In the late 80s, California Assemblyman John Vasconcellos convinced our governor to set up a task force on self-esteem. Vasconcellos, who still represents Silicon Valley, now in the State Senate, lists his commitments on his home page; they include:

• redesigning society to encourage development of healthy, self-realizing, responsible human beings
  
  
• developing a new human politics based on belief we human beings are innately inclined toward becoming life-affirming, constructive, responsible, trustworthy

The California Task Force to Promote Self Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility made the State the butt of jokes from every journalist who had it in for California, i.e. every wit who doesn't live here. Doonesbury milked it. Lots of the criticism was unfair. The Task Force was approved not by Governor Moonbeam, but by a Republican. The justification was not to bliss out the populace; rather, it was to investigate whether higher self-esteem was correlated with increased productivity, less crime, higher rates of employment, and fewer teen pregnancies, among other things.

Vasconcellos believes that human beings are innately inclined toward becoming constructive, life-affirming, responsible, and trustworthy. He says "self esteem is at the heart of our capacity to lead lives of community, responsibility, productivity, satisfaction." Like many fashions and movements that seem hoaky on first hearing (e.g. organic farming, human potential, surfing), in time people across the country acknowledged the value of increasing self esteem.

In an article in the January issue of Scientific American, authors Roy F. Baumeister, Jennifer D. Campbell, Joachim I. Krueger and Kathleen D. Vohs describe an intensive literature review and then attempt to blow the worth of self-esteem out of the water.

Boosting people's sense of self-worth has become a national preoccupation. Yet surprisingly, research shows that such efforts are of little value in fostering academic progress or preventing undesirable behavior.

Raising self-esteem is not likely to boost performance in school or on the job.

After coming to the conclusion that high self-esteem does not lessen a tendency toward violence, that it does not deter adolescents from turning to alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and sex, and that it fails to improve academic or job performance, we got a boost when we looked into how self-esteem relates to happiness. The consistent finding is that people with high self-esteem are significantly happier than others. They are also less likely to be depressed.

These findings don't ring true to me. Isn't low self-esteem almost a marker for depression? I've experienced clinical depression; low self esteem was always right there with it. For creative people, the pessimism and listlessness that accompany low self esteem blind them to opportunities. Someone with confidence built on self esteem will take a chance on an activity the low-esteem person will pass up, thinking, "Nyah, that will never work." The authors of the article describe this as floccinaucinihilipilification (I am not making this up), which is "the action or habit of estimating as worthless."

Floccinaucinihilipilification (Thank God for cut-and-paste) colors experimental results: you can't trust a floccinaucinihilipilificator to report anything correctly. The research team decided to eliminate any studies that didn't include objective measures throughout. This reduced their research base from 15,000 studies to 200. The team also rejected studies that did not demonstrably avoid the fallacy that correlation implies causality.

The researchers started with studies of self esteem and academic performance. They didn't find much correlation. This is hardly surprizing, since grades rarely correlate to anything outside of the school system. Next, they considered the world of work.

Even if raising self-esteem does not foster academic progress, might it serve some purpose later, say, on the job? Apparently not. Studies of possible links between workers' self-regard and job performance echo what has been found with schoolwork: the simple search for correlations yields some suggestive results, but these do not show whether a good self-image leads to occupational success, or vice versa. In any case, the link is not particularly strong.

This is the only paragraph supporting the authors' claim that self-esteem is not likely to boost performance on the job!

Just as correlation does not prove causality, lack of evidence does not prove that something fails to exist. If you're researching other people's findings, isn't it possible that they failed to ask the right questions? One wonders how many of the less than 200 studies dealt with work, not school.

Last time I read Scientific American, it was a bit more, ah, scientific.

My suspicion has been that higher self-esteem is positively correlated with job performance. This article didn't change that belief.

ABC names bloggers people of the year.

Dec. 30, 2004 — A blog — short for "web log" — is an online personal journal that covers topics ranging from daily life to technology to culture to the arts. Blogs have made such an impact this year that Merriam-Webster named it the word of the year.

"There's a blog for every niche. There's a blog for every interest," said technology writer Xeni Jardin, who co-edits the blog boingboing.net.

Dylan Verdi, an 11-year-old known as the world's youngest videoblogger, says she covers "things that I've seen that I like or that I've heard of, or just anything that happened to me that day that I'm thinking."

When I started blogging in late 1999, the phenomenon was about as common as drinking absinthe. Blogger was the only game in town. When the dot-com dark ages swept through, Blogger itself became a one-man company, with Ev running Blogger out of his bedroom. Two years ago I was touting a then-new idea, using blogs to capture and distribute corporate knowledge -- and people couldn't imagine what I was talking about. Six months later, I asked a European audience of 300 knowledge management professionals and students how many knew what a blog was; only two hands went up. In late 2003, I was the lone corporate guy amid a crowd of 40 people attending the first Ed-Blogger Conference.

That was then. This is now. Now everybody knows. Blogging has crossed the chasm and entered the mainstream, sparked by the Dean Campaign, the downfall of Trent Lott, and blogging the Democratic Convention. As the ABC release notes,

There are millions of blogs on the Internet — a new one is created every seven-and-a-half seconds. More than 10,000 new additions are added to the "blogosphere" each day.

Blogging has entered what Geoff Moore clumsily used to call "the early majority." It has migrated up the adoption curve to that red circle. And with that, I lose interest in blogging per se. I'll continue to blog and I'll recommend blogs as components of solutions to problems, but I don't plan to spend much time on the arcana of HTML, color codes, Perl scripts, and browser features. I'm shedding those interests in favor of new stuff entering the blue circle.

I'm an enthusiast by nature. If you'd met me in the early days of the IBM-PC or the Internet or the Web or eLearning, you might have labeled me fanatic. Promising new fields infatuate me. The initial meetings of the SF PC Users Group, the Bay Area Internet Users Group, and TechLearn had the magic of Woodstock: the tribe was convening. We kindred spirits shared a vision of how things should be. Outsiders were clueless.

Normal people (and by definition, most of the world falls into the red circle) don't easily understand the mind of the enthusiast. Let me draw an analogy. Remember the first time you fell in love? You couldn't get your lover's image out of your mind. You'd walk miles...you'd climb mountains...you'd swim oceans if that's what it took to move to the next step. Life without your lover would be worse than death. Inconceivable. My early descriptions of the web or of eLearning were love letters.

Blogs were a great girlfriend. We went steady for more than four years. Now that relationship is over (we'll still be friends). I'm ready to cavort with some new technology and concepts. Bring on the new year!

Statistics and target setting can be a farce, by Kenneth Armitage. Charles Goodhart, former advisor to the Bank of England postulates that, "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." Marilyn Stathern boils this down to: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Armitage concludes:

In the end motivation is not simply about achieving targets and money. In my view very few people are motivated solely by money. Most people want to be able to work in an area that is interesting and that stimulates them, that offers them opportunities for recognition and advancement and that increases their self worth through promotion and pay rises. Part of that process is to belong to a structure, an organization that has clearly defined goals or objectives, that has, perhaps, ethical and moral values and that makes the most efficient use of available resources by not setting too many confusing or unattainable targets.

I may have ‘over-egged the pud’ with examples but this area is important if you are to avoid unnecessary target setting, tie your staff up in red tape and figure chasing and risk alienating employees. Frankly, I have always believed that it is performance, through communication and commitment and not targets that are important and provided your employees are motivated and provided your products are what people want, are competitively prices and promoted then you may achieve what you set out to do. Perhaps one target to set is a reduction in targets and to introduce more active management and leadership!

This is not as mystical as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle; it's human nature.

Set simplistic targets and people inevitably game the system. School students study for the test. Managers work to make their numbers. Tis better to learn and to perform.

See also The Elusive Quest for the Catch-all Corporate Metric.

I only see something like this once a year. It's an empty mailbox:

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Cleaning my office is like an archeology dig. Most layers are just garbage, but occasionally there's a gem. For example,

First Wordz is the first product from friend and Emergent Learning Forum booster, Ken Fong's company, T.P. Kidz. Record baby's first words and email them to grandparents for less than $20. Sorry I didn't find this one again until after Christmas.

---

Clipping from Econtent magazine, dead-tree version:

Content syndication = distributing information outside of the primary place of creation/publication. "I suspect the next big wave will involve optimizing syndicated content behind corporate fiewalls. Of course, syndicated business news and information services have thrived on corporate portals and intranets for years. But it will be fun to see if RSS feeds take off as a way to distribute synicated content directly to corporate users," writes David Scott.

I certainly agree with this. In-house RSS, yet another component of bottom-up knowledge management.

In my journal, I've scribbled about looking at corporate information through the lense of the Johari window. Business entities need to be explicit about how transparent they want to be. Is it in their interest to expand or contract the Arena? What's it worth to elucidate the Blind Spots? Is our approach to innovation mining opportunity from the Hidden area?

---

An Inxight brochure reports this handy metric:

Recent industry studies estimate that an enterprise with 1,000 knowledge workers loses a minimum of $6 million annually in time spent just looking for information.

The volume of electronic information is increasing up to 60% annually, making access and use more of a dream than a reality.

---

A story retold by Wayne Hodgins:

When Smith-Corona was closing its doors, the chairman pulled the very last typewriter made off the line. He told employees it was probably the best typewriter SCM had ever made. "What we did was to perfect the irrelevant."

---

Remarks from a senior-level presentation I was privy to:

Making the most of intellectual assets is at the hunter/gatherer stage. It is innovation in experience that leads to customer value (because labor is being commoditized.) Yet assets are akin to "mushrooms they found in the woods."

---

Tim O'Reilly talks of changing the world by spreading the knowledge of users. "Follow the hacker frontier."

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Orchestrating Loosely Coupled Business Processes: The Secrety to Successful Collaboration

by John Hagel III, Scott Durchslag, and John Seely Brown 2002

An awesome article, available on Hagel's website.

• Collaboration can only generate economic value when it is firmly anchored in specfic busines processes that span across enterprises.
  
  
• Loose coupling gives service providers the opportunity to specialize more and more on the activites where they have truly distinctive capabilities.
  
  
• Web services are the technology analog to loosely coupled business processes.
  
  
• This is not a simple transition.... Success requires migrating towards a much more flexible business architecture....

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Blogs are the number one tech trend described in Fortune magazine.

According to blog search-engine and measurement firm Technorati, 23,000 new weblogs are created every day—or about one every three seconds. Each blog adds to an inescapable trend fueled by the Internet: the democratization of power and opinion.

So far, so good. The next paragraph is the spoiler:

Of course, it's difficult to take the phenomenon seriously when most blogs involve kids talking about their dates, people posting pictures of their cats, or lefties raging about the right (and vice versa). But whatever the topic, the discussion of business isn't usually too far behind: from bad experiences with a product to good customer service somewhere else. Suddenly everyone's a publisher and everyone's a critic.

Uh huh. Personally, I find it hard to take magazines seriously. Most of them involve girls trying to look sexy or boys ogling babes or lefties raging about the right (and vice versa). What are we to make of such upstanding publications as Cat Fancy, Dog Fancy, Soldier of Fortune, Guns & Ammo, Monster Muscle Magazine, Shape, Hustler, National Enquirer, Strictly Slots, Fangoria, Fate, Cosmogirl, Martha Stewart Weddings, Playgirl, True Love, Anon, Badazz Mofo, Drop Out, Savage, Flash, Skin Art, Easy Riders, Biker, Gauntlet, Taboo, Celebrity Skin, Bizarre, Barely Legal, and Busty? Why would anyone pay to advertise in any medium this frivolous?

Early in 2001, I was processing applications to join the eLearning Forum by hand. Someone in Paris applied; under "job description," he listed eLearning guru. We struck up a correspondence. Peter Isackson invited me to join a panel session on cross-cultural learning issues he was chairing at a conference in Berlin. We stayed at the Hotel Gates (a networked PC in every room!) and became fast friends.

Peter is an extremely interesting fellow, an American who graduated from Oxford as well as Hollywood High, has lived in Paris for decades, and is brilliant at designing and producing language and acculturation programs that get results. In 2002, we rented an apartment for the duration of Educa, and the following year we worked together in Paris.

In late 2003, America's invasion of Iraq was not winning the U.S. any awards for popularity...or statesmanship. The economy was awful. It didn't seem like a propitious time for doing business. I skipped Online Educa. Not wanting to miss out entirely, I asked Peter to share his notes. We published them here.

This year, once again, Peter agreed to share his observations of Online Educa with us. The official Conference Report is now available on the Online Educa website; I find Peter's words more entertaining and informative. How often do you get to hear from a European-American who has been on this journey for the duration?

Online Educa (number ten): a chance to look at history

Reichstag 1995, wrap by Christo

Ten years ago we lived in a different world. The Berlin wall had taken its tumble only six years earlier and the official reunification of Germany was just five years old and an ongoing project. The fate of the ex-Soviet Union was still up in the air (but has anything really changed today?). Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary were ex-Soviet satellites floating between two worlds and not full-fledged members of the European Union (the United States of Europe?). Clinton was in his first term as president moving from deficits to surpluses for the first time in decades. And of course the World Trade Center was a little wobbly after the attack of 1993, but both towers were still proudly standing. Perhaps more significantly, the World Wide Web was in its infancy as a kind of Technicolor version of the good old Internet and not yet seen as a vehicle of mass marketing. The dotcom boom and its subsequent crash were still several years in the offing. The world was clearly a different place.

1995 is when Online Educa was born. 2004 was thus number ten in the series, and more impressively, number ten in the curve of increasingly rapid growth. One of the guiding principles of the original event, as I discovered when I was asked to help plan it in the spring of 1995, was the idea that the Internet and new learning technology in general could help accelerate the integration of the two Europes that were wondering what life without a wall and opposing armies might be like. That explains the choice of the original venue: a vast and drafty concrete capsule on Alexanderplatz, smack in the middle of East Berlin at the end of a street still called Karl Marx Allee.

Parts of the wall were still visible in 1995.

Online Educa 1995 was an amazing event. It was marked by the usual teething problems of any new event: misunderstandings, about the purpose of the event (what the hell is “online”?) and even the language spoken (English only); complaints -- about the sound system in the main hall or the quality of the catering (lunch was a slab of ham or cheese on a stale roll followed by an apple); and shameless examples of vaporware marketing targeted at what was presumed to be a gullible audience (Microsoft presenting its revolutionary educational product, “Blackbird”! – anyone out there remember that? Nobody at Microsoft – apart from maybe its official historians – seems to be able to!). OE Berlin 95 was wonderfully naïve in its speculation about the future and its predictions of how “systems” that didn’t yet exist would evolve.


Jay's impressionist portrait
of Peter Isackson in Bougival
As this quick review of history is meant to remind you, much has changed in the annual Berlin event since then, and not only the quality and quantity of the catering and the professionalism of the technical infrastructure. Though speculation about the utopia of future systems is still very much part of the official discourse in the city of Bauhaus, the focus in most of the presentations (as opposed to keynote addresses) moved to real experience as early as 1999. The keynotes continue to fulfil their role of providing the inspiring homilies for the religion of technology required in such events, but even there subtle changes have taken place. It’s become a religion that has turned away from traditional technocratic dogma to embrace and glorify its social role as a ”binding” agent (“religio” in Latin literally means “tying together”). On the philosophical (if not theological level), collaboration has become the central theme even for promoters of technology (IBM) or content (BBC), this in strong contradistinction to the ready-to-wear eLearning and centralized management so often promoted in the recent past.

With more than 1700 people officially enrolled and over 400 presenters from 66 countries, Online Educa has reached a point, as Jay has remarked, where its precious sense of intimacy – perhaps it defining characteristic -- is severely threatened. It’s an amazing feat that the growing numbers haven’t turned this three-day global village into an anonymous Metropolis (as imagined by Fritz Lang). The deft management of ICWE deserves our thanks for this. As Jay points out, the refusal to follow his own advice to move out of the Intercontinental Hotel has turned out to be a prudent decision. In their wisdom, the organizers have apparently found at least a short-term fix. A series of parallel sessions this year – including my own, on intercultural issues -- took place in the Davos room of the Hotel Schweizerhof hotel just across the street. I pointed out to my audience the historical and geographical symbolism of the migration, ten years on, from East Berlin’s Alexanderplatz to Davos: from class struggle to first class, from crust of bread to upper crust, from Karl Marx to Warren Buffet. It made me realize that Online Educa has been exceptional in attributing a certain nobility to learning and training, something we rarely find in the corporate and academic environments where it usually takes place.

Part of this sense of nobility is the manifest independence of the event. There were no platinum, gold and silver sponsors in 1995. Now there are lists of them whose names parade across the backdrop of the stage as a kind of screen-saver between talks in the plenary sessions. I’ll mention no names (after all, each sponsor got his euro’s worth during the event), but the relationships between the sponsors and the public were ones of sincere and constructive exchange, or at least appeared to be. Particularly striking and representative of the spirit of things was a first day keynote program that saw, entre autres, Nancy de Viney’s partly canned and expectedly utopian (but also convincingly sincere) IBM vision of business efficacy mediated by infallible technology followed by Robert Caillau’s dream-deflating assessment of the future of technological complexity. The message of the man presented by Jane Massy as one of the author’s of the World Wide Web: humanity – as an identifiable product of the history of the universe -- hasn’t been designed to be compatible with technological utopia. The contrast was invigorating.



Peter in Sisley painting

East is East and West is West, but even in the luxury of West Berlin’s Intercontinental, the twain continue to meet as the questions of learning and technology engage professionals from five continents, more concerned with the issues – how it all works, how human society and its economic and political institutions will deal it -- than the products. Two years ago Jay and I tried to convince the organization that culture and intercultural issues should be given far more prominence. I continue to chair the one isolated parallel session on that theme (though IBM has asked me to organize a special pre-conference event on culture next year). But even without its official promotion, Online Educa is all about intercultural and international exchange, thought, initiative and action. It’s what happens in practically all the informal conversations and, in varying ways, in many of the presentations. It’s also what was concretely put together in the Middle Eastern E-learning Forum on Wednesday dedicated to privately organized pre-conference sessions. The conference remains open to other initiatives of this type.

Learning isn’t just about transmitting static knowledge and even less about technology. It’s also a vital element of history, interacting with economic and political history in varying ways, as the first ten years of Online Educa has demonstrated.

Peter's new company is InterSmart. Email p.isackson (at) intersmartcom.com

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I gave two presentations on Informal Learning and Collaboration the first week in December.

The first was a panel presentation at Online Educa on Thursday; I raced through it in the interst of time and still didn't cover all I'd hoped to. Friday morning I delivered a presentation on the same topics remotely to the 3rd Learning and Development Conference in Athens. They gave me the better part of an hour. I've posted that presentation on the web. Forgive the references to the agora, Socrates, and Heraclitus; I thought you'd prefer the extended version of the talk.

Summary: Learner-centric no more. My focus is shifting to the performance of connections.

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I post to Internet Time Blog almost daily, and I hope my words retain more value than yesterday's newspaper. After all, the Blog is where I share my discoveries and interpretations, not perishable news. Nonetheless, on a standard Blog, the new pushes the old off the bottom of the page, out of sight, and out of mind, regardless of value.

To keep longer-lived items from falling over the edge, I decided to catch some of the run-off in a KnowledgeBase.

I needed a logical structure for pigeonholding incoming items. Performance is what it's all about; that deals with organizational objectives and metrics, the impact of learning, and how performance improvement is implemented. There's a Process level above this that includes meta-learning, design principles, timing, and how humans tick: things that transcend individual cases. There's also a level below that specifies the Place the learning or performance is happening. My first approximation looked like this:



This evening I started divvying things up among the topics. The "Community" topic turned out to cover many potential topics:

• collaboration
• learning with peers
• social software apps
• discussion groups and wikis
• Communities of Practice
• informal learning
• reputation management
• expert locators
• corporate culture
• groupware
• social network analysis
  

While these topics differ, they're all related. Collaboration means working together. Community is a group of people with common interests. Members of communities collaborate. Collaborators aren't necessarily members of the same community.

Other "co-" words crop up in learning. Constructivism describes learning built on an existing foundation. Connectivism, recently coined by George Siemens, makes it explicit that the learner is augmented with connections to networks of people and information. Context is king this year, dethrowning content. Computer and commerce share the same linguistic heritage, as do commerce, competition, consult, contend, and correct.

So what's the, ahem, connection? A very handy reference tool, The Online Etymology Dictionary, taught me that co- and com- derive from Latin cum, meaning "together, together with, in combination." The co's are all "with" words. It takes more than one to confer, to communicate, to concur, to confer, to condemn or to conceal.

Com-puter = reckon with
Con-spire = breathe with
Con-tend = stretch with
Con-trive = sing with
Con-tribute = pay together
Con-verge = bend together
Com-plex = woven together
Com-pete = strive together

Without a "co-/com" situation, there's no interaction. There's no action. Nothing happens. Learning is co-creation; work is co-creation; life is co-creation.

Separate entities...

...collide, connect, converge...

...to create something new.

In the virtual world, virtual connections will do the trick. We can connect with others, with ideas, and with tools from anywhere.

The proliferation of open connections heralds a new world of continuous improvement where chain reactions of combined thoughts and learning recombine in ever-greater patterns.

"Learner-centric" has been the rallying cry of eLearning for five years now. For me, it's time to move on. That particularly squeaky wheel has been oiled enough. We've demolished the "instructor-centric" conceit that the only good learning is that which takes place when there's a real live teacher running the show. Last year, in an informal history of eLearning, I wrote:

Learning isn’t content. Learning isn’t infrastructure. Learning is a process of forging neural links. It’s new thought being wired into the brain’s network. Hard to believe, given that the brain is a chemical soup shot through with electrical charges, more closely resembling a haggis than a sophisticated network processor. eLearning came along at the right time to embrace the learner-centric view.

Learning for learning's sake doesn't interest me. I'm pragmatic. This past year, I began to shift my emphasis from the learner to the worker. In 2005, I plan to focus less on individuals and more on ecosystems. My interest is turning to improving the performance of connections between workers and the work environment.

For me, it's the year of the network connections. What's flowing back and forth to the nodes has my attention. What? Where? When? How? How much? How often? Quality? Impact?

Now I've got to re-think that taxonomy. You can never do just one thing.

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Selected words derived from Latin cum, "with" or "together"
collaborate = work with
coherent = stick together
college = group of colleagues
colleague = those chosen to work with
collide = strike together
collusion = play together
combat = fight with
combine = yoke together
commence = initiate together
commensurate = measured with
comment = stay mindful with
commerce = trade with
commit = bring together
common = shared with
communicate = impart, share with
companion = one you share bread with
comparison = make equal with
compel = drive together
compendium = weighed together
compensate = weigh together
compete = strive together
complain = beat the breast together
complex = woven with
complication = fold together
compose = put together, arrange
comprehend = grasp with the mind
compute = reckon with, prune
concatenate = link with
conceal = hide with
concentrate = center with
concierge = with slave
concise = cut off with
concoct = boil together
concord = agree with
concourse = run with
concubine = lie with
concur = run together
condemn = damage with
condense = make thick with
condescend = descend with
condolence = suffer with
condominium = own together with
condone = give with
conduct = lead with
confess = admit with
confine = end with
confirm = strengthen with
confiscate = with public treasury
conflate = blow together
conflict = strike together
conform = form together
congeal = freeze with
congress = meeting with
conjugal = with spouse
connect = fashion with
connive = wink together
connoisseur = recognize with
connubial = marriage with
conscious = knowing with
consent = feel together
consequence = follow with
console = comfort with
consolidation = make solid together
conspire = breathe with
constant = stand with
constipate = press together
construct = pile up together
consult = gather together, seize together
consume = take or buy together
contain = hold together
contemporary = with time
contempt = with scorn
contend = stretch with
context = join together
contort = twist with
contribution = pay together
contrive = sing together
convalesce = grow strong with
convene = come together
converge = bend together
converse = move with
convince = conquer
convivial = carouse together
convocation = call together
convoy = go together
copulate = join together, link together
cordial = with heart
correct = with rule
correspondence = answer with

This is inexact science. Time changes meaning. Compete originally meant striving together. Now it has become strive against. It has grown closer to combat (fight with) than collusion (play with).

Related reference: Autopoiesis and Coevolution

Who Links Here

Most of the time, we delegate personal decisions to our mental autopilot systems. Otherwise, sensory overload would pitch us back to a baby's impression of the world "as one great blooming, buzzing confusion" as described by William James in The Principles of Psychology, and we'd be clueless about what was going on.



I bought a new book by Malcolm Gladwell, Blink. It comes out next month. The author says...

It's a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, Blink is a book about those two seconds, because I think those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good.

Three years ago, I was fascinated to read an article by Gladwell that reported:

A person watching a two-second silent video clip of a teacher he has never met will reach conclusions about how good that teacher is that are very similar to those of a student who sits in the teacher's class for an entire semester. Apparently, human beings don't need to know someone in order to believe that they know someone.

The article reminded me of a caption in my college yearbook. Under a photo of the school's IBM 7094-II mainframe, it read "Princeton's new computers can predict a student's four-year GPA from College Board scores, making four years of study totally unecessary." Hmmm. How good are snap judgments? How much can we trust decisions made under extreme uncertainty?

I suspect that our blinders play a much larger role in life than we suspect. One of my white papers describes what really goes on in the head of a senior executive making a decision:

“Good Heavens, this effort is going to cost us $8 million. I wonder what Mikey thinks. I hope there's a cold Heineken in the fridge. The ROI is better than building another fab plant but some of the underlying numbers are soft. Why is the dog barking? Of course there’s no guarantee that the fab plant wouldn’t be another white elephant when it came on stream in three years. The breeze is picking up outside. I bet it rains tonight. Without eLearning, we’ll never become an eBusiness. Some of our systems are pretty creaky right now and would benefit from streamlining. Marcia better have packed my new Greg Norman golf shirt. We need to shrink cycle times throughout our organization. This eLearning infrastructure would give Charlie a platform for broadcasting his tirades about transforming our organization. The Net Discounted Cash Flow is $2 million better than if we took this on ourselves. And the real problem there is that our IT staff would be swamped. And this would wait in line behind the other "mission-critical" projects they’re working on. I wonder how Charlie feels. The ballgame comes on in about ten minutes. Where do I come out on this one? I’m optimistic about the potential. It feels right. I’ll support it at the Executive Committee Meeting on Monday.”

We're so accustomed to kidding ourselves that humans are rational decision makers that we forget that in the real world, unstated assumptions, emotions, hormones, and mental static frequently crowd out logic. I think, therefore where are my keys?

In the industrial age, Frederick Taylor told workers "You are not paid to think." In tomorrow's world of business, that's about all workers will be paid for. The pace of business will require everyone on the payroll to make decisions without consulting policy or the boss. As Gloria Gery says, workers will need to be able to "name that tune in one note."

Manufacturing jobs will be as scarce in the future as agricultural jobs are today. Workers won't be making things; they'll be making relationships productive. Lots of jobs will be as free-flowing and spontaneous as conversation. Imagine what it takes to prosper in such a job. Success in person-to-person, impromptu business will depend on making good judgment calls. Values and beliefs will drive work instead of rules and regulations. Workers will become proficient through acculturation, not training.

Since no one is reading this, on the last day of rampant consumerism before Christmas, I assume I can get away with turning to four attenuated philosophers* from yesteryear for a hint at how this will come about.

You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good bye.

Teach your children well,
Their father's hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you'll know by.

Don't you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,
So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.

We have to be authentic in this. Transparent. Real. Confident to be ourselves. As the goddess** says,

Tears and fears and feeling proud to say I love you right out loud,
Dreams and schemes and circus crowds, I’ve looked at life that way.
But now old friends are acting strange, they shake their heads, they say
I’ve changed.
Something’s lost but something’s gained in living every day.

I'm pondering my life's mission. Well, the next year of it. I would like to make lots of people happy by helping them feel fulfilled and to bury vestiges of the outmoded thinking that is holding them back.

Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe it's the time of man
I don't know who l am
But you know life is for learning.

*Crosby, Sills, Nash & Young
















**Joni Mitchell

---

The Gladwell Archive

May 29, 2000
DEPT. OF HUMAN RESOURCES
The New-Boy Network
What do job interviews really tell us?

Earlier this year, Myers attended a party for former Microsoft interns called Gradbash. Ballmer gave a speech there, and at the end of his remarks Myers raised his hand. "He was talking a lot about aligning the company in certain directions," Myers told me, "and I asked him about how that influences his ability to make bets on other directions. Are they still going to make small bets?" Afterward, a Microsoft recruiter came up to Myers and said, "Steve wants your E-mail address." Myers gave it to him, and soon he and Ballmer were E-mailing. Ballmer, it seems, badly wanted Myers to come to Microsoft. "He did research on me," Myers says. "He knew which group I was interviewing with, and knew a lot about me personally. He sent me an E-mail saying that he'd love to have me come to Microsoft, and if I had any questions I should contact him. So I sent him a response, saying thank you. After I visited Tellme, I sent him an E-mail saying I was interested in Tellme, here were the reasons, that I wasn't sure yet, and if he had anything to say I said I'd love to talk to him. I gave him my number. So he called, and after playing phone tag we talked--about career trajectory, how Microsoft would influence my career, what he thought of Tellme. I was extremely impressed with him, and he seemed very genuinely interested in me."

What convinced Ballmer he wanted Myers? A glimpse! He caught a little slice of Nolan Myers in action and--just like that--the C.E.O. of a four-hundred-billion-dollar company was calling a college senior in his dorm room. Ballmer somehow knew he liked Myers, the same way Hadi Partovi knew, and the same way I knew after our little chat at Au Bon Pain. But what did we know? What could we know? By any reasonable measure, surely none of us knew Nolan Myers at all.

---

"The brain structures that are involved here are very primitive," Ambady speculates. "All of these affective reactions are probably governed by the lower brain structures." What we are picking up in that first instant would seem to be something quite basic about a person's character, because what we conclude after two seconds is pretty much the same as what we conclude after twenty minutes or, indeed, an entire semester.

Look closely at this man.


What do you think?
What kind of person might he be?

I took the photo myself. He really looks like this.

Got your first impression down?

Good. Then read on.











































This is Malcolm Gladwell.

He wrote The Tipping Point. After growing the 'fro, the police profiled him. Several times. He contemplated what goes into first impressions. He writes about it in his new book, Blink. An article in Fast Company, The Accidental Guru, describes Malcolm's logic:

While most of us would like to think our decision making is the result of rational deliberation, he argues that most of it happens subconsciously in a split second. This process -- which Gladwell dubs 'rapid cognition' -- is where room for both error and insight appears. Many of the snap judgments we make are based on previously formed impressions and are competing with subconscious biases such as emotions and projections. Once we become aware of this, Gladwell argues, we can learn to control rapid cognition by extracting meaning from a 'thin slice' of information.

Amen.

Gladwell discovered that the vast majority of their CEOs were at least 6 feet tall (only about 14.5% of all American men are 6 feet or taller). What does this say about the way we hire? "We have a sense of what a leader is supposed to look like," he writes. "And that stereotype is so powerful that when someone fits it, we simply become blind to other considerations."

So that's why I've never been offered a Fortune 500 CEO slot. (I'm 5'8" on a tall day.)

Malcolm gets $40,000 for a presentation. If I remember correctly, he's not more than 5'8" himself. Hey, I'll do a presentation for you for a mere $20,000.

By the way, the few times I've chatted with Malcolm, I've found him to be a totally charming, down to earth guy. Even when I asked about the hair: "Did you stick your finger in a light socket?"

Jane Massy said it best. Online Educa is the global crossroads. It's where you come for meaningful conversation about learning and technology. This year's event, the tenth to meet in Berlin, drew 1700 delegates from 66 countries.

While Online Educa has surpassed TechLearn in attendance and influence, it is a different sort of event entirely. The ambience is more refined; the relationships, more sincere. It's not just the free-flowing wine and tasty appetizers (and noxious cigarette fumes). When you talk with IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and friends, it's collegial. It's you and me, not sales rep and prospect. Vendors are more likely to talk about how we can work together than about what they can sell me. Aretha put it succinctly: it's R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

A couple of years back, I lobbied the conference organizers to move to a larger venue. The Intercontinental Hotel just about bursts at the seams when Online Educa shows up. I assumed that bigger was better. Not so. Management fears that making Online Educa larger might destroy its intimacy and feeling of community. Rather than bloat Berlin, ICWE is expanding into other markets.

Soon you'll be able to download the conference report from the OE site, so I won't detail the content of the conference here.

The day before OE began, 130 delegates from 28 countries took part in the first Middle East E-Learning Forum. Next year, the Middle East Forum will be expanded. This is analogous to Latin Americans flocking to the annual ASTD Conference. It's easier to accomplish things on neutral ground -- and to piggyback on the main event. I liked this year's Middle East Forum and doubtless will return in 2005.

Americans were in short supply several years back, when Online Educa was more heavily academic (now it's balanced with corporate) and when it fell on Thanksgiving (next year, OE will again take place after Thanksgiving.) If you're interested in the world learning situation, I encourage you to scribble these dates in your calendar: November 30 - December 2, 2005.

If enough North Americans are interested, we might host a warm-up symposium, a meeting of Emergent Learning Forum, or perhaps a few walking tours of Berlin in conjuction with OE in 2005. It's a festive time of year in Berlin. Drop me a line if you have ideas or suggestions.


Christmas lights on the Ku'damm


The gate


Ancillary benefit

Here is something I haven't seen since this time last year: a clean desktop!



I'm beta-testing a photo editing package. It's marvellous. Just when I think things cannot get much more intuitive, they do just that. If I could add narration, this would become a storytelling tool.

I'm also continuing to discover new and wonderful things about Flickr. The Flickr environment makes it so easy to create photo scrapbooks! In future generations, sharing photographs will be easier than writing is for us. Visual literacy, here we come. (Click the photo for an explanation of what this is.)






Note to self: Less is more.

The Week in Review has become my favorite section of the Sunday New York Times (The Book Review is second), because it looks beyond the day-to-day adrenalin rush of the front page to things that will matter for years.

In The Pursuit of Knowledge, From Genesis to Google, Alberto Manguel riffs from the Tower of Babel to the Library of Alexandria to Google's announcement of embracing library content. Manguel cautions that "...reading, in order to allow reflection, requires slowness, depth and context; that leafing through a material book or roaming through material shelves is an intimate part of the craft...."

As every years winds down, my mental gears begin struggling to answer the question asked by the dog who got on the bus: "Now what?"

Internet Time Blog is a place where I lay out my thoughts in public, both to clarify my meaning internally and to share what I find with others. The teacher always learns more than the pupil; I take advantage of my readers to increase my own learning.

When net-knowledge was scarce, this led me to write lengthy interpretations and essays. I maintained The eLearning Jump Page, essentially a selective page of links. These days, the problem is too much knowledge, not too little. Furl replaces the Jump Page. RSS brings exposes us to many viewpoints. Now I question what aspects of Internet Time Blog are worthwhile. Encyclopedic blogging is futile.

Jorge Luis Borges, who once imagined an infinite library of all possible books, invented a ... character who tries to compile a universal encyclopedia so complete that nothing would be excluded from it. In the end he fails, but not entirely. On the evening on which he gives up his great project, he hires a horse and buggy and takes a tour of the city. He sees brick walls, ordinary people, houses, a river, a marketplace and feels that somehow all these things are his own work. He realizes that his project was not impossible but merely redundant. The world encyclopedia, the universal library, already exists and is the world itself.

Better to just do it than to write about it. Last night I fell asleep reading reviews of the best business books of the year in Strategy+Business. Exhaustion, not boredom, closed my eyelids, for the writers were addressing a favorite theme of mine, the "Knowing/Doing Gap." Rather than tout the latest nostrum to bring about "alignment," they write:

“Great strategy, poor execution” is, in fact, a pernicious oxymoron, rooted in ineffective concepts that sharply separate the formulation of strategy from its execution, and assume that there is a linear, sequential relationship between the two.

....

So pervasive are these notions — and so widespread is the resulting separation of strategy from execution — that many companies today, in their efforts to increase value, seem to ignore strategy entirely, choosing instead to focus solely on execution. The highly visible failures of companies with poor execution have exacerbated this subtle twisting of the “great strategy, poor execution” oxymoron into a perilous move toward “great execution, no strategy.” Such an approach inevitably consigns a company to producing below-average returns to investors, leaving it vulnerable to competitors.

The Future of Competition asks businesses to focus on the customer relationship -- not merely cordiality but active co-creation. Think Amazon.

Co-creation requires major changes in operations. Marketing, for example, must be organized with several “experience gateways”: one for customers interested in extensive help or involvement, another for users who want only a simple transaction, possibly one for users willing to purchase the product over the Internet, and a different gateway for users who want to touch the product or interact with a human being. Operations must be more flexible, capable of providing each customer with a consistently high-quality experience without a significant increase in costs. Management of risk is more important and more difficult, since customers are part of the experience of other customers.

Confronting Reality: Doing What Matters to Get Things Right tell us strategy is iterative:

Successful companies realize that internal activities, financial results, customers, and external results are all equally important — and that the linkages between these aspects of strategy are all bi-directional. For example, not only must operational priorities and organizational structure conform to the strategy, but an effective strategy also must be built upon superior organizational and operational competencies.

The heart of effective strategic management is “an organized, rigorous way of looking at the health and profitability of a business, now and in the future” — what they call a “business model." For them, a business model is a mental model that logically breaks down the many elements that make up a business, from its markets to its income statement to its leadership elements; the mental model groups the elements into three components — external realities, internal activities, and financial targets — and then analyzes how all the elements are linked.

Robert Kaplan and David Norton's Strategy Maps continues to flesh out the elegant framework that began with The Balanced Scorecard. A strategy map addresses and links together:

1. Financial Performance. This lagging indicator provides the ultimate definition of an organization’s success. Strategy describes how an organization intends to create sustainable growth in shareholder value.
2. Customer Value Proposition. Success with targeted customers is a principal component of improved financial performance. In addition to measuring lagging indicators of customer success, such as satisfaction, retention, and growth, the customer perspective defines the value proposition for targeted customer segments.
3. Internal Processes. These create and deliver the value proposition for customers. The performance of internal processes is a leading indicator of subsequent improvements in customer and financial outcomes.
4. Learning and Growth. Intangible assets are the ultimate source of sustainable value creation. Learning and growth objectives describe how the people, technology, and organizational climate support the strategy. Improvements in learning and growth measures are leading indicators for internal process performance, customer outcomes, and financial performance.

The reviewers conclude that's what really important is:

Confront reality. Every manager should continually question whether his or her business is adequately confronting reality. Will the traditional business model continue to generate profitability? Are traditional competitors changing their models? Are potential competitors testing new business models? Is my business in danger of losing its preeminence?

---

Continuing the Berkleian philosophy from a previous post, dualism is dangerous.

Strategy and execution, intent and action, inside and outside, style and substance, figure and ground -- you can't have one without the other.


Don't believe him
Breaking wholes into pieces so you can analyse them logically is a mind game. Reality doesn't work that way. Logical arguments assume "everything else being equal," and it never is. The more experience I accumlate, the more my right hemisphere runs the show.

Visionaries tell us the work of the world is increasingly turning from goods to services. Okay. But where is all our stuff going to come from? From what I've read, it will be a while before our personal meat machines are reassembling molecules to create anything we ask for, like Captain Pickard commanding, "Computer, make me a BLT sandwich."

Bruce Sterling told an audience at SIGGRAPH this year,

Having conquered the world made of bits, you need to reform the world made of atoms. Not the simulated image on the screen, but corporeal, physical reality. Not meshes and splines, but big hefty skull-crackingly solid things that you can pick up and throw. That's the world that needs conquering. Because that world can't manage on its own. It is not sustainable, it has no future, and it needs one.

Bruce wants Pickard's BLT to be 100% recyclable. No pollution. How? He tells the SIGGRAPHers:

Listen to this: ProE, FormZ, Catia, Rhino, Solidworks. Wifi, bluetooth, WiMax. Radio frequency ID chips. Global and local positioning systems. Digital inventory systems. Cradle-to-cradle production methods. Design for disassembly. Social software, customer relations management. Open source manufacturing.

These jigsaw pieces are snapping together. They create a picture, the picture of a new and different kind of physicality. It's a new relationship between humans and objects.

If you can bear with me a while today, and kind of oil and loosen the joints of your incredulity, I'm gonna suspend some disbelief for you here.

To get the full import of Sterling's speech at SIGGRAPH, I think you had to be there. After the intro, I got a lot more out of his lecture on Shaping Things to Come, an intriguing vision of design in a virtual world...

Interactive chips can identify anything. Once we give things unique names, we can track them throughout their lifetimes. Bruce calls these spimes. The "sp" is for speculative; the "im" is for imaginary. This is because a spime can be a digital model that never makes it into physical form. When and if it does, it has a history, a trajectory. The recorded history of objects will be more valuable than the objects themselves. Imagine bar codes on objects. 30 years they didn't exist and now they are everywhere. Barcodes enabled accurate inventory, better market analysis, better flow of goods, and fewer human errors. 5 billion were scanned today. However, paper barcodes are obsolete.

Traditional barcodes tell only two things: the maker and the sort of object it is. Braun_coffeemaker. It is vulnerable to fraud, abuse, and degredation. The electronic product code will be more vulnerable -- but it will be 1000s of times more efficient.

Barcodes identify only a class of things. There's no fine detail. Far better with electronics to identify individual objects. RFIDs (pronounced R-fids) are tiny, cheap combinations of computers and radios. This enables an "internet of objects." Some protest. RFIDs create dossiers. The object is inert, the system that tracks it is alive; the tracking system is more valuable.

Local & global positioning.
Locative technology. RFIDs have radar. You can hear them while they move. An RFID inventory can be automated.

Powerful Search Engines. Google local beta. In the internet of objects, a search engine will be able to tell you where anything is.

Virtual design. We can work with the electronic plans of the objects. Before those objects physically exist. Often a virtual model (interactive, weightless, manipulable) serves me better. Gravity, friction, raw material...I don't need any of that. I can change, copy, restore, and save digital models as many times as I want.I have an object processor. I can email this.

Computer fab. I'll use a 3D printer, a fabricator. My virtual model has become the crucial part of the object. The model is the command and control aspect of the object; it is the entity. Say it's 30 years from now. You call up a Spime. It's not created until you want it to me. After the purchase, manufacture, and delivery of your object, a link is made to a list of its ingredients, history of design, position history, recipes for customization, a public forum for discussion of your Spime, and the Blue Book value, should you care to sell it, and links to service centers.

Cradle-to-cradle recycling. At the end of its useful life, it is deactivated. It is smart garbage. It's data lives on for analysis, but the object is put back into the manufacturing stream. The Spime is a set of relationships first and always, and an object only now and then.

Imagine my shoe is a Spime. No product lasts forever. Once my shoe is a Spime, fully trackable from beginning to end; the shoe is a momentary entity, a pause in time. It evanesced. History is our one inexhaustible resource. Answering questions from the audience in Munich, Sterling says that the real question is, "What is an object?"

Information seeks to be free. RFIDs want to imprison you. However, we can't continue the way we have. We're polluting the biosphere because we are not tracking objects. The only stuff we know we're passing along to future generations are space crap and nuclear waste. We're going to have to build our way out of this, just as we built our way into it. The Spime revolution gives us more time to deal with things. If we had a way to harness time, we wouldn't have this fatal, short-term attitude.

---

I've been pondering my personal philosophy. Of all things, I'm coming to see the world in part through the philosophy of Bishop George Berkeley, the cleric-philosopher for whom Berkeley, California, was named. Not that I've read Berekely since Philosophy 101 eons ago. What remains of Berkeley's oeuvre is that the redwood I see in my back yard may not be there. If I look away, it's probably not there at all. I quickly look back and see what looks like the redwood; however, it's just an idea that God put in my head. God creates this virtual reality wherever I look. (Not Berkeley's exact words.)

On one level, the redwood is just a bunch of energy particles or waves or vibrations, depending on how I'm observing it. And what I think I'm seeing is really just my brain's interpretation of the photons that weren't absorbed by the tree or whatever that tall thing out in the yard is. But my brain is generalizing from a tiny fraction of the photons bouncing my way because my visual bandwidth is much too limited to receive the photons of a even a single needle on the tree. This tree business is all in my head. In the long run, everything is in our heads, isn't it? Reality is just an interpretation of something else; everything is intangible.

Do other people feel this way or am I just getting ready for a trip to a padded cell?

You can't believe your eyes. There's a classic psych experiment where the audience is instructed to watch a short film of a dozen people passing a basketball back and forth. Some wear black shirts, others white. How many times does white pass the ball to black? At the conclusion of the film, the instructor asks, "How many people saw the gorilla?" Rarely does a hand go up. The film is run once more. Knowing what to look for and no longer concentrating on the basketball players, everyone sees a fellow in a gorilla suit walk across the stage. He even stops to wave at the audience. We all make and watch our own internal movies.

Sterling's point that form is more important than substance rings another chord with me. I lived in Germany thirty years ago. On a return visit this month, I saw many characters who seemed to step right out of 1970. Disheveled older guys with bushy mustaches quaffing beer and women with prim business suits and dayglo lipstick. These people were younger than I, yet they had become clones of their parents. You can shake hands with someone who's a dead ringer for Bismarck. I reflected on the fact that over the course of seven years, every one of our cells dies and is replaced. Physically, I am not at all the same person I was in 1997. I don't feel like a different person. When and how did my personal memories get backed up and restored? Another Bishop Berkeley moment.

I'll return to this Berkelian philosophy meme but first I've got to get some real work out of the way. At least, it looks like real work.

Ubicomp, or ubiquitous computing, is the inevitable result the convergence I described yesterday in "The Business Singularity." Inevitable? Consider:

...the new schema for Internet Protocol addressing, IPv6, which, with its 128-bit address space, provides some 6.5 x 10²³ addresses for every square meter on the surface of our planet, and therefore quite abundantly enough for every pen and stamp and book and door in the world to talk to each other. And of course it is a future economically latent in the need of manufacturers and marketers for continuous growth, and the identification of vast new markets beyond the desktop, laptop, personal audio player and mobile phone.

All watched over by machines of loving grace: Some ethical guidelines for user experience in ubiquitous-computing settingsby Adam Greenfield in the current Boxes and Arrows makes the case for ethical guidelines in user-interface design in the ubicomp, always-on environment. The theme will be familiar if you heard me speak at TechLearn this year: like atomic energy, the new computing environment has the potential for wonderful rewards or utter catastrophe. Says Greenfield,

With all due respect, we have seen that products designed by engineers, or whose design is permitted to default to the tastes, preferences and predilections of engineers, almost always fail end users (unless those end users are themselves engineers).

This is not an indictment of engineers.* They are given a narrow technical brief, and within the envelope available to them they return solutions. It is not in their mandate to consider the social and environmental impact of their work.

What could happen? Greenfield envisions this:

Imagine the feeling of being stuck in voice-mail limbo, or fighting unwanted auto-formatting in a word processing program, or trying to quickly silence an unexpectedly ringing phone by touch, amid the hissing of fellow moviegoers - except all the time, and everywhere, and in the most intimate circumstances of our lives. Levels of discomfort we accept as routine (even, despite everything we know, inevitable!) in the reasonably delimited scenarios presented by our other artifacts will have redoubled impact in a ubicomp world.

I am more fearful of how Dilbert's pointy-haired boss and his HR Director Catbert will use continuous surveillance to ruin people's lives. And don't get me going on the TSA that frisks me at airports or its parent, the Department of Homeland Security.

Greenfield proposes a starter set of principles for user-experience professionals.

• Default to harmlessness. Ubiquitous systems must default to a mode that ensures their users’ (physical, psychic and financial) safety.
  
  
• Be self-disclosing. Ubiquitous systems must contain provisions for immediate and transparent querying of their ownership, use, capabilities, etc., such that human beings encountering them are empowered to make informed decisions regarding exposure to same.
  
  
• Be conservative of face. Ubiquitous systems are always already social systems, and must contain provisions such that wherever possible they not unnecessarily embarrass, humiliate, or shame their users.
  
  
• Be conservative of time. Ubiquitous systems must not introduce undue complications into ordinary operations.
  
  
• Be deniable. Ubiquitous systems must offer users the ability to opt out, always and at any point.

These guidelines are a step in the right direction, but implementing them takes a commitment to humanism that's hardly a defining characteristic of engineers and geeks. Instructional designers and developers, courses are dying; please get involved in user interface design, where you're badly needed.

---

*Especially not you, Philip.

In the latest issue of CLO...

The Business Singularlity by Jay Cross

The structure of business, the role of workers and the architecture of software are changing before our very eyes. Business is morphing into flexible, self-organizing components that operate in real time. Software is becoming interoperable, open, ubiquitous and transparent. Workers are learning in small chunks delivered to individualized screens at the time of need. Learning is becoming a core business process measured by key performance indicators. Taken together, these changes create a new kind of business environment—a business singularity.

Businesses are evolving into networks. What happens inside the walls is not nearly as important as the flow of value from raw material to customer. Networks shared among suppliers, partners and customers integrate the business into a commercial ecosystem—a larger network.

Software is evolving into networks. The Internet is the new model for organization. Open networks that can talk with one another are far more valuable than yesterday’s proprietary fortresses. As on the ’Net, enterprise software evolves, routes around damage and reaches out to form new connections.

People are networks enmeshed in networks with one another. Our bodies and minds are networks with built-in firewalls and filters. Outboard memory in the form of PDAs and personal data stores supplement human wetware. The biggest factor in individual success is the quality of our social networks.

In any thriving network, tentacles reach out to snare new members. Growth begets growth until a tipping point is reached. Then, expansion becomes explosive. The rewards of membership become so high that everyone must join.

We are about to witness a spectacular convergence of networks of people and businesses. Workers and their work are becoming synchronous and inseparable. Colleagues and customers collaborate seamlessly. Transparent software eliminates the business-IT divide. Organizations focus on what they do best, outsourcing everything else to the greater commercial ecosystem. Network efficiencies eradicate the largest drag on corporate performance: slack. The pace of business trends toward instantaneity.

The way people improve their performance in this business singularity is called “workflow learning.” It is what corporate learning can become in three to five years. It takes place in a virtual workplace where workers interact, learn and control the process of creating value in real time. The virtual workplace results from the internetworking of changes in business, software and learning. (See Figure 1.)



Networks are defined by the quality of their connections. The successful business has high bandwidth and connections so good that value flows without friction. The successful software environment connects so well that no one notices it’s there. The successful worker is so synchronized with the challenges of work that he enters a psychological state of flow.

Happily for us, when connections are working properly, we don’t need to see them. Take, for example, the Internet cloud. As far as the user is concerned, she has a direct connection to the site on her screen. In reality, the image she sees is probably the result of information being bounced through a variety of pipes both near and far. Workflow learning is an aspect of a work cloud. As far as the worker is concerned, he is looking at the flow of work, making mid-course corrections, taking care of exceptions, communicating with colleagues and learning how to improve performance. He doesn’t take courses so much as drink from a stream of learning experiences flowing by.

The future of corporate learning is all business.

Flickr, the photo software for the web, is astonishly good. If you post photos on the web, you simply must try it right away. (Did I mention that it's free?)

This morning I uploaded photos of modern Chinese art that I'd snapped at the China Club in Berlin. Drag and drop. Drop-dead simple.

Check these out: The set of photos. The slide show.

A thumbnail (automatically generated)

A display image (automatically generated)

The uploaded image

For several years, I have championed visual learning. Give me pictures and diagrams so I can grok the gestalt. Today I add Flickr to the growing constellation of technologies that promote learning. Expect to see some experiments in the next few days.

---

Experiment #1 -- Internet Time Models.

I'm several weeks out of date. I found out about IBM selling its PC business to a Chinese firm only because it came up in conversation with a cousin studying in Latvia as we took part in a family feast of roast goose in Braunschweig last week. The only thing I remember from reading German newspapers is that Heidi Klum has a new baby and wants to have more. Oh, and that a 3 kilometer-long vodka pipeline was busted in Lithuania.

Twenty years ago, I would have read a few copies of Newsweek to fill in the blanks. Now, I'm turning to two sources: the Sunday New York Times' Week in Review and Stephen Downes' handy consolidation of education-related RSS feeds.

Getting to the Sunday Times, I noticed the current front page:

PeopleSoft, RIP

In Week in Review, I loved this item from an article on America's abysmal math skills:

In all but the most arcane specialties (like teaching math), the need for math has atrophied. Electronic scales can price 4.15 pounds of chicken at $3.79 a pound faster than any butcher. Artillerymen in Iraq don't use slide rules as their counterparts on Iwo Jima did. Cars announce how many miles each gallon gets. Some restaurant bills calculate suggested tips of 15, 18 or 20 percent. Architects and accountants now have spreadsheets for everything from wind stress to foreign tax shelters. The new math is plug-and-play.

A few paragraphs later, this:

In math, as in chess, countries that produce the most grandmasters per capita - like Hungary and Iceland - not only don't rule the world, they don't even rule chess. Sheer power counts, as it did in chess for the Soviets. America may lose math literacy surveys, but it dominates number-crunching in every sphere from corporate profits to supercomputers to Nobel prizes.

Aside from that, the week's events were more of the same for Africa, Iraq, the Euro, torture, social security, and the Times itself.

Edu_RSS is more rewarding -- and this is only a sample from one day's worth.

George Siemens eloquently describes a new learning theory for the digital age, Connectivism. In short: it's not all in your head any more.

Dan Gilmour is leaving the Merc.

Absurd blogging boosterism at Blogumentary.

RSS Submission Service.

Lilia has won an EduBlogger award for best research-based blog.

The Chronicle reports that plagiarism is rampant.

John Perry Barlow unreasonably searched and seized.

Over the coming year, I will be conducting a deep-dive exploration of informal learning. As you might expect, I am my own best study subject. I'm always available, I'm motivated, and I own the only head I can inspect from the inside.

I just awoke from a 14-hour sleep, in part because I hadn't slept at all on the flight home from Hannover yesterday but more importantly because there's nothing more comfortable than one's own bed. I haven't listened to two weeks of phone messages yet; in fact, the phone here is turned off. I haven't read email since returning. I'm easing back into routines. Because I think reflection is a vital part of learning, if not the vital aspect of learning, I want to reflect for a while before getting back into the buzz-buzz-buzz trivia and soundbites of day-to-day reality.

Naturally, since human relationships are paramount, I'll reach out to you as I reflect internally. Question: What sort of automobile is this? Answer.

Trying to break free of its roots, Volkswagen has purchased Bentley, Bugatti, and Lamborghini, among others, and opened sort of an auto theme park, the AutoStadt, on the grounds of the world's largest automobile factory. Some wonderful cars are on display in the AutoStadt history museum.

---

This is the lion of Braunschweig, the medieval city where my wife Uta was born. Braunschweig hit the big time when Heinrich der Löwe (Henry the Lion) took up residence in the mid-12th century. The city is chock full of half-timbered houses. Alas, almost all of the "historic" buildings of Braunschweig are reproductions. Old Braunschweig burned to the ground in October 1944 after an Allied bombing.

Eating is high on the Christmasmarkt agenda.

One final quiz question. What do you think this is? Answer.

---

Porsche. This is one of Dr. Ferdinand Porsche's prototypes of the People's Car. Here are the prototypes that did not make the cut:



Return

---

An indulgence. A 1500s amnesty from damnation. This form of bribery lit Martin Luther's fuse, causing him to post the famous 95 theses here in Wittenberg:




Saxony

P.S.
Flickr is great. It makes it easy to post photos and annotate them. Others can comment. And it's free.