It ain't so much better

Often I sit back home in Australia and wish that I was here in the USA. The main reasons for this yearning is that I want to be connected and use the technologies that are so readily available and at far more reasonable prices.

And I know that these advantages are somewhat dissolved by the lack of access to good health care... but what really gets my goat, is that I do get here with my unlocked technological device (iPhone) which is finally a device that can actually work inside and out of the USA and then I can't buy access to a network that will offer me the features of the phone. I am left with a basic phone which only gains the additional functionality when I wander through a WiFi hotspot. This is not the way it is meant to be.

At times prices may be lower, and the better competition is often cited but it is behaviours like this that show me the mercantile protectionism that still exists here. It is then that I realise those cheaper prices are provided on the back of the average Joe, who is often none the wiser.

I will happily take Australia, with her flaws.

Twitter killed the facebook...

I have long been thinking about posting on how my twitter fetish has killed off any hope for my Weblog, but I kept myself from posting. The main reason was that I am certain that it had all been said before over the three years of Twitter's life. It is quite natural that a disturbance in the force results in a renegotiation of how to fit everything in.

What inspired this post has been the recent barrage of complaints on Facebook about the twitter updates that apparently consume facebook 'news' feeds. From what I understand, by tweeting some of my friend's walls are consumed by my activities... but isn't that the point?

What is it about web2.0 that these people aren't getting? but if I went down this rabbit hole, I would be just as bad. So instead... Things that @#$% me about Facebook:

1. Being bitten by Vampires/superwalled and poked

2. Friends' statuses about the current domestic that they are having

3. What this quiz can tell me about me

4. You can control your news feed

5. This is where your mum is now

The Cynic loves the organisation

When you pick it up a tool should fit your hand and way of working (like my Macbook and social computing in general) rather than requiring me to bio-reengineer my hand (and often my brain) to fit some idealistically designed and all too often fetishistic tool. 

Whilst Dave used this in a rant referring to KM approaches and Social Networking, but I am overwhelmed by the relevance to Lean and other forms of Business Process Re-engineering.

This relevance refers to some recent exposure to some zealots who have perpetuated every case-study of failure I have read of the Lean approach. It always seems to be a failure of leadership... I mean really, if it is always the same failure mode, surely one would've figured out the cure...

Or maybe Leadership is really just a figment of one's imaginations... but that is more the realm of Scott Adams.

So what does leadership do? Well it appears that they convert the low-level non-believers to this one true way of Business Improvement, but the hardened rebels and cynics are culled to make way. This then appears to constitute 'Success'.

So if you need to reengineer your organisation to make the approach work, maybe it is not the right tool... 

The title is also attributed to Dave Snowden

You Might Be In a Cult if...

• There are rituals that validate the hierarchy
• Everyone wears the same clothes
• There is one true way
• When the one true way fails, it is always due to a lack of faith
• Dissent is treated as a lack of faith
• Information is controlled

Sound familiar?

Telco wars

Those who follow me on Twitter will have seen a berating of Optus and who am I not to explain?

Optus sent me a bill for $1500 and whilst I was expecting a slightly larger phone bill for my new iPhone... this bill missed the mark by a long shot.

This resulted in the desperately avoided call to 'customer service'... Now a telephone company should not drop the customer's call 3 times... Sensing some KPI Management, I changed my tact by showing a seemingly new operator that their system could possibly be wrong... I did this by demonstrating that the $900 charge was actually meant to be $0... After another long stint on hold, the 'customer care assistant' offered a $400 discount on the amount, she even sounded convinced that it was a good offer...

When I explained that the offer was the equivalent of fining me $500, she placed me back on hold.

At this point I could imagine the flashing red lights of KPI failure...  when the new offer was made at less than a tenth of the original bill. But accepting this wasn't ever going to be the end of the saga... was it?

Dishonour fees (for not paying $1500), calls from their finance section (asking why I haven't paid the $1500) and 2 weeks later... Still not resolved.

So a communications company, maybe not getting the billing right is understandable but not being able to transfer the metadata of the customer from one person to another (let alone the computer that captures it at the beginning of the call) is really going to struggle in their bid.

A Diversion

HA! Boy did it miss the mark (hat tip: Dave)... as surely anyone will know that I am far from an introvert...

I have to declare that I have completed the MBTI accreditation and do selectively use the instrument in support of some of my consultancy work. I find it quite useful in drawing out some of the differences that people display particularly around communication and mostly with regard to workplace harmony. (Mind you, I make no commercial gains conducting them as I my work is internal).

I take on board the issues raised in Skepdic but I also feel some sympathy for the readers. That being said I might take the liberty of offering my own $0.02. 

The use of the instrument as an absolute or final say in something as important as whether or not someone gets a job is quite abhorrent. I use the dichotomies that the instrument draws out merely as a means to draw out the normal variations in individual preferences and then as a platform to discuss group preferences. 

The main criticism that I personally have heard about MBTI is that people use the instrument as an excuse for the worst examples of behaviour attributed to the Type. Unfortunately, this has been a behaviour that I have witnessed myself. That being said, a well administered MBTI session (i.e. not one online, which lacks the various stages required to be anywhere near useful) should show the participant the ways to realise their strengths and manage their weaknesses, no matter how they are derived.

And how they are derived are hardly that concerning when someone identifies as an Extravert they might be more comfortable in large noisy groups and their weakness might be that sometimes they exclude those who identify as an Introvert... sounds fairly uncontroversial to me

Time of the year

It is performance appraisal time... and boy do I not enjoy it! Now there is always the uncomfortableness (yes, that is now a word) with the difficult conversations but that is not what I dislike about it. I find that our system puts a lot of weight on the 'score' that the individuals get irrespective of the corresponding word picture that describes the mark.  Now the reason that the score matters is that the performance appraisal is the sole input to the promotion system, which is given the first allocation of ranking (hence if you aren't above the cutoff mark... no further consideration). So a tool that is meant to be a meaningful management tool becomes the hinge to an individuals career where they are assessed on a score (which ends up being a long way from a normal distribution) which isn't related to technical mastery...

Which is why I can probably relate to this ... 

HECS and beyond

Given that it seems the Government is comfortable grandfathering industry why not then guarantee loans for Social Good/National Need.

I refer to the HECS system in Australia whereby students may defer their tertiary study fees until an income point at which they must repay the debt through the Taxation System. Now there are some important factors in this system, such as the debt is indexed to inflation hence is not subject to interest and is only payable whilst the debtholder is earning above a threshold. This ensures that the individual can pursue whatever career they choose with a reduced upfront cost.

I propose that R&D companies and/or other social good/national need organisations be able to avail themselves of similar loans, which are only repayable via success... I would further challenge government to influence companies to invest in their own R&D through a Serendipity prize... but more on that to come...

That is not a sport...

It is an age old debate usually sparked in the second week of the Olympics... Generally during the Synchronised Swimming.

Personally, (is there any other kind?) I think this idea should go further... Anything without direct competition gets scratched. Subjective artistic components annoy me, and frankly what is a perfect ten? and what happens when someone does it better?

Don't get me wrong... They are impressive and there is no freaking way that I could do a tenth of that with my body but without direct competition, bias must play a role. Would the world really miss Rhythmic Gymnastics, Synchronised Swimming and Equestrian from the Olympics? For mine, they have a place it is just not the Olympics...

Innovation is not subsidising Corporate R&D

I recall the debates over Digital TV in 1998 here in Australia, and Government was faced with mandating not only a rollout period but a format for delivery. To grossly simplify, the choices were between Broad- and Datacasting. Datacasting would move Australia to the forefront of the Information Age. Datacasting essentially allows the consumer to pull the program at their leisure looking like a souped up version of i-view rather than the Broadcast model which centrally controls what and when is available to be consumed, just a digitisation of the contemporary system. One might see that an investment in such a program might have helped our lagging broadband issue...

I raise this in light of some more myopic Australian Innovation Sponsorship... take our stance on environmental technologies. Once again it appears our government chooses to support the Commercially-favourable technologies over real innovation. Surely government should be investing in potentials and not the R&D budgets of Industry.

The journey not the end...

If I were to tell you a story of a Superhero, you would expect a villain. And there would always be a villain or else the Superhero would become the villain and the people (police, DA etc) take the role of Superhero. (I am aware that this is more eloquently put by Harvey Dent in the Dark Knight)

Thus we have centered stories on a co-emergence for as long as Hero stories have been told... and even in Newtonian physics forces were described in this fashion. So why then do we engage in behaviours and expect it to asymmetrical benefits in the long term? If Lean is the Hero, who is the Villain?

And then there is from Villian to Hero

To draw on my observations... During a tender for outsourcing, a service provider may be able to underbid the incumbent which is a fantastic proposition (unless it is your job, but you will probably work for the outsource company anyway). But once the tenderer is selected what then occurs? the environmental constraints have changed and thus a lack of competition ensues and the performance adjusts the old environment and you run out of TP. So surely one might be able to see that the state of competition is in fact the better option and not the selection of the winner. I think that an attitude closer to this might allow us to avoid prescriptive recipe books like six stigma (Sorry Dave, I had to steal that... You can have Pathological Deconstruction)

I take this as not a mere coincidence but a fault of replicating the end conditions.

Or am I being too yin & yang?

White Noise

It is often a joke in Australia (the World?) to pull the mickey out of Americans for their ignorance but reading last month's The Monthly, I have to consider the effect of white noise.

If we are constantly bombarded by low level information at what point do we stop discerning. I read a blog that my boss put me onto that might have a point that news will find you...

So then do we surround ourselves with like-interested people who act as filters for us? isn't this what web2.0 is really all about? self-censoring? so then we can be responsible for our own ignorance... IF we know what we are doing... In a constrained environment (behind a firewall) then maybe it is a positive but societally I wonder about heading toward a place where Gatorade is used to hydrate crops.

On reflection of Something For Kate Your not the first to think that everything has been thought before... I would tell you that this article is related, but I didn't make it through before getting fidgety and ...