Businessweek has a great short piece by Marshall Goldsmith describing the five steps you need to take to become an effective leader.

Often this kind of material is more about the writer’s prejudices than evidence-based advice. Goldsmith drew on a study of 86,000 people working in major corporations before devising his list – so I suppose this might be better titled “increase your corporate leadership effectiveness”.

Goldsmith says the jury is out on whether great leaders are born that way (in fact he asks his readers for their opinions on this). However, he argues the essential skills are not hard to learn.

One tip I particularly like is:

Periodically ask co-workers for suggestions on how you can do an even better job in your selected behaviors for change.

I may not always like what I hear when I get feedback, but good or bad it is always welcome.

How to Increase Your Leadership Effectiveness – BusinessWeek.

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Plaxo is part social media tool, part address book. It’s a useful way of keeping contacts names and addresses up-to-date. Useful, but in my opinion not as elegant or as handy as alternatives such as Linkedin.

The company and its product have a chequered history. In the earlier days Plaxo messages would turn up in my email all the time. The looked like spam and were extremely annoying. The company climbed aboard the cluetrain and the unpleasant stuff stopped.

While I understand Plaxo needs to make money – don’t we all? I’m not sure the company’s current approach is going to work. It certainly doesn’t work for me.

Plaxo operates a so-called “Freemium” business model. The basic product is free, if you want to do more with the tools you have to pay. In theory it’s a good business model and there are many cases where it works well.

I’ve recently come across three ways Plaxo aims to get money from me. I don’t think I’d pay for any of these:

1. Outlook sync. This was free, with a paid-for version allowing more features. Now sync is part of Plaxo Premium and costs US$60 a year – around a NZ$100 give or take exchange rate fluctuation.
2. Then there’s Plaxo Pro available in three versions; Basic, Plus and Power. The Power version is a whopping US$250 a month and essentially provides you with a way to spam Plaxo members. It includes Premium.
3. Then there are e-cards, basically electronic birthday cards and similar stationary at a cost of US$20 a year.

You can forget the e-cards straight away. Why would I ever want to pay US$20 to send them? I’ve no need or inclination to spam people, which rules out Plaxo Pro. Which brings us to Plaxo Premium – paying for support is fair enough. Paying for the ability to back-up is reasonable. Paying to remove duplicates is a bit on the nose, but we’ll let that go. I can’t use the sync to Windows Mobile and I used the Sync to Outlook when it was free and was not overly impressed.

Plaxo is an OK online address book. It’s not a useful to me as Facebook or Linkedin. It has around 15 million users – Linkedin has 43 million, mainly business oriented users, Facebook has 300 million. Which one of those is the most valuable? Certainly not Plaxo.

Double standards from News Corp. on paid content battle? write Mark Fletcher at the excellent Australian Newsagency Blog. Fletcher says while Murdoch is busy making noises about paid content online, railing against free news on the net and fighting Google, he isn’t ready to charge an economic cover price on the print editions of his papers. This, says, Fletcher, means newsagents distribute News Corporation publications at a loss.

My this subject has just become more interesting.

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Lijit looked like it could be useful. It’s a search application installed on this site as a Wordpress plug-in. You can see the Lijit search widget about halfway down the sidebar on the right of this screen.

In theory Lijit improves Wordpress search and drags in social network content. I’ve seen no evidence of this.

So far, after a month or so of using the plug-in it’s been used a total of 16 times. Over that period there have been more than 5300 visitors to the site, so the strike rate is incredibly low. No-one has clicked the button in past week.

There was a fancy-looking Lijit widget, but this was the slowest-loading part of my site, so I switched back to the plain text version. This may explain why there’s so little activity.

I’m going to persevere for a few more weeks, but unless I can find a good reason to stick with Lijit, I’m going to drop the application.

Is there something important about Lijit I’m simply not getting here?

When it comes to free PC security applications Panda Cloud Antivirus is hard to beat. I first wrote about it in August, since then it’s moved forward slightly, but the software is still relatively unknown. However, I suspect it will quickly gather momentum as people catch on to the software.

Unlike other security tools, Panda does most of its work in the cloud – that is, it is a software-as-a-service application. It sends data about dangerous looking files off to its servers for closer inspection.

Because your computer doesn’t have to do the hard work, Panda imposes almost no overhead. When I benchmarked my PC there was no performance difference between the system running the software and having the software switched off – there may however be a network overhead, but again, nothing I could measure.

Panda’s other big advantage is the malware checking database is always bang-up-to-date. There are no signature files to download.

One issue I have with Panda is the program is so trouble-free, it is easy to forget. You barely notice it. I previously described Microsoft’s Security Essentials as “barely there” – Panda Cloud is even more nebulous.

The program also appears to be better than the other free antivirus products at trapping malware. I previously ran it for a month without any issues and have run it for the past three or four days with no ill effects.

I’d say it is the most promising free anti-virus application on offer. Presumably at some point the developers will need to make some money. I’ll be interesting to see how that develops. For now, this is possibly the best free choice.

Of course, you may prefer not to leave your computer’s protection in the hands of free software makers.

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Rob O’Neill’s front page story on today’s Computerworld draws on research by US-based Objectwatch saying the total cost of IT failure in New Zealand is $5.4 billion a year. The story is not online at the time of writing.

Objectwatch’s CTO, Roger Sessions calculated the cost globally, for the US and for New Zealand saying the number includes the indirect costs as well as direct costs.

The number seems unusually large for two reasons:

• First. For a country with around 4.3 million people Sessions’ waste amounts to around $1280 per person or roughly three percent of GDP* – in plain English that means IT failure wastes one out of every 20 dollars earned in New Zealand.
• Second. According to IDC numbers in a press release issued in August New Zealand’s total IT market was worth $5,911 million in 2008 and is growing at 3.6 percent. So Sessions’ statement could be interpreted as saying the money spent on IT is wasted.

On this basis we’d be better offer dumping computers and switching back to trusty old adding machines.

* That’s my calculation. I used the Investment New Zealand estimate of GDP.

Willie Sutton understood.

When the legendary US bank robber explained why he robbed banks, he said it’s because “that’s where the money is”.

If Sutton were alive today, he’d be plugged in to the net.

Sutton’s heirs reached the same conclusion. Criminals cottoned-on to online early in the piece. They’ve been active almost as long as computers have used telephone lines to swap data.

In fact the early computing underground grew out of phone phreaking – a murky, highly technical game where the aim was to access the world’s telephone lines without paying tolls.

Computer crime started in the 1960s

The first widely reported cases of computer crime Came in the 1960s. During the early days, electronic misdemeanours were usually inside jobs.

An explosion in online communications over the past 15 to 20 years has seen the problem grow in size and scale. Insiders remain a large part of computer crime, but these days the emphasis is more on external activity.

United States Department of Justice statistics show that reported online crime cases increased 43 percent between 1977 and 1999. However, the statistics also note that online crime is notoriously under reported. This means nobody knows for certain, but anecdotal evidence says that many companies are paying blackmailers and sweeping theft under the carpet in the hope that other online criminals don’t notice their vulnerabilities.

Some hope.

Online crime is everywhere

The tentacles of online crime reach everywhere. A 1998 report by Pricewaterhousecoopers (pwc) found 73 percent of US companies experienced a security breach in the previous year. Incidentally, matching this figure against reported online crime confirms companies only report a fraction of incidents.

The numbers have stayed at roughly the same level for the past decade. A survey conducted earlier this year Forrester Consulting on behalf of Veracode found two-thirds of UK companies reported a security breach in the past year. More recently Beverly Head at iTWire in Australia reported; “Small and medium Australian enterprises are particularly vulnerable to computer security breaches, with the average SME breach costing $37,661″.

Insiders give way to outsiders

It’s interesting to look at who is behind the attacks. The ten-year old pwc report found that authorized employees were responsible for 58 percent of the reported breaches in 1998.

In a later report by the same company, pwc technology risk specialist Mark Lobel noted in 1999 only 14 percent of reported security breaches were attributed to hackers. By early 2000 hackers accounted for 50 percent of all online break-ins.

There’s a clear shift away from online crimes committed by disgruntled employees – other surveys have found a correlations between corporate restructuring and internal compromises of computer security – to crimes committed by outsiders.

In part this move away from insider jobs reflects better security rules, tighter control and more all round professionalism on the part of corporate IT departments. However, like any effective local policing operation, the main upshot is that the criminals have moved elsewhere.

Yet amazing companies are still in denial about the external threat. Last month SC Magazine reported Businesses skeptical about external hacking. Iain Thomson writes:

A global survey of IT managers from IDC and sponsored by Dimension Data has shown that the vast majority think that having the company hacked from the outside is highly unlikely.

Changing nature of computer crime

The nature of internal security breaches is also changing. In the past employees would either vandalise their employer’s systems as an act of revenge or use them to steal money.

For example, in May 2000 network administrator Tim Lloyd was found guilty of sabotaging the company network he spent years of his life building. The cost to his employer, Omega Engineering, was more than US$12 million. Lloyd plotted the destruction as his standing in the company diminished. Then, three weeks after his sacking, the system ground to a halt after a software time bomb deleted almost all the company’s programs and data.

These days, external problems are more likely and are more often criminal money-raising exercise than retribution.

Called to the dark side

There’s another force coming into play. The kids who were hackers back in the glory days of 1980s were mainly idealistic. They hacked for fun, the approval of their peers or just to show off their skills. Today these people are middle-aged They have mortgages, schools fees and other bills to pay. Many are successful. A minority are not. The temptation to go over to the dark side is strong.

In February 2000, Mark Rasch of Global Integrity Corporation appeared before an US senate appropriations subcommittee and told politicians that today’s employees are more likely to steal sensitive customer or market information before they head off and form and float their own dot.com company. I’ve personally witnessed this in the last few years – it’s not funny.

Underlining his point, Rasch said that theft of proprietary information and intellectual property increased by 15 percent since 1998. He also testified that unauthorized access by insiders has increased 28 percent and system penetration by external parties increased 32 percent from 1998. Both statistics support other data showing the threat is moving outside of companies.

ERP is risky

In his report for pwc, Lobel writes that trade-secret theft and information loss is three times higher in businesses employing electronic supply chains, ERP or e-commerce and that revenue loss is seven times more likely to hit e-commerce sites than non-e-commerce sites.

He writes;

About 60% of those who sell products or services on the Web report at least one or more security breaches a year, 22% experience information loss and 12% suffer data and trade-secret theft. More than half of those with non-transaction sites report one or more incidents. And the number of hits from outsiders is on the rise.

Reports from organizations as diverse as the Australian Federal Police, the Computer Security Institute, the FBI and the United Nations all confirm the rising menace of cybercrime. At the same time as online crime increases in value and number of attacks, it is also increasing in its scope.

Today the range of activities is wider and wilder than ever. For example the early part of the decade saw the rise of denial of service (DOS) attacks. These are events where e-commerce sites are effectively rendered unable to perform transactions because a large amount of dummy traffic jams incoming data lines. A spate of DOS attacks in late 1999 and early 2000 took high-profile sites like Yahoo!, ebay and Amazon.com offline.

International crime

Another disturbing trend is the cross border nature of computer attacks. Five years ago almost all computer crime was local – that is criminals and their victims were located in the same country. Today crimes are conducted remotely. The most visible hot spots are Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union.

And then there’s China. Some experts suspect, with some justification the country’s government is either sponsoring or turning a blind eye to organised computer crime. And China isn’t the only suspect.

Authorities everywhere have finally caught up with the technology. They now recognise the potential to commit crimes using computers and other information technology tools is one of the greatest law enforcement problems of our times.

They could have reached that conclusion quicker if they remembered Willie Sutton – because online is where today’s money is found.

You’ll find good backgrounders and explainers on knowledge management all over the web. But most assume the reader works in a large, or at least medium-sized company with plenty of resources.

On the other hand, Michela Ledwidge’s excellent Knowledge management 101 published by the Australian Nett magazine provides an overview for smaller businesses and entrepreneurs.

As Lewidge says;

Knowledge management is one of those terms you have probably heard but dismissed as something only big companies do.

She then goes on to explain why you should at least think about knowledge management and how you can get started.

I only read it 30 minutes ago and I’m already exploring Zoho CRM and looking up other tools.

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I can’t honestly tell you if AVG Free 9.0 offers decent PC security. That’s because the application was so annoying and imposed such an overhead on my home desktop I deleted it before testing finished. Sometimes free is too high a price.

AVG Anti-Virus Free 9.0 is still only two weeks old. It arrived about the same time as Windows 7 and is compatible with Microsoft’s new operation system.

I downloaded the file in late October to test on my desktop running Windows 7 release candidate version. The program is available at AVG’s free web site – but as I’ll explain in a moment, I don’t recommend it.

It’s only a small download at 869Kb – it takes seconds with broadband. The initial file is actually a down-loader application which fetches and installs the actual software.

While process is easy enough, the second screen you see is only the start of what becomes an annoying and shrill sales pitch which is designed to control your choices and trick you in to paying money. It appears AVG has learnt from the scam artists the software promises to protect you from.

Flakiness abounds

Your first choice is to select either the free basic protection, or a 30-day trial of the company’s comprehensive protection. Notice the way this choice is presented. The implication is that responsible people will choose the second option – which means in 30 days AVG will ask yu to hand over money. Don’t worry – you’ll get plenty more opportunities to pay AVG if you choose not to do so at this point.

I thought I was downloading the free software – that’s what I clicked on at the AVG web site – so that’s what I proceeded with.

During the download AVG asks you to remove existing anti-virus software. This makes sense, anti-virus applications can conflict with each other and anyway, as each program imposes an overhead, the performance drop can multiply.

Annoyingly AVG doesn’t remove the other software. It’s install halts and opens the Windows uninstaller so you manually remove it. Even more annoyingly the AVG installer closes itself at this point – you need to hunt around in your download folder to find it and start all over again – by now many megabytes have been wiped off your download cap.

Click, click, bloody click

There’s a lot of clicking throughout this process – some of it unnecessary. Then you are asked if you wish to install the AVG Security Toolbar. It’s recommended. The software has also helpfully pre-selected the option to change your default search engine to Yahoo. This is spam – of a sort. In both cases I choose No. It’s actually tricky – if you click off the first box, the Yahoo box stays ticked but grayed out. This can only be designed to trick you into selecting the search engine choice.

At this point the installer had to close Firefox. Not wanting to be sent all the way back to the start rather like that horrible long snake at the end of a game of Snakes and Ladders, I clicked to close Firefox held my breath. Phew. The install resumes. At this point we are now 40 minutes into the process. Even at minimum wage rate this free anti-virus program has cost me the price of lunch and a clutch of grey hairs.

Finally

Suddenly the process is over. A box appears telling me the install has finished. But wait, what is this? More stuff to click. Do I agree to give anonymous information? Oh alright then. And now would I like to receive spam? (Sorry news and alerts). Please enter your email address. Are you kidding? No.

While AVG starts its first scan. I reload Firefox. In the meantime I notice the program has installed an icon on my Windows desktop. Did I ask for this? No I damn well did not. AVG asks tons of questions during the install – but doesn’t allow me to choose whether the icon despoils my desktop. At this point I’m starting to get annoyed.

Not responding

Meanwhile Firefox is failing to load. What’s going on here? There was a string of open tabs – none of them are visible. Windows tells me Firefox is “not responding”.

Eventually – more than an hour after the first download, Firefox opens. And what’s this? AVG has installed AVG Safe Search. Is this the toolbar I choose not to install? The name is different, so let’s assume it isn’t the same thing. I wasn’t warned or asked about it, but hey, let’s go with the flow for a moment.  So, Firefox opens at the home page – my tags are all lost.

At this point the AVG software is scanning my computer looking for viruses. I open up the scanner’s display and see what looks like a banner ad for the paid for software at the bottom of the screen.  Fair enough, the software was free and these people have to eat. I can accept a little advertising as the price to pay for free anti-virus.

But it has to go

Before long my computer started crashing, randomly. And things started being very s l o w   l i ke  w a d i n g t h r o u g h m o l a s s e s. There could be only one explanation for this. I removed AVG, reinstalled Microsoft Security Essentials and performance returned to normal.

Of course, you mileage may vary. AVG may rock your boat. But for me it has proved so disastrous I couldn’t even test its efficiency as an anti-virus tool. I give it zero stars out of five.

See: Microsoft’s barely there Security Essentials

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An interesting piece at Computerworld about the father of modern management and the first person to use the phrase “knowledge worker”. I’m not sure about describing Drucker as a “life coach” though – it’s a term I’ve learnt to mistrust.

Peter Drucker as Life Coach: Book Shares His Wisdom.

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