The Cloudworker’s Creed

October 23, 2008 By

In which we offer up a lyrically-hyperlinked (and determinedly purple) paean to the Future of Work. Even as economic storm clouds gather, a grimly pragmatic worker archetype is floating in on that other sort of cloud, which just came off beta status. Advance apologies to readers on a low-fat diet. Sometimes I just want to cook adjective-loaded long sentences.

The telecommuter is dead; meet the cloudworker (I made up the term for a contest). Commuting being an artifact of the work-life style of the Organization Man, the term telecommuter absolutely deserves to be retired in favor of one that captures the richness of what is actually going on. The cloudworker is the prototypical information worker of tomorrow. He overachieves or coasts remotely, collaborates or backstabs virtually, and delivers his gold or garbage to a shifting long-tail micro-market defined only by his own talents or lack thereof. The cloudworker manages personal microbrand equity and network social capital rather than a career. Over a lifetime, through recessions and bubbles, he navigates fluidly back and forth between traditional paycheck employment, slash-work and full, untethered-to-health-insurance free agency.

Cloudworker

Cloudworker

To paraphrase William Gibson, the cloudworker is already here; he is just unevenly distributed in the workforce.

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Mastering the Hype Cycle by Fenn and Raskino

October 16, 2008 By

You know you’ve got an interesting idea on your hands if it helps you build a fairly compelling case that the Amish are more sophisticated meta-innovators than Fortune 100 CEOs. Mastering the Hype Cycle by Jackie Fenn and Mark Raskino of Gartner, manages to do that about a third of the way through. Now, the Hype Cycle (the Wikipedia entry is pretty decent) is one of those intuitive and obvious-seeming ideas that makes you wonder (with 20-20 hindsight), did that actually have to be invented? (answer: yes it did). It’s been Powerpoint fodder for a few years now, and I’ve used the thing myself, to justify proposals. You can think of it as the older, bigger, badder brother of Godin’s Dip. If you aren’t familiar with it, it is a data-validated curve that looks like the picture below, and captures the typical pattern of hype associated with an innovation as it diffuses through the economy:

Hype Cycle (from Wikipedia, Creative Commons license)

Hype Cycle (from Wikipedia, Creative Commons license)

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The Headcount Myth and the Value of Overbooking

October 7, 2008 By

Fourth quarter, when a young information worker’s thoughts turn lightly to thoughts of headcount. I’ve argued before that the idea that headcount (a.k.a HC in managerese) measures information worker bandwidth is a myth. The interplay of strengths and the ambiguity of definition of information work conspire to make it so. Headcount persists as a fixture in resourcing discussions because it signals relative priorities (and because we haven’t found anything better). So far. Here I’ll argue for a far better way to optimally use human bandwidth: true overbooking via continuous planning, coupled with strategic quitting. First, let’s understand why headcount is a dumb measure of resource capacity and bandwidth, using one of my famous drawings. This one shows how 3 different workers (assume they are equally valuable) might react to 3 different loading conditions, and how much they can drive themselves before it becomes too much and their capacity “overflows.” Think of capacity overflow as “brain muscle failure.”

The Headcount Myth

The Headcount Myth

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The 10 Immutable Laws of Nanoeconomics

October 1, 2008 By

I am about to go all Hammurabi on you and deliver unto you a 10-law summary model of the economy that is taking shape around you at a frenetic pace today: the nanoneconomy. I call it that because its fundamental behavior is determined by the behavior of the human individual rather than the firm (the practical unit of analysis in microeconomics). Many of the dominant themes of this blog — virtual geography (aka globalization) the future of economics, the changing nature of work, and the role of the individual in the economy, all came together for me last week as I pondered the lessons of the political-economy (I love that archaic term) train wreck that is the US Congress’ bailout plan for Wall Street (and Main Street, we are being told). Let me transcribe my tablets for you. For fun, I am calling these laws immutable, but I hope some of you treat this as a mutable blog-meme discussion of the economy, and propose your own amendments.

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A Generational War (Guest Post on Enterprise 2.0 Blog)

September 29, 2008 By

I just posted a piece titled Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War as my first guest post on the Enterprise 2.0 blog. Go check it out. Post your comments here if you like, since the E2.0 folks don’t have open comments. Here’s an excerpt:

You’d think Knowledge Management (KM), that venerable IT-based social engineering discipline which came up with evocative phrases like “community of practice,” “expertise locater,” and “knowledge capture,” would be in the vanguard of the 2.0 revolution. You’d be wrong. Inside organizations and at industry fora today, every other conversation around social media (SM) and Enterprise 2.0 seems to turn into a thinly-veiled skirmish within an industry-wide KM-SM shadow war. I suppose I must be a little dense, because it took not one, not two, but three separate incidents before I realized there was a war on. Here’s what’s going on: KM and SM look very similar on the surface, but are actually radically different at multiple levels, both cultural and technical, and are locked in an undeclared cultural war for the soul of Enterprise 2.0. And the most hilarious part is that most of the combatants don’t even realize they are in a war. They think they are loosely-aligned and working towards the same ends, with some minor differences of emphasis. So let me tell you about this war and how it is shaping up. Hint: I have credible neutral “war correspondent” status because I was born in 1974.

Check out the rest of the piece. I admit I am being deliberately provocative in this piece to a certain extent. Given how long my pieces tend to be, I need some spice to engage a new set of readers!

Crowdsourcing and The Wisdom of the Crowds

September 25, 2008 By

When my review copy of Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing arrived in the mail, I figured I’d use the opportunity to finally finish my half-read copy of James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds (2004) and do a two-in-one review. It took a good deal longer to write than I expected, mainly because I kept getting distracted by other connections I wanted to explore, which threatened to turn this post into an extended and discursive riff on all sorts of other subjects. I finally firmly trimmed off the wayward thoughts and put them into other post drafts, so luckily for you, this is a relatively focused two-for-one book review.

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Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

September 18, 2008 By

[This detailed, chapter-by-chapter précis of Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions is a guest post by George Gibson, a colleague of mine at Xerox. George originally posted it on our internal blogs as a series, and I found it so much fun to read, I asked if I could repost it on ribbonfarm. So here you go.]

Chapter 1: The Truth About Relativity

This was clearly the most interesting of the books from my summer reading list. Let me be clear that though I don’t buy all of the points Dan tries to make, I find them all interesting and worthy of thought. With any luck we can begin a real discussion of his ideas and observations in the commentary. That means I’ll attempt (not always successfully) to keep my opinion out of the body of this piece, and reserve that for any commentary that might develop. The real point here is to get you interested enough to read the book yourself.

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How to Measure Information Work

September 11, 2008 By

Continuing my exploration of information overload, in this piece, I’ll further develop the argument that it is not the real problem, but a mis-framing of a different problem (call it X) that has nothing to do with “overload” of any sort. Most people who start their thinking with the “information overload” frame look outward at the information coming at them. One aspect of the real problem is terrible feedback control systems for looking inward at your work. On the feedback side of things, we measure capacity for work with the wrong metric (headcount, or in shorthand managerese, “HC”). I’ll explain why HC is terrible at the end of this piece (and I’ve also written a separate article on HC).

So, can you measure information work? Yes. Here is a graph, based on real data, showing the real cumulative quantity of information work in my life during two years and some months of my life, between January 2004 and about March 2006.

Quantity of work over one year

Figure 1: Quantity of work over one year

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Organizing to Disrupt

September 6, 2008 By

Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma has helped frame an entire decade of thinking on innovation. His taxonomy of radical/incremental//sustaining/disruptive, despite being very widely misunderstood, has been the filter through which all of the popular innovation literature has been viewed in recent years. Now, more than a decade later, finally companies are figuring out how to systematically organize to disrupt. Three recent books (one blessed by Clay himself) address bits and pieces of this theme, so let’s try to synthesize an overall view of what it takes, and along the way, talk about these three new books (and a bunch of older ones that have play key roles in this story).

First, recall what disruption actually means. I made up a mnemonic graphic, based on the against-the-grain metaphor, to help me remember.

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Maslow for Market Segmentation

September 4, 2008 By

It suddenly struck me today that I’ve never seen a visualization of a very obvious way to understand markets at the broadest level: segment all products and services based on what customer need they serve on the Maslow hierarchy. Though I’ve seen Maslow discussed in the marketing/sales literature, I’ve never seen a graphic like the one below, that actually draws the famous Maslow triangle with areas sized to represent dollar value of corresponding markets. I include in my broad notion of “market” the demand for things supplied by governments and organized religions, rather than private enterprise. Here we go. Should be self-explanatory. I’ve sized the areas in this example roughly based on what I think the market sizes are in a developed economy, and included examples of businesses that deliver products and services to that level in the hierarchy. Some explanatory comments follow, for tricky bits.

Maslow-Based Segmentation for Markets

Maslow-Based Segmentation for Markets

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