Predictions 2010 (on Silicon Angle)

January 4, 2010 By

Silicon Angle ran a guest post by me while I was on vacation (written with my work hat on, and with input from my team). My five predictions for Web technology are:

  1. The rise of the long form
  2. The Cambrian explosion of devices
  3. The “Website” will dissolve into the real-time Web
  4. The quality/quantity chasm will deepen
  5. Social filtering will start to displace search as the primary driver of monetizable content

Click on to read the details. Shortened URL for the original post for your C&P pleasure: http://bit.ly/92RDT8

Of course, my predictions are a function of my personal and professional biases/interests/agendas, but still, I do believe them. I think there really are forces making these 5 things happen. Thoughts?

The Right and Left Brains of Enterprise 2.0

December 16, 2009 By

As some of you know, I occasionally (very occasionally in recent times) guest post over at the Enterprise 2.0 blog. I just posted a combo-pack review of two recent books there: Andrew McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0 and Fraser/Dutta’s Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom.

Click on over and read. There are also a few links scattered in the piece, to my older E 2.0 theme articles. At some point I’ll make an E2.0 trail, but for now, you might also enjoy this trail on the “Enterprise 2.0: What A Crock” debate that has recently been brewing (start reading or go to the Trail Map)

I’ll be out on vacation for the next couple of weeks, so I won’t be posting new material till January. If I have time, I might set up a couple of “rerun” posts on older popular pieces before I leave.

Happy Holidays!

Random Promotions and the Gervais Principle

December 13, 2009 By

The New York Times has a section in the most recent magazine called the Ninth Annual Year in Ideas. Divya Manian (@nimbupani) alerted me to  the second idea in the business section: random promotions.

In 1969, the Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter posited the “Peter Principle”…Eventually the entire economy becomes like the paper company Dunder Mifflin in “The Office” — clogged with incompetence…Is there any way to avoid this trap? Yes, by promoting people at random.

It’s a short piece, and is based on organizational dynamics simulations by a trio of Italian scientists. Go check it out. It is an intriguing thought: that random promotions might break the Peter Principle. Do they break or validate the Gervais Principle? 

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Pricing in Pay-It-Forward and Gift Economies

December 1, 2009 By

Thanks to this site lurching up a notch in traffic and visits, with a corresponding lurch-up in various revenue streams (coffee, Amazon Affiliate sales, Google AdSense), an interesting set of economics questions has been on my radar. Over the last two months, ribbonfarm.com made a few hundred dollars (mainly due to the Gervais Principle articles). That’s still pretty much a rounding error in relative terms, compared to my real job, but in absolute terms, it is actually worth thinking about. Here is the main question: what percentage of revenue should someone like me devote to contributions to all the fantastic open-source infrastructure that makes this blog possible? So far, I’ve behaved pretty randomly. Last month, I donated $20 to the guy (Ankesh Kothari) behind the “Buy me a beer” plugin (which you see on this site as “Buy me a coffee”). I also donated another $20 to Wikipedia. But I’d like to think about this more systematically, and figure out how much to contribute, how, and who gets it. Here are my opening thoughts.

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The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk

November 11, 2009 By

We began this analysis of corporate life by exploring a  theoretical construct (the Gervais Principle) through the character arcs of Michael and Ryan in The Office. The construct and examples provide a broad-strokes treatment of the why of the power dynamics among Sociopaths, the Clueless and Losers.

Series Home | Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | ebook

 

This helps us understand how the world works, but not how to work it. So let me introduce you to the main skill required here, mastery over the four major languages spoken in organizations, among Sociopaths, Losers and the Clueless. I’ll call the four languages Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk. Here’s a picture of who speaks what to whom. Let’s use it to figure out how to make friends and influence people, Office style.

langsTom

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The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office”

October 7, 2009 By

My neighbor introduced me to The Office back in 2005. Since then, I’ve watched every episode of both the British and American versions. I’ve watched the show obsessively because I’ve been unable to figure out what makes it so devastatingly effective, and elevates it so far above the likes of Dilbert and Office Space.

Series Home | Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | ebook

Until now, that is. Now, after four years, I’ve finally figured the show out.  The Office is not a random series of cynical gags aimed at momentarily alleviating the existential despair of low-level grunts. It is a fully realized theory of management that falsifies 83.8% of the business section of the bookstore.  The theory begins with Hugh MacLeod’s well-known cartoon, Company Hierarchy (below), and its cornerstone is something I will call The Gervais Principle, which supersedes both the Peter Principle and its successor, The Dilbert Principle. Outside of the comic aisle, the only major and significant works consistent with the Gervais Principle are The Organization Man and Images of Organization.

hughMcLeodCompanyHierarchy

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The Manager on Labor Day

September 3, 2009 By

There will never be a Management Day to complement Labor Day. The reason lies in the nature of the function, which I once flippantly defined as “delegating whatever you can define, and doing whatever you cannot.” What you cannot define, you cannot step away from. Stuff so ambiguous, you can only define it after actually doing it. When worker bees step away from their tools, situation awareness fades rapidly, and perforce, they must relax a little. There are no tools to the management trade. Your head is it, and it goes with you to the beach, even on Labor Day.

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The Outlaw Sea by William Langewiesche

August 27, 2009 By

To most of us, the oceans are about romance, not shipping logistics. Violent thirty-foot waves and gripping piracy tales are conspicuously missing from The Box, the first shipping-themed book I reviewed. While that story (see my post the epic story of container shipping) had all the passion and high drama of a business thriller, it was essentially a human and technology story. The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime tells a parallel tale, one focusing on the realities of the oceans themselves . There are plenty of waves and pirates here, and this is easily the most absorbing maritime-themed book I’ve read since Treasure Island, which is saying a lot, since it is non-fiction.

Rainbow7

The "Alondra Rainbow", pirated and renamed "Mega Rama" (picture from Indian Coast Guard site)

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On Going Feral

August 19, 2009 By
This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Regenerations

Yesterday, a colleague looked at me and deadpanned, “aren’t you supposed to have a long beard?” When you remote-work for an extended period (it’s been six months since my last visit to the mother ship), you can expect to hear your share of jokes and odd remarks when you do show up. Once you become a true cloudworker, a ghost in the corporate machine who only exists as a tinny voice on conference calls, perceptions change. So when you do show up, you find that people react to you with some confusion. You’re not a visitor or guest, but you don’t seem to truly belong either.

I hadn’t planned on such a long period without visits to the home base, but the recession and a travel freeze got in the way of my regular monthly visits for a while. The anomalous situation created an accidental social-psychological experiment with me as guinea pig. What’s the difference between six months and one month, you might ask? Everything. Monthly visits keep you domesticated. Six months is long enough to make you go feral. I’ve gone feral.

Feral cat (Wikimedia Commons, GFDL)

Feral cat (Wikimedia Commons, GFDL)

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Two Manipulative Ways to Close Conversations

August 12, 2009 By

I have a morbid fascination with the idea that conversations represent two computers trying to program each other in real time. Pondering this sometimes yields insights that seem to be valid but manipulative. Here are two examples; you can decide whether these moves should be used. The first has to do with IM/chat conversations. Do you ever tire of closing rituals that take too long?

A: Ciao!

B: Yup, ttyl

A: Have a good weekend

B: Thanks, am looking forward to chilling on my camping trip. You have a nice weekend too.

A: Oh, where are you going?

I’ve found a move that tends to cut off these sessions surgically. I call it repeat-or-complement. The first time the other person uses a closing phrase, you either repeat it exactly (mirroring) or provide the most ritualistic, banal complementary response available. In the example above, the response to Ciao! should have been Ciao!, not ttyl. This works for neutral/symmetric closings. If you get something like Thanks, you should choose You’re welcome (no exclamation point). Not no problem or anytime dude.

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