Doing Business Digitally

The $100 laptop finally ships

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 15:14:00 +0000

The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) $100 laptop 2B1 Children's Machine laptop developed by MIT's Media Lab has finally made it to the real world. The first few hand-built units of this little machine made it from Taiwan to the US yesterday. It's a nifty green-and-white device that looks suitably toy-like. I hope it is robust, given its intended market.

The technology is interesting: it's intended to be both a computer and a wireless router, so that each machine forms part of a mesh even when the laptop is closed. It comes with a small solar-powered repeater that can be nailed into a tree to get better range. The laptops run Linux using AMD's Geode processor, and have 128MB of memory and 500MB of flash memory rather than a hard disk.

Apparently a bunch of central American countries have put in a purchase order, so it's going to get out there as soon as production-line versions are available. Congratulations to Nick Negroponte and the MIT Media Lab, and of course to OLPC.

American Marketers 2006: Web 2.huh?

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 11:48:00 +0000

Zoomerang will be publishing a study next week which reveals that even though Web 2.0 has hogged the business headlines (for what, a couple of years now?) 8 out of 10 marketing professionals still are not even familiar with the term. At the other extreme, one third of those who have latched onto what is going on are using web 2.0 approaches in their marketing, and most of those (70%) are having success.

Assuming the study is correct, what does this say about how in touch with their markets most marketers are? Marketing is all about understanding consumers and reacting to (if not anticipating) shifts in interests, attitudes, values, and behaviours. It is hard to imagine that web 2.0 (which, despite what its detractors may say, heralds a megashift in consumer culture) has gone unnoticed by the hordes of marketing wonks, their agencies, researchers, and advisors. I could accept that they don't really understand it or that they dismiss it as a temporary anomaly -- but that they have never even heard the term web 2.0 is just scary.

Corporations (particularly of the kind reviled by The Cluetrain Manifesto) are notoriously slow to catch on to or care about what their customers or potential customers are doing. You sort of expect that level of indifference in the folks in Finance or Production or even in the boardroom. But if anyone should be intimately in touch with the chaotic changes in the consumer world, it's the Marketing people. Maybe there's a new digital divide to think about: those who care about what is going on in their professional area have tuned into digital media; those who do not are still waiting for the memo from corporate.

ISPI Europe Conference

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 14:17:00 +0000

Last week I was in Prague where, with my colleague Sarah Ward of ALTER Inc., I was speaking at the European Conference of ISPI (the International Society for Performance Improvement). The September edition of ISPI’s journal Performance Improvement published an article that I co-authored with Sarah and our friend and collaborator Dr. Karen Medsker on the processes required for large organisations to create a strategic approach to learning evaluation, and we were in Prague to see how those ideas fit with European business cultures.

The theme of this year’s conference was building performance into organizational culture in Europe. Presentations covered various case studies or approaches dealing with the need to increase competitiveness in the face of continued global economic pressure, and how best to improve existing job design, work processes, and organizational systems. For a small conference, there was amazing diversity in the participants – more than 40 nationalities were present. It was a little disappointing to see US speakers getting half of the air-time, though there was a concerted effort to work the lessons from existing American models into evolving European models rather than just advocate US-centric approaches. America is, after all, only America, and despite what most Americans may believe, its business culture is as unique and un-exportable as any other culture.

That said, there were many fascinating inputs from American and Canadian speakers that fuelled much discussion both in session and later over large glasses of Pilsner Urquell. Bob Evans, Director of IT Operations at France Telecom did a keynote on how he was brought in to build performance into the organizational culture of the France Telecom Group, demonstrating that often it takes someone perceived as a “crazy outsider” to shake up a calcified culture that is so habituated to its own stagnation it cannot see the advantages of change. In similar vein, Bill Daniels (author of Change-ABLE Organisation, one of the most useful books on change agentry I have ever read) talked about overcoming cultural resistance to performance improvement. His emphasis, which resonates with my ongoing focus on large-scale strategy, was on looking beyond individual performers to the system as a whole.

Other presentations covered a surprisingly broad canvas, with case studies from several eastern European countries providing a lot of practical insight into the performance challenges and solutions in developing nations.

Among the luminaries that I was delighted to get to know during the Prague meeting were Roger Kaufman, who has published an impressive 38 books on various aspects of performance improvement and is one of the most fun people I have ever spent time with at a conference; Tony Marker and Linda Huglin from Boise State, who had done some interesting work on the state of research in the performance improvement field; Mary Norris Thomas of the Fleming Group, who could be the next Celebrity Researcher; Bob Carleton who is probably the practitioners’ practitioner but shares my concern that research is moving too much toward cookery book replication and too far from rigorous case-specific craftwork; and John O’Connor of O’Connor Consulting in the UK, who spent many years earlier in his career where I grew up in Zambia (small worlds getting ever smaller). What impressed me about every conference participant that I talked with was their candour and their grounding in reality – the last thing you would expect from an organisation whose publications set very high standards and often read like doctoral theses.

Bob Carleton, Bill Daniels, and Timm Esque and his wife enjoying dinner in Prague.

I can recommend unreservedly ISPI’s European conference to anyone involved in performance improvement in their own organisations. It is a really intimate meeting where you can easily know who’s who and get to hang out and share experiences with anyone of interest – and everyone was of interest. You know you have been at a well-managed event when you look back at it and can’t quite work out how you had so many worthwhile conversations with so many people in so few days. Perhaps a key factor was that there were no vendors there, or at least none that made themselves conspicuous.

I have pretty much had it with the vast 8,000 plus conferences that I used to find so stimulating, and now prefer much smaller more focused events where you are more likely to find yourself among peers and “conferring” is more likely to happen. ISPI Europe is definitely on my calendar for next year.

Montreux and the ISWC Mothers of Invention

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 14:19:00 +0000

I have always liked Montreux. It is an idyllic lakeside town that would ooze class and opulence were oozing not just too tackily post-19th century. Its olde-worlde feel is overlayed with a general bearing of grace, politeness, and pleasure in service which is neither too obsequious nor too begrudging. When I lived in Switzerland in the 80’s and 90’s, I visited Montreux often en route to or from the neighbouring town of Vevy (home to the international headquarters of Nestlé and Philip Morris), and, as in the rest of the country, not a lot seems to have changed. Tipping is still considered vulgar; people still don’t walk on red at pedestrian crossings; the stores still close for lunch; and the trains still run on time.

Lounging below vine-covered hillsides at the eastern end of Lac Léman (that’s Lake Geneva to the non-Vaudoise), Montreux is the kind of resort town that Merchant Ivory would set movies in, had E. M. Forster ever written stories based there, and, of course, had Ismail Merchant not recently gone to join the choir invisible. As has Freddy Mercury, who loved the town and apparently lived out his last years there, his loyalty being rewarded by an appropriately larger-than-life statue of him jutting out his butt and punching the air in triumph as he glares across the lake at France.

Creative types have always been attracted to Montreux. Lord Byron was inspired by the nearby lakeside castle to write The Prisoner of Chillon whose opening line “Eternal spirit of the chainless mind!” could be the T-shirt slogan of the blognoscenti. Queen owns a recording studio in the Montreux. Deep Purple burned down the casino while recording there some 35 years ago (actually, it was a fire that broke out during a concert by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention), inspiring Smoke on the Water, the guitar riff from which is also commemorated in a lakeside sculpture. David Bowie has a home in Montreux, though nobody in the town would be so indiscrete as to tell you where. Every summer a horde of jazz musicians and fans descends on the town for the amazingly wonderful Montreux Jazz Festival. Where else, as I was lucky to do one year, can you see onstage in one evening Deedee Bridgewater, Van Morrison, Georgie Fame, Santana, and John McClaughlin each playing their own sets and then jamming till the early hours with many other musical legends who are in town to listen and play?

Freddy does Montreux

This year another black-clad crowd of unconventional but somewhat geekier Mothers of Invention descended on the town to enjoy the engineering equivalent of jazz. While the inventors of the air guitar T-shirt were missing from the Montreux symposium, a few hundred other engineering students, professors, policy makers, industrialists, and techno-hucksters from all over the globe converged for a few days of future-gazing, presenting the improvisations, concepts and experiments that must surely be at one of the bloodier edges of bleeding-edge thinking.

The International Symposium on Wearable Computing melded out-of-this-world engineering, ergonomics, and human-computer interfaces with some of the more intense needs for performance improvement that exist in the real world: The GPS-linked head-up-display on fire-fighters’ visors that guides them out of smoke-filled buildings; the doctor’s hospital note taking system that works on arm gestures so as not to take attention away from the patient (pity the unfortunate patient seeing a doctor repeatedly making a sign of the cross at his bedside); the scary guy who uses his skin as a conductor to send 2 Megabits per second of data across his body, eliminating the need for iPod headphone cables; the see-through eyeglass displays and motion-sensing wrist bands that train auto-workers to install headlamps. The theory sessions, covering topics like “Humans – A Tutorial,” were even more mind-bending than the practice sessions.

For someone like me who is engaged at the application and performance impact end of technology, it was fascinating and a little humbling to spend a couple of days in the company of the brilliant minds that actually have to conceive, design, and build the revolutionary tools in the first place.

International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC)

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 14:20:00 +0000

A couple of days ago I was a guest at IEEE’s annual International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC), held this year in Montreux, Switzerland. I was there to judge entries for the annual ISWC Design Competition, and to award the check and prestigious IEEE trophy.

As the sponsor of this year’s competition, I chose to set a challenge that took the thinking away from designing ultra-expensive cyborgian machines for ultra-niche purposes and instead focused on designing ultra-cheap solutions for ultra-mass markets. I wanted to see if anyone could come up with a design for using already existing devices and infrastructures to facilitate education and training in developing countries where computers (and even electricity) are simply unavailable and where a month of web access costs typically more than the annual per capita income.

Though I did not say so in the brief, for some time I have been advocating the idea of using mobile phones (that most ubiquitous of wearable computers) and the extensive wireless phone infrastructures for core literacy and basic business education. While MIT and others are making great strides toward the $100 computer, that’s an idea whose usefulness is severely undermined by the difficulty of distributing the device and the general lack of electrical power or conventional internet access in those areas where such a machine might be most desirable. The cell phone, on the other hand, is everywhere already and it’s already connected.

Jose Gonzales explains his team's entry to Paul Lukowicz, ISWC Chair.

The winning entry was submitted by a team of graduate engineering students from Florida headed by Jose Gonzales, whose day-job is designing data-acquisition systems for aircraft in the US military. If a sign of true creative genius is the ability to dramatically reverse your perspective and still stay clear and focused, Jose is a very impressive intellect. I’d be a little concerned that I liked his design simply because it aligned rather well with my own vision, but the other judges concurred unanimously that the entry was streets ahead of the competitors. The conceptual technical design approach was well-researched, elegant, cheap, and pretty much ready to roll. Now we need the content, instructional design, a little political will, and some kind of sponsorship for both the development and the running of the phone-based learning service.

In essence, the design takes advantage of the ubiquity of GPRS (its coverage around the world is remarkably comprehensive) and its data rate of 115kbps, which is more than adequate for sending text and speech in various configurations. This is complemented by the ubiquity of devices – in places like Kebira in Kenya, more than 8 out of ten people have access to a mobile phone, though they may not have electricity or running water. Hand cranks can provide charges, or for a few cents people recharge their phones from someone running a small street-corner generator. Put your content through a free open-source Java tool that configures it so it will work and look good on any of more than 500 different phone models, and you are (at least in theory) ready to teach.

But what is the economic model? It should be possible, given the low entry cost, to get large corporations, NGOs, or even governments to front the cash for development of the content, and to subsidise the delivery. Large corporations have a vested interest in getting involved in such projects, in part because they believe in good corporate citizenship, and in part because it’s a great marketing opportunity. In fact I had a brief conversation with a Nokia representative after I had made the award announcement, and he was keen to take the discussion further. Watch this space

Corporate spin and the mythology of management

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 14:46:00 +0000

What on earth are we teaching people in “management training” courses? The more senior managers I encounter, the less impressed I am with either our training practices or our promotion processes, or both. In organizational management, there seems to be a growing sense of self-righteous despotism, cosmetically made over as leadership, in an ecology characterized by denial.

There has always been a lot of lip-service paid to “employee nurturing” in organizations. Our Vision, Mission, and (especially) Values statements bask in a PR-conscious preciousness that rarely reflects the reality on the ground. Upholding human dignity, respect for the individual, fairness, equal opportunity, striving for excellence, all drip from the earnest clichéd prose used by corporations to describe their management regimes. But, in most companies, at the one-on-one, manager-to-employee level, it’s a sham.

There’s a disconnect between the myth and the reality of corporate life. Proving the effectiveness of marketing, many employees actually believe their employers’ propaganda, even though the contradictions whack them upside the head every day. Managers spout the company line back at the rare employee who plucks up the nerve to question whether in fact the emperor is naked, and with luck the confused employee starts to believe again, if only for a while. If your lifestyle (and your mortgage) has you strapped to your company, and you spend 8 to 16 hours a day immersed in the business, you have to believe simply to suppress your inner despair. The alternative is existentialism, the “it’s only a job” mentality that those too jaded to care often opt for. Beyond that, go postal, or get out. There is material here for a PhD dissertation on corporate spin and employee perceptions of reality. But you’d never find a sponsor.

Over the decades I have worked with corporations large and small around the world, and my universal impression has been that most people manage by fear and manipulation, and they get ahead by polished bureaucracy, skilful (or instinctive) use of politics, networking above themselves, avoiding risk, and exploiting their peers. The warm, fuzzy, touchy-feely stuff so beloved of HR policy wonks and management training gurus is a whitewash that obscures the reality: at the individual level, people-management in corporations is all about taking credit and passing blame.

If this is a result of incompetence or indifference, then perhaps training is at fault. But often it is a result of calculated competitiveness in those with ambition for “bigger things,” or desperate attempts at maintaining control in those already out of their depth. As consultants, we prefer to ignore these realities, because formally acknowledging them is career suicide in companies that are in denial.

In upper-middle management you have a cadre of political officers who discourage any challenge from below to the illusion of impeccable decency and high standards in management practices. If an employee speaks out, they have an “attitude problem” and if they can’t be rehabilitated, they are often disciplined, exiled, or terminated.

Far too often, dominance rules over competence. That appears to be the natural order of things anyway, so maybe it is the best way to run a business. It’s how the military has been run for centuries, and 20th Century business organization was derived from military organization, with command-and-control hierarchies the central pillar of most corporate designs. Sadly, the military has always done a much better job of managing talent.

The dog-eat-dog environments in which most employees operate tend to allow those with bigger teeth and less restraint to advance ahead of those who may be better qualified but less ferocious, or less sly. Nothing is more guaranteed to have you occupying the same desk for decades than doing a good job and passively waiting to be recognized. The result is a top-tier of management whose unifying characteristics are ambition, ruthlessness, and a sense of infallibility, and whose integrity, decency, and fitness for task may be questionable.

It is that mix of characteristics which gets companies into trouble. It is how mega-corporations lose billions in only a few months. It’s what leads to the commonplace firings of thousands of workers, a gesture that says “I have absolutely no constructive ideas how to manage my business out of the hole that I put it in, so I’ll just dump overhead.” Bizarrely, such acts of desperation are routinely applauded by analysts as indicators of strong management.

That self-serving indifference to employees also leads to another commonplace management practice – instead of simply re-organizing a department, everyone in it is instructed to re-apply for their own job. “You have been working for me for years, but I don’t really know who you are or what you do, so sell yourself to me.” In the contorted world of management-speak, this grotesque process is seen to be clever, yet it is really another admission of management failure.

Individual employees are routinely ignored, stifled, oppressed, mentally abused, and in other ways subjected to enormous stress that has nothing to do with their roles or tasks. Good people are played off against each other. Managers nurture those least likely to threaten their jobs or their egos, and sideline those whose competence makes them uncomfortable. Getting ahead these days typically requires a good performer to change companies. None of this is good for the health of an organization.

There’s something wrong with this picture, but what, if anything, is to be done?

Should we heroically be trying to train managers to act in the best interests of the company, even when it is not in the best interest of their own careers? Should we be training managers to recognize and respond appropriately to self-serving practices in those reporting to them? Should we be training employees how to get ahead, giving those who are by nature less assertive the skills and insights to compete? Or is this all futile – should we simply stick to regurgitating Argyris, Ansoff and Maslow, and hope that nobody ever notices that we are not in touch with day-to-day realities?

Podcasting Goes Mainstream in Training

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 14:22:00 +0000

In the autumn of 2004, I wrote a brief guide to podcasting, suggesting that this would rapidly become a useful tool in the training world. Eighteen months later, with podcasts proliferating from the BBC, CEOs, neighborhood gossip bloggers and marketers, it seems like at least for knowledge transfer the podcast has gone mainstream.

But podcasting is still controversial and largely misunderstood in the training world. There are those who look on podcasts as nothing more than upgraded audio cassettes or books-on-CD. Their objection is that there appears to be nothing new to justify all the fuss. Others will avow that passively acquired audio-only is an ineffective medium for learning, so podcasting must be a retrograde step, even if you can now podcast video and images too.

Then there are those who see accessibility issues looming – what about learners who don’t have an MP3 player? On the other end of the spectrum are the techno-zealots who, predictably, over hype podcasting as a revolution in learning. But in the middle are an awful lot of people who are quietly just getting on with it, and are making learners rather happy.

As for the view that iPods are like CDs or cassettes: is TiVo like a VCR? Is BitTorrent like the BBC? Just because the digestible output is similar does not make the user experience or the benefits the same.

Yes, the end product is audio content, but then you get that from the telephone, the radio, and the towne crier. Where podcasts differ, and they are significant differences, is in:
1) Their ease of creation and immediacy.
2) Their disintermediation of lengthy and expensive supply lines.
3) Their ability to time shift delivery.
4) The user's ability to seek and even automate acquisition of only those targeted pieces that are of interest.
5) The ease with which they can be integrated into other web 2.0 resources such as blogs, discussion forums, communities of practice, and so on.

Try doing that with a commercially produced and distributed CD system.

What about the argument that audio-only is a poor training medium? Well, that may be true for many subject or skill areas. But it’s not necessarily a poor learning medium for many other fields. You can’t blindly accept the conventional wisdom that you retain only ten per cent of what you hear, and make sweeping decisions about all learning on that questionable precept.

It's alternately amusing and annoying that bogus "statistics" like the "10% from hearing" notion manage to embed themselves so deeply in the folklore of training.
Many have no academic study behind them; others have questionable studies to support them; others may have a sound study or two in the background but have been widely misinterpreted or misapplied. We all like simplistic rules by which to manage our work, but often what we take as fact is nothing more than gross generalization at best, pure mythology at worst.

Podcasts will be created badly and used inappropriately by many, but this is true of any technology that enables (democratizes?) content creation - PowerPoint, web video, the digital camera. It was only a few years ago that the august professors at Stanford were putting talking-head videos of actual lectures online and selling it as e-learning.

I have wasted a lot of time partially listening to bad podcasts. They suffer from fuzzy audio, atrocious speaking styles, muddled structure, and often simply incorrect content. But, as with other resources, you learn to discern good from bad, and you select those sources which are useful to you.

There are a lot of things that I would not choose to learn in an exclusively audio mode, but I find that podcasts are a very convenient way to stay in touch with what is going on in my fields of interest. Being able to hear the voices of people who I respect adds a dimension that holds my attention, often better than their written words.

It's not easy to podcast well, even if the technology is simple and you have well designed content to convey. I've made many attempts, and find I just don't have the voice, but I keep on experimenting (watch this space..).

I can see a time in the next year or two when podcasting skills training will appear in the catalogues just as presentation skills training or webinar skills training does. Now there's a business opportunity for someone …

Stupid in America

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 15:23:00 +0000

American schools in general do not turn out high school “graduates” with a decent education. They do turn out people with almost belligerent assertiveness, and boundless (though unfounded) self-esteem that makes it difficult for them to perceive that they have anything more to learn. In an individual this is tragic; in a corporation, it’s dangerous; in a nation it’s disastrous.

Over recent years studies have shown that illiteracy, innumeracy, and inability to communicate are among the major workforce challenges facing American corporations. Schools no longer produce employable graduates, forcing companies to launch their own basic education programs – or, more recently, simply set up shop in India. Last week a report titled “Stupid in America” was aired by a major television network in the US. Though its focus was the sad reality of American schools, it struck me that there were some important lessons for corporate training.

In essence, the piece described how, between the ages of ten and fifteen, kids in the US get left behind in basic knowledge and ability levels by kids in two dozen other nations, and argued that poor teaching is at fault. (This is all about averages, of course, and there is no denying that there is a positive end of the bell-curve where excellent schools do a superb job). The study is nothing new – I can recall reading of similar dismal results years ago. Yet American schools and teachers’ unions continue to resist any attempt to measure teaching performance. How odd it is that in corporate training we stress evaluation of impact against learning objectives, and are increasingly held accountable for ROI, yet that concept is scorned in school education, where the foundation for future growth is laid.

Educational authorities, in turn, blame the lack of learning on lack of funding, but there is evidence to show that more money often leads to poorer performance – schools tend to spend budget increases on offices, sports facilities, computers, security systems and so on, rather than on better teachers and better educational processes. By contrast, smaller low-budget schools led by passionate educators who have no computers, gyms, or even janitors are producing exceptional results.

Does throwing more and more money into organizational training have any payback if it is primarily directed at hardware, computer systems, and more prestigious “corporate campuses”? And how does the recent trend toward having training run by technocrats rather than trainers affect our focus on the core mission – helping people perform better? Often the technology we adopt serves to further entrench legacy models of training rather than encourage new thinking. The more we standardize learning around enterprise technology systems, the more we suppress the individual passion of trainers and instructional designers.

I am a product of a number of colonial schooling systems that could all best be described as totalitarian, more “Brick in the Wall” than “Ridgemont High.” While my American peers were hanging loose, I was enduring daily beatings because my hair was a millimeter too long or my handwriting was too angular. So I am sympathetic to the libertarian laissez faire approach taken in many schools today. That freedom and concern for the individual choice is one of the great attractions of learning 2.0. But the needs of the individual employee and the needs of the organization are often on divergent paths, so some structure and focus is called for.

I don’t buy the argument that the blame for the dumbing-down of America’s youth falls exclusively on the educational system. It seems clear to me that culture, particularly the culture in the family, has failed to instill a strong enough veneration for learning and corresponding intellectual curiosity. Parents abdicate responsibility for educating their kids, particularly when they get a little difficult in their early teens. It is easier to concoct a host of external reasons for a child’s learning problems than to acknowledge personal failure. But learning takes place within an evolving ecosystem, not in isolated instances.

Companies make the same mistake – they think that performance problems should be solved by training, and if that doesn’t work, training gets the blame. How many times do we hear trainers bemoan the fact that the environment to which trainees return almost guarantees that what was learned will never be reinforced or applied? It was only after I left school that I understood the real purpose of homework was not to keep me from going fishing, but to get my parents engaged in the education process. We should do more to integrate learning with the workplace and engage managers and the immediate “work family” in supporting the ongoing development of new skills. Blended learning should blend what happens in class or online with what happens back at work, and that means getting the learners’ immediate colleagues engaged as a support network.

Looking from the outside at the way schools perform can teach lessons and prompt questions about corporate training. Are issues of choice, teaching passion, learning culture, and budget echoed in corporate training? Is it not more important to build a culture within the organization that overtly values and rewards learning, rather than use it as a reward in itself? By outsourcing much of our training, particularly to vendors who are not held accountable for anything more than smile sheet scores, do we risk the same abdication of responsibility and dilution of influence to which so many American parents have apparently succumbed?

Corporate pandemics of 2006

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 15:25:00 +0000

Inspired by a batch of recent frustrating consulting gigs, a battery of medical check-ups and the current buzz about pandemic preparedness, here are my predictions for six emerging corporate pandemics that trainers will have to deal with in 2006:

1) Ulteriorsclerosis – the clogging of an important initiative by personnel or policies, for spurious reasons that mask more pernicious ulterior motives. Widespread ulteriorsclerosis will lead to the demise of several organizations in 2006. The disease, once it takes hold and starts to spread, can only be cured by surgical OD interventions. It manifests itself in the right projects not being approved, or not moving forward, for apparently good reasons which, with persistent investigation, turn out to be fatuous. Ulteriorsclerosis is typically artificially induced by the idle, the desperate, or the power hungry, and can be career threatening to diagnose.

2) Nearly Ubiquitous Wireless Mobile Informal Learning Syndrome (NUWMILS) – the propensity to instantly learn only what one needs to learn in order to perform, when and where the performance is required. Also referred to as Schizogooglia, it will evolve in cultures where networked knowledge links of known quality and reliability become so intuitively accessible that it will be like having multiple brains in your head. Sporadic outbreaks have been occurring with increasing frequency, and now seem set to attain pandemic status in 2006. Once it loses its stigma and is accepted as a blessing rather than a curse, NUWMILS will be renamed “ambient learning” and at least three gurus will claim to have invented the term.

3) Mailanoma – the unrestrained metastasizing of productivity-sapping email, texting, and instant messaging, leading to complete breakdown of one’s ability to communicate. While much of this has been from externally inflicted spam, as 2006 progresses there will be increasing volumes of malignant messaging that are internally generated through quite unnecessary cc-ing, bcc-ing, and e-messaging of people sitting whispering distance apart. As communication is the life blood of organizations, malfunctioning of the system can cause a serious breakdown in performance – and in the ability of training to have an impact.

4) Infobesity – the deleterious effect of excessive data consumption on the fitness and agility of individual and corporate minds. With the volume of new data being produced doubling every three days (vs. every three decades a few generations ago), Infobesity will become dramatically debilitating, though it will stimulate the growth of technology filtering tools. Those who master infofiltering will jog confidently through the fog, while those who don’t will keep staggering into lampposts. Employees and teams with calcified knowledge filtering modes will become alienated and resentful, unable to compete, and decreasingly productive. Fortunately for them, they make up most of upper and middle management, and still dominate the shareholders of most large companies. So they will hold onto legacy processes and implement new glass ceilings to keep info-savvy juniors from gaining power (often by inducing ulteriorsclerosis in the relevant area). Unfortunately for their companies, the info-savvy are subversive, mutate rapidly, are well networked, and will job hop into smaller, more fluid entities that will collaboratively run competitive rings around the big corporations.

5) Organizational Incontinence – the involuntary leaking of things you’d rather not have others see. As the networked world brings on premature aging in organizations, they will start to leak at increasingly alarming rates. They will leak knowledge (IP Incontinence) as their walls become porous and their employees network outside of the company to gain the insights they need to get things done. They will leak processes, as much that used to be done in-house becomes outsourced. They will leak secrets, as staff start to blog and podcast without the censoring filter of Corporate Communications. And they will suffer from increasing motivational incontinence as employees finally lose all sense of belonging to a cohesive caring organizational family. This in turn will lead to the leaking of valuable employees. Organizational Incontinence, in all its forms, may require a significant rethink of the role of learning services, and its repositioning as an aid to the enhancement of an individual’s market value.

6) Learning Impact Myopia – the failure to expect or demand that learning initiatives have lasting effects. Like most other things in corporate life, training activities will be evaluated more and more on what effect they have on each quarter’s financial results, rendering longer term impacts irrelevant, and in turn making the development of long-term programs pointless. When trainers struggle to develop interventions that have lasting impact, they will be told that such esoteric stuff simply does not matter, and will be pressured into providing instant gratification to the bean counters. Learning Impact Myopia and Schizogooglia both seek faster short-term solutions to the expertise problems, but for different reasons. Trainers may have to selectively succumb, while still fighting for some strategic surgical impact. [Paradoxically, Surgical Learning Impact Myopia (SLIM) -- the deliberate implanting or nurturing of e-learning 2.0 where appropriate -- may give SLIM organizations added vigor and longevity].

Be prepared! The future will be a dangerous place if you relinquish control of your integrity to the organizational pandemics.

Compliments of the season to all, and may your 2006 be filled with health, wealth, and happiness!

Thinking outside the idiot box

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 14:33:00 +0000

The current buzz about IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) makes me realize how rapidly some industries are evolving, and how relatively slowly the marketing profession is responding.

In 1998 I engineered an invitation to the Royal Television Society conference, the biennial Cambridge gathering of 200 of UK television’s elite. Much of the conference was spent in presentations, planning, and self-congratulation on the recent coverage of Princess Diana’s funeral. The only two presentations that still stick with me were a history professor’s singularly unpopular assertion that TV was creating news rather than simply reporting it (much hissing from the audience), and a demonstration of WebTV by the now CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer.

At the time a mere VP, Steve Ballmer was actually heckled. From the audience I heard all the superior snickers of disbelief and the whispered dismissals of the very notion that television might become interactive. The leading decision-makers in the industry were so conditioned by their past experiences of television that they could not conceive that any significant change might be possible, let alone desirable.

I had seen WebTV unveiled a couple of years earlier in New York, before Microsoft acquired it, and had been captivated by the notion that you no longer needed a computer to surf the web. In those days I was all about convergence, and would assail anyone who would listen with my predictions that TV, the web, and mobile telephony would collide and facilitate revolutions in entertainment, communication, and education. Of course this was not original thinking – lots of people were working toward achieving that convergence, and it was an uphill battle.

One of the people at the conference who I tried in vain to convert was a producer of Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast, whose resolute position was something like: “The internet is rubbish. I’d rather have my children watching TV than wasting their time online. You can’t get more educational than a television documentary.” The Big Breakfast was at least innocent, entertaining, predictable, and vaguely informative. But, to my mind, it seemed more worthy of the “rubbish” label than much of what was available online.

The singular lack of vision, with an edge of defensiveness, demonstrated among the television cognoscenti at the time was frustrating, but not unexpected. Even highly intelligent and wonderfully creative people have their limiting horizons and their comfort zones.

What is remarkable to me is not so much that attitudes and behaviors have changed, but how rapidly they changed. The technologies have advanced significantly in the past decade, but so too has our willingness to use them. Our notion of what a computer is has dissolved – it is no longer a grey box under a desk connected to the world with cables, but a palm-sized clam-shell on our hip. It has become almost second nature to take and send images and video using a mobile phone. E-commerce is rapidly going mobile – in Japan you can rent a car, or even get a Coke from a vending machine, by pushing a few buttons on your phone. Bloggers proliferate, entertainment and commerce exploit new media, and news coverage and commentary have decentralized and gone real-time. Now, with the imminent arrival of the millions of channels made available by IPTV, convergence is almost total.

But what of marketing? Where are the revolutions in thinking, the exploitation of new possibilities, the creativity and experimentation? I still work with companies, some with seemingly limitless resources, who are slowly “putting their ads online” and trying to catch up with a paradigm that now belongs in the last century. It baffles me why we in marketing are so slow to evolve. Our role in training is to prepare brands for the future, yet we cling tenaciously to the past.

Is it because marketers define themselves too narrowly, and think of themselves in “activity” terms instead of in “outcome” terms? Or is it because companies don’t consider the value that marketing can bring to the organization is sufficient to justify the potential cost of innovation? Or is it, perhaps, that the current generation of management is still conditioned by its own past experiences, and is not capable of seeing that marketing does not have to be that way? I know that we have only recently accepted the benefits of online engagement, but perhaps we should continue to peer over the horizon instead of settling into a new zone of comfort?

If you did not have a website or the capacity to run TV or print ads, but you and all your target customers had web-enabled mobile camera-phones, how would you exploit the technology more efficiently and effectively help build your brands and grow revenues?

Constructive disruption, presence and focus in a wireless world

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Mon, 16 May 2005 14:54:00 +0000

The other day I was running a workshop to define competitive strategies at a client company. Five minutes after the scheduled start time the first few participants wandered in. Twenty minutes later everyone was there. Were these lapses in discipline clues to their competitive problems, or simply the way it is in business today?

The fact that everyone was eventually there physically, did not mean they were mentally present. Mobile phones vibrated constantly. Blackberries were consulted obsessively. People left the room to take calls. Thumbs compulsively punched out SMS messages. Much of the communication was task-related, with people seeking input from clients and colleagues or remotely accessing data on their desktops; much of it had nothing to do with the task at hand. Yet the work got done, everyone contributed effectively, and the result was better than any had hoped for.

This apparent lack of focus is not a unique phenomenon, nor is it a recent development. But it has become more and more pervasive over the past few years. There was a time when I would ban mobile phones from meetings. Then I simply banned their ringing out loud. I realize that we are living in a radically different communication paradigm to that of a few years ago. We are now able to multitask in a way that was simply not done in the 1980s. Back then, most people did not have the skills or the tools to “parallel process” productively, and if they did, it was something done in the privacy of their own office. Politeness was our way of denying that we were unable to do many things at once without chaos, or apparent rudeness, ensuing. It’s interesting how digital deftness has corroded punctuality and redefined attentiveness, by changing our sense of time, place, and focus.

Our perceptions of what is "normal" behavior are determined by the habits of our most familiar peer groups. Over the years I have done a lot of work in various Latin American and Asian countries, South Africa, and most of Europe. In a business meeting context, the sensitivity to punctuality and attentiveness is always less cultural than contextual, and within that context you cannot make sweeping statements about national cultural attitudes or behaviors because corporate culture plays a major role in guiding those attitudes.

There are a couple of companies that I have worked with in Mexico and Brazil where -- counter to the false national stereotype of unreliability and lack of urgency -- I am always the last to arrive at my meetings, the other participants eagerly glancing at their watches as start time approaches. Conversely, there are companies in the US and UK where -- counter to the false national stereotype of task-focused discipline -- I have given up expecting more than half of the participants to be punctual, and where participants come and go at will (physically or mentally) throughout the meeting. Our concept of appropriate ground rules for interacting in a formal business meeting, no matter what its purpose, is being changed, not by e-learning, but by a growing culture of constructive disruption.

Some of us, fortunate enough to have graduated in the age of Aquarius, are most comfortable with the lava-lamp mindset, where we can endlessly watch things unfolding slowly and elegantly. We were succeeded by the MTV generation, a society of sound/video-bite junkies, who couldn't focus for more than 15 seconds on anything unless it moved dramatically, constantly. Then the post-MTV perpetually-looping CNN mode of communication produced people who assume that there is no beginning or end, believing that they can always catch up no matter where they start or how often they get distracted.

That fractured attention span seems to be getting even more fragmented with the advent of SMS and other remote communication technologies. The latest generation of company recruits thinks and behaves in genuine non-linear random-access modes. This internet generation, the “digital natives” born into a world where personal computers were already pervasive, is a society of text-bite junkies who can't think unless they are thinking about many things at once. To support this, text is making a comeback, fleshed out by a resurgence in cryptic iconography. Instant messaging, SMS, chat-room style communication, ticker-style news highlights on TV. All of it is text, but not as Shakespeare knew it. Text has a new Morse code that evolves and mutates daily. If u hve smthg 2 say, it takes 2 long to cre8 a pic. Or it did before camera phones came along. :-) LOL.

A picture is not worth a thousand words to communicators who can instantly infer complex meanings from cryptic alphanumeric string-sets. A picture is too limiting, too defined, too unambiguous, too unchallenging -- and way too unspontaneous.

Is internet culture overwhelming organisational culture? The digital divide (if we think of it in terms of those who have embraced connectedness versus those who just get by) is just getting wider. True, "smart mobs" can coalesce and disperse with split second precision. But these are funky folks on the fringe, not mainstream people in the workplace. What may become more pervasive, particularly as mobile phones become smarter and Wi-Fi becomes ubiquitous, is a blurring of the line that separates "presence" from "absence". Perhaps technology will be used to inflict punctuality and attentiveness. Or, more likely, technology and parallel-processing mental modes will make these concepts unnecessary, outmoded, and counter-productive.

Paid product placement in rap lyrics

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Tue, 05 Apr 2005 14:55:00 +0000

The concept of schizophrenic branding is not new. Marketers have always tried to target different messages to different markets using selective media. Of course there is always the fear that one positioning might undermine another. So how do you position luxury brands to the lavish-lifestyle hip-hop generation without turning off your primary staid and conservative markets? Through surgical internet targeting? Too technical. Through product placement? Not repetitive enough. How about through brand name placement in hip hop lyrics? I’m lovin’ it.

Great rockers of old regarded the use of their music in commercials as a sell-out or a breach of artistic integrity, and they stuck with it, at least till they turned fifty and the royalties started drying up. That’s when the Clash backs Pontiac, the Who hypes Nissan, and Led Zeppelin defibrillates Cadillac. Sell out or not, it works.

Rappers have no such qualms. In fact, the bling bling image is all about conspicuous association with elitist brands. Since 50 Cent dropped Courvoisier and Dom Perignon into his lyrics, they have gained recognition and street cred with the hip-hop crowd. Courvoisier has gone from “Huh? Say what?” to simply “Cou.” Jay-Z has had a similar effect on Bentley’s image and recognition, though fewer fans can afford to splash out on one of those. These were brands firmly associated with boring old f@rts, pretentious but effete jet-setters, and industrialists from nations beyond the scope of most peoples’ geographic competencies. Suddenly they are hip, and there is absolutely no danger that their “traditional” markets will ever find out. And it cost the marketing department nothing.

Enter McDonalds, stage right.

Enthralled with the apparent success of their “I’m lovin’ it” campaign, McDonalds has decided that some of that Cou effect would do the Big Mac a power of good. Rappers don’t sing about Big Macs without a little prodding, because a burger does not have the same fabulous decadent cachet as Dom Perignon. So McDonalds is offering a bribe: mention our product in your lyrics, and we’ll give you a kickback for any airtime you get. We’re talking significant money, enough to buy you two Big Macs for every time the product-placement song gets played. If I am not mistaken, that’s a lot more than the record company pays. Five bucks a spin? I’m in.

But will it be a sell out to commercialism? Will fans lose respect for the performers if they know the deal (and they will know the deal)? Will they reject the products pushed, or will they start eating more burgers with their Courvoisier? Now there’s an interesting research project.

Give your supermarket the finger

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 15:58:00 +0000

In September last year I suggested the JIT lattes concept: service businesses like fast-food outlets and coffee shops provide regular customers with RFID cards, so that on walking in the store the kitchen can be notified to prepare their normal order and shave minutes off the time it takes to process each customer.

But that means customers have to carry more plastic in their wallets. You get around this by ditching the card and injecting the RFID chip under the skin of the customer, as some European beach clubs are doing to help members leave their wallets back in the room-safe. But your average store customer is not yet ready to implant a bunch of Cyborgian chips in their bicep. Along comes biometrics, allowing German shoppers to now use their fingerprint to pay for groceries.

It's early days, of course, and privacy issues abound. I can see the CSI team earnestly looking to identify a partial print from a crime scene: "No hits on AFIS. Better try WalMart."

Will people who would go to court to prevent the government from getting their fingerprints on file be willing to let their supermarket have a record of their fingerprints? Of course they will. If e-commerce has taught us anything about consumers, it's that convenience beats out privacy and security every time. It's your finger -- don't leave home without it.

Chinese take-away: Asia eats America’s lunch

noreply@blogger.com (Godfrey Parkin) — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 16:00:00 +0000

To some, this was going to be The American Century with the US as the hub of a booming knowledge economy. Lower-paid menial jobs would go, and Americans would upgrade to higher-paid knowledge jobs. George Bush, when asked what he would say to someone who had just lost his job to someone in India, said he’d give that poor worker some money to get a better education in a community college. But many of those losing jobs to offshore companies don’t need community college educations, because they are already graduate engineers or PhDs in computer science. The White House has become an Ivory Tower.

Business Week has a fascinating breakdown of the impact of Chinese competition on the manufacturing sector in the US. But, alarming as it is, the problem is a lot larger and a lot more immediate than this article suggests. The focus of the article is mainly on what damage Chinese productivity and/or economics are doing to the manufacturing sector in the US, and the associated balance of trade issues.

Manufacturers are hurting, at least the smaller ones are. Retailers, however, currently benefit from sourcing cheap goods in China. But they also become dependent on their suppliers. WalMart is doing $18 billion with China this year, getting 70 percent of its stock there. WalMart is China's eighth largest trading partner, beating entire countries like Russia and Canada. It has taken only three years to get to this, and the process is accelerating. You’d think cheap suppliers make for good profits and sweet dreams. But if the CEOs of retailing companies are sleeping well at night they do not know what is going on.

A very high percentage of everything that US consumers buy comes from a factory in China. What happens when Chinese entrepreneurs wake up to e-commerce and disintermediate the entire US retail sector? Why would you pay $500 for a designer suit at Macy's when you can get the same suit from the same factory online for $50? $35 for a blender at Target, or $5 for the same thing online? A couple of Chinese Amazon.coms and a Chinese FedEx could cripple one of the few sectors in the US where employment is currently growing. And it could happen overnight.

One telling quote from the Business Week article: "Can China dominate everything? Of course not. America remains the world's biggest manufacturer, producing 75% of what it consumes, though that's down from 90% in the mid-'90s." Of course not?? If we have lost that much that fast, we can lose a lot more even faster. Disbelief in its own vulnerability is one of Americas biggest obstacles.

That's why I get annoyed when politicians in both camps talk about the slump in the US economy as if it is something cyclical that we will pull out of. It is a one way street. In the interests of achieving quarterly profit targets and pumping up the immediate value of our investments, we are offshoring everything to an Indian-Chinese hemisphere that will be eating our lunch by the time the next Olympics take place, appropriately in Beijing. The US has bigger problems to deal with than terrorism, but the next round of White House cabinet appointments will probably not reflect any of these concerns.

The US is negligently imperiling the future of its economy with a callous disregard that makes Enron seem benign. That may seem like the jingoistic ranting of an extremist, or worse, a Sinophobe. But the facts are these:

The American scientific/engineering base is weakening – enrollments in graduate and post-graduate courses are down by huge percentages
Numbers of foreign students coming to America to study and stay are way down
We are not producing or importing the critical mass of brilliant minds that we used to
China and India produce many more scientists and engineers every year than the US
China and India are capable of innovative thinking and good design, not just sweatshop work

Combine the massive growth in China’s economy with its urgent need for oil, and we could see the US being outflanked in the Middle East, further compounding America’s economic problems.

American retailers are endangered, but do large American manufacturers care? They are investing heavily in having a manufacturing base right there in China to supply not American demand but the enormous demand that is coming from increasingly affluent (relatively) Chinese consumers. They know how the boom years in the 50s and 60s made them giants, as newly-middle-class Americans put refrigerators and washing machines and TV sets in their new homes. They did well out of a couple hundred million Americans -- there are a couple of billion potential consumers in India and China. But the profits will probably not make it back to the US, because financial headquarters are being offshored too, to tax havens.

Corporate America apparently no longer values having brain-power or talent on the domestic payroll – the notion of human capital as an investment is being replaced with the notion of human ingenuity as an expense. If our money, our designers, our R&D, our manufacturing, our management, our business partners, our suppliers, and our major markets are all in Asia, where does that leave the USA?

Figuring out creative ways to survive what will surely become known as the Chinese decade should be a national priority.