; this means that you can copy a conversation from one place and paste it into another place. It also means that it’s difficult to determine if the content was doctored.
  4. Invisible audiences. While it is common to face strangers in public life, our eyes provide a good sense of who can overhear our expressions. In mediated publics, not only are lurkers invisible, but persistence, searchability, and replicability introduce audiences that were never present at the time when the expression was created.

Pass this on to any educators who think that technology is the devil or that they can hide until all this Internet stuff is gone. Following danah boyd’s advice might actually encourage critical thinking and learning.

Facebook selling your information?

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Last week, I said that I thought that there should be an open source alternative to Facebook (and there is at least one) . A few days later I came across this video overview of the money and politics behind Facebook, though I wasn’t sure of its veracity. Today, I saw this note from Lorne Novolker on Facebook:

Apparently Facebook has started SELLING user information (surprise, surprise!) to third parties. They call it the “Facebook Development Platform.”

To restrict use of your information, do the following:
Click “Privacy” on top right.
Under the “Facebook Platform” section click”Edit Settings”.
Scroll down to the bottom and UNCHECK ALL of the items under facebook platform.

Most creepy is the inclusion of photographs!
(Do your friends a favor and repost this as your own note.)

Unless a platform is truly open source, it seems that when we participate, someone else always profits.

“The life, and death, of Canadian Startups”

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Got a startup or know of one in Canada? Tell the folks at StartupNorth:

StartupNorth is a project to review Canadian startups and to build a community of users who are passionate about building great companies in Canada.

The community is still in its infancy, but it looks like it could become  a great place for interesting business conversations.  There are only a few companies listed so far, including a previous client of mine, YourTeamOnline.

Old-School Rules

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Tom Haskins adds to the many comments on Will Richardson’s post about technology being the devil, and then shows the real rules that students learn from an industrial-age “teach-to-the-test” approach:

It’s as-if the teacher is saying:

  1. This is a bogus challenge that’s designed to diminish your curiosity and creativity. Please don’t think about the pseudo-value of this challenge to you. Don’t approach the useless exercise or flawed course design as the actual problem to solve. Don’t see through this scam or find solutions among yourselves that I’ll be clueless to comprehend.
  2. I‘m pretending the web does not exist. I’m assuming you do not have successes every day where you easily find what you’re looking for online. I expect you to experience information as a scarce resource that’s difficult to find and disconnected from other sources. You are required to play along with me.
  3. This is a stupid game to play that deserves your contempt. I’m cheating you out of an authentic learning experience so please return the favor and cheat your way out of this stupid game.
  4. I’m a pathetic game designer. I have no idea how to add a narrative dimension to the challenges. I can only be blatantly obvious and boring. It’s left to you to show me how to be devious, ingenious and clever in hopes I might learn what you know.

There is no shortage of information in our networked world. We don’t need to teach “stuff” because our children live in a world of information abundance. A teaching and content-centric approach is outdated and useless. Education today needs a learning and process-centric approach. As Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

The rules of the game need to change.

An alternative to corporatism

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A while back I said that I believe that the great work to be done at the beginning of this century is to create new organisational models that reflect our humanity. Our current business models don’t serve the people, only a very small group at the top. Corporatism is only helping the rich get richer:

“In 1980, the average corporate CEO earned 42 times as much as the average worker. In 1998, the average corporate CEO earned 419 times as much as the average worker. Today, the average Fortune 500 CEO earns 443 times as much as Hourly workers in their companies.”

The corporation as an entity has outlived its usefulness for humanity, and it’s time to find an alternative. This overview from a study guide for the documentary The Corporation, clearly shows the symptoms of a dysfunctional system:

“If the corporation can be viewed legally as ‘a person’ then why not socially? Actual internationally recognized diagnostic criteria are used to judge the behaviour of corporations and the picture that emerges is one of the corporation as self-interested, inherently amoral, callous and deceitful; it breaches social and legal standards to get its way; it does not suffer from guilt, yet it can mimic the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. Four case studies, drawn from a universe of corporate activity, are used to demonstrate harm to workers, human health, animals and the biosphere.”

It’s time to test out alternatives to corporate governance models in the private and public and social sectors. Dave Pollard has written an excellent article on how we can use the natural enterprise model to create sustainable ways of wealth generation, because our current models sure aren’t working:

“The whole capitalist system is a miserable failure, and it’s only the corporatists’ control of the media (and hence their ability to brainwash us into believing the system actually works), that has kept us from rising up and dismantling it.

Well, actually that’s not the only thing keeping us from overthrowing it: We don’t know what to replace it with. Socialist systems don’t seem to work. Totalitarian fascist systems certainly don’t work. So now we’re indoctrinated into believing that there are no other systems, and that we’re stuck with the capitalist (or more accurately, corporatist) system that is destroying our world (and eliminating the middle class in the process).” – Dave Pollard

Dave proposes three types of public organisations – Directorates, Auditors, and Agencies. Each with its responsibilities, limitations and controls.  This reminds me of the US model of legislative, executive, and judiciary authority or the Canadian version of Crown, Commons, and Senate. Recent events in both countries show that we need to create new models, as the old ones get corrupted over time.

One place to start is at the local level, where we can have greater influence and perhaps see faster development of new models. This includes getting involved in local riding policy-making, testing organisations like a work commons or co-work space, and ensuring that local politicians understand the underlying systemic issues plaguing our society. As Dave says, “We have to do better. The old models don’t work, any of them. It’s time to try something new.“

Are we fostering bi-illiterates?

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I’ve been watching the New Brunswick bilingual education system for a decade now. It’s presided by a Minister who heads two separate departments, based on language. Within the English sector many schools offer early, middle and late French immersion. There is also a movement in our district to offer a hybrid between early and middle immersion. Few seem happy with the system and there are constant attempts to tinker with it.

My own observations, as a parent and a consultant to the Department, are that design and implementation don’t seem to mesh very well. The idea of French immersion is to start with a lot of spoken and written French in the early years and then taper off in high school. The concept is fine, but the implemention requires teachers with excellent French language skills, as the students only have one person to emulate. Our experience shows major discrepancies in French ability amongst teachers, to the extent that in some cases we have had to correct the teacher’s assignments.

At the NextNB public forum [what ever happened to those recommendations from 2004?] I remember a French language professor stating that he preferred students who had not been in French immersion in high school, as they had fewer bad habits. He said that non-immersion students passed the immersion graduates by the middle of the first year of university.

I have often wondered if we are developing bi-illiterate graduates in our public school system; fluent in neither English nor French. I was reminded of this in reading Alec Bruce’s article, Trudeaumania. Alec says that Justin Trudeau slayed a few sacred cows on his recent visit to New Brunswick, including this attribution:

“New Brunswick’s bifurcated public school system produces functionally illiterate Francophones and Anglophones more efficiently than it graduates culturally tolerant, linguistically engaged citizens.”

Perhaps we are seeing the beginning of a movement to make the radical changes that we need in our education system. It seems that this conversation is becoming more public.

… in spite of news to the contrary, I still believe that it’s good to have a serious discussion about our education system.

Early Years Study Presentation with Fraser Mustard

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Received this invitation by e-mail and was asked to pass it on:

The attached invitation is in regards to an upcoming seminar with Fraser Mustard and the Hon. Margaret Norrie McCain at Brunton Auditorium, Mount Allison University, Sackville, NB on May 15, 2007 from 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM.

Fraser Mustard will be presenting an overview of the recently released Early Years Study 2: Putting Science into Action.  There will be a question and answer session with Fraser Mustard and Margaret McCain following the presentation. (He is also receiving an honorary degree at the MtA convocation)

Early Years Study 2 reports on how the children in our country are doing and what can be done to apply the lessons of the study.  The evidence is clear.  The needs are clear.  We can take action now that will make a difference.  If we act as a community, we can improve the outcomes for all children and their families.

Read more about him, and his work as a champion for communities supporting Early Childhood Development.

If you are able to attend  please RSVP to the Council for Early Child Development, tel: 416-849-1332 or email cecd_general@councilecd.ca

Citizen Participation

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I fnally created a Facebook account, especially since it’s now banned for Ontario government employees. Only takes a ban to get me motivated ;-)

I also see that Cynthia is using Facebook to connect with voters during the PEI election, so maybe this is more than just a flash in the pan, given the +15 million members.

All of this citizen participation that is breaking out made me think about a poster created by demonstrating French students in 1968. Is someone else profiting from all of these social networks, or is it truly a citizen-led phenomenon?

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