Teblog

Link: How green is your vendor?

Date: 2 Nov 2007

Audience: IT Professionals

Link: How are your suppliers' green credentials?

Writer: David Tebbutt

Where: Computing

Date: 2 Nov 2007

Audience: IT Professionals

Link: How are your suppliers' green credentials?

Writer: David Tebbutt

Where: Computing

Project management nightmare

Still emptying the house in preparation for the move. It's odd what you stumble across.

I'm no artist, as you can see, but I drew this at a particularly frustrating time in my career. It cut through the complexity of the work and hit right at the cause of my dissatisfaction. Within weeks of articulating my feelings in this way, I'd started to plan my escape. (It was 1979 and I ended up at Personal Computer World.)

The participants in the picture are: in the middle, with his hands in the air, the team leader from a third party software house. His company had been chosen by my company, the hardware (and project management) supplier, to write some software for our mutual client.

The guy on the left is the client's project manager who thought his job was to make ever more unreasonable demands. He's the one turning the screw on the team leader. I'm the silly sod with his arms and legs outstretched trying to prevent the vice closing on the team leader. I'd been warning the client to stop pressuring because a) it was unproductive and b) I genuinely feared for the team leader's sanity.

Sadly, the pressure didn't stop and the team leader did, indeed, crack up. He was found gibbering to his radio.

I've never drawn a picture like it since. I guess because I've never been in such an impasse again. Thank goodness.

What Mindset Are You?

Yesterday, Guy Kawasaki provided a bunch of links relating to Professor Carol Dweck and her book: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. A nice graphic by Nigel Holmes brings it all together.

I've collapsed the key points into this grid:

Reading through, I could see myself at different stages of my life. Fortunately, I have moved from the blue list to the green list to a large extent, but I can still feel elements of the blue tugging at my thinking. If you know me, you can probably see more blue than I'm prepared to admit to.

As the majority of my contacts these days are involved in social media one way or another, they all tend to operate in the green side of the grid. We may never get rich but, by heck, I bet we enjoy life more.

Over at Guy's post you can see a (slightly out-of-synch) four-minute video of the professor explaining the impact of blue and green mindsets on the way students work. It's revealing stuff.

Was Wired WaggEd?

Once upon a time a PR firm accidentally sent a British journalist the profile it held on him. It started "This guy's a lush." Oh dear.

Well it's happened again, more or less. This time it's Wired contributing editor Fred Vogelstein who has been accidentally (or maybe not!) sent briefing notes from Waggener Edstrom prior to interviews with Microsoft executives.

Although it contains a short briefing on the journalist, it is mostly a backgrounder and 'game plan' for the Microsoft executives for a feature on its "video blogging initiative, Channel 9, and its overall campaign to embrace corporate transparency". From this perspective, it's an excellent insight to how thoroughly Microsoft is briefed for interviews with influential publications.

If you've ever wondered about how to brief and steer your executives, it's worth a read. Scale your approach to the importance of the publication otherwise you'll end up paying PRs a fortune in bloated briefings.

I can't help wondering whether Waggener Edstrom deliberately copied the information to the journalist. He and the PR know the game. Both know that preparation on both sides is key. So why not be transparent and pretend to reveal all? Then, with the journalist suitably off guard, send a second, confidential briefing to the executives that takes them deeper into the journalist's psyche and the interview strategy.

The journalist would have a great resource to get him up to speed in the areas that Microsoft wants to talk about. Result: a fast start and an implied boundary to the conversation.

But, regardless of whether the leak was deliberate or accidental, any self-respecting journalist would still find ways to throws interviewees on the back foot and not let it change their approach in the slightest.

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A PDF of the memo

Waggener Edstrom president Frank Shaw comments on the fuss.

Fred Vogelstein blogs his perspective.

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Antony Brewerton: On branding the library

Found myself speaking at Re-imagining the Library the other day, sponsored by CILIP and Talis. The audience was a mix of public, corporate and academic librarians and the speakers were charged with sparking off some fresh thinking. None did this better than Antony Brewerton, head of academic support at the University of Warwick. Previously, he was at Oxford Brookes University and before that at the University of Reading.

Anyway, his presentation was excellent. The others I saw (I had to nip out, unexpectedly, for a couple of hours to take a briefing for some urgent writing work) were very good but if there was a prize for best presentation he'd have won it. He was intelligent, articulate and amusing on the tough subject, for librarians, of branding.

To give a flavour of the man, he decided to take the theme of 'inspiration'. He looked at pennies dropping, Rodin's Thinker, a light bulb (incandescent, naughty boy), but while good, he felt there was something better. Then he thought of Newton and the famous apple.

Well, and this shows the calibre of the man, Antony couldn't have any old apple, it had to be special.

He spent hours in greengrocery shops studying the goods. Eventually, he found the perfect apple. Then he needed the right light for the photography. He found it outside on a bright day. But then the pesky apple, while it had all the right colours, didn't reflect the light properly. So he took it indoors and gave it the Johnson's Wax treatment. Back outside, he placed it on a large sheet of white card and finally got his shot.

Sadly, I can only find a monochrome picture but, as soon as I find a colour one, I'll put it here.

You can already see what a fine apple it is and how magnificently it's been polished.

And the caption was:

Brilliant. So simple. Addresses the undergraduates' second most important issue (after beer). Or do I mean third?

He cited Theodore Levitt who said, "Purchasing agents don't buy 1/4 inch drills; they buy 1/4 inch holes."

So true. And so easy to forget.

Thanks Antony.

Don't be shy, promote yourself

I have a friend who is darned smart and darned modest. He wonders why people don't realise how good he is and rush to engage him. After all, he writes the odd blog and fires off the odd email to people who he finds interesting and who, therefore, should be interested in his work.

And they are. They see him as bright, and are happy to take his feedback, probably thinking they're dealing with an enthusiastic amateur. Or, God forbid, a tech groupie. The result is that his goodwill is frequently abused. People take a lot from him but give little in return. Yet he has valuable skills to offer and certainly plenty of enthusiasm.

I tell him he should push himself a bit more. When people ask him about himself, forget the self-effacing modesty and articulate clearly and simply what parts of his world are likely to be of interest to the listener.

He finds this incredibly difficult. It's probably a culture thing as much as anything. Over this side of the pond, we're not taught to be assertive, even in a pleasant way. We get hot under the collar and tongue-tied and, in the case of many techies, embarrassingly modest. "I do a bit of blogging and software testing" might mean, "I'm an A-list blogger and I am a freelance software evaluator for major research organisations." You'd never know it.

We give no glimpse of why someone should be interested.

After my friend told me of another lost opportunity, I suggested he sit down quietly and work out what value he can offer other people, then try and articulate that into a workable sentence. It doesn't need to be a life story, just enough to catch the interest of the other person.

Then, when he meets people in future, he can ask them about themselves. (This is always a good conversation starter, even if they kick off by asking about you. I've found you can ignore that, and they go spouting off about themselves. Eventually they remember their manners and say, "but you didn't answer my question.") By then he has gained the knowledge he needs to adjust his own opener to suit the listener.

He's not comfortable with any of the above. Ideally, he wants to be retained for his skills but doesn't want to take this next step. In frustration, I cobbled together a picture and said, "if you were at a party, which person would you prefer to speak to? You're like the one on the left."

Here's an adaptation of the picture but, as you will realise, I've changed the sex to protect the innocent:

At a party, say, which one would you prefer to talk to?

It seemed to ram home the point. My friend is going to take stock. Hooray.

When Second Life anonymity bumps into reality

I signed up for Second Life in June last year and, thanks to a pair of poorly performing computers, didn't take it far because I was too irritated by the process.

I cranked up the performance of both machines and really got stuck in over the Christmas period, first of all meandering around as someone who looked like a fitter version of me. Then I wanted to be less threatening (big, bearded, old) etc, so I changed sex and made myself look like a modest young woman.

This was all fine, apart from when I was being propositioned, until I started chatting with someone while I was lounging in an armchair on the stage at Cisco's amphitheatre. He walked up to the stage and we exchanged pleasantries. Then it turned out we were both into social computing, both providing services to Cisco and he mentioned that his web address was in his profile. I clicked and it turned out we had met in real life.

What if the conversation had taken a different tack?

What if he'd propositioned me?

How would that have made me feel?

Worse, how would it have made him feel?

Obviously I can head that sort of behaviour off at the pass, but it does trouble me deeply that I - someone who is normally open and honest - had actually created a situation through my deceptive appearance where people could be lured into behaviours they would certainly not adopt had they known who was behind the avatar.

Yet, my non-threatening appearance encourages friendly conversation and leads to insights that I might not arrive at were I to say, up front, "Hi, I'm really a male journalist". Until the meeting with someone I knew, I was fairly relaxed about my pose. And, it has to be said, having fun. After that meeting, the deceptive aspect bothered me a lot.

I am researching Second Life to discover whether it has a practical business value. Maybe, after this stage of my participation, I'll revert to the real me.

But you can be sure that other people in Second Life are setting out to deceive quite deliberately.

Anyone want to share their thoughts on the issue?

Hitting a networking nerve

Rajesh Setty offered some thoughts in response to Hugh MacLeod's call for 500-word 'Change the world' mini-manifestos.

On in particular jumped out at me: "It is just not who you know; it is who knows you."

Over the past 25 years, I have met thousands of people, some of them exceedingly prominent, either then or now. I could claim, "I know Steve Jobs", for example. But it's utterly meaningless because I'm certain he doesn't remember me. (I'm the guy who gave you a hard time on the Apple III at a London briefing, so we had lunch instead. Just in case you're reading this, Steve.)

I used to be editor of a computer magazine and, for years, was a columnist on a succession of titles. It gave me access to industry big cheeses, but I didn't for a moment imagine that this resulted in anything other than the occasional mutually beneficial temporary relationship.

In future, if anyone asks, "Do you know xyz", I'll say, "we've met but they probably don't remember me."

Setty's right. The only relationships that count are the ones where the other person knows you.

Sorry if you think this is stating the obvious. When we rub shoulders with the well-known, it's easy to forget that the 'relationship' is often a one-way street.

The Journalistic Nose

Stuart Rock was already editor of the Director magazine when I first met him fourteen years ago. He kindly adopted me as IT correspondent and we got to know each other pretty well. We still meet occasionally and he's as sharp and incisive as ever. He has, in spades, what I'd call a "journalistic nose". Like most journalists, he can smell a rat at fifty paces.

While I love the blogging world, and the interesting characters that inhabit it, I have to say that many of them are too prepared to accept company spoutings at face value. The burden of proof has moved from the writer to the reader. And, it's fair to say, if the reader has time to aggregate multiple reports and follow-up comments, they can often get closer to the truth than the average hard-pressed news journalist who has to whack in copy on a deadline.

Which brings me back to the 'nose'. Journalists quickly acquire a sixth sense about the people and companies they engage with. Over on "The Business Editors", Stuart talks of how his instinct screamed against supporting Computer Associates' Sanjay Kumar as a speaker at a conference on corporate governance. This is from Stuart's blog post:

Would Sanjay Kumar, then CEO of CA (previously better known as Computer Associates), be a good person to speak at a conference on corporate governance? CA, I was told, was keen to get him to appear at "high level" events.

That last sentence would have set any journalist's antennae quivering.

Yesterday, Kumar was sentenced to 12 years for accounting fraud.

Hurrah for Stuart's nose.

How To Get Rich. And where does social software fit?

This is a bit off to one side. I'm returning to Felix Dennis' book "How To Get Rich". (You can get it discounted at Amazon.)

I've read it. Every word. And I, someone who's never chased the money, enjoyed it. And I learnt a lot, about Felix and his approach to getting rich. It is a book for people who just want to get rich legally. It's not for people who want to follow a vocation or passion, unless that passion happens to be 'getting rich'. (Felix is one of the richest self-made multi-millionaires in Britain.)

As I was reading it, I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the the part of my world labelled: 'social computing behind the firewall' or 'Enterprise social software' as wikipedia now calls it.

The human being in me says that this effective communication lark is self-evidently good, as well as building a corporate memory into which newcomers can tap (as well as snoops and regulators). My experience of the blogosphere and wikis (and other stuff like RSS, APIs and mashups) has led me to a new view of the world. One in which minds meet before bodies (which gets face to face meetings off to a fast start). One in which I have learned more and faster from more people than ever before in my life. (I hope I've put back some value too.) And one in which events and projects have evolved and teams formed rapidly and organically. LesBlogs 1 and 2 and Office 2.0 being just three examples.

The benefits are apparent to me. As is the monumental downside of spending hours in front of a computer screen when I should be with the family or enjoying the fresh air (or something). I'd hate to do a personal ROI calculation. Right now, it would look bad because of all the learning involved. Longer term it might look very good indeed. (ie I might still be in the game as opposed to being on the scrap heap.)

But, with my freshly-minted Felix hat on, I want to see the money. I want to see the improvement to the business in some measurable way. I want to see the increase in productivity, the improvement in company valuation. Wearing my Felix hat, I'm suspicious of something that seems to provide staff with such a huge potential distraction from real life.

There's a circle here that needs to be squared. Blind faith isn't going to cut it. The published success stories are too few. I know that Euan Semple brought about a transformation in the BBC culture, although he's no longer there. One of the high points was how the staff rallied round Greg Dyke during the sexed-up dossier scandal outrage. (For the first time since Greg took over, I thought the BBC had regained its credibility. Then look what happened...)

Semple gives loads of examples of time saved and teams bonded. Anecdotes rule, but I'd like to see the corporation's 'bottom line' take on it all. (We're talking internal social computing, not the outward-facing stuff. That's another story. And it looks like a good one for the Beeb.)

IBM's at it with internal wikis and blogs. I presume it has decided they're valuable. Where can I read the justification? JP Rangaswami introduced social computing within DrKW, although he's no longer CIO. (What is it with these successful social computing engineers? I guess there's a big world out there to conquer...)

The National Institute of Mental Health for England has welded a community of special interest groups together. There just have to be more success stories and, if you know of any that are beyond pilot and delivering measurable value (even if it's only opinion from the CEO), I'd like to hear about them.

Returning to the book, I think Felix has done me a huge favour. When I talk to people, I shall whip out the Felix hat from time to time to make me more diligent about grading interviewees along the hype-reality continuum.

Of course, money isn't everything to most of us. But when businesses are expected to invest in enterprise social software and accommodate the resulting cultural upheaval, they have to gauge the bottom-line benefit very carefully.

Our challenge, as a community, is to collect and share the evidence. If there is any.

Over to you...