Opting-out of Google Analytics

Google has released a new browser extension that will stop your browsing information from being sent to Google Analytics. I hope this takes off, and gets Web site owners to stop thinking about meaningless metrics like pageviews.


You can get the extension here: Google Analytics opt-out extension

Good stuff Google!

HighTouch Book Club: Update

I've finished reading The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion. I will work on getting my book notes put up in the next couple of days. If you haven't read this book I highly recommend it.

I have no other new book club reads in the queue at the moment. Your suggestions are most welcome.

I am stepping back in the interim to enjoy a couple of older books sent to me by @ethnobot (Thank you so much!) These are: The Pursuit of Wow! by Tom Peters, and Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace by Richardo Semler.

Regular book club reads will continue when I have finished these two books.

A great movie and example of flow experience

We watched The Hurt Locker last night on PPV. What a great movie! I'm so glad we saw it yesterday, because if we'd waited just one more day, I'm pretty sure this news would have seen me exercising a personal boycott of the film: Creators Must Move Beyond Suing the Audience

The file-sharing public faces yet another wave of predatory litigation, this time from the so-called US Copyright Group ("USCG"), which is suing BitTorrent users on behalf of various independent filmmakers. The Hollywood Reporter reports that more than 20,000 individuals have been sued, with more suits to come, and the producers of the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker have also signed up with the USCG to go after BitTorrent users.

That said, the character played by Jeremy Renner in the movie was simply incredible. I've been reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. You couldn't ask for a better example of living in the flow than Sergeant First Class William James. This character had all the elements: immersion, mastery, a distortion of time, a suspension of self-consciousness, clear goals-- you make a mistake you die, and a desire to continuously push the boundaries of performance. It's worth seeing The Hurt Locker for no other reason than to study this character.

You can achieve flow states in all walks of life and in every type of job. You don't have to go looking for highly dangerous situations, e.g. bombs to defuse. You just have to push your personal everyday boundaries in ways heretofore unimagined.

Can you Trojan Horse cultural change?

We all know the tale of the Trojan Horse. I was thinking of it again this week while listening to Byron Reeves (Total Engagement, Harvard Business Press, 2009) speak at a conference about the potential for gaming technologies to transform the work environment. Byron talked about the values baked-in to games that support the larger organizational trends toward greater transparency, openness, collaboration, and flatter more democratic work environments.

When I read Byran's book, and again this week while listening to his talk, I couldn't help but think of the Wizard of Oz. That behind every enterprise gaming curtain will be some little man micro-managing the worker's every move. I've talked about this before when discussing the dangers of  workstreaming:

Workstreaming is one of those things that causes me a great deal of angst. It worries me so much that I have been reluctant to write this post. Its potential to be misused by micro-managers and control-freaks is huge. The logs track a worker's every action, through syndication feeds that data is exposed, through aggregation it is combined, and through filtering it is synthesized. Used improperly, it has the potential to lead to work-group hell. You could very easily create a workplace that no one would want to work. Think time-cards, dot-boards, seat-time, and otherwise irrelevant metrics on steroids. Giving these tools to old-school managers would be something akin to Sheriff Taylor letting Deputy Fife put real bullets in his service revolver. 

I'm totally in the camp that says these technologies, when deployed in the right organizational setting, will be incredibly powerful and transformative. I'm left wondering,  however, what happens when you introduce these tools into situations where they are at strong odds with an organization's predominant culture? Do the trojan-horsed values have the power to change the culture? Or, are organizational cultures so strongly entrenched that they will eventually displace the values embedded in this new breed of software?

We're headed for a classic battle once people begin to realize what's hidden inside that big wooden horse called code. I don't have a crystal ball, and I have no idea how it will play out. My gut tells me that most organizations will attempt to drive the embedded values out of the code. In the end, I suspect their attempts will fail, but it's going to be a long battle. Changing organizational cultures is a tricky business.

Freeranging Chapter 2: The Science

This is the synopsis for chapter two lifted directly from the book proposal. I'm currently working on this chapter-- it's been much tougher to write than I anticipated. It's hard to take things directly from research and make them interesting and also relevant. I'm trying...

Chapter 2: The Science

Just as Taylor's Scientific Principles of Management changed the culture of the 20th century, there is new science to support a different way of working for the 21st Century. How do we optimize our working environments to support creativity? This chapter will discuss the science of freeranging. In particular recent scientific advances in these areas will be detailed. These advances will be contrasted with specific principles of Taylorism, and its modern day descendant Sixth Sigma. It will illustrate how the management practices from the last century are harming ideation and creative work. Each example from the science will be accompanied by testimonials from freerangers describing how they work, and detailing how their experiences are supported by the science.

• Creativity and Innovation - open innovation
• The biological basis of work-- circadian rhythms and working the way nature intended
• Social network analysis-- what sociology and anthropology tells us about our connectedness
• Multitasking-- how it promotes ideation
• Working in the flow-- people's abilities to adapt and make sense of massive amounts of information
• Complex Adaptive Systems theory-- work environments optimized to deal with complex and chaotic problems

As before, your thoughts and ideas are most welcome.

OpenCourseWare Consortium and Copyright

I've visited a couple of OpenCourseWare sites of late and have been baffled at the lack of clear information concerning the copyright applied to their educational materials. My curiosity led me to write them to ask what was up. Here are the copyright rules for the OCW consortium:

OCW course materials are made available to the public under a license that:

• Grants users the right to use and distribute the materials either as-is, or in a modified form:
• Allows users to create derivative works:
• Edit
• Translate
• Reformat
• Add to, combine with, or incorporate into other materials
• Obliges users to meet certain requirements as a condition of use:
  • Use must be non-commercial (optional)
  • Materials must be attributed to [Your Institution] and to original author/contributor
  • Publication or distribution of original or derivative materials must be offered freely to others under identical terms (“share alike”) (optional).

That seems pretty clear. One of the entities I wrote responded to my inquiry this morning. I'd asked back in March:

Dear Kevin

Thank you for your email. We are in process of placing CC and copyright information on our website.

Best Regards

Okay, that's something. The other university, a major midwest public school still hasn't responded to my questions, and continues to sport an all-rights-reserved copyright notice on all their pages.

So what gives with OCW? Is this something people can just slap on their site, and no one bothers to check that the conditions of membership are actually being met? Inquiring minds want to know.

Freeranging Chapter 1: A More Natural Way of Working

Over the next few weeks I'm going to begin to share the chapter summaries from my Freeranging book proposal. The first chapter has actually been written, but I'd still appreciate your feedback.

Chapter 1: A More Natural Way of Working

This chapter sets the stage for the entire book, and introduces the major concepts. It starts with a story of a working environment enjoyed by a freerange worker that is dramatically different than that experienced by the overwhelming majority of today's workforce. It discusses work from an historical perspective. It touches on the predominant ideologies that have defined our working environments over the last 150 years. It visits Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management, and how these have been misapplied in the network economy, and how information technologies are being misused to create an always-on culture and a workplace hell.

The chapter concludes with the progressive use of technologies to free workers, and to create a workplace optimized for greater innovation and creativity. We touch on The Rise of the Creative Class, and how social networking is making this new form of working a possibility for a larger percentage of the workforce. It concludes with the values and principles driving the freerange enterprise, and delineates the goals of the book.

I RIDE FOR LIVESTRONG

Dear Friend,

I have 48 hours to help LIVESTRONG raise $75,000 for the global fight against cancer.  I need your help – RIGHT NOW!

LIVESTRONG Action just launched I RIDE FOR LIVESTRONG, a virtual version of the Tour of California. The Tour is the biggest cycling event in the United States, and Lance Armstrong and Team RadioShack will be riding in it later this week. They’re dedicating their ride to survivors and caregivers and raising awareness about the worldwide fight against cancer. You can do the same by creating your own virtual bike and dedicating it to someone in your life--a survivor or caregiver who has inspired you.

I just dedicated my ride, but I need your help – cheer me on! The more cheers I get, the faster I ride:

http://www.livestrongaction.org/bike/kevin-rides-for-research

Now, more than ever, we need to talk about the global cancer crisis – this year, cancer has become the leading cause of death worldwide. And if something doesn’t change, one in two people will be fighting cancer by 2030.

We have to fight back, push our leaders to act and dedicate resources to realize a world without cancer. Every single story and rider strengthens our cause and helps to make our voices heard. That’s why I RIDE FOR LIVESTRONG – will you cheer me on?

http://www.livestrongaction.org/bike/kevin-rides-for-research

LIVESTRONG,
Kevin

Freeranging the Book: Table of Contents

Below is the Table of Contents for the Freeranging book. In subsequent posts I will share more details about each chapter. So far, I've only written the first chapter and part of the second. I do have brief descriptions for each chapter written, however. I will share those short pieces over the next few weeks, and then go into more detailed discussions of each chapter as the writing progresses.

Contents

Preface

A More Natural Way of Working

The Science

The Culture

The Environment

The Technology

Workstreaming

New Work Metrics

The Imperative

Making the Transition

Coda

Notes and Further Reading

Any thoughts? I know you are seeing this with none of the details but hopefully from having read this blog in the past you have some idea as to how each chapter might unfold. The order? Anything missing? Anything that should be removed?

In subsequent posts I will provide brief descriptions of my thinking as to what will go in each chapter. Your feedback is most welcome.

Freeranging synopsis...

I've been meaning to start sharing some of the stuff I've been working on from the Freeranging book. Being that I've reached a bit of a writer's empasse I thought maybe now would be a good time to start. Conversation on these items would be most welcome.

What follows is the synopsis from the book proposal. Does it sound to you like there's a book here? What should I emphasize/de-emphasize? Your feedback is most welcome.

Synopsis: Creating work environments that foster greater innovation and creativity is a twenty-first century organizational imperative. Our economies have evolved to ones based on knowledge and information as the primary drivers of wealth creation. We are witnessing the growth of what former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has termed the “weightless economy”— an economy in which knowledge and technical capacity are contributing an ever greater share to GDP. Fully 40% of today's workers in advanced economies are involved in knowledge and other forms of creative work. Less than 10% are engaged in manufacturing, and yet we manage these knowledge workers as if they were still working on the factory floor.

This book details the issues surrounding our current work environments, and points the reader to a better way. It draws heavily on the the science surrounding ideation, and the emergent values of the open-source and social networking movements. It offers a vision for creating a world of work in the networked economy that is not only more friendly and natural, but that also results in greater effectiveness.

In a subsequent post I will share the Table of Contents, and we'll take it from there...

The President drinks from the 'information overload' Kool-Aid

I was disappointed to see President Obama's remarks from the commencement exercise at Hampton University today: Obama: iPad, Xbox Turn Information Into A 'Distraction'

You're coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank that high on the truth meter," he told the students. "And with iPods and iPads, and Xboxes and PlayStations -- none of which I know how to work -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation. So all of this is not only putting pressure on you; it's putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy.

He's right about one thing-- the increase in knowledge flows is absolutely putting pressure on our country and our democracy. He's wrong about the solution and about information becoming a distraction. Dealing with knowledge flows is an essential skill going forward. Those that learn to thrive in these new information rich environments will prosper. Those that choose to hide will be left behind.

I'm currently reading The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel and John Seely Brown. I highly recommend that the President (and his speech writers) read this book.

Push mindsets and practices are tightly grooved to a world where knowledge stocks mattered and knowledge flows were at best a peripheral event. We must accelerate a shift to a very different mindset and to practices that treat knowledge flows as the central opportunity and knowledge stocks as a useful by-product and key-enabler.

We old folks cut-our-teeth in a push world. That world is rapidly collapsing. Telling the next generation  to turn off their information appliances and to disengage from their knowledge flows is doing them a disservice.  Learning to live in the flow is the new imperative. This is the edge where value is being created. We can only hope those young people at Hampton University were busy reading their feeds on their smart phones, and that they filtered-out the President's bad advice.

Image attribution:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/blvesboy/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

Why Buzz is important

Louis Gray does a great job of explaining why the Buzz platform is so important going forward: Why I am Using Buzz and Why It Is Important that Buzz Succeeds

I do not want a world where the only social networks available are Facebook and Twitter. I don't trust Microsoft to do a good enough job to provide a real alternative, and I don't think Apple wants to. LinkedIn won't transform overnight, and Plaxo is not a candidate. Cisco and other companies aren't even close. So Google provides us the only real alternative to these two networks, and looks to be on the right path, talking openly about privacy, data security, and openness.

I really like Buzz. I was a diehard FriendFeed user because of the quality of the conversations. With FriendFeed's demise we needed an alternative. Buzz came along at just the right time. In its short three months of existence I have built a stronger network in Buzz than I ever had in FriendFeed. It works. You can join me in Buzz by visiting my Google profile. An awful lot of what I used to blog I do now through Buzz.