Adam's Day At Work

Here's what Adam had to say about working with me today (HE wrote this!):

Hi, I am Adam. I am in 6th grade, and go to Springfield Middle School. Today was take your child to work day, so I stayed home with my mom since she works at home. I had a fun experience at my mom's work today.

My mom does three important things to run her business. She must have work (customers and partners), get work (business development), and learn things (professional development). These three things are a cycle. You learn a lot of things; you meet people who might give you jobs. Having more jobs helps you learn.

My mom gets her work through customers and partners. Customers are people who give her work to do. Partners are people who share work with her.

Professional Development is learning about current events. It is also going to conferences, or training classes. The way she learns the most is by working.

Some people like staying the way they are. When changes come, they don’t want to change. Eventually, these people are forced to change, and when they do, it is a lot harder then if they changed before. Now other people look ahead and prepare for the same changes. When the changes come, they will be ready. These people are happy and excited when the changes come. My mom helps those people who don’t want to change.

I would want to work at home because I could save more time in the morning by not having to drive to my office. Another reason is that I could never forget something at my house, I would be there. Finally, because I could take a 20-30 minute break.

Take Your Child to Work Day

My son came up to me last night and said “Mom, tomorrow is take your child to work day”. Before he could finish I started laughing “so you want to stay home. Nice try!”

Then I thought about it. Why was my first assumption that he wanted to watch TV and play video games all day? Is that what employers think working at home involves? Shame on me!

Why shouldn’t he understand that working from home has its own set of demands, rewards, and complications?

So…Adam is home today. He is getting a few lessons on what I do, how to run a business, and he’s organizing all of my reading material (as you might have imagined, I have a TON of reading material).

He’s also feeding the dogs, keeping the laundry running, and dealing with any other interruptions that might arise. He’s learning that in my life there aren’t hard lines between business and everything else. Personally, that’s how I like it.

When he’s done today, he has to write a blog entry – so we’ll get to see what he thinks about working this way!

A Whole New Mind: Senses

In my last entry I said that we’d be talking about the skills needed to be successful in the Concept Age. Actually, in A Whole New Mind, Dan Pink refers to senses. This is an important distinction.

Normally, we can all see, hear, smell, touch, and taste. Some of us have more heightened sensitivities than others, but we’ve been born with these abilities.

A sense can also be amplified. Think of someone with an affinity for wine. Through innate ability AND training they may become a connoisseur.

The six Concept Age senses (design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning) are similar. We are all born with these abilities and through use (or lack thereof) we can alter our proficiency with them.

Like the five physical senses, no one sense is better than the other. They all provide our brains with information that we use to interpret a situation and decide how to act.

Dan covers each of theses aptitudes in a separate chapter of the book. Each chapter is broken into a section describing the sense and its application to the Concept Age and a section that gives us concrete things that we can do – exercises – to increase our sensitivity in each area.

I am going to follow his lead.

So – I have some homework to do! As soon as I finish a “design” sense exercise or two, I’ll tell you about design – the first Concept Age sense.

A Whole New Mind

Dan Pink’s new book, A Whole New Mind, introduces so many important ideas that I’ll be doing a series of blog entries on it. Consider the next several posts your cliffs notes!

Dan’s premise (and the subtitle of the book) is that we are moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age.

The Information Age has been the age of the knowledge worker. We made our living by acquiring and applying knowledge. The activities that brought us success (and an income!) were centered on the left-brain: sequential, textual, detail-oriented, analytical, and focused on the “hard” facts.

In an age when automation can replace the knowledge worker for simple rule-based tasks, outsourcing to Asia can satisfy more complicated activities, and an abundance of facts are available to anyone with a browser, what is the knowledge worker to do?

Enter the Conceptual Age, a time marked by the rise in significance of right-brain thinking. Creativity, context, the “big picture”, pattern recognition, and synthesis are becoming more important than simply knowing and applying facts.

Dan has identified six skills we will need to develop to be successful in the Concept Age: design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning. Defining, identifying, and building these skills will be the topics of my next six posts.

While we explore this book, remember that it isn’t about left-brain versus right-brain. It’s about – A Whole New Mind.

NOT By Invitation Only!

I’ve been struck recently by how easily you can join just about any conversation.

In the last several months I’ve been connecting with people I barely know, commenting on blogs, and writing this one. I am interacting with people all over the country and I’m more in tune with colleagues now than when I went to an office every day.

Why is that?

Sure, there are more technologies that enable interaction and collaboration - but did that spark my participation or did something else change?

I believe it's because I finally decided to get involved. And when I did there was a whole suite of technologies that enabled me to do so (some of which I’ve already covered in past posts).

But my point here is that no one is stopping you from joining any conversation.

Technology has made it tough to come up with a good excuse to stay on the sidelines – but was there ever really a good one anyway?

Compromise

Purple Cow has really gotten me thinking about compromise in product development.

As Seth Godin writes, “Compromise is about sanding down the rough edges to gain buy-in from other constituencies. Vanilla is a compromise ice cream flavor…But vanilla is boring. You can’t build a fast-growing company around vanilla.”

Well, the problem is that you can’t anymore!

Compromise generally worked when the focus was on mass markets. It was how you could be “appealing enough” to large numbers of people.

At the annual SIIA Content Division meeting earlier this year Neil Budde, General Manager of Yahoo! news, talked about how information has always been distributed in bundles. Creating that bundle involved compromise. It had to cater to the largest part of the audience consuming it in order to keep circulation up and keep advertisers interested. Compromise was profitable - until there was a more accessible and customizable alternative to the bundle.

When online news came along, people started to consume only the portion of the offering that appealed to them. They suddenly had many options to fulfill a broader spectrum of their interests and these options weren’t all created by traditional journalists!

Suddenly consumers could act as their own filter, not relying on professionals to determine their choices. Consumers started selecting information for themselves and sharing those choices with others (go look at: del.icio.us, flickr, and squidoo).

With all of these exciting options, how can we expect people to continue to buy the static bundle for the masses? People are moving past that now.

It’s no longer about compromise, it’s about being remarkable!

Who’s accountable?

In my last post I advocated forgetting irrelevant rules and making your own decisions. That might sound a little ridiculous to some, but consider this:

Only you are responsible for your actions. Sure, doing what you’re told might give you a great excuse, but does it absolve you from your responsibility to use your brain? I don’t think so.

Who’s to say that it’s really any safer following orders? While advocating that you forget the stupid rules may sound radical on the surface, it really isn’t.

It’s not an all or nothing situation. You don’t just ignore the rules all the time or follow them blindly.

Not all the rules are stupid or irrelevant and you’re accountable for the decisions you make.

That’s why you have to think.

What are rules for anyway?

Rules replace thought. If you know the rules, you always know what to do.

Rules are comfortable. If you know the rules, you never have to stretch too far.

Rules are safe. You probably won’t get fired for following the rules.

Unfortunately, you probably won’t make much progress either.

Rules work when the rate of change is slow enough that they can be adjusted before they are irrelevant.

Can you think of some irrelevant rules in your company?

Worse than irrelevant, what rules are getting in the way of your company’s success?

When do you sit (usually with your colleagues!) and debate the rules rather than taking the actions you know are right?

Ask someone about those rules.

If you can’t find any meaning in them – ignore them.

Do what you think is right - what will make your company be more successful.

Forget the stupid rules!

THINK!!!

Who are your customers?

A couple of weeks ago in a posting on Tom Peters’ blog (look in March archives for the entry “Refine to Simplicity”, March 10th), Steve Yastrow proposed that customers are:

Anyone whose actions affect your results

In an information creation and management organization, how differently would you treat content providers (authors) if you considered them your customers? In any organization, how would you treat employees or partners? They affect your results.

Last week (March 28, 2006), EPS (Electronic Publishing Services, Ltd.) wrote an Insight entitled “Google the Bookseller”. The article focused on how Google’s digital bookselling models could help bring innovation to digital publishing.

What interested me was seeing that Google became more successful signing up publishers when they changed their tactics.

Steve Sieck of EPS wrote: “But by restricting access to online viewing … denying the ability to save a copy to disk, and stressing publishers' voluntary participation and ability to set their own end user prices, Google is taking the "partnering” philosophy to heart in a way that was lacking in its peremptory approach to publishers at the launch of its Library Project last year.”

I’m glad to see that Google changed their approach. If they needed publishing content for this project to be successful, they needed to focus on how to make publishers feel better about participating. Now I’m not saying that the publisher’ concerns were valid, reasonable, or forward-thinking. However, for this project -

Publishers’ actions will significantly affect Google’s results!