Which trap do you fall into?
In the world of Higher-Education summer is a time of reflection on the past season, and planning for the new college year (all too rapidly approaching!) My own reflections this year are getting some inspiration from a recent CIO Magazine editorial: A Simple Scoring system for Complex Times. How does your organization score accomplishments and initiatives? In the article it is suggested that doing the expected – like maintaining system uptime or performing regular software upgrades – gets a 0. That zero. Why? In part because users don’t give us much, if any, credit for doing these things. And these items don’t actually add any value to the organization – we maintain existing value, but aren’t adding anything. Clear wins – projects that are noticed by users as generating new value or improvements – get a +1. And clear losers, where people notice and are unhappy, get a –1.
In the many rounds of budget cutting and belt tightening over the last 16 months one of the causalities for many has been training budgets. And that is probably not entirely a bad thing. For a single employee a standard week-long training class can run $2,500 for just tuition, plus travel and lost time in the office. But something needs to fill the gap, as a commitment to continuous learning is essential:
I just finished The Craftsman by Richard Sennett. I don’t quite remember how I came across the book, but I’m glad I did. It is a thoughtful and well presented work on the concepts of craft and craftsmanship with much application to our modern work lives. I see his presentation as breaking down into two broad categories – management and teaching. Here I’ll talk on the management side.
I just finished reading The Social Factor: Innovate, Ignite, and Win through Mass Collaboration and Social Networks, by Maria Azua. She served as IBM’s vice president of Technology and Innovation, where she helped implement social networking tool across IBM’s 125,000 global workforce. While not exactly a book about IBM’s practices, it does draw heavily on them. Overall I found the book a little long on generalities, and thin on specific examples. This might be exactly the book for an upper-level executive with little-to-no experience with social media. But anyone with an active Twitter or Facebook account will find much of it too basic.
From making homemade bagels to a talking suitcase, you’ll find detailed instructions on Instructables. There are an incredible number of great ideas there. Sure, there are also some not so good or poorly presented instructions and even some flat-out wrong things – but that doesn’t detract from the quality of the experience. The how-to’s are clearly from individuals, with no promise or hint of any quality control – except of course for the user comments. Instructables does host contests, with winners getting a nice badge added to their page. But otherwise it is a free-for-all.
Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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