Author: JP

Normal service is not resumed

You may have noticed that I’ve been pretty quiet of late. In terms of posts per day, this is the quietest month I’ve had since I started blogging. Now when you consider the fact that I had a major heart attack last December and still managed to blog pretty regularly, the emptiness of June 2007 takes some explaining. So here goes.

As with many things, it started with something apparently unconnected. Reason One was that I moved home. And it took me a while to get everything sorted out in my new home; for the first time in many years, I had a taste of what it felt like to be Without The Net. It felt strange, very strange.

Which brings me to Reason Two. My wife and I had had many discussions over the years, about the way computers could intrude into family life, in fact actually damage family life, if care was not taken. We’d learnt how to deal with television, to deal with time shifted TV, with video games, and even with computers…. or so we thought. Or so I thought, anyway. My wife disagreed with me. And guess what?

I was wrong. As laptops with wireless connections became the norm rather than the exception, and as social networking sites blossomed, our home lives had begun to change, albeit subtly. I realised that my wife had been right all along, we had been risking something precious in our family life, and it was time to take action.

There was a third reason: since my moving home had “enforced” a layoff from being online for all of us at home, for once I had the opportunity to observe what my children did as a result, and to continue learning from them. Seeing what they asked me to do for them online while connected at work; seeing what they went to friends’ houses to do online; seeing what they didn’t care about;  seeing what displacement activities came up, how they spent their time as a result.  If anything, everything I’d observed endorsed the call to action.

So.

The action I’ve taken is to spend less time online, to encourage my family to reduce their time as well, and to do other things together as a result; naturally, this means I will post less often. I hope to make up for the deficiency in quantity by raising the quality of my posts. I haven’t stopped thinking, or reading, or talking to people.

Apologies for the lack of warning; it was one of those things that just happened as I thought about things, something I am wont to do every now and then.

of relationships, conversations and transactions

Being Indian, and having lived there for half my life, I’m used to people chatting for a while before getting down to business, as it were.

Relationships first. Then conversations as a result of relationships. And finally, only where necessary, transactions.

Cluetrain. Markets are conversations. (Doc has a Nigerian pastor story that shows how universal this structure is. I will link to it when I have something more than a BlackBerry to use as my internet connection.)

A few hours ago, I read that Facebook now has more “transactions” per day than eBay does. Given that eBay has 8 times the number of participants, this is a fascinating trend.

Normally I would expect conversations to be a multiple of relationships, and transactions to be a subset of conversations.

And that would suggest that the community with more members will have more transactions, especially if they were a birds of a feather community.

Why is this not the case with facebook? Is it driven by the relative youth of the community and their perceived free time? Is it because the marketplace is open and free? Is it because of the high graphic content as a result of the sheer number of photographs? Is it because you don’t need a credit card or a paypal account? Is it because it is easier to use? Cooler? More fun?

Worth thinking about. More later.

on visible hands and grinding gears

I was sad to hear about the death of Alfred Chandler, the professor whose works were instrumental in giving me an understanding of what suits did.

He was described as a business historian, and to an extent it was the title alone that led to my researching his works. I found his writings fascinating, more as a counterpoint to Drucker than anything else. I loved what Drucker wrote, so it made sense for me to spend time understanding other viewpoints. We can so easily become dogmatic, even heretical in our views.

Chandler stood for structure, for process, for “professional management”, for many aspects of organisation I am not particularly
fond of. I have written before about Chandler’s Law, something that anyone involved in strategic change should read and understand.

He will be remembered more for his Pulitzer winning book “the visible hand” than anything else, since it was the first serious management book to push back against the Adam Smith Invisible Hand doctrine in a formal and structured way.

While I disagreed with many things he wrote about, I was very taken by the detailed, objective and dispassionate way he dealt with the subjects at hand, a true and talented “business historian”. Probably the first of his kind.

It was strange to read Sean’s post bemoaning the pushback against market forces (I think the context was weather and Australia) soon after hearing about Chandler’s death.

What Alfred Chandler did was to help me understand the motives of professional management cadres, even if I didn’t agree with them. Thank you Alfred.

cognitive biases

Paul Downey pointed me towards this article:

http://www.healthbolt.net/2007/02/14/26-reasons-what-you-think-is-right-is-wrong/

The graphics, comments and general editorial whatchamacallit make it sufficiently different from the wikipedia entry so as to make your journey worthwhile.

two webs or one?

Liz Strauss, commenting on a recent post of mine, muses about the separation of the information web from the relationship web, one data driven, one social.
You can see her post here:

blogherald.com/2007/05/29/are-you-ready-for-a-whole-new-blog

I’m currently in the midst of moving house and will be without access to thè web for a while, except via blackberry. So my comments are of necessity short.

I think the answer’s simple. We need to keep on ensuring that we build the web in a customer centric way, a la cluetrain. First relationships. Then conversation. Then transaction. Then the distinction between the two webs will disappear.

It is up to us. More later.