Category: Personal

The experiment continues. Today is my sixth blogiversary.

When I started this I was teaching information technology and knowledge management topics at the Kellogg School. Today, I’m helping clients deal much the same set of issues. We have powerful technology and new services that promise to make us more effective and productive. Sometimes they actually do.

This space is a place where I try to get my own thinking straight and a way to immerse myself in the ongoing conversation of others trying to get their thinking straight. Some of them think in like-minded ways, others in very different ways, and all are important to the journey.

This particular set of social technologies must be lived in to be understood. I think this is one of the impediments that larger organizations face in managing adoption. They are comfortable with the illusion of carefully crafted plans. They need to become reacquainted with the less well-marked paths of real learning.

What I said in 2005 is still true:

I remain interested in the challenges of making organizations better places for real people to work in and still believe that the effective use of technology makes a difference. I suspect that large organizations are nearing the end of their useful life and that the evolution toward new forms will continue to be painful and noisy. I worry about leaders and executives who choose to ignore facts and who can’t or won’t distinguish between the theory of evolution and the theory of who shot JFK. [McGee’s Musings]

As has become my custom, I want to thank those whose paths I’ve crossed, if only electronically:

Jenny Levine, AKMA, Terry Frazier, Betsy Devine, Buzz Bruggeman, Denham Grey, Marc Orchant, Cameron Reilly, Ernie Svenson, Judith Meskill, Jack Vinson, Ross Mayfield, Lilia Efimova, Jeremy Wagstaff, Matt Mower, Ton Zijlstra, Eric Snowdeal, Rick Klau, Greg Lloyd, Chris Nuzum, Jordan Frank, Halley Suitt, Jon Husband, Dina Mehta, Shannon Clark, Bruce MacEwen, Espen Andersen, Hylton Jolliffe, Stowe Boyd, Francois Gossieaux, Jim Berkowitz, Eric Lunt, Dennis Kennedy, Matt Homann, Jim Ware, Elizabeth Albrycht, Regina Miller, David Gurteen, Rik Reppe, Tom Davenport & Larry Prusak, John Sviokla, Bryan Rieger, Stephanie Rieger, Sheryle Bolton, Lynne Whitehorn-Umphres, Bill Ives, Giovanni Rodriguez, David Maister, Nancy White, Dave Snowden, Andrew McAfee,  Euan Semple, Kathleen Gilroy, Stuart Henshall, Paula Thornton, Jay Cross

Since I am hitting the road later today to take my eldest off to Drake University to begin his college experience, this year’s list is particularly relevant.

How This Year’s Frosh Will Make You Feel Older

Beloit releases annual “Mindset List” to help professors understand the worlds (real and virtual) of their newest students.

Although, I would prefer to think of it as taking credit for encouraging Jack to add his insight and voice to the blogging world., rather than blame 

It’s been four years

Hard to believe that I have been at this for four years now. 

Thanks to all my readers (FeedBurner says there are ~1300 on the feed; 40 readers via FeedBlitz; 2000 visitors a day at the website), and thanks to the hundreds of inspirations I have out there who take me down interesting paths and teach me new things.

All blame lays on the shoulders of Jim McGee, who told me to start writing on my own blog instead of peppering him with comments all the time.

I’ve finally gotten around to porting my old Radio archives over to WordPress. One unintended consequence is that the urls for the individual daily archive entries change. In Radio the archive entry for today would be http://www.mcgeesmusings.net/2007/05/14.html; In WordPress the url becomes http://www.mcgeesmusings.net/2007/05/14 .

Google searches that point to an old Radio url end up with a 404 not found error. This seems to be a case where Apache’s rewrite rules should help, but I don’t know how to write the right rule off the top of my head. I could do my usual combination of searching for clues and trial and error. Perhaps someone out there could point me in a productive direction in the comments.

Like Rick, I haven’t published a blogroll here for quite some time. Since I do 95% of my own blog reading inside FeedDemon, I don’t pay much attention to them myself. I’m curious as to who might want to see a blogroll here. It would have to be a subset of the 300+ feeds I am currently monitoring. Let me know in the comments.

Blogrolls matter

I haven’t had a blogroll on my site in years. Turns out that’s a mistake. I’ll be working on remedying that in the next few days…

Courtesy of Jack Vinson, I found Bill’s blog within days of its start. Since then, Portals and KM has been part of my core knowledge work reading list and Bill and I have had the chance to work together virtually. Later this month, we will finally get the chance to meet face-to-face at the Enterprise 2.0 Rave in New York.

Portals and KM: Third Anniversary

Tomorrow I start my fourth year with this blog. On May 2, 2004 I did my first posts. There were three, Is KM the Killer App for Portals?, Some good articles on blogs and blogs on blogs, and Is RSS TNBT? I think the last one is now answered yes as RSS is everywhere and not just with blogs. Blogs are also everywhere and in many niche business markets such as real estate and sports. KM may be a killer app for portals but web 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis, and tagging are going to change intranets forever so they may not look or act like the enterprise portals that I was describing.

…

Francois called me earlier this week and persuaded me (it wasn’t hard) to join him as one of the facilitators/participants at this upcoming session in New York in May. He’s getting a really interesting collection of people together and committed to a format that should tap into everyone’s insights and experience. If you use the link below to register you can get a $250 discount on registration.

Ready for an Enterprise 2.0 Rave?

Here is another cool project I am working on – organizing an Enterprise 2.0 RAVE in NYC on May21-22 with the great team at Longworth Venture Partners .

If you are a practitioner looking at deploying web 2.0 tools in your enterprise or actively strugling with pilot projects to try to do that, you should not miss this event. And if you do plan on going, use the link below to get a $250 discount for the RAVE. Seating will be limited and we already have two registrants!

The paint is still wet, so if something does not work correctly let us know.

See you there.

[Tags: future of work enterprise 2.0 web 2.0 wiki tag blog]

I just got the sad news from Espen. My thoughts parallel Espen’s. Jim was a major intellectual influence in my life and was a remarkable human being.

I remember him as being one of the most non-linear thinkers I know. He saw and understood connections at a far deeper level than most. Trying to follow his thinking was often an exercise in frustration. Many times I would wake up in the middle of the night, hours after listening to Jim explain some complex interaction between organizations and systems and people, and suddenly grasp what he had been saying. I wasn’t as brave as Espen to choose Jim as my thesis chair, but I learned an immense amount from him on multiple levels.

I always thought it was particularly sad that his brilliance and originality was taken by Alzheimer’s. I will miss him.

Jim McKenney dies at 77

I just got word that Jim McKenney, Harvard Business School Professor (Emeritus), died last week.

Jim was responsible for the MIS Doctoral students at HBS and my thesis advisor after Benn Konsynski left for Emory in 1992. Jim taught me many things, such as interview technique, longitudinal research strategies, and how to understand corporate strategy from behavior rather than theory. Most of all he taught me how to draw parallels between technical, organizational and societal evolution. He was an expert on the US airline industry (he was on the board of Continental Airlines) and had life-time memberships to most airline clubs, as well as a strong network of contacts in all kinds of transportation businesses.

Jim was defiantly original in everything he did. Small and wiry, he wore a bowtie and spoke quietly and eruditely in large classrooms, constantly surprising students with wry observations on why organizations did as they did. I still remember how I talked to him about an organization that did something specific (I have forgotten what). As I was trying to work out why, Jim said “That’s not a strategy – that’s just bad management!”

Jim had a big Victorian (I think) house with self-tended garden in Lexington where he and his lovely wife Mary held annual summer parties for faculty and friends. As he became my thesis advisor and I also worked as his research assistant, I frequently made the trip up to Lexington to retrieve papers or ask questions.

Jim is one of two reasons (the other is Benn) that I (and my good colleague Ramiro) wear bowties. His reason for wearing them was practical – when he arrived at HBS, he was a poor junior faculty with worn shirts collars, and the bow tie hid that fact effectively. That’s the story he told, anyway. I have a sneaking suspicion his real reason was to be original, though, to mark a distance to the slicker parts of HBS and cut a noticeable and contrarian figure around campus.

Jim was stricken with Alzheimer towards the end of the 90s, and we lost touch. I last saw him in 99, still living in his large house, still gardening, but gradually being reduced. Still, you could find that spark of originality underneath at times, and I like to think he never lost it completely.

My thoughts go to Mary and the rest of the family – may their memories be of an interested and interesting man, well read, soft-spoken, opinionated, kind and unabashedly original.

It’s time for my next set of adventures.

I’ve left Huron, although I expect to continue to work with them as a contractor. Our paths are diverging and this represents a way to continue to work together when it makes sense and not get in each other’s way when it doesn’t. They’re a great group of people and I look forward to continuing to interact with them.

I haven’t settled on exactly what to do next. I’m talking to a lot of people about the challenges of making organizations more effective and better places to work. I continue to be especially interested in how to make knowledge work more effective. Whether I work on that from inside one organization, with another consulting firm, or entirely on my own remains to be seen.

Over the last several years, I have been working primarily with knowledge intensive organizations. Although there is a rich set of thinking and research on how to address their problems, there is still a bias toward squeezing these problems into models and frameworks better suited to the industrial economy that drove progress in the 20th Century. There’s the classic observation from John Maynard Keynes:

“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”

I think today’s organizations need better ideas and better theories. And they need better ways to merge them into their daily practices. That is likely to remain my focus regardless of the particular organizational affiliations I maintain.