Retail Sales Community

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There are a lot of retail stores in this country and most are so small that they don’t have dedicated HR, training or development staff. Professional development is not often part of the life of a retail sales clerk in a small or even medium-sized business.

Enter 3point5.com, with a community that links retail sales professionals with manufacturers of the products that they will be selling. There are specific modules on brand-name products as well as general information on broader activities, such as watersports for outdoor equipment outlets.

Sara at Wanderlust Outfitters here in Sackville tells me that all of her staff use the online campus and there are even prizes and deals to be had for members.

The business model for 3point5 seems simple enough – aggregate a community that cannot afford custom training or job performance support, link this community to those who would benefit from a more informed retail sector (wholesalers & manufacturers) and then make it very easy for these communities to connect. The same model applies to many other markets and I’m working on a couple at this time.

Community is king, IMHO.

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.

Walled Gardens

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Following up on Boring is Good, I think that the major barrier to use of these systems, whether collaboration or learning-oriented, is the “walled garden” framework. If I have “to go” somewhere, then that’s a barrier to use. E-mail comes to me, so it’s easy. Personally, I prefer using my feed aggregator to follow people and news. I use my blog and then perhaps Facebook to write once and publish to many. I find these tools EASIER than e-mail, but I’ve been using them for a long time.

For small groups, e-mail still works well, even though many of us have seen its limitations in terms of finding something buried in the pile. What will work are small applications or widgets that let the learner/user add what is needed at the time. The problem with most organisations (schools, businesses, universities) is that they force the learner to adopt to their system. And what makes it worse for the learner is that they cannot transport any artifacts from one garden to another. This begs the question, how can walled gardens enable cross-pollination?

A simple method for online collaboration for an educational institution would be to ask each student and staff member to have a blog. it doesn’t matter which blog platform is chosen and not everyone has to use the same one. For course work that requires posting of information or conversation around it, just decide upon a common Tag for that course, lesson or theme. Add in social bookmarks, wiki spaces for collaborative work and maybe a social network and let everyone use whatever plug-ins they need. All the institution needs to do is provide some aggregation, cataloguing and external indexing and there you have a real “Learning management System”. The testing function can be kept separate from the learning (as it should be), so there’s no need for all those tracking features.

That is how how your walled garden can become a resilient and growing ecosystem.

Photo by recursion_see_recursion

Boring is good

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I thought that enterprise top-down software was a thing of the past and that small pieces loosely joined was the new model, but I’ve been in learning hell with a community of practice platform that uses the walled garden metaphor to the extreme.

Christopher Sessums refers to Clay Shirky’s comment in Here Comes Everybody, that “Communication tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring” . Christopher adds:

In other words, it’s not the invention of the tool that holds value; it’s the tool’s ubiquitousness that contains the value which ultimately leads to profound social changes.

Similarly, the tools that support virtual communities probably won’t be very interesting until they become invisible, everyday components in our lives. For some, this is already the case and as such we are beginning to see new and powerful means to share, commune, and identify with one another.

Message to tool builders – you cannot be ubiquitous inside a walled garden.

I have spent a few days trying to figure out my client’s system. This will be a larger problem when a casual computer user has to make sense of all of the functions as well as the underlying model of the platform.  Having created several online communities and participated as a member and a moderator of many more, I can’t see how a community can grow if there is any difficulty in using the technology. The only case where a complicated system will work is when the option of not using it is unacceptable. The litmus test for any community software should be, “is it easier than e-mail?”, because that is what most users will compare it to.

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.

Business Cards 2.0

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I’m starting to run out of business cards and I’ve been using the same design since I started this business in 2003. The original design was intentionally conservative and I have no urge to change it. However, I decided to try a parallel path and test out Moo minicards. These are very small business cards (very “2.0-ish”) which can be printed on demand. I ordered 100 cards and a small case and used one of the available designer themes. You can also import Flickr photos and best of all, each card can have a different design.

I’m already considering my next order and Andrea wants a bunch from her Flickr gallery to use as business cards and price tags for her art work. I can also see these cards as quite useful for events like conferences. The shipping is very fast, even to Atlantic Canada :-)

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.