Intangibles

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Jay Cross just created a short video discussing the importance of intangible assets. When examining value networks, which we will discussing in our free Value Networks Workshop on March 20th, one looks at tangible and intangible types of value, the latter described by Verna Allee as:

Intangible knowledge exchanges include strategic information, planning knowledge, process knowledge, technical know-how, collaborative design, policy development, etc., which flow around and support the core product and service value chain.

Intangible benefits are advantages or favors that can be offered from one person to another. Examples might be offering to provide political support to someone. Or a research organization might ask someone to volunteer their time and expertise to a project in exchange for an intangible benefit of prestige by affiliation. These are intangible “products” that can be exchanged, as indeed people can and do “trade favors” to build relationships.

The relationship between intangibles and tangibles reminds me of the informal/formal learning continuum. In each case, it seems that the formal/tangible component is easier to measure, so that is where our industrial management methods have concentrated their efforts. As our organisations become inter-networked, and relationships create more of our value, we realise that we have to pay attention to the silent majority that is intangible/informal.

For further reading on value networks, check out Patti Anklam’s blog at Networks, Complexity and Relatedness.

Building Resilience – The Upside of Down

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I’ve just finished reading The Upside of Down, which is very disturbing, but at the same confirms some of my own directions in life. A good part of this book reads like An Inconvenient Truth, but Homer-Dixon adds more detail about how we got into this mess. Much of the book is dedicated to an explanation of the five tectonic stresses that we face as a civilization — population; energy; environmental; climate and economic. About 80% of this book is depressing to any thoughtful or caring person.

However, there is a positive note — in times of crisis and destruction come opportunities for regeneration. This requires a ‘prospective mind’ that can anticipate crises and prepare for them. For instance, Homer-Dixon encourages building resilience into our communities and economies, so that we are not dependent on tightly coupled global supply chains. Resilience implies redundancy and is evident everywhere in nature.

Homer-Dixon suggests two related tools for helping us to build more resilient communities – the Internet and open source collaborative problem-solving. He sees much untapped potential in using one billion interconnected volunteers to bypass elite special interests and tackle our urgent global problems. Connecting with a worldwide community of interest while creating resilient local communities is the general recommendation from Homer-Dixon.

Advance planning means we need to develop a wide range of scenarios and experiment with technologies, organizations, and ideas. We’ll do better at these tasks, and we’ll also do better in the confusing aftermath of breakdown, if we use a decentralized approach to solving our problems, because traditional centralized and top-down approaches are not nimble enough, and they stifle creativity.

Homer-Dixon’s argument and suggestion to address “catastrophe, creativity and the renewal of civilization” is a solid argument for many of the activities that I now find myself engaged in. These range from the creation of our community work Commons; our local organic food purchasing cooperative; and implementing open source organisational models. There is also the search for meaning, beyond that which was developed two millennia ago by the great faiths, during what is described in the book as the Axial Age, when “… people came to understand that they could use reason and reflection to see beyond their immediate reality …”. What we usually experience is more like this:

When we get in the door of our nearest church, mosque or synagogue, we find there’s no real opportunity for discussion. Instead, we’re handed a creed of some kind. We’re told what to think about values, not how to think about them.

The first step in our renewal as a civilization is admitting that we face a global crisis and talking about what we can do.

Everything is Political

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This blog is not supposed to be about politics; well at least I didn’t set out to discuss politics three years ago. However, Jon Husband recently quoted Dante Alighieri, who said that, “The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.”

Then along comes Jon (again) referring to a piece by Joe Bageant that ends with this line – “Divisive politics once again beats the snot out of reason.”

All of this reminds me of my current read, Thomas Homer-Dixon’s, The Upside of Down. From the Chapter “Cycles Within Cycles”:

For the vast majority of us who sell our labor in the marketplace, our economic insecurity and relative powerlessness impel us to play by the rules. And in capitalist democracy, playing by the rules means not starting fights over big issues like our society’s highly skewed distribution of wealth and power. Instead it means focusing on achieving short-term material gains – such as bettering our contracts with our employers. Put simply, our economic elites have learned, largely through their struggles with workers in the first half of the twentieth century, to protect their status by creating a system of incentives, and a dynamic of economic growth, that diverts political conflict into manageable, largely non-political channels. As long as the system delivers the goods – defined by capitalist democracy itself as a rising material standard of living and enough new jobs to absorb displaced labor – no one is really motivated to challenge its foundations.

I’ve previously written about Corporatism Run Amok, but I may take more forays into the political realm, particularly as politics continues to affect my own intersection of interest – learning (state-run education), work (support of corporations) & technology (digital copyright & IP) .

Green Domain Hosting

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For Canadians, I have found two ways of becoming a “greener” presence on the Web. One is to use Green Hosting, where everything is powered by renewable energy:

All the electricity required by the server and ancillary operations (101% of demand) is generated by wind turbines in Alberta, and is distributed through the Greenmax© program of the Calgary utility ENMAX. Both generation and distribution are certified under Canada’s national EcoLogo© program to ensure that this service contributes directly to the reduction of GHG emissions and supports new renewables facilities.

Another possibility is to use Ethical Hosting’s service, which uses offsets, or green tags:

Obviously we can’t just throw up a Wind turbine outside our office and it would be very expensive to do so (but would be very cool if we could!) This is where green energy certificates or Green Tags come into play. After auditing our energy usage, we were able to calculate the electricity usage of our office and computers. We are then able to purchase the necessary amount of Green Tags through a nationally recognized provider: The Pembina Institute.

Definitely a couple of considerations if you’re looking for a new host or considering changing your current host.

Team Sports and Ethics

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When we mention that we will be home-schooling, many people say that our children will miss important socialisation activities, especially team sports. Personally, I was never interested in most popular team sports and neither was my wife, so our family doesn’t have a history of playing hockey, basketball, football, baseball and other team sports.

This report released by the Josephson Institute of Ethics, which surveyed 5,275 high-school students across the USA, shows some interesting findings regarding ethics and team sports, such as:

Some Sports Are Worse Than Others. Boys engaged in baseball, football and basketball are considerably more likely to cheat on the field and in school and to engage in conduct involving deliberate injury, intimidation and conscious rule-breaking than boys involved in other sports. Generally, boys participating in swimming, track, cross country, gymnastics and tennis were markedly less likely to cheat or to engage in bad sportsmanship than their male counterparts in other sports. Girls involved in basketball and softball were more likely to engage in illegal or unsportsmanlike conduct than girls involved in other sports.

They also found that “Many Coaches Teach Negative Lessons”, specifically – Illegal holding; Using the other team’s playbook; Faking an injury; llegally altering a hockey stick; Illegal start; Wrong player shooting free throws; Altering the field of play; Soaking the field to slow down the other team.; Throwing at a batter; Mistake in score; Trash talk; Showboating; Motivation through insult; Swearing at official to motivate team; and Holding back an athlete in school.

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Like anything else, we have to be careful about generalising, but these data show that we shouldn’t take for granted that all team sports teach good socialisation skills.

Energy Efficiency Information Session in Sackville

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Passing on this information I received via e-mail.

EOS Eco-Energy and Efficiency NB are hosting an Energy Efficiency Information Session on 16 March 2007 at 7:00 PM. It will be held at the Sackville Civic Centre and admission is free. The presentation will cover existing homes, new homes and multi-unit residential buildings. To learn more about existing New Brunswick energy programs, go to the Efficiency NB site.

Open Source is (still) best for customers

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I’ve been an advocate of open source software for quite some time now. Part of the reason for this advocacy was my experience selling a proprietary learning management system. I saw how customers could become hand-cuffed to a technology once they had put a critical amount of data into the system and could no longer get it out. This wasn’t just our company but everyone in the business.

Matt Asay, in a case study from University of Nebraska (that’s an academic client folks), once again shows why open source is better for the customer in the long run:

You buy into a Microsoft (or Oracle, or ….) ecosystem, and they provide all the tools to get you in deeper, and to keep you there. There are good reasons for Microsoft to do this, reasons which have nothing to do with pernicious business practices. One reason is that Microsoft can better control the total user experience if it controls all the interlocking pieces, just as Apple does on its computers.But therein lies both the promise and peril of a vendor-dominated ecosystem. It’s hard to get out once you get in.

Here are some of my past discussions on open source for learning:

How open source has a much lower total cost of ownership.

A Canadian case study on open source in education.

Open source is recommended by impartial research organisations.

NB Self-sufficiency Task Force

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The New Brunswick government has commissioned a task force to look into ways that this Province can become self-sufficient.

You are invited to view the comments and/or join the discussion. The Task Force Co-chairs also contribute, by posting questions and/or clarifying issues. The contents of this Discussion Forum will be analyzed and contribute to the preparation of Final Report of the Task Force on Self-Sufficiency. The Discussion Forum is open until March 31, 2007.

The recommendations to date could be considered to be a bit controversial and have fostered some discussion and conflicting points of view. I’ve added my comments to a few of the six discussion areas:

  1. Increase population and labour force
  2. Sweeping changes
  3. Increase labour productivity
  4. Rural and Urban connections
  5. Export growth
  6. Expand our existing corporate base
  7. Leaders

Part of my concern about this process is that it is just a snapshot in time and does not connect to the serious discussions that have been going on for several years in non-traditional media (like blogs). If you have some perspective on economic & community development, then please add your comments to the “official” discussion. I’m told that the Premier will read these comments, while I’m sure that most politicians don’t read any of our blogs (correct me if I’m wrong).

So if you have older posts that pertain to these topics, then just copy and paste them in. Think of it as a manually-operated RSS aggregator ;-)

Value Networks Workshop

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We will be hosting a workshop in Saint John, NB, on Creating Value Networks for SME’s in the ICT Sector on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007. This event is being conducted in partnership with PropelSJ and NRC-IRAP, and it’s free.

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Consider this your invitation

The workshop will be conducted by Patti Anklam, thought-leader and practitioner of value network analysis. Patti has literally written the book on the subject – Net Work: A Practical Guide to Creating and Sustaining Networks at Work and in the World, to be published this April.

The other hosts with me will be Hal Richman (Productivity Solutions) and Gordon Smith (CBCL Ltd.) who have applied value network analysis in the ocean and marine technology sector in Newfoundland & Labrador [I’ll be there too, but if you’re reading this on my blog, you already know me].

So what are value networks? According to Verna Allee, author of The Future of Knowledge: Increasing Prosperity through Value Networks:

A value network is a web of relationships that generates economic value and other benefits through complex dynamic exchanges between two or more individuals, groups or organizations. Any organization or group of organizations engaged in both tangible and intangible exchanges can be viewed as a value network, whether private industry, government or public sector.

Plan to attend this workshop and learn how value networks can help your organization do more business world-wide.

Location: The New Brunswick Museum, 1 Market Square, Saint John, NB

Morning (open session), Lecture and Skills Building Workshop

Mary Oland Theatre, NB Museum

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Afternoon (invitation only), The Value Network for PropelSJ

Specifically for Catalict clients & mentors and invited ICT companies

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Reservations will be required for the afternoon session and are preferred for the morning session.

Contact me or PropelSJ for further information or an invitation to the afternoon session.

Why does Aliant’s service suck?

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I don’t like using the “S” word when referring to a company, but in this case I feel it’s appropriate. I have complained before about Bell-Aliant’s service, and how it took over a year to get things straightened out:

A little bit of searching and I found the e-mail of one of Bell Aliant’s VP’s and sent my story, with links to my blog. Within 24 hours, Aliant had delivered:

  1. an apology directly from a VP
  2. a rebate on the High Speed Ultra service for which I paid
  3. a year’s worth of free Ultra service

Unfortunately, what I received from Aliant has almost no value. First of all, Aliant’s service does not work with Skype, my preferred VoIP application.

Net Neutrality Canada - Neutrality.ca

Secondly, Aliant’s Ultra service comes with free “TV on your PC”, but this service hasn’t worked at all for 3 weeks, and my requests for help remain unanswered.

All I can say is, “Buyer Beware”, and choose an alternative.

Update: I never received a response from Aliant’s technical support regarding TV on my PC, but my son suggested that I roll back Windows Media Player, and after two rollbacks (to v. 9) it now works, in spite of Aliant’s statement that the service works with Version 9 “or higher”. Still no joy with Skype.

Update 2: It seems that other telco monopolies are blocking traffic.