Endless Knots

Eight years at the airport?

A colleague told me an astonishing statistic yesterday. One of the units of her multinational (sorry, I can't share its name and, no, it's not the one you might think) did a survey of how much time its professionals spend traveling. Including the end-to-end bits, meaning leaving the house, waiting at security, flight time, car rental or its equivalent plus travel to the destination, the average business person in said firm spends EIGHT YEARS OF HIS/HER LIFE ON THE ROAD!

The next statistic I'm looking for: how much of that time did the traveler find meaningful? Some people like traveling for the sheer solitude it brings; others, imagine, actually find the meetings they go to worthwhile.

Which brings the question I ask often: how many of the meetings you've traveled to recently were worth the trip? I'm traveling today - but it's only across town and I KNOW this one will be worthwhile (just in case the attendees are reading).

And thanks to the small but mighty band of greensters

Had an excellent conversation today at the Work Green, Work Virtually session at Enterprise 2.0. Slides will be posted. Used the stream of posts beginning here, continuing at The Content Economy, and then on to the flowchart from Michael Sampson as per below. We were joined by John Shea, a sport diver, who happens to be working for the company providing media services to the event. John has seen the death of coral reefs around the world, which he told me while we were setting up, so we asked him to say a few words. His contribution plus that of folks from Vanderbilt University, Canada, Washington, DC, and a few other places that I can't remember at the moment made for an unusually deep conversation. Thanks everyone. We collectively need to keep building lots of lookouts for this topic.

Bloggers at Taste

If any Newton locals were at Taste yesterday morning, that noisy group in the window was us, five bloggers plotting "What blogging brings to business," our panel this coming Tuesday, 2:15 PM, at Enterprise 2.0. Five = Bill Ives, Patti Anklam, Doug Cornelius, Cesar Brea et moi. Here's the plan:

1. We introduce ourselves: name, blog name, number of years slaving away at blogging, and profession (er, blogger?)

2. You introduce yourselves: name, blog name, profession/org affiliation

3. Instead of the obligatory panelist-by-panelist drone, we converse:

• Who do you blog for?
• What value has come to you from blogging?
• What topics are off-limits; which do you avoid?
• What's been your most popular post?
• Has blogging improved your writing?

4. We do pop quizzes. If you can think of any good questions, please comment.

Join us. This should be fun.

A start-up for "liquid gold"

Last weekend, Boston Globe's Sunday Magazine ran "The Story of My Start-up," a feature on five interesting start-ups in the area. Thrilled to see my friend Naomi Bar-Yam's Mother's Milk Bank of New England as one of them. Fascinating undertaking, she's got. When her first son was born at "only 4.5 pounds...he was in the NICU. Another mom didn't have enough milk, and I was the only mom with extra, so I shared. Then, about seven years ago, my dad was very sick. There had been anecdotal evidence that mother's milk can be palliative for cancer. I thought I would arrange for a milk bank to send him some, but I discovered there were none in New England. The first milk bank in the US was in Boston; it was downright embarrassing that there wasn't one [now]."

Determined to right the situation, Naomi is changing all that. Purpose of the Milk Bank is "to provide donor human milk to newborns in need by: collecting, pasteurizing, and dispensing donor human milk; educating the medical and general communities about indications for, benefits and use of donors human milk; and contributing to furthering our knowledge of donors human milk through research."

Human milk is often called "liquid gold" because of its color (gold tinged) and "the value of the irreproducible nutrients, antibodies, and growth factors babies receive with each nursing. Numerous studies prove the nutritional and immunologic qualities of human milk and support its use as a preventive treatment for many diseases," according to the Mother's Milk Bank site.

FYI. there's an interesting conversatioon going on at World Hall, where policy issues related to breastfeeding are being discussed in an open forum. Weigh in with your views on what actions employers, Congress, insurers, CDC and even the JHACO (Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations) should take to promote and protect breastfeeding and breastfeeders.

I encourage all my young nursing mother-friends to donate. A little bit of pumping goes a long way. Bravo, Naomi. I wish this had been around when I was nursing.

Holy holograms!

Stop whatever you're doing and watch this video from Cisco. I'd heard about the use of a hologram in a meeting a couple of years ago at Shell, where an executive was beamed in from hundreds of miles away for a conversation. Don't have time to do this justice but the future is here. On this video, you'll see Cisco's CEO on stage in Bangalore with two of his execs in San Jose, Calif. All on the same stage. And the whole thing is being broadcast over the Internet around the world. Musion is the company that's developed the technology. Incredible. I hope they're at Enterprise 2.0 next week here in Boston and I can see it live. Will report back if they have a demo running. Last year Cisco had its telepresence technology there.

Medical researchers to play nice in Boston

Kay Lazar's piece in this morning's Boston Globe is another worth the click: "Harvard medical researchers to pool work." For access to hundreds of millions in NIH grants over the next five years, the mano a mano among Harvard Medical School affiliated hospitals also will have to give sway to a new martial art: cooperation. Grant criteria mandate that fierce competitors work together on specific projects, forming always-on "communities of practice"  that cross organizational boundaries. The purpose of the arrangement is to "shorten the time it takes to turn discovery into treatment." Harvard Medical School hands out the allowances. NB: The grants represent only a portion of NIH research dollars available to the institutions but still it's a great start in putting our best medical minds together here in Boston:

There will be matchmakers to introduce scientists who have never met because they have been hunkered in their isolated research labs. A massive, centralized database will give Harvard's researchers instant access to one another's work.

..."There has always been a disincentive to collaborate," said Dr. Lee Nadler, codirector of Harvard's new Clinical and Translational Science Center, which will link researchers and allocate Harvard's grant money..

"If we succeed in doing what we are trying to do, then it will become far easier for studies that relate to specific diseases to be carried out for the maximum benefit of patients," he said. "We also will be training people to carry out this type of collaborative research in the future."

Last year, Johns Hopkins University was awarded one of the new grants from NIH in an earlier round of funding, and leaders there have since found collaboration to be a strong learning experience.

 

Does this make sense?

I just stopped at the grocery store to pick up three items for dinner. The checkout clerk started to put the items in a large paper bag at which point I said that I didn't need a bag. He looked at me strangely. "Only three items," I said. Then I realized that if I'd brought in my reusable bag, which was sitting in the back of the car, I'd have gotten a 5-cent rebate. Which I mentioned. He looked at me strangely again. So...because I didn't bring in the bag which I didn't need I didn't take a bag and thus didn't get my nickel rebate. Shaking head.

"When face time is a matter of life and death"

I was sitting in a meeting a few weeks ago when someone made the most powerful argument I've ever heard for virtual working: having to travel through armed conflict to get to a meeting. For those of us lucky enough not to be in war zones (I've lost track of how many wars are going on around the world - last I checked it was something like 50), we don't have to consider taking our lives in our hands when we go to a meeting. It got me thinking and I ended up writing "When face time is a matter of life and death" for The Industry Standard. I linked it back to the discussion we've had here on green teams. Here are the opening paragraphs:

"Many people have been killed going to meetings in Iraq.” It was an offhand remark made by a US military advisor in a casual conversation about virtual work -- its benefits, its pitfalls, its resisters, its committed participants. Until that moment, it had never before crossed my mind that traveling to a face-to-face meeting could be lethal.

Turns out Army commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken measures to reduce travel. “One of the first things I did here was set up a collaborative network to offset the fact that we couldn't travel easily or safely," Lieutenant General Jim Dubik explained in an email to me. "Needless to say, doing so contributed hugely to the coordination of our work.” Dubik is Commanding General of Multinational Security Transition-Iraq. Dubik’s work follows a decade-long history of Web 2.0 and other media experimentation in the US Army (see The Social General)...

Continue reading my Industry Standard article here.

 

Virtual Teams 2.0, 3.0, 4...at Enterprise 2.0

Coming to Enterprise 2.0 here in Boston in a few weeks? If so, please let me know and please come to our sessions. I'm involved with three, including this one, which I'm sharing with, guess who, Jeff Stamps, and is about, guess what, virtual teams current and future:

Virtual Teams 2.0, 3.0, 4...

Virtual teams have always been in the 2.0 world, adding content to their shared online spaces, carrying on conversations after the lights have gone out, trying out new media. But the explosion of 2.0 technologies - and the advent of a generation that knows more about how to work online than their bosses - has altered (and will continue) to alter the virtual team landscape. What are the simple ideas that can slice through the complexity facing virtual teams? How can they easily form networks? How can they navigate among the multiple organizations that they serve? Hear the latest from the people who coined the term "virtual teams."

Date: 6/12/2008
Time: 10:45 AM
Room: Carlton

The most influential people in IT

Delighted to find my friend John Halamka named #31 among eWeek's "The 100 Most Influential People in IT." He also plays a mean Japanese flute as per below. And at #38, my Facebook friend Andrew McAfee, who invented the term "Enterprise 2.0." And (I'm still going down the list), my friend Tom Davenport (#70), whose thinking keeps knocking down shibboleths; the intrepid Mass congressman, Ed Markey (#73), who was worrying about the Internet before most people puzzled over whether to capitalize the word or not (see this press release from our MassNet inaugural event in 1995 that he keynoted); Ross Mayfield (#74), co-founder of Social Text and a virtual friend; and Good to Great, etc. author Jim Collins (#87), whom we once shared the podium with at a Royal Dutch Shell Scenario event. Way to go, guys. Proving again that it's good to be a friend of mine - just kidding, just kidding....

Email is obsolete

Really? According to Bombay's Business Standard, "'Obsolete tools' like e-mail and instant messengers could act as roadblocks for the growth of web collaboration, say experts." Experts cited in this article come from some technology companies purveying different gadgets for getting along online so reader beware. Still, this notion that email is on its way out (first time I've heard it applied to IM, though) continues to pop up in odd places...not including the enthusiastic email defender I recently encountered in a workshop.

Help wanted: Chief Blogging Officer

To the burgeoning bureaucracy of chiefs add this one, from workforce.com: "Chief Blogging Officer Title Catching On in Corporations:"

For better or worse, it seems corporate blogging—and the title of chief blogger—is beginning to hit its stride. Companies such as Coca-Cola, Marriott and Kodak have recently recruited chief bloggers, with or without the actual title, to tell their stories and engage consumers.

... Geoff Livingston, CEO of Livingston Communications and blogger at the Buzz Bin, [said]: “The problem is that too many people focus on the actual tool: the blog,” he said. “What they need to focus on is the principles behind social media that make it work—like participating in a larger community works, and not controlling the conversation works.”

Make nice with your virtual team

Tagged by Ellen Offner (thanks): Elizabath Garone has a good one on managing virtual teams in WSJOnline, "Managers learn to bond with remote workers." Since, as we learned in the previous post, most organizations are bound to work this way soon (and many already do) worth reading in full. Here's what got me:

• "One way to avoid some of the common communication blunders among far-flung teams is to hire people who are ready to work in a virtual environment from day one."
• "Communicate each person's role and business objectives regularly, and establish agreed-upon ways to resolve conflicts and solve problems early on," says James Eicher, senior manager of organization effectiveness at NetApp Inc. and author of "Making the Message Clear. " Remote employees should be comfortable with voice over Internet protocol, or VOIP; video streaming; and instant messaging."
• " You have to put yourself in the shoes of the people you're working with. There is one of me and 10 of them," says IBM's Erik Bush, vice president of global delivery.

There's a green team in your future

Chartered Management Institute, a long-standing British research and membership organization (er, organisation), says that three-quarters of executives surveyed believe their workforce will conduct itself via virtual teams within a decade. The Guardian has a nice summary ("Wave goodbye to the nine to five, and say hello to the virtual enterprise") of Management Futures - The World in 2018 (March 2008) that you can download. Thanks, Chartered Management. Rich source of future thinking.

A report on the nature of employment in 2018 predicts an exodus from the traditional workplace caused partly by environmental pressure to reduce the carbon footprint of commuting and partly by the demographic pressure of an ageing population, with fewer employees able to avoid looking after older relatives, leading to a blurring of boundaries between family and care.

The hazards of Second Life

BusinessWeek.com has a good roundup - "The (Virtual) Global Office" - of company efforts to use Second Life (the virtual world where you too can be two people or three...) by Rachael King: They hold meetings that are simultaneously face-to-face and virtual, they recruit new talent, they collaborate, and sometimes things get out of hand:

Cisco is among companies that recruit in Second Life. "My extended team uses Second Life primarily to recruit new talent," says Andrew Sage, a marketing vice-president at Cisco, adding that Second Life is good for finding workers under the age of 25. Yet even for an executive as tech-savvy as Sage, using an avatar in Second Life can be challenging. Early on, during a recruitment seminar for resellers, Sage accidentally caused his avatar to fly away while making a presentation. "Needless to say, it wasn't ideal," Sage says.

I hope he made it back to terra firma, so to speak.

A matter of good Taste

Remember my rave about Taste? I had to find out more.

It won't be long until there's a major feature in The Times or Gourmet about these two. Or it may be in JAMA. Too good to be true but let's start with their ages - 23 - until the end of the month when first Nik Krankl turns 24 on the 24th and a week later Julia Tatum does. They're engaged.

Last week, Julia began her residency in psychiatry at Brigham & Women's Hospital here in Boston (third year of Harvard Medical School).

Two months ago, Nik bought Taste, the former Caffe Appassionatto, far and away the most beautiful coffee house in my hometown.

So how does someone (Nik) this young (when she's not at the hospital, Julia's writing the board, washing dishes, chatting up the customers) manage such a thing - and radically improve it in a few short weeks? Study journalism, manage six JP LIcks stores for a year and a half, write for a poker magazine, and come from a food family. "I'm no stranger," Nik says, as in his mother, Gail Silverton, owns Gelato Bar in LA, his aunt is the Nancy Silverton, pastry chef, restauranteur, and cookbook author, and his father, Manfred Krankl, owns Sine Qua Non Winery in Ventura, CA.

And Nik lurvvves coffee so much he "wants to roast," wants to "provide the service of roasting and how to prepare" the global bean "that wants to taste bad." Espresso is "the fragile one," he says, because it "takes coffee and puts it under a microscope."

Yesterday was a tasting day at Taste and when we arrived after 5, the place was still packed as a violinist (who was blocking "our" table, ahem) played.  Ah, the good old days at this location, when Sunday's meant coffee house concerts by jazz trios and guitarists. Only better.  Nik's pedigree shows - I celebrated with a double decaf espresso, served with a chocolate kiss and we shared a piece of coffee cake, my indulgence. Jeff had his regular cappuccino, which he reports as "excellent."

Look for us there. We're already regulars. Again.

Taste Coffee House, 311 Walnut St. Newtonville, MA 02460 (617) 332-6886

Stand-up for your meeting

Had the privilege of sitting in, er, standing up at a client's daily meeting. Three times a week, weather permitting, everyone in the organization gathers on the porch at 8:30 AM for a "stand-up." They go around in a circle, anyone with something to say saying it. Brief little reports, lots of chiding, and one frustrated person who couldn't get on the network arguing with the IT folks (I'm sure this never happens in your organization). On the days when they don't do the stand-ups, they do a conference call at the same time. Keeps the group in synch. Nice way to start the day. Try it (providing you work with people face-to-face).

"The" handbook for virtual teams

It's out. And it's got lots of useful information, says she, co-author of "The Virtual Networked Organization," the final chapter in this highly collaborative volume. You can order it here and read on for the press release.

Sad to see you go, BostonNow

Sorry to learn that BostonNow, the free local paper that had built its circulation to 119,000 in just a year, has shut down. According to the notice on the site, "rapidly deteriorating economic conditions" are the cause. JSONS, Journalism Students Online News Service, goes into more detail about the paper's financing:

Current financial problems faced by its prime investor, an Iceland based company called Bauger-Group, triggered BostonNOW's closing. Last week, Bauger-Group sold all of its media holdings to Dagsbrun Media, which in turn shut down BostonNOW.

We here at Endless Knots, being me in thoroughly self-referential form, are particularly sad as I'd been named a "featured blogger" on the site, meaning I was listed on its homepage. Just a week ago, they'd contacted me, asking for pictures and permission to use my name and image in an advertising campaign.

The exposure was great. Every day, I posted here and on BostonNow, which meant that I had even more readers. A number of my posts were chosen for reprinting in the paper as well. So good for us bloggers and quite sad for those working at the paper.

You'll be missed. And thanks, editors, for all the efforts.

Bad in math? Take art!

Lucky me. I had the chance to spend some time the other night with my old friend and networker extraordinaire, Lisa Kimball. Lisa’s been working of late with Plexus Institute, purveyors of the concept of “positive deviance.” In a nutshell, this approach to organizational change focuses on what goes right rather than its dreaded evil cousin. Plus, instead of introducing massive initiatives from the top, these folks find those pools of ingenuity in the organization, coaching staff to coach others in very simple interventions that solve seemingly intractable problems. In other words, do-it-yourself because...those who do know best.

Here’s a video that makes the point: Jasper Palmer, for whom “The Palmer Method” has been named, came up with a simple fix for a mounting problem. As staff at Albert Einstein Hospital in Philadelphia began using isolation gowns and gloves in all situations where needed, their trash problem grew exponentially. Some numbers help demonstrate the magnitude of trash growth: from 6000 gowns to 120,000. That’s a lot of paper and latex to get rid of. Mr. Palmer figured out the fix. Take a look.

Now what has this to do with the title of this post? The principles of positive deviance remind me of some beliefs about education that we witnessed working with a child who was doing poorly in math while excelling in art. The parents of said child were advised to tutor her in math. They chose a different approach: they amped up her art education and guess what? The following year, she got As in physics.

Circling back to positive deviance: find what’s working well in your organization and spread the news laterally. Identify areas where processes are good and invest in making them exemplary. The laggardly areas are sure to follow.

Powerless Point

Last week, I was cleaning up a presentation ("Virtual Teams in the Age of the Network") that I gave last Fall at the Brookings Executive Education program for a new one I'm giving there next Tuesday. It was, let me see, a frustrating (no), aggravating (closer),  *!#$%^***!! (getting there) experience.

For reasons known only to some programmer (not even a developer) who's probably cashed out by now for life on a private Caribbean island, I could not change the footer. Page numbers would not appear. Bullet symbols would not convert from vertical lines to small dots. Line spacing would not reduce.  Please don't send me suggestions as I didn't just fall off the PPT turnip truck. I tried saving with a new file name, copying content of troublesome slides to new slides, changing slide master, etc. We all know the tricks. A colleague with a PC (yes, I'm Mac, he's PC) - after struggling as well - was finally able to make most of the changes.

So when I was asked to speak at the Boston KM Forum, I decided to go slideless. Just stand up and speak. True, the topic lent itself to addressing the audience directly: "Moving Beyond Web 2.0 Resistance." Which ultimately is not about technology but about people, ye ole' "90% people, 10% technology" rule.

When Larry Chait introduced me, he said I would not be using slides. A hearty round of applause followed. And as I spoke, I sensed that people were actually listening, as in making eye contact, nodding their heads, responding when I asked questions. Note to other speakers out there: IT FELT GREAT!

Doug Cornelius live-blogged my talk which Paul Levy has responded to with "Throw off the crutches of ppt!" - where he gives a really good list of reasons why Powerpoint may not be exactly the most powerful way to engage an audience. Read them both. And thanks, guys. Maybe we can teach a class about how to give a presentation without slides.

One last thought: Edward Tufte gives a very good seminar (and has written an essay called "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint," in which he gives some excellent suggestions for how to use PPT if you must). I attended it a few years ago and, humbly, feel that when I do use slides, they're the better for it.

Or so I thought, Superpages - don't cancel Ticket #2280341

Being an apologetic person, I just wrote to Superpages, admitting my mistake about the time stamp problem.

AND THE AUTO-MESSAGE THAT CAME BACK FROM THEIR SERVER HAS THE WRONG TIME ON IT!!!!!

So now I've solved the problem for the NetAge generated messages...but not for the ones coming from my email provider. Everyone else who loves me: please send me a message right now so I can prove, yet again, that this really truly is not my problem.

I mean I really goofed - cancel Ticket #2280341

Forty lashes with a wet URL for me. Or I'll take crow with a side of crow.

I did get a call this afternoon from Nadim, a supervisor with Superpages. He said he was calling to update me and that he'd tested my mail and found no problem. I quickly accused him of being on a Windows machine, but he said no, that he was using Mac Mail 3.2, and, for the record, what version was I using? Wow, I'm really out of date, Mac Mail 2.1.3, I said.

So I quickly searched for an update (which I'd done earlier in the day) and alas nothing more recent. How could that be? Turns out he was on a machine running Leopard, the new, as of last October, Mac OS (operating system, Em, Jude, and friends). Well, I'm not on Leopard (I'm on Tiger), I said, and not planning to be on Leopard. (Holy Cats, I thought).  Both of us were troubled that even if he could clear the problem with Leopard, why was it still happening when messages originated on their server? All in all, it was a rather unsatisfactory call, we agreed, and Nadim said there'd be another update tomorrow. (He also said he'd heard about my blog posts - ah, bloggers, we are powerful after all.)

I felt bad when we hung up. What if it was an email version issue after all and I'd caused all this fuss for nothing? I decided to search yet again, something I've done before, only this time I chose the very canny terms "mac mail timestamp problem."

First hit's a charm. According to Philip-Elmer DeWitt, there's a known bug in Mac Mail that creates my very problem!

Mail is plagued with a bug that users have been complaining about, to no avail, since the release of Tiger: when it receives mail on a POP account, it stamps it as incoming in Greenwich Mean Time, no matter what time zone you've set your clock.

Here's the workaround:

In Mail, go to the View pulldown menu, select Columns, click Date Sent and unclick Date Received. For reasons unexplained, it now does the right thing, more or less.

How many years has it been since Tiger was released? Geeze, guys, it's not as if Mail is an obscure app that nobody uses.

Good point, Philip. Thanks for the tip because I followed the instructions and alas it cleared the problem.

Thus, my apologies to Verizon and Idearc.

Now how to feed this info back so the next poor person who experiences this can be spared my  pain? Apparently this known bug is a Great Big Secret. The Apple Support people I spoke with any number of times didn't know this nor did Derrick, the great guy at the Apple Genius Bar last week, who did clean up some other problems for me (thanks). And certainly poor little Idearc and its ex-parent Verizon didn't know. What's the knowledge management solution to spreading this little bit of critical info?

And the quandry remains: why did this happen first when I switched to Verizidearc, affecting all my mail and then, with the  recent time change, affecting only mail coming from their servers? Methinks there might still be a bit of a problem there. For now, though, I'm happy. (And feeling a little silly.)

"Something will be calling you shortly"

Latest from my new friends at Idearc, requesting the long headers for the umpteenth time:

Hi Jessica,

We are actively looking into this issue for you. I have one request of you at this time, can you please send me the long headers of the three messages that came in from Superpages Hosting Support. I know that you have already sent it but I would like fresh info.

Something will be calling you shortly to assist you.

Thanks,

[Beleagured tech person]

Ok, I goofed - it's not Verizon's fault, no, no

So it turns out that Verizon bears no responsibility for my email problems. They spun off Idearc and now only market Idearc's email and web hosting. A friendly fellow with the title of "Executive Customer Relations" responded to my email to Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg with this: "I will refer your issue to their CEO, Kathy Harless' office for handling."

You can write the next sentence yourself. Nothing has happened.

Except for this: continuing email from Idearc's Tech Support explaining the difference to me between GMT 0 and GMT -4, telling me that I don't know how to attach documents to email, asking me for the same long headers of emails that I've sent multiple times....AARRGGHHH!!!

But there's a bright side. I'm gathering terrific material for an article (never mind all these blog posts).

One last thing: I've looked at Idearc's site and cannot figure out what this company actually does. Can you? "Idearc consists primarily of assets, liabilities, businesses and employees engaged in the delivery of our multi-platform suite of advertising products."

If anyone has a suggestion for a good email/web hosting solution for small business, please let me know.

Ivan Seidenberg, hello? Ticket #2280341

Periodically, I have to bow in the direction of Tim Berners-Lee. The web makes it so easy to do what I am about to, taken from the Verizon site:

"For millions of customers every day, a Verizon network -- wired or wireless -- is the gateway to communication, and our fundamental mission is to make that connection as powerful and reliable as possible."   

Verizon CEO, Ivan Seidenberg

Unfortunately, Mr. Seidenberg, I'm not one of those lucky customers. We switched our email provider to Verizon about 18 months ago. There were problems, as in I randomly couldn't receive certain people's emails - like Harris, not a known spammer, at least to his friends and colleagues where he is highly regarded as a board chair, former CEO, dean, and all-around helpful person. But could I receive email from Harris, even when I wrote to him and he replied?

I made many calls to Verizon about this, of course, where I was repeatedly asked to send the email I hadn't received. No comment.

Eventually, I wrote to Mr. Seidenberg <ivan.g.seidenberg@verizon.com> and, within 24 hours, four vice presidents had called me but alas the problem remained unsolved.

Many calls later, a savvy tech figured it out and all was well...except for the other problem:  since switching to Verizon, the time-stamp on my email has been set to Greenwich Mean Time. Doesn't sound like much of a problem until someone refers you to the time they sent you an email and you have to do the math. You shouldn't have to do math to read your email or, the newest permutation of this, go on a treasure hunt to find your new mail. Because as of daylight savings time this year, now everyone's email comes through time-stamped properly, everyone except for the people at NetAge.

I, by the way, am the only NetAge person suffering from this. What this means is that my email doesn't show up in sequence in the queue, and if I skip around, reading the most important email first, for shame, then I forget about other email unless I reorder the queue every time I want to read. And do the math for the sending time of the NetAge email. Do the math, categorize, and then I can read my mail. "Powerful and reliable."

Last Tues, Verizon promised me it would be resolved within 24-48 hours. On Thurs, Verizon promised to resolve it within 24 hours.   It's Sunday. I've called Apple Support to make sure it's not a problem with my machine, gone to the Apple Genius bar with my machine, reinstalled my mail application, updated all my software, and checked every setting known to woman.

Ivan, my problem is coming from your server. Fix it, please. Ticket #2280341.

Monique: "It wasn't supposed to turn out this way"

My friend Monique Doyle Spencer has another doozie in today's Boston Globe, Working women, where did we go so wrong?

When my kids were little, my "sister" Judy came to visit. Sister is in quotes because by birth neither of us legally has a sister, which both of us regretted, so after about 20 years of friendship, we adopted each other. Judy was sitting at the kitchen table and I was cooking food to take to my mother in the nursing home (situated one good cry's worth away). I don't remember all the details anymore - but the weekly cooking was only one responsibility (my mother hated the food there so...). I was working full-time, the girls were perhaps 5 and 7 (no further explanation needed), Jeff and I had a looming book deadline, and on and on and on. "You never take anything away," she said. "You just keep adding things."

This is what Monique's piece is about. There are too many pieces for the puzzle yet we keep jamming more in. Thanks, Monique, as always:

IT'S ALMOST the end of National Women's Month and I have a big confession: I think we women ruined the workplace.

Ouch. I don't want to feel that way, but take a look. Once upon a time, when a woman took a professional job, she worked a 60-hour week on average. Her boss was a man and she thought she had to prove herself. She didn't make any more money than the guys who worked 45-hour weeks. She thought this was the glass ceiling, so she started working 65 hours instead. Still, she made no more money. She did, however, get promoted to head of her department. She was the lowest-paid department head in history, so she worked even harder.

Here's the honest truth: Her boss didn't even know what she made. He didn't care, either. She never felt secure enough to negotiate her own raise, so she waited for somebody to notice. They never did. So the extra $10,000 a year that would have made a world of difference to her family never came home. It stayed at the company where it meant absolutely nothing to anybody...

        Monique Doyle Spencer is author of "The Courage Muscle: A Chicken's Guide to Living with Breast Cancer."

"Making cross-border teams work"

I've carried on before about off-the-top of the head lists of how to make virtual teams work. The one I'm about to refer to is not that.

Thanks to Leading Virtually, I came across Making cross-border teams work, an excellent article by Anik K. Gupta and Haiyan Wang in The Times of India, that provides some general principles about what the authors call "global business teams." The article doesn't cover the entire laundry list of concerns but it articulates three very well: team charter, team composition, and team process. If you're troubling over how to make these complex distributed entities more effective, satisfying, and creative, take a look.

 
   

Geek Doctor on OrgScope

Pleased to report that John Halamka over at GeekDoctor posts today about our OrgScope in his Cool Technology of the Week series:

Understanding the six degrees of separation of healthcare in Eastern Massachusetts can be challenging with our numerous providers, private payers, public payers, and academic affiliations...

I found this hyperbolic viewer [OrgScope] much easier than an org chart for navigating a large number of complex relationships and look forward to the potential uses of this technology for visualizing our increasing connectedness in healthcare...

Over the past few months here at NetAge, we've taken a stab at mapping the relationships among the complex players in the Boston Healthcare network. Spaghetti, for sure, but since all of us here in Boston must somehow navigate that bowl of pasta, we're hopeful that these initial maps will contribute to making it easier for those working in healthcare here and for those of us consuming it. Thanks, Geek Doctor.

If you click through, you can play with the maps. This is but one picture. You can move it around, putting different institutions at the center, turn links on and off, and run analyses in a variety of ways. There's also an inside look at the organization chart of a fictitious large enterprise and Boston-Area Healthcare Network, a presentation that explains what we're up to with this stuff. Have fun with it and let me know what you think.

From West Newton to Lund to Christchurch

Mr. Sampson has taken the next step with the "Do we need face time?" checklist. Blogged "green teams" first here near Boston, which was picked up and expanded via blog in Sweden, and now has up-leveled again in the countryside outside Christchurch in New Zealand.

Michael's drawn a decision tree that logically steps through the 11 questions in the current checklist. If this, then that, good for the cognitive type that functions this way for sure - and excellent for stimulating a group discussion.

Take a look and send suggestions. My first: maybe add a "benefits" branch if you make the choice to travel? I sometimes write a lot while traveling, which is an incentive.

The entire "When to Travel Flow Chart" is at this link; here's a snippet:

A passing of quality

Heaven must be running very well these days.

For those of us who started reading management books back in the '70s (true), we learned a few names quickly: Deming, Drucker, Juran. All three lived very long lives, Mr. Juran's the longest. He died on Friday at 103, leaving his wife of 81 years, Sadie. Together, these three defined  the way we think about organizations, what they do, why they do it, and how they accomplish their goals.

Each time we use the word quality, mention defects, allude to Six Sigma, or most familiarly, talk about the 80/20 rule, we're drawing on Mr. Juran's work. His thinking about cross-functional management has had a big impact on our work. We wrote about these ideas extensively during the '90s.

I wasn't blogging when Peter Drucker died in 2005 (Mr. Deming died just after Tim Berners-Lee gifted the world with the web). Had I been, that would have been a very long post as he was the only one of the three whom I knew. That the last of the three pioneers has died is some kind of marker and perhaps a call to discover the new breakthrough organizational thinkers among us. Some quiet voice inside is whispering that they're not to be found only in the business schools or in the commercial world, perhaps not even writing business books.

Come on, Comcast - seat hogging at the FCC hearing?

Thanks to Scott Kirsner (on the story, as usual), you too can shake your head at Comcast's tactics when the FCC came to Harvard last week for a hearing about who controls the Internet. As per Heads Up, Netizens below, the agency that has some regulatory powers over the Internet (it can't really control the whole thing now, can it, the Internet being global and all) came to Boston to hear first-hand about Comcast's transmission policies. In short, Comcast has apparently blocked BitTorrent's use (so many stories that I'm just putting in the Google search link).

Well, now. It appears that Comcast hired people off the street to fill seats at the FCC hearing so that the public (that's us) couldn't sit in the them. Click through to the Portfolio story by Sam Gustin and see a priceless picture. Here's one telling paragraph:

Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury said that the company paid some people to arrive early and hold places in the queue for local Comcast employees who wanted to attend the hearing.

Speaks for itself.

And while we're on the subject of Comcast: last week, as I reported in Under the desk, our Comcast cable service went down. Not completely. Not predictably. Just the kind of frustrating experience that makes me want to sell the house, buy a farm, and go off the grid entirely. The finger-pointing between Comcast and Verizon, our website and email provider, was skit-worthy. That said, I had one conversation with Eric at Comcast Tech Support that bears reporting. In trying to diagnose my problem, which included not being able to send attachments, I suggested my sending two emails to him, one with an attachment, one without.

"We can't send or receive email," he said.

"You're kidding," said I.

"I'm not," said Eric.

"Comcast Tech Support doesn't have email? Isn't that kind of pathetic?"

"Our lockdown policies go waaaay beyond pathetic," he replied.

My condolences to Comcast Tech Support (Eric did figure it out, by the way, thanks).

And Comcast: tell us who made the decision to hog the seats. And please show that person/those people the door.

"The lovely experience"

When I relaunched this blog nine months ago, I promised to write about life as an independent consultant. I know there are others here who’ve chosen the same crazy path - and I know there are young people reading who are considering it. I haven’t done a very good job of writing about this so far as I’ve felt some conflict. Frankly, sometimes it’s great and sometimes it’s...

That said, this week has been one of the better ones. It’s been a mix of rat-a-tat-tat unexpectedly good meetings, contract reviews (love the plural there), comfortable travel (yes, I really said that) for a keynote with an unusually warm company, and then back to Boston for a stimulating day spent with a “collaborative learning community of business leaders and [university-affiliation deleted] researchers.”

I was pretty tired when I went into my study last night to shut down my machine, but took that last look at the old inbox. There I found this note from a client (posted with permission) that makes the tired worth it. Young 'uns: if you choose this path, don’t expect to receive this kind of feedback all the time - and I realize this may appear self-serving - but read the final sentence and tell me whether you feel as I do: that this is how we all want “work” to feel:

On the plane last night, I was reflecting on what a wonderful feeling it was yesterday - exhilarated exhaustion - after our very successful conference.  The excellent program you facilitated for our team will undoubtedly be a big part of the satisfaction ratings I am confident we will receive.  I was especially impressed with the really effective - and relevant - combination of practical, pragmatic tips and powerful philosophy to guide how we build and sustain our organizational teams.  As you so aptly inferred from observing us in action, we are an organization that deeply believes in the importance of achieving great results AND in achieving those results through means that reinforce and build our culture.  We have so much capital in the minds and hearts of our dedicated colleagues, and your work yesterday is already helping us to better cultivate that valued resource in service to our customers.

THANK YOU!!!

On a more personal note, I have so enjoyed our collaboration and greatly look forward to future opportunities...Thanks again for the lovely experience of working with you.  Somehow, it makes the word 'work' quite inappropriate, and that is about as good as it can get!

Sitescape goes to Novell

For those who follow the business of the collaboration/communities of practice/virtual teaming business, Novell has acquired Sitescape as per the Feb 13, 2008, press release. And for those with a long memory, Sitescape got its start in the mid-90s and came to wider attention when it acquired AltaVista (now owned by Overture Services), the first truly powerful search engine and my fave for many years, from Compaq, which had acquired it when Compaq swallowed Digital Equipment Corporation, home to the engineers who invented AltaVista.

Very good Karma

Photo from Boldfacers site

Our friends Phuni and Wangchuk Meston, author of Comes the Peace: My Journey to Forgiveness, are the Boldfacers in this week's edition of the Boston online publication. The article is touching and so is the video - not to mention the beautiful pictures of the two of them. Here's a little excerpt but be sure to click through for the whole, incredible story of these two inspirations:

By the time Daja and Phuni Meston met and fell in love, they had been through slavery, monasteries, abandonment and war; in short, the stuff of epic films. But this was not fiction but fact, not plot but destiny.

They own Karma Boutique in Newton, far away from the south Indian refugee camp where Phuni spent her childhood and what might as well be a planet away from where Daja grew up—in a Nepalese monastery, where his mother left him as a toddler and where he became an ordained monk at 16. No, Newton, draped in double-mocha lattes, Range Rovers and couture cocktail sheaths, is easily the last spot Phuni and Daja imagined finding meaning. But there you go. Life’s a trip that way. 

Anything but Standard

For a long time after it ceased to publish, I continued to peruse the airport magazines stands (the ones near the gate where issues are free for the ride) looking for The Industry Standard. Its appearance a decade ago on the publishing scene was a grand marker of the dot-com era and its reappearance yesterday, albeit in a different, let's say, 21st-century format, with its focus on "prediction markets," offers an interesting twist.

We won't be able to pick up the magazine at the airport but we will be able to read it online, where in addition to good old tech reporting and opinion, it promises also to tap "The Wisdom of Crowds." James Surowiecki's book by that name points to a favorite topic of ours - that collective intelligence, group smarts, is/are  generally of a higher quality of discernment than any single individual can produce and that such thinking can probably predict what's coming up.

All of this means that "prediction markets" will be a prime feature of the new Standard. Readers can participate in online "bets" about what's going to fly and what's going to crash in the technology world. Don't worry - it's not really a bet and it's all legal, being virtual and all. Take a look and you'll see.

Watch for this news to whip around the blogs and take a look at Betsy Schiffman's piece in Wired.com's "It's Baaaaaack: The Industry Standard returns:"

The Industry Standard, the web 1.0 bible, launched a decade ago, in 1998. In two short years, the magazine set a publishing record for selling 7,558 advertising pages. At its peek, page count for the magazine grew as high as 300, but its business collapsed along with the dot-com bubble. IDG bought the its assets in bankruptcy court for roughly $1 million, and the brand has pretty much sat dormant ever since.

"We found that the brand had quite a bit of equity left," Butcher says. "People remembered what the brand stood for before. Still, there's obviously going to be a new generation of people who have no idea what it is."

Where's the chicken?

I'll save the recipe for another post but Sundays are Romertopf Chicken day at our house. For those poor souls who have deprived themselves the joy of cooking (oops, taken, can't call my cookbook that), the Romertopf is a clay cooker that one soaks before using. Then whatever goes inside the cooker steams and bakes all at once. Vegetarians and vegans - you too can have delicious meals cooked this way. No animal products required.

Chez nous, we love Romertopf Chicken. Even my veg daughter admits that her yearning for it may be the meal that breaks her.

So yesterday, a trip to the grocery store to gather the ingredients (root veggies and chicken). Then in a rare act of culinary pre-preparedness, I decided to get everything ready, do yoga, then cook. Things were progressing quite well, I was admiring the parsnips, loving the potatoes...and then went to the fridge to get the chicken. I'd purchased a brand I'd been eyeing for a while, Pollo Rosso (more than you could ever want to know at that link unless you're thinking of going into the biz), raised the Italian way, organically, of course, so I thought I'd try it for a special occasion (which turned south as per the previous post). There was only one such chicken left, it was ridiculously expensive for a chicken, as in perhaps $7/pound, but given the special circumstances, I sprang for it.

But alas no chicken. Knowing that anything is possible, I checked the car. The freezer. The potato bin. The utility room where we keep the dog food. Then I called in my hubby. While he (and his gender) are not widely known for finding things in the fridge, he did a thorough investigation and alas he confirmed the complete lack of chicken in our house.

Back to the store with my receipt in hand and alas, being Whole Foods with their classy team approach to customer service, a young woman quickly joined my case, looked up the "left behinds," and indeed found a data entry for my chicken. Off she charged toward the meat department, me scurrying behind - note: I'm a fast walker but jeez this woman was nearly running - and while she slipped behind the meat counter, I went back to the display case where my chicken had first lived. There she was, all $18.34 of her.

Then the mad dash back to the customer service counter with the young woman. She now had my receipt in her hand and I, in a rush myself as my yoga window was narrowing, asked if it was OK for me to leave. Just a minute, she said, as she took another member of the team off to the side. They did some intense whispering, which concerned me (did I look really crazy?) but then, they were whipping out another set of documents. "For your inconvenience," a young man with a button that said "team leader" said. Next I knew, I had a $10 gift certificate to Whole Foods in my hands.

Nice but I'm still thinking it was my fault. I'd asked for paper not plastic (deliberately had not brought my own bags as we needed the paper bags to recycle our newspapers - what's wrong with this picture?), which meant I hadn't noticed the plastic bag into which they'd put the chicken. Maybe the bagger failed to put it in my cart, maybe I'd ignored it while loading the car...but in any event, I'm $10 richer in Whole Foods dollars.

Checklist for green teams - beta version

The folks over at The Content Economy led by Oscar Berg's efforts (sparked by my post, "Carbon neutral teams") are working on a checklist for "green teams." Do you really need to meet face-to-face or will virtual meeting via conference call or videoconference work? When you do travel, what small gestures can you make that also reduce CO2 emissions? What can you do right this minute, today, to contribute to wiser use of our precious natural resources (ah-hem, always turns off your computer, perhaps)?

After brainstorming with his colleagues (they met face-to-face in Stockholm, he took the train from Lund in the south of Sweden), Oscar has posted their first list on their blog in the hopes that others will comment. Let's call this the begining of a collaborative process of creating a checklist that we all can use to make wiser decisions about how we meet. Check it out and add your thoughts there. Great work, you guys! (For the record, I don't "know" Oscar at all; we've never even exchanged emails but our mutual interest in this topic has sparked this creative undertaking via our blogs.)

And in the interest of getting as many people to think about this as possible, I'm poaching their list right here as well. Please think about what Oscar and his colleagues have come up with and make some comments, which we can share back and forth among blogs:

1. Start with yourself and where you are – think of how you can reduce the CO2 emissions that you cause at work (we already assume that you think of what you can do at home). Here are some of all the things you can do:
   
   - Turn off your computer when not using it – and unplug the power adapter
   - Drink water on tap (filtered if necessary) instead of drinking bottled water
   - When you go to meetings nearby - take the bike, public transportation by train or bus, or share a car
   - When you stay at hotels - shower instead of taking baths, reuse your towels, choose a hotel with a climate policy…
   - When you need to eat - choose seasonal fruits for the fruit basket, walk to the nearest restaurant, eat locally produced food…
2. Ask yourself when a face-to-face meeting that requires travelling is really necessary - and when it’s not. Reflect on and question your own behaviour – are you sometimes travelling because you like it or get a feeling that you are an important person when doing so?
3. If you need to meet but not necessarily face-to-face, ask yourself if any of there are other ways to meet and communicate than by a face-to-face meeting in real life - phone conference, instant messaging, group chat, web conferencing…
4. If a face-to-face meeting is really necessary, is it an option to meet virtually? Video conferencing, virtual meeting place (Second Life)…
5. If you really need to meet face-to-face in real life, check if you can meet at a location where as few of the meeting attendees as possible have to travel to the meeting, thereby shortening the total distance travelled by the meeting participants. Also question what persons really need to participate in the meeting (identify and try to stop meeting professionals from attending).
6. If you need to travel yourself to the meeting, check what transportation options you have at hand. Try to choose the means of transportation that produces the least CO2 emissions but still offers a reasonable travel time and cost – and be sure to include the cost for any CO2 emissions in the cost! If it takes a few hours longer by train than by plane – can you motivate taking the train if you can work during the travel?
7. If possible, always try to compensate for the CO2 emissions that you cause by traveling. You can calculate how much CO2 emissions you produce and how much you should pay on the CarbonNeutral Company’s web site: http://www.carbonneutral.com/pages/businesscalc.asp
8. Finally, be open and proud about your achievements when it comes to minimizing CO2 emissions. Tell others that you choose not to travel to a meeting because you did not find it necessary to meet and that you solved it with other means of communication instead, that you walked instead of taking a cab to the nearby meeting, that you chose to go by train instead of flying, and so on. It will not only show that you care about the environment, but also that you are a responsible and caring person in general. It builds trust. Don't be afraid of how other people might react. For some, it can be an eye-opener and they might be impressed with your reasoning and behaviour, and eventually they will start changing their own behaviour. Others might be offended since it might cause bad conscience. But whatever kind of reaction you will get, telling others about your choices will help move things in the right direction.

"A credible, persuasive case"

From time to time, we receive nice notes from our clients. A recent one from the senior executive of a very large global organization made us feel especially good. So I'm crowing a little. Indulge me, please:

Dear Jessica and Jeff --

Thank you for taking the time to lead a stimulating discussion about the transformational power of teams and networks at the [organization's name] Knowledge Management conference.

The insights you presented added tremendous value to our efforts to be the intellectual hub of [organization's name] Knowledge Management proponent. You made a credible, persuasive case for reinforcing hierarchy through networks of teams.

I appreciate the extensive work you're done with [organization's name] over the years and look forward to continuing our relationship.

Sincerely...

And back to work. Made our day.

Simulating work in the B-schools

Thoughtful piece by Francesca Di Meglio in Business Week on business schools using online simulations with students: "Virtual Workplaces in the Classroom." With students who've grown up gaming - and clever technology available, the B-schools are introducing simulations for hands-on learning. (Click for "Business Education, Enhanced with Technology," a slide show showing how simulations, complete with photos of students using them - kudos to folks who put this together).<