Category: Knowledge work

Radio Archives

I started this blog in October of 2001 using Radio as my blogging tool. The blog has been hosted with its own domain from the beginning so the archives are already here. I am gradually porting them over to WordPress. In the meantime here are links to archived posts that have yet to be converted.
2002/12

2002/11

2002/10

2002/09

2002/08

2002/07

2002/06

2002/05

2002/04

2002/03

2002/02

2002/01

2001/12

2001/11

2001/10

About this blog

I started McGee’s Musings in October of 2001 when I was on the faculty at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management as a way to share thoughts with my students. While they sometimes struggled with the notion that I often had more questions than answers, that seemed to cause less concern to those who came here. Most of what I think and write about here has to do with knowledge work, knowledge workers, learning, design, and how organizations are dealing with changes triggered in large part by technology.

No one pays me to write this blog or to say particular things on it. I pay webhosting and bandwidth costs for this blog out of my own pocket. Recently (late 2005), posts here are picked up and reposted at Corante’s Web Hub; there is some hope and expectation that this might ultimately generate some modest revenues to me, although my primary objective there is greater visibility. I also happen to like the folks at Corante and think they are doing interesthing things. I do not run ads here and do not expect to.

My day job is as a consultant helping clients on issues related to the management and use of technology. I do not identify clients by name or in any way that would make them identifiable unless I have explicit permission (and generally not even then).

I’ve been an entrepreneur and I’ve been around the technology world for a while. I believe, and I have found, that transparency is a good thing. If I encounter a situation where my previous connections or other circumstances bear on what I write here, I disclose the pertinent details or find something else to talk about instead.

As David Weinberger suggests in his blog disclosure (which I cribbed from for this disclosure), I use my judgment. Since I am not a lawyer I choose to err in the direction of assuming that anyone reading here is also capable of exercising judgment.

If you have questions or concerns, feel free to contact me.

Going hands on to get your arms around Enterprise 2.0

I was not able to attend last month’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. I wanted to pick up on something Andrew McAfee had to say during his keynote there, however. Here’s his set up:

I found myself in an uncomfortable position at the end of my short keynote speech during the Enterprise 2.0 conference yesterday. I got through my prepared material and still had about five minutes left in the alloted time. So I had to ad lib.

The idea that occurred to me (from no identifiable source) was to make Enterprise 2.0 personal. I compared where my thinking was a year ago to where it was today, and tried to convey how big a shift had taken place.

[Speaking From the Heart, and off the Top of My Head ]

He goes on to share some of his observations about blogs, social networks, and how organizations are taking up the mix of technologies that fall under the Enterprise 2.0 rubric. For example:

I used to believe that blogs were primarily vehicles for blaring opinions, and that bloggers generally proved Kierkegaard’s great quote that “People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” I now get a large percentage of my daily food for thought from blogs, and write one myself. It’s proved to be an unparalled vehicle for getting ideas out into the world, getting useful feedback on them, and meeting people who are interested in the same things I am.

[Speaking From the Heart, and off the Top of My Head ]

What struck me was the particular importance of hands on knowledge in appreciating the importance of these technologies. The organizational value of these technologies is in how they change the possibilities for productivity and effectiveness of the managerial and executive core. You need to work with them in a substantive way to appreciate what they can do for you. That makes them different from so many other applications of technology in the organization. McAfee has made that investment and has become an effective spokesperson for them. How do we get others in similar positions to invest in the necessary learning?

Procrastination, knowledge work, and important problems

[Cross posted at Future Tense]

Paul Graham’s latest essay is getting some play including within the David Allen, Getting Things Done, world where I came across it. Frankly, I didn’t find it one of Graham’s better efforts and you’d probably be better off sticking with Allen’s insights about life and work. I’d boil down Graham’s take as “stay focused on what’s really important and let the little stuff slide in order to do that.” I don’t have the luxury to hire a personal assistant to let me do that and I’m confident that my wife wouldn’t let me get away with it either. One of the reasons I keep sticking with Allen’s approach every time I fall off, is that Allen gets the reality of both the important stuff and the nitty-gritty reality of day-to-day errands that still have to get done.

On the other hand, Graham also points to another essay by computer scientist and Turing Award winner, Richard Hamming that has much more importance to any of us who want to accomplish something significant in the knowledge work that we do.

Hamming’s essay, You and Your Research, dates to 1986, but is still packed with insight about how to think about your work and problems worth tackling when you have significant discretion about what problems to work on. That’s the defining characteristic of knowledge workers and there’s precious little guidance to draw on. Just a few sample quotes to pique your interest:

What Bode was saying was this: “Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.” Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity – it is very much like compound interest. I don’t want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate.
…

Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don’t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing – not much, but enough that they miss fame.
…

After quite a while of thinking I decided, “No, I should be in the mass production of a variable product. I should be concerned with all of next year’s problems, not just the one in front of my face.” By changing the question I still got the same kind of results or better, but I changed things and did important work. I attacked the major problem – How do I conquer machines and do all of next year’s problems when I don’t know what they are going to be?
….

…I suggest that by altering the problem, by looking at the thing differently, you can make a great deal of difference in your final productivity because you can either do it in such a fashion that people can indeed build on what you’ve done, or you can do it in such a fashion that the next person has to essentially duplicate again what you’ve done. It isn’t just a matter of the job, it’s the way you write the report, the way you write the paper, the whole attitude. It’s just as easy to do a broad, general job as one very special case. And it’s much more satisfying and rewarding!

As you can see, lots and lots of good ideas and advice. I’ll be chewing this one over for several days at least. Start with Hamming’s essay, go back to Graham’s later if you have the time. And for fun, do take a look at John Perry’s classic, Structured Procrastination as well.

Great essay on procrastination.Jack Holt e-mailed me a link to Paul Graham’s essay on procrastination. It’s great, couldn’t agree more. Thanks, Jack, and Paul.

Comments (1)

Comments on this Entry:

(Pascal Venier on Jan 1, 2006 10:29 AM)

An old classic … in praise of procrastination is Stanford Philosopher short essay from 1995 on “Structured procrastination”: http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~john/procrastination.html

[David Allen]

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An old look at a new idea – the value of personal knowledge management

(cross-posted at Future Tense)

One of the blogs I’ve been reading on a provisional basis recently is “Inside Higher Ed.” It provides an interesting contrast to the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Wired Campus blog. Both offer valuable perspective on the life of knowledge work and knowledge workers that goes well beyond their specific focus on the world of higher education.

In a column from November, Scott McLemee reflects on a 1959 essay by the sociologist C. Wright Mills “On Intellectual Craftsmanship.” You can get your hands on a copy by buying a copy of Mills’s The Sociological Imagination. At the core of Mills’s recommendations is the notion of maintaining a file or journal, which ought to sound quite familiar. His description is worth sharing at length:

In such a file as I am going to describe, there is joined personal experience and professional activities, studies underway and studies planned. In this file, you, as an intellectual craftsman, will try to get together what you are doing intellectually and what you are experiencing as a person. Here you will not be afraid to use your experience and relate it to directly to various work in progress. By serving as a check on repetitious work, your file also enables you to conserve your energy. It also encourages you to capture ‘fringe-thoughts’: various ideas which may be by-products of everyday life, snatches of conversation overheard on the street, or, for that matter, dreams. Once noted, these may lead to more systematic thinking, as well as lend intellectual relevance to more directed experiences.

You will have often noticed how carefully accomplished thinkers treat their own minds, how closely they observe their development and organize their experience. The reason they treasure their smallest experience is that, in the course of a lifetime, modern man has so very little personal experience and yet experience is so important as a source of original intellectual work. To be able to trust yet be skeptical of your own experience, I have come to believe, is one mark of the mature workman. This ambiguous confidence is indispensable to originality in any intellectual pursuit, and the file is one way by which you can develop and justify such confidence.

The primary value of today’s tools and technologies for blogging, wikis, and the like is that they eliminate technical and usability barriers to maintaining and investing in the kind of long-lived knowledge asset that Mills is describing. Secondarily, these tools make it easier and more productive to engage in the kind of active reflection and learning Mills talks about.

What the tools don’t do is provide the discipline and support structures to help you keep at the long-term investment in becoming a better knowledge worker. Or provide a nice, neat ROI argument that you can bring to your CIO or CEO.

Davenport, Prusak and Cohen are Blogging

This should be interesting to watch and likely will be a very welcome
addition to the ongoing conversations about knowledge management and
knowledge work. Tom, Larry, and Don have long been astute and
insightful observers of the world of organizations and knowledge work.
Both the opportunity to get an earlier look at their thinking and the
insights they are likely to develop as they immerse themselves in some
new tools should be valuable for all of us.

Steve Matthews writes that Davenport & Prusak are Blogging

Along with Don Cohen, they are publishing a collaborative blog titled The Babson Knowledge Blog. The blog is also connected to the Babson College's Working Knowledge Research Center, or WKRC.

They started at the end of September.
They are taking their time and writing longer pieces less frequently.
They deserve to take their time. It should be interesting to follow
what they have to say.

Comments

On the Menu at BlawgThink

Matt Homan and Dennis Kennedy are putting together a really interesting
get together next month. Jack and I are planning to put together a
highly interactive session to tap the collective interests and
experience of everyone who chooses to join us.

Jim McGee and I are going to host a session on knowledge management / collaboration during BlawgThink 2005, here in Chicago. LexThink! Blog – Speaking of BlawgThink

Q: What do Matt Buchanan, Ben Cowgill, Dennis Crouch, Fred Faulkner, Peter Flashner, Brandy Karl, Cathy Kirkman, Rick Klau, Jim McGee, Steve Nipper, Kevin O’Keefe, Evan Schaeffer, Doug Sorocco, Ernie Svenson, Jack Vinson, and J. Craig Williams have in common?

A: They are all speaking at BlawgThink 2005. We’ll have a few more additions to this list by the end of the week.

Comments

The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community

Bill Ives finds a nice report on the use of new technology within the intelligence community. You will need to register with the Social Science Research Network (for free) in order to download the report, which is a pdf file, but it’s worth the trouble

The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community. Here is an article by Calvin Andrus of the CIA on how they can use blogs and wikis to help them change, The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community, which is not a bad idea. As… [Portals and KM]

Thinkers you should know – Alan Kay

One way to get a handle on the future of work is to get to know some of those who are already there.

Alan Kay with "Dynabook" prototype
Alan Kay with “Dynabook” prototype (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the recent news about layoffs at HP, several sources noted that Alan Kay is among those getting a pink slip. It struck me that Alan is a perfect embodiment of William Gibson’s observation that “the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” He is the prototypical example of someone who has been living in, and creating, our future for the past 30 years. Taking some time to examine and reflect on his thinking is time well spent. Alan was one of the scientist/engineers at Xerox PARC. Much of the technology we use and take for granted today traces its lineage to work Alan and his colleagues did in the 1970s at PARC. Alan is an engineer not an academic; more interested in building things than in writing papers for journals. If you ever get an opportunity to hear Alan talk, take it. In the meantime, there are some worthwhile starting points on the web I can recommend:

Alan is also fond of aphorisms. Two of my favorites and among his best known are “the best way to predict the future is to invent it,” and “point of view is worth 80 IQ points.”