Author: JP

Open, but not as usual

…goes the headline of the Economist’s Special Report on opensource business. And how nice, I can actually link to it and you can read it for free.

Lots of good stuff there. Like “A world in which communication is costly favours collaborators working alongside each other; in a world in which it is essentially free, they can be in separate organisations in the four corners of the earth“.

One thing I disagree with. “….even though open-source is egalitarian at the contributor level it can nevertheless be elitist when it comes to accepting contributions. In this way, many open-source projects look more hierarchical than the corporate organograms the approach is meant to have torn up“. Not true. So not true. The role of the core, moderator or 1000lb gorilla is nothing at all like that of the manager in a hierarchy. The core does not decide where resources are to be applied or prioritised, cannot direct the time or work of the (usually voluntary) contributor, has neither carrot nor stick to wield, and does not waste time in mangling or mutating weak signals down the “hierarchy”.

There is no hierarchy if there is no lock-in, no ability to rule, no reporting relationship.

What Sun did with Java looked like that to begin with, hierarchical opensource. It didn’t work. Sun gave up. And then it worked.

Quite all right

The Man In the Doorway’s question on the usage of learnt versus learned reminded me of one of my favourite books, Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Here are two examples why:

Page 522 of my version, when discussing the use of respective(ly) goes on to say:

  • B. FOOLPROOF USES
  • The particular fool for whose benefit each r. is inserted will be defined in brackets. Final statements are expected to be made today by Mr Bonar Law and M. Millerand in the House of Commons and the Chamber of Deputies respectively (r. takes care of the reader who does not know which gentleman or which Parliament is British, or who may imagine both gentlemen talking in both Parliaments). …….[excerpts edited]…Each of the Rugby first three pairs won their r. matches against opposition not to be despised (the reader who might think that one of the Rugby pairs had won a match between two of the others).

Wonderful stuff, especially in 1926. His article on quite is also worth reading:

  • The colloquial form “quite all right” is an apparent PLEONASM, quite and all being identical in sense; “quite right” is all right, and “all right” is quite right, but “quite all right” is all quite wrong, unless indeed all right is here used in its sense of adequate but no more, and quite is added for reassurance.

Now how do I convince RageBoy to choose his favourite excerpts from that edition (not the Burchfield follow-up) and have them illustrated by gapingvoid? Make for a great book.

This book is permanent: Musings on trust in the 21st century

I went for my usual Saturday morning constitutional, a walk into town, coffee (lots of) and a browse through the charity shops, I think they call them thrift shops in the US. Probably only to be found in the “West”, I can’t remember ever seeing one in India.

And I bought a secondhand copy of Rime of the Ancient Mariner, illustrated by Gustave Dore, published by Dover. While savouring the full-size engravings over coffee, I glanced at the Dover statement on the back cover….excerpted here: “Books open flat for easy reference. The binding will not crack or split. This is a permanent book.”

This is a permanent book. What a wonderful statement. And I realised that for forty years, I have trusted Dover as an imprint and a publisher. I have memories of my earliest schoolboy Pillow Problems and my Sam Loyds being Dovers.

Now I have no idea who owns Dover, how many people it employs, what it does. What I do know is that I trust Dover, and I will often buy Dovers even when I’ve never heard of the author or the subject. Just because it’s Dover.

The same happens with Kirkus Reviews. If Kirkus say a book is good, then I buy it. Period.

Again, I have no idea how big Kirkus is, who owns it, whatever. I just know that when Kirkus says it’s good, I tend to agree.

I trust Dover. And I trust Kirkus. And this trust has been gained over a long time over a large population of recommendations. These examples are about books, something I grew up surrounded by, something I remain immersed in, but probably irrelevant to the next generation of workers. Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be and all that jazz.

This whole episode of Coleridge and Dore over coffee then made me think about that next generation, what their Dovers and their Kirkuses will be. So here are my musings:

  • They peer into the future
  • Unlike our generation, used to centralised reference points and quality attributions, the youth of today rely on aggregated peer reviews and ranking. Distributed rather than centralised, networked rather than hierarchical. And they are used to interacting peer-to-peer
  • Their world is flat
  • We’re used to paying by the yard, by the pound (yes I am showing my troglodyte nature). More and more, they’re used to flat fees. Not transaction pricing. Unlimited use. No hidden charges. No creeping taxes crawling out of the woodwork.
  • They’re always on
  • The DSL Tivo iTunes Messenger mindset thinks differently. They don’t do dialup. They don’t switch things off and on, they switch themselves off and on. But the things stay. And they’re a mobile generation, used to doing things on the move
  • They don’t lock doors here*
  • They’re used to easy access and egress, and have little tolerance for things like format mismatches and compatibility checks.

What have these things to do with trust? I guess I’m drawing a warped line from values and experience through to expectation, and suggesting that the only things they will trust are those that fulfil those values and expectations. And somewhere in the dark recesses of my head, I can’t differentiate between their expectations of a firm that wants to employ them, a device they use to experience entertainment, an institution that helps them learn. All the same to them.

So to win them over we need to get with the program. Theirs. And the Dovers and Kirkuses of their generation will be the firms that meet that expectation. Peer-reviewed and recommended, not Mcluhan-advertised. No hidden costs or charges or lock-in. Supporting mobility and always-on-ness.

*A variant of one of my favourite lines from one of my favourite movies: Local Hero. I just love the scene where the young upstart turns up very late at this pub in the middle of nowhere in Scotland, starts banging on the door and waking everyone up, and the landlord finally puts his head through the window and says “We don’t lock doors here”.

I want to live in a world where we don’t lock doors anywhere.

For she’d an apron wrapped about her, and he took her for a swan

Polly Von. From Peter Paul and Mary’s  In the Wind. One of my favourite albums, just finished listening to it. Love it.

And yes, a la Churchill, I will resist the temptation to mention Dick Cheney.

Blogrolls and music. Malc referred me to the predecessor of this. That’s how I think blogrolls could work, and allow us to stumble across people. I know many of you liked the anti-blogroll idea, but somehow I’m anti that. I want to build people up, not criticise them. To concentrate on the positive and not the negative. To hate hate. However that may sound, it’s what I believe in. Constructive not destructive. Which is why I still have mixed feelings about a lot of reality TV.

Still on blogrolls. I was going through Jackie Danicki’s blogroll. Seeing what’s common and what’s different. Meandered to one of her other sites. And came across this.

Now this is interesting. Zopa blogging. A P2P startup using a P2P tool at a nascent stage of the company. What uses will they dream up? I shall watch with interest, as they move through customer surveys and R&D and customer service and product improvement and good old-fashioned talking-to-your-customers.

Music is important. Otherwise we’re only fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils, as the Bard said. I want to be fit for more than that.

Information, organisations and flow: Musings on the future of work

There is no point thinking hard about information unless it is placed in the context it operates in. While I am primarily interested in markets, (yes it’s Cluetrain time again), and while I see greater and greater disaggregation in the size and shape of market participants, the “firm” is still here, and employs many of the people who are reading this.

I believe it is instructive to look at the future of the firm, and of work in general, when seeking to understand and respond to the information needs of tomorrow.

As usual, I’d like to pay homage to those that have influenced me in this. Tom Malone and his The Future of Work (Sean and I had the privilege of listening to him at Supernova last year). John Roberts and his The Modern Firm. Ricardo Semler with Maverick and The Seven Day Weekend. Steven Johnson’s Emergence. Lots of Drucker. Some Richard Scase and some Michael Power. More than you would believe from Carlota Perez. From Ken Ohmae. And regular stuff from Esther and Release 1.0.

And, of course, the opportunity to try a lot of the stuff out in a live environment; the patience and tolerance of my employers, the enthusiasm and occasional resigned acceptance of my colleagues.

So here are my seven points, the backdrop against which I’m trying to define how information needs to work.

1. The war for talent will get worse

We are in the midst of a war for talent. Whether it’s the educational system worldwide (but particularly in the West), whether it’s caused by greater human mobility, whether it’s the impact of changing demographics, and whether it’s the impact of 3 billion people getting connected to the world economy, Houston, we have a problem. So we need to know how best to attract, retain, develop and enhance talent. First get good people.

2. There are finite solutions to this problem

  • Using new models to access resources: opensource, outsource, partner.
  • Using new models to attract and retain resources: respond to consumerisation, leverage the learning of the next generation
  • Using new models to use existing resources: collaboration tools

3. Any solution, isolated or hybrid, will need to meet the expectations of today’s youth

  • Not tied to working from one place (so much so I can foresee a time where home address is not a field on an application for employment) Provision of mobility support
  • Not tied to working for one company (which is another reason for building platform-independent software, the firm will not control the device for much longer) Better handling of permissioning and authentication and privacy and data protection
  • Not tied to working at a specific time (I thought punching cards in and out was old hat, but sometimes you wouldn’t believe it) Offline and online, synchronous and asynchronous
  • An engagement with information that extends their consumer experience (web-based, single sign-on, tagged not hierarchied and foldered, always on, quick response, accessible from anywhere)

4. The solution must support group activity

Tools to promote and facilitate multiperson activity are mandatory rather than nice-to-have

5. The work-life balance issue matters

But differently from prior expectations. It’s not this is work, this is life, let’s keep the two distinct and separate. It is this is work and life at the same time, changing rapidly from one to the other. This is a big enough point for me to return to later.

6. What the remnant of the firm “stands for” matters

It is this, a firm’s core values, that will attract the youth in the first place. And soft issues like corporate social responsibility, attitude to trade and poverty, integrity of behaviour and offer set, support for diversity, assistance in support for further academic activity, all this will matter more and more. A company’s organisation structure reflects its communications structure, as I blogged earlier from Conway. But I can go further and say that a company communications structure reflects its culture and values. And maybe, just maybe, a company’s applications architecture does the same. If not today, soon. Again, a blog for later. Command and control versus distrubuted and empowered, emergent and agile versus established and plodding, horizontal soft strata rather than vertical silos.

7. And we somehow have to do all this in the face of increasing post-facto regulation, of regulatory conflict between locations and sectors, of more litigiousness and higher risk aversion.

Oh frabjous day.

What’s this got to do with information? Everything. Markets are conversations. Markets are made out of people. And people will disaggregate and reaggregate in space and time and “employment”.

More later. As usual comments welcome. And yes, I know I haven’t mentioned the role of dealing with bad DRM to solve all this.