Thinking of tools for knowledge workers

I’ve been thinking about Ted Leavitt recently.

Leavitt taught marketing at the Harvard Business School. His most famous aphorism is that “customers don’t but a quarter-inch drill bit, they buy a quarter-inch hole.” Clever, and possibly helpful, if you’re a marketer by trade. But what if you happen to be a knowledge worker? You don’t have the luxury of knowing that what you need is a quarter-inch hole.

While every technology marketer out there is trying to sell you quarter-inch holes, you actually need to be thinking in terms of what kind of general purpose knowledge work toolkit you need to assemble to address the changing and unpredictable demands you face. For knowledge work, solution selling gets in the way at best. A tool perspective will be more productive, even if it is working against the grain.

Here are some quick contrasts between a solutions perspective and a tools perspective:

Solutions Tools
Passive Active
Accept/Reject Co-create
Train Learn
Conformance Craft
Consumer Producer
CEO Hacker

One challenge to overcome is that we’ve been conditioned to think in terms of solutions. We wait for the early adopters to figure everything out so that we can buy the answer off the shelf. We are still too soon in the world of knowledge work. If you are a knowledge worker, then circumstances have forced you back to the level of creating your own toolset. And back to the level of digging underneath the hypothetical solutions to hypothetical problems that today’s marketing conventions will layer on top of the tools themselves that ought to be your target.

The creative age

Both Hugh Macleod and Evelyn Rodriguez belong in your pay attention to list if you are remotely interested in the topic of knowledge work and how it is changing the nature of the organizations we inhabit and create.

the creative age. A blogger I’m enjoying a lot these days is Evelyn Rodriguez. She’s in sync with a lot of my current thinking, namely, that we’re entering into what is known as “The Creative Age”. Good-bye white collar, hello black collar…. [gapingvoid]

Risking curiosity

This struck a chord. I make no secret of being cursed with curiosity and it has come close to killing me a few times both metaphorically and literally (there was that high voltage probe on a Hewlett Packard scintillometer back in high school that wasn’t quite properly grounded).

Curiosity is not something greatly respected in our culture today and that is a dangerous thing. It makes you easier to manipulate. Hemingway’s advice on crap detectors applies to more than writers and appears to be in desparately short supply these days.

My only caveat here is that while I agree that “the pursuit of knowledge is never done,” that does not imply for me that there are no objective truths in the world. If I let go of this laptop in the TSA security line, it will hit the floor. That does complicate things because “agreeing to disagree” isn’t always an out in all conversations. There are “facts” that can be agreed on, but that doesn’t finish the conversation or the deeper search for truth.

Children are our best guides here. None of them need to be trained in the techniques of 7 whys (would that toddlers would stop at 7). After formal schooling, however, most of us need to rediscover what we naturally know how to do.

Can we teach the joy of thinking?. I have been blessed – and cursed – with a curious mind. I say cursed not simply because curiosity killed the cat, but because it makes it very difficult for me to understand people who seem to lack curiosity about themselves and the world around them. This difficulty causes me the most grief when, every fall, I am faced with students who appear to utterly lack curiosity. When I am in a good mood, I ask myself how that is even possible. When I am in poor humour, I wonder why they’ve bothered to go to university at all.

Sound harsh? Well, it probably is. And no doubt oversimplified. But here’s the thing: in a world where people are not equal in terms of interest, how can we teach wonder?

You see, I wonder all the time. Actually, I would need several lifetimes to understand all the things I wonder about. I don’t know how not to wonder. I keep a notebook that contains only questions – hundreds of them – which I share with my students whenever they say that can’t think of anything to research or write about. Colleagues have warned me that I am “giving away” my ideas for future research and, presumably, some sort of future glory. But for me, the beauty and the reward is in our ever-changing understandings – and it sure won’t be me who definitively sorts the world. I only hope there are enough people who keep asking hard questions.

I genuinely believe that the pursuit of knowledge is never done. This is, in part, related to my understanding that there is no absolute, determining, objective truth in the world – a position which obligates me to continue asking questions and forces me to acknowledge that no knowledge is neutral or impartial.

If the best we can offer is subjective, multiple, and partial truths, then learning and understanding requires critical thinking, the questioning of assumptions, self-reflection and self-awareness. In a world that doesn’t want to “waste time” with things other than “the facts,” it turns out that these inter-related practices are, by far, the hardest ones to teach. And I can’t help but to believe they are the most important. [Purse Lip Square Jaw]

George Lakoff on how to argue with conservatives.

Whatever your political leanings, you need to read this interview and think about what Lakoff has to say.

George Lakoff on how to argue with conservatives. David Pescovitz: Last year, BB pal Bonnie Powell conducted a staggering interview with cognitive linguist and cultural commentator George Lakoff about why the Democrats need a lesson in language. In these days just before the Republican National Convention, Bonnie sat down again with Lakoff to discuss his forthcoming book, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, and why it’s important to think before you speak:

You’ve said that progressives should never use the phrase “war on terror” why?
There are two reasons for that. Let’s start with “terror.” Terror is a general state, and it’s internal to a person. Terror is not the person we’re fighting, the “terrorist.” The word terror activates your fear, and fear activates the strict father model, which is what conservatives want. The “war on terror” is not about stopping you from being afraid, it’s about making you afraid.

Link [Boing Boing]

The cubicle turns 40

I’m not sure whether this is best understood as an example of unintended consequences or of the inevitable evil/cluelessness of the suits. Regardless, it is certainly a story worth understanding in more depth.

As a consultant I’ve spent most of my career working in temporary spaces of one sort or another. There is great power in being able to quickly rearrange workspace to meet immediate needs. More often than not, that has worked best with the cheapest and simplest of furnishings. While cubicles capture the form of flexibility, they often miss the spirit. And the hardest issue is usually how to avoid the furniture police.

Happy 40th Birthday, cubicle!. Mark Frauenfelder: Metropolis‘ Yvonne Abrahams profiles Bob Propst, inventor of the office cubicle. A great example of a neat idea morphing into its opposite.

cubicleSo, in 1964, Herman Miller’s Action Office system was born. It started with a huge open area, sectioned off to give workers completely enclosed spaces if needed, or semi-enclosed spaces for a more social kind of privacy. Offices were arranged in such a way that workers would be likely to have plenty of contact with each other and with management.

…

Propst’s forward-thinking motives were misinterpreted by some companies, which simply crammed more workers into smaller spaces and took advantage of the system’s huge potential for savings and tax breaks … “Lots are run by crass people who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes. They make little bitty cubicles and stuff people in them. Barren, rat-hole places.”

Link (Thanks, Bill!) [Boing Boing]

Advice on blogging successfully

A good mix of serious and entertaining tips on how to blog successfully.

I would also recommend Phil Windley’s advice on how to start a blog. Noting profound or earthshattering in either one, but they do represent a solid collection of good advice and both have good sets of links to other sources.

I would also recommend taking a look at RSS right off the bat. Feld Thoughts recommends a whitepaper from MediaThink (with annoying Flash animation) called RSS: The Next Big Thing Online (pdf file), as a good introduciton. Skip the annoying stuff and go straight to the useful stuff.

About Blogging Successfully. Simon’s Everything You Wanted to Know But Were Afraid To Ask attempts to be a complete round up of essential and practical blogging knowledge. There are obvious contradictions: Be Original(#19) Vs. Plagiarism is Encouraged(#22), but he probably does not expect to be taken seriously(#4). I wish he extended (#49) to include padding … [wordlog.com]

Online Stopwatch

I have no immediate need for this. On the other hand, it is cool, which still matters to me even if it does brand me as totally out of touch. Which also makes it worth an entry here.

Online Stopwatch. I’m trying my hand at radio commentary, where time limits are critical. But I didn’t have a stopwatch to use for practice. A little Googling and, presto, I found an online version. It’s actually easier to use than a “real”… [Dynamist Blog]

Update to OneNote Virtual PowerToy

Although I’ve been using OneNote off and on for several months now, it has still not become part of my default toolkit. For Microsoft it is an excellent early stage product. At the same time, their compelling need to make products that appeal to the broadest possible audience make it feel more homogenous than I would like.

One of the best aspects of OneNote is that it is extensible. If it manages to draw a developer community to it, then it may evolve into something that will become part of the toolkit. This may be a step in that direction.

Update to OneNote Virtual PowerToy. Yesterday, I wrote about the marvelous new OneNote PowerToy by Darron Devlin. Evidently, some users had problems printing from Word. I m pleased to report that Darron has already posted an update to the OneNote driver that fixes the problem. Be… [Working Smart]

Putting the hours in- working on your craft

This got a lot of play earlier this month in my aggregator, but I only managed to get to it this weekend. It certainly lives up to its billing and Gaping Void now has a place in my aggregator.

Too much writing and thinking about creativity perpetuates a myth that creativity is some sort of innate binary characteristic–you either have it or you don’t. I much prefer a perspective that, regardless of your creative gifts, there is craft to be learned and developed. You can’t do anything about the raw material you were given at birth, but, as Macleod also points out, it is within your power to put the hours in. Reminds me of Jerry Pournelle’s classic advice on how to get his job.

Hard Truths from the Gaping Void.

A few months ago I stumbled upon Hugh Macleod’s Gaping Void weblog, enjoying his crazed cartoons and his jaundiced insights. He has one post that he keeps adding to that is just completely fricking brilliant, called “How to be Creative”. The original post is good, but he has a couple elaborations that are even better:

He has one observation that is straight out of the advice I hear over and over for new writers, most of whom are looking for some sort of silver bullet that will allow them to become successful without spending all that boring time with their ass in a chair doing the work:

3. Put the hours in.

Doing anything worthwhile takes forever. 90% of what seperates successful people and failed people is time and stamina.

This stuff is all good reading, and worth thinking about if you have any ambitions towards being creative – as an artist, as an entrepeneur, as a software developer, as a person.

Comment on Hard Truths from the Gaping Void [Evil Genius Chronicles]

Atom support for news aggregator in Manila and Radio UserLand

One more plus in “Radio”‘s camp. They are about to release atom support for their aggregator. I’m testing it now. It has handled most of the atom feeds I’ve tried. It still chokes on some, but that’s to be expected. More complications to my effort to choose my next blogging environment.

Beta: Atom support for news aggregator in Manila and Radio UserLand. We’ve got a new feature for testing: Atom support for the news aggregator in Manila and Radio UserLand. Before a general release, we would like to invite anyone interested in testing the changes.

You can find the instructions and post any feedback here: Radio UserLand (radio-dev) or Manila (manila-dev). [UserLand Product News]