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.

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.

[Russ Goring, an erstwhile colleague of mine, is responsible for initiating this particular flight of fancy. It was he who spoke to me about this at length many years ago. Thanks Russ]

Take an egg. Separate its component parts. So far so good. Then break norm one. Throw away the yellow and keep the white. Break norm two. Add sugar not salt. Break norm three. Bake.

And we have meringue. I guess that Heston Blumenthal keeps doing similar things at the Fat Duck.

Meringue moments. That’s what our children will do with information and social software. But only if we make sure they are free to. I would not be surprised if I found that meringues couldn’t have been “invented” today because of food regulation. But I am more likely to believe that meringues would have been patented.

Bad law with respect to patents and copyright and intellectual property can prevent meringue moments. Which is a real shame.

I was listening to my favourite song a few minutes ago. And just thought I’d check to see what the web has to say about it. Just because I could.

And there it was, the song had a wikipedia entry. Unbelievable. I need to stumble around WikiPedia. Anyone with tips and tricks?

I think Hugh Macleod should draw a gapingvoid cartoon in the song’s honour, and post it to Wikipedia. You listening, Hugh?

When I was young, I remember being entranced by my grandad (he was a chemistry professor)  telling me about Glenn Seaborg. And his unlikely postal address made up of elements. Seaborgium Berkelium Californium Americium.

There is a Wikipedia equivalent to come. A post consisting only of Wikipedia-linked material, yet a story entire in itself?

Chris says I need to add more graphics. I agree. But I’m still learning about this medium. So I thought I’d take a leaf out of Sellar and Yeatman’s 1920s classic and provide you with a relief map. Stare at the space below if you need to.

 

 

 

If you haven’t read the book, you could do worse. It taught me knitting. P for Plain. P for Purl. What’s the problem?

My dad was a journalist. So was his dad. Surprise.

And he told me lots of tales. Wonderful tales. I remember one about a real yellow journalism fight between two papers in Somewhere, USA, called the Post and the Sun. Might have been New York, before my time.

In an editorial, the Sun called the Post a “dirty dog”. And the next day the Sun carried a simple editorial response: The Post called the Sun a dirty dog. The attitude of the Sun to the Post is that of any dog to any post.

Those were the days.

I feel the same way about this story. A smiling Truman holding ”Dewey defeats Truman”. And I cannot begin to tell you how frustrating it feels not to be able to just cut and paste the related photo, because of potential infringement of image rights. Even reading through the Wikipedia warning made my skin go cold. Digital Wrongs Management.

I was named after a relatively famous Indian freedom fighter, in fact he was meant to have been my godfather. I have no memory of ever meeting him. Sometime in 1977 I think the BBC World Service announced he had died. And he hadn’t, so a correction was issued. So the guys at my university thought it must have been me. [But that was in another story, Malcolm, and besides the wench is dead.]

The point is that big media do make mistakes. Lots of them. And corrections tend to be published in the most unlikely places, always at odds with where the uncorrected story ran.

Now, as we move into real use of social software, we have the opportunity to make new mistakes. But the mistakes tend to be out in the open, and the speed of correction is high. And the corrected versions are in exactly the same place where the errors were.

Big difference.

Blogs are not big media replacements. They are different. Period. And who knows, I will learn from big media about blogs as well. I tend to spend time watching my kids using MySpace and seeing how they do things, without the corruptions in thought and practice that someone like me has, without that bag and baggage.

Incidentally, did Bill Gates invent opensource? Opensource testing, that is. I wonder.