It’s not the really quite clever ways that the author thwarted the very best efforts of presumably large companies to rigidly control his, and his colleagues’, behaviour that amused and inspired me to write.  It’s far more his challenge that I have quoted below:

If you are an IT professional and you find your self thinking, “damn, I have to make sure I restrict my users from all of these crafty uses of EC2″ then, jackass,you are the problem with your firm’s IT department.

Just how many people out there will have read his blog post and thought exactly that?  How many IT (and other, lest we forget) departments are staffed by the sort of mindless automatons that just keep on implementing the same old controls because it’s just “better for everyone if we do it that way”?  Sigh, even writing about it frustrates me.

Compare this way of thinking to a recent interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt (http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10380917-264.html) – Eric points out that things change, simple as that.  Google didn’t really figure out the pricing for Google Apps using a tried-and-trusted method, they just kinda made it up.  I love that.  I love the fact that the most disruptive technology company in the world sometimes just makes stuff up.  You don’t find people who think about controlling the business-as-usual behaviour of others just making stuff up that ends up having a positive impact on those around them.  Best to quosh that kind of talk right now, oh yes…

Stop doing things the way they’ve always been done and just ask yourself “Why?” now and then.  Business as usual guarantees failure.

Well, I’ve managed to survive the deluge and thought it about time to blog about something.  Something close to my heart, books.

You can’t throw a rock right now without hitting an online article stating just how bad things are for the publishing industry, whether it’s newspaper revenues crashing (http://mashable.com/2009/08/31/newspaper-revenue-crash) or Readers’ Digest filing for Chapter 11 protection (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/aug/17/readers-digest-chapter-11).  eBook readers such as Amazon’s Kindle are heralded as being the death knell for physical print books at the same time as being lauded as a potential saviour to get publishers’ material into peoples’ hands.  It looks grim for publishers right now – it also looks confusing as to where they’re going to go next; the very technologies and companies that threaten the publishing industry are the only ones that can save it.

To make things slightly more confusing, because it’s all just so easy apart from this, Google ups the online syndicated-news reading experience with GoogleFlip (http://fastflip.googlelabs.com) – this looks nice and, ironically, is designed to emulate the experience of reading a ‘real’ newspaper.

The idea of a Kindle is appealing to me but, to be honest, it’s just too expensive right now for me to make the jump.  So, recently I decided to do something that I hadn’t done in a long time – I went to my local library.  It was a revelation – it’s modern, well stocked, leverages the resources of other libraries in the city, allows me to request books for free (or a token amount) online, tells me when my books arrive (usually within a couple of days), reminds me when they have to go back.  It’s just great.  So, for all the fanfare and bluster of eBooks being the future, I’m just happy that there’s a really easy, cheap and accessible way to get my hands on the real folding paper-based type of reading material just around the corner from me.

The deep irony here is that I wouldn’t consider actually buying one of the books that I’m now getting out from the library – the subject matter changes just too fast to make that sensible in most cases and, in all cases, I read them just once then I’d never open them again.  So the publishers only get a limited amount of revenue from the library purchases.

It’s interesting to see that there’s now some movement by Life Inc. and some other major Magazine publishers to launch a ‘Hulu for Magazines’ – I’m not sure how this will work as the majority of the content they’d be charging for is available for free online already – that’s a big precedent to reverse before the charging model will work. (http://mashable.com/2009/10/02/hulu-for-magazines)

To summarise, I love books, will never stop reading and I predict that I’ll be using a Kindle or equivalent soon.  But, until then I’ll continue frequenting my local library and strongly encourage you to do the same!

However, even in a friendly envronment full of people that ‘get’ the sharing idea, there is still resistance.  The resistance isn’t, primarily, from individuals but more from the culture those individuals work within.  This blog post http://leveragingknowledge.blogspot.com/2007/03/organizational-cultures-not-conducive_20.html outlines a few easily-recognisable corporate cultures that are a sure-fire giveaway that your attempt at fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing are going to be, well, troubled to say the least…

Now, the weird thing about large companies is that their staff constantly moan about the politics, the overhead, the lack of agility and so on.  This is weird because it’s the people themselves that allow this to happen and to keep on happening – if a group of people just refuse to let it get in their way then behaviours change, barriers come down and soon enough the world will be a little brighter.  Don’t believe me?  Well, think about the last time there was a real crisis in your corporate firm – everyone pulled together, right?  Things happened quickly, right?  The normal tectonic plate-movement speed of decision making just got removed from the situation.  This is because it had to otherwise you’d all have been in trouble.  This is the well-known idea of a single super-ordinate goal bringing people together to produce great outcomes.  Corporate behaviour removes super-ordinate goals and replaces them with individual job-protection mindsets.  Read this blog post for a better-written viewpoint http://www.journalism20.com/blog/2009/06/10/how-to-bring-a-startup-culture-into-the-newsroom/

The normal corporate roadblocks generally only survive in stable, peaceful times.  Peace is good.  I like peace.  Stables are good if you’re a horse.  If you want your daily political hell to ease off a bit then introduce a bit of disruption on a daily basis – go on, stir things up; ask why; suggest something different even though you know the ‘powers that be’ will tell you it just isn’t done that way around here; then suggest it again; be vocal and you’ll soon have a whole crowd with you!  Who knows, you might just end up establishing a little bit of Startup right there in your corporate…

Compound: A substance composed of two or more elements chemically combined in definite proportions by weight.
Mixture: Two or more substances that are not chemically united, such as air.

This is a beautifully accurate way of describing what happens when you try to force collaboration and teamwork by establishing that most fashionable of work-place dynamics, hot-desking.  The idea is that if you put people in ever-changing locations, they will sit next to lots of different people and will magically, yep, magically, start to collaborate thereby making your business just, well, just better. 

This doesn’t happen.  What happens is lots of people feel homeless, with no physical way to anchor their being, they resort to virtually (phone, IM, email) reaching out to those they know best – their team, their friends etc.  This means that they absolutely fail to build any relationship with those in the same boat around them and, even if they try, their new friend isn’t going to be there tomorrow.  So, the results are pretty much guaranteed to be abject failure as far as collaboration goes – you end up with a mixture, not a compound.

I propose that, rather than hot-desking, organisations would be better advised to get teams to select ambassadors to ‘plant’ into other related teams on a medium-term basis.  These correctly-selected characters should be outgoing individuals who naturally build new bonds – couple this with the fact that the teams actually have real work to do together (a service team coupled with a product specialist team, for example) and the ambassadors will bond the teams together and foster new open conversations.  Seems far more likely that a compound will result from this approach.

Herrero describes disruptive management ideas as the below (extract from the DisruptiveIdeas.org link above):

Disruptive ideas provide management alternatives that, if spread, can completely transform the way the organisation works without the need for a massive ‘change management programme’. Each of them in its own right has the potential to create significant change, but the compound benefit of a few of them is a real engine of change and business transformation.

Disruptive Ideas:

1. are simple
2. have a total disproportion between their simplicity and the significant impact in the life of organizations
3. can be implemented now
4. have zero cost or are cheap to implement
5. are most likely to be contrarian
6. are most likely to be counterintuitive
7. have a high risk of being trivialised or dismissed
8. can spread virally very easily, as soon as some people implement them

So, for now I will continue to share as much as I can with the external communities whilst carrying the torch for being social inside the firm’s Yammer network.  Not sure how this will work out in the end – more on this as and when I figure it out…

The two options investigated were to pre-record the presentations, edit them and then share on a collaboration site either internally or externally.  This wouldn’t have allowed the interactive remote guests but would’ve allowed very high quality videos and after-the-fact discussions to take place on the collaboration platform.  The other option was to use a true web meeting / screen sharing service.

Pre-recorded presentation options: (mostly lifted after feature comparison from Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_screencasting_software)

• Camtasia Studio http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp 
• ScreenCam http://www.smartguyz.com/
• DemoCreator http://www.sameshow.com/demo-creator.html

All of these support fullscreen under OpenGL and DirectX as well as post-record editing to allow voiceovers to be added after the walkthrough has been done.  The result was that Camtasia pretty much does everything you could possibly want and then some. 

However, after taking a look at the feature set of WebEx, we’ve decided to run with that on a trial basis.  Seems to do everything including recording the meeting BUT need to check resultant video encoding – http://www.gofixit.com/?p=137  or http://www.thenetworktechnician.com/webex/how-to-convert-a-wrf-file-to-wmv/

WebEx costs AUD92 per host per month with no commitment.

Calls to action, musings on what I find out there, notes for myself (and others).