Robert Paterson's Weblog

The workplace of the future now - IBM!

What is stopping your organization from creating the kind of work environment where you are in control of your time? What is stopping your organization from allowing you to use the tools and the gear  that you know work best for you?

Of course the answer is culture. But who can you use an example to your organization to give you a chance to shift your organizational culture? The answer ironically is IBM!

Last week I called my old IBM buddy Luis Suarez at his home office in a small village on the Canary Islands. I wanted to find out directly what the new IBM was like.

Here is where the Canary Islands are. I show you this to make a point. Luis’s reporting boss is in Madrid and his team is in the US. Each one of his US team live in a separate city. One lives in Toronto. Luis doesn’t even work in the capital of the Canaries but in a  small village. He is part of a group of 200,000 IBMers who work remotely. He is one of 5,000 who use Macs! The IT group at IBM, far from being the Gestapo have a mandate to serve the workplace of the future. Mobility is the key issue. Everything is done to ensure that the individual is connected to the team at any time. The individual chooses their kit. All laptops are supported. All apps are supported. Skype plays a huge role in the organization. All access is supported. Again the key here is to give the IBM worker the ability to control their own work space and to be connected to the larger whole.

My conversation with Luis focused on two strands – what was this like and how had IBM been able to cross the culture barrier. Let’s start with the Culture Barrier.

The key to the culture was to stop measuring presence – ie punching the clock as at a factory – and to start measuring results and outcomes. This of course is true for any consultant. I am not hired to be busy I am hired to get some specific things done. In reality that is how all work should be measured but in reality that is not how work is measured. We measure instead the appearance of work as evidenced by how much we are seen at the office.

Once you make this cultural shift, then everything opens up. Also the organization gets more focused. After all were we not all meant to be going somewhere and not merely being busy?

The other key to the culture was to get the IT department and the CIO behind their main task which is enabling the people to get the most out of their investment in technology. In most organizations the role of IT and the CIO is in effect the opposite. It is to control the legacy systems at all costs.

Now the full power of all that is happening in the world of tools and apps becomes available. Security is something that you design in rather than make security the only issue.

So what is life like for Luis and for the 200,000 other IBMers who work outside of the “office”?

First of he gets to choose where he lives. Luis is not a native Canarian and comes from Northern Spain. He could have worked in Madrid. One of the worlds most attractive cities. Also right up there in costs. But, like me he loves the Island life. He lives in a place of remarkable beauty that is very affordable too but he is paid a global wage. He has an aesthetic and a surplus that is not normally available to those that choose to live in a major city.

His team is in North America spread over a number of time zones. Luis’s work day begins at noon and ends at 7pm which in Spanish culture is ideal because dinner is not usually until 9.30 or 10pm. Of course these hours are not fixed because he is measured by results. He has a huge amount of flexibility. No fretting about the plumber or the dog going to the vet. If he had been married lots of space to be a great parent. No commute. No office wardrobe.

I asked Luis about that dreaded part of the conventional office – all those interminable meetings!

The team are connected in real time by a variety of chat tools. If you have a question, you ask it. Most issues are settled in real time meaning that they only have one meeting a week and that is very focused. In a virtual meeting like this, everyone is still working in parallel. In a face to face meeting this is impolite, but in a virtual meeting it helps. As issues shift on the agenda, new material is surfaced. There are never any minutes etc because it is all recorded in real time.

The meeting that really count are the social ones. Periodically the team gets together face to face and works and most importantly bonds. Because they are all on the road, they spend a lot of the time socially. THIS is the glue that works better than being “at the office” all day with people that you don’t really know.

So what does this mean?

It means that there is no excuse anymore. If IBM can do this with 200,000 people so can you.

It means that the whole work/life issue can be taken off the table. So long as you have to turn up at the same time at a place far from home, there can be no balance.

The key? Measure results. The outcome, a vibrant engaged, enthusiastic workforce and a focused organization. What could be better than that?

Oh yes and one more thing. Everyone’s costs get lowered. Luis can choose where he lives and plant roots. He has no commuting costs. IBM save on the office costs. My bet is that if we could see the healthcare costs of IBM, they would be much lower than in a firm that insisted on the old ways. For what drives our health more than any other factor is the issue of control.

The old adage used to be “No one got fired for hiring IBM”. Maybe we can modify this today and say “If IBM can do this, so can we”

In closing, seeing is believing. In July Luis has promised some video of what hos workplace and life is like – watch this space.

Child Alliance Response to the PEI Pre-School Excellence Initiative

The Child Alliance is pleased to see the emphasis that the government of PEI has put on helping the children of PEI have a better start in life. 

There is no doubt that that putting significant resources into a formal system to help our younger children learn is vitally important to their future and to the future of our province.

The plan, as tabled, is of course more of an intention than a plan. The details of what to do and how to do this have to be worked out by all concerned. The Government has asked for help and support in making this intention real.

So it is response to this request that we put forward this context and these questions.

Context: We can all agree with the overall intent to offer Quality, Choice and Access to a better learning environment to the 6,300 children on PEI that are from 0-4. Currently 2,000 of these are enrolled in some kind of daycare. 

It is important to note that more than 4,000 children have little or no support. Our questions stem from the challenge of this group. 

What is the Goal - What does Success Look Like? How do we measure Progress? The plan currently has no measurable goal for what success might be or what all this investment is for other than to have a better system. 

What does “better” mean and what is the “problem” that we seek to address?

We respectfully urge all concerned to establish such a goal. Here is a suggestion.

In BC, the Government has been clear.  The problem there is that 30% of the children enter the school system unable to learn and unable to behave. This group is largely lost from the start. By 6 it is an exceptionally hard task to change a child’s wiring. Also, the size of this group at 30% is so large that it disrupts the enter system putting all the other children at risk.  It is this large group that comes from the most vulnerable part of society that is the focus. The core of the problem of this vulnerability is found in the family. For Parents, not any institution,  are the main driver of their children’s development. This is not simply a problem of poverty. Middle class children make up most of those in this group. The most critical years are from conception to aged 2.

The BC goal is to reduce this 30% to 15% and then to 10%. Such a goal enables all the organizations and all the resources to find ways of collaborating in a common cause that can be measured.

On PEI we have exactly the same numbers. About 30% of children arrive in school not being able to learn and cope. They have the same disruptive impact on the other 70% of children who arrive being able to learn and behave. This is the kernel of both our problem and our opportunity. 

The child’s trajectory for development is set by the age of 2. So the battleground then is the family. The key issue is how well or not parents can cope and parent.

We don’t see any of this in the plan so far. We are concerned that at the core of the plan is a focus on a worthy cause, that of building an excellent daycare system. We are concerned that in the excitement and in the potential achievement of succeeding the noble goal of having a much better Daycare system that we miss the strategic lever of the vulnerable. 

Key questions for us fall out of this context:

• How inclusive will this be? 4,000 children were not in any program before. It is these children that are the most vulnerable. What is the approach to this vulnerable group going to be? Many of these parents have no financial resources. Many are unemployed and cannot get employment. Our approach has to extend beyond access to daycare and early learning - what is the full continuum of support that this group need?

• What about parents? There is a provision for them to act as advisors but there is nothing in the plan to support them as parents. Parents are the key shapers of a child’s ability to learn and to develop. 0-2 is the key time. What is the plan?

• With the focus on setting up the Early Years Centres, what is the allocation of funds from the new resources to the parts of the system that has the most impact - 0-2? 

Our Offer - The Child Alliance does more than talk. We have been instrumental in attracting resources from off PEI to help Island families and children.The government has made the financial commitment. The government has asked for ideas and support.

We offer to work across the Island to bring forward the best goals for the work and to design a measurement system that works from outside the system to keep the system accountable.

You thought I was joking about an atom bomb for Deepwater - This is the solution

via youtube.com

The leak is much much bigger - Matt Simmons recommends that we do what the Russians did and use a nuclear bomb to disrupt the structure - it has come to this.

BP has to be shoved out to do this.

If Simmons is right about the scale of the leak this is the Tipping Point for Oil, for Obama and most importantly for all of us.

So.........

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

BP - The Soviets Used an Atom Bomb - Is this next?

via businessinsider.com

What more can I say?

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

Rachel Maddow- The more spills change_ the more they stay the same

via youtube.com

I think that this is a vital story - what it tells us that there is no risk management system that can help in a blow out.

The only conclusion? Stop this.

But then o dear, we are closer than ever to peak oil - yes we are. So the real work is to break our dependence.

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

Easy Rider - Born To Be Wild - More relevant than ever RIP DH

via youtube.com

HT to Bub - The saddest thing is that the slaves love to be slaves and fear the outsiders who see the slave.

See it again the iconic film of the conflict between freedom and slavery.

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

To Pig to Fail

via 3.bp.blogspot.com

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

We are ruled by the Mob - The Finance Economy - Gandhi shows the way out

via borderland.northernattitude.org

This short video tells an important story. Real wages have fallen in the last 40 years. Productivity has risen.

A tiny few have a stranglehold on all of us. What we have contributed has gone to them.

They control the system. As it crumbles and more and more of us fall off the perch, they suck more of what is left to them.

I actually don't think that this is a plan. I think it is how the system works.

We have made finance the core process. Not making and doing things that benefit us really.

So in a Finance world BP is rewarded for not being safe. Its cost cutting pays off in earnings and we all pay for their mistake. BP is not in the oil or the energy business it is in the making money for the gang that includes many of our politicians.

In a finance world, medical help is denied to most Americans because, the Insurance companies make more money that way. They pay off the gang.

In the finance world the defence business make stuff that is not use to the troops on the ground such as the F22 and America that spends more than the next 15 countries combined has the oldest, smallest, and least effective inventory of equipment since the end of WWII. The Defence industry is not about defending America but about making the gang, including retired Generals, rich.

The banks are not in the business of funding new business or our needs. They are in the cocaine business of binding us to them as nations, as organizations and as individuals. They are in the vigorish or loan sharking business.

As our culture has become dominated by finance - the real world - the needs of the planet and of us as a species go out the window and are replaced by the needs of the Capos.

We joke about the "Banksters" but look at the model - this is what a real gang does. They exploit our human weakness with sole goal of making the guys at the top rich.

So what to do?

I think that the first thing is to see the truth - that by using the finance lens, we actually don't get what we need. Organizations serve only the bankers. So as the population grows the opportunity to get decent work diminishes. So as our environment gets trashed, the incentive is to trash it more. As we get to the edge of our dependency on oil, we are kept in its thrall.

Worst of all, the leadership of our states and nations have been captured and are working hard to keep on the teat.

This reminds me of the end of the Soviet Union.

People like Havel at first tried to reform the system. They failed. Then they tried to combat it. They failed.

What worked was that they then stood aside and built a new system in parallel. That worked.

Gandhi took the same path in India. How was he to get the Raj to leave? He could not take the British on directly. He could not persuade them morally. What he had to do was to help the mass of Indians recognize that THEY did not need the Raj any more.

So what to do? I think that we have to disengage from the system and start to engage with each other. We have to start in our small local way to build a paralel system that works for the planet and for people

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

We don't live in a democracy - But a Corporatocracy

The oil companies and other giant corporations have a stranglehold on American policies and behavior, and are choking off the prospects of a viable social and economic future for working people and their families.

President Obama spoke critically a couple of weeks ago about the “cozy relationship” between the oil companies and the federal government. It’s not just a cozy relationship. It’s an unholy alliance. And that alliance includes not just the oil companies but the entire spectrum of giant corporations that have used vast wealth to turn democratically elected officials into handmaidens, thus undermining not just the day-to-day interests of the people but the very essence of democracy itself.

Forget BP for a moment. When is the United States going to get its act together? Will we learn anything from this disaster or will we simply express our collective dismay, ignore the inevitable commission reports (no one pays attention to study commissions), and bury our heads back in the oily sand?

President Obama said on Thursday that his administration was “moving quickly on steps to ensure that a catastrophe like this never happens again.” Well, he can’t ensure anything of the kind. And, in fact, his corporate-friendly policy of opening up new regions for offshore drilling (that policy is only temporarily halted) will all but guarantee future disastrous spills.

The U.S. will never get its act together until we develop the courage and the will to crack down hard on these giant corporations. They need to be tamed, closely monitored and regulated, and constrained in ways that no longer allow them to trample the best interests of the American people.

via nytimes.com

What is remarkable about this piece from Bob Herbert of the NYT is that this is now the consistent message of the NYT - a paper of record. This is not Mother Jones.

What it says to me is that the knowledge that America has been captured is seeping out into the mainstream.

The Tea-baggers may be laughable but I think they too have this sense - their anger is focused on government which is only part of the problem. When they see more clearly they will see that their government is a slave to corporate interest.

Feels like the 1760's to me. A nation that was governed by a government whose interests were for itself and not for those that paid the taxes. The American Colonies paid for Britain's imperial and business interests at the price of their own.

At first it was just a few hot heads like Paine. But as the decade moved on and especially after the end of the 7 years war when Britain had to pay for the war, the injustice and the pain of being controlled by a government that did not care for them entered the mainstream. When pillars of the local system like Washington and Jefferson could see that this situation could not stand.

Time I think for a new Declaration of Independence - this time from the Corporate control.

Jefferson's words ring with today's truth do they not?

"That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good."

Martin Luther did the same 200 years prior when he called the Church to account for their corruption. His point was that only God could offer redemption - not the Pope or his priests and certainly not as a commercial transaction. His point was that the Church had been captured by commerce.

"1. Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said Poenitentiam agite, willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance.

2. This word cannot be understood to mean sacramental penance, i.e., confession and satisfaction, which is administered by the priests.

3. Yet it means not inward repentance only; nay, there is no inward repentance which does not outwardly work divers mortifications of the flesh.

4. The penalty [of sin], therefore, continues so long as hatred of self continues; for this is the true inward repentance, and continues until our entrance into the kingdom of heaven.

5. The pope does not intend to remit, and cannot remit any penalties other than those which he has imposed either by his own authority or by that of the Canons.

6. The pope cannot remit any guilt, except by declaring that it has been remitted by God and by assenting to God's remission; though, to be sure, he may grant remission in cases reserved to his judgment. If his right to grant remission in such cases were despised, the guilt would remain entirely unforgiven."

The green curtain is being pulled back week by week. The man with the white hair is being exposed.

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

Is Europe heading for a meltdown? - What about PEI?

Mervyn King, the Bank of England Governor, summed it up best: "Dealing with a banking crisis was difficult enough," he said the other week, "but at least there were public-sector balance sheets on to which the problems could be moved. Once you move into sovereign debt, there is no answer; there's no backstop."

In other words, were this a computer game, the politicians would be down to their last life. Any mistake now and it really is Game Over. Or to pick a slightly more traditional game, it is rather like a session of pass-the-parcel which is fast approaching the end of the line.

The European financial crisis may look and smell rather different to the American banking crisis of a couple of years ago, but strip away the details – the breakdown of the euro, the crumbling of the Spanish banking system to take just two – and what you are left with is the next leg of a global financial crisis. Politicians temporarily "solved" the sub-prime crisis of 2007 and 2008 by nationalising billions of pounds' worth of bank debt. While this helped reinject a little confidence into markets, the real upshot was merely to transfer that debt on to public-sector balance sheets.

The problem is that this has to stop somewhere, and that gasping noise over the past couple of weeks is the sound of millions of investors realising, all at once, that the music might have stopped. Having leapt back into the market in 2009 and fuelled the biggest stock-market leap since the recovery from the Wall Street Crash in the early 1930s, investors have suddenly deserted. London's FTSE 100 has lost 15 per cent of its value in little more than a month. The mayhem on European bourses is even worse, while on Wall Street the Dow Jones teeters on the brink of the talismanic 10,000 level.

The problem is not merely that holders of Greek government debt would dump their investments, or even that they would ditch their Spanish and Portuguese bonds while they were at it. It is that government debt is the very bedrock of the financial system: should Greek government bonds collapse, the country's banking system would become insolvent overnight. In fact, banks throughout the euro area would be at risk, given that they tend to hold so much of their neighbours' government debt. That, at least, is the theory, but as was the case in the aftermath of Lehman's collapse, no one really knows how great their exposure is.

via telegraph.co.uk

This feels like the "End Game" to me. At best the weight of uncertainty is enormous.

Where is the safe haven? At the moment it is the US Dollar and US Treasuries.

But if we look at the US - the fundamentals are not good there either.

I have struggled with "What to do?" Because we live in a system, other than retreating off grid there is not much we can do - we are embedded in the system. When Rome fell, you could not have your little Island of Empire that remained safe.

But maybe what you can "do" is to have a prepared mind. If you can only see our current reality as the only reality, then you may not be able to cope with what is to come. You will dwell in the denial phase too long.

This is what happened to many Jewish families in Germany in the early 1930's. You business was not movable - you had a shop or were a lawyer or dentist. Your family had been in Berlin for 200 years and your father had won the Iron Cross in WWI. You were German. Germany was the most cultured nation on Earth. But it was clear by 1933 what was coming.

A few could see the inevitable, that they would be made the scapegoat. They gave up everything and left while they could. Those that could not do this perished.

So I think the "Do" now is to be open for how big a change could confront us.

I see signs in the States that the new budget realities are going to strip out the services that all relied on. Teachers are already feeling the pain. All those who work for government and those that rely on government are going top feel the pain - there is no stopping this. The States cannot have a deficit and there is no way that their income can meet their outgoings. Soon as in Europe Pensions will be put on the table.

In Europe the entire social system will go away. In fact governments will tax and tax but only to pay the banks. The people will only get the pain. How long can that be sustained?

So what about us? We live in a hyper connected system. We cannot escape.

In places like PEI - we are already like Greece. We rely on the feds and a tiny group of people to pay the taxes and we commit to relatively massive social spending. We can do this now because we can finance the deficit. Interest rates are low and the market is open for us.

So when nations in Europe are rated as junk and maybe in default and the same is true for many states in the US, how will PEI finance its debt?

How can we avoid what is happening to nations and states? Do you see a way?

Posted via web from Rob's posterous