Work

business & working

Self-sufficiency or Resilience?

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The NB Self-Sufficiency Task Force is making its recommendations, based on its stated realities of a “need to increase our population and our labour force”, “increase labour productivity by providing people with the right tools for he right jobs”, create “large-scale investments in infrastructure”, and “expand our existing corporate base”. All of this is premised on what appears to be the primary reality, that “Export growth must drive overall economic growth. This will create prosperity”.

The ways to achieve this are provided as 20 policy recommendations, including “Rebranding New Brunswick”, creating a “flexible incentives program to attract businesses” and conduct a “review of business tax policy”. The Task Force also recommends the establishment of several new organisations, including:

  • A Commission on the Future of Local Governments
  • An Aboriginal Employment Council
  • A $1-billion Self-Sufficiency Fund (of which $500 million would be raised from long-term bonds from the Liquor Corporation)
  • A not-for-profit corporation to raise funds necessary to develop an e-health system
  • A centre of excellence for service delivery

In addition, the Task Forces recommends the “creation of a lean manufacturing program by the Research and Productivity Council” and a targeted immigration strategy.

I’m not an economic development specialist but I have worked with several NB companies, government departments and non-profits. I try to see patterns and determine the underlying foundation of operating models, to see what makes them tick.

It appears that the foundation for self-sufficiency is that we need to export our stuff and we need to get bigger companies (corporations) to locate here so that they can sell our stuff. In return we get jobs, and employees will continue to take their cars and drive to these places that generate the paycheques, from which the government will deduct taxes or invest their beer money profits. This money will create some think-tanks and money-lending agencies to fuel this economy.

So what’s new? Corporations create jobs based on shipping stuff that belongs to the people, especially our grandchildren. We get jobs to pay taxes and attract some more people to come and pay taxes. Everything goes along just fine as long as there is demand for our products. The corporations get richer and the average citizen remains a wage-slave. This is self-sufficiency?

In reading the reports, I didn’t see much that was innovative at all. Yes, there’s an understanding that “We need to be prepared for sweeping changes of unprecedented magnitude”, but little that explains how we can be better prepared. For instance, the need for education is stated, but it is assumed that the same outdated industrial structure is adequate for our societal needs. It is assumed that work will continue to be a place to which we commute, increasing the demand for roads. Recommendations for agriculture are to continue the corporatist model, whereas there is real innovative thinking coming from people like Rob Paterson on Food:

This series will be all about how we can practically, and in a generation, shift from a model where farming now profits only a few large external companies, where it creates serfs of our farmers and where it is ruining our biosphere. Shift from this to a model where it is our farmers who make the money and where farming is the most powerful beneficial force that restores and sustains the key services that give us all life on PEI.

This report seems to be a recommendation for business as usual, but under a new brand. It supports the entrenched powers, particularly faceless corporations who are not rooted in the land.

Thomas Homer-Dixon has said that we really need to develop resilience in order to be prepared for an uncertain future. The best tools available for that task are open source collaborative problem-solving and the Internet. The grassroots, who really understand the land and our communities now have the means to assemble and collaborate. It seems that real leadership and vision for our future as a resilient region is up to us.

Entrepreneurship for students

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I’ve been asked by a local high school teacher to spend some time with his students on Friday:

if you wouldn’t mind coming in and sharing some of your expertise with my Business, Organization and Management Class …

particularly what I would hope you could offer is how you as an entrepreneur have made the switch from a past life and career, some of the risks and challenges you faced, and of course how you have Managed and Operated your consulting firm to fill specific niches locally, regionally and nationally if applicable …

one of those niches I was hoping we could focus on is maybe a deeper look at cooperatives and how they are formed, structured and work, and your experience in them

I’m not really an entrepreur, as I view freelancing as quite different from entrepreneurship. Freelancers have less risk, but don’t build any equity. Anyway, I’m thinking about discussing how the web has significantly changed many business models and talking about some of the lessons I’ve picked up from my clients over the past decade.

Any advice or recommendations for a one hour session with these Grade 11 students? Does anyone know of a good, but short, video that I could use to generate a discussion on business?

Value Network Analysis Resources

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We had a very informative session on value networks yesterday in Saint John. The workshop, conducted by Patti Anklam, Hal Richman and Gordon Smith, received positive reviews. Due to the weather we had several last-minute cancellations, but that meant more good food for everyone, as is evident in this photo:

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Therefore, as a follow-up to our workshop, here are several resources to further explore value network analysis and how it can be used in your organisation:

Once again, I’d like to thank our partners, NRC-IRAP and PropelSJ for helping us to put on this workshop.

For me, a key understanding about value network analysis is that it is a process which is more art than science. Humans work in complex environments and we are by our very nature unpredictable. The result of a VNA allows you to ask better questions but it doesn’t give specific answers (it’s not a tool for bean counters). I think that VNA is an excellent change management tool. I can see the use of VNA and the resulting concept maps enabling better communication within organisations, with clients, with funders and throughout communities.

All in all, it was a good learning day for me :-)

Homework is the result of poor time management

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Dan Meyer is a mathematics teacher who doesn’t believe in the value of homework for homework’s sake. His argument is quite clear. If the teacher is organised, then instruction and practice can be completed in class. He also found in his research that few students actually benefit from mathematics homework. The “A” students don’t need it and the “D” students don’t do it.

From Dan:

The issue for most math teachers, I believe, is one of time management. If your class is slow to start the period and quick to finish, if your transitions are labored, or if you waste time disciplining your class, then you won’t have the time to get through forty problems. The only year I assigned homework with any regularity was during my student-teaching, when my class management plainly sucked, failing by every one of those metrics and more.

It was such a criminal arrangement.

By assigning whatever practice we didn’t finish to homework (I’d like you guys to finish this for homework) or by using homework to compensate for underplanning (tell you what, I’ll let you guys start your homework early) I was transferring the cost of my poor teaching onto my students.

Yikes.

One more time: my time management was a bust so I helped myself to whatever time I wanted from my students’ personal store, whenever I wanted.

I’m not a teacher, but I see an interesting connection between the industrial classroom and the corporate workplace. When I started working on my own I suddenly had much more time to get my real, client-related, work done.

In my previous, traditional job, much of my day was spent in meetings that were not related to my official work. I would have to spend time on internal functions that added no value for my clients. I would then have to work early or late or on weekends in order to get my billable work done. Even my time in the military was filled with ‘secondary duties’ that did not relate to my operational role. On my own, I can accomplish as much in one day as I would in almost a week in my old office. The only meetings I now attend are the ones that I decide to attend, and those are few.

Perhaps teachers and managers have too much control over the discretionary time of those whom they direct. Perhaps teachers can’t or won’t optimize instruction and practice in the classroom. Perhaps managers can’t or won’t optimize their workers’ time. Where is the problem? Not with students and workers.

Work opportunities in the learning field

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When one door closes, many others open.

I never knew that there were so many work opportunities for instructional designers and others until Vitesse/Provinent closed its doors in Fredericton. The former employees quickly put up a wiki and started sharing information to support each other in this stressful time of job loss and uncertainty.

Paul Lyon’s wiki includes a job opportunities page that has dozens of postings in several professional areas. It’s great to see this entrepreneurial spirit and online collaboration amongst the former Vitesse gang. It also shows how the DIY Web is empowering the grassroots in all fields.

Learn About Value Networks

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Fatsia

Photo by Crissxross

As previously announced (follow link for details), there will be a free workshop on Value Networks, on Tuesday, March 20th in Saint John.

The morning session (coffee at 8:30 AM, start at 9:00 AM) is a general overview and open to anyone. The afternoon session is a hands-on workshop focused on small and medium-sized businessses in the ICT sector. Come out and learn something practical to improve your business. In itself, this will be an opportunity to meet some interesting people in an intimate and comfortable environment.

Further reading:

What Is Value Network Analysis Verna Allee (PDF)

KM and the Social Network Patti Anklam (PDF)

Everything is Political

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This blog is not supposed to be about politics; well at least I didn’t set out to discuss politics three years ago. However, Jon Husband recently quoted Dante Alighieri, who said that, “The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.”

Then along comes Jon (again) referring to a piece by Joe Bageant that ends with this line – “Divisive politics once again beats the snot out of reason.”

All of this reminds me of my current read, Thomas Homer-Dixon’s, The Upside of Down. From the Chapter “Cycles Within Cycles”:

For the vast majority of us who sell our labor in the marketplace, our economic insecurity and relative powerlessness impel us to play by the rules. And in capitalist democracy, playing by the rules means not starting fights over big issues like our society’s highly skewed distribution of wealth and power. Instead it means focusing on achieving short-term material gains – such as bettering our contracts with our employers. Put simply, our economic elites have learned, largely through their struggles with workers in the first half of the twentieth century, to protect their status by creating a system of incentives, and a dynamic of economic growth, that diverts political conflict into manageable, largely non-political channels. As long as the system delivers the goods – defined by capitalist democracy itself as a rising material standard of living and enough new jobs to absorb displaced labor – no one is really motivated to challenge its foundations.

I’ve previously written about Corporatism Run Amok, but I may take more forays into the political realm, particularly as politics continues to affect my own intersection of interest – learning (state-run education), work (support of corporations) & technology (digital copyright & IP) .

Value Networks Workshop

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We will be hosting a workshop in Saint John, NB, on Creating Value Networks for SME’s in the ICT Sector on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007. This event is being conducted in partnership with PropelSJ and NRC-IRAP, and it’s free.

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Consider this your invitation

The workshop will be conducted by Patti Anklam, thought-leader and practitioner of value network analysis. Patti has literally written the book on the subject – Net Work: A Practical Guide to Creating and Sustaining Networks at Work and in the World, to be published this April.

The other hosts with me will be Hal Richman (Productivity Solutions) and Gordon Smith (CBCL Ltd.) who have applied value network analysis in the ocean and marine technology sector in Newfoundland & Labrador [I’ll be there too, but if you’re reading this on my blog, you already know me].

So what are value networks? According to Verna Allee, author of The Future of Knowledge: Increasing Prosperity through Value Networks:

A value network is a web of relationships that generates economic value and other benefits through complex dynamic exchanges between two or more individuals, groups or organizations. Any organization or group of organizations engaged in both tangible and intangible exchanges can be viewed as a value network, whether private industry, government or public sector.

Plan to attend this workshop and learn how value networks can help your organization do more business world-wide.

Location: The New Brunswick Museum, 1 Market Square, Saint John, NB

Morning (open session), Lecture and Skills Building Workshop

Mary Oland Theatre, NB Museum

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Afternoon (invitation only), The Value Network for PropelSJ

Specifically for Catalict clients & mentors and invited ICT companies

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Reservations will be required for the afternoon session and are preferred for the morning session.

Contact me or PropelSJ for further information or an invitation to the afternoon session.

RFP – you get what you ask for

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I’ve pretty well given up responding to RFP’s. In most cases they are are so poorly worded that you don’t really know what the client wants. Unless you have inside knowledge, responding to an RFP is a crap shoot. I am referring here to RFP’s for consulting services, especially performance improvement, and not those requesting commoditized goods or services that can be clearly specified

As the successful bidder you have to meet the requirements as stated in the RFP, even if they they make little sense. It may be cheaper to sub-contract a task that is required, but the RFP requires it, so you calculate it at double what someone else could do it for. Clients do this so that they only have to manage one contract.

I recently came across this article on The Elephant in the Room, from Hamer Associates [I wish there was an RSS feed on this site]:

And this is where the RFP process breaks down –in the case of human performance management or change consulting– the RFP seeks the cheapest (or most experienced) provider of a solution to a problem; a solution that the organization has already chosen. However, as I reflected on past RFP responses, in too many cases the problem either was not defined, not communicated, or so poorly defined that it begged discussion. And even in cases where the problem was defined, the chosen solution often would not have solved the problem.

I had a similar case a few years back where the client’s RFP required e-learning, but I was quite certain that e-learning would not address their issues. Luckily, I was able to negotiate some time for a “confirmation of the analysis”. My report enabled a significant reduction in e-learning (courses online) and a new focus on performance support and procedural changes.

Too often, consultants do just what the RFP has called for, even if it is not in the best interests of the client. RFP’s may be the safest contracting method from an accounting or a bureaucratic perspective, but for real organisational performance improvement they are definitely not the best tool.

Provinent (Vitesse Learning) Files for Bankruptcy Protection

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* Please see the Provinent Wiki for up to date information or to post any job offers. *

It’s now official. Provinent, an e-learning company in Fredericton and part of Vitesse Learning (I can’t figure out what name to use any more) has closed its doors.

From Fredericton’s Daily Gleaner:

Provinent, a local e-learning company, has laid off 44 workers from its Fredericton office after filing a notice of bankruptcy protection.
Ted Root, the CEO for Vitesse Learning in Toronto and Baltimore, Provinent’s parent company, sent a letter to dozens of employees throughout Atlantic Canada and Ontario on Tuesday informing them of the job losses.
The notice of bankruptcy leaves the provincial government on the hook for more than $1.5 million.
Provinent is an e-learning consulting and content-development company that provides custom learning systems.
Much of the contract work was done for clients in the U.S., but Canadian clients included Canadian Tire, Scotiabank and Maple Leaf Foods.
Root said Provinent foreclosed and subsequently shut down its U.S. operations.

The commentary can wait, but I’m sorry to hear that in the middle of Winter a lot of people are now out of work. I know what it’s like.

* Please see the Provinent Wiki for up to date information or to post any job offers. *