Work

business & working

Net Working

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Le Café (Clark, Dave, George, Jane, Jay, and me) is in its infancy as a group of collaborators, but we’ve just finished an exercise that I think really shows the power of networks.

Jay is on-site with a large company and during the day many questions came up that needed more reflection and multiple perspectives. Jay posted these questions and the rest of us commented on our wiki or via e-mail (firewall issues). Not only do we offer multiple perspectives, but the fact that we live in multiple time zones works to our advantage as well. Comments came in last night and I edited these and sent a synthesized version to Jay before he had breakfast this morning. Even though I’m used to spinning on a dime, the speed of reaction and the ease of weaving our comments together still amazed me.

Democratic Workplaces

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The WordBlu most democratic workplace list is out for this year, with several Canadian companies on it:

1-800-GOT-JUNK?

Axiom News

La Siembra

TakingITGlobal

As my “not-yet-published” bio for our Cafe society reads, I’m rather interested in democracy:

Harold likes to analyze situations, sense patterns, and make sense of them. He enjoys acting as “adviser of last resort.” He works at the convergence of business, learning, organizations and technology. He finds working with NGOs gratifying. Most of his work involves democratization of the work force. He establishes self-sustaining communities. He believes “Open,” broadly defined and including resilience, diversity, and ecological models.

I’m also reading The Great Turning, which offers an excellent review of the development of democracy, from the original Athenian experience to the American revival of democracy two millennia later. As David Korten states in the section, America, the Unfinished Project:

We think of ourselves as a nation of problem solvers. To solve a problem, however, we must first acknowledge it. To this end, the following chapters take an unflinching look at the realities and implications of our national imperial legacy, the imperfections of our democracy, our reckless relationship with the natural environment, and the real and inspiring struggles for justice of people of color, women, and working people, to whom justice has long been denied.

Democracy is neither a gift nor a license; it is a possibility realized through practice grounded in a deep commitment to truth and an acceptance of the responsibility to seek justice for all.

Is Johnny Bunko Right?

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I recently picked up Dan Pink’s latest book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need, that tells the story about a young man working in the corporate rat race who is befriended by Diana, a magical advisor with six lessons for Johnny to uncover. Because it’s a graphical, Manga-style book it’s a fast and easy read (about an hour). The lessons are fine but not earth shattering. However, the book may foster more conversations about work and careers and may engage younger readers, so that’s a good thing. Lesson #1, There Is No Plan, is good advice and in hindsight would have been good for me 30 years ago.

I was thinking about Johnny’s lessons when I heard about the CPRN’s latest research report on youth and the labour market in Canada, which makes this observation:

Canada has a relatively high percentage of well-educated young adults who see themselves as over-qualified for their jobs.

That’s where Lesson # 3 may be appropriate for youth – It’s Not About You, or as Diana says, “Of course you matter. But the most successful people improve their own lives by improving others’ lives” . Or put more directly, it’s not about qualifications, it’s about making a difference.

I would add to Johnny’s list that no one deserves a job because of some qualification, and many qualifications do not correlate directly with work requirements. The only job that a university degree directly qualifies you for is another university degree. Sitting in a classroom, writing essays and answering tests is not the workplace. Solving real problems, of importance to others, within existing constraints – is what most work is about.

For more information, check out The Adventures of Johnny Bunko.

Reaching interesting markets

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In anticipation of the AIM Conference in May, Steve at Business New Brunswick asks:

Here is another offer for you to consider: We would like to find local success stories of companies using the Internet to export, or just using it in a unique way or to reach interesting markets. Do you fall into this category? If so, and you would like to be part of our pre-conference press program, give me a call right now or send me an email.

I’ll be speaking at AIMC on the topic of Marketing Yourself as a Free-Agent on the Internet about my own experience and also highlighting other free-agents and small businesses. I would say that a large part of my success as a consultant is due to my use of the web to engage in the multi-way conversations that it enables.

For instance, my website in its first year online (2003) had about 700 unique visitors. In 2007 there were over 1.3 million. I attribute that growth to the increasing use of the web by more people but also to this professional blog, started in 2004.

The only money I spend on marketing is for my website. I have never purchased advertising. By writing regularly about my fields of interest, my blog has helped me get speaking engagements, writing assignments and requests for reviews of books, businesses and software. Some of these are paid, but in no case did I have to lay out cash for what amounts to marketing.

I have had clients find me via search engines and then my blog gives a good idea of what I’m about. It also helps to weed out clients who may not be a good match with my skills and outlook. However, my blog is about much more than marketing and I would continue it just for my own professional development. The advantage is that I don’t need to spend money on someone else to sell my services.

How else could an independent consultant living in Sackville (pop. 5,000), New Brunswick (pop. 740,000) be able to work with clients and partners spread over thousands of kilometres? There are no great secrets to this and I’ll post my notes and observations after my presentation on 6 May.

Busting down the barriers

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My post on wirearchy has an interesting conversation going in the comments. What I’m noticing as well is that the barriers to more flexible and open business models are breaking down all over the place. I’ve met with three local companies this week and have offered some free advice (FWIW). One is focused on HR, another on retail/wholesale products and another on higher-end retail. I’m also building a new community site for AWI using mostly free applications.

In each case there is a wide variety of online tools available for low cost or even free. These include easy websites, ecommerce, Facebook groups, Flickr photo sharing etc. These tools enable people in business to spend more of their time talking to their customers and have these conversations anywhere and anytime. It also means that people can more easily experiment with new business models. This is empowering and it’s fantastic to watch.

What is most interesting is that these changes are happening at the local level, with people who don’t live online. The revolution is speeding up, there’s little doubt.

A new organisational lens

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In 1999, Jon Husband coined a new term, wirearchy:

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

As I bump against corporations in my work of implementing networked learning, collaboration or business, I am beginning to realise that Jon’s organising principle is what’s missing. As companies try to move to Enterprise 2.0 or Web 2.0 they are constrained by Organisation 1.0. They may be using the tool, the terms, or some of the techniques but they are still mired in industrial management. The major premise of The Future of Management is that real innovation only happens when you change your management model. All other changes are incremental but management innovation can be exponential.

I’ve worked for some interesting start-ups doing some innovative work, but I’ve noticed that they all use the same management methods as the companies they’re trying to subvert. Even Google uses mostly instructor-led classroom training, for no reason other than that’s how training is done. I think that these industrial-age management models will be like a weight around these initially innovative companies, especially as cycle time decreases and competition for creative people increases.

I’m doing some work with a start-up in the HR field and I wonder if there are “2.0” versions of tools and techniques we take for granted in this space. Is there a better alternative to the organisation chart? Do job descriptions actually tell us anything? Do most businesses need regular hours of work? Is compensation based on time really necessary?

These kinds of questions don’t get asked until you start looking at the entire organisation with a different lens.

wirearchy.jpg

Reputation and Transparency

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I’ve referred to my blogging as a permanent presence on the Web and have encouraged would-be bloggers to first get a permanent domain name. My site is where anyone can find out most things about me, such as what I think, who I’ve worked for or how to contact me on various platforms. Michele Martin writes that you can’t hide with Web 2.0 and that “managing your online reputation becomes a critical success skill for both individuals and organizations in a global trust economy”.

I just received an invitation to a service, Naymz, that will supposedly let you manage your online reputation. Kind of like a broker for your whuffie. This seems to be a step up from ZoomInfo which aggregates online information about people. I’m sure we’ll see more of these cropping up.

Of course, I can see the downside of these reputation management systems and I’m sure that there are people figuring out how to manipulate them already, just as Google Page Rank is constantly gamed. However, anonymity on the Web seems to bring out the worst in us. I’ve been reading CBC’s French immersion articles with some nasty and bigoted comments by anonymous posters. Viewing anonymously makes sense and in certain cases anonymous posting may be useful, but for the most part, online forums should tacitly encourage the use of real names, perhaps through OpenID or some other user-controlled service.

Overall, transparency is a good thing but I’m going to reserve judgement on whether we need centralized services to manage our reputations.  I’ll stick to having my own little piece of the Web on which to make my own mistakes for the world to see.

End of an era

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The debate on the elimination of early French immersion will continue, but the NB Liberal government has drawn a line in the sand and is moving ahead with its one-size-fits-all approach to fix its industrial school system. Immersion was the grand experiment that began 32 years ago in order to put fact to the policy that this province was officially bilingual. Some embraced this view while others rejected it. Now even the Minister of Education is telling people to get their early language learning outside the school system.

Today our students score low on international literacy tests and have poor numeracy test results as well. The Minister wants to fix the system and fix it quick. However, he is stuck with an industrial school system staffed by an aging unionized workforce using crumbling facilities with students arriving in diesel powered buses from far and wide on a daily basis. There is not much room to manoeuver. Just imagine what fuel price increases will do to the bus contract in the next few years.

In order to get more leverage, the Minister and his staff have decided to consolidate their efforts in a last ditch attempt to make school relevant and hopefully effective. But hope is not a strategy.

titanic_departure.jpg
Departure of RMS Titanic

What has kept this industrial school system going is that most parents feel that it is a “good enough” option and the costs of leaving (e.g. home-schooling) are high, especially when many families have both parents working outside the home. Early French immersion kept many of the more involved parents committed to the system. Now it is gone. We’ve run out of money and options, constrained by years of added bulk to the system.

I do not believe that this strategy will work for several reasons:

Just as the newspaper, radio and music publishing industries (all based on a broadcast model) are becoming obsolete, so too is broadcast education – we teach, you learn; perhaps. One system to save us all will not work and I think that this decision will create a sea change in the people’s relationship with their public education system.

See my Public Education bookmarks for more resources.

Just after posting this, I came across Ross Dawson’s post on industrial policy [my emphasis]:

Japan and Singapore are examples of nations that have had highly interventionist industrial policies and industry support through the second half of the twentieth century, with great success. However once economies become developed, the key issues are far less about manufacturing prowess. Today the buzzwords in national economic development are knowledge, creativity, media, content, entertainment, design, and the like. All of these flow easily across boundaries. Moreover, the educational and social structures required to support them are dramatically different to those that support the creation of an industrial and manufacturing powerhouse.

Learning at Work

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Note: This is part of a Working/Learning blog carnival hosted at Dave’s Whiteboard

This post repeats some themes that regular readers have seen over the past few years, but I’m finding that there is still a great need for individuals to take control of their knowledge-creation and sharing and many are overwhelmed by the Web.

I have come to consider that the basic unit of learning is the individual and this person is indivisible. To be successful, all learning activities, products and strategies must be centered around the person. We can then go on to develop environments for many people, but the individual is the building block – not the learning object, the course, the programme, or the institution. All of these are temporary organisations that the individual may use, or be part of.

I would also say that knowledge itself cannot be managed, and neither can knowledge workers; not effectively anyway. However, workers can manage data and information in order to develop their knowledge, and today we have several cheap and ubiquitous Web tools available to help us. It’s what I call Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), with an emphasis on “personal”.

In our day-to-day learning, one often repeated task is making the link from “this is an interesting idea” to “this is what I know”. The Web now provides us with an array of cheap and free tools to collect and collate information. PKM is a set of processes, individually constructed, to help the flow of implicit to explicit knowledge. However, PKM is more about attitude than any particular tool set. It’s taking (or rediscovering) our innately curious nature and tapping into it so that we can continue to expand our horizons.

One analogy of the Web is that it is a stream that we dip our buckets into from time to time. Another analogy is that of a surfer who follows the various streams and channels. It’s quite obvious that we cannot keep track of everything in nicely confined boxes with labels anymore. Even cataloging and indexing (taxonomies & hierarchies) are changing to a more flexible model of tagging or folksonomies on the Web, though the latter have their detractors.

If your work entails a need for current information, analysis, opinions or tapping into the knowledge of others, you probably need some form of PKM. If you have regular access to the Web, here is a suggested sequence:

  1. Start by moving your Bookmarks/Favourites on your browser to the Web. Social bookmarking services like Delicious or Furl let you create an online, searchable and shareable database of what you find interesting. Use tags (AKA categories or labels) to identify your saved pages and be liberal in their application. Here’s my Delicious list.
  2. Now start reading other sources of information in your field or in fields of interest. You can search for Blogs on Technorati or Bloglines. Once you are reading several sources you will need a way to organise these so that you’re not constantly going back to see if there is anything new. Use an aggregator. I would suggest Bloglines or Google Reader. Here is my Bloglines public account.
  3. Add your comments to blog posts of interest and if you make a lot of comments you might consider a comment aggregator, such as CoComment or Commentful. Bloglines Beta offers comment tracking as well.

What you are doing in these three steps is aggregating your information output and input, as well as adding information of importance to you (tags and comments). This process of sense-making is a great start to personal knowledge management. Some people have even more to say, and they usually become bloggers and podcasters, but that’s not for everyone.

Now that they’re all posted:

Here are the other Carnival posts hosted by Dave:

From cottage industry to international certification

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It’s a few years from now and you’re sitting in your office in an old Victorian building in your new position as Dean of Students. You thought that this would be the perfect job in a small university town with an easy walk to work, great colleagues and eager new students each year. However, you are looking at enrolment for this year and it’s down 30%. You have a major problem and you have some explaining to do about last year’s recruiting drive. What’s going on?

Online degrees now compete quite fiercely with “traditional universities”, especially those from reputable institutions that only charge $6,000 versus your current tuition fees of $45,000 for a Bachelor’s degree. However, you cannot decrease your fees as you’re facing rising costs. Just heating the dorms is an ever-increasing part of your budget, with oil at $3.50 a litre. You’ve even discussed shifting the academic calendar to take advantage of the warmer Summer months. On top of that, the university just negotiated a costly settlement with the faculty association, after a prolonged strike.

Robert Cringely explained the situation in 2008, but few schools or universities took action:

This [education] is an unstable system. Homeschooling, charter schools, these things didn’t even exist when I was a kid, but they are everywhere now. There’s only one thing missing to keep the whole system from falling apart – ISO certification.

I’ve written about this for years and nobody ever paid attention, but ISO certification is what destroyed the U.S. manufacturing economy. With ISO 9000 there was suddenly a way to claim with some justification that a factory in Malaysia was precisely comparable to an IBM plant on the Hudson. Prior to then it was all based on reputation, not statistics. And now that IBM plant is gone.

Daniel Lemire likened it to a similar business phenomenon:

Not long ago people bought European electronics because it was supposedly better. Now? These days are long gone.

At a certain point in time (2008?) the cost-benefits of a university education will be put in question. How expensive does it have to be before the majority opt out or look for “good enough” options? Once a certification body gets recognized by enough employers, it could become the de facto as well as the de jure standard.