consultbrain

I’ve never had an office job. Although I’ve worked in many offices, I cannot recall being able to claim any of them (except the one at home) as mine. I’m more used to sitting at the opposite side of a work desk, sharing it with someone, than watching the same view and daily routine unfold themselves. A significant chunk of the communication I do on a weekly basis is virtual, and come to think of it, last week there wasn’t one day that I spent in the same place, or allocated my time in the same way. I am nothing if not a virtual worker.

Yolanda Sing of Chloe Consultants (and an expert in Equine Assisted Learning) and I noticed that the increasing virtualness of work-life, thanks to flexible work practices, globalised teams, and technology, is not being supported by sufficient training around the skills needed to be an effective virtual worker. If you do it for a number of years, it becomes part of how you work, but many companies are introducing flexible work practices in environments were routine is king. The result is some people start to feel that flexibility adds stress and feelings of chaos and loneliness to their work lives, rather than the freedom they expected.

To address this emerging need for a better understanding of what it means to work virtually, Yolanda and I have developed a modular Virtual Working Skills course that is aimed at individuals in their personal roles, but also view them within the context of their wider teams.

The two-day course is being offered in-house and customised to the needs of the client, who can choose beforehand which themes are most relevant to the organisation. We also ensure that what we present is tailored to the technology environment in the organisation, and a number of the built-in exercises simulate the real-life work environment.

More information on the course can be found at the newly launched website: www.virtualworking.co.za and includes contact details for interested parties.

This coming week, on 24 June, I will be participating in a Flexible Working Practices Seminar organised by Knowledge Resources in Johannesburg. I will be chairing the day and will also talk on the challenges facing flexible managers and employees alike when flexibility is introduced and the established office routine is broken.

It’s not only about preventing yourself from snacking constantly while working from home (although that’s also important :-)), it’s about maintaining the appropriate contact with colleagues and team members so that they are informed of what you are busy with, and you don’t feel left out. The topic of my presentation will be “Working virtually of virtually working?” and looking at the range of topics covered by the speakers, it’s bound to be an interesting day.

I have stuck my head into the cloud. And it computes.

After researching netbooks for the last four weeks and postponing the inevitable purchasing decision just long enough to avoid being called “impulsive,” I eventually bought a Lenovo IdeaPad S10 on the weekend.

I have another notebook, an Acer Travelmate 6292, which features the standard bells and whistles for regular travel: a small (or it used to be) 12″ screen, an extended life nine-cell battery, dvd-writer, 220Gb harddrive, 2Gb RAM, and a buggy spacebar. Why buy another one and a smaller, slower, cheaper one at that?

The Wired.com article on The Netbook Effect was an intriguing read, the reviews and word-of-mouth tales are all fairly positive, the one a colleague brought to a meeting the other day was just beautiful, and the challenge of successful cloud computing as a consultant, exciting. In the end, it came down to:

The challenge is, of course, keeping it light and nimble and not creating a clone of the higher spec notebook. So far I’ve chosen Google Chrome as my browser, foobar2000 as my music player (while still scrobbling to last.fm) and while I’m cheating with the basic Office programmes, I’m not using Outlook at all as I can sync my HTC Touch Diamond’s calendar with the other notebook.

Whether I’m starting to sink through the cloud on my way back to application gridlock ground zero, is to be seen, but so far, so good. The trip to Namibia armed with only one small netbook on Wednesday will be enlightening.

A topic I started researching recently is the frustrating one (from a consumer’s perspective) of music distribution rights. A lot has been written about the global music industry’s historic inability to adapt to changing times, and the antiquated business models music labels are clinging to. For now, I’ll provide a consumer’s perspective, but I will over time try to suss out why distribution rights are still so entrenched in a world of digital music.

The problem is this: I believe strongly in supporting musicians and artists, especially as I have the disposable income to pay for music I like (I suspect an important variable impacting on people’s choices). I have an eMusic account, which is providing an amazing service for smaller, independent labels and their fans. However, every once in a while, I see this message on the eMusic site:

ALBUM UNAVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD
We’re sorry. This album is unavailable for download in your country (South Africa) at this time. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

I have further figured out that these instances only happen if you stumble across an album in a roundabout way - usually it will just hide unavailable albums from you if you happen to be unlucky enough to be in a territory not covered by the label’s rights. South Africa usually falls under the UK or Europe rights, so a USA label might not be allowed to make the album available in a digital format to me over the Internet.

Therein lies the rub.

I don’t buy many cd’s anymore, I buy digital versions of most music, and cd’s in exceptional cases. Preventing me from downloading an album on eMusic will not make me buy it in the shop, so everyone loses out. If it’s important enough, I’ll find another digital copy elsewhere, but again buying straight from a territory like the UK. The South African distributor and I might never meet, nor would I rely on the company to make me aware of a new release, especially when numerous user-generated content websites exist where recommendations can be made based on other people’s listening profiles, e.g. last.fm

Why therefore, do territory rights for physical products apply if I am a South African, yet interested in a digital product? I might be living in Thailand, or travel globally five days a week.

As I mentioned, I am keeping an open mind until I understand the distributors’ perspective(s), but find little things like this frustrating in a supposed global economy. That’s the customer in me speaking.

I have to give credit to one label: Polyvinyl Record Co.. I have been pestering some labels about distribution rights and usually I receive a response like: “Sorry, that’s not our territory.” Polyvinyl went out of their way to resolve the issue and the album I was after was made available to me within a week. In the process, they made me a loyal customer and not a pirate.

Soon… more on this issue of musical terror-tories, with more of a focus on the future of distribution rights.

Two posts ago, I made the point that blogs are difficult to introduce in corporate environments if no-one can find the time to write something worthwhile. To prove my point and extend the hypothesis to individual bloggers, I disappeared for 18 months and will now continue where I left off…

Many things happen in 18 months, and ways of communicating via the web have changed in profound ways, with people even arguing that blogging in its old-fashioned, long-winded format is dead; long live Twitter! In fact, instead of writing this manifesto, I should have just twittered: “Phew, time flies! Back again.”

I am busy upgrading this space with the help of a good friend and will soon link to a number of sites I am setting up for different ventures I am involved in. All I can say is that the words “virtual” and “flexible” will appear a lot.

My wife bought a book for her research on knowledge sharing in complex adapative systems, which I cannot wait to also read. The Fractal Organization: Creating Sustainable Organizations with the Viable Systems Model by Patrick Hoverstadt looks very interesting. Here’s a quick quote on being willing to embrace uncertainty that caught my eye:

“No matter how difficult or awkward it may be, addressing the future is what strategy is about and if we want to do it effectively, we have no choice but to try to engage with the uncertainty of the environment and the future.”

With those words, I will now go forth and engage the future uncertainty of what to post about next.

Mike Wesch, the Kansas State University professor who’s Youtube video Web 2.0… The Machine is Us/ing Us became an instant hit in the way it explored the impact of digital technology on humans, released a new video entitled The Information R/evolution.

At 5 and a half minutes long, it provides a perfect summary of what David Weinberger conveys in his book Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder.

I have been planning to write a review of the book, but pointing a link at Youtube seems so much easier :-).

I was discussing setting up an internal corporate blog with a client the other day, and I had one very important word of warning: it sounds great, it can be a very potent communications and knowledge sharing tool, but if people don’t update the content or post, it will be a failure. And I should know. With a last post somewhere in April, I am not the most prolific of bloggers. My excuse? The oldest one in the book: lack of time.

I have contemplated many a blog post, but sitting down and writing up my thoughts always seems to be relegated to the last to-do of the day and by that time it’s early morning of the next day already. On a daily basis I debate with colleagues and clients what content management system will suit different needs, whether “data quality” can be sold as sexy, why a bunch of helium-filled party balloons won’t make people like Oracle overnight, the personal change management process I had to go through learning Office 2007 (”I liked the old interface!”) - all things which can make for interesting discussion points, but which are never packaged in a way that makes for insightful reading.

I am therefore in a race against time to finish this post in the airport lounge before my plane departs.

That was another day. I never finished the post in time.

Just when organisations hesitantly take the step towards blogging, the world has changed again. Facebook has arrived in many of our lives. I wanted to say “all of our lives,” but it was refreshing to chat with an old school friend recently and find someone who didn’t know what I was talking about. At one stage, I had two blogs, a wiki and a Netvibes account, where I could keep track of my RSS feeds and all things Web 2.0. Since the arrival of Facebook in my life a few months ago, however, all I had to do was install the necessary apps and there they are - huddled together like nomads under a yurt, each jostling for the best spot. My Flickr photos, my Last.fm profile, my del.icio.us profile, with room to spare for some socialising. Even the Inbox feature has supplanted ye’ olde email in conducting muli-person threaded conversations.

Facebook has done wonders for virtual communities, some of them who did not even know they existed beforehand, and for long-distance friendships. A friend recently published an Afrikaans primer on Facebook in a local daily, one of three articles that dealt with new Internet phenomena. What he did not state is that he wrote the articles from Xi’an, China, thereby contributing yet another example of virtual working.

What Facebook has done, by creating a single place where people can catch up on friends, write about things, post pictures and just be silly, is similar to what Google has done by aggregating a multitude of services and applications under one virtual roof. I am still a member of an informal group blog, as are my three co-members in China, Germany and Johannesburg, but instead of me sending emails to them with messages like: “ok guys, we need to post something here. Gambatte!” we now just update our status, write on each other’s walls and off we go.

There have been many recent articles published on how companies are blocking Facebook access at work (just google facebook banned work), which is a kneejerk reaction IMHO. Companies that are embracing Facebook and the graduates that have come to live by it, are much more prepared for the Next Big Thing, whatever that may be. Networking, interaction, collaboration, connectivity, mobility - these are not things that will go away. We have not yet seen a mashup of Skype, Facebook, Second Life, Youtube and Ebay, all rolled into one, but I’m sure somebody is pitching to angel investors right about now. Now that’s a thought to share with your friends…

I attended a talk in Cape Town tonight by Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, founder and CEO of Creative Commons and a proponent of free culture. Lessig is in South Africa as a speaker at the Digital Freedom Exposition organised by the University of the Western Cape. Tonight’s talk was hosted by the Internet Society South Africa and focused on the challenges technologists and policymakers face in finding common ground when dealing with the Internet and regulation.

Lessig describes the Internet as an “environment of innovation and control” and structured his talk around the changes that have taken place in the last 10 years with regard to the four layers that make up the Internet’s architecture: content, application, logic and physical. He revisited the fact that the logic layer was historically the only open or free component - based on the protocols that govern how data is moved and displayed, while proprietary or closed systems governed the other three layers.

Using a wide range of examples, from historical anecdotes to mashup videos, Lessig argued that the other three layers have also started opening up and that the weakening of control in the layers, through competition, has resulted in widespread innovation and is thereby contributing to the increasing development of a “Read-Write,” rather than a “Read-Only” Internet culture. The bane of spam, and our inability to curtail it, was used as an example of where regulation is not being used innovatively enough. Lessig argued that effective use of volunteers by way of spam bounties can be a much more effective strategy to get rid of spam. He further warned that the way technologies are currently applied, by overlaying protection, is ineffective and creates the risk of email increasingly becoming unreliable for its intended purpose.

Lessig’s plea is for technologists and policy makers to communicate, to talk to each other, when devising methods of regulation. He urged technologists, which seemed best represented in the room, to be proactive and to prevent this thing they built (the Internet) from disappearing.

What was fascinating was Lessig’s effective use of a constantly changing, meticulously choreographed, slideshow to accompany his talk. On each side of the stage was a flat screen that flashed key words and concepts as he spoke - never was there any information overload. In browsing his Wikipedia entry, I noticed this style of presentation gets a specific mention and it was definitely one of the best presented talks I have ever witnessed.

Some time was allowed for questions and, as one would expect, those in the room did not disappoint with the quality of their questions. In each case, Lessig took his time in building up a response, developing context, using examples and eventually ending his answer with a neat conclusion. The cost of bandwidth has become a regular conversation topic in South Africa and Lessig strongly argued that the current Telkom monopoly controlling the telecommunications infrastructure is the biggest and most obvious stumbling block to breaking down control and fostering innovation. He added that it is so obvious what needs to be done, the decision is an easy one: remove monopoly control to improve poor connectivity and decrease high prices. Doing it, however, remains tricky if no political buy-in is present.

It was a great way to spend a Wednesday evening. I have always thought, when reading his opinion pieces and articles, that what he says is just so logical. It seems crazy to think he needs to fight so many fights with regulators and policy makers. Lessig remains a strong proponent of regulation, but he sees regulation as customised to ensure sufficient control, while not stifling innovation. He also argued for the economy of business to become involved as a champion in the search for a common(s) ground. An enlightening and entertaining talk.

Back in October 2004 when I first read the article “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson in Wired, I intuitively grokked the concept. I remember how, as teenagers, my friend Heinrich and I had to take the train to Johannesburg after school to search for imported records at Street Records and Moolla’s. Not only were those the days of anti-Apartheid sanctions, which limited availability of imports, but there was an inverted relationship between what we wanted and what the typical music store stocked. According to Anderson’s concept, we were shopping in the Long Tail - the countless collection of niche markets that cannot be catered for in limited physical spaces governed by “the tyranny of the shelf.”

Over the years, finding music became easier. In 1994, in search of an obscure, out-of-print CD, I engaged in my first Internet-enabled trade via Usenet with Dan from San Francisco. By 2005 I had traded music with people in Indonesia, Paraguay, Canada, USA, UK and Australia. In 2007 I have an eMusic account, a last.fm profile, I buy directly from record labels or search Amazon for recommendations. In the Internet age, change is quick.

The original Long Tail article unpacked the phenomenon in a clear and compelling way. On a personal level, I was already participating in various long tails, and understood that bricks-and-mortar retail outlets could not offer the same diversity the Internet could, but being able to apply a framework to the economic model was enlightening. I made some copies of the article for colleagues and talked about the concept, but didn’t follow the evolution of the idea closely. I did not read Anderson’s blog, where he continued to elaborate on and refine the concept of a long tail business model, so when the book appeared late 2006, I was excited to see what had since been added to the concept.

The Long Tail is not a long read - my edition numbers 238 pages in total and I finished the bulk of it on four return flights between Cape Town and Johannesburg. This is in part because it is not a difficult concept to grasp and does not require an encyclopedic definition.

What is it about? In short, traditional retailers are limited by physical space in terms of how much stock can be carried, therefore will only carry those things that have the best chance to sell. If something promises to sell well, less popular items lose their place in order to carry stock of the popular article. With the advent of the Internet and e-tailers that are not bound by the same physical constraints, more items can be offered and more items are bought from the long tail - the area not serviced by bricks-and-mortar retailers. Not many of each item are necessarily sold, but even if only a few, the numbers add up to large volumes overall. The image below illustrates the concept as per the original article:

What Anderson has done in the book is focus more on understanding the Long Tail, its enablers and its consequences for other business models. He identifies three forces that have driven the emergence of the Long Tail by “reducing the cost of reaching niches”:

• Democratising the tools of production (the rise of the personal computer has lowered barriers to entry for aspiring writers/ musicians/ artists/ entrepreneurs to create content);
• Cutting the costs of consumption by democratising distribution (the Internet has meant everyone can be connected to everyone on a global level);
• Connecting supply and demand (search engines, filters, Web 2.0 applications have all contributed to make it easy to find niche content).

Each of the three forces is discussed in detail with examples of specific companies that have harnessed the opportunities, whether it be by selling goods or by organising the search environment. Anderson argues that the last force is crucial to the success of the Long Tail model, as people want choice, as long as it is easy to find the necessary information to assist in decision-making. Six additional themes of the Long Tail interwoven throughout the book are:

1. Most markets have far more niche goods than hits;
2. The cost of reaching niches is falling dramatically;
3. Filters that assist in finding what people want can drive demand down the tail;
4. Increased variety and optimised filters flatten the demand curve;
5. The number of niche products, when added up, comprise a significant market;
6. Once all of this is in place, the true nature of demand (much more diversity) is revealed.

The book is, understandably, written from a US perspective, given the consumer data used and the fact that many of the dominant players in the Long Tail world are US-based, e.g. Amazon, Google and Yahoo. Even if Netflix and TiVo are not available outside the US, the principle is global, though. As Anderson illustrates, long tail markets can consist of many smaller long tail markets, each depending on the type of filter applied. In other words, fans of a specific movie genre, say Korean cinema, might find themselves towards the bottom of the overall movie long tail (if outside Korea), but this group in itself might be split into various long tail distributions depending on variables such as movie genre preferred, culture, geographic location, books read, languages spoken etc. Multiple niche cultures mean consumer segmentation becomes much more tricky, but with good filters, much more accurate.

For example, I have personally made an effort of submitting accurate feedback to Amazon’s recommendation system as to what books and music I own. I noticed, however, that only selecting whether you own an item or not does not make for good recommendations. Only if you take the extra effort to rate each item you own, does the accuracy improve, and eventually becomes uncanny if you consider it is based on what other people have bought and rated.

One of the most interesting chapters in the book is “Niche Culture,” where Anderson asks the question whether unlimited choice and fragmentation of consumer culture into multiple niches is dangerous for society and social stability. He refers to such sceptics as Christine Rosen, who is quoted as follows:

By giving us the illusion of perfect control, these technologies risk making us incapable of ever being surprised. They encourage not the cultivation of taste, but the numbing repetition of fetish. In thrall to our own little technologically constructed worlds, we are, ironically, finding it increasingly difficult to appreciate genuine individuality.

Anderson’s own perspective is different, as illustrated in this quote:

Today we’re not so much fragmenting as we are re-forming along different dimensions. These days our watercoolers are increasingly virtual; there are many different ones; and the people who gather around them are self-selected. Rather than being loosely connected with people thanks to superficial mass-cultural overlaps, we have the ability to be more strongly tied to just as many if not more people with a shared affinity for niche culture.

Of course, it would be surprising for the author of a book celebrating the Long Tail to agree with sceptical points of view, and I tend to agree with Anderson’s view that virtual, self-selected groups break traditional lines of aggregation that could stifle new ways of thinking. Think of it: I emailed a person in Finland today to ask advice about interesting places to visit during an upcoming trip, based only on a knowledge of his musical tastes, as we belong to the same mailing list. I expect he might be more useful than trying to extract my interests from a one-size-fits-all guidebook.

The Long Tail makes good use of graphs where certain concepts require further explanation and is written in an accessible and informal style. It might seem repetitive at times if you have read the 2004 article, as the concept is explained again and sometimes certain elements are repeated in the book. For a new reader, however, it provides the necessary basic background, before expanding on the concept and its potential business applications in the chapter “Beyond Entertainment” - possibly one of the weaker chapters due to the fact that the Long Tail concept applies best in entertainment markets (books, music, movies). The book ends with a delightful little section: “Coda: Tomorrow’s Tail” which briefly sketches the scenario of people in the near future using 3D printing technology to search, find, buy and produce an item of their choice.

For persons interested in consumer marketing, the impact of the Internet on our social and commercial lives, or for those who merely wish to confirm to themselves that they’re not the only ones who love choice - infinite choice - The Long Tail is highly recommended.

As I sat down to write this review of The Perfect Thing: How the iPod became the defining object of the 21st Century by Steven Levy, I realised my 4G iPod was still docked in the kitchen from when I was cooking earlier in the evening. Obviously, I had to get up and retrieve it. Only once I settled back into the chair, iPod connected to the PC, iTunes fired up, listening to the beautiful opening track from You Are There by Mono did I realise the irony of what just happened. Everything I just did echoed what Steven Levy writes about in his book: the human attachment to an electronic gadget, the sudden ubiquity of music in everyday life and the fact that it’s not a Zen or a Zune, but an Apple iPod.

To quote from the book:

With all your music at hand, in an enclosure to die for, the personal experience with the iPod goes beyond mere listening. It’s almost a relationship.

The Perfect Thing is a quick read. My UK edition, a square, white hardcover measuring just over 14 x 17 cm is easy to carry around and perfect for reading in snippets. Why? Because it’s been shuffled. The chapters do not follow a clear chronology, and with titles like “Origin,” “Cool” and “Download,” each focuses on a different element of the iPod phenomenon. The US edition is titled The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness and the chapters are shuffled differently. This reinforcement of the iPod characteristics contributes to an awareness of how quickly (5 years) the iPod and its features have changed how we think about and listen to music.

Of Levy’s other books, I have read Crypto, which dealt with the modern-day history of cryptology and its impact on personal computing. It was equally fascinating, but required at least some cursory interest in the subject matter. The mass-market appeal, or at least awareness of the iPod, means that many more people will find The Perfect Thing interesting, whether they own one or not. Levy’s view is that the impact of the iPod is defining the way music will be listened to from now on:

How will we remember the iPod? As something that embodied who we were - and who we are going to be - in the early part of the century bound to take us places we couldn’t hope to imagine? It was our fetish and our future. Its irresistible contours made us hungry to possess it. But it possessed us. Taking full advantage of the flexibility and fungibility of digital technology, the iPod changed our behavior, made business winners and losers, and made everything it touched just a little cooler.

The book provides a cursory overview of the key factors that lead to the development of the iPod and analyses the reasons for its dominance in the portable MP3 player market. It assesses the impact of the iPod on the traditional music industry business model and peaks into the world of iPod lovers - how they anthropomorphise their shiny toys, how they use their playlists to project their identities and how frustrated they become when iPods show ‘behavioural’ quirks. Levy, as the chief technology correspondent for Newsweek makes use of the unparalleled access he has to Apple CEO Steve Jobs and the Apple senior executives to write what at times seems like an insider account. Levy is an unabashed Apple and Jobs fan and he places a strong focus throughout on the personality of Jobs the leader, the commander, the bully and the salesman:

Jobs can be capricious, but the persistent application of a standard of excellence - excellence that, at a minimum, must surpass all previous efforts - is a powerful tactic for any commercial or creative enterprise. The path of least resistance is accepting work that is, well, acceptable. But what if a company considers merely acceptable work as unacceptable? What if good excuses for not pulling off a tough task are rejected? What do you get when even people’s Aminus projects are curtly tossed back in their faces, with the implication that if they don’t deliver Aplus maybe they would be happier somewhere else?
You get Apple.

The Perfect Thing does at times read like an Apple marketing brochure or press release, but luckily Levy’s genuine interest and, at times, palpable excitement makes this aspect easier to digest. An unfortunate habit that does grate, is his sometimes childish comments, comebacks, or simplistic arguments to debunk comments by skeptics, Luddites and detractors of Apple.

What I found most compelling of the story is how the principle of “a great product” and the insistence of Apple to focus on great design and ease-of-use made the iPod what it is. Very few corners were cut when Jobs had a vision of what the design or features should entail, and Levy argues convincingly that only with his connections in IT and media (through Pixar) could many of the deals with the record industry, including to license songs through the iTunes Store, be signed. It shows that quality and design, two characteristics associated with Apple products, can prolong the market leadership of a product, rather than just relying on being the first entrant, but it also shows the value of a strong leader. There are, of course, a few compelling questions to ask about which elements are the ones that make Jobs a great leader.

While the issue of the randomness (or not) of the iPod’s shuffle algorithm is indeed a hotly debated topic on the web, the book possibly delves on the issue too long in the chapter “Shuffle.” Of all the chapters, I found “Identity,” “Origin” and “Apple” most interesting, the latter two from a company and product perspective and the former because of the fascinating research results of how people programme their playlists to impress others. Levy himself shares a very funny account of how a music-swop he arranged with a female former dot-com executive ended in a severely bruised ego for him due to his comparatively unadventurous music tastes.

The Perfect Thing doesn’t dwell on the negative. Most iPod owners probably have some minor gripe with their player, or with iTunes (I have too) and there are many detractors who scoff at the almost-bankrupt darling of the early computing era’s amazing return to prominence, thanks to the iPod. The Perfect Thing gives a fascinating account of this story - how the iPod came into being and the elements that make it so desirable. It is not a tome, nor an exposé. It is a well-written story that should interest business people with a passion for technology, design and branding. A recommended read.