Friday’s Finds

Friday’s Finds:

“When prepping for a big story about a company in crisis, news outlets go to LinkedIn to look for people who have recently left.” – @TorontoLouise

“Culture is what happens when the managers leave the room – doing what’s right in the absence of authority.” – @ValaAfshar

“I actually think that getting schools to change the physical ways kids use the school space is harder than changing pedagogy in class.” – @ChrisLehmann

Innovation is only innovation when it’s sustainable. – by @DonaldClark

All in all, she [a school teacher in Cambodia] was building a sustainable, scalable solution by fitting the technology to her scant resources with a fair amount of cultural sensitivity. This is exactly what I presented at Online Africa, and why I’m so critical of many of Sugata Mitra and Negroponte’s ‘parachute projects’. Innovation should not trump sustainability.

The Brazilian Protests are Existential: an indicator of a crisis of civilization bubbling up at the margins:

Most of the kids I met in Brazil had at least two mobile phones. They monitor their global community of Facebook friends hourly. They are impatient to get on with their lives but as they reach adulthood they find little space for either their aspirations or their concerns. The work available to them (and for 25% there is none) is as low paid drones in faceless corporations or failing public institutions that deliver neither adequate services nor fulfilling career opportunities.  They feel oppressed by massive cultural forces that are making robots out of them. They feel “rage against the machine.”

Fast Co.Exist: Meet Alt-Labor, the non-union workers movement – @FastCoexist

“Brands like Nike, they don’t own factories anymore. They don’t manufacture anything. They don’t even manage manufacturing,” Fine says. She cites the shift from vertically integrated firms to a world of contractors and subcontractors as a central problem for any labor movement, especially since unionizing contract workers is illegal. “We have this dramatic mismatch between 1930s forms of representation and 21st-century forms of employment,” she says.

skills + literacies = global fluency – by @tonyjreeves

Image by Tony Reeves

Friday’s Finds:

“Any sufficiently advanced form of testing is indistinguishable from monitoring.” – @shs96c

“A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists either of writing or thinking about writing.” – Eugene Ionesco – via @PascalVenier

Competency Models – HR and Understanding Work in the Network Era – by @JonHusband

Today we know much more about how to function effectively in social networks than a decade ago, and I think much of what we know is portable to the networked workplace.  Off the top of my head ..

Listen to others
Share generously
Add value, but don’t insist on being right
Listen some more
Practice good ‘social hygiene’
Avoid attacking others
There’s a fine line between criticism and negativity .. find it and use it

When Training Fails, Try Learning – via @NickMilton

“There is a necessity to create real learning opportunities that are directly linked to the business and to move away from training driven by other objectives. If any learning initiative is to succeed, there must be a clear understanding among everyone about the necessity of creating, sharing, and managing knowledge for specific business objectives.The right learning interventions provide frameworks and guidelines that allow people to make the right daily decisions” – Margareta Barchan, President and CEO, Celemi

Being a Professor Will No Longer Be a Viable Career | History News Network – via @AdrianCheok

“Average” faculty, [Steve] Weiland [MSU] said, will be subject to the kind of unsympathetic management advocated by foundation heads like William G. Bowen, president emeritus of the Mellon Foundation, who wrote in a recent book that “the days are over when faculty can … expect to have complete control over the tools they use.” Bowen didn’t mean faculty like Nagy or Michael Sandel, Weiland said. He meant professors like Weiland himself, and most of those present at the AAUP.

Fridays Finds:

“Only in fairy tales are emperors told that they are naked.” – Warren Buffett – via @WallyBock

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” – Andre Gide – via @RonJeffries

The changing nature of work – via @pieriaview

Those who bewail the loss of our industrial base, sniff at service industries and think that only “making stuff” is proper work, are living in the past: the future of work lies in social activity and caring for people, not “making stuff” that we can produce for nearly nothing with little human involvement.

The job of a lifetime no longer lasts a lifetime – SocialHire.com

How had this [being jobless] happened to him?  He had worked hard.  Been successful.  What he hadn’t been was constantly curious.  It had been a long time since he had read anything outside of his direct field.  It had been years since he had pro-actively sought knowledge outside his small range of expertise.  He had become one of the best at a job that few companies were looking for any more.  It will take him a long time to dig himself out of that hole, not the least because, since he had not been trying new things, he has no idea what he might be interested in.  Simply put, he had stopped learning.

Pattern recognition, quantified self and big data by @eskokilpi

Companies are not managing their employees’ long term careers any more. Workers must be their own HRD-professionals. With opportunity comes new responsibility. It is up to the worker to construct the narrative of work-life, to know what to contribute, when to change course and how to keep engaged – much longer than we have been used to. To do those things well you have to develop a new understanding of yourself and what you are actually up to.

Note: These last three quotes give some of the reasons why Jane Hart and I have launched the Connected Knowledge Lab

Friday’s Finds:

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over; on the edge you find things you can’t see from the center.” – KurtVonnegut. – via @JenniferSertl

“Everyone is a born leader … We were all leaders until we were sent to school to be commanded, controlled, and taught to do likewise.” – Dee Hock – via @Jan Höglund

“By the excessive promotion of leadership, we demote everyone else.” – Henry Mintzberg – via @flowchainsensei

“Privacy is a side effect of people not being connected.” – Buster Benson – via @tar1na

@claytoncubitt – “Turning your phone off at the door is the new taking your shoes off at the door.”

@MarkFederman – “‘Organizations are too complex; we must make things simpler.’ Wrong. Organizations are made too complicated in response to complexity.”

Peter Kruse: Transforming Organizations into Social Brains | sense-making strategy – via @toughloveforx

Organizations that do not develop connectivity, arousal (or engagement) and collective valuation facility will have a poor chance of survival in the competition with organizations that do.  That includes the organizational approach to strategy, leadership and communication, whose main task will be to enable neural facility (or at the very least not stand in its way!)
Success in the neural world will depend strongly on social empathy and an ability to work with social resonance phenomena, that steer and focus attention and energy through the net (Kruse—part 4).

The Financialisation of Labour – via @lpgauthier

At present companies are hoarding capital and worried about the future, so it is not in their interests to invest in plant – which is what robots are. Their outlook is essentially reactive and short-term, so they want a reactive, short-term workforce. They don’t want to undertake the capital expenditure required to automate. They don’t want to invest in workers long-term either because training and development is also a capital expense. And they don’t want to wait for full productivity: they want to buy in workers who can “hit the ground running” – hence the impossible requirement for young people entering the workforce to have “experience”. However you look at this, there are structural problems in the labour market caused by companies’ short-term outlook and lack of confidence about the future.

Friday’s Finds:

“first come the innovators, then the imitators, then the idiots … you can set your watch to it.” – @littleidea

“Sad. So many education questions now start with, “Do you know any apps for … ?” and nearly none with, ‘What outdoor games do you know … ?'” – @surreallyno

“Ninety percent of what we call ‘management’ consists of making it difficult for people to get things done.” – Peter Drucker – via @davidgurteen

serendipity: let’s talk numbers – via @jhagel

For example, my research found that, on average, people made up one third of the participants (the nodes illustrated by person thumbnails in the networks illustrated above) of a serendipity story, where the remaining participants were deemed to be either information or physical objects. This is practical information of potential value to a designer of a serendipity system: if, say, ten participants are somehow simulated, engineered or factored into a system, then it might be a useful starting point, although by no means any guarantee for serendipity—remember that control is too simplistic a concept—to allow or arrange for around three of these participants to be people.

Social enterprise tools: an industry in denial? via @sheynkman

Teens have problems like pregnancy, truancy, drug use, low grades. They also use Facebook. If I were to suggest that I can solve these problems by creating a Facebook page, I’d be rightfully laughed at.

Yet this is often the sales tactics in my industry: five bucks a month per employee and all or most of those pesky problems with productivity and barriers to collaboration magically go away. It may increase sales, but this strategy all but guarantees a blowback in the future.

From “unemployed” to unworking – via @tiacarr

“Jobs” are a product of industrial society, those typified by economic growth. However, as economic growth becomes untenable and businesses continually streamline their processes through automation, society is left with deep structural unemployment and wealth inequality. More people find themselves with less disposable income and so they consume less and have lower social mobility.

“Networked minds” require a fundamentally new kind of economics – via @eprenen

Networked minds create a cooperative human species

“This has fundamental implications for the way, economic theories should look like,” underlines Professor Helbing. Most of today’s economic knowledge is for the “homo economicus”, but people wonder whether that theory really applies. A comparable body of work for the “homo socialis” still needs to be written.

“While the “homo economicus” optimizes its utility independently, the “homo socialis” puts himself or herself into the shoes of others to consider their interests as well,” explains Grund, and Helbing adds: “This establishes something like “networked minds”. Everyone’s decisions depend on the preferences of others.” This becomes even more important in our networked world.

Have you mapped your network? Here’s some methods and tools – by @kanter

Friday’s Finds:

“Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.” – George Box [1919-2013] passed away today – @fhuszar

“The true test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald – via @goonth

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” ~ T.S. Eliot – via @ethnobot

“Managers complain that employees do not think outside the box, but it is the management system…that keeps them firmly inside.” ~M.Addleson – via @janhoglund

Innovation Teams Don’t Work – via @petervan

The companies that are the most successful at maintaining cultures of innovation understand that sometimes – nay, many times – innovations fail. Those companies accept the risk of that failure and have a culture that allows for failures and encourages risk taking.

Public good or playing markets? The real reason for MOOCs – via @ShaunCoffey

In fact, though the MOOCs clearly have a potential to grow immensely, these figures are strikingly similar to what was achieved during the last wave of e-learning euphoria in the early 2000s.

Been here before

During this earlier wave, all of the US investment banks in the late 1990s and early 2000s extended the hype cycle from the adventures of dot.com companies directly into e-learning start-ups.

Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Securities, Hambrecht and Co, Sun Trust, and many others relentlessly spruiked the e-learning industry as destined for fabulous growth trajectories and mouth-watering revenue streams.

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past fortnight. My Friday’s Finds are a collection of what I have found of interest but have not blogged about. I have been curating these collections for several years, this one is the 189th.

“If I were unemployed, I would spend my non-job hunting time learning to code. It’s a skill that can be applied in just about any field.” —Nedra Weinreich

“I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself.” – Rita Mae Brown, via Marcia Conner

O’Reilly Radar: GitHub gains new prominence as the use of open source within governments grows, via JP Rangaswami

When it comes to government IT in 2013, GitHub may have surpassed Twitter and Facebook as the most interesting social network.

The Atlantic: Young people are desperate for learning that is relevant … without it all being mapped for them in advance

It is no wonder my daughter wants to mess around with the guitar and the Internet and pursue some interests at a pace that doesn’t feel like the relentlessly scheduled pressure of school and structured activities. For her, the Internet has been a lifeline for self-directed learning and connection to peers. In our research, we found that parents more often than not have a negative view of the role of the Internet in learning, but young people almost always have a positive one.

Three reasons to keep the name with the knowledge – “personal” knowledge management for organizations, by Nick Milton

When you’re publishing knowledge,there are three main reasons why it’s important to keep the name of the originator attached to the piece of knowledge. Whether it is a blog post, a lesson in a database, a contribution in a call centre knowledge base, or a couple of paragraphs in a Knowledge asset,  it is important tokeep the name with the knowledge.

HBR: How WordPress Thrives with a 100% Remote Workforce. via Florence Dujardin

Not all remote work is the same. To evaluate remote work as a singular idea is a paper tiger. There are many policies to choose from and those choices matter. Managers of remote workers at older companies need to make adjustments to enable remote workers to thrive, especially during a trial period when everyone is experimenting and learning what will work for them. But to try remote work without making any allowances or adjustments is foolish. Any progressive idea can be made to fail if the people in charge don’t support it.

The best ever review of standing desks why and what to buy from Wirecutter, via Robert Paterson. Here is my new standing desk :)

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past two weeks.

And now for something completely different [for my long-time readers]:

“Pertussis epidemic: How Vermont’s anti-vaxxer activists stopped a vaccine bill” via @nahumg

Schools and homes are where disease spreads. And in Vermont, [Doctor] Till says there are “pockets of unimmunized” posing a threat to their communities, especially in the “hot spots of anti-vaccination.” One such hot spot lies outside the capital, Montpelier. “These young parents were born in the vaccine era and have not seen devastating diseases,” he says. Till says these parents are “picking and choosing which vaccines they give to their children.” One of the vaccines these parents are most often choosing not to give their children is against polio.

“I feel so sorry for the public.” Former chief scientist, Frito-Lay on industry’s deliberate contribution to obesity – via @TimOReilly

The public and the food companies have known for decades now — or at the very least since this meeting — that sugary, salty, fatty foods are not good for us in the quantities that we consume them. So why are the diabetes and obesity and hypertension numbers still spiraling out of control? It’s not just a matter of poor willpower on the part of the consumer and a give-the-people-what-they-want attitude on the part of the food manufacturers. What I found, over four years of research and reporting, was a conscious effort — taking place in labs and marketing meetings and grocery-store aisles — to get people hooked on foods that are convenient and inexpensive. I talked to more than 300 people in or formerly employed by the processed-food industry, from scientists to marketers to C.E.O.’s. Some were willing whistle-blowers, while others spoke reluctantly when presented with some of the thousands of pages of secret memos that I obtained from inside the food industry’s operations. What follows is a series of small case studies of a handful of characters whose work then, and perspective now, sheds light on how the foods are created and sold to people who, while not powerless, are extremely vulnerable to the intensity of these companies’ industrial formulations and selling campaigns.

Court of Appeal seems to ban Bayesian probability (and Sherlock Holmes) – via @undunc

… when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth
(Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of the Four, ch. 6, 1890)

In a recent judgement the English Court of Appeal has not only rejected the Sherlock Holmes doctrine shown above, but also denied that probability can be used as an expression of uncertainty for events that have either happened or not.

US Dept of Justice DOJ Admits It Had To Put Aaron Swartz In Jail To Save Face Over The Arrest – via @wikileaks

Apparently the DOJ thought it was a reason to throw the book at Swartz, even if he hadn’t actually made any such works available.

The “Manifesto,” Justice Department representatives told congressional staffers, demonstrated Swartz’s malicious intent in downloading documents on a massive scale.

Some may agree with that, but it seems like a jump towards “thoughtcrime” since he hadn’t actually made any move towards making the JSTOR data available. It’s possible that he planned to only make the public domain works (of which there are many) available. It’s also possible he planned to leak the whole thing. But, really, you would think that there should be a bit more evidence of that before prosecutors throw the book at him.

More importantly, it suggests that Swartz was arrested and prosecuted for expressing his opinion on how to solve a particular problem. You may or may not agree with it, but I thought the US was supposed to be a place where we were free to express ideas. There’s even some famous part of our Constitution about that…

Finally, on a lighter note:

“@Cmdr_Hadfield we found your space to-do list! Just one item left.” @davyay

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past two weeks.

The Value of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM):

@LucGaloppin – “If we’d look at digital communities as a life insurance for our own learning, exactly how would that influence our participation?”

@NielsPflaeging – “Learning is that process that continuously makes you think: How could I have been so dumb 14 days ago?”

@DavidGurteen – “PKM is actually what KM is really all about.”

Our Work Structures:

10 years of lying up the hierarchy – via @PeterVan

We should have taken our managers, chief executives, politicians, civil servants and funders to see what was actually going on. We should have persuaded them to sit on council receptions for days at a time, to listen to hours of phone calls from the public and to understand service users in their own contexts. Only then would they begin to understand the true performance of the organisation. Performance officers do not need to spend whole days tinkering with text and formatting reports, mediating reality into something palatable. There is no need for an expensive bureaucracy between the decision makers and the truth.  Confronting the brutal facts is free.

What does a ‘No Fire’ policy change? Everything. – via @StoweBoyd

Probably the biggest impact was the effectiveness of performance evaluations. Development discussions were usually wrought with skepticism from the employee standpoint — are you really trying to help me or just documenting material to potentially fire me? Since getting fired wasn’t an option, everyone became more open to talk about their real problems. Performance evaluations became what it was always intented for – development discussions, open, honest and often real and raw conversations on what people are struggling with. Since people could voice real concerns at work, they left those toxins there and didn’t take them home with them. Home life improved as well. – Charlie Kim

The Guardian: Increasingly, corporations and politicians treat the poor with distrust. 

Inside Amazon’s flagship factory in Rugeley, Staffordshire, a new way of working is evolving. There is a strong topnote of distrust, evinced by the full-body scanners that workers have to pass, every time they leave, to prove they haven’t stolen anything. The profound insecurity built into the employment model is dressed up as discipline – which is to say, Amazon expects huge seasonal fluctuations in the number of people it needs, yet likes to mask their dismissals behind a misdeameanour, so a lot of people get axed for crimes like being ill. There’s a lifesized blonde lady made of cardboard at the entrance, with a think bubble coming out of her head that says, “This is the best job I’ve ever had!” If that detail alone is enough to make your blood run cold, marry it to the testimony of the chairman of nearby Lea Hall Miners Welfare Centre and Social Club: “The feedback we’re getting is that it’s like being in a slave camp.”

Global Guerrillas: Life in a Networked Age

So, what’s going to replace bureaucracy and markets?

We don’t have digestible names for them yet.  However, let’s just call them few to many (F2M) systems and P2P systems.   F2M systems are run by a few people and delivered to a great many people.  In contrast to broadcast, these systems are interactive and smart.  Many use software bots to gather and process data 24/7.

P2P systems allow ad hoc interaction between indepedent individuals.  Every node in this type of system is an equal to any other.  They are not dependent on each other.

Both types of systems have value.  Both have problems.  Both are immature.  As we move to an information based global economy, we’ll see these systems increasingly dominate the playing field (to the detriment of bureaucracy and markets).