Friday’s Finds

Here are some insights and observations that were shared via Twitter (and Google+) this past week.

I had the great pleasure of meeting Hugh Macleod – @GapingVoid @GapingVoidArt – and watching him in action this week at Sibos-Innotribe in Toronto. Here is one of my favourite cartoons:

Quotes of the Week:

“The Internet is the largest and most expensive human artifact ever created.” ~ Stowe Boyd via @GapingVoid

“10 year old daughter: ‘Are you going in for work or for meetings?’ Even she knows there is a difference! ;-)” – by @KevinDJones

“What it means to be skillful is going to change when information is universally accessible.” ~ Lawrence Summers via @willrich45

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Evidence-based HR: How many Deloitte HR consultants does it take to jelly a stapler?

I recently had the misfortune of finding myself diverted by this report and my immediate reaction was to ridicule its pretensions and verbosity but words fail me – it is beyond ridicule.  As someone who is well-used to the rhetoric of large consultancies I still find it difficult to conceive how an organisation like Deloitte can employ so many supposedly intelligent people, who take themselves so seriously, and yet are happy to discharge such large volumes of untreated sewage into the HR ‘sea’.  Or perhaps I under-estimate Deloitte – maybe they know exactly what their HR clients like to wallow in?

If you don’t have social interactions at work, how can you be productive in a creative economy? How playing Games at Work Can Help Boost Your Creativity by @elsua

[We should] do another piece of research or study on the impact of NOT having social software tools, or games, to build trust, connect, collaborate and share your knowledge with your peers, customers and business partners.

How internet time is changing business – by @Om

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Finally, I reiterated on Twitter that My blog is my “outboard brain” where I put many thoughts and ideas. If people read them, that’s fine; but it’s mainly for me.

Here are some interesting things that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@SebPaquet ~ “Make something idiot-proof and somebody will make a better idiot.”

@CharlesJennings ~ “we deliver milk. we facilitate learning. we transfer funds. we help build knowledge.” [on ‘learning transfer’]

@StevenBJohnson ~”you can’t have an epiphany with only three neurons” – Where Good Ideas Come From [innovation is about networks]

Marc Benioff [CEO Salesforce.com]: We learned that the key to success with social collaboration is integrating social into workflow. Collaboration is not an island. – via @JayCross

The Physics of Finance: The more chaotic our environment & less control we have, the more we see non-existent simple patterns, or as Valdis Krebs pointed out, seeing fictitious patterns in random data is called “apophenia”

This is interesting in this limited context of discrimination and how the orderliness of physical environments might influence it, but the effect described seems in fact to be far more general — it reflects a human longing for order and simplicity whenever faced with too much uncertainty.

People Are Close to Revolt (James Fallows, The Atlantic) via @SteveBrant

All of the people I know who are capable of rational thought also understand that the combination of (we’re rural so pretty much everyone gets climate change) climate change and energy issues, lack of jobs, and the refusal of government to provide us with basic services means that a new revolutionary social movement is needed. Food prices are soaring, gas prices are making it hard for people to get to low paying jobs, and the amount of suffering because of lack of access to medical care is dire. [US Midwest University Librarian]

Situated Technologies: interesting future-oriented reads HT @JonHusband

The Internet of People for a Post-Oil World [available as free PDF]
Spring 2011 – Christian Nold and Rob van Kranenburg

The authors articulate the foundations of a future manifesto for an Internet of Things in the public interest. Nold and Kranenburg propose tangible design interventions that challenge an internet dominated by commercial tools and systems, emphasizing that people from all walks of life have to be at the table when we talk about alternate possibilities for ubiquitous computing. Through horizontally scaling grass roots efforts along with establishing social standards for governments and companies to allow cooperation, Nold and Kranenberg argue for transforming the Internet of Things into an Internet of People.

Will you soon be able to make Amazon’s Kindle at Home? by @SteveDenning [reminds me of Cory Doctorow’s book, Makers]

Igoe and Mota point out that digital manufacturing is beginning to do to manufacturing what the Internet has done to information-based goods and services. Just as video went from a handful of broadcast networks to millions of producers on YouTube within a decade, a massive transition from centralized production to a “maker culture” of dispersed manufacturing innovation is under way today.

Here are some of the insights and observations that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@SteveDenning “If you’re not hearing laughter, it’s a sign you’re still in the land of traditional management.” via @JurgenAppelo

@HildyGottlieb ” When we plant seeds of moral outrage, we eliminate the possibility for action on what we have in common.”

Learning Organizations Then and Now – by @Driessen

The learning organization sees companies as communities (organisms). A very interesting statement is made towards the end of the book [The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook]:

The lifeblood of the organization as community is dialogue, not only within teams but in the whole organization. If intellectual capital is the most important production factor than the capacity to have deep discussions about important topics is essential for breakthrough thinking and innovation.

Has the recession created a freelance utopia or a freelance underclass? via @MsRasberryInc

The country’s freelance nation has always been a diverse lot, some of whom were pushed out of full-time jobs and others who actively pursued this pathway with entrepreneurial zeal. But the recession has forced a growing number of people to grudgingly pursue this path. Do some of them end up “loving it”? Of course. Will some devote their extra free time to creative pursuits, perhaps to become indie rock darlings? Sure. But those who want to pursue the freelance life to support themselves full time are having a far harder time doing so.

Douglas Rushkoff: What we lack is not employment, but a way of fairly distributing the bounty we have generated through our technologies

The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with “career” be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?

China adds $6.50 of value per iPhone. iPod supported 14000+ jobs in the US – by @TimHarford

A similar story seems to hold for jobs. Greg Linden, Jason Dedrick and Kenneth Kramer of the University of California, Irvine, look at the jobs created by the old faithful iPod. Their study reckons that the iPod accounted for almost 41,000 jobs worldwide in 2006, and only 30 of those were in manufacturing in the US. But the iPod supported more than 6,000 engineering or other professional jobs in the US – as well as almost 8,000 lower-paid jobs in the likes of retail and distribution. Linden and his colleagues reckon that US workers earned more than two-thirds of all the wages paid to workers in the iPod value chain.

Guardian: Ecology is the new economy. via @JenniferSertl

The basis for this thinking is that the linear way in which the world economy currently operates fuels a culture of consumption and creates more waste than is sustainable in the long term. In contrast, the living world operates in a circular cycle where the waste of one species provides the food for another and resources flow.

Here are some of the things that were shared via Twitter this past week.

“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea” ~ Isak Dinesen – via @jhagel

@tom_peters – “Best practices” are to be learned from — not mimicked.

@bankervision – “In a decent democracy the police dance at a street party and don’t lose control of the crowd!”

Think You’re An Auditory Or Visual Learner? Scientists Say It’s Unlikely – via @SharonLFlynn

In fact, an entire industry has sprouted based on learning styles. There are workshops for teachers, products targeted at different learning styles and some schools that even evaluate students based on this theory.

This prompted Doug Rohrer, a psychologist at the University of South Florida, to look more closely at the learning style theory.

When he reviewed studies of learning styles, he found no scientific evidence backing up the idea. “We have not found evidence from a randomized control trial supporting any of these,” he says, “and until such evidence exists, we don’t recommend that they be used.”

@PenelopeTrunk – “Voices of the defenders of grad school. And me crushing them.” – via @lemire

It’s pretty well established that non-science degrees are not necessary for a job. In fact, the degrees cost you too much money, require too long of a commitment, and do not teach you the real-life skills they promise.

Yet, I do tons of radio call-in shows where I say that graduate degrees in the humanities are so useless that they actually set you back in your career in many cases. And then 400 callers dial-in and start screaming at me about how great a graduate degree is.

Here are the six most common arguments they make. And why they are wrong.

“Jaron Lanier on economics, the Internet, advertising — very interesting video:  @SamHarrisOrg”  via @edge

… It can become such a bizarre system. What you have now is a system in which the Internet user becomes the product that is being sold to others, and what the product is, is the ability to be manipulated. It’s an anti-liberty system, and I know that the rhetoric around it is very contrary to that.

Finally; it’s really amazing what gets passed on via Twitter!

Here are some interesting finds that were shared on Twitter this past week.

@EskoKilpi – “The big shift: Transformation from status hierarchies to task hierarchies – #networks” [I think this is a critical differentiation between the industrial/information economy and the creative/knowledge economy we are shifting to.]

Mike Wesch “I don’t want to help make students for the world. I want to help make students who make the world over.” – via @JonHusband

@JohnnieMoore – “I see so many promising “breakthrough” methods as if it can be guaranteed, controllable and risk-free.”

@RosabethKanter – “The first rule for change agents is “Stay alive” ”

Survival is more important than heroism. As a wise mentor once said, the first rule for change agents is “Stay alive.” That’s a lot more important than showing off. If you can’t force a major change or get the best possible deal, a lesser deal that keeps doors open for the future means living to fight another day. Baseball analytics show that getting on base is among the most important ways to win the game. If you strike out while trying to hit a home run, the whole side might go down. If you go for a lesser way to get on base, such as taking a walk, you keep the game alive. Sometimes backing down averts a major crisis and keeps the debate alive.

@dhinchcliffe – First Rule of Collaboration: If you can’t link to it, it didn’t happen, HT @maverickwoman No web of links = no social business

What ever tools you use to collaborate with others, make sure there is a way to log the conversations, keeping a history is vital. And beyond that, if you can’t share links to that history, then it may as well not exist.

“Very nice piece by Marc Andreessen in WSJ saying software is eating the world and why that’s good” – @RossDawson

Six decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor, and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale.

@SteveDenning  – Why Amazon Can’t Make a Kindle In the USA – Disturbing piece on loss of US manufacturing in high tech:

The U.S. has lost or is on the verge of losing its ability to develop and manufacture a slew of high-tech products. Amazon’s Kindle 2 couldn’t be made in the U.S., even if Amazon wanted to:

• The flex circuit connectors are made in China because the US supplier base migrated to Asia.
• The electrophoretic display is made in Taiwan because the expertise developed from producing flat-panel LCDs migrated to Asia with semiconductor manufacturing.
• The highly polished injection-molded case is made in China because the U.S. supplier base eroded as the manufacture of toys, consumer electronics and computers migrated to China.
• The wireless card is made in South Korea because that country became a center for making mobile phone components and handsets.
• The controller board is made in China because U.S. companies long ago transferred manufacture of printed circuit boards to Asia.
• The Lithium polymer battery is made in China because battery development and manufacturing migrated to China along with the development and manufacture of consumer electronics and notebook computers.

Here are some of the things that were shared via Twitter this past week.

“It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It’s that they can’t see the problem.” – G. K. Chesterton – via @albybisy

@umairh – “Being airlifted into a triathlon is probably a pretty bad way to check if your leg’s broken. And similar is true for social contracts.”

Economist – “The Internet has been a great unifier of people, companies & online networks. Powerful forces now threaten it.” – via @dhinchcliffe

Yet it is another kind of commercial attempt to carve up the internet that is causing more concern. Devotees of a unified cyberspace are worried that the online world will soon start looking as it did before the internet took over: a collection of more or less connected proprietary islands reminiscent of AOL and CompuServe. One of them could even become as dominant as Microsoft in PC software. “We’re heading into a war for control of the web,” Tim O’Reilly, an internet savant who heads O’Reilly Media, a publishing house, wrote late last year. “And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform.”

IBM poll of CEOs (2010) found they deemed creativity to be “the NUMBER ONE leadership competency of the successful enterprise of the future” – via @charlesjennings

Image by ibmphoto24

Here are some interesting things that were shared via Twitter these past two weeks.

I was called a Bandwidth enhancer by @WallyBock – I like that term!

“Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.” ~Peter Ustinov – via @CBurell

“if managers really managed, they wouldn’t need performance consulting. Performance is the managers job.” – @BillCush

(organizational / institutional) “Hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust” … Warren Bennis .. an original leadership guru – via @JonHusband

BPM, overpromised & under-delivered: Programming is the automation of the known. Business processes … are the management & anticipation of the unknown – by @pevansgreenwood

Since Frederick Taylor’s time we’ve considered business – our businesses – vast machines to be improved. Define the perfect set of tasks and then fit the men to the task. Taylor timed workers, measuring their efforts to determine the optimal (in his opinion) amount of work he could expect from a worker in a single day. The idea is that by driving our workers to follow optimal business processes we can ensure that we minimise costs while improving quality. LEAN and Six Sigma are the most visible of Taylor’s grandchildren, representing generations of effort to incrementally chip away at the inefficiencies and problems we kept finding in our organisations.

Social & Workplace Learning through the 70:20:10 Lens – by @CharlesJennings

The shift in focus to workplace and social learning by HR and Learning professionals over the past few years is a significant one. And it’s not just a passing phase or fad. It is reflecting a fundamental change that is happening all around us – the move from a ‘push’ world to a ‘pull’ world, and the move from structure and known processes to a world that is much more fluid and where speed to performance and quality of results are paramount.

The Progress Principle: “One of the best business books I’ve read in many years.” … @DanielPink

[Teresa Amabile] Our survey showed that most leaders don’t understand the power of progress. When we asked nearly 700 managers from companies around the world to rank five employee motivators (incentives, recognition, clear goals, interpersonal support, and support for making progress in the work), progress came in at the very bottom. In fact, only 5% of these leaders ranked progress first – a much lower percent than if they had been choosing randomly! Don’t get me wrong; those other four motivators do drive people. But we found that they aren’t nearly as potent as making meaningful progress.

“And no, there was no need for a training department”; comment by @UFrei on Training Departments will Shrink

And why did these experts spend so much of their valuable time coaching us newbies? … And no, there was no need for a training department (our branch had been too small anyway). But there was an attitude to passing on the expertise from the best SMEs to the ‘apprentices’ and this attitude had been sponsored by senior management.

My conclusion: We need Sponsors facilitating learning (something former ‘Training Departments’ could probably do) and motivated Coaches among the experts with the allowance to spend part of their time to develop new expertise.