This bears some thought
We now speak the language of self-management, but it is still difficult for a group of subordinates to call a meeting that excludes their boss. We bear the imprint of the fact that in times past self-management was called mutiny.
— Peter Block, Flawless Consulting
A sentiment well worth adopting.
Building on the Past (.mov) is the winning video from the recent Creative Commons contest. I especially like the ending words:
“creativity always builds on the past
and you’re building the past right now.
Share now.
Shape tomorrow.”
More fascinating examples from Tufte about how to squeeze more meaning into data displays. The interesting tradeoff to be managed here is between design time to find compelling and meaningful representations and interpretation/decision time by those who will use the representations. As a gross generalization, design time gets short shrift at the expense of increased problems with interpretation and decision. A bad cost/benefit tradeoff.
Spaklines. Edward Tufte: Sparklines or Wordgraphs–some draft pages from Beautiful Evidence… [Emptybottle : Coasters]
Good reference well worth your time.
Cyberspace Innkeeping: Building Online Community. Sometimes an essay is timeless. That’s an apt description for Cyberspace Innkeeping: Building Online Community by John “Tex” Coate. I met Tex online when Fig-Tex (Cliff Figalo & Tex) ran the WeLL. Tex won the respect of everyone on the WeLL, even the over-the-top rowdies… [Internet Time Blog]
If you’re going to be in the tail of a distribution it helps to be in the tail occupied by interesting folks like Scoble. I certainly don’t entertain plans to surpass his subscription count. I’m hovering around 300 feeds now and that is probably a but beyong my practical capacity.
Most people can’t handle more than a couple hundred feeds. Andrew Grumet has computed the distribution of subscription numbers among Share your OPML participants. Here’s the cumulative graph, which highlights how much of an outlier Robert Scoble is with his (at last count) 1296 subscriptions:
[Seb’s Open Research]
Idea Recording from Charles Cave. Great list of of ideas on how to use journals, software, note cards to capture the various ideas floating around in your mind. [Michael Fioritto’s Radio Weblog]
Definitely an interesting list worth thinking about. I’ve written before about my own practices, if you’re interested.
Speak freely. Jevon MacDonald on organizational silence and its costs.
Key graf:
Organizational communications are at the mercy of corporate culture. The more top-down our methods (newsletters, presidents reports, corporate newspapers) of communicating and directing, the more we formalize (by implication) our less structured interpersonal communications. Even the validity of our consensus building exercises comes in to question when we realize that our corporate culture may be fostering silence within the hierarchy.
Very thought provoking piece. One of the frustrating aspects of organizational silence is how easy it is to provoke even when senior executives are desperately in need of more open communication and would welcome it if they got it. What they tend not to see is how they contribute to silence instead of voice. It’s hard in the midst of all the more obvious pressures they face.
Lago
Academic life is ruining the internet for me. An example: Today I read Joi Ito s wandering entry on money, economics, and physics, and the first thing I thought of doing was to post a bibliography of all of the reading that should have been done before that post was made. And then I realized that posting such a bibliography is the equivalent of shouting at the television. It doesn t matter what I say about it. The TV (and the internet) can t really hear me.
Lago reacts to an interesting point that I in fact pondered yesterday before posting my thoughts from my lunch with Seth. Is it better for me to post my superficial musings with Seth in the one hour that I had before I needed to move on to the next thing, or do I scribble them in my notebook and write a more rigorous treatment with references. I decided, as Cory often says, that my blog is my notebook and that even though many of my thoughts were half-baked, it was better to write early/write often than to back burner the thoughts and probably never get around to posting them.
[…snip…]
I don’t want to ignite a academic vs non-academic flame-war here. I’m just trying to point out, as Lago does, that we are all making decisions about how much to study in order for us to make the right decisions. I don’t have the time or the ability to do “all of the reading that should have been done before that post was made.” Having said that, I would encourage people to post “a bibliography of all of the reading” since I am interested and so are many other people.
By Joichi Ito joi_nospam_@nospam_ito.com. [Joi Ito’s Web]
Interesting ruminations from Joi Ito on how to strike a balance between getting something out the door and thinking some more about it.
I feel that I tend to err in the other direction of sitting on things too long instead of putting something out there, although the experience of weblogging over the past two years has helped immensely in moving toward Joi’s position. It’s something I find myself thinking about explicitly far more than I used to.
“Email is where knowledge goes to die”. What a great line. (This piece by Bill French might be the original source.) Via Lilia, who reflects on asking questions in public.
[Seb’s Open Research]
Get’s my vote for meme of the week. I also think I saw a reference to this from Scoble as well. Thank you Robert, Bill, Lilia, and Seb.
Good Experience: Five Ideas for 2004. I have five ideas for you to consider this year. They’re not exactly predictions – you can get those almost anywhere, this time of year – but rather thought-starters for you to consider as the new year begins. [Tomalak’s Realm]
This got picked up recently with most bloggers picking up on
IDEA 4. Blogs are just content management systems,
but I am more intrigued by
IDEA 5: Managing one’s bits is an increasingly essential skill.
Last fall I began coaching a friend of mine on his bit literacy – the ability to manage one’s bits: e-mail, pictures, files, contacts, calendar, applications,… everything that laptops and other digital devices might hold.
I’ve learned that bit literacy is a skill that most people don’t have, and almost no one else is talking about. Yet it’s an increasingly essential skill. We deal with more and more incoming bits every day – and not just spam mail. Bit literacy is the ability to manage it all and still be effective
I think Mark Hurst is on to something important here, although I don’t think it is about the bits. It’s about the related notion that the products of knowledge work all pass through a bit stage somewhere in their creation and use. On the plus side, with a common representation, new forms of analysis and management become possible. On the negative side, the uniformity and invisibility of bits makes it harder to take advantage of our other skills for managing knowledge work products (think of the value of piles of paper). What we need to do, and what Mark looks to be thinking about, is what kinds of new skills will we need to develop to take advantage of the opportunity and compensate for the limits of a world of knowledge work that is fundamentally digital. I’ll be watching for certain and contributing where I can.
