The Obvious?

Money as debt

2008-10-11T17:19:10+01:00

I first watched this brilliant explanation of what is going wrong in the world of finance back in March but it keeps coming back to me and I thought others might appreciate it in the current circumstances.

It's only money

2008-10-11T16:53:25+01:00

The most valuable things in life are not measured in monetary terms.

The really important things are not houses and lands, stocks and bonds, automobiles and real state, but friendships, trust, confidence, empathy, mercy, love and faith.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) philosopher & mathematician

via Jon Husband

A comment on comments

2008-09-27T21:56:32+01:00

Noticed today that there have been more than 10,000 comments left on this blog.

Thanks to everyone who bothered!

Have I ever told you how much I love the web .....?

2008-09-25T17:17:13+01:00

Well things like these three links make me love it even more.

Wordia

Periodic Table Of Videos

12 Seconds

Thanks to net@night for the first two

Hyper local news

2008-09-16T18:09:40+01:00

Jay Rosen, amongst others, has been promoting the idea of hyper local news for some time -using the web to find out things that are never going to make it into current news and only hit the local papers after the event. Tonight when I arrived at Amersham station there were about 30 police, dogs and what appeared to be a metal detector being used to scan kids, I guess for knives. It seemed way over the top for a routine operation but a quick Google search for "amersham station police today" lead to this link which explained that it was!

It's only an hour ....

2008-09-13T07:32:22+01:00

.... but it took me too long to get around to investing it in this.

I hope you don't take as long.

"Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system"

2008-09-08T08:58:06+01:00

Clive Thompson's has a good article in WIRED about radical transparency and how some execs are dealing with it. Whether you think it is a good thing or not networked communication makes keeping secrets much harder than it ever has been and I have often argued that your best defense, as an individual or an organisation, is openness.

[Hat tip to Antony Mayfield for pointing to the article.]

Matt Moore on leadership

2008-09-08T07:19:17+01:00

If you want to be a leader then try some actual leading. Head off somewhere and see who comes with you. It needn't be somewhere hard to get to. If no one will come then ask them why. They may have some good reasons.

http://engineerswithoutfears.blogspot.com/

It was only a matter of time ....

2008-09-07T07:17:55+01:00

Join the campaign here

More on finding the good stuff

2008-09-03T06:58:53+01:00

Following on from my previous post about the power of the social web being partly the collective process of finding and pointing to good stuff David Smith has linked to this wonderful collection from The Observer of The 50 greatest arts videos on YouTube pulled together by Ajesh Patalay.

YouTube is best known for its offbeat videos that become viral sensations. But among its millions of clips is a treasure trove of rare and fascinating arts footage, lovingly posted by fans. Ajesh Patalay selects 50 of the best - Joy Division's TV debut, readings by Jack Kerouac, a Marlene Dietrich screen test, Madonna's first performance... and much more

There is a huge potential for individual curatorship like this where people earn reputations for being able to find and pull together quality content. One of my favourite blogs from way back is Mark Wood's Wood S Lot which has very little original content but is a wonderful collage of material from all sorts of sources assembled skillfully in interesting and often powerful combinations.

Google Launches Video For Businesses

2008-09-02T06:50:57+01:00

I have no idea how good this is but I do know people who will be very interested in it:

This morning Google is launching Google Video for business, a customized video platform aimed at businesses for internal use. Think training vides, HR videos, etc. (anything that isn’t outside facing). The product is included in Google Apps Premier Edition for free, with 3 GB of storage per user account.

This is a “Zero billion dollar market today” Director of Product Management Matthew Glotzbach said in a briefing about the product. The reason there’s no market, though, is that it’s a huge pain to build a video infrastructure for internal use. Google Video for business aims to make that trivially easy.

http://www.techcrunch.com

Finding the good stuff

2008-08-30T21:00:48+01:00

I was listening to Twit the other day when the contributors were talking about their concern that too many blogs "just" pointed to stuff. I am not so sure that this is a problem and sort of rests on the, mistaken in my view, assumption that blogging has to be like journalism.

One of the original uses of blogs was to point to stuff and to add comment about why it was interesting enough to point to. A lot of the benefit I get from the bloggers in my aggregator is their ability to find and point to good stuff related to my interests and concerns. Yes there is also great original content in there but even if all they did was point to stuff I would still get value from subscribing to them.

This relates to a conversation I am having with someone in a news agency where I am arguing that part of the work of agencies has always been "finding the good stuff" from the mix of paid journalists, stringers and freelancers and is this so different from building a brand on finding the good stuff on the web?

The "collaboration" word

2008-08-30T19:30:02+01:00

It bugs me the way people seem to set out to make things harder than they need to be - no doubt in an attempt to make themselves seem clever and their software indispensable. One of the words that press my buttons currently is "collaboration". How have we managed to turn talking to each other into such a fad? An e-mail exchange I have just had reminded me of my attempt to come up with one of those one liners to describe my BBC job that I was called on to do with depressing regularity. I suggested ""Increasing the frequency and quality of the conversations that get your job done". I still rather like it.

Hang in there

2008-08-16T06:38:58+01:00

I suggested to a potential client yesterday that one of my main functions is to be a shoulder to cry on for those in organisational life willing to step up to the mark and initiate change. The following quote from Machiavelli picked out by Dave Snowden sums it up nicely:

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things; for the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order; this lukewarmness arising partly from the incredulity of mankind who does not truly believe in anything new until they actually have experience of it

Career advice

2008-08-14T06:42:05+01:00

Thanks to David Smith for pointing to and summarizing this wonderful post from George Monbiot
be wary of following the careers advice your college gives you.

... What the corporate or institutional world wants you to do is the complete opposite of what you want to do. It wants a reliable tool, someone who can think, but not for herself: who can think instead for the institution.

... my second piece of career advice echoes the political advice offered by Benjamin Franklin: whenever you are faced with a choice between liberty and security, choose liberty.

... my final piece of advice is this: when faced with the choice between engaging with reality or engaging with what Erich Fromm calls the “necrophiliac” world of wealth and power, choose life, whatever the apparent costs may be.

... You know you have only one life. You know it is a precious, extraordinary, unrepeatable thing: the product of billions of years of serendipity and evolution. So why waste it by handing it over to the living dead?"

My biggest regret is that it took me so long to learn these lessons - hopefully if you read Monbiot's post you will learn them quicker

A bit of an adventure

2008-08-03T18:02:08+01:00

Last night I was woken from deep sleep at around 4.00 am by the sound of screeching tires and a loud crash. As I woke I wasn't sure whether I had dreamt the noise or not but as we live on a fast road near a dangerous junction I thought I had better check.

Having put some clothes on I took a look outside and there in the dark, mist and rain was the back end of a sports car with the front buried in a tree and the driver moaning and calling "Someone help" "Get me out of here". I made a quick 999 call then grabbed an old jacket and a torch and ran over to get a better look. There was this young lad, barely conscious with a fair bit of blood on him, both air bags having gone off and the whole of the front end of his Porsche crumpled.

My first thought was that there was a hell of a strong smell of petrol and I needed to get him out of the car as fast as possible. I was wary of moving him in case he was badly injured but reckoned if the car went up he was going to get a lot worse. I had to haul the damaged door open and then tried to lift him. Initially he seemed in too much pain and I was worried that his legs may have been damaged so i stopped. By this time my wife had joined us with a fire extinguisher and my first thought was to get her to keep back in case the car exploded and the kids lost both their parents right outside their front door!

The driver was becoming a bit more active by this time and his legs were obviously OK so with his help I was able to pull him from the car and sit him on the edge of the road. He was talking about his daughter and appeared worried that she had been with him so I did a quick scan around with my torch but there was no sign of any other passengers. The driver soon got on his feet and was agitated and wanting to walk away. A neighbour had now joined us by this time and we both kept persuading him to stay where he was until the ambulance arrived. He started walking along the road and we were following him, keeping him safe when at last the police arrived and moments later an ambulance.

I won't go into detail about the subsequent conversations with the police but we soon headed back to the house and tried to get some more sleep. By the time we got up again the car had gone and the only sign of what had happened was the damage to the tree.

Looking back it all seems a bit dream like and has left me feeling tired and unsettled. I may never get to know how he is or the full story as to what happened but at least he walked away in one piece.

Women

2008-07-30T09:22:12+01:00

Contrast this with this and consider where the future lies.

News?

2008-07-30T06:27:41+01:00

I haven't bought a newspaper for ages, don't listen to The Today Programme, but I do look forward to David Smith's del.icio.us bookmarks dropping into my aggregator every morning with baited breath.

[And before you start going on about echo chambers I am with Loic when he says that if news is important enough it will find him.]

Suffering for her art

2008-07-29T18:32:38+01:00

Me: Could you tidy that mess up please?

Seven year old daughter: You can't help making a mess when you are an artistic person

Me: .........

Editorial standards matter ...

2008-07-28T07:46:41+01:00

.... even in Twitter

Nice to see Stephen Fry back and on form

2008-07-26T06:53:25+01:00

... businesses that aren’t so pompous and deluded as to think dullness and bad design are a sign of probity and business acumen.

http://stephenfry.com/blog

Who are you calling a horse?

2008-07-23T08:01:28+01:00

Dave Snowden has an interesting blog post today about management in which he, rightly, questions those who claim that organisations don't need management any more. He also re-asserts Tom Davenport's point that:

...the two extremes of anarchistic or chaotic self-organisation and micro-management of command and control are just that, extremes that rarely exist in reality for any length of time. In effect all management is complex, a system of constraints in which behaviour modifies the nature of the system itself over time. OK it would be good if managers stopped failing to manage outcomes and recognised that success is better achieved by managing constraints and connectivity with a view to coherence.

Sadly though, for me anyway, Dave falls at the last hurdle by re-asserting the origin of management as meneggiare, the ability to ride and train horses. I have never felt the need of a horseman and never needed any of my managers to actually tell me what to do. I needed them to give me reasons to do what i did, context within which to know how to do it well, and a willingness to take on some of the administrative activity and negotiation with the rest of the organisation that I needed but that would distract me from my work if I did it myself.

I have always said that networked ways of working are not bottom up in nature and are of as much interest to those in the middle and the top of current hierarchical structures. Everyone is a node in the network who has network power depending on the number of their connections and the perceived value of their input. In many ways this gives managers more ability to influence than they have ever had and may get them to give up some of the pretense of control.

What is interesting is considering different ways of "managing" businesses - almost certainly with different structures. certainly with different underlying assumptions of the role of managers and possibly even with sufficient re-definition of the role that current language becomes unproductive. Someone once described my role in the BBC as being that of an "intrapreneur" and someone else as an "animateur".

I am not suggesting that we move over wholesale to French management speak but that there is huge potential for a radical re-think of how stuff gets done in organisations, who is "responsible for it and how.

Setting Postcodes Free

2008-07-22T16:40:13+01:00

Thanks to Tom for flagging this small but big thing

Rock Star?

2008-07-21T19:59:54+01:00

I have tried several times today to write about this but have failed.

I just want to register discomfort.

Telegraph CIO on swapping Google in for Microsoft

2008-07-19T07:41:18+01:00

Paul Cheesbrough, a former colleague from the BC, has taken the leap with the comment that:

"The CEO’s challenge to IT was to stop being a beat-up group."

Lets hope he proves an inspiring example!

CIO

Tickles goes walkies .....

2008-07-17T18:00:49+01:00

Euan

Best practice?

2008-07-15T22:55:42+01:00

Michael Walsh just sent me the following list gleaned from the Simple Sabotage Field Manual Section 11 General Interference with Organisations and Production"

(1) Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
(2) Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate "patriotic" comments.
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
(7) Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

Job going at Going Solo

2008-07-14T16:14:27+01:00

My friend Stephanie Booth is hiring:

Going Solo is looking for an enthusiastic salesperson to negotiate and finalise sponsorship deals. After a very successful first event in Lausanne, Switzerland, the conference is taking place again in Leeds, UK, on September 12th. There are plans to produce the event elsewhere in Europe and in the US.

I reckon she'd be great to work for!

Faith in human nature ... and iPhones

2008-07-12T08:56:00+01:00

I have been making such a fuss about the loss of my iPhone and my inability to pick up one of the new ones yesterday that my very good friend Geoff Jones took pity and sent me his 2G iPhone in the post. It arrived this morning, recorded delivery, wrapped in foam in a small wooden box.

I have to confess to having had a lump in my throat as I unwrapped it.

iPhone 3G Launch

2008-07-11T07:58:02+01:00

I am watching leo Laporte do 24 hours of coverage as the 3G iPhone launches in various timezones around the world. Not even half way yet and he is looking fresh as a daisy!

I'm also looking forward to the reports from my mates at Sleepydog who have launched a life blogging app for the iPhone called LifeCast. They are going to be sharing video and images from various UK iPhone outlets and aggregating content on rezpondr.