Work

business & working

Thanks to my fellow freelancers

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Over the past five years I’ve had the opportunity to work with, or at least try to find work, with other independent business people. In most cases we’ve worked without any contract, non-disclosure agreement or other formality. We’ve just trusted each other and it’s worked out. I’d like to thank my fellow free agents for all of their help, especially in helping me get to the five year mark (officially next week).

Here are some great people with whom I’ve shared a common project:

Will Pate – a serial entrepreneur and the smartest young guy I know

Alec Bruce – an excellent writer and commentator on the local political scene

Hal Richman – who has much experience and wisdom

Patti Anklam – smart and insightful

Marquis Bureau – a real diplomat to work with

Jay Cross – a wealth of knowledge and ideas, and fun to work with

Jim Pickard – the hardest working partner I ever had (and an engineer to boot)

Vaughn McIntyre – an experienced executive who really understands business

Rob Paterson – a true visionary

Bryan Chapman – an expert in his field and a gentleman to work with

I’ve worked with a lot of companies, but we freelancers share many of the same issues and values, and I feel a certain camaraderie with them.

I also look forward to increasing this list over the next five years, especially with our newly-formed Le Café (Jay Cross; Dave Gray; Jane Hart; Clark Quinn and George Siemens).

Photo by mpd

Time Out

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Time is used to measure a lot of things in my professional world. Many people bill by the hour or the day. I have a daily consulting rate but I prefer a fixed fee linked to deliverables. In the e-learning field there is always talk about an “hour of courseware”, though no one has ever figured out how to measure it. Instead, we just merrily go along in this fantasy time zone as if we knew what we were measuring. After all, most people have bought into the notion of the industrial “person day”.

Michele Martin thinks it’s time to move away from this focus on time, and I agree.

What I find really interesting is that we finally have technology that makes it possible for us to do most work anytime, anywhere, yet we continue to stick with our same old paradigms of working in a particular location during certain hours. We also stick by our belief that time is the best measure of what we do, rather than results.

Shifting away from time and focusing on results is relatively easy for a consultant. However, I still have clients who want work described in days of effort, not results. Making this change for salaried employees would be a major workplace cultural shift and I’m not sure that it will ever happen. Salaries, working hours, and time & motion studies are part of the industrial economy’s DNA. Trying to change this would be difficult, if not impossible.

I think that a Results Oriented Work Environment (ROWE) is not really possible in a workplace that is built on industrial management models. ROWE may be possible in pre-or post industrial work but not in hierarchical organisations. You can see it in a film production, with major actors getting paid by the film, not by the hour. You also have ROWE in piece work, reminiscent of pre-industrial cottage industries. I cannot see ROWE where you have more than one or two levels of management, but that is the structure in most medium and large businesses, bureaucracies and non-profits. On the other hand, I’m sure a change to ROWE will come to many more fields of work as generations shift and time on task is seen as largely irrelevant.

An ecosystem of knowledge

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Jon Husband dragged up an older post about blogging, that concludes:

Finally, an ecosystem of knowledge can develop that consists of the aggregated sets of links and content the participants in a blogalogue create. And this “body of knowledge” and understanding remains online, available to anyone who cares to become involved.

Advocates of blogging know how valuable our blog knowledge base is for our work and learning. I have over a thousand posts, several thousand comments and connections with hundreds of other blogs on a wide variety of subjects of professional interest ranging from schooling to the semantic web. The value of having a blog, reading other blogs, using a feed aggregator and making my bookmarks social and searchable has very tangible benefits. I’m actually more productive.

In spite of the obvious benefits, it’s still a challenge to get adoption of these tools and techniques with non-blogging professionals. Unfortunately, it takes more than a few blog posts to see how these can become a knowledge base or how they enable you to connect with others. The benefits take a while before they’re “obvious”.

After my first workshops on Personal Knowledge Management (using social bookmarks, aggregators, blogs etc., to make sense of digital information flows) I saw about 1% of participants actually try to adopt some of these tools. Perhaps three or four tools are too much at once, and any move to co-creating knowledge should start with the basics and only proceed to the next tool once there is a level of comfort. Here’s an idea/suggestion:

  1. Move your Bookmarks online using Social Bookmarks and some common tags for your group/team (1 – 3 months).
  2. Set up an aggregator for each worker, with a few pre-selected sites and have people Tag any posts of interest, using the Social Bookmarks that they now use (3 – 6 months).
  3. Create company or team multi-user blog focused on one area of interest or practice. Something like external training activities may be a safe place to start, with comments on how pertinent these were for those who attended (give it a year).

Your valued opinion on work and life in the 21st Century

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Nine Shift

One of my favourite blogs is Nine Shift and the book of the same title is still worth reading, even after being in publication since 2003. Bill & Julie have recently been asking several questions that warrant comments, so I’m linking to them here:

What you are doing in response to expensive gas.

If you have a feature special to you in your home office.

Whether students should be penalized for late work.

Whether you think the web will help close the gender pay gap.

Here’s a snippet from the book:

As we will see, the Internet is behaving exactly in the same way as the automobile did 100 years ago in its impact on society. The auto is not used here as an “analogy”, which is defined as something “somewhat similar”. Instead the influence of the Internet on our lives is exactly a replay, a mirror, of the influence of the auto on society 100 years ago. The outcomes will be different of course, but the forces and how these forces interact and change our lives, are the same.

This book is not really about the Internet. It is more about the consequences and changes of the Internet, about how the Internet is changing how we work, live and learn in this century.

NRC IRAP Workshop Follow-up Links

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Here are the follow up notes from the session in Halifax this afternoon on Open Source and Web 2.0.

The Open Source Initiative

Social Bookmarks, that are searchable and shareable, on the topics of Open Source and Web 2.0

Videos:

Web 2.0

Open Source by Greg Papadopoulos

Yochai Benkler (author of The Wealth of Networks) at TED 2005

Cathedral & Bazaar story

Tools & Applications:

If this is your first time to this blog, check out the Key Posts or look into the major threads here, such as OpenSource.

PS: For those who attended, and got a free book, I’m looking forward to the book reviews ;-)

Going Solo

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I would have loved to attend the Going Solo conference in Switzerland last week, but alas I had neither the time nor the budget to fly across the Atlantic. I’m starting to see more interest in the option of freelancing and I think that some of this has to do with demographics (aging boomers looking for something to do) as well as economics (globalisation, outsourcing and downsizing). For instance, I was a bit surprised at the high level of interest in my presentation on Marketing Yourself as a Free-agent on the Internet.

I also see the free agent route as one of the only practical ways of currently implementing wirearchy, “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, with a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology“.

The only situations where I have witnessed a real “two-way flow of power and authority” is when I work with other free-agents. All of these relationships have been built on trust and in most cases there is not even a contract. I think that free-agents, working together, will eventually come up with the new organisational and management models required for a wired future. I don’t see how we can make incremental changes to industrial organisations and expect them to change their DNA.

If you want to see the future of business, take a look at how interconnected free-agents do business today and find out what they still need to do better.

A Partnership Economy

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Jon Husband, whom I finally had the chance to meet in person this week, sent me a link to a 1999 article by management guru Peter Drucker. Jon tells me that this article helped spark his concept of wirearchy. In Beyond the Information Revolution, Drucker explains the similarities between the printing; industrial and information revolutions. He concludes that we are definitely in a knowledge economy and that knowledge workers, as the only means of economic production, can no longer be treated as employees.

Bribing the knowledge workers on whom these industries [the new ones created in the 21st C] depend will therefore simply not work. The key knowledge workers in these businesses will surely continue to expect to share financially in the fruits of their labor. But the financial fruits are likely to take much longer to ripen, if they ripen at all. And then, probably within ten years or so, running a business with (short-term) “shareholder value” as its first — if not its only — goal and justification will have become counterproductive. Increasingly, performance in these new knowledge-based industries will come to depend on running the institution so as to attract, hold, and motivate knowledge workers. When this can no longer be done by satisfying knowledge workers’ greed, as we are now trying to do, it will have to be done by satisfying their values, and by giving them social recognition and social power. It will have to be done by turning them from subordinates into fellow executives, and from employees, however well paid, into partners.

If you agree with Drucker’s reasoning, which I do, then there is little doubt that industrial management and all that it has created (chain of command, human resources, line & staff, production, etc.) are the wrong models for the emerging workplace. We are seeing some signs of innovation in companies like Google, that give 20% independent research time to their engineers, but there is much more work to do.

The companies and societies that create and master the new models for wirearchy will be the leaders for the next century. However, there is no guarantee that this will happen here in Canada, the US, or Europe. In fact, it probably won’t happen where industrial models and values are the strongest. Look at the working definition of wirearchy and see if your organisation even remotely practices anything like this:

a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, and a focus on results enabled by interconnected people and technology

School Buses – A symptom of a larger problem

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CBC News reports that:

The P.E.I. government will be taking about a third of its school buses off the road immediately, and pulling the rest on Thursday and Friday after problems were found in some of the vehicles, the province announced …

All of the province’s older buses, 104 of the 320 vehicles, were being pulled off the road Wednesday. Students who had been dropped off at school already would be shuttled back home using newer buses and could expect long delays.

This is one symptom of our industrial school system. We are addicted to cheap transportation. Eighty years ago we closed down local schools and created factory schools that required a bus system to transport students back and forth each day, using large quantities of fossil fuels. Gas prices will continue to go up and therefore the cost of our aging infrastructure maintenance will increase. Industrial schools were premised on cheap transportation and centralised control. It’s time to consider decentralisation, especially since we have the information and communications technologies to support a wider variety of schools and administrative options. As with learning, one size no longer fits all.

The same can be said for the way that we structure our workplaces and our cities. We need to look at long-term options that let us live in a more environmentally sustainable manner. More people have to understand the scope of the problem and we have to keep pushing the issue, especially with politicians, planners and anyone in charge of publicly-funded organisations.

Marketing Yourself as a Free-agent on the Internet

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This is a follow-up post from my presentation on Marketing Yourself as a Free-agent on the Internet which I gave this afternoon at the Atlantic Internet Marketing Conference.

Some links for further information:

Small Business Blogs

Commoncraft Explanatory Videos on Blogs, RSS, etc.

Business Blog Consulting

The Cluetrain Manifesto

Book: Naked Conversations

Web Tools Diagram

My perspective on the Benefits of Blogs in 2005

Independent-mindedness

Cognitive Surplus

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This is a connecting-the-dots post. Jim McGee discusses Clay Shirky’s recommendation to start looking at how we can leverage “cognitive surplus”:

The first order of business for business is to immediately appropriate Shirky’s term. Organizations that care about innovation and adaptive capacity should begin talking about “cognitive surplus”. Look for ways to measure it, if only crudely, and increase it.

Dave Pollard also talks about the need to spend time making sense of data and that by 2020 this will become a full-time vocation for some people:

The main complaint from businesspeople and the public about information in 2020? This hasn’t changed since 2008 — it’s still information overload. But at least in 2020 the value of information intermediaries has been rediscovered — people who are skilled at (and have time to) ‘make sense’ of the raw information coming at us in unmanageable amounts. And as a result a little more attention is paid to the meaning, implications and possible actions that stem from all this information.

More people are working in creative fields today, because if your work is not creative then it will likely be outsourced to a cheaper labour market or done by a computer. That makes creativity a more valuable skill, but being creative isn’t something you can just turn on and off. Just ask any artist.

The notion of cognitive surplus now becomes a critical business attribute. How do I stay creative and therefore competitive? Some companies give you time to pursue other activities but the norm is to look busy while “at work”.

The notion that moving from consuming broadcast media to creating interactive media is now engaging a new generation is quite fascinating. Just think of all the hours spent watching TV that can now be used to generate ideas – some good and many bad – but they’re being generated on an enormous scale. Now take this idea one step further and think of all the time wasted in the workplace just consuming – listening at meetings; reading directives, waiting for someone else to make a decision; commuting; etc. Imagine what could happen when an entire organisation can use all of its cognitive surplus.