Robert Paterson's Weblog

More on Attention - The Link to Why Markets are Conversations - The brilliance of Michael Goldhaber

As I read Michael Goldhaber more carefully - the more I feel that this is a very important article that sheds more light on the economic revolution than any other that I have yet found.

Here are some key snips that build the essential argument.

Attention - Breaking through the Noise to Find the Money

Marketing as we know it does not work anymore. Just in case you did not hear me: MARKETING AS WE KNOW IT DOES N OT WORK ANY MORE. If you did not hear me: MARKETING AS WE KNOW IT DOES NOT WORK ANYMORE

My point? Today we are bombarded with marketing messages. So many that we have to shut them out to cope. So most of what is spent on marketing is wasted.

The issue is now how do we get people's attention.

The Bush Meets the Queen Intelligence Test

I have been very serious recently.

Time for a timely laugh

HMCS Chicoutimi - Why men die for each other

"Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends" John 15

Why do men die for their friends? What is it about the community of a submarine that makes it so close? What is it about life in the forces that is so different from civilian life?

As I think of Lt Saunders' sacrifice for his shipmates, I remembered a passage from William Manchester's epic memoir of his time as a marine in the last war. Manchester in this passage has returned as an old man to Mount Suribashi where 7,500 marines had died and had climbed to the top. Standing there and looking down the grass covered hill he had an epiphany:

"And then, in one of those great thundering jolts in which a man's real motives are revealed to him in an electrifying vision, I understood at last, why I had jumped hospital 35 years ago and, in violation of orders, returned to the front line and almost certain death.

It was an act of love.

Those men on the line were my family and my home. They were closer to me than I can say, closer than my friends had been or ever would be. They had never let me down and I couldn't do it to them. I had to be with them, rather than let them die and me live with the knowledge that I might have survived them.

Men, I now knew, do not fight for flag or country, the the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for each other. Any man in combat who lacks comrades who will die for him, or whom he is willing to die for, is not a man at all. He is truly dammed."

As I read it, I thought of the drama of a fire in a submarine and the demands that the life places upon every member of the crew. This too was the moment of truth about a real community, when the Russians entered the reactor room. This is the type of act that represents everything that is noble about real community and it shouts out the lie that is corporate life or the buzz word "community' that governments use so often today.

My thoughts go out to his family.

The New Customer Revolution - How I think that it really works

The mass consumption, centralized machine model is dying. Why? Because it shrinks choice and voice. Its relationship with employees and with customers is primarily adversarial. Just as Ford changed everything 100 years ago for all business - so a new model is emerging now that will overwhelm the Ford model.

eBay, Amazon, Starbucks, Southwest, Wal*Mart and Dell are all redefining their sectors or have invented an entirely new way of doing business. I will be teaching a course at UPEI on this revolution starting in January about this. If you are interested, the continuation will show you the outline.

Being 6 again and becoming real

This is a picture of me aged 6 on vacation in Cornwall. I am calling to my sister Diana to join me in playing with the boat. I have this picture on my desk and I use it an an icon to remind who of a time when I was more sure of who I was. I have felt for a long time that institutions such as school and corporate life deaden this sense of self. I certainly forgot entirely who I was and it has been along struggle to find me again.

When I get lost, I now think back to how i was when I was 6 and I return. I am not talking about a childish 6 but a child of 6 who is full of wonder, who loves those close to him, who believes in magic and who cares not how the next meal will comes as he knows that it will. In this frame of mind, I dropped by Doug Manning this morning and found that as he married his daughter, that he too looked back at the innocence and wonder of childhood and welcomed signs of a return to this state in his adult daughter.

Doug Manning at Proactive Living is a low frequency high value poster. His focus is on self-knowledge.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

From Little Gidding by T S Eliot

This natural quest to be who we are is important. Maintaining an image that is significantly different than our identity is exhausting. Living a life consistent with our natural self is exhilarating. It is valuable to have a good sense of who we are. Clues that reveal who we are can be found in past and present experiences.

Project Management - The Good Way & the Bad

Beyond being thrilled about Burt Rutan's achievement and what it may mean for us, I have been thinking recently about the difference in Project Management Approach that this project displays. Is there something dysfunctional about the traditional approach that makes getting a good result fast and cheap all but impossible?

I keep thinking in this context about IT projects.

The loser organizations are obsessed with with security and hence miss the point - that security is always prejudiced when you rely on large hackable name brand proprietary enterprise systems. They seek security in the wrong place and by doing so actually take more risk.

Loser organizations fear novelty as risky and seek security by embracing the known. Consequently they are not open to a new and inexpensive way of solving a problem. Going into Space on $20 million is impossible for NASA. Building a government website for less and $1 million is impossible.

Scale itself drives complexity and risk. Rutan had to think small - this was the road to success. Most large organizations think that they have to think big - this is the road to complexity and hence to a high risk of failure.

In IT, most organizations recall the old systems saying that "no one gets fired by hiring IBM". They seek the safe bureaucratic choice hoping that they as individuals will not get fired but lose site of the organizational outcome which is that their real job is to deliver a system that will drive more value. In seeking safety, they inevitably drive down the return on investment. Many large systems add no value at all.

Today there is nothing more operationally vulnerable than a proprietary system. Proprietary systems bring all sorts of risk with them. They are hackable, they are clunky as they were designed to fit all, they cost a lot to develop and to maintain and they create dependence on inside experts who have customized the monster and on the supplier. Above all they don't work well. They have a very low ROI.

Paradoxically, Open Source enables you to avoid all these risks. They are hard to hack, they are neat, they fit you like a glove and they are easy to develop and to maintain. Above all they work well. They have a very high ROI.

So loser organizations start by not seeing the systemic risks of seeking security in the known. They then fail further by not seeing the point of the system which is to create value.

Having made the wrong strategic call by selecting a hackable and clunky system, they are then forced to build an impenetrable firewall. They are so frightened by being hacked that they reject interaction.

So loser organizations are obsessed with static & on-way proprietary systems. Having such a vulnerable platform, they naturally fear the risks of interaction. So a site like Town Square for Charlottetown is built on a clunky proprietary platform and has very little real interaction and hence functionality but cost millions. Try and do anything on this site of value to you. An Open Source approach would have cost only thousands and would have had a great deal of interaction and functionality.

Can large organizations overcpme this risk? I don't think so. No one is larger than Wal*Mart and they work very differently from the typical loser. Wal*Mart rejects the traditional approach entirely. Here is a model of how do do well, go fast, get great results and be inexpensive.

A lesson for us all.

Team America - Got to see it

When things are so terrible, humour is required. A great review from Xeni at Boing Boing

Snip
Marionettes playing AK47-toting homeland defenders don't have to do much to be funny. There's a specific kind of physical humor here only possible with marionettes: suspended on visible strings, they amble as if they're drunk in zero-g. During a poignant exchange, one puppet tries to point tenderly to another's heart, underscoring a dramatic line about "feelings." Her clumsy, string-guided hand misses the mark, to great comic effect. And like "Mister Bill," the characters are at their funniest when they're suffering -- tortured, murdered, or spontaneously impaled like sentient little olives on toothpicks.

There are many moments of blow-soda-through-your-nose comedic brilliance. North Korea's megalomaniac dictator performs a reflective, autobiographical musical ballad. Housecats with the voices of rabid panthers maul celebrity peaceniks. Matt Damon's puppet doppelganger cameos as a "Timmy"-esque halfwit whose vocabulary consists entirely of his own name. A computer intelligence network touted as the world's most sophisticated -- and appropriately named I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E -- speaks in a stoned surfer drawl. If Oscars were awarded for moments of cinematic vomit excellence, The Exorcist would have won 30 years ago; one scene in Team America would make it a shoo-in today. And an explicit marionette sex scene manages to cram in such a dizzying array of positions -- from reverse cowgirl to rimming -- you'll need a copy of the Puppet Sutra just to keep up.

George Soros is blogging

Here is the link

It is only a matter of time before blogging will be the key to politics

The Real Costs of Going to Work - Do you really make any money and do you have any time for you?

For most of us getting to and from work is a much bigger chunk of time, energy and money than we care to think about. When we are at work, much of our time and energy are used up in internal politics and meetings. When we are at work, we are often so immersed in the internal world that we have little time to talk or meet with our clients. You don't believe me? Have you tried to speak to your bank manager recently. She is always in a meeting. What are the costs of working conventionally? Employers who insist that we all turn up don't think about the real costs of a 8-5 office either. What is the real cost of all that space? What are the technology issues when the organization owns all the tools?

Here is a short case study that explores the realm costs of going to work for a friend of mine. How do you stack up?

When we say "I am off to work" what we usually mean is that we are off to work in a place. This place is a distance from where I live and my community. We go to work not when we feel like it or when we have to but when the custom dictates it. As employers we also often fee that we need is a prestige place that will impress visitors and clients. An enormous amount of the direct and indirect cost of work is built into this paradigm.

What are the costs for you the employee?

"Ron" is a manager in Private Banking at the Royal Bank Plaza, one of the most expensive business addresses in Canada. He commutes from the suburbs averaging three hours a day. He has a large office with rosewood furniture. His office is connected to many meeting rooms, most of which are empty. There is a large support staff on call throughout the day. He spends about 10-20 hours a week in internal meetings.

This all looks quite normal. Until you ask him how many clients visit him in a week and how they really want to do business with him.

Ron see 2-3 clients a week in this office. Most of his business is conducted over the phone. Most of his clients would like to connect their computers to Ron's. But this is not allowed. Most of his clients would prefer Ron to come and see them but he does not have the time because he has to spend so much of it at the office. His time at home, he has three children, is very limited because he leaves home at 6:30 am and usually is not back before 7:30 pm. He has a full briefcase which eats into his home life even further. He is not in control of his life. He has run out of time. Here is how the numbers play out for Ron:

Gross Salary - $80,000. Bonus Opportunity - $15,000

So far it looks good Ron can make up to $95,000 a year or $60 an hour (working 200 days a year for 8 hours a day)

But remember the tax man takes 45% of his gross leaving him with $52,250 in his pocket or $32 an hour net.

Because Ron has a family he lives in a suburb and drives to work each day. His wife with 3 children also needs a car. Lease car payments, on one car and depreciation on the second car, insurance, maintenance and gas total $33,000. $27,000 of this expenses is directly related to getting to work. As a banker, Ron has to look the part, so he has to buy no less than 2 suits a year and all the right accessories $1,500 for office clothes.

Ron's direct costs of simply getting to work are - $28,500. Net real take home pay - $23,750 or $15 an hour net.

His commute takes 3 hours a day. This is lost time when he is not with either his colleagues, at work or with his family. Time commuting means that he loses 600 hours a year or the equivalent of 75 eight hour working days. If you costed this out on an hourly basis the indirect costs would be $19,200. The largest real cost to Ron is in having time and energy with his family.

The direct and indirect costs of Ron getting to work are about $42,000 or most of his net pay after tax.

Real Cost for the Employer

Prestige office space that gives the right impression - 1,000 square feet plus use of meeting rooms - $48,000

Time taken in meetings to talk about minutiae (15 hours a week for 40 min. for 40 weeks at $60 an hour gross). Time in meetings on a day basis is the equivalent of another 75 working eight hour days. No wonder Ron has not time either to serve his clients properly or meet his family needs, $36,000.

Support staff to Ron, salary and benefits - $55,000.

It costs the Royal Bank an additional $139,000 to have Ron come to work in the traditional manner.

Think of how you work. Think about the people that work for you. Does your picture look as odd as Ron's? What can you do structurally to change this. What would working at home most of the time do for you and your family and your productivity?