July 31, 2002
Mammals of Australia Terence Lindsey
Mammals of Australia
Terence Lindsey
The monotremes, platypus and echidna, egg-laying mammals that use the same orifice for sex and defection (mono-treme). The marsupials, which nuture a barely formed young 'un in a pouch, and include roos, wallabies, wombats, quokkas, Tasmanian devils, bandicoots, bilbies, numbats, koalas, possums, bettongs, potoroos, pademelons, almost all of which we saw in Tasmania and/or the Sydney zoo. A great little pocketbook that answers the important questions like
- Are echnidnas smart?
Is the Tasmanian Tiger extinct?
Which large Australian mammal leads a subterranean lifestyle?
How do possums communicate?
A fine little book -- IF you're going to Australia.
July 30, 2002
Bandwidth is time-dependent, so I'll
Bandwidth is time-dependent, so I'll put this handy table from JOHO here.
- Bluetooth is 10 times faster than a 56k modem
USB is 10 times faster than Bluetooth
802.11b is as fast as USB
10baseT is as fast as USB
100baseT is 10 times faster than 10baseT
FireWire is 4 times faster than 100baseT and 40 times faster than USB
Gigabit Ethernet is 10 times faster than 100baseT
July 29, 2002
The Book on the Bookshelf
The Book on the Bookshelf by Henry Petroski goes from papyrus scrolls to hardbound codex to chained book, kept in armoires, triple-locked chests, and lecturns by the monastery windows. The name of the book hasn't always appeared on the spine, and early on, the spines faced inward. A wonderful collection of book trivia.
The Four Agreements by Miguel Ruiz implores you to be impeccable with your word, not to take anything personally, not to make assumptions, and to always do your best. Miguel tells you this over and over and over. That's the Toltec way, I guess.
In a Sunburned Country by
In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson, recently retitled Down Under, is a humorous trek around Australia with an incurably curious funny guy. I read this on the plane to Australia and during our first days in Sydney, chuckling along and thoroughly enjoying Bryson's quirks. Not much about urban life. I started but ran out of time with Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore, the story of the early days. An engrossing book, but not one I have much use for now that I'm back in California.
the haiku anthology, a delightful anchor paperback from 25 years ago, purchased for a nickel at the Albany Library book sale earlier this year. The 5-7-5 structure is total nonsense, given that the Japanese don't have syllables so much as thought-bites. In English, it's permissable to shorten things:
- tonite
northing to write
but this
- The silence
in moonlight
of stones
Back from Australia! I haven't
Back from Australia!
I haven't slept for...let's see...six hours before flight, 14 hours from Sydney to L.A., 4 hours in L.A., 2 hours flying back to San Francisco, arrived in Berkeley a couple of hours ago...28 hours, but the trip adrenalin is still coursing through my arteries, and my head feels marvellously clear.
All it takes is a little distance, georgraphic and psychological, to clear one's head of trivia. I have more than 1,000 emails waiting. Microsoft Outlook is balking at downloading even the first one. Archiving my old messages corrupted my mail files irrevocably. So I plan to toss all my old mail. It's a millstone I don't need. But I can't figure out how to delete Outlook from my system.
Aussie photos.Friends are asking, "How was Australia?" One answer is that Down Under makes one question Up Above. When you go to Europe, things are so different than in the States that it's hard to forget where you are. That's part of the charm. But in Australia, the similarities are many. It's like the U.S., but 10% out of kilter. A few times I felt like Hunter Thompson in the movie version of Fear and Loathing, where a normal scene would turn into ripples for a while before snapping back to reality.
Take waiters and waitresses. In Australia, they are polite. Friendly. They make you feel looked after. They'll take a break to tell you a story. And they don't expect tips. No one expects a tip!
Take shops. Shoppes. There are too many Target, McDonalds, Esprit, etc., just like in any mall in America, but there are also arcades filled with one-room shops run by the owner. You never know what you'll find at the quaint little jewelry shop or the stamp shop or the haberdasher's. The arcades date back a hundred years and are enjoying a renaissance.
I'm still enjoying beginner's mind. Zero-based planning. Oyster world.
Maybe I'm into amateur's mind. Partly back to my reality, partly in another world.
July 18, 2002
July 13, 2002
Enough kvetching. Tomorrow is vacation.
Enough kvetching. Tomorrow is vacation. Time to be mellow, contemplative, and thankful. Besides...
Why me? Why me? Why
Why me? Why me? Why me? Do other people get crap like this from Win XP?
Some days I feel like Job, being tested by the gods of Microsoft.
I feel like the dog
I feel like the dog who got on the bus.
Now what am I supposed to do?
(I pulled the plug.)
July 11, 2002
Believe it or don't! THE
Believe it or don't!
THE THIRD EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON ORGANIZATIONAL KNOWLEDGE, LEARNING, AND CAPABILITIES
How useful is that?
Don Norman has written a
Don Norman has written a very nice piece entitled Emotion and Design: Attractive Things Work Better.
Affect and emotion are not as well understood as cognition, but the cognitive and neurosciences have made major strides in the past decade. Note that terminology is still a problem, so in this paper, to avoid the technical debate about distinctions among the concepts of affect, emotion, feelings, mood, motivation, and qualia, I use the reasonably neutral term of "affect." Affect and cognition can both be considered information processing systems, but with different functions and operating parameters. The affective system is judgmental, assigning positive and negative valence to the environment rapidly and efficiently. The cognitive system interprets and makes sense of the world. Each system impacts the other: some emotions -- affective states -- are driven by cognition, and cognition is impacted by affect.
The surprise is that we now have evidence that pleasing things work better, are easier to learn, and produce a more harmonious result.
The affective signals work through neurochemicals, bathing the relevant brain centers and changing the way we perceive, decide, and react. These neurochemicals change the parameters of thought, adjusting such things as whether reason is primarily depth first (focused, not easily distracted) or breadth first (creative, out of the box thinking, but easily distractible).
Affect therefore regulates how we solve problems and perform tasks. Negative affect can make it harder to do even easy tasks: positive affect can make it easier to do difficult tasks. This may seem strange, especially to people who have been trained in the cognitive sciences: affect changes how well we do cognitive tasks? Yup.
Good design means that beauty and usability are in balance. An object that is beautiful to the core is no better than one that is only pretty if they both lack usability.
In the quest for enhancement of life, let us not be usability bigots. Yes, products must be usable. But all the many factors of design must be in harmony. Marketing considerations must be accounted for, aesthetic appeal, manufacturability -- all are important. The products must be affordable, functional, and pleasurable. And above all a pleasure to own, a pleasure to use. After all, attractive things work better.
July 10, 2002
The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual
The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization
by Thomas A. Stewart
The Wealth of Knowledge is easily the best business book I've read in several years. The logic is sound, the metaphors communicate, and the prescriptions are practical. Some of the goodies I high-lighted follow.
All the major structures of companies – their legal underpinnings, their systems of governance, their management disciplines, their accounting – are based on a model of the corporation that has become irrelevant. There are no rules of thumb, no advice, no tried-and-true consulting methods, no academic work on how to make the oil-rig worker more productive during the five-sixths of his time he is not holder a wrench. Knowledge workers are on their own—getting a word of advice here and there from a colleague or a boss, or from self-help books about how to be better organized.
The single most effective way to strengthen employees’ loyalty is to increase their opportunities for growth.
We all know that we learned more from our classmates than from our classes.
Collaboration, customization, constant correction occur in a special kind of place, a place with Ba.
By the middle of 2001, dot-com schadenfreud had become as tiresome and unenlightening as e-business braggadocio was two years earlier.
An organization is defined from the inside out—by budgets, departments, org charts, and reporting relationships. A business is defined from the outside in—by markets, suppliers, customers, competitors.
The Four-Step Process for Managing Intellectual Capital
1. Identify and evaluate the role of knowledge in your business—as input, process, and output. How knowledge-intensive is the business? Who gets paid for what knowledge? Who pays? How much?
2. Match the revenues you’ve just found with the knowledge assets that produce them. What are the expertise, capabilities, brands, intellectual properties, processes, and other intellectual capital that create value for you? What is the mixture of human-capital, structural-capital, and customer-capital assets?
3. Develop a strategy for investing in and exploiting your intellectual assets. What are your value proposition, source of control, and profit model?
4. Improve the efficiency of knowledge work and knowledge workers. Bearing in mind that knowledge work does not necessarily follow the linear path that physical labor often does, how can you increase knowledge workers’ productivity.
Stephen Denning, at the World Bank, identified 114 knowledge domains, and for each, created a help desk, a who-knows-what Yellow Pages, a collection of key sector statistics, records of the bank’s previous projects (emphasizing best practices and lessons learned), an electronic bulletin board, and finally provision for outsiders (such as the bank’s client countries) to get into the system directly.
Collegiality (and knowledge-sharing) contends with subverters, wiggle-outers, and a few outright foes. Auditors, lawyers, security officers, personnel staff—everyone wants to keep secrets.
The Disciplines of a Knowledge Business
Traditional organizations are run like buses, with routes to follow and schedules to meet; real-time organizations are taxis, which respond to a waving armor a voice crackling on a two-way radio.
· Decisions that once were made internally are now made with and by outsiders—customers or the market as a whole.
· The more choices people get, the more they want.
· Time is present time and distance is zero.
· Volatility is baked in; live with it.
You find knowledge products not by looking at your own value chain, but by look at that of your customers.
“Never sell anything only once.” Art Buchwald
“If you’re not absorbing knowledge from your customer, you’re not doing anything.” Nick Bontis
Value creation itself, more and more, is a collaboration between buyer and seller.
A fully developed customer learning process will have four traits. First, it will emphasize communication over information mining. Without a process of mutual learning—which permits smarter buying and selling—there’s little basis for customer loyalty in a low-friction knowledge economy. Second, customer learning needs to be integrated across functions—that is, not just confined to marketing, sales, and service, but reaching into new product development and even HR and finance. Third, the process should create a kind of relationship capital that is as valuable to the buyer as it is to the seller. Finally, the customer learning process should be so visible day to day that you can’t imagine running the company without it.
Knowledge sharing builds social capital, trust, morale, and culture. Whatever your business imperative—speed, innovation, frugality, quality, customer focus—knowledge sharing helps it. (Yet a study of thousands of professionals by Korn Ferry found that only 12% had access to lessons learned within their own company!)
Bill Raduchel says, “You can’t have a virtual conversation unless you also have real conversations. The indispensable complementary technology to the Net is the Boeing 747.”
Consultantware = semi-finished products that consultants then tailor to their clients’ needs.
In a knowledge economy, where unthinking jobs have been automated, companies are asking all workers—and especially managers and knowledge workers—to make decisions. Their inner gyroscope must be aligned with the corporate compass.
How to Train More Effectively
Emphasize action learning. Classroom training has its place: a small one. It’s inefficient: Half the people in the room are secretly working on their “real” jobs….
Build informal learning into work. Make it easy—and culturally acceptable—to ask for help.
Train for today’s job, not tomorrows, and train to increase the overall flexibility of the workforce.
Focus on key skills and knowledge workers. A company’s training should emphasize what differentiates it from its competitors.
Accounting, long dead, is not yet buried, and the situation stinks. Okay, that overstates the case, but not a lot.
Organizations are not so much collections of parts as they are connections of brain cells, nerves, and sinews. To discover this is to discover the power of knowledge set free and of technology made human. It is to discover that it’s possible to improve not only a company’s performance today, but its responsiveness, its repertoire of skills, and its capacity to deal with the future.
From The Wealth of Knowledge
From The Wealth of Knowledge by Tom Stewart,
On a lakeside near Zurich, a city where Lenin plotted Bolshevist revolution, ur-capitalist Dean LeBaron, former fchaiman of Bastterymarch Financial Management, contrmplates the information revolution: "We financial analysts were brought up looking at charts whose x-asis represented time.You'd see trends. Time was a wave. In the new economy, I'm beginning to think time is a quantum. What comes next bears no relationship to what came before." That glorious abstract image becomes earthy as LeBaron explains: "It use to be that information oozed out into the makret. Now it's dumped out all at once."
from RIch Persaud: Why are
from RIch Persaud:
My dinners with Pierre (et
My dinners with Pierre (et ses amis)
Last week in France, home of Bergson and Proust, I noted some differences between French and US notions of time.
- The French have not only minutes, but also "small minutes." This appears to be a euphemism for "it's really going to be longer than that." Petit pops up in other contexts, e.g. "Do you want a whisky?" "Maybe a small one." Thus, a petit minute is to a minute as "just a sec" is to a second. Different.
- For the most part, American meetings cut to the heart of the matter and Continental meetings start with social and philosophical foreplay. I suspect that the Americans assume the existance of "one best way" and see no need to open that bucket of worms when discussing business matters. The French are more philosophical and enjoy confirming the context before getting to the point. Also, the circular warm-up in France paves the way socially for deeper interaction -- if and when the point of the meeting is reached.
- In one day-long session to formulate strategy, for the first couple of hours, I felt like I was in slo-mo. My Dinner with Andre. And yet after lunch, we reached more agreements in a shorter time than I've ever experienced in American sessions. The lengthy warm-up built the foundation for rapid agreement. Overall, the Continental approach was more time-efficient. And in addition, we had time left over to discuss nuances over a pleasant dinner at a local brasserie.
- On the road, American drivers assume other drivers will obey the rules of the road. American highways are less ambiguous in defining what's proper and what's not. Driving in California, I can almost flip into auto-pilot, monitoring details with my peripheral vision and not paying much attention to the second-to-second interplay of the automobiles and trucks around me. In France, many streets were laid out for carriages and farm animals. Streets meet at oblique angles. Cars parked along residential streets leave but a single lane for traffic. When cars approach a chokepoint from opposite directions, it's not at all clear who has the right of way. Driving on auto-pilot in France would be suicidal. It's a much faster game, where one driver has to react to the moves of the others. I suspect French drivers have much quicker reflexes than their American counterparts because they have so much practice.
July 09, 2002
The BIrkman Instrument rated me
The BIrkman Instrument rated me at the tip-top of the scale on empathy. When this popped up nearly twenty years ago, I was so surprised that I had the test sent back for rescoring. Once again, empathy. Now I'm beginning to see what it meant: my basic operating assumption is that most of us are on the same page.
Last week I put my foot in it again. Friends have suggested I am an intellectual capital claimjumper. I posted pictures of an event I attended on the web, I didn't mean to spill any confidences; I just believe ideas should be free. That's one reason I post so much stuff on the web.
It's not as if there are many new ideas out there. Most of the things I come up with are just rearrangements of other peoples' thoughts. I don't own these ideas. Nobody does. If they help the world become a better place, I'm glad to pass them along. It's not as if I'm losing anything. The more I disseminate my thoughts, the more my reputation spreads. This attitude would not make me popular on campus.
Academe does not empathize. In some quarters, express an idea on their campus and it becomes their intellectual property. When I share in a conversation on campus, I remove those words from public discourse. (I've been asked not to post my notes on the web.) Heavens to Betsy, we would not want a thought to be misattributed in the mere search for truth. I could rant on but I won't. Because I simply don't get it. I understand protecting personal privacy, proprietary secrets, and physical property, but ideas???
July 06, 2002
Sometimes it's the little things
Sometimes it's the little things that trip you up.
I am in Paris this week, working with a French eLearning start-up. It's wonderful to be here but responding to email is tough
Used to a QWERTY keyboard? Ha, ha, ha, ha. In France, it's AZERTY. They also moved the letter M. And all the punctuation. And the numbers are all upper case; the symbols are lower case, except a for common ones like @, which is an alternate lower-case symbol.
With Windoze, I could reset the keyboard to QWERTY layout but it seems too much a bother: However, consider a bigger hassle: documentation. If you wqnt to show a screen shot, you'll need a picture of a French keyboard to do it. You can't tell the French user to switch to QWERTY because he would lose é, è, ç, à, €, £, ù, qnd µ.
Plus çq chqnge, plus c'est la meme chose.
Yesterday I visited the chateau that Napoleon gave Josephine. Like Sinatra, M. Bonaparte did it his way. Big N's engraved everywhere. The emporer's keyboard would have sported an entire row of N's of varying size. It's quite a legacy.