10:34 am | 0 recommendations | 1 comment

Create, Rip, Mix and Burn: A New Model For Corporate Learning

The phrase "create, rip, mix and burn," popularized by Apple, summarizes how fans are personalizing and sharing their music experience. They are empowered with the ability to "create new music," "rip or copy music," "mix" this music to generate new musical creations and lastly "burn" this into a final new product to enjoy.

Richard Baraniuk is a professor at Rice University and founder of Connexions, a free, open-source, global clearinghouse of course materials. He has translated this concept of "create, rip, mix and burn" to textbooks and given people in almost 200 countries around the world the ability to create and share new textbooks on everything from engineering to ornithology to music, while adapting the content as they see fit. The potential is enormous. Catherine Schmidt-Jones, a mom in Illinois with a degree in music, creates music curriculum for children using the Connexions process which has been downloaded over 600,000 times from her site, many by traditional K-12 teachers.

Now fast forward - think about how this can be used in corporate learning. Rather than spending millions of dollars on designing expensive customized learning programs, everyone in the organization can be empowered to create new content using a Web 2.0 toolkit of blogs, wiki’s and RSS feeds. The advantages can be enormous including:

• Faster response time to changing, new knowledge
• Customizable to local needs that require a different presentation of material
• Lower cost
• Wider base of contributors and potentially richer content
• Faster translation to languages by members of the community

"Create, Rip, Mix and Burn" will continue to emerge as the new model for corporate learning in your organization.

Corporate Learning Consultant• New York City, NY • New Learning Playbook

04:35 pm | 0 recommendations | 1 comment

A Different Approach to Planning

Can you name four magnificent events in your life which came about because of perfect planning? Sure, there was the vacation in '99. Then the move from… oh, scratch that. Even if I count a house we built, which was well-planned but not as-planned, I can't name four. Neither can anyone else I've asked.

Yet on Groundhog Day, when more than 70% of all New Year resolutions have been deep-sixed, it's easy to view the eleven months ahead as an empty field for making plans: carefully orchestrated, meticulously organized, stressed over and un-shadowed plans.

In the glow of possibility we seem to forget the 80/20 rule, the path of least resistance, the law of attraction, synchronicity and serendipity as the more accurate patterns for how (and why) change happens in real life.

I don't propose you stop planning all together. Buckminster Fuller said, "All physical movement is a series of course corrections." After you craft plans, persistently revisit and tenderly modify them whenever they lose step with the music. Be less gentle when subsequent activities acquire a life of their own. Above all, spend your time adjusting and equilibrating rather than entrenching yourself in plans created so far.

Take for instance a mid-size company influenced by a big consulting firm to develop a strategic plan. Objectives were agreed upon, analytic staff members were selected to lead the development, customers were polled, constituents and suppliers were surveyed and the board agreed this was to be the organization's new work. Task groups were formed and emails started flying.

Within only a few months, however, many who joined the development team because of an unwavering belief in planning ("If you don't know where you're going, every path leads there" and so on) became disillusioned and their energy began to flow elsewhere. Meanwhile, the development team grew frustrated and felt abandoned, becoming increasingly controlling rather than easing up.

When I was brought in to figure out how to get the strategy back on course, I interviewed the relevant and affected parties, learning that nonstop requests to ask if everyone was on track had become distracting and destructive, creating an environment inhospitable to how passionate people innovate and create something full of life.

We replaced check-in emails and conference calls with mid-course gatherings, both in person and online, where participants across task groups joined in to talk about new discoveries as well as how new information could help everyone work toward a better future.

In parallel, senior management met to revisit any objectives that needed rejiggering, actually altering their organization's targets to take into account new market factors, unexpected plays from competitors, changes in the economy and newfound intel from their teams.

Everyone in the organization became less focused on the course itself (recognizing the course itself didn't matter) and instead examined how where they were at any time could get them to their destination. One department head said this approach reminded her of how walking through the old town of an ancient city proves far more valuable than zooming along a modern road. You get to the same destination, but from only one do you actually learn something en route.

Even the organization's efficiency experts spoke of their delight when changed happened faster than anyone expected because people were now looking up and around rather than down at their desks figuring out how to cajole their work into someone else's form.

Almost a year after the new strategic plan was adopted and now guides much of their work (and as you might expect, gets regular tweaks), I hear from employees who tell me they've adopted a similar process in their personal lives: moving off course to be on target.

Rather than make your trek into spring fretting about the path you've already meandered off of, reassess where you are. Reflect on where you have journeyed. Then ask yourself if your target needs to be moved a little or maybe even completely changed, and then reset your trajectory accordingly. The sun will come up.

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Marcia Conner > www.marciaconner.com

12:45 am | 0 recommendations | 3 comments

Xobni- Taming My Inbox

A few weeks ago I ran into a Beta for a product called Xobni Insite. (Xobni is Inbox spelled backwards). Xobni is another in a long line of email taming tools (NeoPro, TrogBar, Jello.Dashboard, Orgoo, etc). The big difference is this one really works.

Unlike a lot of the “inbox tamers” this one does not try to change the way I work. Instead it augments it. That was the key for me. I ran the Xobni installed, it installs a simple sidebar and starts to catalog all my emails. I have about 6 sets of Personal Folders and Xobni found them all. Once all the emails were cataloged (it only took a few minutes) I was ready to go.

I clicked on my first email in my inbox and here’s what I got

Email analytics

Each sender was ranked by the total amount of emails I sent them and that I received from them

I got a break down of the average time when emails were received by me from that sender. I quickly realized I have too many friends sending me emails at 1:30 am.

Availability Matrix

I love this feature. I have a lot of people who do not have access to my exchange server. With the click of a button, it will send that user a list of my availability times for the next 7 days.

Instant Search

Xobni's instant search allows me to search for someone with my emails.. For example I type in Daniel, I get a Wiki search, all people with Daniel as their name or part of their name and every email with the name Daniel mentioned in the body and/or title.

Quick attachment discovery.

Every attachment, no matter what folder, exchanged with this user is now accessible from the panel.

Threaded conversations

All my conversations with that user in one place. Click a thread and I see the conversation in full without leaving my inbox. I can directly reply or forward from the Xobni bar. It brings my favorite aspect of Gmail to Outlook (finally!)

Phone Numbers

Automatically extracts a contact's phone number from their signature. And supports dialing via Skype directly.

People Connected

This area shows me every person connected via email to that user. What is nice is address I have sent “one-off’s” to are listed here as they were part of communications with that user at some point.

Access to Appointments, Tasks, To-Do’s and Follow-up

All right from the Xobni bar.

The bottom line is the constant toggling between Outlook calendar, inbox, personal folders, and the to-do list is a pain and time consuming. Xobni removes all that. It lets you look for everything from within the sidebar, and correspond with people from it — all without leaving the email you were originally working on.

See it in action for yourself via their You Tube video here or at their site at www.xobni.com. Again, Xobni is still in beta but it’s one to watch and grab when the beta is up. If you do get in, Xobni offers some free invites for your friends. I still have one or two so if you’re interested, email me and I will shoot the first respondents one. Sorry Windows users only. There is no Mac version at this time.

Stephen is Sr. Partner and Network Architect with Odyssey Consulting Group and a Microsoft MVP in Connected Systems.

01:03 pm | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

Work/Life: Recession and Work+Life Fit

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been repeatedly asked: “What do you think will happen to work+life fit and flexibility if the economy experiences a recession?”

I think two things will happen. Unfortunately, too many leaders and organizations will default to a shortsighted fall back position, “Forget flexibility. People are just lucky to have jobs.” But the smart leaders and organizations won’t. They will continue to move forward integrating flexibility into the way they do business because they understand that there is no turning back. To use a recession as an excuse to stop developing news ways of flexibly managing work and life will only put them further behind in terms of growth potential when a recession ends.

What do these smart leaders and organizations know that the less enlightened overlook? They understand that flexibility is key to their businesses success in a 24/7, high tech, global work reality. They know that:

• Even in a recession talent will still be a scare commodity (see the results from PriceWaterhouse Cooper’s recent Global CEO Survey). If organizations hope to hold on to valuable talent (especially employees under the age of 30) once a recession ends they better do all they can now to win employee loyalty and be the employer of choice. And finding a better work+life fit is very important to a majority of the workforce. As a leader in a professional services firm recently said to me, “Back in 1975, there were 30 resumes for every job. Now there are 10 jobs for every qualified resume.” That ratio isn’t going to change drastically with a recession;

• You can’t effectively service global clients and manage global teams without flexibility that considers impact on work+life fit. Domestic employees can’t be on the phone all night with Singapore and then haul themselves into work the next day 8-to-6. Clients and teams in other countries can’t always be expected to be the ones to make the early morning/late night concessions. Organizations aren’t going to stop operating globally because of a recession;

• In a recession, more needs to be done with fewer resources. It’s even more critical that your employees are at their most productive and your workflow and communication management is at its most efficient. Studies show that flexibility to help employees manage their work+life fit results in increased productivity, more efficiency, and better communication.

• Finally, companies that need to cutback will use flex to creatively downsize. By offering to reduce schedules or a transition people to project-based, consulting work, employees who otherwise would lose their tie to the organization can stay. When business turns around, those companies then have the option of offering those employees a return to a full-time schedule.

So what do you think the leaders of your organization will do if we begin to experience a recession? Will there be a knee-jerk retrenchment where all innovation related to work+life fit and flexibility is halted as people fear for their jobs? Or will the recognition that without flexibility to manage time, talent, and workflow, a company will not be positioned to succeed prevail?

09:00 am | 0 recommendations | 2 comments

Green (Fri)Day: How Big is the Green Economy?

On Wednesday the website GreenBiz.com released a big report on the "State of Green Business.(pdf)" Working mainly with government agency numbers, they scored the economy as a whole to be "treading water" in 10 categories, "sinking" in two, and "swimming" in eight--but for some of those, executive editor Joel Makower admitted they were "being generous." (I agree. Take LEED-certified office space construction--it may be a "swimming" category in terms of square footage, but as I argue in an October story, LEED certification is not the be-all and end-all of environmental design.)

It's dismaying to see that despite all the talk about "climate neutral" and "zero carbon," America is making insignificant gains in carbon intensity--the greenhouse gases emitted per unit of GDP.

But where Greenbiz really did a good job was in being honest about the questions they asked but couldn't answer.

For example, water use. "We wanted to measure water efficiency," they wrote, "the amount of water used per unit of GDP. We were shocked to discover that there is no
annually updated metric for national water use."

Or an even more basic question that's certainly of interest to us here at Fast Company--the overall size of the green economy. "I must get 50 to 100 calls a year from people who have some version of the question: how big is the green business movement?" said Makower. If you restrict the question to ground-up, mission-driven green businesses, the Avedas and New Leaf Papers of the world, you'll get one answer. If you count up the people working on GE'sEcomagination, Wal-Mart's Sustainability 360 , and the US Climate Action Partnership, or the companies from Starbucks to Alcoa who have added "VPs of sustainability" to their corporate rosters, you'll get a much bigger picture.

11:53 am | 0 recommendations | 5 comments

Is the Design Revolution Here? Can Designers get to the top of a publicly traded company?

In the past months I’ve read several articles and blogs about the possibility that Jonathan Ive, SVP of Industrial Design at Apple, could succeed Steve Jobs as CEO. As far as I can tell this is only a rumor, but it prompts the questions: Is corporate America ready for the design revolution? Can designers be CEOs? I can only imagine how much fun that would be, not only for the people working in these companies but for the consumers, finally getting products and services that go beyond their expectations. And imagine what that would do to the stock price.

Although to many, designers as CEOs, may sound like a crazy idea. I believe designers could do very well as top executives. Designers have a unique set of skills that combined with traditional management knowledge could create a new kind of leader, more in tune with today’s needs. Why? Because they know how to explore possibilities, connect the dots, simplify complex information down to a relevant summary and remind of us of context and humanity. They know how to work closely with engineers, marketers and outside manufacturing contractors. Rather than being simple stylists, they're leading innovators in the use of new materials and production processes.

With this I am not advocating that any designer can be a good CEO, but a few have a unique set of skills that are more relevant to today’s and tomorrow’s competitive markets. Where almost everything is commoditized and differentiation can only come from thoughtful products and services, companies must go farther than just talking about design and begin using it.

Design is a powerful tool that is just being discovered and mildly used by most companies and strategically implemented by a few. I wonder how long it will take for most board of directors to understand the value of design and make bold moves to utilizing it?

manuel
manuel@manuelsaez.com

04:03 pm | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

Innovation: Old Often Becomes New

Originality is overrated. Engineers are often told in engineering schools that a good design typically consists of 45% duplication, 45% slight modification and 10% originality. Those who follow this principle benefit from the experience of their predecessors. Their designs tend to work. That is the way it should be.

We think the 10% originality might be a little too high. Engineering tends to be expensive and slow. For many manufacturers, the engineering efforts involved in bringing something to market often become the bottleneck in the process. This is the case whether in designing the product or the process to produce it cost-effectively. Sales people often go out and pick up orders for something, having to later tell the customer that the engineers haven’t yet worked everything out.

Let’s take the example of the compressed air car. In the highly competitive car industry, it is being touted by many as the next big thing in car manufacturing. India’s largest carmaker, Tata Motors Ltd., is preparing to roll out a line of compressed air cars in 2008. These cars are expected to go about 100 km on a charge of air that costs about 1 euro or $1.50 and takes 2 to 3 minutes to fill up. You’d have a hard time buying a hot dog or a cup of coffee at that price.

Compressed air cars produce zero emissions, contain no fuel that can catch fire or spill and are cheap to make and run – getting 50,000 km on an oil change. Search “compressed air car” and you’ll get several pages of hits. But they are not new. Search “compressed air locomotive” and you’ll see what we mean.

Since the 1800s, thousands of compressed air locomotives have been produced for mainly the same reasons: cheap, safe, easy to fill and run, low maintenance and zero emissions. Most of these locomotives ended up in mines where miners couldn’t survive if there were toxic exhaust emissions.

Today’s cars and yesterday’s locomotives also share the same main drawback. A charge of compressed air doesn’t contain much energy compared to fossil fuels. The old locomotives didn’t go very far which was okay in the mines where these heavy beasts only needed to move a few carloads of ore for short distances. They weren’t able to compete with coal or oil fired steam locomotives that traveled between cities and across countries.

Most of the original engineering in the new compressed air car deals with finding ways to keep the weight as low as possible, while using every little bit of available energy as efficiently as possible. The mining locomotives needed to be heavy to give them enough traction to pull heavy loads whereas the cars are coming in at a miserly 330 kg (725 pounds).

Don’t get us wrong, we appreciate how difficult the job is to engineer these car weights down and efficiencies up. The point we are trying to make is that the cars are more likely to succeed because these issues are known and obvious in light of the historical experiences. The carmakers can focus their efforts as they have been doing on overcoming the longstanding issue of range relative to costs.

Tata is likely to have its car in production long before and at a much lower cost than let’s say: the hydrogen fuel cell car. Several billion dollars have been spent worldwide pioneering the development of fuel cell technologies since the first fuel cell vehicle was built in 1959 – a 20 horsepower tractor. There was no fuel cell vehicle experience to build upon. These expensive engineering efforts are not likely to end anytime soon. Recent hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius that use a combination of well-established technologies and designs have already eclipsed fuel cell powered cars.

From a marketing point of view, you need to discount the past. People are not interested in things that look like leftovers. People tend to be interested in things being new and “innovative.” Or at least new to them. No one likes feeling cheated by finding out that what they thought was new and original is in fact yesterday’s news. Except maybe the investors who don’t mind profiting from proven technologies.

So where does that leave the innovator? The answer depends on how success is measured. If commercial success is the main driver, that entails making sure the engineering design is likely to work. Sooner rather than later. Cost-effectively.

So which approach is more likely to get there, the tried and true or something highly original? We recommend the tried and true as much as possible because it is just that: tried and true.

Please comment and share your experience with us.

Atomica Creative > Strategic Product Marketing • Vancouver, Canada • tnakagawa@atomicacreative.com