Work

business & working

CopyLeft Commies

by

I guess that I’m a Copyleft commie, if you believe Bill Gates. Here’s Bill’s comment that launched a thousand blogs:

"No, I’d say that of the world’s economies, there’s more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don’t think that those incentives should exist."

Follow this with Michelle Delio’s overview of some of the issues around patents and open source:


  • Recently     – IBM just gave a few hundred of them [patents] away while other companies are greedily gobbling them up.
  • The issue – "The real story here is that we are in the midst of a huge revolution because the patent system hasn’t kept up with technology and changes in society," says Sunstein [an attorney specializing in intellectual property law].

On the other hand, Creative Commons offers creators an option to control their own copyright – With a Creative Commons license, you keep your copyright but allow people to copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit — and only on the conditions you specify here.

There is also a Canadian petition circulating on user’s rights, which gives a different perspective from what one hears from the established media companies. If you want a good (US) historical perspective, then read or listen to Lessig’s book, Free Culture.

Finally, if you think that the movement for copyright and patent reform is just a bunch of radical commies, then you should read Will Shetterly’s Biblical parable to see what happens when an idea/technology, ?ɬ† la McLuhan, "flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits".

For the Toolbox

by

As a new Training Development Officer (TDO) in the Canadian military, I was told by the more experienced officers to build my own “TDO Toolkit”. This was to be a selection of templates and job aids to help me with my future employment. TDO’s were mostly responsible for ensuring quality control of training programs, and many of us worked as the lone training specialist in an organisation.

Much of my work involved the development of new job specifications, followed by the creation of training standards for personnel who worked on some aspect of our newly purchased helicopter.

One of the tools that we used was DIF (difficulty, importance, frequency) analysis in determining if we needed to develop training on a specific task. In my first year on the helicopter project, I had to examine several hundred tasks for training suitability. The diagram below shows you a quick & dirty way that this can be done. This is the simple diagram, and there is also a more detailed version that we used.

DIF.jpg

The Medici Effect

by

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.

Bridging the Chasm

by

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.]

The Past Year as a Free-Agent

by

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

by

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 :-)

Worthwhile Reading

by

Halley Suitt, in Worthwhile, refers to the 800CEOREAD list of top 25 books for business. I have read only one of these, The Art of the Start, which I believe is an excellent reference book for any business. In perusing the other 24 titles, I noticed that there is nothing that peeks my interest. I guess I’m not your "average" business reader. For instance, here are my best reads this year, though they weren’t all published in 2004:

These are some of the books on my list to buy/read:

Any other suggestions for a free-agent, consultant, learning/business/technology guy?

de Kerckhove: Communication in Evolution

by

For fans of Marshall McLuhan, or those interested in knowing more than just the phrase, “the medium is the message”, there is an excellent interview [dead link] online with Derrick de Kerckhove, Director of the McLuhan Program in Toronto. There is lots of stuff to chew on, as well as a concise overview of McLuhan’s tetradic Laws of Media:

“every new medium:

  • extends a human property (the car extends the foot);
  • obsolesces the previous medium by turning it into a sport or an form of art (the automobile turns horses and carriages into sports);
  • retrieves a much older medium that was obsolesced before (the automobile brings back the shining armour of the chevalier);
  • flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits (the automobile, when there are too many of them, create traffic jams, that is total paralysis)”

The most enlightening for me is de Kerckhove’s view of a new kind of identity in our inter-networked world:

The key to the new identity is what I call “selving”, that is the self in progress, in becoming, as in quantum physics where “things are not, they merely tend to be”. The new identity is in perpetual formation and reformation at the moment of use and on line it is fluid and aggregative as when people meet and change their perceptions of each other during the meeting. I sometime suspect that screens were invented only for the purpose of allowing several persons, minds, identities to meet and share thinking and speaking at a distance. The new connective thinking system is the screen. Via What is the Message? [dead link]

“Don’t let the bozos grind you down”

by

A short interview with Guy Kawasaki [Author: The Art of the Start], by Blogfonk. Here is Guy’s response to the question, "what is your motto?":

Don’t let the bozos grind you down. Because the bozos will try to grind you down, they’ll tell you that you can’t do something, that something won’t work, or that something isn’t needed. The only thing worse than a bozo is a person who listens to a bozo.

Natural Enterprise

by

Dave Pollard can’t find a publisher for his book, Natural Enterprise. I have used parts of it in my own work and have found it to be a refreshing perspective on how to grow a business without sacrificing your values. You can read most of it online, and I’m sure that others have used it as well. I would gladly buy a copy, as it is destined to remain on the desk, not hidden on a dusty bookshelf, like The Fifth Discipline. Natural Enterprise ranks up there with The Art of the Start in usefulness for business planning.