The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) $100 laptop 2B1 Children's Machine laptop developed by MIT's Media Lab has finally made it to the real world. The first few hand-built units of this little machine made it from Taiwan to the US yesterday. It's a nifty green-and-white device that looks suitably toy-like. I hope it is robust, given its intended market.
The technology is interesting: it's intended to be both a computer and a wireless router, so that each machine forms part of a mesh even when the laptop is closed. It comes with a small solar-powered repeater that can be nailed into a tree to get better range. The laptops run Linux using AMD's Geode processor, and have 128MB of memory and 500MB of flash memory rather than a hard disk.
Apparently a bunch of central American countries have put in a purchase order, so it's going to get out there as soon as production-line versions are available. Congratulations to Nick Negroponte and the MIT Media Lab, and of course to OLPC.
Friday, November 17, 2006
American Marketers 2006: Web 2.huh?
Zoomerang will be publishing a study next week which reveals that even though Web 2.0 has hogged the business headlines (for what, a couple of years now?) 8 out of 10 marketing professionals still are not even familiar with the term. At the other extreme, one third of those who have latched onto what is going on are using web 2.0 approaches in their marketing, and most of those (70%) are having success.
Assuming the study is correct, what does this say about how in touch with their markets most marketers are? Marketing is all about understanding consumers and reacting to (if not anticipating) shifts in interests, attitudes, values, and behaviours. It is hard to imagine that web 2.0 (which, despite what its detractors may say, heralds a megashift in consumer culture) has gone unnoticed by the hordes of marketing wonks, their agencies, researchers, and advisors. I could accept that they don't really understand it or that they dismiss it as a temporary anomaly -- but that they have never even heard the term web 2.0 is just scary.
Corporations (particularly of the kind reviled by The Cluetrain Manifesto) are notoriously slow to catch on to or care about what their customers or potential customers are doing. You sort of expect that level of indifference in the folks in Finance or Production or even in the boardroom. But if anyone should be intimately in touch with the chaotic changes in the consumer world, it's the Marketing people. Maybe there's a new digital divide to think about: those who care about what is going on in their professional area have tuned into digital media; those who do not are still waiting for the memo from corporate.
Assuming the study is correct, what does this say about how in touch with their markets most marketers are? Marketing is all about understanding consumers and reacting to (if not anticipating) shifts in interests, attitudes, values, and behaviours. It is hard to imagine that web 2.0 (which, despite what its detractors may say, heralds a megashift in consumer culture) has gone unnoticed by the hordes of marketing wonks, their agencies, researchers, and advisors. I could accept that they don't really understand it or that they dismiss it as a temporary anomaly -- but that they have never even heard the term web 2.0 is just scary.
Corporations (particularly of the kind reviled by The Cluetrain Manifesto) are notoriously slow to catch on to or care about what their customers or potential customers are doing. You sort of expect that level of indifference in the folks in Finance or Production or even in the boardroom. But if anyone should be intimately in touch with the chaotic changes in the consumer world, it's the Marketing people. Maybe there's a new digital divide to think about: those who care about what is going on in their professional area have tuned into digital media; those who do not are still waiting for the memo from corporate.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
ISPI Europe Conference
Last week I was in Prague where, with my colleague Sarah Ward of ALTER Inc., I was speaking at the European Conference of ISPI (the International Society for Performance Improvement). The September edition of ISPI’s journal Performance Improvement published an article that I co-authored with Sarah and our friend and collaborator Dr. Karen Medsker on the processes required for large organisations to create a strategic approach to learning evaluation, and we were in Prague to see how those ideas fit with European business cultures.
The theme of this year’s conference was building performance into organizational culture in Europe. Presentations covered various case studies or approaches dealing with the need to increase competitiveness in the face of continued global economic pressure, and how best to improve existing job design, work processes, and organizational systems. For a small conference, there was amazing diversity in the participants – more than 40 nationalities were present. It was a little disappointing to see US speakers getting half of the air-time, though there was a concerted effort to work the lessons from existing American models into evolving European models rather than just advocate US-centric approaches. America is, after all, only America, and despite what most Americans may believe, its business culture is as unique and un-exportable as any other culture.
That said, there were many fascinating inputs from American and Canadian speakers that fuelled much discussion both in session and later over large glasses of Pilsner Urquell. Bob Evans, Director of IT Operations at France Telecom did a keynote on how he was brought in to build performance into the organizational culture of the France Telecom Group, demonstrating that often it takes someone perceived as a “crazy outsider” to shake up a calcified culture that is so habituated to its own stagnation it cannot see the advantages of change. In similar vein, Bill Daniels (author of Change-ABLE Organisation, one of the most useful books on change agentry I have ever read) talked about overcoming cultural resistance to performance improvement. His emphasis, which resonates with my ongoing focus on large-scale strategy, was on looking beyond individual performers to the system as a whole.
Other presentations covered a surprisingly broad canvas, with case studies from several eastern European countries providing a lot of practical insight into the performance challenges and solutions in developing nations.
Among the luminaries that I was delighted to get to know during the Prague meeting were Roger Kaufman, who has published an impressive 38 books on various aspects of performance improvement and is one of the most fun people I have ever spent time with at a conference; Tony Marker and Linda Huglin from Boise State, who had done some interesting work on the state of research in the performance improvement field; Mary Norris Thomas of the Fleming Group, who could be the next Celebrity Researcher; Bob Carleton who is probably the practitioners’ practitioner but shares my concern that research is moving too much toward cookery book replication and too far from rigorous case-specific craftwork; and John O’Connor of O’Connor Consulting in the UK, who spent many years earlier in his career where I grew up in Zambia (small worlds getting ever smaller). What impressed me about every conference participant that I talked with was their candour and their grounding in reality – the last thing you would expect from an organisation whose publications set very high standards and often read like doctoral theses.
Bob Carleton, Bill Daniels, and Timm Esque and his wife enjoying dinner in Prague.
I can recommend unreservedly ISPI’s European conference to anyone involved in performance improvement in their own organisations. It is a really intimate meeting where you can easily know who’s who and get to hang out and share experiences with anyone of interest – and everyone was of interest. You know you have been at a well-managed event when you look back at it and can’t quite work out how you had so many worthwhile conversations with so many people in so few days. Perhaps a key factor was that there were no vendors there, or at least none that made themselves conspicuous.
I have pretty much had it with the vast 8,000 plus conferences that I used to find so stimulating, and now prefer much smaller more focused events where you are more likely to find yourself among peers and “conferring” is more likely to happen. ISPI Europe is definitely on my calendar for next year.
The theme of this year’s conference was building performance into organizational culture in Europe. Presentations covered various case studies or approaches dealing with the need to increase competitiveness in the face of continued global economic pressure, and how best to improve existing job design, work processes, and organizational systems. For a small conference, there was amazing diversity in the participants – more than 40 nationalities were present. It was a little disappointing to see US speakers getting half of the air-time, though there was a concerted effort to work the lessons from existing American models into evolving European models rather than just advocate US-centric approaches. America is, after all, only America, and despite what most Americans may believe, its business culture is as unique and un-exportable as any other culture.
That said, there were many fascinating inputs from American and Canadian speakers that fuelled much discussion both in session and later over large glasses of Pilsner Urquell. Bob Evans, Director of IT Operations at France Telecom did a keynote on how he was brought in to build performance into the organizational culture of the France Telecom Group, demonstrating that often it takes someone perceived as a “crazy outsider” to shake up a calcified culture that is so habituated to its own stagnation it cannot see the advantages of change. In similar vein, Bill Daniels (author of Change-ABLE Organisation, one of the most useful books on change agentry I have ever read) talked about overcoming cultural resistance to performance improvement. His emphasis, which resonates with my ongoing focus on large-scale strategy, was on looking beyond individual performers to the system as a whole.
Other presentations covered a surprisingly broad canvas, with case studies from several eastern European countries providing a lot of practical insight into the performance challenges and solutions in developing nations.
Among the luminaries that I was delighted to get to know during the Prague meeting were Roger Kaufman, who has published an impressive 38 books on various aspects of performance improvement and is one of the most fun people I have ever spent time with at a conference; Tony Marker and Linda Huglin from Boise State, who had done some interesting work on the state of research in the performance improvement field; Mary Norris Thomas of the Fleming Group, who could be the next Celebrity Researcher; Bob Carleton who is probably the practitioners’ practitioner but shares my concern that research is moving too much toward cookery book replication and too far from rigorous case-specific craftwork; and John O’Connor of O’Connor Consulting in the UK, who spent many years earlier in his career where I grew up in Zambia (small worlds getting ever smaller). What impressed me about every conference participant that I talked with was their candour and their grounding in reality – the last thing you would expect from an organisation whose publications set very high standards and often read like doctoral theses.
Bob Carleton, Bill Daniels, and Timm Esque and his wife enjoying dinner in Prague.
I can recommend unreservedly ISPI’s European conference to anyone involved in performance improvement in their own organisations. It is a really intimate meeting where you can easily know who’s who and get to hang out and share experiences with anyone of interest – and everyone was of interest. You know you have been at a well-managed event when you look back at it and can’t quite work out how you had so many worthwhile conversations with so many people in so few days. Perhaps a key factor was that there were no vendors there, or at least none that made themselves conspicuous.
I have pretty much had it with the vast 8,000 plus conferences that I used to find so stimulating, and now prefer much smaller more focused events where you are more likely to find yourself among peers and “conferring” is more likely to happen. ISPI Europe is definitely on my calendar for next year.
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Montreux and the ISWC Mothers of Invention
I have always liked Montreux. It is an idyllic lakeside town that would ooze class and opulence were oozing not just too tackily post-19th century. Its olde-worlde feel is overlayed with a general bearing of grace, politeness, and pleasure in service which is neither too obsequious nor too begrudging. When I lived in Switzerland in the 80’s and 90’s, I visited Montreux often en route to or from the neighbouring town of Vevy (home to the international headquarters of Nestlé and Philip Morris), and, as in the rest of the country, not a lot seems to have changed. Tipping is still considered vulgar; people still don’t walk on red at pedestrian crossings; the stores still close for lunch; and the trains still run on time.
Lounging below vine-covered hillsides at the eastern end of Lac Léman (that’s Lake Geneva to the non-Vaudoise), Montreux is the kind of resort town that Merchant Ivory would set movies in, had E. M. Forster ever written stories based there, and, of course, had Ismail Merchant not recently gone to join the choir invisible. As has Freddy Mercury, who loved the town and apparently lived out his last years there, his loyalty being rewarded by an appropriately larger-than-life statue of him jutting out his butt and punching the air in triumph as he glares across the lake at France.
Creative types have always been attracted to Montreux. Lord Byron was inspired by the nearby lakeside castle to write The Prisoner of Chillon whose opening line “Eternal spirit of the chainless mind!” could be the T-shirt slogan of the blognoscenti. Queen owns a recording studio in the Montreux. Deep Purple burned down the casino while recording there some 35 years ago (actually, it was a fire that broke out during a concert by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention), inspiring Smoke on the Water, the guitar riff from which is also commemorated in a lakeside sculpture. David Bowie has a home in Montreux, though nobody in the town would be so indiscrete as to tell you where. Every summer a horde of jazz musicians and fans descends on the town for the amazingly wonderful Montreux Jazz Festival. Where else, as I was lucky to do one year, can you see onstage in one evening Deedee Bridgewater, Van Morrison, Georgie Fame, Santana, and John McClaughlin each playing their own sets and then jamming till the early hours with many other musical legends who are in town to listen and play?
Freddy does Montreux
This year another black-clad crowd of unconventional but somewhat geekier Mothers of Invention descended on the town to enjoy the engineering equivalent of jazz. While the inventors of the air guitar T-shirt were missing from the Montreux symposium, a few hundred other engineering students, professors, policy makers, industrialists, and techno-hucksters from all over the globe converged for a few days of future-gazing, presenting the improvisations, concepts and experiments that must surely be at one of the bloodier edges of bleeding-edge thinking.
The International Symposium on Wearable Computing melded out-of-this-world engineering, ergonomics, and human-computer interfaces with some of the more intense needs for performance improvement that exist in the real world: The GPS-linked head-up-display on fire-fighters’ visors that guides them out of smoke-filled buildings; the doctor’s hospital note taking system that works on arm gestures so as not to take attention away from the patient (pity the unfortunate patient seeing a doctor repeatedly making a sign of the cross at his bedside); the scary guy who uses his skin as a conductor to send 2 Megabits per second of data across his body, eliminating the need for iPod headphone cables; the see-through eyeglass displays and motion-sensing wrist bands that train auto-workers to install headlamps. The theory sessions, covering topics like “Humans – A Tutorial,” were even more mind-bending than the practice sessions.
For someone like me who is engaged at the application and performance impact end of technology, it was fascinating and a little humbling to spend a couple of days in the company of the brilliant minds that actually have to conceive, design, and build the revolutionary tools in the first place.
Lounging below vine-covered hillsides at the eastern end of Lac Léman (that’s Lake Geneva to the non-Vaudoise), Montreux is the kind of resort town that Merchant Ivory would set movies in, had E. M. Forster ever written stories based there, and, of course, had Ismail Merchant not recently gone to join the choir invisible. As has Freddy Mercury, who loved the town and apparently lived out his last years there, his loyalty being rewarded by an appropriately larger-than-life statue of him jutting out his butt and punching the air in triumph as he glares across the lake at France.
Creative types have always been attracted to Montreux. Lord Byron was inspired by the nearby lakeside castle to write The Prisoner of Chillon whose opening line “Eternal spirit of the chainless mind!” could be the T-shirt slogan of the blognoscenti. Queen owns a recording studio in the Montreux. Deep Purple burned down the casino while recording there some 35 years ago (actually, it was a fire that broke out during a concert by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention), inspiring Smoke on the Water, the guitar riff from which is also commemorated in a lakeside sculpture. David Bowie has a home in Montreux, though nobody in the town would be so indiscrete as to tell you where. Every summer a horde of jazz musicians and fans descends on the town for the amazingly wonderful Montreux Jazz Festival. Where else, as I was lucky to do one year, can you see onstage in one evening Deedee Bridgewater, Van Morrison, Georgie Fame, Santana, and John McClaughlin each playing their own sets and then jamming till the early hours with many other musical legends who are in town to listen and play?
Freddy does Montreux
This year another black-clad crowd of unconventional but somewhat geekier Mothers of Invention descended on the town to enjoy the engineering equivalent of jazz. While the inventors of the air guitar T-shirt were missing from the Montreux symposium, a few hundred other engineering students, professors, policy makers, industrialists, and techno-hucksters from all over the globe converged for a few days of future-gazing, presenting the improvisations, concepts and experiments that must surely be at one of the bloodier edges of bleeding-edge thinking.
The International Symposium on Wearable Computing melded out-of-this-world engineering, ergonomics, and human-computer interfaces with some of the more intense needs for performance improvement that exist in the real world: The GPS-linked head-up-display on fire-fighters’ visors that guides them out of smoke-filled buildings; the doctor’s hospital note taking system that works on arm gestures so as not to take attention away from the patient (pity the unfortunate patient seeing a doctor repeatedly making a sign of the cross at his bedside); the scary guy who uses his skin as a conductor to send 2 Megabits per second of data across his body, eliminating the need for iPod headphone cables; the see-through eyeglass displays and motion-sensing wrist bands that train auto-workers to install headlamps. The theory sessions, covering topics like “Humans – A Tutorial,” were even more mind-bending than the practice sessions.
For someone like me who is engaged at the application and performance impact end of technology, it was fascinating and a little humbling to spend a couple of days in the company of the brilliant minds that actually have to conceive, design, and build the revolutionary tools in the first place.
Saturday, October 14, 2006
International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC)
A couple of days ago I was a guest at IEEE’s annual International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC), held this year in Montreux, Switzerland. I was there to judge entries for the annual ISWC Design Competition, and to award the check and prestigious IEEE trophy.
As the sponsor of this year’s competition, I chose to set a challenge that took the thinking away from designing ultra-expensive cyborgian machines for ultra-niche purposes and instead focused on designing ultra-cheap solutions for ultra-mass markets. I wanted to see if anyone could come up with a design for using already existing devices and infrastructures to facilitate education and training in developing countries where computers (and even electricity) are simply unavailable and where a month of web access costs typically more than the annual per capita income.
Though I did not say so in the brief, for some time I have been advocating the idea of using mobile phones (that most ubiquitous of wearable computers) and the extensive wireless phone infrastructures for core literacy and basic business education. While MIT and others are making great strides toward the $100 computer, that’s an idea whose usefulness is severely undermined by the difficulty of distributing the device and the general lack of electrical power or conventional internet access in those areas where such a machine might be most desirable. The cell phone, on the other hand, is everywhere already and it’s already connected.
Jose Gonzales explains his team's entry to Paul Lukowicz, ISWC Chair.
The winning entry was submitted by a team of graduate engineering students from Florida headed by Jose Gonzales, whose day-job is designing data-acquisition systems for aircraft in the US military. If a sign of true creative genius is the ability to dramatically reverse your perspective and still stay clear and focused, Jose is a very impressive intellect. I’d be a little concerned that I liked his design simply because it aligned rather well with my own vision, but the other judges concurred unanimously that the entry was streets ahead of the competitors. The conceptual technical design approach was well-researched, elegant, cheap, and pretty much ready to roll. Now we need the content, instructional design, a little political will, and some kind of sponsorship for both the development and the running of the phone-based learning service.
In essence, the design takes advantage of the ubiquity of GPRS (its coverage around the world is remarkably comprehensive) and its data rate of 115kbps, which is more than adequate for sending text and speech in various configurations. This is complemented by the ubiquity of devices – in places like Kebira in Kenya, more than 8 out of ten people have access to a mobile phone, though they may not have electricity or running water. Hand cranks can provide charges, or for a few cents people recharge their phones from someone running a small street-corner generator. Put your content through a free open-source Java tool that configures it so it will work and look good on any of more than 500 different phone models, and you are (at least in theory) ready to teach.
But what is the economic model? It should be possible, given the low entry cost, to get large corporations, NGOs, or even governments to front the cash for development of the content, and to subsidise the delivery. Large corporations have a vested interest in getting involved in such projects, in part because they believe in good corporate citizenship, and in part because it’s a great marketing opportunity. In fact I had a brief conversation with a Nokia representative after I had made the award announcement, and he was keen to take the discussion further. Watch this space
As the sponsor of this year’s competition, I chose to set a challenge that took the thinking away from designing ultra-expensive cyborgian machines for ultra-niche purposes and instead focused on designing ultra-cheap solutions for ultra-mass markets. I wanted to see if anyone could come up with a design for using already existing devices and infrastructures to facilitate education and training in developing countries where computers (and even electricity) are simply unavailable and where a month of web access costs typically more than the annual per capita income.
Though I did not say so in the brief, for some time I have been advocating the idea of using mobile phones (that most ubiquitous of wearable computers) and the extensive wireless phone infrastructures for core literacy and basic business education. While MIT and others are making great strides toward the $100 computer, that’s an idea whose usefulness is severely undermined by the difficulty of distributing the device and the general lack of electrical power or conventional internet access in those areas where such a machine might be most desirable. The cell phone, on the other hand, is everywhere already and it’s already connected.
Jose Gonzales explains his team's entry to Paul Lukowicz, ISWC Chair.
The winning entry was submitted by a team of graduate engineering students from Florida headed by Jose Gonzales, whose day-job is designing data-acquisition systems for aircraft in the US military. If a sign of true creative genius is the ability to dramatically reverse your perspective and still stay clear and focused, Jose is a very impressive intellect. I’d be a little concerned that I liked his design simply because it aligned rather well with my own vision, but the other judges concurred unanimously that the entry was streets ahead of the competitors. The conceptual technical design approach was well-researched, elegant, cheap, and pretty much ready to roll. Now we need the content, instructional design, a little political will, and some kind of sponsorship for both the development and the running of the phone-based learning service.
In essence, the design takes advantage of the ubiquity of GPRS (its coverage around the world is remarkably comprehensive) and its data rate of 115kbps, which is more than adequate for sending text and speech in various configurations. This is complemented by the ubiquity of devices – in places like Kebira in Kenya, more than 8 out of ten people have access to a mobile phone, though they may not have electricity or running water. Hand cranks can provide charges, or for a few cents people recharge their phones from someone running a small street-corner generator. Put your content through a free open-source Java tool that configures it so it will work and look good on any of more than 500 different phone models, and you are (at least in theory) ready to teach.
But what is the economic model? It should be possible, given the low entry cost, to get large corporations, NGOs, or even governments to front the cash for development of the content, and to subsidise the delivery. Large corporations have a vested interest in getting involved in such projects, in part because they believe in good corporate citizenship, and in part because it’s a great marketing opportunity. In fact I had a brief conversation with a Nokia representative after I had made the award announcement, and he was keen to take the discussion further. Watch this space
Saturday, August 5, 2006
Corporate spin and the mythology of management
What on earth are we teaching people in “management training” courses? The more senior managers I encounter, the less impressed I am with either our training practices or our promotion processes, or both. In organizational management, there seems to be a growing sense of self-righteous despotism, cosmetically made over as leadership, in an ecology characterized by denial.
There has always been a lot of lip-service paid to “employee nurturing” in organizations. Our Vision, Mission, and (especially) Values statements bask in a PR-conscious preciousness that rarely reflects the reality on the ground. Upholding human dignity, respect for the individual, fairness, equal opportunity, striving for excellence, all drip from the earnest clichéd prose used by corporations to describe their management regimes. But, in most companies, at the one-on-one, manager-to-employee level, it’s a sham.
There’s a disconnect between the myth and the reality of corporate life. Proving the effectiveness of marketing, many employees actually believe their employers’ propaganda, even though the contradictions whack them upside the head every day. Managers spout the company line back at the rare employee who plucks up the nerve to question whether in fact the emperor is naked, and with luck the confused employee starts to believe again, if only for a while. If your lifestyle (and your mortgage) has you strapped to your company, and you spend 8 to 16 hours a day immersed in the business, you have to believe simply to suppress your inner despair. The alternative is existentialism, the “it’s only a job” mentality that those too jaded to care often opt for. Beyond that, go postal, or get out. There is material here for a PhD dissertation on corporate spin and employee perceptions of reality. But you’d never find a sponsor.
Over the decades I have worked with corporations large and small around the world, and my universal impression has been that most people manage by fear and manipulation, and they get ahead by polished bureaucracy, skilful (or instinctive) use of politics, networking above themselves, avoiding risk, and exploiting their peers. The warm, fuzzy, touchy-feely stuff so beloved of HR policy wonks and management training gurus is a whitewash that obscures the reality: at the individual level, people-management in corporations is all about taking credit and passing blame.
If this is a result of incompetence or indifference, then perhaps training is at fault. But often it is a result of calculated competitiveness in those with ambition for “bigger things,” or desperate attempts at maintaining control in those already out of their depth. As consultants, we prefer to ignore these realities, because formally acknowledging them is career suicide in companies that are in denial.
In upper-middle management you have a cadre of political officers who discourage any challenge from below to the illusion of impeccable decency and high standards in management practices. If an employee speaks out, they have an “attitude problem” and if they can’t be rehabilitated, they are often disciplined, exiled, or terminated.
Far too often, dominance rules over competence. That appears to be the natural order of things anyway, so maybe it is the best way to run a business. It’s how the military has been run for centuries, and 20th Century business organization was derived from military organization, with command-and-control hierarchies the central pillar of most corporate designs. Sadly, the military has always done a much better job of managing talent.
The dog-eat-dog environments in which most employees operate tend to allow those with bigger teeth and less restraint to advance ahead of those who may be better qualified but less ferocious, or less sly. Nothing is more guaranteed to have you occupying the same desk for decades than doing a good job and passively waiting to be recognized. The result is a top-tier of management whose unifying characteristics are ambition, ruthlessness, and a sense of infallibility, and whose integrity, decency, and fitness for task may be questionable.
It is that mix of characteristics which gets companies into trouble. It is how mega-corporations lose billions in only a few months. It’s what leads to the commonplace firings of thousands of workers, a gesture that says “I have absolutely no constructive ideas how to manage my business out of the hole that I put it in, so I’ll just dump overhead.” Bizarrely, such acts of desperation are routinely applauded by analysts as indicators of strong management.
That self-serving indifference to employees also leads to another commonplace management practice – instead of simply re-organizing a department, everyone in it is instructed to re-apply for their own job. “You have been working for me for years, but I don’t really know who you are or what you do, so sell yourself to me.” In the contorted world of management-speak, this grotesque process is seen to be clever, yet it is really another admission of management failure.
Individual employees are routinely ignored, stifled, oppressed, mentally abused, and in other ways subjected to enormous stress that has nothing to do with their roles or tasks. Good people are played off against each other. Managers nurture those least likely to threaten their jobs or their egos, and sideline those whose competence makes them uncomfortable. Getting ahead these days typically requires a good performer to change companies. None of this is good for the health of an organization.
There’s something wrong with this picture, but what, if anything, is to be done?
Should we heroically be trying to train managers to act in the best interests of the company, even when it is not in the best interest of their own careers? Should we be training managers to recognize and respond appropriately to self-serving practices in those reporting to them? Should we be training employees how to get ahead, giving those who are by nature less assertive the skills and insights to compete? Or is this all futile – should we simply stick to regurgitating Argyris, Ansoff and Maslow, and hope that nobody ever notices that we are not in touch with day-to-day realities?
There has always been a lot of lip-service paid to “employee nurturing” in organizations. Our Vision, Mission, and (especially) Values statements bask in a PR-conscious preciousness that rarely reflects the reality on the ground. Upholding human dignity, respect for the individual, fairness, equal opportunity, striving for excellence, all drip from the earnest clichéd prose used by corporations to describe their management regimes. But, in most companies, at the one-on-one, manager-to-employee level, it’s a sham.
There’s a disconnect between the myth and the reality of corporate life. Proving the effectiveness of marketing, many employees actually believe their employers’ propaganda, even though the contradictions whack them upside the head every day. Managers spout the company line back at the rare employee who plucks up the nerve to question whether in fact the emperor is naked, and with luck the confused employee starts to believe again, if only for a while. If your lifestyle (and your mortgage) has you strapped to your company, and you spend 8 to 16 hours a day immersed in the business, you have to believe simply to suppress your inner despair. The alternative is existentialism, the “it’s only a job” mentality that those too jaded to care often opt for. Beyond that, go postal, or get out. There is material here for a PhD dissertation on corporate spin and employee perceptions of reality. But you’d never find a sponsor.
Over the decades I have worked with corporations large and small around the world, and my universal impression has been that most people manage by fear and manipulation, and they get ahead by polished bureaucracy, skilful (or instinctive) use of politics, networking above themselves, avoiding risk, and exploiting their peers. The warm, fuzzy, touchy-feely stuff so beloved of HR policy wonks and management training gurus is a whitewash that obscures the reality: at the individual level, people-management in corporations is all about taking credit and passing blame.
If this is a result of incompetence or indifference, then perhaps training is at fault. But often it is a result of calculated competitiveness in those with ambition for “bigger things,” or desperate attempts at maintaining control in those already out of their depth. As consultants, we prefer to ignore these realities, because formally acknowledging them is career suicide in companies that are in denial.
In upper-middle management you have a cadre of political officers who discourage any challenge from below to the illusion of impeccable decency and high standards in management practices. If an employee speaks out, they have an “attitude problem” and if they can’t be rehabilitated, they are often disciplined, exiled, or terminated.
Far too often, dominance rules over competence. That appears to be the natural order of things anyway, so maybe it is the best way to run a business. It’s how the military has been run for centuries, and 20th Century business organization was derived from military organization, with command-and-control hierarchies the central pillar of most corporate designs. Sadly, the military has always done a much better job of managing talent.
The dog-eat-dog environments in which most employees operate tend to allow those with bigger teeth and less restraint to advance ahead of those who may be better qualified but less ferocious, or less sly. Nothing is more guaranteed to have you occupying the same desk for decades than doing a good job and passively waiting to be recognized. The result is a top-tier of management whose unifying characteristics are ambition, ruthlessness, and a sense of infallibility, and whose integrity, decency, and fitness for task may be questionable.
It is that mix of characteristics which gets companies into trouble. It is how mega-corporations lose billions in only a few months. It’s what leads to the commonplace firings of thousands of workers, a gesture that says “I have absolutely no constructive ideas how to manage my business out of the hole that I put it in, so I’ll just dump overhead.” Bizarrely, such acts of desperation are routinely applauded by analysts as indicators of strong management.
That self-serving indifference to employees also leads to another commonplace management practice – instead of simply re-organizing a department, everyone in it is instructed to re-apply for their own job. “You have been working for me for years, but I don’t really know who you are or what you do, so sell yourself to me.” In the contorted world of management-speak, this grotesque process is seen to be clever, yet it is really another admission of management failure.
Individual employees are routinely ignored, stifled, oppressed, mentally abused, and in other ways subjected to enormous stress that has nothing to do with their roles or tasks. Good people are played off against each other. Managers nurture those least likely to threaten their jobs or their egos, and sideline those whose competence makes them uncomfortable. Getting ahead these days typically requires a good performer to change companies. None of this is good for the health of an organization.
There’s something wrong with this picture, but what, if anything, is to be done?
Should we heroically be trying to train managers to act in the best interests of the company, even when it is not in the best interest of their own careers? Should we be training managers to recognize and respond appropriately to self-serving practices in those reporting to them? Should we be training employees how to get ahead, giving those who are by nature less assertive the skills and insights to compete? Or is this all futile – should we simply stick to regurgitating Argyris, Ansoff and Maslow, and hope that nobody ever notices that we are not in touch with day-to-day realities?
Tuesday, April 4, 2006
Podcasting Goes Mainstream in Training
In the autumn of 2004, I wrote a brief guide to podcasting, suggesting that this would rapidly become a useful tool in the training world. Eighteen months later, with podcasts proliferating from the BBC, CEOs, neighborhood gossip bloggers and marketers, it seems like at least for knowledge transfer the podcast has gone mainstream.
But podcasting is still controversial and largely misunderstood in the training world. There are those who look on podcasts as nothing more than upgraded audio cassettes or books-on-CD. Their objection is that there appears to be nothing new to justify all the fuss. Others will avow that passively acquired audio-only is an ineffective medium for learning, so podcasting must be a retrograde step, even if you can now podcast video and images too.
Then there are those who see accessibility issues looming – what about learners who don’t have an MP3 player? On the other end of the spectrum are the techno-zealots who, predictably, over hype podcasting as a revolution in learning. But in the middle are an awful lot of people who are quietly just getting on with it, and are making learners rather happy.
As for the view that iPods are like CDs or cassettes: is TiVo like a VCR? Is BitTorrent like the BBC? Just because the digestible output is similar does not make the user experience or the benefits the same.
Yes, the end product is audio content, but then you get that from the telephone, the radio, and the towne crier. Where podcasts differ, and they are significant differences, is in:
1) Their ease of creation and immediacy.
2) Their disintermediation of lengthy and expensive supply lines.
3) Their ability to time shift delivery.
4) The user's ability to seek and even automate acquisition of only those targeted pieces that are of interest.
5) The ease with which they can be integrated into other web 2.0 resources such as blogs, discussion forums, communities of practice, and so on.
Try doing that with a commercially produced and distributed CD system.
What about the argument that audio-only is a poor training medium? Well, that may be true for many subject or skill areas. But it’s not necessarily a poor learning medium for many other fields. You can’t blindly accept the conventional wisdom that you retain only ten per cent of what you hear, and make sweeping decisions about all learning on that questionable precept.
It's alternately amusing and annoying that bogus "statistics" like the "10% from hearing" notion manage to embed themselves so deeply in the folklore of training.
Many have no academic study behind them; others have questionable studies to support them; others may have a sound study or two in the background but have been widely misinterpreted or misapplied. We all like simplistic rules by which to manage our work, but often what we take as fact is nothing more than gross generalization at best, pure mythology at worst.
Podcasts will be created badly and used inappropriately by many, but this is true of any technology that enables (democratizes?) content creation - PowerPoint, web video, the digital camera. It was only a few years ago that the august professors at Stanford were putting talking-head videos of actual lectures online and selling it as e-learning.
I have wasted a lot of time partially listening to bad podcasts. They suffer from fuzzy audio, atrocious speaking styles, muddled structure, and often simply incorrect content. But, as with other resources, you learn to discern good from bad, and you select those sources which are useful to you.
There are a lot of things that I would not choose to learn in an exclusively audio mode, but I find that podcasts are a very convenient way to stay in touch with what is going on in my fields of interest. Being able to hear the voices of people who I respect adds a dimension that holds my attention, often better than their written words.
It's not easy to podcast well, even if the technology is simple and you have well designed content to convey. I've made many attempts, and find I just don't have the voice, but I keep on experimenting (watch this space..).
I can see a time in the next year or two when podcasting skills training will appear in the catalogues just as presentation skills training or webinar skills training does. Now there's a business opportunity for someone …
But podcasting is still controversial and largely misunderstood in the training world. There are those who look on podcasts as nothing more than upgraded audio cassettes or books-on-CD. Their objection is that there appears to be nothing new to justify all the fuss. Others will avow that passively acquired audio-only is an ineffective medium for learning, so podcasting must be a retrograde step, even if you can now podcast video and images too.
Then there are those who see accessibility issues looming – what about learners who don’t have an MP3 player? On the other end of the spectrum are the techno-zealots who, predictably, over hype podcasting as a revolution in learning. But in the middle are an awful lot of people who are quietly just getting on with it, and are making learners rather happy.
As for the view that iPods are like CDs or cassettes: is TiVo like a VCR? Is BitTorrent like the BBC? Just because the digestible output is similar does not make the user experience or the benefits the same.
Yes, the end product is audio content, but then you get that from the telephone, the radio, and the towne crier. Where podcasts differ, and they are significant differences, is in:
1) Their ease of creation and immediacy.
2) Their disintermediation of lengthy and expensive supply lines.
3) Their ability to time shift delivery.
4) The user's ability to seek and even automate acquisition of only those targeted pieces that are of interest.
5) The ease with which they can be integrated into other web 2.0 resources such as blogs, discussion forums, communities of practice, and so on.
Try doing that with a commercially produced and distributed CD system.
What about the argument that audio-only is a poor training medium? Well, that may be true for many subject or skill areas. But it’s not necessarily a poor learning medium for many other fields. You can’t blindly accept the conventional wisdom that you retain only ten per cent of what you hear, and make sweeping decisions about all learning on that questionable precept.
It's alternately amusing and annoying that bogus "statistics" like the "10% from hearing" notion manage to embed themselves so deeply in the folklore of training.
Many have no academic study behind them; others have questionable studies to support them; others may have a sound study or two in the background but have been widely misinterpreted or misapplied. We all like simplistic rules by which to manage our work, but often what we take as fact is nothing more than gross generalization at best, pure mythology at worst.
Podcasts will be created badly and used inappropriately by many, but this is true of any technology that enables (democratizes?) content creation - PowerPoint, web video, the digital camera. It was only a few years ago that the august professors at Stanford were putting talking-head videos of actual lectures online and selling it as e-learning.
I have wasted a lot of time partially listening to bad podcasts. They suffer from fuzzy audio, atrocious speaking styles, muddled structure, and often simply incorrect content. But, as with other resources, you learn to discern good from bad, and you select those sources which are useful to you.
There are a lot of things that I would not choose to learn in an exclusively audio mode, but I find that podcasts are a very convenient way to stay in touch with what is going on in my fields of interest. Being able to hear the voices of people who I respect adds a dimension that holds my attention, often better than their written words.
It's not easy to podcast well, even if the technology is simple and you have well designed content to convey. I've made many attempts, and find I just don't have the voice, but I keep on experimenting (watch this space..).
I can see a time in the next year or two when podcasting skills training will appear in the catalogues just as presentation skills training or webinar skills training does. Now there's a business opportunity for someone …
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