The Future of Information Work

Last night I went to a Seattle Mariners game. They lost 2-0 to the Blue Jays. As I was sitting there, not in such rapt fascination at the sport of baseball, I looked around at the rather happy, mostly out of shape fans that surrounded me. And in that pattern of blue jay and compass covered fans, it struck me that American had outsourced its exercise.

Researchers wonder why American's waste lines are getting bigger (but yet we seem fairly happy according to a recent survey (gross national happiness). One of the reasons? We outsource out exercise. We live vicariously through athletes who perform amazing feats, and suffer the consequences of their work. But we can scream and yell, we can, in short, participate in sports while eating hot dogs and drinking beer. Thus, we have a correlation between weight and sports. The ones funding it get bigger, while the ones performing get richer.

The economics are pretty simple and pretty market driven. Those who dislike sports salaries should stop patronizing sports, and those who complain about our pre-occupation with the couch should realize that we are participating in sports, albeit in a rather passive-aggressive way. We are getting what a free country deserves - the consequences of its decisions are manifest in the people making those decisions - for good and for ill, but mostly for good, because if we cared that much about the ill we would have more real athletes and far less income in sports.

And who's to say that the time spent by a smart programmer not exercising makes us less economically well off, if he or she is unhealthy, they are probably create more contribution early in life to that pursuit - so if they worked out all of the time, that great idea might never make it to the compiler. And besides, we can always exercise later. For now, a game is on, and if not, we can just whip on up on the Xbox. Its not about good and bad, its just about how things are because of the choices we make.

Yesterday I spoke at 9th Global Information Technology Management Association (GITMA) in Atlanta about the challenges of creating an economics for the knowledge economy. Education came up as the earliest entrant to the knowledge economy, and one that typifies many of the issues about knowledge and measurement when it comes to economic realization (with most higher education institutions judged by endowments, enrollment and the publishing and reputation of their professors - with little ability to judge the value of their outcome - the long term success of their students in the world).

One of the topics was pushed back at industry. We were discussing the perception that higher education does not create the kind of students needed by business, to which one professor said: "it is your problem. You write the job descriptions that we try to meet. They are all about technical skills. And then you talk about collaboration, communication, adaptability - but you never write that on the job description, you just give programmer specifications." - Paraphrased. So we are creating faulty inputs and getting what we ask for.

I don't think the answer is as easy as better job descriptions, because the balance is important. I don't think we really understand the demands of today's workplace and the way rapid  shifts in focus and skills sets play into the mix. That is an important dialog to start, and important research to fund so we can better align education with need.

And beyond that, we also started discussing the need to generally reinvent education - eliminating the gated process view of the middle ages for a more continuous view, fostered from the youngest ages, that learning is something that will never end.

Take a moment to read this blog at Healingtheworkplace.

Learning from Douglas McGregor « Healingtheworkplace’s Weblog

It is good to see this kind of dialog. I know it has been a peripheral conversation for years, but given the waves of changes we are facing, it is necessary to push this kind of conversation to the forefront of management theory. We need to start testing theory by letting more people feel empowered.

In Best of the Blogosphere: June 20, 2008 - Capital Commerce (usnews.com) Daniel Drezner says:

Yes, globalization is responsible for some job losses and wage compression, but its contribution is pretty damn small. Obama—or his advisors—are being disingenuous when he says that jobs have left Michigan for China. Those jobs have disappeared into the ether, period. Technological innovation has yielded so much in the way of productivity gains that even though manufacturing jobs are shrinking in the United States, manufacturing output in this country has more than doubled since 1980. The same process has caused the global number of manufacturing jobs to shrink as well.

Drezner understands what the presidential candidates do not. If we keep applying the industrial age to the information age and the knowledge economy we will continue to lose jobs around the world because we will be all about making things cheaper, and cheapening our relationships and our innovation. Productivity is fine, but it isn't everything. If we want to create jobs we need to fund things that may not be efficient. Learning and innovation are messy because they involve mistakes, and productivity is about eliminating mistakes.

The biggest mistake our politicians of this new age could make is getting us to vote for the industrial economy one more time. This isn't about being green, its about being creative. Being green will be a by-product of solving real problems again - of making mistakes and learning and moving forward rather than trying to make the past ever more efficient.

Your food is getting smaller (read here in USA Today). The excuse is often the higher price of food components. Tallow in soap, the cost of eggs. Although most manufacturers say they doing this to cut cost, the ramp up to the reduced packaging required investments in new package design, and probably a change in the manufacturing technology required to put the food in the package (most equipment is very precise about what it can handle, so going from a half gallon to 1.75 quarts involves more than turning down the spigot.

And then, as my mother, wife and sister all discussed over the weekend - recipes are now wrong. 16 ounce cans are now 14 ounces. If a recipe for a family favorite requires 16 ounces, then than means buying two cans and taking just 2 ounces out of the second can. Another cost increase for the consumer.

There are implications to change, and we are often too quick to change without considering all of the implications. The comments on the USA Today article are pretty interesting. It isn't just about size, but about quality. As we tune our scientific management to measure the costs of manufacturing, as we drive down quality of products, shareholder need to be aware that brand is not just a name. Companies that make the choice to reduce quality, and size, also reduce perception, which is the cornerstone of brand. I hope the Boards at these companies are hearing the discontent coming at the companies they are charge with overseeing. This is a knowledge economy, and if big manufacturers keep scrimping to save on cost and quality, we will start seeing the mergers and acquisitions that made scale everything over the past few years, feel even more pressure from boutique firms who may be a bit more expensive, but who will trade on quality and trust and ethics.

I know I am buying more local and reading more packaging. What makes you buy? - Cost? Quality? Trust?

The Discovery Channel is running a fascinating look at the early NASA programs. I grew up with NASA. I watched every launch, I recorded the Apollo-Soyuz mission on real-to-real tape. I find it sad that space exploration has become work and not exploration. We have lost our nerve as a nation and as a planet. We worry about the loss of astronauts, but we send soldiers into combat, a combat that perhaps meant more in Vietnam, not because of the war against communism, but because the nation was involved in testing limits while it was defending its right to test those limits. We need to test limits today, not fight for complacency and comfort.  There are many things to be learned, many limits to push. We need to push limits - to inspire the next generation to test themselves, to understand the cost and struggle of progress.

So here's to NASA of yesterday, the NASA of today, and the hope for agencies and individuals that will push our limits tomorrow and beyond.

Regular readers will know that I just hate putting version numbers on concepts. They are misleading and over simplify some very complicated ideas. You should market it if you can't buy it, and you can't buy Web 2.0.  You also won't be able to buy Web 3.0, but you will be able to get connected (now in beta, soon broader) to Twine.

Twine purports to be a way of tracking your interests by bundling together the places you visit, then using pattern recognition, connect you with other twines and people with similar twines. Inferred social.

So far I like the experience. I want a Live toolbar button so I don't have to go down through my list of favorite to say Twine This. I am cautiously optimistic that this will be a useful tool.

But here's the problem. And its going to keep being a problem. I have a computer full of files not easily Twined. They are easily OneNoted and I have been diligently moving to OneNote for all of my research and personal management (like which books to buy and which Shakespeare plays I have seen). But I also have Mind Manager from MindJett. Cool thing it is very connected to OneNote. Now all of this Web 2.0 computing in the cloud stuff is great, but my stuff isn't in the cloud and the cloud is a long way from understanding me or giving me integrated applications at the level of Mind Manager and OneNote. That is not, and never will be, an experience one can have with the cloud...

Unless something like Twine really works. Well, partially, because Mind Manager is not just an information tool, it is a creativity tool, and I want a fat client with a hefty processor behind it to manage my pen scrawls and mouse clicks. I don't want to worry about not being connected and therefore not being able to learn or share.

The world without PCs will be like the world of take off and landing. I a couple of leather 3x5 card holders. I take a lot of notes on them, despite OneNote mobile on my phone. Why, because I don't have to turn them on, or charge them, and they work during take off and landing. I can live with that, but I will never be able to abdicate my personal infrastructure to the web. As a complement, as a transport, I'm fine with the Net, but I did a lot of cool things on my PC before the net, and I don't plan on not doing those just because somebody put a word processor in the cloud. I may, however, share some of my web experiences so I can learn and share even when I'm not at my PC - and, as good as PCs are at some things, they pretty much suck at managing the web experience (why don't all PCs come with a really good bookmark manager - one that checks to see if they still work before you do?)

So I will be testing Twine. Hope to see you there.

Serdar Yagulalp, writing in InformationWeek (read it here) is worried about open source code being used in services without the service providing giving back to the community. I find this fascinating in that the model for open source is built around altruism and trust - which is not universal. When things are in the public domain, regardless of their licensing model, they will get used. The edges of agreements will be tested and models will change. The open source community is coming up against  a moment of change, that will either drive innovation or it will drive a retrenchment. If information wants to be free, as many in the open source community believe, then people will use that software. And the kind of altruistic competition seen in this article is naive. The suggestion that the open source community quickly compete, duplicate and drive those who don't give back out of competitive advantage. If services are good, and they get picked up, they will thrive, and most users won't worry about how the code was developed. They will only worry that the service is accurate, safe and reliable.

Rather than get defensive, it is time for the open source community to look at themselves and innovate. They protectionism that thwarts innovation in manufacturing, also thwarts innovation in software. The open source community can't afford to be derisive on this issue. They will need to evolve their model in a way that services the needs of their community - those who contribute and those who don't.

James Surowieki has nailed an important political issue the May 26, 2008 New Yorker (read it here). One of my litmus tests for political candidates is their ability to see the working work in a real way. Most of them haven't work real jobs in years, so they are pretty disconnected from the workplace, or even the economics of work in America. A good thing about prolonged campaign period for the democrats is the necessity for them to get out with people and understand what is going on. That doesn't mean doing everything they are asked to do, but they are promising things they were asked to do, like bring jobs back to America. Sure we want jobs, but we want good, high value jobs - not low value manufacturing jobs. Not that there is anything wrong with manufacturing, but we also want low cost goods and American manufacturing can only compete on niche manufacturing - making things of special value - not commodities where the cost needs to be very low to even be competitive.

There are ways that commodity manufacturing could return to American, but as Surowieki points out, we probably don't want to live in those futures, because it would mean that our economy can no longer compete. I'm torn between a return to more liberal social policies, which also seem to go with protectionism and isolationism. 

What we need is to drive innovation. To create new niches that go beyond our borders. Green is a bit of a fantasy, but if we are innovative, it may not stay that way - but we can't put all of our solar panels in one basket - we should also be looking at innovation in every area we can imagine. And I don't hear that kind of inspiration from any of the candidates.