Category: Four pillars

Thanks to Doc Searls for pointing me towards this FactoryJoe post. Fantastic stuff. And if that gets me labelled even more Utopian, tough.

I particularly like:

Think about it this way: if the water that’s piped into your house had DRM on it and only allowed you to use it for showers, how would you wash your clothes? If you were only allowed to make ice cubes, how would you make iced tea? If you had to pay $0.99 everytime you wanted a glass of water?

The whole lot of proprietary infrastructure needs to be open sourced and given back to people. To people over companies. To those who believe in self-determination.

This is not tree-hugger stuff. Markets are consumerising and market participants are gaining further self-determinism than was previously possible. And it changes everything.

And the post continues:

Listen, here’s what’s at stake:

Ideas and hope need to flow like water if a civilization is to continue its ascension toward greatness. Impediments to that flow will stall growth. Fortunately, like a solvent, the culture of open source will continue to expand, will wear away at these impediments, to restore the natural flow of social capital, of ideas, of hope. Those who get this first will rise, and rise quickly.

Don’t think that the owners of the 21st century have been preselected.

There’s a lot of snowballs in that, Doc.

It’s that Saturday feeling.

Funny days in the park
Every day’s the fourth of july
People reaching, people touching
A real celebration
Waiting for us all
If we want it, really want it

From Saturday in the Park by Chicago

I just love the emotion expressed in  “every day’s the fourth of july”, an innate need to enjoy the freedoms we have bestowed upon us. And I love Chicago’s music.

I see the Encyclopedia Britannica’s finally decided to come out fighting, and have challenged Nature’s research on the accuracy of Britannica versus Wikipedia.

I am reminded of a story in one of Po Bronson’s earliest books, Bombardiers. [And by the way, please do read Bronson. If you’ve worked in the City or the Street, take a look at this]

I’m paraphrasing Bronson, but somewhere in the book he points out that in the Stone Age, Might was Right, and you could work out who was Mighty; in the Industrial Age, it became Money Ruled, and you could work out who was the Man; now, in the Information Age, we have a problem. Information often changes faster than the time it takes to verify its accuracy. So hunches are important.

Please remember this is a paraphrase years after reading the book; any inaccuracies are mine and not Po’s. And by the way I’ve decided to link to him as well, keep in touch with what he’s doing.

What’s this got to do with Wikipedia and Britannica? This is the way I look at it. The Big Endians and Little Endians will have their Blefuscudian battles forever. But if we step outside the study, and look at the biggest stories we’ve had on inaccuracies and changes in Wikipedia: John Siegenthaler; Tom Harkin; Norm Coleman; Tom Coburn; they’ve all had one thing in common:

Politicians.

Go figure. We will always have both Wisdom as well as Madness when we deal with Crowds. And we will have Politics, where the two meet.

I was reading The Park Paradigm this morning, noting Sean’s “obligatory” post/comment on Google Finance. In it he refers to an external post from Internet Outsider, which makes the point that Google Finance works better than Yahoo Finance because it concentrates on content aggregation rather than content production.

And this made me think of blogs again, and an old observation of mine:  There are three types of blogs:

• Thinkers, where there is a lot of original content created
• Linkers, where there is a lot of original content pointed to
• Stinkers, where neither of these takes place

I sense there is a “right” thinker-linker ratio which will aid and catalyse co-creation of content through comment and “snowballing”. Too much T and it’s all too theoretical. Too much L and it’s a news service. And there’s never a good reason for any S.

Any thoughts or experiences out there? What makes you read a blog? What makes you go back? What makes you link?

When I put people on a blogroll it’s because I read them. Just like by the time I implement last.fm it should show the music I’m actually listening to. In fact there’s probably a market for the equivalent of last.fm for blogs….someone out there listening?

Anyway, here are a few ideas  that did their serendipity thing on me today while I was reading other people’s blogs.

The first was at Accidental Light, where Malc was opining on self-healing organisations. Great post. And it made me think about institutional memory.

In days of old when job mobility and attrition were relatively low, teamwork and consensual approaches were easy to achieve in large organisations.

In team sessions individuals made sacrifices. Established their unease or disagreement with some stated thing, and once that was done, went with the team view. This allowed a Lencioni-like trust to operate, giving people the chance to express their concerns.

This capacity to make sacrifices as part of a team is critical to team behaviour. And one of the reasons people made the sacrifices was because they knew the other team members would remember.

As job mobility grew, this became harder to guarantee. People were less willing to make sacrifices, and consensual behaviour went out of the window. Why? Because they could no longer be sure who would remember the sacrifice.

And so we saw teams move as teams, to try and retain the memory. This happened in advertising, in research, in IT, even in aspects of trading. People moved as teams because they had created a trust relationship with a history of sacrifice and teamwork, and they wanted to retain that trust relationship.

Now we have blogs and wikis and IM. A digital environment. Dissent and concern can be established and recorded, and yet a consensual approach can be taken.

As for me, I haven’t quite got the hang of attrition and why it happens. I cannot for the life of me understand why any firm would plan for a level of attrition. I would prefer to prevent, not accept. Fossilfool me.

But maybe blogs can help.

More later on what happened when I read Park Paradigm. Next post.

Don’t try denying livin’ on the other side……America, Don’t Cross The River

 

Great band. Not just about a Horse with No Name. Incidentally, I’d always wondered why an American band that made original music, writing it, playing it, singing it, would call themselves America. And it was only recently I found out that they were all children of US servicemen stationed in the UK, and it all made sense.

Reading The Man In the Doorway’s recent post, and reading Steven Johnson’s article in Time (see previous post), got me thinking again.

You “organise” within a firm to achieve a small number of things:

• to prioritise the allocation of resources towards achieving some agreed goals
• to handle conflicts within matrices
• to deal with issues escalated up a hierarchy
• to monitor and review progress against plan
• to refine the allocation process as a result of feedback
• to refine the allocation process as a result of new stimuli

When you do this 19th century “organising”, one of the things you rely on is the flow of uncorrupted information. Fundamentally what you are doing is making decisions on a plethora of things because of your position in the hierarchy.

Which is fine when it works. Time for an uncommercial break, “a word from our sponsor”.

Ten of my favourite Drucker short quotes:

• Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things
• It’s more important to do the right thing than to do things right
• Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.
• So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.
• We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn
• In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from
• There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
• The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong question
• No executive has ever suffered because his subordinates were strong and effective.
• Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation

Leadership and learning. Two things that don’t happen too well in hierarchies.

Ok, we’re back. Where were we? Oh yes, Malc’s post on magical numbers. In my comment I pointed people at George Miller’s famous paper, always worth a read, which you can find here.

And with that at the back of my mind, I was reading Steven Johnson’s blog, and a few more scales dropped from my eyes.

I spoke before of organisational hierarchies being up-down and networks being sideways and Conway’s Law and the implications for social software.

And until today I didn’t really get one thing.

When people complain to me or criticise blogs and wikis and IM, the usual reason they complain is because they don’t like the “non-work” element in such things. And my usual response has been that I’m not prepared to control or tabulate watercooler, restroom or coffeeshop conversations either.

I just didn’t realise they don’t like those things either. The people who object to social software actually object to social anything at work. Except under their control.

Don’t try denyin’ livin’ on the other side.