commentary

What Advice Would You Give

Tim Walker (Hoover's Business Insight Zone) asks What "Real Advice" Would You Give Your Company?

Quick fix = easy.

Tips-’n'-tricks = easy.

Actually doing things better = hard.
...
Even the best of us can fall for this illusion some of the time. In the business world, managers of high quality don’t believe in money for nothing. But even they can fall into the chasm between knowing that a problem exists and acting on that problem.
...
It’s going to take more than tips-’n'-tricks to get them where they need to be. It requires real advice, which is hard to give and hard to hear.

YOUR Advice

So, that brings us to you.

• If you could offer it without fear of recriminations . . .
• If you knew that it would be heeded and acted upon at the highest levels . . .
• If you knew that your organization was willing to go through the hard slog of making itself better . . .

. . . what REAL advice would you give?

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Feedback

Recently, Tim Walker posted a weblog essay on how to give unsolicited feedback.

It’s easier when you’re the boss, because you have a presumptive right to give feedback at any time to those below you. You should be home free if you show a little savvy by (a) pairing the criticism with a dose of praise, (b) offering it in private, and (c) making the criticism about a task or a skill instead of about the person. (E.g. “I really like what you’re doing with this project . . . but I think this presentation might have been clearer if . . .”)

-- How do you give unsolicited feedback?, August 22nd, 2008, www.hooversbiz.com

As he often does, Tim asked for comments (feedback) on the essay:

But what about other situations? What about all the other people you interact with in the course of your work? How can you use your insights, skills, base of knowledge, and so on to offer honest help to someone you know could use it?

I don’t have the answers to this one, despite having faced this situation any number of times in my career. So please share your own wisdom — I’m all ears.

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Who Owns the Data?

There's been a lot of discussion in the Cyberverse recently regarding Robert Scoble and Facebook. Robert lost his Facebook account (he got it back after appealing) when he violated Facebook's Terms of Use by using a program to "scrape" (download) Facebook data -- specifically, his "friends" list. Facebook’s Terms of Use "broadly prohibits the running of automated scripts on the site."

Here's what Robert was trying to do:

I was alpha testing an upcoming feature of Plaxo Pulse .... It is a Facebook importer that works just like any other address book importer.

What does it collect?
Names and email address and birthday.

It did NOT look at anything else. Just this stuff, no social graph data. No personal information.

I wanted to get all my contacts into my Microsoft Outlook address book and hook them up with the Plaxo system, which 1,800 of my friends are already on.

It’s ironic that you can import your Gmail address book into Facebook but you can’t export back out.

I sympathize with Robert's plight; I recently triggered a "bot sensor" myself on a site. (I wasn't even using a program, just looking at a lot of pages in sequence!.)

But what's interesting to me is that most of the discussion doesn't surround Facebook's policy or whether they were within their rights to turn off Robert's account, even temporarily. Much of the discussion concerns whether Robert Scoble had any right to the data he was "collecting".

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Tact Filters

In 1996, Jeff Bigler was trying to help a friend at MIT better understand her co-workers and why she and they weren't communicating well. The analogy he presented worked for her and Jeff posted it to the Web.

All people have a "tact filter", which applies tact in one direction to everything that passes through it. Most "normal people" have the tact filter positioned to apply tact in the outgoing direction. Thus whatever normal people say gets the appropriate amount of tact applied to it before they say it. ...

"Nerds," on the other hand, have their tact filter positioned to apply tact in the incoming direction. Thus, whatever anyone says to them gets the appropriate amount of tact added when they hear it. ...

(from Tact Filters, Copyright © 1996, 2006 by Jeff Bigler.)

Ten years later, the "Tact Filter" theory has stood the test of time. Jeff still gets "quite a bit of fan mail" about it and the Tact Filter has been mentioned in many other sites, most recently on 43Folders where I first heard about it.

I think the theory works well to explain a lot of personal interactions. Discovering it gave me one of those AhHa! moments. (I'm one of Jeff Bigler's "nerd" by the way. :-)

However, there's one part of Jeff's theory that I don't agree with.

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Re-orgs Hazardous to Teams

On Monday, my manager said "We're having a re-org. But don't worry. it doesn't affect anyone in my group."

She was partially correct. There is no immediate, direct, acute effect. However, the longterm indirect effects are demoralizing. We're losing three people from the Team.

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Hiding Behind the DMCA

Whatever happened to old-fashioned courtesy?

I recently linked to a cute photograph at icanhascheezeburger.com. To avoid network bandwiidth issues, I put a copy of the image file on my server and linked that back to the original page.

Unfortunately, in this case, the original photo was apparently "borrowed" without authorization from the person who snapped it. When the person who took the photo found out, the fur began to fly. She started sending out stiff-necked, stiffly worded notices to ISPs, mine included:

I am writing to you to avail myself of my rights under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This letter is a Notice of Infringement as authorized...

Ye gods.

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Four Walls and a Door

In 1992. I was working at Apple. Apple had recently completed and opened a new R&D center — 6 large buildings, across the road from where I worked. Our group wasn't moving but we'd heard the rumors. Everyone in the R&D center had an office with a door.

In 1993, I went to work for Taligent, the Apple-IBM Joint Venture. Taligent was about to start construction on new office space. They studied what Apple had done, then proceeded to follow the same model — a hard-walled office for every employee, complete with a door.

The space wasn't large; it had less floor space, frankly, than my former cube. But it had real walls and a door, a door I could close (and often did). It had its own lighting controls.

It was private. It was conducive to thought and productive work.

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Whisper Campaign

I recently switched to a new manager at The Job. By "new" I mean both new for me and new to the Company That Employs Me.

Our first meeting was not what I expected. My new manager's first words were:
    "So, what's with this email?
        (What email?)
    The email you sent yesterday.
        (Which email?)
   You seem very frustrated?
        (Um...no?)

Things went downhill from there. She asked me to send her anything I was planning to send to a "large audience" first so she could preview it before I sent it. Over the next week, I kept getting battered with repetitions on the theme. The preview requests went from "email to a large audience" to "email to managers" to "long email" to pretty much any email to anyone.

I began to wonder what was really going on. Was she micromanaging? Or did someone put her up to this? And why?

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Touchy Feely Paperwork

I have a new Job beginning Monday. It's a 3-month contract (to start). With luck, it can be extended, but this is not assured. It's through an agency (as most "contracts" are these days in "nobody is independent" California.)

Of course, before I start I have to fill out paperwork. There is a lot of paperwork.

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Internet Ties

I have a strong personal and professional interest in social networking applications and social software. Social software "enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities." Examples include email, instant messaging clients, weblogs, wikis, and social/professional networking sites such as Friendster and LinkedIn. **

Common to most definitions is the observation that some types of software seem to facilitate "bottom-up" community development, in which membership is voluntary, reputations are earned by winning the trust of other members, and the community's mission and governance are defined by the communitys' members themselves. Communities formed by "bottom-up" processes are contrasted to the less vibrant collectivities formed by "top-down" software, in which users' roles are determined by an external authority and circumscribed by rigidly conceived software mechanisms (such as access rights).

[ From the Wikipedia entry on Social Software]

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