Thinking longer

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Via Jay Cross, are these comments from some of the most interesting and thought-provoking people in the world, through Edge: the World Question Center. The comments of Esther Dyson really struck a chord:

We’re living longer, and thinking shorter.
Unfortunately, this carries over into how we think and plan: Businesses focus on short-term results; politicians focus on elections; school systems focus on test results; most of us focus on the weather rather than the climate. Everyone knows about the big problems, but their behavior focuses on the here and now.

As a consultant, you are often called in as a last resort, and asked to come up with a quick and pragmatic solution. Don’t bother us with details and an analysis, just get the job done. However, getting down to the root causes of a messy problem may take some time. Fixing systemic problems takes even more time and effort.

We have to learn how to slow down. This can be through regular time for spirituality, exercise, reading or socialising. Organisations should incorporate slow time into their workflow. I once read that in Japan it was OK to sit at your desk and read, whereas in North America we take that as a sign of having nothing better to do. As Socrates said, “The unreflected life is not worth living”. I will take “thinking longer” as a new year’s resolution.

Firefox problems

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I’m having some problems with Firefox today. I can’t see my images that I have on my site, such as the one here. I have also lost the DHTML editor toolbar in Drupal. I know that it’s not a Drupal problem, because I have lost all of my Bloglines feeds too. On the other hand, everything works just fine in IE and even Opera. I have uninstalled and re-installed Firefox, but the problem continues. Any suggestions? I have already run a complete virus scan.

Update: Well it seems to be a Firefox problem and I can’t fix it. I’ve reloaded Firefox twice, even used the UK version instead of the US version. I can’t see any of my subscriptions in Bloglines and I’ve lost functions in Drupal, so it’s back to the dark side I go … Any other recommendations out there? This is weird.

Update 2: I’m now using Mozilla Navigator, and it seems to be working just fine. We’ll see.

Update 3: Have reloaded Firefox 1.0 on my XP SP2 system , but keeping Mozilla as a backup. Using shift-reload, I was able to see the functions in Drupal this time around. Didn’t work last time. Maybe it was just a chair-keyboard interface problem. Anyway, thanks for everyone’s help. Also, you may have noticed that I had allowed direct posting of anonymous comments for the last 24 hours. The online casino spammer caught on to this at 11:00 AM this morning, so they’re now turned off again.

The Medici Effect

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In reading Frans Johansson’s book, The Medici Effect, I was able to take away a lot of practical ways of increasing innovation especially by looking for the intersections between fields of practice. Kind of like my tag line ;-)

Johansson tells you to look for reversals which may give you insights into new ways of doing things. He uses a restaurant as an example, saying that the assumption is that restaurants have menus, but the reversal would be a restaurant without a menu. This would be one where, “The chef informs each customer what he bought that day … the diner selects the desired food items and the chef creates a dish from them, specifically for each customer.”

Looking for reversals is the same strategy that Federmann & deKerkhove advise in McLuhan for Managers; based on McLuhan’s Laws of Media. You might want to read these two books in tandem.

Johansson states that those with lots of good ideas are also those with lots of bad ideas. The important thing is to generate many ideas, and follow through on those that show promise. Innovation is the following through part. As Guy Kawasaki says, “Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.”

Johansson suggests that the way to be creative is to start early and let the idea develop over time. Don’t wait till the last minute:

… we should start by working hard and in a focused manner on a problem or idea and develop it as far as possible. Then we should wait, move on to something else, and forget about the problem for a while. [and repeat]

The Medici Effect is a quick read and I really enjoyed it. I would recommend this book as a window on some new possibilities.

A Bridge from Nowhere

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Robert Paterson has taken the chasm analogy and applied it the population of PEI. He even has a new curve to show how the Island rates. New Brunswick and many other rural regions are not much different from what Rob describes.

I said yesterday that my work focused on bridging the gap between innovators/early adopters and the pragmatic majority. Rob’s premise is that government panders to the majority and ignores the innovative. Given that innovation is the current buzzword of bureaucrats and politicians, you would think it isn’t so. To take the analogy further, PEI (and many other regions) are so focused on the pragmatic (and visionless) majority that they have forgotten that ALL of the innovation comes from the left side of the curve. It’s not just bridges across the chasm that are needed, but something has to be there to get across. Kind of scary when you think about all of the innovators leaving for places that rate higher on the Creativity Index.

Rob’s solution – “If I was King, my Population Strategy would be to build the cultural container to attract the creative to come here and to keep our best young here as well.”

If I was King …

I would limit the centralized control of departments of education, and allow for independent solutions. The government should get out of the education delivery business, and get into the supporting learning business. Let people decide the best way that they want to learn. Learning and experimenting, not Education, will breed innovation.

But I’m not King; so I guess on a local level we have to support innovative, small companies that can attract and retain a few good people. One graduate, one dropout, one entrepreneur, one SME, and one new venture at a time. Let’s continue to help these folks and that will help all of us.

Bridging the Chasm

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Chasm2.jpg

Geoffrey Moore’s analogy of “crossing the chasm” is used a lot in information technology. Basically, the premise is that any new technology is quickly adopted by innovators and early adopters, but there is a chasm to cross in order to get the more pragmatic majority to adopt the new technology. For marketing, this is the real challenge – can the new product get widespread acceptance? In many cases (but not all) the development costs can only be recovered if the majority purchase the goods or services.

I previously referred to this model and tried to tie it to Gladwell’s “tipping point” theory. Much of my consulting work is in bridging the chasm

  1. I attempt to be an early adopter myself, and use this experience to work with the early pragmatic majority. I also use a broader definition of technology; being the application of organized and scientific knowledge to solve practical problems. I spend much of my time watching the innovators, and
  2. try to determine which of their ideas and new technologies would make sense for my clients. To do this, I have to keep trying out new tools and processes in my own work.
  3. It’s a real balancing act, trying to be on the leading edge but not the bleeding edge.

Some of the technologies that I believe are ready to cross the chasm in the next year [2005] are:

… as well as some that probably won’t get across, yet:

Update March 2006: It’s seems that the use of blogs has exploded, with Technorati’s current count at 29 million. Workflow learning has stalled a bit, while the value of informal learning is catching on. Wikis are also becoming more popular, especially those that replicate word processesors, like Writely. There also seems to be a growing interest in natural enterprises and something to replace corporatism as a guiding model, so I am more optimistic than last year.
[Picture based on Wikipedia entry.]

University Enrolment in Atlantic Canada

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On a previous post on University & College Trends, I questioned whether there was any data showing enrolment trends in Canadian universities. A recent report from the Association of Atlantic Universities shows some interesting figures. For instance, both Acadia and Mount Allison are down 7.4% and 6.8% respectively in undergraduate enrolments this past year. Overall Atlantic numbers are:

Full-time Undergraduate + 2.2%
Full-time Graduate + 1.9%
Part-time Undergraduate – 0.1
Part-time Graduate + 4%
Visa [international] students + 8.3%
Total First Year Students – 7.4%

The distribution is not even, but there appears to be a trend to more international students, which can only be beneficial for Atlantic Canada in the long run. I hope that our industries and government know how to capitalise on this.

South East Asia Earthquake and Tidal Wave Relief

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From the Community Health Promotion Network – Atlantic, is this information for Canadians who wish to donate to the tsunami disaster relief effort:


Canadians wishing to make a financial donation may donate online, call 1-800-418-1111 or contact their local Canadian Red Cross office. The 24-hour toll free line accepts Visa and MasterCard. Cheques should be made payable to the Canadian Red Cross, earmarked "South East Asia Earthquake and Tidal Wave Relief" and mailed to Canadian Red Cross National Office, 170 Metcalfe Street, Suite 300, Ottawa, Ontario, K2P 2P2. For information on how Red Cross manages donations, please visit "How We Care For Your Donations". Donations of goods are not accepted.

You can also access the very busy Red Cross website.

Best aggregated information is at tsunami-info.org

Comment Approval Queue

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Given the increase in comment spam on this site, I have configured the comment function so that anonymous comments have to be approved before they are posted. I know that this may be a pain, but it’s my only option until I install Drupal 4.5. You should be able to log on to this site with a Drupal password (tell me if you can’t), or you can contact me and set up an account on this site.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but I’m tired of cleaning up all the spam every day.

Update: And now everything you wanted to know about comment spam and how to fight it, from Six Apart. The recommendations are specific to Movable Type, but may be of interest to others.

The Past Year as a Free-Agent

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It’s been a typical consultant’s year for me — periods of feast and famine and never being able to plan more than a month in advance. An article by Rob Levinson in the Wall Street Journal shows that even with success, free-agents ask different questions than would a full-time employee:

In my past life as a full-time employee, compensation, bonus structure, benefits and title were all that mattered when comparing assorted job offers. What else was there? For a consultant, the criteria for determining next steps are less clear. What are the relevant factors for solo consultants trying to chart a career path?
…
That’s because I have serious personal questions for myself. Do I focus on partnering with my colleague Kate and building her consultancy? Should my consulting firm be my first — and only — priority? Should I chart a growth strategy and think about hiring employees?

From Michael Cage, I also learned business lesson #1 again, and I became seriously immersed in blogging — moving to my own hosted site after having used Blogger and Quicktopic. A blog is definitely the best marketing tool for free-agents and small businesses, and it’s not about publishing a diary, but more about the network effect that makes blogging so powerful for small business. As Jon Udell says:

We can’t say exactly how the trick is done, but we understand the basics: a network, a message-passing protocol, nodes that aggregate inputs and produce outputs. The blog network shares these architectural properties. Its foundation network is the Web; its protocol is RSS; its nodes are bloggers. These ingredients combine in ways that are not yet widely appreciated.

Probably my greatest work achievement this year was in extending my network of friends, colleagues and fellow professionals through blogging in order to expand my own scope of learning and work. Knowing that I have this extended network makes me more optimistic about the coming year, because I know that I’m not alone :-)

My First eCommerce Experience

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I recently posted a link to SmartDraw at the bottom left of my website. This is a purely commercial venture on my part, and I receive a small commission for every sale of SmartDraw that occurs as a result of a purchase though this link. Someone purchased SmartDraw7 this month (thank you very much) and I will get some cash (cool). Here are the main reasons I decided to do this:

  • I have been using SmartDraw for a couple of years, and I like the product (ask me for details if you like)
  • SmartDraw is a small company, with about 25 employees, and I like helping the little guys
  • I wanted to experiment with paid ads, and see what happens

I would appreciate any feedback on my e-commerce foray, especially if you think that this detracts from my independent consultant status. I don’t intend to add more products to my nav bar, and no I don’t get any money for the Firefox banner – I just really like the product :-)