Memo to Management
Published on 30 Apr 2007 at 4:56 pm by Oliver |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Manifest Masquerade, Thanks for Playing, Pathetic Success, Brain Trust, One Corporation Under God, Limited Lie-ability, In Corporations We Trust, Business and Corporation Related, Humor.
There are ten items in the following list. Grab a pencil and rank them according to the ones most important to you in your job.
• Challenge
• Empathy
• Fair Discipline
• Full Appreciation
• Good Working Conditions
• In On Things
• Know That Management Cares
• Opportunity for Growth
• Pay & Benefits
• Security of Employment
Done? Okay. Now if you’re a manager, rank them according to how you think your employees would rank them.
Now let’s see how Amercian workers rank them, on average, and how their bosses think employees will rank them.
Employees:
• In On Things
• Full Appreciation
• Know That Management Cares
• Challenge
• Fair Discipline
• Security of Employment
• Pay & Benefits
• Opportunity for Growth
• Good Working Conditions
• Empathy
Managers’ Estimate of How Employees Feel:
• Pay & Benefits
• Security of Employment
• Good Working Conditions
• Fair Discipline
• Opportunity for Growth
• Empathy
• Know That Management Cares
• Full Appreciation
• In On Things
• Challenge
Memo to Management: It ain’t about pay. It’s about not being a dick.
VoIP - Threat or Menace?
Published on 25 Apr 2007 at 11:14 am by Oliver |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Technopolitical, Design, Interface, and Usability, Networking Technology, Pure Geek, Information Technology, Open Source Software.
My esteemed colleage Paul has written at length in this space on VoIP, and as always he brings tremendous insight. And yet the point is missed.
I’m not challenging the benefits of the many technical improvements that have been made to the PSTN since Alexander Graham Bell’s day. Dedicated engineers have worked long and hard to make it an unremarked marvel of the world, and the idea that perhaps variable-length packets might be more efficient that fixed-length ones is entirely reasonable. And I have no doubt that converging the wiring plant (over time) will save money.
Paul cites unified messaging. Octel introduced this in the 90s; Paul knows one of the senior product managers on the project, he can ask her for details. UM doesn’t care about packet length. After all, a .WAV file consists of fixed-length 8-bit "packets".
The advent of VoIP is an opportunity to re-define the user experience. Once, not so many years ago, I was a happy knowledge worker with a computer on my desk. One day corporate management awarded me a "Messaging Terminal", a dedicated box that did what amounts to email. You typed, it stored-and-forwarded. Others’ messages appeared on the screen. Wow, what a cool idea! I wonder if it will catch on? 
Mind you, Unix email was well-established at this time. (Sidebar: we built a gateway between our Unix email and the corporate system. Management found out and demanded that it be unhooked. We complied, then shipped it overseas and reconnected it between to far-flung points, and kept it more secret. It ran for years….) I didn’t want a separate email terminal; why do I want a separate voice terminal?
Skype has shown us what VoIP could be. Skype works well, is free, is even easier to deploy than VoIP, and, wonder of wonders, does not compel the use of strange incomprehensible numeric endpoint addresses.
It’s not perfect. I wish it were open. As Paul suggests, an open system would allow a faster rate of innovation. OTOH, the open VoIP systems still haven’t move past !~@@#$^&!@$%! phone numbers, so maybe it’s a purely theoretical advantage.
As for the opne-ness of standards-based VoIP, yes, it could happen, but…. I suspect that the mind-set of the telephony world will keep it from evolving very quickly. Their unwillingness to let go of the station instrument model is telling in this regard. Innovation under the sheets to save money? Sure. Helping the user? Get real - this is the phone company we’re talking about. Oh, and Ernestine is holding for you on line two.
The bigger issue with Skype is one which applies to all VoIP systems, namely that the government will bugger them to death with regulations and taxes. Vonage is in critical condition; E-Bay has bigger fish to fry than Skype and is unlikely to mount a to-the-death defense of it virtues.
Hello coders! Anyone out there wat to create the next, truly distributed and open peer-to-peer VoIP system? Skype has shown the way. Screw SIP and all that, just code something that works!
It’s Easy…..
Published on 5 Apr 2007 at 9:36 pm by Oliver |
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Yes, you read it right:
"It’s easy to get results with great people. The trick is to do it with the people you’ve got."
Spoken by a CEO who was trying to make a different point than the one he made. It is a pearl of wisdom nevertheless. The reality of life in an organization of any size is that your people will be, well, average. And no, rank-and-yank won’t fix it; it just changes the filter so you get a different average. Humans are multi-dimensional. If you select on the basis of RnY, your get people good at surviving that, but who says they’re good at anything else?
The wise CEO seeks to maximize the team he’s got. Now, I’m not saying never lay anyone off. But if your organization has a three-digit payroll, you are reverting to the mean, and you need to focus on motivating the people you have, and _enabling_ the people you have. How many barriers do your troops face in requisitioning bullets? Are you ordering them to build starships with only stone axes as tools? My guess is yes - most comapnies are.
Assume they’re not idiots. Empower them. Feel free to hold them accountable. You pay ‘em big bucks; why assume they’re stupid?
7 Wonders of the Internet
Published on 5 Apr 2007 at 12:05 pm by Oliver |
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Our esteemed colleagues over at Network World are developing a list of "The Seven Wonders of the Internet". Here at Cargo Cult, we’ve worked out the list. It is: <cue drumroll>
1. Making the World’s knowledge accessible: Google. What can we say? Google is now a verb, and is essential. There may be a better search engine than google some day, but whatever it is, it will be the wonder of the world.
We’ll go so far as to say that Google is so far in the lead as a WotW than the rest of these items should be number 12 through 17, not 2 thru 7.
2. E-mail. Fuddy-dud luddite calligraphers notwithstanding, E-mail has done more to promote person-to-person communication that anything since, and maybe even before, the telephone. Why, one of us now writes to his poor old Mom, regualarly. Lots of people are finding each other and renewing connections that had gone cold over 20, 30, even 50 or 60 years.
3. Wikipedia. Not perfect, but neither were the Pyramids. (One collapsed, you’ll recall.) Wikipedia is an excellent and usually-reliable - and FREE - source of basic info on everything. Need a reference on medieval Bulgaria? Wikipedia has it. Quick check on some obscure technical standard or acronym? Go to Wikipedia.
Again, Wikipedia _might_ be supplanted someday by a free and open variant that addresses some of Wiki’s issues w/o killing it, but whether it’s today’s Wikipedia or some future variant, it’s a wonder of the world.
4. Open news media. Call ‘em news-blogs or whatever, the ease with which citizens can now check on the MSM and correct its errors is a big deal. We are moving toward a world where there are truly zillions of media outifts, where everyone has a printing press, etc. Most importantly, we are breaking down the false distinction that a journalist is somehow distinct from a citizen.
5. iTunes. OK, maybe not an Internet app in the strictest sense, but the way in which technology is busting up the media monopolies is wonderful. We buy the songs we want and listen on our schedule. We buy the TV programs and movies we want and listen on our schedule. We can much more easily find, and support, the artists I like. Try the Wicked Tinkers sometime.
Realistically, we should lump mp3, TiVo, and a bunch of related tech in here as well. You Tube probably belongs in this category, too. It’s where we watch the Superbowl ads - saves over three hours of tedious football. 
6. E-Bay, and all the other sites that make commercial markets in things you just couldn’t find or buy, or even know existed to solve some problem you had. As Stewart Brand put it 35 years ago, "Access to Tools".
There isn’t a clear seventh. Some items that do NOT belong on the list, namely MySpace/Facebook, etc. Blah! Zillions of idiots proving their idiocy. It is possible that some wondrous thiing may yet evolve out of this technology, but I’ve seen no sign of it yet……
We would, however, assert that Skype has a good shot at being a WotW. It shows how you could, and should, do VoIP. It’s not quite ubiquitous enough to be a clear list-member yet, but it’s getting there. Don’t have Skype? Get it. Got Vonage or some similar? You poor pathetic loser. It’s 80s tech, dressed up but insubstantial.
If it’s on the web, is it secret?
Published on 26 Mar 2007 at 11:28 am by Oliver |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Blogosphere, Legal, Law, and Courts, Government: Federal, State and Local, Main Stream Media.
It seems that the NYPD has used the internet to "spy" on groups and individuals. They’ve visited web sites and chat rooms, exchanged emails, and probably even sent IMs. And on the Internet, no one knew they were dogs.
Is this wrong?
Should it be wrong?
I cetainly agree that a person is entitled to keep secrets. But does a person have an expectation of secrecy for any material he places on the Web? Does a person have a right to expect that another person, met electronically, is who they say they are?
A recent NY Times story reports on NYPD activities which including building up files on persons who might be planning to disrupt things at various anti-war demonstrations. Is this evil, or good police work?
It seems that nowadays most of the big-city "peace" demonstrations are not altogether peaceful. At least a portion of the attendees are there to create mischief. Long ago, your humble scribe joined a few anti-war (Vietnam) demonstrations for that very reason, and so he is inclined to be sympathetic. But he is also inclined to be sympathetic to the police, whose job it is to prevent such mischief.
If it’s on the web, is it really a secret?
The Real Reason for the Economic Boom
Published on 17 Mar 2007 at 2:38 pm by Oliver |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Technopolitical, Business and Corporation Related, Information Technology, Economics and the Economy, Humor.
In Tom Standage’s excellent "A History of the World in Six Glasses" he describes the rise of the coffee culture in London, beginning in the very late 1600s. Coffee meant business people - from clerks to wealthy merchants - went to work fresh and alert; even stimulated, instead of being under the slight fog created by the then-traditional glass of wine or beer with breakfast. England enjoyed an economic boom through most of the 1700s, in part as a result of the innovations created in banking, finance, and insurance by the coffee-stimulated gentlemen of London. Lloyds of London was a coffee house, as was the London Stock Exchange.
In American, the sixties and seventies were fueled by things which dulled the intellect. The coffee culture first appeared in the early 80s; Mr Toot’s in Santa Cruz, California, fed many early adopters. By the lates 80s coffee houses were common, if not so universal as the Starbucks nation today.
And the boom happened. From around 1983 to now, we have witnessed a sustained period of growth around the world, with only minor hiccups, soon recovered, in 1991 and again post 9-11.
Is coffee why?
“Getting” VoIP
Published on 7 Feb 2007 at 7:00 am by Paul |
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As both a huge VoIP advocate and senior networking consultant, I’ve been meaning for some time to assemble a robust response to Oliver’s earlier questioning of the burgeoning enthusiasm for VoIP. At the risk of vying with the prophet Zarquon for tardiness, here is my attempt to shed some light on some of the salient questions Oliver has raised, and thereby dispel some of the confusion that I still see surrounding VoIP in the corner offices. And in deference to our colleagues over at the tech support board at Sundance Communications, I’m cross-posting this as a comment to Oliver’s original thread which was picked up there.
Before I go into why I think VoIP is such a great thing, I think first we need to clarify just what we mean by "VoIP" in the first place. There are several ways to interpret the term, and unfortunately I think that the idea that the term can mean different things in different contexts is not at all well understood, especially by executives (I know of a CIO who, already having various wrong-headed ideas about voice technology in general, banned the use of EVDO-capable cell phones because he thought they were using VoIP, and that VoIP was insecure). There are five basic ideas (that I know of) the term can refer to:
- The various signalling and transmission protocols used to encode analog voice signals and then transmit them over packet data networks using the Internet-standard IP protocol for processing by different endpoints.
- The use of asynchronous packet data networks to carry voice signals, as opposed to the old skool method of isochronous circuit-switched TDM networks. (Wikipedia is your friend if that– or indeed anything else I’m writing– doesn’t make much sense).
- The use of a single homogenous packet switched network to carry both voice and data traffic
- The use of the particular packet switched data network called the Internet to carry voice traffic
- An "Enterprise 2.0" buzzword referring to enterprise voice solutions that enable sophisticated unified messaging, flat-rate long distance, free international calling, and follow-me services, regardless of the technologies used to provide those services
While I end up touching on each of these concepts throughout this article, I will attempt to identify which definition I am referring to at a given point. Clarifications now having been made, let’s move on to my response to Oliver’s implicit question of "What was the point of VoIP again? I seem to have missed it." By way of elucidation, I will claim that there are really two key advantages to voice/data convergence (and I would also contend that anything beyond these are chimeric), of which VoIP (in the sense of meaning #3) is the primary enabling technology:
1) We will call the first advantage "unified infrastructure", again per meaning #3. You only need to worry about a single information delivery infrastructure within a building. This is, IMNSHO, the biggest and best point about VoIP. No more split plant, no more having to run the voice wires separate from the data, etc. And, the same skillsets used to maintain the wiring for the computers work for the phones, too. Another big win from doing this is that you can take your VoIP phones wireless, and get rid of the cabling altogether if so desired. "We’ve had wireless phones for decades", you say? Yes, but here again, it’s not the concept so much as the implementation that is an order of magnitude improvement. Unless you’ve been toiling in the IT boiler room for a good part of your career (as I have had the dubious honor of doing), the advantages of being able to jettison half of the extant physical communications infrastructure may seem somewhat underwhelming. But believe me, this is a huge win.
Building on this point, WiFi phones can then be connected far more cheaply, easily, and reliably than their older analog or digital counterparts, and with a far richer feature set. It’s important to keep in mind that, say, a Cisco or Aastra WiFi SIP phone differs substantially from the typical home cordless, or even a cell phone. The plethora of features available on legacy PBX phones (call forwarding, voice mail, conferencing, do-not-disturb features, and especially multiline appearances) are present on a WiFi phone. This is not the case with a mere cordless phone, most of which simply take one or two "analog lines" and make those available on the handset with the PBX features unavailable or hidden in cryptic button sequences that not even the PBX engineers can remember. Sure, the big name legacy PBX vendors like Avaya and NorTel make "cordless PBX phones", but these things cost the earth, have limited range, and their roaming capabilities around, say, an office park campus are a joke. None of these limitations apply to WiFi phones (assuming a properly designed wireless data infrastructure– a topic for another post, to be sure).
2) We will call the second advantage "unified services". There are several aspects to this, but VoIP magic isn’t about applying Nyquist algorithms to acoustic signals; as Oliver notes, that’s old hat. VoIP is about using open encoding and transmission formats that can finally be "gotten at" by any developer who wants to take the time to dig into them. The idea of third parties having access to the digitized voice streams in legacy PBX systems was all but unheard of. Not that the VoIP PBX’s themselves aren’t a healthy swath of proprietary moat-and-castle architecture (although see further observations below), but the idea behind using open standards for encoding and signalling is that anyone who bothers to can make hardware or software that can interact with the PBX and add value. Read on…
Non-Census
Published on 1 Feb 2007 at 2:52 am by John |
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Warren Meyer at Coyote Blog comments here about his dislike of so-called census forms. These forms aren’t the once-in-ten-years form used to apportion representation, but rather (further?) tedious governmental snooping with legal penalties for failure to complete them completely, promptly, and accurately. Here’s the USDA FAQ which discusses the version of this which I recently had to complete. Here is a link to the regulation page at the USDA-NASS site. REGS
What I hate about this is:
1. They’re an invasion of privacy
2. Life, business, and in my case, farming, is too complex to be accurately represented by answers on a form. Furthermore, the agencies requiring the information are typically unwilling or unable to give advice about how the questions should be answered, what the definitions of the terms are, or even what the questions mean. Yet, one must answer correctly and completely, or face the force of law!
3. The amount of work required to answer these things reasonably accurately is quite large and constitutes a kind of tax or taking which I don’t appreciate.
In the end, yes, I’d rather they just had no information. I wonder how these things would be received if they were aimed at the average salaried white collar worker…
1. How many times in the past year did you work past your nominal quitting time and/or through part of your established work break?
2. Please list the exact occasions and the duration of each incident.
3. Give the exact value of all incidental benefits received, eg. personal phone calls made from work and their exact dates and durations, food stuffs left in break room by co-workers with dates and values, and all similar events with exact dates, times, and amounts.
Remember that your responses are required by law to be complete and accurate…
I’ll bet people would pitch a fit even the folks in Washington would hear. Is it a targetted policy intended to harrass categories of people such as farmers and small business people? Or, is it just that they know the general public wouldn’t sit still for it?
DTV Sci-Fi Is Shape of Things to Come
Published on 5 Jan 2007 at 2:00 pm by Paul |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Technopolitical, Apple Computer and Macintosh Related, Business and Corporation Related, Networking Technology, Pure Geek, Main Stream Media, Branding and Values, Public Relations and Marketing.
I agree wholeheartedly with the predictions made over at geekmonthly in this article on recent direct-to-video distribution plans for several sci-fi movies.
The DTV approach may still be seen as a sort of desperation move for content that can’t quite justify the big screen, but I expect that going forwards sci-fi content is going to lead the way for a huge revolutionary boom in direct-to-consumer content production. The reason is that, overall, geeks are already sitting on personal high-end direct-experience systems, so there’s a natural fit in the demographic. To continue my generalizations, geeks are also notoriously voracious for sci-fi content, and declining production costs are making possible the narrowcasting of this demographic in ways not previously possible.
I think that ultimately we will see big-screen releases done for literal "theatrical" value, rather than being such a mainstay of overall content distribution revenue as they are today. We’re seeing this very dynamic take form this year with the decisions mentioned in this article.
I’m deliberately riffing Negroponte, Stevenson, and others here. The point is that the idea of a "channel" has already been redefined by the Net, and the broadcast media are still adjusting to the narrowcast paradigm. Think convergence between Universal and U-Tube, and that’s where we’re headed. The infrastructure is already in place and being used; it’s just a matter of time before narrowcast medium and perhaps even large budget productions become the norm rather than the exception.
FWIW,
Paul
P.S. The detail orientated among the readership will have noticed that one of the categories I’ve filed this post under is "Apple Computer Related." Do the math there and see what you come up with for which demographic is right behind the geeks…
Execs These Days…
Published on 4 Jan 2007 at 6:41 pm by Paul |
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So, the latest girls-gone-bad incident of out-of-control cheerleaders in the great state of Texas has hit the media. I ran into the mini-expose over at CBS News, though of course there’s plenty of other venues for the newsbytes on this one. What caught my eye was the baldfaced hypocrisy of the whole thing. The poor little vixens are being vilified for figuring out that, yes, that’s right, they really can get away with just about anything. Even worse, the ABC presentation, at least, attempts to take a very high-minded tone about the importance of accountability. Quoting Rosalind Wiseman (and thus implying that we have here the be-all and end-all of authorities on ethical child raising), "’Their job is to raise an ethical child, which means holding them accountable for bad behavior.’".
You’re probably thinking that I’m about to launch into some tirade about bad parenting and the need for society to support parents in the disciplining of their children, instead of Social Services and every other proponent of the Nanny State undermining their authority to mete out family justice as they see fit. It’s terribly tempting, I admit, though I’ve just tipped my hand. But here’s the concluding bit from the ABC News article that prompted this post:
Being comfortable talking to people in positions of power can be a valuable skill, one that parents can teach kids early.
"If your child learns to speak to people in a position of power about something they feel is not right and to articulate how they feel about it, you are teaching your child a very powerful life lesson," Wiseman said.
Excuse me? Where on Earth does this nice little "ethical bon-bon" match up with the world we are currently inhabiting? Things are bad enough in our court system, where spin, clever arguments, and partisan judiciary have all but destroyed the foundational virtues of Justice and Integrity that the system is supposed to operate on. But where are we really most likely to find ourselves in need of appeal to authority for intervention? Where else but in our careers and with our employers.
I doubt there are any of you out there who are are naive enough to think for a moment that the movers-and-shakers at the firms we toil at are going to respond positively to any sort of appeal about improper or unethical behavior on the part of the middle managers between the rank-and-file and the C-suites. No, this is exactly the sort of behavior that will get you shunted over to the black list and thence be first against the wall when the (inevitable) layoff comes.
For a while there, it seemed like the age of the plaintiff was of some help in determining whether the response of authority when engaged would be just and reasonable or unfair and oppressive. But that era is pretty much gone; maybe a kindergarten student could request teacher assistance in resolving a dispute, but even then I wouldn’t put any money on expecting a reasoned and reasonable response. I just can’t get better support for this viewpoint than the excellent rundown of school administrative insanity over at T.S. Eggleston’s "Zero Tolerance Stupidity" page.
And we all know that it doesn’t get any better the older you get. The difference is simply that most adults have figured out that all the prosletyzing during their youths about trusting authority was bunk, and that when you involve The Man, you’re more likely to be the one to get burned than seeing any sort of justice done.
I’m probably coming across as having a chip on my shoulder for this issue– probably even for the ongoing lack of justice in our world. If not, I do apologize for the unclear writing. As a career veteran, just when I think I’ve seen it all in terms of executive malfeasance, another chart-topper comes along. I say this about both the high-flying media bad boys like Ken Lay and Bill Clinton as well as the less visible– but no less nefarious– executives I and other co-workers have had the misfortune of seeing and experiencing in action.
There is a reason Dilbert is popular. There is a reason we are a jaded electorate who take a dim majority view of politicians. There is a reason corporate malfeasance is perpetually in the news. There is a reason executives who fail get multimillion dollar severance packages while successful line workers get the boot. The reason isn’t merely that power corrupts– it’s that we’re living in a world where wickedness wins, and virtue loses.
The media are by nature schizophrenic; they’re in the business of making news (you’re not naive enough to think they’re really just reporting it, are you?), so it’s natural for them to excoriate Ken Lay for a lack of integrity in corporate values one day, then fete their favorite politicos the next– even though the ethical level of both is probably hovering somewhere around pond scum. But this recent ABC news article is oddly condescending; do they think we don’t know the score, or are they hoping for a suspension of disbelief for the duration of the article?
The corruption and untrustworthiness of the Powers That Be in our society is an established fact. By all means, we should get ourselves together as a nation and as a society and put an end to the wicked hypocrisy that’s eating away America’s soul. But pretending that favoritism, essential immunity from prosecution, and revelling in abuses of power are somehow not the example our leaders are setting for future generations– this sort of patronizing, we can do without.
Good day.
"We cannot win. But we will fight."
– King Theoden, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
