Friday’s Finds

Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week.

QUOTES

@EskoKilpi “Control means being able to predict (if A then B); if we can’t predict, we can’t control.”

via @4KM Complexity is necessary … confusion & unnecessary complication should be eliminated. (Don Norman)

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via @lpgauthier The Management Myth: Most of management theory is inane  (The Atlantic 2006)

Between them, Taylor and Mayo carved up the world of management theory. According to my scientific sampling, you can save yourself from reading about 99 percent of all the management literature once you master this dialectic between rationalists and humanists. The Taylorite rationalist says: Be efficient! The Mayo-ist humanist replies: Hey, these are people we’re talking about! And the debate goes on. Ultimately, it’s just another installment in the ongoing saga of reason and passion, of the individual and the group.

via @sahana2802 Not So Fast: Scientific management started as a way to work. How did it become a way of life?  (The New Yorker)

Whether he was also a shameless fraud is a matter of some debate, but not, it must be said, much: it’s difficult to stage a debate when the preponderance of evidence falls to one side. In “The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong” (Norton; $27.95), Matthew Stewart points out what Taylor’s enemies and even some of his colleagues pointed out, nearly a century ago: Taylor fudged his data, lied to his clients, and inflated the record of his success.

via @charlesjennings Why Our Jobs are Getting Worse’ — interesting article by Aditya Chakrabortty touching on ‘Digital Taylorism’

As I described last week, the last two decades have seen more British workers get higher levels of skills than ever before. And yet over that time they have come to exercise ever less control over their jobs. Official skills surveys show a plunging proportion of workers who report that they have much influence over how to do their daily tasks – from 57% in 1992 to 43% by 2006. If you’re an NHS worker or teacher you have targets or central curricula to meet; if you’re employed by an outsourcing company you’ll have two sets of bosses breathing down your neck – those in your office, and the client company too.

The labour-market academic Phil Brown has a phrase for this trend: Digital Taylorism [PDF].

via @C4LPT Job 2.0 – The End of Profession (TheNextWeb)

The Job 2.0 era gives us all an opportunity to have more than one profession at a time. Plumbers don’t just do plumbing anymore. They have to be in marketing and PR as well and offer more related services than just plumbing to satisfy market demand. Architects aren’t just designing buildings anymore. They also design cities, furniture, books and gadgets.

Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week:

QUOTES

via @CharlesHGreen “When you dig yourself into a hole, first, stop digging.” up by your bootstraps

via @HealthCareerPro “I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.” ~ Winston Churchill.

@EskoKilpi “The everyday live interactions we experience do not exist in a meaningful way in any documents.”

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via @bduperrin Six Fundamental Shifts in the Way We Work – HBR

Despite long-term increases in labor productivity, the average return on assets (ROA) of US companies has steadily fallen to almost one quarter of what it was in 1965. We’re running faster, but still losing ground. There is no sign of this long-term erosion flattening out, much less turning around.

The conclusion is inescapable: our management practices and corporate institutions are fundamentally broken. The good news, if you can call it that, is that this isn’t sustainable for much longer: the trend line on ROA approaches zero in 2020.

The Power of Power Laws by @jhagel “We’re shifting from a Gaussian world to a Paretian world, with profound implications for business.” followed by a reply to Power Laws by @downes “The thing with this discussion is, the two types of worlds are being described as if they are natural phenomena, as though they are patterns that we just fall into.”

@SteveCase – Studies Show Why Students Study is as Important as What: Education Week

The research suggests two parallel motivations drive student achievement: “learning orientation,” the drive to improve your knowledge and competency; and “performance orientation,” the drive to prove that competency to others. Watkins found the highest-achieving students had a healthy dose of both types of motivation, but students who focused too heavily on performance ironically performed less well academically, thought less critically, and had a harder time overcoming failure.

Two guesses which orientation develops under a U.S.-style assessment accountability system, and the first doesn’t count.

The Working Smarter Fieldbook: A Glimpse & Some Thoughts by @sahana2802

The book is a synthesis of years of collective experience, know-how,  knowledge and deep passion for improving and enabling human performance. As an L&D professional, for me the book is a practical guide to the implementation of a more efficacious “workscape” and even tells me what my elevator pitch should be. However, as I read it, I realized it is also much more. It speaks to me at a personal level showing me how I can push myself to become a more effective professional, find my Element by investing in collaborating, learning, and sharing, by building a network and being part of a network of professionals.

@JudithELS Although I’m not a great fan of slide-only stuff, these speak for themselves > Internet Time Alliance View of Change

Here are some of the things I learned on Twitter this past week.

QUOTES

“Anything you think is either unoriginal, wrong or both”

@courosa Look at a single Twitter page. Think about prior knowledge / literacies needed to decode that page. RTs. links. voice. events. #MediaLiteracy

@Dave_Ferguson My comment to @rnantel : fixing most performance problems with training is like fixing a leaky faucet by painting the kitchen.

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KM tools for small business: an array by @jackvinson

But wait a minute.  Why go with these additional systems?  Why not just help people in the business do a better job with what they have?  Why not teach and encourage advanced Personal Knowledge Management skills, possibly using some of the online services?  That’s not a bad idea, actually.  If everyone can use the same tools and those tools can share information amongst colleagues, that may be a good starting point.

via @sebpaquet What life lessons are unintuitive or go against common sense / wisdom? Quora.com

Focus on spending this money in ways that improve your happiness and reduce your stress levels, and be cautious about using it to buy things that other people say you “should” buy.

Designing for complexity by giving up control: a traffic example via @johnniemoore

Recommended viewing for contemplating the power of self-organisation and the hidden costs of top-down control. The best line in the commentary was this: “Road capacity might be limited but empathy is boundless.”

A Man with a PhD: Sounding strident & desperate for a reason by @RBGayle

We sound desperate and strident because dealing with this level of managed ignorance puts tremendously unnecessary stress on our ability to solve complex problems.

@NatashaChart did a lack of print copyright law jump start Germany’s industrial development and popular literacy? Spiegel Online International

Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country’s industrial might.

[snip]

Indeed, only 1,000 new works appeared annually in England at that time — 10 times fewer than in Germany — and this was not without consequences. Höffner believes it was the chronically weak book market that caused England, the colonial power, to fritter away its head start within the span of a century, while the underdeveloped agrarian state of Germany caught up rapidly, becoming an equally developed industrial nation by 1900.

Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week.

Quote of the Week: @hrheingold “Free, open, multimedia university of tomorrow is here now, technically. Knowing how to self-organize learning with others is another matter”

via @nancyrubin Collaboration – If it Were That Easy We Would all Do It – Well

Five Models of Collaboration:

• Communities of Practice/Interest
• Content Collaboration
• Process Collaboration
• Project Collaboration
• Goal-based Collaboration

@davecormier “next time someone makes fun of twitter …  tell them about you guys finding the name of the berry that Posey ate for poison control [baneberry]”

we took the kids into the woods, on a little trail on the back of Dave’s ancestral lands. and we spun our heads back, three of us at once to see Posey in her tutu and her grandmother’s fake plastic pearls chomping heartily away on…something.

three parental mouths opened in unison to say what’s she eating? and then Dave crossed the three steps between him and her in only one and he pried the berry from her mouth. ew, she said.

he grabbed the culprit to ask the internet, once we were back at the house.

Photo & The Culprit

via @helinur the best goal is no goal :

So what does a life without goals look like? In practice, it’s very different than one with goals.

You don’t set a goal for the year, nor for the month, nor for the week or day. You don’t obsess about tracking, or actionable steps. You don’t even need a to-do list, though it doesn’t hurt to write down reminders if you like.

What do you do, then? Lay around on the couch all day, sleeping and watching TV and eating Ho-Hos? No, you simply do. You find something you’re passionate about, and do it. Just because you don’t have goals doesn’t mean you do nothing — you can create, you can produce, you can follow your passion.

via @markwfoden Case study on using micro-blogging to support informal learning [PDF] at Pitney Bowes:

• Better Employee Learning: Yammer facilitates and augments the highly valuable “casual learning” that happens every day within Pitney Bowes.
• Easily Searchable Knowledge Base: Each discussion is archived and accessible to all within the organization for future access.
• Better Knowledge Flow: Knowledge isn’t siloed into specific regions or departments.

via @elsua Starting another day with this required reading: Am I Crazy? Or Is It The Whole Firm Where I Work? by @stevedenning

A century hence, when historians come to write the history of the current age (assuming our species survives so long), they will, I believe, be puzzled as to why so many people managed—and so many more people allowed themselves to be managed—in ways that were known to be unproductive, crimped the spirits of those doing the work, and frustrated those for whom the work was being done. Why, they will wonder, did this continue for so long on such a wide scale?

Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week.

Why focus on informal & social learning? by @CharlesJennings | Related Slide Presentation

In many cases non-formal and social approaches will replace formal learning. In a few cases they won’t.

There are 8 drivers for this change:

1. There is a strong imperative for continuous learning – the world is changing so fast that we need to continually update our knowledge, skills and productivity. Doing it in discrete steps just doesn’t work any more – even if the steps are small ones. We all need to develop the mindset of continuous, always-on learners. Informal and social learning approaches fit this need better than staccato formal learning …

via @roundtrip – 10 ways the “world of work” will change in the next 10 years @Gartner_inc “non-routine” work = adaptive innovative

1. De-routinization of work
2. Work swarms
3. Weak links
4. Working with the collective
5. Work sketch-ups
6. Spontaneous work
7. Simulation & experimentation
8. Pattern sensitivity
9. Hyperconnected
10. My place

@johnniemoore Is there a real innovator’s dilemma in an age of abundant creativity. Or just a bureaucrat’s dilemma pretending otherwise?

From HBR: Higher education is overrated; skills aren’t [as I wrote in the university myth]

Foolish New York Times stories notwithstanding, education is a misleading-to-malignant proxy for economic productivity or performance. Knowledge may be power, but “knowledge from college” is neither predictor nor guarantor of success. Growing numbers of informed observers increasingly describe a higher education “bubble” that makes a college and/or university education a subprime investment for too many attendees.

via @nomad411 New Zealand rejects software patents.

In updating its policy position, the New Zealand government acknowledged the growing importance of open source, and the logical reasons for excluding software from the list of patentable inventions.

Evaluating knowledge workers – a cartoon essay by @tonykarrer

Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week.

Value creation has thus been shifting from protecting proprietary knowledge, to fostering collaboration, both within the company and beyond its boundaries, in order to help the firm participate in as broad and diverse a range of knowledge flows and thus improve its competitive position.  It is within this context that one has to consider the business value of social networks, and their impact in helping people better connect with each other, and build sustaining relationships that enhance knowledge flows and innovation.

via @bbetts -Oscar Berg: Why traditional intranets fail today’s knowledge workers

To conclude: a major reason why traditional intranets fail today’s knowledge workers is that all information they provide access to is produced with a push-based production model. This model assumes that all information resources on the intranet must be produced in advance (only serving information needs which can be anticipated) by a small subset of all available resources (employees) and that the entire body of information needs to be supervised by a few people for the purpose of controlling the message, format and/or organization of the information resources.

A Man with a PhD: Natural selection: networks & diversity

One thing to remember is that true and pure natural selection would tend to drive genes to the best possible – the most fit – actually removing diversity. To a first approximation, selection would seem to produce a single set of genes that are ‘best’ evolved for a particular environment. Any other set of genes would be less fit.

In reality, selection is often not that fine, there are a range of different gene products that can probably be almost equally fit and most biological systems are designed to support a wide range of diversity.

This argument implies that one cannot hope to get ahead of others just by finding the “right” network. “People think of their network as something they can expand, or buy a new version of, or change in some dramatic way as if it were clothing that you can take off and put on,” Burt says. A network does not give added competitive advantage independent of your effort. Rather, it allows a person to become more skillful at managing various connections so that he gains greater competitive advantage. It is what a person does with his network that counts.

via @jhagel – Generating Serendipity: diversity; sharing; network weaving; provocation

Serendipity is the emergence of desirable novelty from a chance encounter, the discovery of something wonderful, unknown and unpredictable. It is the act of unexpected cross-pollination, the seed of something new.

Much of lasting value comes into being serendipitously. How many of the most amazing things that have happened to you have happened because of an overheard word, an accidental encounter, a connection made by a friend? Serendipity is the antithesis of control.

Connections drive innovation [and learning] by @timkastelle

The moral of the story is simple. Connections drive innovation. We need input from people with a diversity of viewpoints to help generate innovative new ideas. If our circle of connections grow too small, or if everyone in it starts thinking the same way, we’ll stop generating new ideas. And then we’ll forget things like how to make a fishing hook. Or a trident missile.

via @charlesjennings – Paris stages ‘festival of errors‘ to teach French schoolchildren how to think

“I’m a scientist. I had nothing to do with education. But then my six-year-old boy went to school and his teacher told me, ‘He’s a nice kid, but he asks too many questions,'” said François Taddei, the author of an education report published last year for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

“This is the problem of the French system,” he added.

“You are supposed to know the right answer. You are not supposed to express your own opinions or ask questions.”

Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week:

Quotes of the Week:

@ralphmercer – “committees are places to lure great ideas to be killed while absolving everyone of the blame”

via @planetrussell- “Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while giving the appearance of stability.” —Nassim Nicholas Taleb, PhD.

“when hiring, we don’t care about formal education” says @JasonFried of 37Signals – the new workplace, the new normal

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via @sebpaquet – Cognitive research shows that facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds:

Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

via @robpatrob – Jesse’s Café Américain – Nothing was sacred: The theft of the American dream:

“Eliminating government” is a trap put forward by the plutocrats for those unable to reason except by prejudice, as they desire to exercise their power unimpeded by the rule of law. Once you knock down the protections and the safeguards in the name of reform, the wolves will turn on the public in an orgy of looting and exploitation. This is an old story, and sadly it often works.

The approaching end of the corporation as a closed box by @euan

So many of my conversations with clients end up being about either maintaining the corporation’s managerial integrity in the face of marauding hordes of Facebook enabled staff, or protecting their brand integrity in the face of viral damage spinning out of control online when a customer decides to get their own back for a bad experience. Neither the fantasy of brand nor managerial integrity are sustainable.

“Social” thinking vs Doing – by @jderagon

Gaining  new knowledge or creating new knowledge and knowing what to do with it is more productive than doing what others do. To gain or create new knowledge requires thinking which is a lot deeper than doing.

Here are some of the things I learned on Twitter this past week:

Mark Twain’s Posthumous Bombshells by @cburell

Why is Mark Twain’s autobiography only coming out now, 100 years after his death? Because he stipulated so before dying.

What he expresses in these screenshots from a PBS Newshour clip of the manuscript suggests why he might have wanted these thoughts to stay silent for a century. And they’re strangely resonant in our own day.

via @couchlearner – The Most Important Question to Ask a Consultant Before Saying Yes – by @timberry:

So the most important question to ask, before you agree to a consulting job,  is who is actually going to be doing the work. Who will deliver it, and who will you talk to in the interim. Yes, you’d think that would all be obvious. But the bigger and more successful the consulting company, the less likely that the actual work will be done by the people you talk to. For example, with most of the top 10 consulting firms the partners sell the jobs (they call them engagements) and the associates – relatively recent hires – do the work.

Has Knowledge Management Been Bad For Us? by @rickladd

But I think we’re missing the point about the real value of knowledge. If, in fact, the largest (by far) percentage of an enterprise’s useful knowledge is locked between the heads of its employees and, if (as we frequently say about tacit knowledge) much of it can’t be accessed until it’s required, why are we not spending more of our limited funds on facilitating the connection and communication, as well as the findability and collaborative capabilities of our employees?

@robpatrob – How to break through the culture barriers in Social Media – Veterans Affairs [VAC] creates a Wedge

So even before “Social Media” was a buzz word, VAC had created a site, using kids, where the public could find out about their loved ones online and where the public could not only look but participate.

The key issue here in terms of culture and barriers, is that this is quite real – the public are really contributing and the service is authentic and valuable – but that the risks are low. Above all that VAC is learning by doing how to get a start.

@DanielPink “The real reason China is laughing at the US” – Creativity: one core skill here, via @charlesjennings

@rossdawson – 5 graphic frameworks showing the future of media:

Here are some of the things I learned on Twitter this past week:

QUOTES OF THE WEEK:

@KareAnderson “Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

“Most of what we know we learn from other people. We pay tuition to a few of these teachers … but most of it we get for free, and often in ways that are mutual – without a distinction between student and teacher … We know this kind of external effect is common to all the arts and sciences – the ‘creative professions.’ All of intellectual history is the history of such effects.” Does Milwaukee have enough college graduates to thrive?

@faboolous “Knowledge work thus requires that each party offer something with no guarantee that they will get anything specific in return”.

@bduperrin “The more social you are you [the] more opportunities you get, the more busy you are, the less social you become.”

@jonhusband “Unfortunately, HR is the home base for the management practices based on old mental models about work & motivation .. not synched with networked work”

@tdebaillon “Most companies aren’t designed for collaboration.” My Little Enterprise 2.0 Diffusion Framework

@umairh “The problem isn’t that we need new jobs. It’s that we need a better economy, composed of new kinds of companies, built for a higher purpose.”

Henry Mintzberg: “In a word, corporate America is sick.” – “A viable economy needs to be led by explorers, not exploiters.” – “The Problem Is Enterprise, Not Economics” via @jonhusband

Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week:

@Louisvancuijk – “Knowledge is only a rumour until it is in the muscles.”

Connected, a declaration of interdependence by @tiffanyshlain

Combining powerful visuals, humor, animation, irony, and serious messages, Connected explores the visible and invisible connections between the major issues of our time — the environment, population growth, technology, human rights, and the global economy – demonstrating how they are all interdependent. Following the filmmaker’s exploration of her own place in the world during a transformative set of circumstances in her life, Connected exposes the importance of personal connectedness in relation to understanding global conditions, ultimately showing how all of humanity is invested in today’s crucial issues.

Online Communities are Changing my World – by @edavidove

#1 – I was organizing a conference in London UK for a client. I researched the internet (blogs, discussion threads, social networks, etc.) and found 2 very interesting speakers to participate. One was from Finland and one was from the USA. The first time we met in person was at the conference. We continue to network and collaborate to this day. One of the speakers connected me to an incredible career opportunity.

Birthing; midwives; knowledge management; organizations & structures – by @johnt

What I got out of it is that midwives are facilitators in uncertain situations.

No two births are alike, and nearly all births don’t fall on the planned date.

Every “mother to be” is different and the midwives both have to deal with people and their situation. They don’t know what to expect as they have not seen the “mother to be” going through a birth, either has the “mother to be” if it’s their first (even if it was the second or third baby, not every birth is the same anyway, so not even the “mother to be” knows how she will react to new circumstances, especially in different environments).

Performance Consulting: finding the best solution from the training, informal learning, performance support mix – by @c4lpt

When confronted with a learning or performance problem, the normal and traditional response from L&D is to create a training solution, probably in the form of an all-singing, all-dancing content-rich e-learning course. For a long while I’ve compared this approach with using a hammer to crack the proverbial nut!

Steve Denning: HBR: Rushing to the 20th Century – via @RossDawson

Want to kill your firm quickly? Then study the current issue of Harvard Business Review. Imbibe its philosophy, its attitudes and its values. Implement everything it says. In so doing, you will be well on the way to turning your organization into a fully-fledged 20th Century organization, with a life expectancy of around 5-10 years.

Competition is overrated: Startups are primarly competing against indifference, lack of awareness, and lack of understanding — not other startups – via @sebpaquet

1) Almost every good idea has already been built. Sometimes new ideas are just ahead of their time. There were probably 50 companies that tried to do viral video sharing before YouTube. Before 2005, when YouTube was founded, relatively few users had broadband and video cameras. YouTube also took advantage of the latest version of Flash that could play videos seamlessly.