Who: The A Method for Hiring by Smart and Street

February 3, 2009 By

Who: The A Method for Hiring is a big title for a management book to live up to. At the moment business writers have something of a love affair going on with the idea that casting decisions are the most critical ones in the practice of management, so the timing of the book is certainly good, but the bar is pretty high. The trend probably started with Jim Collins (Good to Great), Marshall Goldsmith (What Got You Here Won’t Get You There) and the folks fueling the strengths movement, which includes Gallup Inc., the psychologist Martin Seligman, and popular writers like Marcus Buckingham and Dan Pink (A Whole New Mind and Johnny Bunko).

The book almost lost me with its opening premise (a scorecard method to define roles), but recovered and finished solidly. More than once I found myself cringing a little as the authors pointed out lazy, stupid and sloppy elements of common interviewing practices, many of which I personally have been guilty of.  Overall, as a tactical manual for hiring, particularly around disciplined interviewing, it is excellent. The process is structured but not bureaucratic. It is natural, intuitive, information-driven and requires creativity and intelligence to apply.

The broader hiring strategy it advocates though, should be used with caution. Given the chaos of layoffs and hiring freezes we are living through, you would do well to follow the model in this book if you want to get the most bang for your remaining payroll bucks. The book should be valuable to interviewees as well, both as interview-prep, and as an aid to identifying and avoiding bad opportunities  (for those who aren’t yet at ‘will take anything’ levels of desperation). It won’t help you ‘game’ the recommended hiring process though, since it isn’t a blind, checklist-driven or aptitude-test driven process.

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Trust in the Age of Twitter

January 30, 2009 By

One of the most interesting problems around today is modeling trust levels in a relationship. The NY Times today has an article on the ettiquete of “unfriending” on Facebook for instance. Facebook has a binary 0/1 solution. eCommerce sites have a narrow, transactional rating model that works well enough in a limited context in the aggregate. Requests for references ask the blunt question: would you hire this person again? But all these approaches are blunt instruments. We need better approaches for the age of Twitter. Here’s my first stab. What do you think?

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Enculturation Recapitulates Civilization

January 23, 2009 By

When I was a kid, we lived in a big, drafty bungalow-style house, verandas, mango trees and all. The dining room floor was some sort of dull red matte-like surface. It worked perfectly as a chalkboard. I would frequently cover the entire floor with chalk drawings. It strikes me that the way I drew back then was rather caveman-like. Atavistic mixes of symbols, metaphors and icons. Here’s a scene I drew frequently. Not quite a buffalo hunt.

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The Cloudworker, Layoffs and The Disposable American

January 18, 2009 By

(warning, this post is much longer than usual, so here is a PDF version)

It has been bitterly cold here in the Washington, DC metro area for the last two days. Experiencing cold as ‘bitter’ is as much a cultural and emotional reaction as it is a physical one. This is my first winter in the DC area, which likes to think of itself as the ‘South,’ creating expectations for itself that nature unsympathetically shatters. An appropriate setting for trying to write a sober article on cloudworkers, their relation to layoffs and Louis Uchitelle’s 2006 book, The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences. If the cold is bitter today, my attitude towards one of my pet subjects, the future of work, is bittersweet. On the one hand, I am receiving a steady trickle of news of layoffs affecting friends around the world. On the other hand, my own modest efforts at punditry on the subject of work are heading in cheerful, hopeful directions. My friends at cloudworker.org, just announced the results of their December contest. Here is my favorite entry, by Second Prize winner Dave Raymond, a musician who chose to represent his cloudworking lifestyle with this stark picture of being on the road.

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His note on the picture: “I have no desk, I have no office, I have no schedule, I have no home.  I have a small family that is far away, and a few friends that I see rarely. I travel the United States all year, and collect inspiration to make the next reason to continue traveling.” Terse and unaffected romanticism worthy of the landscape that inspired Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac, and ideally representing the paradox of cloudworking: individualism that is at once radical and socially situated. The picture is a perfect American cloudworker backdrop: Big Sky, green grass and a hint of modernity in the electric cables. Perfectly proportioned.

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Allenism, Taylorism and the Day I Rode the Thundercloud

January 7, 2009 By

Today, January 7th, was a brutal bitch of a day, and it was a great day. Every grim reality of the cloudworker lifestyle, the dark side of everything from mobility and laptops to eating on the run and elite car-rental status, hit me with full force. Both my New Year’s resolutions were hammered by gale-force winds. The business of life hit many potholes, and the game of work threatened to fall apart on me. But I not only survived, I actually made it a better-than-average day. I made it all work. Truly, it was the day I rode the thundercloud (I stole the phrase from a really old Reader’s Digest article I read as a kid).

And that’s why as my first post of 2009, I will offer up a meditation on the life-work of David Allen, he of Getting Things Done (GTD) fame, and his new book, Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and Business of Life. I’ll tell you all about the role of Allen in the emerging landscape of the future of work.

Here’s the short, illustrated version. In 1911, Frederick Taylor invented the management model of Taylorism, which became the operating system of the The Cathedral, where the Organization Man was born, with William Whyte becoming his biographer. Six Sigma is the last hurrah of Taylorism. Ninety years later, In 2001, David Allen, with Getting Things Done, created Allenism. A model of work that is well on its way to becoming the operating system for the antithesis of the Cathedral, The Bazaar, home of the Cloudworker, whose biographer is undoubtedly Dan Pink (I just came up with the word, Dan’s written three books about cloudworkers). Eric S. Raymond, who wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar about the open source movement, billed himself an accidental revolutionary. I am more modest. I’ll call myself the accidental wannabe-word-coiner, and hope that ‘cloudworker’ at least merits a footnote in the history of work. Anyway, here’s my picture explanation of Allenism vs. Taylorism:

You doubt that GTD is the future of work? The original GTD book has been seeing increasing sales every year since publication and is currently at an astronomical #53 on Amazon. With MIAW, a tipping point has been reached. The future of work is now here.

But to understand it, we have to zoom down from these century-level dynamics, what Allen would call the 50,000 foot level, to the runway level: 8:00 AM, the morning of 1/7/09, Wednesday, hump day, when the thundercloud hit me.

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Six Personal Favorites for 2008

December 31, 2008 By

Yesterday I got this gentle complaint from a friend and reader, “It’s great that your cloudworker stuff is getting picked up. I’m afraid it may tear you away from your non-business interests though, and we won’t get to hear any more parrot stories out of you.”

This seems to be a recurrent theme in the feedback and criticism I get about my writing. People who like my more introspective pieces seem dismayed that I also write more sociable pieces that belong in broader business/technology/culture conversations. There have even been suggestions that my more sociable pieces are corrupting my otherwise pure and childlike soul. At any rate, I guess it is no accident that my own personal favorites from 2008 lean towards the introspective side, so if this stuff is my soul, I think it will endure at least for another year. Check out the full roundup for 2008, if you don’t like my own picks.

  1. The Blue Tunnel: the second Ribbonfarm experiment in the graphic novel form, this time more like a picture-book story in the Dr. Seuss “Oh the places you will go” vein.
  2. The Bloody-Minded Pleasures of Engineering: A tip-of-the-hat to Samuel Florman’s The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, comprising my own meandering thoughts on what it means to be an engineer.
  3. Bargaining with your Right Brain: an attempt at an unorthodox look at bargaining as collaborative-adversarial storytelling.
  4. Creative Destruction: Portrait of an Idea: we take a look at the concepts and history of the notion of creative destruction, from ancient times to Schumpeter.
  5. Towards a Philosophy of Destruction: Following up on my creative destruction post, this took a discursive look at destruction, all by itself.
  6. A look at Amy Lin’s wonderful dot art, and the trains of thought it sparked for me.

I promise I won’t sell my soul in 2009; at least not for under $10 million.

Happy New Year!

Venkat

Complete 2008 Roundup

December 26, 2008 By
This entry is part 2 of 17 in the series Annual Roundups

I wrote 80 articles in 2008, and this post contains an annotated list of links to all of them.  Ribbonfarm.com still doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up. Here is a picture of how my focus has shifted, drifted and meandered since I started in July 2007 (here’s the 2007 omnibus review). Red arrows point to the blog’s ‘soul’ at various points. Yellow ‘scope’ wedges show the changing ADD levels. [Read more…]

How to Make New Year’s Calibrations

December 15, 2008 By

You read that right. Calibrations, not resolutions. Until you know a) exactly where you are, b) where you are already going, b) with how much momentum, c) and how much discretionary steering authority, resolutions are just rituals. For New Year’s party drunkards. You, of course, are a paragon of follow-through, but forward this to all those friends of yours who clearly need help. It’s an illustrated five-step program. If you start right now, you might actually be ready to make real resolutions by first-drink-time on December 31st.

Step 1: Calibrate PERSPECTIVE

Resolutions are supposed to be significant, even lofty, life-course-changing intentions. The only way you’ll know what counts as significant for you is to look back as far as you can, until your memories vanish into the foggy cloud of babyhood. For me, that means late 1974 foggily, late 1975 practically.

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Serious Games for Serious Business

December 10, 2008 By

This is a guest post by Marigo Raftapoulus

Gaming technology, interactive media, digital entertainment and knowledge industries are converging to create new forms of learning. Learning 2.0, in the form of ‘serious games,’ allows people to learn new skills and experiment with different strategies in ‘safe-fail’ environments. Serious games build in safe-fail experimentation based on the premise that through failure we learn more about the problem that we want to solve through adaptive learning. In contrast, ‘fail-safe’ environments tend to stifle experimentation and innovation through an ensuing ‘fear of failure’ culture that tends to develop in such environments.

So what does a serious game look like? Check out this demo for a game designed to train emergency response paramedics in case of a terrorist attack (warning! Scenes are bloody).

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Brain Rules by John Medina

December 3, 2008 By

If you read only two books about the brain, Medina’s Brain Rules should probably be your second one (thanks Kapsio, for the recommendation), after Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. If you’ve been reading this blog for more than a few months, you might remember a post I did nearly a year ago called The Broken Brain Books. Let me repeat the quote from Steven Johnson’s Mind Wide Open that I used to start that post:

…while it is interesting to find out [the] exact addresses [of brain functions], that information is ultimately unsatisfying. Call it the “neuromap fallacy.” If neuroscience turns out to be mostly good at telling us the location of the “food craving center” or the “jealousy” center,” then it will be of limited relevance to ordinary people seeking a new kind of self-awareness — because learning where jealousy lives in your head doesn’t make you understand the emotion any more clearly. Those neuromaps will be of great interest to scientists of course, and doctors. But to the layperson, they will be little more than trivia.

By this critique (which I wholeheartedly agree with), most ‘brain’ books are a big waste of trees. Medina, thankfully, avoids this trap, and doesn’t even mention fMRIs till fairly late into the book, and when he does, he steps away lightly from pointless fMRI-pornography. That leaves us with 12 brain rules, each of which gets a chapter. The chapter on short-term memory for instance, is titled “repeat to remember.” Well Duh! you might say. Fortunately, there are deeper insights buried within. Despite appearances, the book isn’t an exercise in providing unnecessary proofs for folk-tautologies.

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