The Future of Information Work: Information Work

BusinessWeek: IBM and Managing by the Numbers - Why Counting Everything May Well Stifle Innovation and Learning

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 14:27:04 GMT

The September 8, 2008 BusinessWeek is covering IBM through a book extract from Stephen Baker's The Numerati (read it here).

I have to say that this article worries me if it is a trend in consulting. As I sit in the academic advisor offsite for the Institute for Innovation & Information Productivity (IIIP) this type of measurement for productivity is reflective of the over application of industrial age measurement techniques to knowledge economy work. I find it disconcerting that just because something can be measured, that it is seen as important. With all of the information available we tend to count before understanding the relationships between the data.

My biggest issue with the article the emphasis on productivity, not on adaptation and learning. If IBM is focusing on "automating management" then they may do well in the short term, but as the world changes, how will they adapt as they are straight-jacketed to a model of people based on what was important when the model was built?

I think an understanding of the world requires numbers, context and relationships (human and data), social context and processes - ignoring any of these aspects or attributes creates incomplete models and the more the concentration on pure data wins, the more constrained the view becomes. Now of course, some argue that anything can be reduced to a numerical model, but that implies the development of relationships - not just with data, but with time.

Organizations that want to remain adaptive need to go beyond the pure numbers, the counting of things, to the understanding of the relationships between numbers, between strategies and goals and perhaps more importantly, about the gaps between what is known and not known, and what can't be known. In a world focused just on productivity, we will see more-and-more efficiencies around things that may be less-and-less important, especially when the time dimension and the need for continuous learning are factored into the equations.

(By contrast see the 3M story, 3M: Struggle Between Efficiency and Creativity, also a famous cover story from BusinessWeek, about managing the balance between the constraints of Six Sigma and the drive for turning creativity into innovations).

A Question of the Right Measures - Is Real Neanderthal Intelligence Really Reflected in Tools?

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 02:30:08 GMT

ScienceDaily reports that Neanderthal's were just as efficient at creating stone tools as early Homo Sapiens (New Evidence Debunks 'Stupid' Neanderthal Myth). The problem is that using stone tool production as a proxy for intelligence isn't intelligent: it is misleading. Evolutionary survival is a complex interplay of factors, and obviously Neanderthal's were missing something, either physically or culturally, that caused their demise. As a hypothesis I will posit that it was a cultural issue rather than a physical one (there are arguments on both sides). If I am right, however, the ability to create stone tools was not the determining factor in survival and may not be the best indicator of overall intelligence. Some other innovation, cultural or mechanical, may have been the factor, or set of factors that allowed our ancestors to survive and eventually thrive.

We have the same issue today, often looking for proxies that equate to some directional indicator. The world is a messy place and proxies are hard to find. With computers we may eventually be able to model enough factors to made sense of many things, but we already know that modeling everything would require a computer the size of the universe - makes one really wonder what questions we were intended to answer, or, as David Gerrold's GOD (Graphic Omniscient Device) from When Harlie was One is designed to do, answer those questions, perhaps, that only humans can ask.

(If efficient production was all that mattered, all of our automobile manufacturers would be on near even footing, but we know efficient production isn't enough - brands, financial management, perception of value, etc. are more of a determination of success today than efficiency).

The Work of Insects: The Wired Commentary on What Bosses Can Learn From Bugs

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 06:55:39 GMT

Leave it to Wired to catch the latest buzz: author Ken Thompson says we should learn from nature (bugs) how to manage. (read the Wired article What Your Boss Can Learn From Birds and Bees - Titled "What Bugs Can Teach Bosses in the print edition here).

I have to agree with Ken. I believe much of our work life is overly deconstructed to the point that when we put it back together we leave instinct lying on the floor with other recyclables.

I do have to disagree with the report a little, in that it says broadcast e-mail is good. As an information device, sure: managers like little bees twitching to send their signals. The problem though is that within corporations we have also disconnected the value proposition of the message from the need to transmit it, so we have everybody sending messages, most of them with one of three values: read me as soon as you can, don't read me if you don't want to and read me now or the world will come to an end. The ants and bees know what they want to communicate and it is critical to their survival. All of the e-mail we receive, and need to delete is not keyed to our survival, real or political. So lesson hear for managers: get in touch with your inner bee and only send out those one way tomes when they really matter.

Geese: divide and distribute knowledge. OK, duh. I tell people when I remember back to knowing almost everything about computers from TRS-80s to CPM to early MS-DOS, even Sinclair/Timex. Then the world got crazy. "Computer People" are now as specialized as doctors (yes, in ancient times, like the US Civil War, "surgeons" knew about as much as could be known). Many disciplines suffer or benefit from that fate. Here's a thought: let's save the expense of the November election and let Obama and McCain run the country together. We seem pretty divided down the middle still. Many countries have a dual leader role. Perhaps we can learn from the Geese.

And finally, worms. Hub people, networkers - derived from the way C. elegans uses its 302 and neurons. Good in theory, unless you also read NewScientist and read that hierarchies may actually be more resilient in the face of change, precisely because of their duplication - the network's downfall is the hub people, who, if taken out, collapse the network, whereas a hierarchy taken down is just replaced with a duplicate (read more in NewScientist: Why the demise of civilisation may be inevitable). The hierarchy may not be innovative, but it takes a licking and keeps on ticking.

Good thoughts Ken, even if the analysis, reported in Wired, may be a bit buggy.

The Future of Work and Education

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:55:43 GMT

When you look at education through the lens of work, new perspectives are ample. When you apply scenario planning, the outcome can be even more enlightening.

Read about my work at Microsoft for applying the Future of Work scenarios to the future of education.

http://www.microsoft.com/education/highered/whitepapers/scenario/ScenarioPlanning.aspx

New Video on Partner TV

Sat, 03 May 2008 21:01:27 GMT

Check out my comments on the future of work, Shakespeare and many other things on Mcrosofts Partner TV.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ptstv/archive/2008/04/30/partner-tv-the-new-world-of-work.aspx

Vision White Papers on Forbes.com

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 00:01:49 GMT

If you are interested in reading the white papers I help develop at Microsoft, please visit Forbe.com and look for the Microsoft Resource Center. Let me know what you think!

http://www.forbes.com/home/businessvisionaries/2008/02/14/biz-viz-celebs-oped-cx_daa_0214bizlede.html

Are My Bags There Yet? - Worries on my Upcoming Trip to Europe on BA

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 04:45:09 GMT

I met with some customers from the UK today. I shared that I was on my way there on Tuesday, and was quickly asked: Which airline? - I said BA - and they said - Bring all carry ons. So I started looking. Talk about a terminal issue of lack of transparency and not turning a crisis into an opportunity. It appears that the new terminal 5 at Heathrow has misplaced and failed to deliver 19,000 (nineteen thousand! - it looks worse in writing) bags - read the Sky News report here.

Rework is expensive. Touching things once and moving them is efficient. Apologizing and taking responsibility without compensating customers: priceless and ridiculous.

I wonder if any passengers from Imperial Airways, British Overseas Airways, or British Caledonian are still looking for their bags. Perhaps this was a time travel thing and terminal 5 was the vortex for all the lost luggage in the history of BA. One could hope, because anything that hinted at mismanagement and human error quickly becomes inexcusable.

BA should deliver the bags, each one accompanied by a personal note of apology, a voucher for a discounted airfare, and a claim form for expenses incurred during the time the bags were misplaced. Imagine the expenses incurred by people on vacation needing to resupply just to make their trip go from horrible to tolerable.

Why this won't happen. People don't have great choices at hubs. They either fly the air carrier available, or they stay home. It's hard to protest when you really want to go someplace, or need to, and the alternatives may be worse than the thing you are protesting. It's time for a bit more competition in the air, it just appears that time run backwards when it comes to progress on airline customer service.

I remember the days when airfare tried to attract passengers and keep them, not with promises that they inspected the plane or wouldn't lose your bags, but that the entire experience was actually an enjoyable adventure, and they were taking care of me all the way. Most of the time now, even with loyalty status, I feel like I'm just this side of a bus with a leaky roof that drips on my the entire trip - real story but for another time.

Grading Doctors Online - The Reputation Systems Are Coming!

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:04:07 GMT

In the March 10 US News and World Report, Michelle Andrews talks about grading doctors online (online version here - a bit older than the article in the March 10, 2008 hardcopy) . WellPoint is teaming with Zagat, for instance. This is just the begriming of a phenomenon forged on the backside of resume references, Linkedin recommendations and ebay reputations.

Reputations. That's the next new thing. It isn't enough to have social networks, we will start creating reputations systems that reflect our opinions of others - and of things. I think this will be the next phase of social networking. We will start rating people like we do the stuff on epinions.

It is inevitable that this will come. We will start rating everything, and eventually develop a universal way of managing reputation across systems. Reputation will even follow us to work. It will not be sufficient for employers to look at credit scores or web pages. They will dredge through all of the metadata the world creates about you.

In the case of doctors, this may keep them a on their toes, knowing patients will communicating directly about patient care. Restaurants already go through this, as do cars and computers. Well, even doctors do in big cities, where local magazines run their best healthcare issues complete with the best plastic surgeons or oncologists.

Start counting down though. Reputations systems will soon be embedded in everything. Just how good a friend are you? You are about to find out!

20,000 page views

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 23:16:04 GMT

A quick thank you to my readers. 20,000 page views as of today. I know some sites get that in a day - but, hey, more people have seen this site than have read my poetry. Feel free to spread the word by sending this link: http://future-of-work.spaces.live.com

And if you want to read poetry, start here: http://www.myspace.com/danielwrasmuspoetry

Thanks again!

Limits to Productivity?

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 18:46:09 GMT

Are there limits to productivity? I was having a discussion with a number of Dutch companies recently and this topic came up. My belief is there is a limit to productivity, which means productivity is a limiting concept to proper description of economic success. If we only measure one dimension of a problem, we failure to understand the contributions to other factors.

In a discussion this morning, for instance, with an academic advisor of the IIIP, we discussed how about the same amount of time is spent today writing academic papers or creating presentations as was spent 20 years ago, but that the quality of the output is far superior. The raw productivity has not improvement, but the productivity of the overall process has improved, including the elimination of a number of steps, people, etc. that might have contributed in the past (like typists, layout, reproduction, graphic artists, etc.). Locally this improvement is staggering, but is the effect for the overall economy positive (which is a bit of a side question, but important to the displaced workers).

More pointed to the question about is how productive can one become before a law of diminishing returns kicks in. Does that one more revision of a presentation actually create equal return. Would it have been better to stop the revisions 3 hours ago and made contact with another customer, rather than spend 3 hours on a presentation that yields the same result in the end without the revisions. How do you know? - and how do we create the ability to sense when to turn from one task to another because we have done all we can on this one to achieve the desired result?

In the manufacturing world these weren't questions. The world was constrained on input and outputs. There was only so much that could be done with a given amount of time. Today we don't have the configuration constraints of a process. We have multiple converging processes whose relationships are unmapped, and therefore, outcomes and outputs are not known to be cumulative, complementary or conflicting. How do we manage is such a world, and does productivity take us far enough in understanding, or do we need to create a much more complex set of relationships that better define our desired outcomes? I think that is what we need to do, but as the world becomes more complex, our desire for simplicity also increases, so are we at a crossroads where understanding the world will be something we just don't have time for?

Adaptation and Handedness

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 19:51:10 GMT

Observers of the future ask people to adapt all the time. To face the subtlety of change, to suck it up and just find a way to fit into a new rhythm. Having just experienced a broken arm, I understand that change is not swift, and not at all about learning: change is about forgetting. You have to first forget you can't type with both hands before you can learn how to be efficient with one. You have to stopped mourning the loss before you can recognize the opportunity.

Change agents need to keep this in mind. Sometimes change should not be negotiated, but be rapid, dramatic and disruptive.

Years ago I helped move a team from a paper-based system to a computer system by locking up the paper. The complaint was the paper was much more accurate. I said if you spent as much attention to detail on the computer as you did the paper, it would be accurate too. Eventually the computer won, not just because it was as good as the paper, but because once it was as good as the paper it could do more.

This week I am trying to learn to do more with less.

Talking about Wikis at Work

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 17:41:07 GMT

So do you Wiki at work? This Wall Street Journal video touches the high level of the topic. What do you do to share knowledge - and if not share knowledge, what do you use a Wiki for?

Wikis at Work

Some think that wikis might be the answer for companies trying to find new ways to share information, with Don Clark, WSJ San Francisco deputy bureau chief and CNBCs Melissa Lee

Jason Fried Hates Interruptions It Seems, but Should You?

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 02:42:25 GMT

Over at MarketingProfs Daily Fix Gewneth Dwyer posted a report on 37Signals founder Jason Fried and how he loathes interruptions. I'll let you read her piece (here) for context but let me say the following:

As I research my book, Management by Design, for Wiley, I am finding that there are no universal answers to questions things like one's affinity for interruptions. One of the problems with management gurus is they think what works for them is the answer for most people. They may be wrong.

Think about relationship building people - social people. They may get, as Fried calls it, "in the zone" with their contacts, but they may also flit from contact to contact just to keep in contact. They like that. It is the way they have wired themselves (I'll refrain from passing judgement on the nature vs. nurture question).

I am writing a section on how people think differently, perceive the world differently, driven by dozens of factors from religion to economics to demographics. For many people, interruptions are a bad thing. People, it seems, like Fried. But in the context of innovation, an interruption may be warranted to move one from a false path, to inject new information - perhaps just to get one to eat, which is necessary as the brain requires fuel to do its work. What we do, as I say perhaps too often, is see everything through the linear metaphor of the factory, through the industrial age haze that hides the emergent chaos and complexity of our information age simultaneity. In a networked world, interruptions are inevitable, and they are needed. They move traffic. They move ideas. They actually create innovation because of the tension between interruptions and linearity - between process and chaos.

I respect Jason Fried's view, that is the point of my book. If I was Mr. Fried's manager, I would coach his peers to leave him alone and let him work the way he works. Organizations need different kinds of workers to do different kinds of things, or lend a variety of perspectives.

Bottom line: If you don't mind interruptions, you aren't weird. If you don't like them, you fit into another category of normal. The best advice, and the kind I hope am writing, is about being tolerant of different perspectives. Innovation comes from diversity, and from tension and from using one's peripheral vision - and that means anticipating interruptions and learning how to take advantage of them when they appear.

The Elimination of the Work Packet

Sat, 15 Sep 2007 03:44:44 GMT

When I first learned about physics, I remember reading that light came in packets, or quanta. As a kid, I remember my father's work coming in much the same way. It was discrete. It had a beginning and an end, and what was in between could be measured.

The loss of the work packet is a characteristic of modern work, or information work. Even if you have packets of things to do, the work itself, at the conceptual level, is a continuous wave function with peaks and valleys to be sure, but it is nearly impossible to tell when something starts or ends because of the close, often overlapping relationship of work.

In a factory, the company owned the means of production. My Dad would occasionally act as a contractor, but that was a rare occasion and didn't involve machines. He brought badly painted sheet metal cases home and stripped them in the backyard - an overtime effort I'm sure the EPA wouldn't condone today. But even that was a discrete act. When the pile of brightly miscolored metal cans was once again a glinty stainless silver, the work was done.

My Dad's career started to delve into the wave function later as he brought home computer work to do, calculations needed to turn strips of paper tape into programs for automated punch presses. And when I started at his company and ran serial lines to terminals across the company, I introduced entirely new ideas of work. From my office, and from my Dad's bosses office, we could see what was going on in the factory - without going into the factory.

But now, away from the churn and whir of machines, my work, from white papers to creating new non-profits, is continuous. Everything I read, even this blog, is related to the work. There is no time that I'm not connected in some way, mentally or physically to the work (via a keyboard of some sort). Because I work at Microsoft even the pleasure of my music listening on a Zune is connected to the work - an example of a consumer device that could be repurposed for work if the right bright IT guys integrate it into their corporate infrastructure to deliver training or messages from management.

I don't know too many people with work packets anymore, certainly not professionals. The clerk at the local drug store may be able to go home and forget about his or her work, leave that packet for some alternative universe with different definitions. For information workers though, the lines are too blur to allow for discontinuity - we never really break through the edges of one packet long enough to emerge in another one, so to the outside observer, we live in a wave, not a packet - and if you are looking for how today's work is different than the work of yesteryear, the loss of the packet may be the most profound indicator of change.

Avoiding the Trouble with Enterprise Software

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 04:33:42 GMT

There is a significant problem with enterprise software according to Cynthia Retting in the MITSloan Management Review (read it here) and I agree with her. Let me just bottom line her stats: it is costing more and more to retain less and less new software.

Enterprise software locks in functionality. It is monolithic and like manufacturing factories who attract protectionist action by unions and local politicians, IT organizations protect their budgets and their usefulness and by virtue of this, and their often limited ability to react to changes in business or investments in new requirements, they attract the ire of management.

What can be done?

We aren't to the point, as I have written before, that distributed computing is making an impact on business computer yet. Well, not distributed computing in the computation sense - but distributed computing is in fact the solution to the problem of enterprise software. If we combine people with their machines and the software that run on them we have a distributed computing model. The data model is flexible, the ability to respond to unknowns is limited only by the imagination of the nodes (read people) and not the pre-programmed rules found in enterprise software. In other words, desktops, laptops, PDAs and SmartPhones the ideal supplement to the binding and boundaries of enterprise software.

Enterprise software is also limited by its process orientation. Now, after years of having the need for process driven into us by management consultants and other pundits, we think everything needs a process. We expose data and metrics about everything until many people spend more time thinking about reporting their work than actually working. What the distributed model of work also does is create an adaptive environment where people can engage with emergent "processes."

Organizations should not think about enterprise software in isolation. It is not, and never will be the solution to everything - it is the solution certain structured processes that, in reality, should have a low probably of need for rapid change. With the way the world and technology changes, it is likely that less-and-less of our information and our interactions will be facilitated through enterprise software, and more-and-more of it will be handled by ad hoc arrangements of communication, content and data created by end users to meet needs that fall outside the scope of enterprise software - the results of which may never find their way into enterprise systems.

I talk about scenarios all the time. They are based at a fundamental level on uncertainties. We base our enterprise software on certainty, but we know our business interactions are unpredictable - so why would we think that enterprise software could handle the plethora of unknowns that surround us? What we need are systems that can adapt to the shift from uncertainty to certainty, and the ability to do that immediately when it is recognized - which means smart people with great tools are the answer to the navigation of the emergent businesses needs.

And when it comes to costs, consider the trade-off of distributed reaction rather than central control. People can use the software they already have to navigate change. Sure, that takes some power away from IT, but it also justifies infrastructure investments in ways the original architects could not imagine. The most cost effective way to manage change is to manage it at its source, and that source comes to your people and their tools well before it bubbles up to IT and becomes some kind of requirement that they may take months to react to.

Dressing Down for Work (or not!)

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 23:51:38 GMT

Back in July, The Week magazine ran an article about dressing down at work. Only 38% of employers allow casual dress today, vs. 53% in 2002.

I give several customer facing presentations every week, and often look odd in slacks and button down with a sweater where others are wearing shorts and t-shirts. My opinion is that if you aren't customer facing, then what you wear is between you and your peers, and in hierarchical organizations, between you and your manager.

For talking to customers my best advice is dress like an advisor. That doesn't always mean a tie, but a sport coat and a nice shirt and professional slacks and well-polished shoes is a sign that you care about your appearance, and will more likely care not only about what the client or customer thinks, but will care about what you say about the client or customer to others.

I know some very smart people who advise others and have a very quirky sense of style. I have to say that my eclectic advisors are seen in a very different light than my "professional" advisors. I love to chat with people of all backgrounds, but when trying to build trust, dressing in the right way is important.

Even at trade shows, and I have been to hundreds, I think those organizations who step up the dress, also give more credibility to the booth or presentation. Wear button-downs that fit. Don't skimp on size (many XL or XXL shirts really aren't when purchased from a trade show supplier - get cloths for your people that fit). Polo shirts are OK for some things, but I would advise against them for the trade show floor. You don't know who you are meeting, and not every one is going to meet an executive, but they should feel like they are being respected, and that they are meeting a professional - and they only way they can tell on a crowded show floor is to start with appearance.

Why is this important to the future of work? Because dress is a reflection of the attitude of the workforce, and more and more people become professionals, their education should include how to dress well, not just how to think well. You can still assert your own style, and you should, but build up from the basics, rather than building down.

Here's a link to one of image architect Sandy Dumont's entries on this topic if you want to explore it more (click here).

Viral Marketing and YouTube Lawsuits

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 16:40:50 GMT

YouTube, one of Google's holdings, is reported to be seeking depositions from entertainers (YouTube seeks to depose Stewart, Colbert).

My point of view is that YouTube will argue that it has become an essential marketing vehicle for shows like the Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Many clips are available on the Comedy Central website, but the best marketing these days is not the marketing directed by the organization that owns the property, but the viral marketing that comes from hundreds or thousands of individuals spreading the word about something they think is funny, intriguing or even disgusting.

I wouldn't know to reference Tay Zonday's Chocolate Rain (already fading into yesterday's news) had late night talk shows and other entertainment venues like VH1's Best Week Ever elevated it from web phenomenon to pop culture icon. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report would not be what they are if it hadn't been for web buzz. The deposition of entertainers is likely to explore their relationship with web audiences, which is clearly bi-directional. The web is now the source of much of the commentary for late night, for talk radio and for mainstream news channels. To create a wall between content on broadcast and content on the web is completely artifical, as bits beget bits and links beget links.

The work ahead is not the work of lawsuits that conclude if such a wall exists between air, cable and the net - the work ahead is the work of creating new business models that eliminate the need for archaic intellectual property laws. YouTube will test the new laws that focus on things like quickly removing protected material when requested. YouTube's relevance is its ability for its users to rapidly disseminate anything and everything to a global audience. If IP becomes an issue, and new busines models don't emerge, Google's investment may be less than fulfilling as its videophiles migrate to friendlier sites, sites more willing to fight for the inevitable new balance between buzz and bullion.

Why the Future of the Hospital Will Not Happen Anytime Soon

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 02:41:39 GMT

Short answer: staff doesn't trust it. Now the story:

My wife just had major surgery. She is recovering well. The hospital system, it seems, remains a bit anemic when it comes to back office technology.

I talked with over a dozen nurses and technicians. They were writing down blood pressure, temperature and oxygen levels on scraps of paper, then entering them on charts, then entering them on the computer. Some documents were scanned in, but the primary item log, the big bulky flip chart with all the paper hole-punched into it sat outside Janet's room keeping a constant vigil. It would crash. It was hard to search, but it would crash. When it came time to release her, she signed paper after paper, on the chart flip book, and the copies went immediately into the log. They may be scanned at some point, but there was nothing electronic about her release procedure. Even the multiple prescriptions were written out on four-up pages in chemical induced duplicate.

Why aren't computers more present? Well, first of all, they were everywhere, but they weren't primary. They improved legibility, the staff reported, but the big issue was technology trust. Power outage, system failure, you name it, they thought it, and they wanted paper because a paper record didn't rely on technology.

I think there is a lot we can do to make systems more reliable and more trusted. Here is a prescription:

Light-weight operating systems that run on solid-state computers with built-in battery backup
Built-in redundancy for data, perhaps critical patient items sent encrypted wirelessly to small solid state computers so even if the big systems go down, the last stuff entered is still available, and new data can be entered for hours before batteries become an issue
Quick dump printers or solid state backup that lets staff feel that if they need to panic (e.g., the last recharge was the last recharge during a power outage) they can transfer everything to permanent memory (if we are worry about EMP then we probably have more to worry about than patient health records)
Light tablet/slate PCs with really simple interfaces, and systems that create backup documents immediately. Transition from the paper by moving to computers and making paper a secondary output, rather than primary with the computer first. Put printers at each station and work patient routing by room. Hell, even put the paper in the book directly from the printer. How are could that be for HP?

If trust in technology is an issue, there is a brief prescription. No sci-fi, just practical stuff that requires an innovation of will rather than an invention of technology. We could do this now, its just a configuration issue, and if we can make the staff more productive, we can then start moving to the next level of backend systems by addressing insurance, pharmacy and other related information lags, including the patient healthcare record, which frankly, my wife has little clue about what it says today, vs. yesterday, and you know, she has every right to - we just don't have the will to let her receive a synchronized update to her Smartphone while I'm bringing the car around.

Works of Fiction: Harry Potter

Sun, 12 Aug 2007 16:45:17 GMT

I have just finished Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows. I had to wait for my daughter Rachel to finish it.

I found the book a very satisfying conclusion to the Potter legacy, but I also found it, as a work of fiction, a rich environment from which an industry of writing may occur. Numerous back stories remain unfulfilled, and many many future lives are left to speculation - though the book does hint that nothing remarkable happens in the nearly twenty years hinted at in the books conclusion. Many works of fiction, however, are made from the unremarkable - just the lives of fiction's greatest characters can be entertaining to say the least, and instructive at their best.

When we look at the worlds of Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and Dune, much writing has occurred outside the canon set forth by the creators of those worlds. Much writing can take place in the Potter world as well. That is the work of fiction writers - not only to create worlds and populate them, but to play riffs off of each other, to expand and extend. In Star Trek this worked well for awhile, in Dune less so, in Star Wars some of the fiction is pretty good, in Dune, the legacy leaves me greatly wanting for the depth the father failed to pass on to the son - and in Lord of the Rings, the ambiguousness of where father and son combine - but for the most part, a technical and scholarly continuation rather than one inspired by the works themselves.

Work itself is a topic of Rowling's books. Magic is a gift, but it creates a complete parallel world, complete in that rather than magic giving its possessors exception from the mundane naggings of the "muggle" world, Rowling gives her Wizards and Witches jobs, sports, family problems - even dysfunctional promotions. Take Sybill Trelawney, charges with teaching prophecies, when she herself has only made two of note, in as far as my reading took me, really didn't know that she had done it, or how it was accomplished. I thought of several talented programmers I knew over my career who were thrust into management because of technical insights which did not imbue them with the skills to manage people, nor the teaching ability to pass on their insights.

I look forward to seeing what becomes of the Potter franchise now that it is reportedly complete from Rowling's pen. Work's of fiction are often things that authors have little influence upon once they abandon their chargers to destiny. Much as Dumbledore learned from his charge Harry Potter.

Five Acts to Make Your Company More Innovative

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 16:57:32 GMT

A cover story in the July/August KMWorld caught my eye. Innovation Strategy: Toss old rules by Cindy Gordon briefly explores the overwhelming culture of success that many organizations use as an excuse to avoid the uncertainty of change.

I remember working at Dataproducts on their daisy wheel printer factory years ago, just before it was closed I might add, with the onslaught coming, at that time, from Epson, with dot matrix printers. Demand was up at this tiny division but we were shipping $100 bill in every box. And besides, we were the daisy wheel printer division, not Dataproducts (at the time, the world's largest independent printer company-now a division of Clover Technologies Group, LLC). We needed to do what we did better, and while we were trying to do that, we didn't notice that the daisy wheel printer market had died around us.

The innovation model wasn't working. It wasn't working in the printers, it wasn't working in the factory and it wasn't working with customers (we kept selling to the same people, not expanding the market - thanks to Wang for keeping the money rolling in because they too missed printing beyond word processing).

After many years in other companies, I have learned a bit about innovation, so here is my list of 5 acts that every company needs to embrace to be more innovative:

Don't be afraid to sell vision to you customers. They are great at helping with incremental innovation by giving current product feedback. Most aren't in the mind space to help you be radical, so you need to be radical with them and get feedback on the vision, not on what they already know. Challenge them and they will not only give you great insights because you helped take them to another place, they will also respect and value your current products more (and increase trust) because you are sharing your vision and including them on the journey.
Kill the thought killers. There are groups in every company, sometimes in finance, sometimes in management sometimes in places you don't expect (look under your covers and behind your desks, you will find them) who are charged with keeping the status quo. They may not do this intentionally, but they are empowered to be protective, and they often wield much more power than the innovators because they are protecting a franchise - they have the momentum. If you want to be innovative and people are acting as gatekeepers to innovation, find them a new role or a new place to work - at the people level, it may be all about expectation not capabilities, so with the idea of innovation starting at home, redefine objectives so these people realize that their bonuses and salaries are based on new products and new markets, not on corporate protectionism.
Don't let size matter. If an idea can't create a multibillion dollar business, then we won't do it. Um, the people making the market judgement are usually informed by the thought killers. We can't predict the future, we make it. It is an easy prediction to say that an idea will not become a multimillion dollar business if it receives no funding. The basics of risk management and risk mitigation are very counter to the actual acceptance of risk. If people have some passion, give them a little rope and see what they can do.
Innovation is hard to repeat so don't rely on the same people all the time. Trust is a big thing, and it is hard to build. But innovation will be a lumpy science, if it ever becomes a science at all. We trust people who have been innovative before to be innovative again. If you are in a culture of status quo what that means is a view that these people "know how to get it done." Well, what they probably had was a good idea they finessed through the system. Working the system is one necessary skill for successful innovators, but not the only one. Pipeline creation, challenges to the system and many other factors play a role in the repeatability, or sustainability of innovation. Meaningful challenges to product, process and service assumptions may come from anywhere. Don't close your mind to possibilities because you have a trusted group that has proven themselves in the past. One status quo replaced by a new one does not create a drive toward innovation.
Open Up Everything. This is the most important. You need to take the risk to challenge your assumptions at all levels. Innovative businesses are in a constant state of flux. Organizations that are good at innovation constantly change their mix: products, services, processes. Change is the constant - managing change the key skill. Open up everything. Let the thought killers go to work for companies not driven by innovation. Let small ideas gestate. Let new people take leadership roles. Listen to your customers, but don't be afraid to lead them to new places. Most important is to think holistically. Don't look at pieces and their success. Don't look just at R&D without looking at sales and marketing, production and support. Don't look at your division without looking at the market. Innovation is not just about products. The more broadly you think about the organization and its connections, the more you can realize rearrangements and see gaps that can lead to innovation. Open up everything, but most importantly, your mind, to see what others can't see in what they look at every day.

(my latest sentence written with respect to Shopenhauer:

"The task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everyone sees.")

Its Not Just Enough to Understand the Measurement, We Need to Act

Sat, 04 Aug 2007 05:24:13 GMT

Productivity and innovation are hard to measure. Energy use is old school. The 25 July 2007 New Scientist (Building for a cooler planet) reports that 29% of energy use in large buildings could be cut by 2020 using existing technology, reducing a large chunk of the 33% of CO₂ emissions responsible for upwards of 33% of society's production of that gas.

In the US by 2020 buildings will be using 25% more energy than today, and China 50%.

We know what to measure. We know how to measure it and we know how to act responsibly in light of our measurements, yet architects and builders continue to build energy inefficient structures.

When we look at our own organizations, there are things we know. Anecdotal things. Measurable things. We too often look to the superficial.

Think about sales productivity. How many sales people do you know that just love their interaction with your CRM system. Probably few if any. They are berated when it isn't used, and seldom praised when they are, because praise comes in results, not in practice. Practice is a way of pointing to deficiency, not proficiency. Proficiency is measured in dollars or euros. If you are proficient you need not worry about your database deficiencies. But to the organization, the knowledge is missing. The good sales person, when he or she leaves, creates an information void. If the reward would have been a universal recognition of the technologies deficiency to be more amenable to the work, then perhaps more people would reach their goals, perhaps they would just be happier because the system they were forced to used worked in a way that enhanced, rather than burdened their production (creating the need for workarounds).

If you know something. If you can measure something, then not acting on it means the measurement is meaningless to the organization, and should therefore be stopped. Having employees know that you know something and that your aren't acting on it is perhaps the most disconcerting data of all.

Its Not Just Enough to Understand the Measurement, We Need to Act

Sat, 04 Aug 2007 05:22:51 GMT

In the US by 2020 buildings will be using 25% more energy than today, and China 50%.

We know what to measure. We know how to measure it and we know how to act responsibly in light of our measurements, yet architects and builders continue to build energy inefficient structures.

When we look at our own organizations, there are things we know. Anecdotal things. Measurable things. We too often look to the superficial.

Distributed Work for Armchair Astronomers

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 18:29:48 GMT

When the Seti program used distributed computing techniques to look for patterns in radio signals, I had hoped the commercial software world would take notice of the potential and through distributed computing into the mix of must have technologies. Not yet. I keep pushing.

Space drives innovation, however, and now astronomers from Oxford, Portsmouth and Johns Hopkins have launched Galaxy Zoo (http://www.galaxyzoo.org/). What they are looking for is not CPU power, but brain power, to help classify galaxies captured in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Computers still don't do pattern recognition very well, so they are employing volunteers to tell spirals from ellipticals.

Perhaps in the future they will use this input to train a Bayesian sorter based on the human classifications.

Even if you don't have time, the website itself gives perspective. As you look through their sample gallery, it is just had to imagine we are the only beings blogging in this big broad ancient universe.

Baseball and Being Worked Over

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 20:17:26 GMT

Months ago I blogged with a riff on the word work. I would like to add to that riff the phrase "worked over" which the Seattle Mariners certainty were last night. Baseball is work, and not play, especially if you are the loosing team (I think the guys hitting home runs last night probably had some fun).

As a fan, I look at stadiums and realize just how much work baseball is. From selling home runs for charity (to Fidelity) to Microsoft buying strikeouts for kids in school, to the plethora of other messaging, not to mention vendors, security, clean-up crews and all the other support staff and officer personnel.

I recently had the pleasure of seeing batting practice at Dodger Stadium in LA. We had a staff member hang out with us while on the field. That was her work for that hour - hosting out of town guests.

And then there is the technology. Nintendo is working with the Mariners (beyond majority ownership) to bring the DS to games. A few Microsoft guys also have a stake, and I'd love to see the same services being offers on the SmartPhone. That is a whole new layer of work - but one that could greatly enhance the experience. I'm not sure I would replay the hat game or the boat race (I really don't like cheering for random number generators) but I certainly would like to have my garlic fries and hot dog brought to my seat - as long as the cost is reasonable and I don't feel worked over like I do when I pay $5.50 for a soda (that doesn't even come with a refill).

(suggestion to baseball: refill cards. Buy the big souvenir mug and bring it from game to game. First one get two refills, and five bucks gets you more. Team spirit, branding and a sense of value. Um?)

How we Measure the Value of Science

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 21:08:35 GMT

The July 7 New Scientist ran a story asking questions about the equality of science (Perspectives: Quantity, Quality and Equality - Why Women Lose Out in the Lab).

I think this is another case of bias and perception. On one hand, men, driven by the culture of performance, perform. They create more science. It may not be better science. In fact the article says women are cited 20% more than men. An astounding number, when, as the article points out, men publish 33% more papers.

Bias: men are better at science because they are more participatory. The bias is toward production, and that drives the perception of men's overwhelming command of the sciences. Measurement is the problem. We need to recognize that the abilities women bring to science may be different, they may have different perspectives, different drivers and different bars that they want research to pass internally.

The outcome of science is discovery and synthesis, understanding and challenge. In most advanced societies we determine value by quantity, and that will be proven a poor metric over time, on many levels. The next time you meet a woman scientist, take time to understand where she is going with her research, what questions she is asking. Chances are the conversation may be more far reaching than one held with a male counterpart-not because the woman is smarter than the man, but because she may be in less of a hurry to get to her destination, and therefore more apt to understand the detail, or check the directions, before she arrives.

The Mismeasure of Things

Sun, 22 Jul 2007 03:02:26 GMT

As the diminutive NASA rovers enter what is hoped to be a brief hibernation as dust storms block the sun from reaching their solar panels, I started to wonder not how we measure power on distant planets, but how we measure inspiration on this one.

I check in periodically with Opportunity and Spirit to see how they are doing. And we should be inspired by their three month mission that has run much longer than many television shows launched at the same time. I do this because NASA caught my imagination in the 1960s with the goal of landing men on the moon. I watched every landing, listened to broadcasts on radio even have a reel-to-reel tape in my collection of the Apollo-Soyuz (recorded on a tube recorder from the earphone jack on an old black and white television).

Why write about this now. Because the current BusinessWeek (July 20, 2007) touched on "High-Tech Memory Loss" and how horrible it is we can't remember phone numbers. We don't dig dirt with our hands anymore either, but that doesn't make shovels bad. Human brains have no need to remember rote facts, or even factoids. What human brains should be doing is looking for patterns and creating things through synthesis and serendipity. The same issue also covers new ways the Billboard and Nielsen record web rankings and musical hits ("Rankings: A New Web Order").

Why NASA, why Mars, why Billboard, Nielsen and memory loss from PDAs? Because we are forgetting what humans do. We are explorers, learners, not measurers. We categorize sure, but we move forward by challenge categories. And yes, if Nielsen and Billboard are recategorizing then perhaps they are moving forward, but they are moving forward in trivia, not in substance.

NASA moved forward in substance in the 1960s. It put our planet in its place. It provided new vistas. That is why I go back to the Spirit and Opportunity sites. We don't have organizations anymore, at least none I know of, that inspire without overly worrying about the bottom line. Inspiration with profits is OK if you can pull it off, but Disney was a financial wreck most of his career. But I can think of no one who created more imaginative alternative views of reality and morality. And NASA as well, asked to achieve the impossible or improbable on a budget - a budget built for acheiving dreams - a budget now that is much more closely tracked than a society trying to inspire should track such agencies (another reason to write this is we need to start looking outward as a nation again, not for nation building but for driving the world's imagination.)

We have become so enamored with productivity and with operational excellence that we fail to realize you can only achieve those things in static environments. Invention and innovation are the antithesis of stability, and therefore create new environments that are neither productive nor operationally excellent because: hello! they are new. As soon as something gets to the point of having a best practice or a cost of learning budget reduction it should probably just be killed because the process is devolving not evolving. It isn't becoming something important, it is becoming institutionalized bric-a-brac.

And we want payback. We want returns on investment. Returns on shareholder equity. Returns on everything except dreams. If Walt were still alive he would be asking his shareholders to measure the return on dreams, as would the early pioneers of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions. As we spend our time counting our beans, we completely forget that beans sometimes grow beanstalks that find giants among the clouds, if only in our dreams. Try to calculate the return on that dream for a fictional boy named Jack, let alone, a real boy named Dan still inspired by watching toys roving around the surface of Mars.

Shakespeare 1599: a Year in the Life

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 01:58:54 GMT

I just started...

A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
1599.
By James Shapiro.
Illustrated. 394 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $27.95

...and it makes me think how disconnected we become from the process of those who make products that become commonplace.

We too often read books for what they tell us they are about, than what they really are about. This is not a book about Shakespeare, it is a book about what Shapiro didn't know about Shakespeare having taught him for years. It is a book about a context for Shakespeare, and a context for the ignorance of scholarship bound by the need to create results.

What I like so far is Shapiro's honest motivations for the writing, his recognition of his shortcomings, and the shortfalls of Shakespeare scholarship. Rather than asserted the unknowable as fact, he asserts the knowable as a frame within which to imagine what we will-rather than take someone else's imaginings as real.

This is a book about Shaprio's work, and about work in 1599, in particular, the work of a playwright named William Shakespeare who lived in a time very different than our own, and that fact is also a lesson of this book: without currency of context we cannot understand anything in a true sense, because we are forced to substitute instead our context upon something that may be very foreign from our experience. Science fiction writers caution us about that all the time. It seems so much more sobering, I guess, when it comes directly at us from misinterpretations of history.

Time and Vacation

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 19:28:20 GMT

The time we realize is mostly self-imposed. Our bodies certainly have rhythms, but those rhythms have nothing to do with work. All dates related to work are artificial. They are created. Historically religion was a type of work, and the work of nations begat the calendar. Where and when a calendar starts is completely arbitrary. Day and night and the year, the month, as times that are less arbitrary, outside of their definition (meaning that what we call them or when we start counting them is arbitrary, but their existence is independent of human interpretation).

This relationship between time and work becomes clear when you are on vacation and disconnect from the need to do things, to complete things, to attend things. Time only becomes important again when vacation intersects with work (as in people working at a tour provider set a time for the tour – if you want to join the tour, you need to be there on their time). And that is really the point. Projects, schedules, budgets, deliverables, etc. are all relational to arbitrary dates, some of which may reach back in time to weeks or months or years or even decades or millennia. But they are, at some point, a reaction to a person putting a stake in the ground and saying this must be done by this time. In contrast, the natural cycles that drive agriculture, for instance, have a rhythm that is driven by outside forces. As much as we attempt to accelerate the cycles, there in only so much day, only so much good weather (putting plants in a greenhouse moves them into the arbitrary land of work where time is set by people, not nature).

So do take time to disconnect for cycles and schedules that really, in the end, mean very little outside of their locality. Perhaps the most important aspect of vacation, the part that brings rest, comes from reconnecting with natural time, and realizing that things that need to get done really don't need you to do them, or at least, not when others think they should be done.

Reflections on a Mob CIO

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 06:17:08 GMT

Tony Soprano had an account, a lawyer and a psychiatrist. He didn't have an IT guy. I think in real life mob bosses do have IT guys. And as the June 15, 2007 CIO article (Interview with a Mob CIO) outlines from a fictional POV, mob bosses are probably the best aligned of IT leadership. A couple of snide online comments question the authority of the fiction, and it may be overly aligned itself with the reality of organized crime IT. But it does make you think. If you haven't read it, I encourage you to do so. I think we too often miss the opportunity to use stories to teach in the business world.

I used to write the Production and Inventory Management Fairy Tale column for the P&IM Review. I wish we found more fiction in the trade press. But then as this article points out, that might be too experimental for practical minded professionals. It is a shame. If fiction was seen as good for business, fiction (and poetry) might be better businesses themselves.

(BTW, pay special attention to the end comments about alignment. I have spent years wondering why IT is so disconnected from business. A recent study we funded at Microsoft reported the same phenomenon. CIOs think they are much better at alignment than their business counterparts. A big way to move in the right direction is to put more business people into IT leadership. Technical prowess doesn't mean business perspective. IT needs to refrain from becoming too attached to their projects. If, as the article suggests, something doesn't make real, tangible sense (in a way that makes sense to the business, not in theory) then don't do the project, and if you are doing the project, don't be afraid to stop.

Did Tony's Uncle use mainframes to run his organization?

Why Our Definition of Life May Blind Us to the Living

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 04:29:33 GMT

The final article from the 23 June 2007 NewScientist that must be examined is called The Medusa Strain and covers a potential new life form that may be the vector of diseases ranging from Alzheimer's to kidney stones.

Here is the quote that caught my attention:

"DNA or RNA," says Fredric Coe, a nephrologist at the University of Chicago. "With modern genomics, if you have really got important DNA, you are going to track it down. That's what I think happens when you are onto something real."

To often we assume we know. We keep doing research based on old rules. Some questions the rules, and they may well be wrong, but science is about discovery, not about knowing and using that knowledge to constrain further exploration.

In this same issue of NewScientist they cover a book called Flat Earth which chronicles the history of the belief that the world is flat (not in the metaphorical way that Thomas Friedman suggests). This is not a history book, because the ideas continue - and the same people that question the spherical nature of the planet also question much of science's accomplishments (the space landing for instance).

These stories are connected. The bias of knowing is dangerous. If we are to take on the serious work ahead. Diplomacy in the Middle East or North Korea. Solving the puzzles and mysteries of science and life - we must do so with open minds. It is not what we know, but how well we question what we know that will lead to real knowledge. Ideology in the flatness of the world, or in the assumption that life must contain DNA will restrain us from the innovations that will create, perhaps, sustainable economies with new definitions of growth, new ways of viewing disease or finding a way to accept at least the possibility that the world is a sphere, and as a sphere, it does nothing to invalidate faith.

As the X Files suggested, the truth is out there. We have to be willing to seek it, question what we have found, and continue to question it even if we believe we are right. The real truth will hold up to our scrutiny - be it scientific or theological. And we need to know that those explorations have their own rules - the theological tests need not fear scientific conclusions because in the end, religion is a mystery that holds its proof in the heart of its adherents, and fighting against an understanding of nature, in my opinion at least, does nothing to reinforce religion or diminish the findings of science. And scientists, who assume a religious posture about their postulates, are just as dangerous to a reasonable future as religious people who force facts to fit their faith.

Not So Birdbrained as we Would Imagine

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 03:48:07 GMT

Any one who has ever watched crows knows that they aren't exactly stupid animals. The 23 June 2007 NewScientist article Don't Call Me Bird Brained sees some very human behavior as the root of crow intelligence, and its not benevolent: it is spying and stealing. Social competition was important in evolution of humans. If we assume we are the last intelligence on this planet (or the only one now) we are probably very wrong. Social evolution is also very important to bonobos and other apes. Over the course of time, other intelligences may arise to challenge us, and they may be even more conflicted about right and wrong than we are (or perhaps not conflicted all - right and wrong do not apply once we leave the definitions of humanity).

We see the world through the prejudice of both our humanity and our intelligence. We may not be able to see the world through the eyes of a crow, but we should recognize that crows see the world through their own eyes, connected to their own brains and those brains are wonderfully complex, and the behaviors meaningful to even our biased views of cognition.

The Work of Cosmology - Does This Post Exist if No One Reads It?

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 00:53:12 GMT

Next up from the 23 June 2007 issue of NewScientist is Reality Check. At the end, the question of uncertainty again raises itself. We don't know many things, and now physicists and cosmologists are asking once again if our reality is only a figment of our imagination.

Why is this about work? Because this is the work that those two professions have factions that are at odds with one another. For those who don't really care if the world is real or not, then this isn't important. For many in the sciences, the future of the world, whatever it is, is dependent on understanding quantum mechanics and its relationship to gravity (a relationship that doesn't exist today in any accepted way). The future of computing depends on this. The future of communications may depend on it as well. And of course, the future of the planet at the macro level also depends on this.

These deep questions should be made more exciting and revealed to children learning physics. It would of course, call into question some of the questions asked on AP physics tests, because the students could answer it depends, and it probably would. But we might also inspire children to learn science by not pretending we know everything, until all of a sudden in graduate school the few who make it that far find just how far we are from real answers.

Genes May Regulate Work

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 00:39:19 GMT

The 23 June 2007 issue of NewScientist was a great issue on work. Here are a few postings.

In the article Genes won't work round the clock Debora Mackenzie reports that genes may work on a circadian rhythm. After watching 20,000 mouse genes over two days they found that all genes oscillated. Without the light/dark cycle, the genes became more random in their behavior. For those researching drugs that will allow people to work odd hours, particularly in the military, the brain may not be the last word in side-effects. Our cells may have a thing or two to say about where and when our bodies work, or for how long they can function normally outside of normality.

Too Stressed to Work??

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 00:21:18 GMT

In the 2 June 20097 NewScientist, Ann Baldwin and Marc Bekoff explore the affect of stress on caged animals used for experiments. Animals, like Mice, kept in similar cages with little outside stimulation. Ah, mice cubicles. We trust in science based on stressed animals, even though Baldwin and Bekoff point out that stress can cause physiological conditions that might not be fully accounted for in test results. They propose looking at stress itself, in the laboratory, both to make the place more amenable to its "guests" and to make the science more conclusive by better understanding the often overlooked element in experimental design.

Back to cubicles. We test people everyday. Environment is important, yet few organizations go out of there way to create environments that reduce stress. People are tested at the mental level all the time, asked to conjure new ideas, or solve new problems, or even worse, solve cognitively challenging tasks time and again. Unlike the mice, people don't have plastic tubes or shelves to wander to (in mice these reduce fighting by offering diversion - I have been in organizations that need tubes and shelves).

Of course, people aren't mice or rats. But we are stressed and in mostly boring environments. And remember also, that with virtualization, as much as we may be in physical environments, we are also in repetitive virtual environments. Both can be challenged and changed, and people can walk around, even walk completely out of their experiments. But when they are at work, performing, concentrating, they may feel the affects the rats feel more pronouncedly than we give credence.

Managers should look for ways to break up days, not just break up weeks or months. Moral is an ongoing effort, not an occasional shindig. If organizations want employee surveys to be meaningful, then they too, need to understand the stress of their employees. They may get much better results if they remove stress, and more meaningful results in the near term if they factor it in as a variable. That high employee turn over you worry about, that is partly about mice with free will marching out of your experiment. Maybe it's time to change the conditions.

Workaholism and the Leisure Gap

Sat, 02 Jun 2007 20:24:56 GMT

In the March 30, 2007 THE WEEK one of their Best Column picks was Jim Sollisch's Workaholism essay from the Wall Street Journal, which ran over into the WSJ blog. Sollisch concluded that workaholism wasn't all bad. In fact, it was addictive, made his life easier as choices narrowed. It is a bit ironic that I pulled this clipping to write about today, because in the background, as I type, is the SciFi Channel's Stargate Atlantis in which they struggle through all manner of frustration to implement forced time off.

As much as we say we blur work and life, the reason we perceive the fragmented view of life at all is because in recent history we have focused their separation. If you look back historically, you see everything as a blend by necessity. Leisure was something experienced after long periods of work and nightly rest. Women had different jobs in many cases, but they worked at home, and often continued to work after the sun went down. Only recently have the afluent created the idea of leisure that caused the middle class to plan for it rather than cherish when it was possible.

This is not a new area of philosophical discussion. G-d commanded that people rest on the seventh day. It was a way of separating the mundane of work and life from the holy, to make the day and the worship connected to it special.

As I watch coverage of what our young American elite do in their leisure time, I wonder if we are in the bit of social evolutionary quagmire. We can recognize the value of leisure. We can recognize the need, but we have not put economic value (or in most cases, personal value) on our leisure activities. We don't have a clear relationship that makes sense between work and leisure. We don't understand the value of intellectual or physical diversity. Even are games are commercial (baseball, basketball, football, etc.) so rather than teaching children to play, we are hoping we will find aptitude for work.

Our affluence has caused many philosophical issues to surface. Over the next decades, this one will be the issue that defines the difference between happiness and despair. We need to learn how to find the value in blend, and for that, I would look to the Millennial generation for guidance. They are pushing back against work and trying to find a new balance. We should learn from the Millennials before we work their aspirations out of them.