CIO - Blog: Something is Happening Here

Writing in the CIO.com Soapbox blog, Michael Hugos shares some of his ideas on generational differences and the changing nature and definition of work: 

This new global economy is clearly about more than just working hard. Innovation and agility don't happen by doing the same old things over and over, harder and harder. What other things might smart people with clear eyes be able to tell me? Innovation is what happens when we integrate different views into new visions.

For as long as I've been drawing a paycheck -- a process that started during the Nixon administration -- I've heard about the importance of working smart, as opposed to working hard.  I never interpreted that as  an indictment of hard work, or encouragement to figure out how to game the system. I took it as encouragement to always have my head in the game, and to always strive to find better ways of doing what I had to do.

Nixon's dead, I'm feeling every day of my 53-plus years, and the world has certainly changed.  But it always has, and it always will. The only difference now is that the pace of change in the first decade of the 21st century is so much faster than it was in the entire last half of the 20th century.  Keeping up isn't getting any easier, but what are the alternatives?

Michael's post also includes this:

A guy named Joe observed "The baby-boomers frequently draw distinctions between 'work' and 'play'. If it's 'work', it's not fun. If it's 'fun', it's not work." He went on to say, "The notions of 'hard work' and 'paying your dues' are clearly lost on the millenials. But is that really such a bad thing? Does it not also make sense, in today's electronic world, to encourage smart, efficient and creative work? In the post-industrial era, is 'hard' work really more valuable than 'fast' work, 'good' work or 'fun' work?"

And this:

But in my more creative moments I know there are insanely great new things to be done with this new stuff. There's lots of fun to be had and there's money to be made too if we can put it all together in innovative ways. Working hard is fine but it's just as important to work fast and have fun. In a world where pensions are going away and working at the some company for your whole career is a thing of the past, we need to think about new ways to motivate people and new ways to produce value. It's time to get inspired.

Give that man a cigar.

Thanks to the Internet and the explosion of technology, we have entered an age unlike any before in human history.  The temporal, spatial, and national boundaries that once separated people have little meaning or relevance in an information economy.  This presents unprecedented opportunities for those willing to take advantage.  But that means accepting change as a constant, and accepting the perpetuity of a 90-degree learning curve.

In this new age, we all have to pay our dues, all the time, regardless of age or generation. We have to work hard at working smart.  

It's the price of participation. 

It's what drives innovation.

But it's also the price of emancipation from the old boundaries and limitations.  If you had the choice, would you really want to spend thirty years at the same job?

Technorati Tags: innovation , career , technology , boomers

Down, but not Out of Ideas in American Democracy

A story in yesterday's WSJ (Have a Laptop? You, Too, Can Sway New Hampshire Race)   presents an interesting illustration of the important role citizen journalists are playing in American politics:  

The Blue Hamsters, as the three bloggers sometimes call themselves and their readers, represent a new class of political amateurs who are changing the way information flows to activists. In Iowa, there's "Bleeding Heartland," a Democratic site founded by a college student. In Florida, Democratic bloggers recently formed the "Blog Florida Blue" coalition. Republicans are getting into the act, too, with sites like South Carolina's "Palmetto Scoop," which serves up bits of news.

The story is significant in that it offers insight into the important role these and similar bloggers play in keeping a channel open between voters and political candidates the mainstream media has already deemed less than worthy of the kind of coverage granted to front runners.  

These back-of-the-pack candidates may not have a realistic shot at the White House, but the MSM shirks its Fourth Estate responsibilities and does a disservice to voters by ignoring their ideas. 

As the front runners maneuver to be all things to all people, the others have little to lose by saying what they really think.

Dennis Kucinich, for instance, has no chance in hell of becoming President - and maybe that's a good thing. But he's also one of the few candidates to actually speak his mind. That kind of honesty is too often missing from a democratic process that for decades has all the political validity and relevance of American Idol.

Independent citizen journalists -- like those in the WSJ article, and the people connected with Cleveland's own Meet the Bloggers, represent a vital new platform, and an important  step toward real democracy. They fill the gap left by the MSM by providing a public platform for those whose willingness to express original, challenging ideas makes them both unelectable in an increasingly superficial political climate, and indispensable in a truly democratic process.

Technorati Tags: politics , democracy , blogs , blogging , citizen journalist , grassroots journalism

EBay: The Place for Microfinance

From a 10/24/07 story in Business Week:

"Tracey Pettengill Turner doesn't want to give handouts to poor people. But she does want to make investments in them. So on Oct. 24, Turner is launching MicroPlace.com, a Web site that lets small investors provide low-interest 'micro' loans, of $50 or more, to would-be small business owners. Her hope is to create sustainable economic growth in the world's most impoverished communities—and do her part to expand the reach of the microfinance industry to more than 1 billion people worldwide, from about 100 million people currently."

Between microbusiness, microfinance, and this new service, there's no reason everyone can't get on the globalization bandwagon.

Read the article

Visit Microplace

When Mass Marketing Dies

From Seth Godin's Meatball Mondae (#2):

"The Meatball Sundae is an idea that's possibly even bigger than that one. When mass marketing dies, the future of the companies that embrace this approach dies too."

The bodies are already piling up: the recording industry, the movie industry, broadcast TV, radio, newspapers, are just the beginning.

A recent Wall Street Journal story (Wal-Mart Era Wanes Amid Big Shifts in Retail) offers evidence of how the giant retailer is losing ground in a rapidly evolving marketplace:

"[T]he Internet is transforming the retail definition of scale. The once-stunning compilation of 142,000 items found in a Wal-Mart supercenter doesn't seem so vast alongside the millions of products available on the Internet. At the same time, the cost of creating and sustaining a national brand is rising because of media fragmentation. Niche brands, created by Internet word of mouth, are winning shelf space and sapping profits required to fund big brands' advertising. Manufacturers such as Apple Inc. and Phillips-Van Heusen Corp., lacking the retail distribution or presentation they crave, are opening their own stores. One result is that retail giants hold less sway over their customers -- and over their suppliers."

Godin's insightful point is that it will take more than a change in marketing tools or strategy to adapt to the new business ecosystem. Companies have to actually evolve, not just change their stories.

The Wisdom of Penis-Obsessed Crowds

I subscribe to Yahoo's Most Emailed News RSS feed because it constitutes a reader-edited newspaper. I figure any story readers will actually take the time to email to someone is probably worth a glance. But sometimes the mix of stories is more interesting than the stories themselves.

For instance, over the last couple of days a theme has emerged. Consider the #3 story:

Woman sets fire to ex-husband's penis - Yahoo! News: "A woman set fire to her ex-husband's penis as he sat naked watching television and drinking vodka, Moscow police said Wednesday."

And here's the #5 story:

British dwarf's penis gets stuck to hoover - Yahoo! News "A dwarf performer at the Edinburgh fringe festival had to be rushed to hospital after his penis got stuck to a vacuum cleaner during an act that went horribly awry."

So maybe Yahoo needs a Penis News feed...

It's interesting to compare the stories on the Most Emailed feed with those on the Most Viewed feed. For instance, as I write this, the #1 Most Emailed story is about how moose burps contribute to global warming. Contrast that with the #1 Most Viewed story, about the latest efforts to detect signs of life in the Utah coal mine disaster.

If there's a common quality to the Most Emailed stories, it's that they are generally of an off-beat, if not outright upbeat nature. So on a collective basis it appears that readers filter out the most depressing or disturbing stories in favor of those that are the most entertaining. And why not -- bad news isn't difficult to find.

For Cities, Is Bigger Better?

Mhari Saito's article from NewsVOA.com describes an interesting application of Smallification:

The plan sounds simple, but Mayor Jay Williams says it's actually pretty radical. "I know for mayors, there are these magical round numbers," he says, "100,000 sounds great and somehow puts you in a different category, but why not be a city of 80 or 85,000 that offers a quality of life that allows you to compete?"

Outsourcing has brought greater efficiency to many companies by allowing them to concentrate on core capabilities. Similarly, there is mass migration underway among large corporations toward service-oriented architecture, a concept that deconstructs monolithic enterprise applications into smaller, stand-alone chunks of functionality. These chunks can be easily shared and reused across the enterprise to create "mash-up" applications.

The common theme here is the recognition that going smaller made more sense -- and ultimately more money -- in a networked, globalized marketplace. Mayor Williams' plans, as reported in Saito's article, reflect an understanding of the kind of evolution that large entities must undergo in order to survive the economic realities of a world that bears little resemblance to world that existed when the Rust Belt thrived

In a globalized, information-driven economy, where geographic location is irrelevant, quality of life is the only issue that really matters. When information workers can do their jobs anywhere, the decision about where to live will be based entirely on the livability of cities and individual communities. In that decision, size is little more than an aesthetic consideration.

Thanks to Ed Morrison's post on Brewed Fresh Daily for the pointer to the NewsVOA.com article.

Why SOA -- or something like it -- is important

Lev Gonick is the VP of Information Services for Case Western Reserve University and serves on the board of the OneCleveland initiative.

In a recent blog post on the the future of my favorite Rust Belt city, Gonick offers this assessment of how the digital world we thought we knew is in the midst of a massive upheaval:

For this generation, empowered by pervasive access, the internet has moved beyond a network of computers. It is, not to sound a cliché, a network of people. All over the world, more than 1 billion people are becoming empowered consumers, co-creating, collaborating, communicating and creating a global web 2.0. It took 15 years to reach the first billion internet users. The next billion to be connected to the Net will take only half as long and the impact will be powerful. Are we ready? This is a generation for whom email is passé, creating web pages are what your mother or father did, dial up is the equivalent for them as the horse and buggy for people of my generation. There are nearly 100,000 podcasts in iTunes. YouTube has over 100 million videos watched daily representing more than 60% of all videos watched on line. There are more than 60 million blogs with over 1.3 million entries and another 100,000 new bloggers being added to the rank of the self authoring voices on the web. Myspace has over 100 million accounts, and Flickr, the web 2.0 community's archive of community photographs has more than 4 million users.

The word "agility" gets tossed around so much in the discussion of SOA that it has lost its meaning. That's too bad, since the ability to adapt to a rapidly changing world will be an ever more important survival skill for any business. Anyone with a stake in the development and application of software will do well to keep that in mind. Maintaining the status quo is a tar pit.

Can the music industry sue its way to profit? - Los Angeles Times

The LA Times recently ran a fascinating op-ed series that pitted Radio and Internet Newsletter publisher Kurt Hansen against Jay Rosenthal, a partner with the Washington DC law firm Berliner, Corcoran & Rowe, an attorney for the Recording Artists' Coalition, and a member of the board for SoundExchange.

The final installment in the series, Can the music industry sue its way to profit?, deals with the pending massive increase in royalties to be levied on Internet broadcasters. Rosenthal's latest contribution includes this glaring example of the industry's obstinate refusal to acknowledge its utter cluelessness and obsolescence:

And now the question is why we don't allow webcasters to do the same thing as Napster and Grokster, but without protest. We should just back off. We should allow them to use the music without payment, perhaps calling it a form of "fair use" or rationalize it as promotion—which will surely result in an explosion of music sales or increased touring revenue or loads of merchandise sales or whatever.

The entire series is well worth reading.

Give that man/woman a cigar!

Someone using the nickname Windbag posted an excellent and insightful comment in response to Children of the Web, from BusinessWeek.com. Here's an excerpt from that comment:

"The internet, agent of universalization, can just as easily be a tool of differentiation and individuation. The trick here will be to recognize that the new local will not necessarily be geographic. We see this already at the political level, where international Islamic communities of various stripes are building homes on the net. The same is happening in nonpolitical areas. The next commercial marketing wave will recognize and exploit these new communities."

Hell yes.

Marketing Cleveland from the Bottom Up

Ed Morrison, weighing in on a discussion on Brewed Fresh Daily of efforts to market the city of Cleveland, offers this:

Efforts at sloganeering (mainline or guerrilla) waste time and money. In this age of transparency, authenticity is the only approach that works. So build a buzz about being an older industrial city willing to re-imagine itself by actually doing it.

Damn skippy!

Brewed Fresh Daily, and the blogs of so many in the BFD circle, have long been a part of an authentic, transparent, and passionate grassroots effort that continues to build buzz about Cleveland -- from the bottom up. The street-level events coverage, restaurant tips and reviews, and overall level of discourse -- political, cultural, and otherwise -- says a hell of a lot more about what's good and cool and truly interesting about Cleveland than any of the formalized, formulaic marketing campaigns I've witnessed in my 53 years in this town.

Does that mean there shouldn't also be mainstream campaigns? Of course not. But the real Cleveland emerges only in the aggregate of all of the various perspectives. No slogan will ever capture or communicate that emerging image.

The End of Software -- as We Know It

In Calling all disruptors: the perfect storm of SOA, SaaS, and open source beckons, ZDNet's Joe McKendrick addresses the disruptive impact of the death of the monolithic application:

...[T]he combined SOA, Software as a Service, and open source movements will drive the software and application industry to highly modular, building-block, assemble-to-order approach -- similar to the disruption Dell incurred on the computer hardware business. Monolithic applications will go away, and replaced
with modular, loosely coupled components.



Will there be application "Dells" that will begin to eat the lunch of the SAPs and Oracles of the world? Stay tuned. The SOA/SaaS/open-source combination is a highly potent disruption force, and we ain’t seen nothing yet. As Winston Damarillo put it: "There are opportunities for commercial vendors -- as Dell did with hardware -- that create an assembly of components into a stack, manage the versions, and deliver it to the customer."

Recognition of this (dare I say it?) paradigm shift is important across the board -- and the boardroom. The transformation to highly modular IT solutions (and highly modular everything else) represents an opportunity for businesses -- regardless of size -- to adapt to an ever-changing global marketplace that will continue to be reshaped and redefined by the Long Tail, the Flat World, and the Wisdom of Crowds.

The Smallification of Work

Free Agent Nation, Daniel H. Pink's great Fast Company article about the smallification of work, includes an interesting observation on the issue of job security:

[Deborah Risi, a 40 year-old, self-employed marketing professional] feels more invigorated than she ever did in a traditional job. No surprise there. But -- and this is one of the many counterintuitive truths of Free Agent Nation -- she also feels more secure. She pilots her work life using an instrument panel similar to the one she uses for her investments: plenty of research, solid fundamentals, and most of all, diversification. Just as sensible investors would never sink all their financial capital into one stock, free agents like Risi are questioning the wisdom of investing all their human capital in a single employer. Not only is it more interesting to have six clients instead of one boss; it also may be safer.

Like it or not, the population of Free Agent Nation is likely to expand, as corporations attempt to adapt to and leverage the Flat World. It's a sweeping change, to be sure, but for people who are prepared to to take advantage, this represents an opportunity to align Life and Work to produce something new, something better.

Connecting solar power and open source software

Jason Brooks, writing in his eWeek Linux and Open Source Blog, offers an interesting comparison between the impact emerging solar power technologies will have on traditional electric power generation companies, and the impact of Open Source software on Microsoft and similar players:

While the technologies required to harness the Sun's abundance remain, for now, on the horizon, the means to tap the equally unbounded intellectual potential of people around the world has already been invented—particularly where software is concerned. Just as new energy technologies will cut back on—and, in time, will likely erase—the need for massive, centralized power production infrastructures, the Internet is already dissolving the requirement that software be developed at and distributed from sprawling corporate campuses.

Not surprisingly, the companies who've counted on collecting cash from every person who consumes software—chief among these being Microsoft—are regarding these changes with no small measure of discomfort. Microsoft, having amassed the means to tap the unlimited store of human knowledge in a way that hadn't been possible for just anyone to do, is watching new technologies threaten to open up those unlimited stores of power and profit to anyone.

Yet another example of Smallification.

Fighting to maintain the Smallification of Music Broadcasts

I've already contacted my senators and representatives, urging them to support the Internet Radio Equality Act.

It's good to hear that efforts to combat the new royalty agreement that threatens the incredible diversity to be found on Internet "radio" stations as reported in NPR, Others Challenge Online Royalties, from Yahoo Finance.


This quote from that article puzzles me:

Normal radio stations don't pay those royalties for regular broadcasts since radio airplay is seen as having value for promoting sales of music CDs.

Is it possible that the people behind this boneheaded royalty plan can't see the promotional value of Internet music broadcasts? Given that sites like Pandora and others make it so easy to purchase songs/CDs from iTunes or online retailers, it's clear that the people behind the royalty plan have: a) never visited any of these sites, and/or b) have an interest in driving Internet music services out of business.

Smallificated Wind Power

Interested in wind-generated electric power, but concerned, for various reasons, about giant, whirling propellers? This article from CNET News.com discusses several companies that are taking a different, distributed approach:

Placing a 300-foot high turbine in downtown San Francisco is problematic. But distributed, or on-site, electricity generation systems can help customers get around the transmission bottlenecks and reliability problems of the wholesale electricity grid, Day said.

The idea is to place a network of much smaller wind turbines on rooftops in urban areas.

But why not extend that idea to individual homes? And what about adding photo-electric solar panels to the home mini-grid. Then instead of relying solely on large-scale power plants, we could generate cleaner, greener power through a distributed network of power-generating widgets.

Open Source, P2P, Weblogs, and Slime Mold

Back in 2003 I was gently coerced by cool dude and all-around smart guy and Daniel Steinberg into writing a blog for java.net. The item below is the only post I ever published on that site, reprinted in its entirety because it's what Smallification is all about.

Open Source, P2P, Weblogs, and Slime Mold

How often have you asked yourself, "What do Open Source software, peer-to-peer file sharing, and Weblogs have in common with, say, a big lump of disgusting mold?" Never? Neither have I. But that's no reason to leave the question unanswered.

In a chapter in Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, author Steven Johnson describes the apparent intelligence behind the activities of slime mold. Slime mold is just what it sounds like -- imagine a school cafeteria desert that's about three weeks past its prime and decides to venture out into the world. That's right, slime mold is self-propelled goo. But that's not the interesting part.

Slime mold is actually a collection of tiny, individual mold cells that get together when the mood strikes them to form into a single unit and move to a different neighborhood, where there's more of whatever it is slime mold needs to be healthy and happy. There's no central brain, no single point of consciousness, no hulked-out single cell with a big ego telling the other cells what to do. Each cell acts in its own self-interest. From this individual action emerges a collective intelligence, in this case a free-ranging aspic on a mission.

And so it is with OSS, P2P, and Blogs. The genuinely mind-boggling thing about these concepts is that never before in human history has there been a way to channel and capture the collective intelligence that emerges from the utter chaos of millions and millions of human brains all flailing away at who-knows-what. It's grid computing, using human grey matter instead of PCs. OK, maybe CB radio came close, but...

Think about what has already happened. The music business is in a major snit because the vast music listening public has discovered a way around cookie-cutter radio stations and other mass-media outlets that dictate what's hot and what's not. (Don't get me started...) If the business is to survive it must learn to tap into the emerging intelligence of the file-sharing community in order to identify the real markets. (Hint: there's more than one.)

OSS, P2P, and Blogs are collaborative concepts that embrace chaos. They reveal chaos as nothing more than a collection of problems that will solve themselves -- if we allow them to, if we learn to recognize the patterns in the eddies and currents of the human enterprise. These concepts and technologies allow us to finally catch up to slime mold, which figured this stuff out a long time ago.

Radio: Too Big for Its Own Good

Writing in The State of Radio, Plain Dealer reporter John Petkovic offers this:

To reduce costs, staffs were chopped, formats were programmed from afar and DJs were piped in - often making taped token references to a local market that were flown to a broadcast to make listeners think that the DJs were actually there.

That radio is losing market share to Internet radio, iPods, and similar alternatives is no surprise. The same failure to recognize the folly of a mass-market mindset has knocked the broadcast TV networks out of their perches.

Even cable networks now face unexpected competition from YouTube and similar sites, as viewers learn that real people can be -- by accident or design -- at least as interesting and entertaining as anything a studio or network can produce. While DVRs and On Demand programing have significantly changed viewing habits, the ability to use keyword searches and RSS to filter and access video programming gives YouTube and similar services a level of personalization the even cable TV can't match. Not yet, anyway.

As Petkovic's article reports, change is in the airwaves, as the realization sets in among stakeholders in broadcast radio that a return to a local focus might save their bacon. As TV networks begin to offer their content online, jeopardizing the role to the local TV station, it's likely that we can expect a similar shift to a more local focus, beyond that already available in news and sports coverage (though I'm loathe to use the term "news" to describe what is often presented).