Work

business & working

World Intellectual Property Day :-(

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World Intellectual Property Day has become little more than a lobbyist day with creators, users, and the facts once again getting lost in the process.

Read the rest of Michael Geist’s commentary on WIP Day in Canada.

On the bright side, there is Creative Commons as a counterbalance to vested corporate interests:

In sum, the Creative Commons toolset encourages and enables participation in creativity by everyone, not only those with access to copyright lawyers. This is as it should be in modern democracies, where the tools for expression and creativity are available to everyone as everyday consumer goods.

How our structures shape us

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If you pit a good performer against a bad system, the system will win almost every time.

This quote from Geary Rummler and Alan Brache in Improving Performance, sums up many of the symptoms of hierarchical systems, whether they be schools, businesses or prisons.

I believe that the great work to be done at the beginning of this century is to create new organisational models that reflect our humanity. Efficiency and effectiveness are not enough, and in many cases have become mechanistic. It’s time to discard industrial management models that emphasize command and control and ensure that individuals at all levels have opportunities to engage in and question the system.

What happens when we don’t question authority? Let me re-quote this article on ABC’s recent re-enactment of the Milgram Experiment:

One of the subjects in the television program was a 7th grade teacher who explained that she didn’t stop shocking the learner because as a teacher she had learned when a student’s complaints were phony. I thought to myself, “Has she electrocuted many students?”

The teacher asked the researcher, “There isn’t going to be any lawsuit from this medical facility, right?” When told that the teacher was not liable, she replied, “That’s what I needed to know.” It is however worth noting that this was after she induced the maximum shock and the learner demanded that the experiment be terminated.

In this interview, Dr. Philip Zimardo discusses the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, where students played their roles as guards or prisoners and abuses started within 24 hours:

But on the second morning, the prisoners rebelled; the guards crushed the rebellion and then instituted stern measures against these now “dangerous prisoners”. From then on, abuse, aggression, and eventually sadistic pleasure in degrading the prisoners became the daily norm. Within thirty-six hours the first prisoner had an emotional breakdown and had to be released, followed in kind by similar prisoner breakdowns on each of the next four days.

In A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan (1967), John Culkin wrote that, “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” This reminds me of the question about who is the most important person on board a ship. Is it the Captain, the Navigator or the Engineer? Actually, it’s the Architect, because the initial design influences everything else.

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you cannot change the way things work in an organization. The problem may be the organizational model itself and it may be better to leave and create an alternative model than to help keep a flawed one going.

Atlantic Standard Tribe

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The Future of Work has an article on distributed work zones — Zevillage in Normandy and Hidden Tech in Massachusetts. These zones offer a sense of local community to freelancers and micro-entrepreneurs. Zevillage is unique in France in that it is the only rural area with high speed Internet access, something that is available in most parts of Canada.

The basic premise of these zones seems to be that many workers have the ability to tele-commute and don’t need to live in an urban area. Avoiding a costly commute seems to be a motivator as are lower housing costs. The zones fill a need by connecting local, mostly home-based, workers who can meet face-to-face to made professional life a bit less lonely.

Work Commons seem to be similar or complementary to these kinds of zones. What I noticed about these two examples is that both are fairly close to major urban centres. For instance, Zevillage is 2 hour train ride to Paris. Out here in Atlantic Canada we don’t have that easy of a commute to a large city. Montreal is an overnight train trip and Boston is a full day’s drive.

Still, I’m wondering if an Atlantic distributed worker zone would be of interest? It would be kind of like a virtual Commons, linking all of us who work in our time zone. Perhaps we could call it the Atlantic Standard Tribe (inspired by Cory Doctorow – another Canadian).

Here is what Hidden Tech is focused on:

In general, HIDDEN-TECH members fall into the following broad market categories: PR/Marketing/Newsletters; Content; E-commerce services/Retailers; Hardware/Software Developers; Web Design/Hosting, and Management Consulting/IT Training. Everyone from jewerly designers to photographers, software developers to marketing specialists attend meetings. Their connection is that they are small, usually not incorporated and use technology to drive their business.

Is this worth following up? I’m willing to do the ground work if there is some level of interest, so contact me or add a comment.

Management is the problem

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Richard Florida writes that Toyota has now surpassed GM as North America’s largest automobile manufacturer, and says that it was due to better systems and better management:

The problem has long had one source: management. Oh, they have had their excuses. High wages, recalcitrant unions, pensions and healthcare. Nonsense. Toyota, Honda and other Japanese companies showed how workers were not real problem. They used American workers – sometimes the very same workers in the very same factories – to make quality cars American want to buy. The real problem was management. Given the right management and production systems, American workers did just fine.

I would say that most of our problems in our industrial economy can be attributed to bad management models, whether it be ineffective public education, short-sighted politicians, bloated bureaucracies or arrogant telecommunications companies. Toyota used the same conditions, changed the rules of the game and came out on top.  Who’s coming under the radar to defeat the  flawed operating models in your industry?

Net Neutrality, Copyright and You

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Monday, April 23rd, is World Book and Copyright Day, and according to the Director General of UNESCO:

Much has also been said about the book as the driving force behind a wide array of income-generating activities and about the role of the book within today’s knowledge economies as an instrument for learning, sharing and updating knowledge. Of course, the linguistic dimension of publishing, an instrument of expression that lives through language and within a language, has also been emphasized and remains a decisive factor.

Lastly, as there can be no book development without copyright, the celebration of the Day has always been closely associated, from its inception and throughout all these years, with an awareness of the importance of the moral and heritage protection afforded to works of the human spirit and their creators.

Well, I think that the DG of UNESCO is way off the mark on the value of copyright and how much it protects the individual creator, especially in a digital, networked world. Organisations like Creative Commons are of even more value in the developing world than in the richer countries, helping individual artists reach their markets without going through the bottleneck of middlemen like publishers. Writers who publish books in the traditional way only receive a small amount of the end unit price, while direct to consumer models like Lulu give up to 80% of proceeds to the creator. When copyright outlives the actual creator, whose interests are being served?

At this time in the evolution of the industrial economy, copyright helps to entrench corporate incumbents and makes it difficult for innovative start-ups.

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The same goes for Internet access, where large corporations with their vested interests control the pipes. Jevon has put forth a good explanation on why Net Neutrality is an important issue for all of us:

Most large internet service providers come from incumbent industries such as Telecom or Cable TV. These large companies have been good and reasonably efficient at rolling out infrastructure, but they have also been birthed in the womb of government protection, artificial market dominance and a market segment that has an inelastic demand for their services.

Why does that matter? Well, it’s a fair bet that if it hasn’t already happened, high speed internet subscriber rates will soon start levelling off. As markets like Canada, the US and the UK see this peaking of subscribers, these incumbent companies will begin to look for ways to meet revenue growth projections. We’ve already seen what this can do here in Canada, it’s happened with our national cellular phone providers.

Get involved in the debate now, before it’s too late and our Big Brothers control not just our past culture but our ways of sharing information to create new culture.

I recently wrote about Packet Shaping and mentioned an organisation called NetNeutrality.ca. Today, this is all that is left of their website:

Thank you to all those who have supported our websites. Due to increasing legal concerns resulting from our public participation in the Net Neutrality debate, we have at this time decided to shut down the operation of these sites.

We have no comment for the media and will not be releasing any additional detail about the factors leading up to this decision. We are currently looking for an appropriate organization to take over these properties and who has the resources to properly operate these sites.

Update: the Net Neutrality website is back up and running :-)

Freelancing

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Thinking about working for yourself? I made the move four years ago and don’t regret it, though working for yourself isn’t easy, it’s just a lot more free. Not as in free beer, but more like free to choose.

If you’re thinking about working on your own, my first recommendation is Dan Pink’s Free Agent Nation. Though it’s US-focused, it gives several perspectives on the ups and downs of free-agentry.

There are many blogs that you can start reading in order to check out life as an independent. If you are working in an office and want to get out of the rat race, check out Escape from Cubicle Nation. You may also want to consider Become a Consutant, if that’s where your inclinations lie. Finally, there’s a new blog from down under, Freelance Switch, that posted this comprehensive article on 101 Essential Freelancing Resources.

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To train or not to train

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I’ve been in the training business for most of my life, in one role or another. Training, when it’s needed and done well, can be a most effective intervention.

Training is really effective when you can clearly measure the end performance. My own experience of good training was with helicopter pilots. As the training specialist I was able to observe instructor pilots and watch the junior pilots develop their skills in the aircraft or on the flight simulator. The program was proficiency-based, meaning that once a skill was mastered, the pilot could move on, without repeating the same thing. Avoiding unnecessary training meant significant cost savings as well.

I was reminded of the down side of training in Michele Martin’s post on 5 Reasons You Don’t Need Training, where she shows that inappropriate uses of training include:

  • To make up for poorly designed work processes
  • As a replacement for corrective action
  • To satisfy a “Requirement” for professional development
  • When performance expectations have not been properly developed
  • When you don’t have management understanding and buy-in

I’ve experienced all of these, from inside the organisation and as an outside consultant. I’ve also learned to stay away from “training” projects that really aren’t about training. I’ve discussed this before in, Whither ISD, ADDIE & HPT, but it bears repeating because training is costly, in both resources and in time (trainers & trainees).

I learned early in my career as a training development officer that training should be the last option, after all other performance improvement measures have been proven inadequate. It’s a good rule of thumb.

Making A Difference

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Do all of the small environmental actions of individuals make any significant difference to climate change? According to an article in In These Times, not really:

One barrier standing in the way of meaningful action is fuzzy-headed thinking on the part of those truly concerned about global warming. So worried are these activists, that their solution to the climate change problem is to marshal legions of Americans to change light bulbs, buy a Prius, or do any other number of helpful, but, in the big picture, not too significant feel-good actions.

Some of my work over the past decade has been in performance improvement, and I’ve tried to focus on the real causes of organisational problems, and not just the symptoms. Having everyone “do their part” may not be enough to reverse global warming and a more concentrated effort to address the root causes may be needed . The article goes on to make this comparison with the civil rights movement:

Take the Civil Rights movement. Yes, personal reflection and individual change had its place, but can you imagine Martin Luther King telling people to “ask” their school boards to integrate the public schools, or “encourage” corporations not to discriminate, or “tell” their elected leaders to “push” legislatures in the South to do away with Jim Crow laws?

One answer may be to act green in our decisions that can actually make a difference. For instance:

  • When voting, choose the most environmentally responsible candidate or party.
  • Don’t settle for half-measures from any elected official and let them know it.
  • Refuse to be sold short-term economic benefits in place of environmental sustainability.
  • Lobby to get rid of the worst offenders amongst our elected officials.

Phone oligopolies ask to deregulate

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I came across this PR piece from Bell-Aliant on TechEast today:

Aliant announced today that it has applied to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) for forbearance from regulation of local residential telephone service in nine competitive exchanges in the Halifax area. [snip] With forbearance, customers in these areas will experience the full benefits of competition, with greater value through increased choice and flexible offers that can be delivered in a more timely manner.

A little more digging and I connected to an article on CBC:

The Conservative government’s move last week came against resistance from the CRTC, whose rules were intended to handicap the big telephone companies until they lost 25 per cent or more of phone users to competitors.

[Industry Minister] Bernier expects that the decision to liberate the big players will result in rapid price reductions, but consumer advocates fear the established operators will use their new freedom to squelch emerging competitors.

I don’t feel that competition is real when you only have a few companies in the market. For example, there is little competition for wireless data in Canada, as shown in this graph by Tom Purves:

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I’d like to re-iterate a post I wrote last year, which discussed the April 2006 edition of The Atlantic. It included five past articles on the subject of Markets & Morals. Here are two pertinent quotes, from the 19th and 20th Centuries respectively.

Henry Demarist Lloyd wrote in March 1881, “When monopolies succeed, the people fail”  and that “The nation is the engine of the people”, in his piece denouncing the practices of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. There is little doubt today about the world wide power and influence of monopolies and oligopolies.

In 1967, John Kenneth Galbraith warned of the dangers of blindly having faith in our industrial/corporatist systems:

The greater danger is in the subordination of belief to the needs of the modern industrial system – These are that technology is always good; that economic growth is always good; that firms must always expand; that consumption of goods is the principal source of happiness; that idleness is wicked; and that nothing should interfere with the priority we accord to technology, growth, and increased consumption.

Just as each generation must work to preserve its democracy, so we have to constantly keep corporate interests at bay, for no matter how much NewSpeak they put forth about the “full benefits of competition”, the truth is that we, the citizenry, are being hornswoggled.

Entrepreneurship Resources

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I really enjoyed my time with the Grade 11 Entrepreneurship class at TRHS on Friday. As promised, here are some references for further exploration. I encourage any readers to add references that may be helpful for either students or teachers.

Online Markets … Networked markets are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, markets are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most business organizations.

It’s a bit of a rant but there is much truth in The Cluetrain Manifesto. I would urge anyone who does any work online to read this book.

In just twenty years, between 2000 and 2020, some 75% of our lives will change dramatically. We know this because it happened once before. Between 1900 and 1920, life changed.

Nine Shift looks at work, life and education in the 21st century and includes a blog. Another blog that looks at similar issues is The Future of Work Weblog.

If entrepreneurship is your main interest, then read Jeff Cornwall’s blog on The Entrepreneurial Mind.

My online bookshelf has many business-related books, and I’ve added my own reviews to several of these.