Robert Paterson's Weblog

YouTube - Where may it go?

Today the Times talks about how our PC is taking us away from TV as a time waster and as a source of entertainment.

....“Internet homes, including broadband and dial-up, watch 9 percent less television over all than the general population. The impact by network differs, with some experiencing 25 percent lower ratings and others substantially unaffected.” (He added that wired homes were generally well-off, a population that watches television less as a matter of course.)

Anecdotally, I can say that our family ends up finding the remote less often. Tally up all the bereft fathers video-chatting with college-age daughters, bored teenagers making videos for other bored teenagers and geeks mashing up existing content to hilarious effect, and there is ferocious, idiosyncratic competition for consumers’ attention.

The threat isn’t new media displacing old media as much as personalization. Media has become something people make, forward, link and program. When we took the 2,000-mile road trip to drop the girls off at their respective campuses, we switched between my iPod and theirs rather than flip fruitlessly through radio channels that had been aggregated and formatted into musical sameness.

Newspapers felt the pain of technological disruption first, when people had dial-up modems capable of transmitting modest, largely text-based data. As fatter pipes developed, music performed a jailbreak, leaving behind a maimed industry. And now, with the number of ever-faster connections spreading and the advent of the Flash player, television seems positioned as roadkill, with great big movie files soon to fall after that.

The question remaining is how these industries will choose to react. Television, it seems, may have learned some of the hard lessons endured by the music industry and taken an attitude of cautious engagement with downloaders rather than randomly slapping them with lawsuits.

I still caught Wednesday’s episode of “Lost,” downloading it to my iPod to view on my commute and sending $1.99 to ABC and Steve Jobs to split. Through the magic of that time-and-platform shift (and my willingness to pay for free content), I remained a part of the “Lost” tribe, although not the kind that shows up on Nielsen.

Selling programming that way is a smaller business for the networks, but not a bad one. Maybe this time, Grandma saw the brick coming

This weekend I discovered that nearly all of Black Adder is on YouTube. Guess what I was doing for most of Sunday?

This American Life has buckled to protest and has now offered each program as a Podcast on iTunes. I think that it is time for Public TV to go down this road. I want to watch Bill Moyers on Net Neutrality later this week but may miss it for scheduling reasons. I would pay to download it on iTunes. I would like to watch all his programs. I would pay to download a lot of PBS content on iTunes. The Centre for Social Media did  a lovely job for iTunes with this video on the topic of Many to Many. Surely this is how it could be done.

If you then "wrapped" the program with a social website where fans could talk about the show or the topic even better. Imagine The Vidcast Site for PBS and for each station where the show could be downloaded for a small fee and where fans could sign up (with all heir details) to extend the discussion. You would generate fees. You would keep the material safe. You would create community and you would know all bout those that liked the show. You would be really ahead of the game.

Come on guys - the lesson is clear. It's do or die here.

Lost - The Start of Discovery

My friend Joanie Brady sends me pictures now and then. This is her latest.

We live in such a complex world now that many leaders have to start out with a question. Such as "What are we going to do in public radio now that technology has disrupted our established business model?" which is where we were a year ago.

No one knew what to do. The wonderful part of the work was that none of the leaders jumped up and said "I know and follow me". They all acknowledged that they did not know and had the patience to go into the deep forest and discover.

This I think is the core of how to work in complex situations. Start with Not Knowing and Trusting that the answers will Emerge if we all talk enough.

Leadership in a Human Organization

What is leadership in a human organization?

As I deepen my conversation with Toke and Chris the idea of the warrior/midwife seems to grip me harder.

Warrior

Midwife

I think that this is the power of the film - The Mission - in that it shows the blend of the warrior and the midwife as a composite for leadership that enables people to become all that they can be.

I have to admit that at the moment I feel more like Mendoza the penitent as he drags his life behind him in a huge net waiting to be released or not by those that he has hurt the most.

Mendoza dragging his penance

The moment of redemption

Storm ahead

I think that we are on this ship right now. If we choose to steer into the storm we will likely sink.

Imagine if the plot to blow up a lot of planes in mid Atlantic had worked? What would have happened? Will it happen anyway? Is such a tragedy now inevitable? is ever tighter security the only response?

Our lives depend on easy air travel - is this over now?

What is going to happen to our society as the threat from terror that we have no defence against builds?

Will our tactical reliance on more control end our liberal society? We saw what happened in India after the bombing in Mumbai - blogging itself was shut down.

Will a response be to control the web?  All the fuss about My Space is a symptom and a trend. Will giving the pipes more power help?

What about our military efforts on the ground?

Imagine that your son or daughter is in the army. Is what we are doing in Iraq or Afghanistan making a positive difference? Every week we hear that things are getting worse.

My question to the commanders is this - tell us how what you are doing is making the situation for all concerned better. My bet is that they cannot, In fact if they were straight they would tell us that in a year's time things in Iraq and Afghanistan will be worse. So our sons and daughters are dying for a mission that cannot work just as they did prior to Vimy in 1917 when Generals simply did what didn't work harder.

What about the heart of our risk - our own Muslim Communities?

Are we doing things that we can have confidence in that are reducing the risk that young Canadian, British and American Muslims are being persuaded to join the Jihad?  Recent reports from the UK suggest that things are getting worse.

All I see is simplistic posturing and the demand for more control, when it is clear that systemic problems cannot be limited by more control and that more control leads in fact to a worsening for all concerned.

I think that we are stuck like WWI Generals responding to new and systemic problems with simple answers. If what you are doing is not working simply try harder.

Like WWI generals, if we keep reacting and trying to control more, it means that we play into their hands. Terror will have won. An American general complained to General; Giap after the Vietnam war that the Americans won every battle. Yes Mon general replied Giap - but we won the war! We are not thinking deeply enough.

I am not just complaining. I have been thinking a lot - at least about how to think about the problem

In WWI everyone was also stuck. No one knew how to think their way through the effect of  the new technology. All Generals could do was to try harder. The result was ever greater casualties for no return.

But there was one group who could not afford the cost who stepped aside and thought of how to think their way through. They were successful and the process that they used to find a solution is a universal one that I think can apply to us today.

That is what I think we need today - to dig deep intellectually and discover a flexible response to a dynamic situation.

Download vimy_lo_3pd.pdf

Light blogging - NAFTA?

Sorry but I have joined the light blogging club for a while.

Excuses - teaching online where I blog many times a day and also that I am writing a lot for a couple of clients. Lastly I am preparing to get a TN Visa to the US. NEVER have I been through such an ordeal!

What a joke NAFTA is. A set of rules to keep Canadians out.

Hopefully I will return in a couple of weeks.

CIBC - Bonus?

Back in the olden times, when I was a SVP at CIBC, we had the big Reichman hit. All bonuses were cut. There is a growing clamor to do the same for the investment bankers at CIBC. Snip from the Globe

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, reeling from a third-quarter Enron-related loss of $1.91-billion, will likely be forced by investor outrage to cut back the $733-million in incentive bonuses it has so far accrued but not paid out, says an analyst who has publicly criticized the bank for not doing so already.

"We think it's going to be hard for the bank to justify paying out bonuses at that level in the face of such a massive loss," Robert Wessel of National Bank Financial said in an interview Tuesday after issuing a report on the matter. In the report, he estimates that CIBC's investment bank, which took the Enron hit, will lose $2-billion for fiscal 2005 as a whole.

A "material reversal" of the bonus accrual —which works out to $980-million annualized —could provide CIBC shareholders with "significant capital benefits (namely, earlier return of dividend increases or share buybacks)," Mr. Wessel said in the report.

If they don't there will be hell to pay. Time to stop the fantasy of being held hostage by the investment bankers guys.

If we look back at CIBC's problem it is that this idea of driving the entire bank by incentives that drives the deal above the bank which is what we saw drive the Enron deal. The bigger the deal, the less the bank's interests and the less the interests of the shareholders and in the end the depositors are taken into account,

What used to govern the risk behaviour of the old style investment banks was that we used to risk our own money. Now we risk monopoly money. Time to see that playing at investment banking means you play with your own money or not at all.

My plan?

My plan was to go to Montreal to pick up James and bring him home here for labour day weekend. We leave at dawn tomorrow. That was my plan.

Tonight the husband of an old friend who lives in Montreal called. Our friend is dying in Montreal. Just now, she has tipped into the final chapter. Plans change. We still pick up James but we go now for another reason- everything is perfect.

How did this happen? How did one plan lead to another? Why was it this weekend for her and for us? What gave us this opportunity to say good bye?

Jevon MacDonald - Special Man

My dear business partner, Jevon, is leaving PEI tomorrow with his new bride Laurel to make a home in Toronto while Laurel attends Medical school at U of T.

I feel like a father whose son is leaving home. I am so proud of him and wish him well and yet ..... while we live in a virtual world ...... I will miss being able to see as much of him as I could while we were both here on PEI.

Safe journey and best wishes
Rob

Rob Paterson - the two of us - and CIBC - Pam Cuber - What an energy

Today I learned that my namesake Rob Paterson at CIBC was let go. It is nearly 10 years since the same thing happened to me - I too was part of the old guard. At CIBC there is a tradition - when you are part of the old King's group or the rival but losing Prince - off you go.

Dear Rob - good luck in your new life. I assure that there is such a thing.

Pam Cuber went too this week. If you could take a star and compress its energy into a person then Pam is that thing. Dear Pam - enjoy your new life too and best wishes from your old nuisance Rob P.

All that I built at CIBC is but a ruin. I feel like Ozymandeas tonight -

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

What a lesson! All that work, that effort!. Is this a lesson for us all - that all the grand plans and works in our work life fall into ruin. That all our power and position is meaningless to those that follow us?

So what is left. I would rather be Siddhartha rowing the ferry across the river.

"In the shade of a banyan tree, a grizzled ferryman sits listening to the river. Some say he's a sage. He was once a wandering shramana and, briefly, like thousands of others, he followed Gotama the Buddha, enraptured by his sermons. But this man, Siddhartha, was not a follower of any but his own soul.

Born the son of a Brahmin, Siddhartha was blessed in appearance, intelligence, and charisma. In order to find meaning in life, he discarded his promising future for the life of a wandering ascetic. Still, true happiness evaded him. Then a life of pleasure and titillation merely eroded away his spiritual gains until he was just like all the other "child people," dragged around by his desires.

Like Hermann Hesse's other creations of struggling young men, Siddhartha has a good dose of European angst and stubborn individualism. His final epiphany challenges both the Buddhist and the Hindu ideals of enlightenment. Neither a practitioner nor a devotee, neither meditating nor reciting, Siddhartha comes to blend in with the world, resonating with the rhythms of nature, bending the reader's ear down to hear answers from the river."

Busy - the Addiction

It has been an interesting few days. I have spent time with two people who know nothing of each other but both told me how hard it is for them to slow down.

One has moved to the from a major global metropolis to the Island and another away from a big city to a smaller one. They both told me how uncomfortable they are with the slower pace and with what appears to be the low brow culture.

They miss being Busy.

What is it about "Busy". Ask someone how they are and you will often get the response "Busy". No one tells you what they are doing, they just comment on the process of their activity. The saddest part of the Busy addiction is that usually busy people are involved in activity that ends up nowhere. Think of government. Anyone in Government feel that they have pulled off any breakthrough in the last 10 years? I doubt it. Yet everyone is so busy there.

How did being busy become a goal in life?

Does this start with what we do with our kids today? If it is 4, it is dance classes, the music lessons, then softball. What happened to play? What happened to getting good at something - for when your kid does 5 things, they do 5 things badly. When they do the things that you think are important, they learn to go along with the flow. In instead of achievement, we get addicted to activity. In time we confuse the two.

You can be so busy that you lose your life. David Whyte has a great moment in the Heart Aroused where a woman in a corporate workshop says quietly to the room

"Ten years ago...
I turned my head for a moment

and it became my life"

Remind you of anyone you know?