February 4, 2008
10:34 am | 0 recommendations | 1 comment
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
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February 2, 2008
04:35 pm | 0 recommendations | 1 comment
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.
--------
Marcia Conner > www.marciaconner.com
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February 2, 2008
12:45 am | 0 recommendations | 4 comments
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.
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February 1, 2008
09:00 am | 0 recommendations | 2 comments
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.
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January 30, 2008
11:53 am | 0 recommendations | 5 comments
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
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January 29, 2008
04:03 pm | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
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
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January 28, 2008
07:13 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
""The things we fear most in organizations -- fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances -- are the primary sources of creativity." -- Margaret J. Wheatley (author, organizational consultant)
Consider This:
One of the most misunderstood gifts that life gives a person or organization is a set of challenges. While rarely welcome, they serve the invaluable purpose of throwing you off of your game - usually when you need it most. They force you to stop - reflect - dig down - and get creative in order survive and thrive. You need challenges. They are the seeds of your greatest ideas.
The biggest mistake you can make when you come face-to-face with a challenge is to resist it. To beat yourself up for having gotten into the situation in the first place. When you do, you're putting your energy in the wrong place. Instead, get curious about how you got there. See it as an opportunity to learn and grow. Talk it out with others. Don't stay in your own head. Challenges themselves don't determine your quality of life - your relationship to them does.
Try This:
1. Think about something you're feeling bad about right now.
2. When you think about this situation, what are you most afraid of?
3. Find someone to share your fears with. Make it someone you trust and who you can be honest with (This is an important step as your fears have a way of dissipating when they hit the light of day).
4. As you move past the fear, what do you see on the other side? (hint, your creative mind will re-engage and you'll begin to see possibilities that the fear was hiding).
5. Pursue those creative possibilities.
6. Repeat frequently as new challenges arise.
Doug Sundheim • Executive Coach & Consultant • New York, NY • www.dougsundheim.com
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January 25, 2008
09:00 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
Dan Hill, living in Sydney, is the web editor of British magazine Monocle. He gave a fascinating talk at a conference called Interesting South last fall that he recently put up on his blog.
He calls it "The Well Tempered Environment." It's a sketch of a "public dashboard" to gather and publish information about energy and resource use, to get people competing on a household, neighborhood, citywide, regional, even global level to use less.
We know that technologies that make information transparent and provide real-time feedback can shape behavior almost effortlessly --for example, wearing a pedometer makes you walk more . Hill's idea applies this principle to environmental awareness. The talk included a half-dozen actual existing products along this line, and I've noticed a few more such ideas popping up elsewhere.
Hill's examples included Wattson, a stylish gadget that monitors and shows your electricity use in watts or dollars, pounds, euro or yen,
Home Joule, a plug-in that monitors energy prices, MorePower, a real time monitor that displays energy use by appliance, Isave faucets with a digital readout of water use, PLOGG, a "smart meter" . Plug an appliance into it and it relays energy use info to your PC or server, and several prototypes from the Interactive Institute, a Swedish nonprofit covering design, art, and science, including a power cord that lights up to indicate intensity of energy use.
A similar idea was featured in our 50 Ways to Green Your Business issue in November: Fiat's EcoDrive, developed by Microsoft, which records and analyzes car performance data, such as CO2 emissions and fuel consumption, using a USB key. (In Hill's vision, a display next to the turn signals might alert other drivers to your efficiency, emissions, and fuel source.)
And actually closest to Hill's idea is a Google project based in the UK that started this month, called the UK Carbon Footprint Project. Local government and nonprofits have supplied "layers" of info to Google Maps like local recycling participation rates, heat map images of famous buildings, nearest recycling locations, and predicted future weather under different carbon emission scenarios. The idea is that volunteers will use Google gadgets to calculate their carbon footprints, tracking the information on their iGoogle home pages and uploading the information to create community maps.
A fundamental part of creating a sustainable economy, planet, and life involves information. This provides a huge, multidimensional business opportunity. Governments and consumers alike are encountering this problem--we don't know if the fish we buy at the market was caught legally or by a pirate Chinese ship off the coast of Africa ; we don't even know if it's mercury-laden bluefin or safer yellowfin tuna. This is what Alex Steffen at Worldchanging calls "backstory", and it's very, very hard to do. In many areas, we need better ecological accounting practices, and better labels, systems, sensors, and censures, so people can have the opportunity to make the right choice.
In other areas, like with electricity and water use, the information is at our fingertips. The challenge is to get it even closer, under our noses, where we actually might act on it.
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January 23, 2008
11:14 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
When engineering, product development and marketing & sales people get together and do a great job in successfully pushing a new product into the market to rave reviews, things can still fall apart. There can still be important blind spots in the system to watch out for. Big companies are not immune to this problem.
We discovered a hole in Fujitsu’s warranty programs after we went out and bought their latest Scansnap S510 office scanner a few weeks ago. We learned about the product from others, mainly online, who were successfully using these to help convert their offices to paperless environments. We bought one.
We’re located in Canada and when we first learned about the scanner, were unable to find it at our local retailers or at the big box office stores that we normally go to for this type of equipment. We got a good deal on a new unit from a U.S. retailer that has an active online sales business into Canada. We learned that unlike in the United States where the product is widely available, the Canadian distribution channels are shallow. We were delighted at how well the scanner worked until the camera module fried.
When someone called Fujitsu USA via the 1-800 number on the warranty card, after listening to muzak for almost an hour to get service, managed to walk through the technical service process to determine it was indeed a hardware problem.
That is when the ping pong started. Fujitsu USA referred us to Fujitsu Canada who referred us back to the American office. Fujitsu USA doesn’t service units outside of the USA and Fujitsu Canada does not service units that they didn’t sell in Canada. We suddenly felt like homeless outcasts from the Fujitsu family.
Ideally, the Canadian office should be the one providing the warranty service because they have regional drop-off centers plus a great and efficient technical service infrastructure designed specifically to service Canadian customers. In our follow up with Fujitsu Canada, the issue from their perspective was that they did not make a dime from the sale of the scanner we bought from the American supplier and that the warranty service would come out of their budget if they fixed our scanner. The American response was that there was no way within the existing system for the Canadian office to bill the U.S. office for warranty service on units that were bought in the United States and that ended up in Canada.
Globalization is putting these distributors in direct competition with each other because products can move quite freely across the Canada USA border in either direction whereas the warranty service does not. It turns out that many of these units are going back and forth across the border and the default is to send them back to the country they were originally purchased in through a clumsy and expensive system of double-shipping through local addresses.
Fujitsu USA unexpectedly hit upon a solution when it offered to do a workaround and fix our scanner if we would send it to them. The U.S. domestic FedEx pre-paid shipping label that the American manager asked us to apply to the unit did not work for this international shipment. When he talked to FedEx about the label, the FedEx response was a quick and simple “no problem.” FedEx fixed the problem in a couple minutes because FedEx had all the systems in place to do it. The American manager handling the transaction liked the example and noted the stark contrast to his own system where he had zero ability to look into the Canadian system to work out a quick fix.
We were fairly patient with the process, mainly because the Fujitsu people on both sides of the border were polite and friendly. This seemed partly due to them knowing there is a gaping hole in their international warranty system.
The lesson for innovators is to beware of the blind spots that can occur anywhere in the marketing process. This is especially important with the accelerating trend toward consumers shopping globally for their products that easily migrate across national and regional boundaries. FedEx obviously has good reasons to be a global leader in addressing cross border service issues. As things become more competitive, a great product needs to be just as good on the back end as it does on the brochure.
Here are some things companies can do to ensure the back end doesn’t fall apart while developing the marketing strategy for new products:
• Perform a product life cycle analysis from the customer perspective,
• Discuss back end product aspects during product meetings,
• Create systems to reward employees who take ownership of customer service problems.
The whole product experience is becoming more relevant as people increasingly turn to online sources which have no boundaries. Watch out to make sure the experience doesn’t fall apart on the back end. We’re still waiting for our scanner to come back from the shop.
Atomica Creative > Strategic Product Marketing • Vancouver, Canada • tnakagawa@atomicacreative.com
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January 22, 2008
12:23 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
I have tried it all. Skype, Vonage, even VoIP from my ISP. Still, none were as easy as promised. Skype required me to purchase a expensive USB headset, Vonage required their equipment and my ISP had too many contracts. All I have wanted is true plug and play VoIP with my own telephone.
Then I found MagicJack. MagicJack is a small USB dongle (looks like a thumb drive) that any regular land based phone and a high speed internet connection. Plug the RJ11 line into the phone and into the MagicJack. That is the longest and most complicated part of this whole process. After that, it takes about 2 minutes to setup.
The Magicjack has excellent voice quality that's almost indistinguishable from a land line, and a cost of about $20 (A one time $20 fee for the MagicJack and a $20 a year charge for service)a year for unlimited nationwide service to any land line or cell. Even my Skype after adding a incoming line and voice mail was more expensive.
If this is your first time using the device, you'll have to run through a registration process and choose from a poll of numbers based on area codes. You can even pick an area code from a state or city other then where you live if you like.. You either request a new number or ask to have your existing number ported (there is a $10 surcharge for porting.). Set up your 911 service and your done.
What’s included? Everything most people need. Caller ID, call waiting, call forwarding, three way calling, free local and long distance to US and Canada, and voice mail that will works even if you're not online.
It works with Windows and Macs and international calling credits will be available in Feb.
For those with home business trying to keep the cost down or with kids in college, this one is a new brainer.
Check out MagicJack here
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