b.cognosco

Breakthroughs Happen in a Social Context

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 16:04:36 GMT

Tuesday night I rode my bike down to Fayetteville, just south of Atlanta, to attend Lisa Haneberg's "2 Weeks 2 a Breakthrough" talk And talk about your breakthrough ideas - Lisa is riding her motorcycle across the country to promote her new book. I feel safe in saying this is the first time a business book has been promoted in such a way. And I'm certain it's the first time ever by a woman. Pretty cool.

So what did I think about the talk? Lisa’s premise for this talk (and the book) is that little things matter. She relates in terms of chaos theory and the Butterfly Effect – which is a little new-agey – but the analogies are for inspiration more than analysis. The main idea is that continual forward progress, even in tiny increments – builds velocity, and forward velocity leads to breakthroughs. To illustrate Lisa uses the consulting mainstay – the 2x2 matrix:

I think many of us spend our lives either in “Dreamer” or “Stuck” modes. Those with adult ADD tend to be in the “Victim” quadrant – confusing motion with progress and paddling furiously but getting nowhere. But where we all want to be is in the “Peak Performer” quadrant.

Lisa offered two points that stood out for me:

Breakthroughs happen in a social context – If you aren’t out actively promoting your goal or idea – discussing it regularly with friends, colleagues, and strangers and sharing your challenges, achievements, and objectives – you aren’t going to make any breakthroughs.
Introverts, no matter how smart, rarely make breakthroughs – Breakthroughs do not happen in front of your face. They happen in the connections and gaps and networks that emerge from constant forward action and focus. [Editor's note: Following a comment from Lisa the above bullet point should read 'Introverts, no matter how smart, rarely make breakthroughs until they breakout of introverted behavior patterns...']

I am a natural introvert. I’m more comfortable sitting alone in my office than I am in a crowd. Over the years I’ve worked hard at developing my extrovert capacity and done a lot of public speaking and presentations. But at my core I’m always more comfortable alone. That makes it easy for me to slip into the Stuck or Dreamer states.

And that’s a dangerous thing. It’s like exercise, or eating habits, or any other behavior you want to modify. What’s required is constant forward progress – even in small steps. If you stop – even for a little bit – getting started again is difficult. The inertia that builds is deadly. This is really the underlying principle behind all behavior modification, from Alcoholics Anonymous to Weight Watchers.

And so it is with Lisa’s program – simple, proven principles packaged in an easy-to-read program and supplemented with specific plans to help you move forward. More important, Lisa is building her own network and cult following. She asked each attendee to contact her by the end of the week and let her know how it was going, and if she could help, she would. Her goal for this tour is to help as many people reach a breakthrough as possible. Lisa has quite a few cities still to visit as she heads back west. Check her travel itinerary and go see her if you get the chance.

How To Think About A Presentation

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Wed, 02 May 2007 14:53:27 GMT

My friend and colleague Sean Murphy, who is a great synthesizer and sensemaker, came up with an excellent presentation idea a while back. He’s done this a few times now and if you’re in the San Jose/Silicon Valley area and have a chance to see Sean’s “12 Books for the Busy CEO” you should do so. Links to his next session is below:

Crucial Marketing Concepts for Consultants @ PATCA May 10
I will be presenting a revised and improved version of the “12 Books for the Busy CEO” presentation on Thursday May 10 at 6pm at the PATCA monthly dinner at the Embassy SuitesÂ Santa Clara - Silicon ValleyÂ onÂ 2885 Lakeside DriveÂ in Santa Clara.

I will cover a dozen books and offer a synthesis of the key marketing concepts (this is not a sequence of twelve book reports) that they offer. I will have an articleÂ on crucial marketing concepts that I will give out for attendees. There is good content here for entrepreneurs, whether they are starting out as consultants or embedding their expertise in software or a SaaS offering.

Spend an hour and leave with a summary of key marketing insights and some rules of thumb for successful innovation in Silicon Valley. You may even identify one or two books that you haven’t read that will be worth your time. IÂ will cover a dozenÂ books that form the basis for conventional wisdom on marketing in Silicon Valley. They provide the terms, the metaphors, the parables–in short the language–that successful high technology firms use to develop their plans and monitor their execution. Some of these books are old–most have stood the test of time, which in Valley years is a decade or more–but still provide succinct guidelines for new product introduction and sales.

I want to thank Mark Duncan for helping us turn a set of black and white PowerPoint slides that were primarily text bullets into a colorful and illustration rich article.

Video of Tool Use in New Caledonian Crows

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 02:25:36 GMT

Check out this cool video of a New Caledonian Crow deciding she needs to make a wire hook to retrive something.

Introduction to tool use in New Caledonian crows
New Caledonian crows (Corvus moneduloides) are known to make and use complex tools in the wild (Hunt, 1996; 2000). We are investigating the cognitive and neural correlates of these natural tool using abilities in a colony of captive crows (the photo shows our first two subjects - 'Abel' and 'Betty' [on the left]; sadly, Abel died of old age in August 2002).

In the wild, the crows make a wide variety of tools from a number of different materials, and we have found that they will also readily do so in captivity, even with unfamiliar materials. They usually remove the leaves and side branches from twigs, and also make tools from other bits of material they find, such as their own moulted feathers (by removing the barbs), cardboard (by tearing it into strips), and leaves. They are even able to use techniques which would not work with natural materials to manufacture a tool for a particular task. We (Weir et al., 2002) found that Betty was able to bend a piece of wire to form a hook, which she then used to pull a bucket containing food from a vertical tube (see movie in panel on left; for more movies, see Photos and movies).

Practical Application of "How To Read A Book"

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 19:44:57 GMT

On 10/05/2005 David Buchan wrote:

Can you explain further how this book helps you specifically. One more book for me to read and I'd like to hear more of the day-to-day practical benefits.

Succinctly, How To Read A Book (HTRB) is a tool for reading difficult expository works. Adler, being borne of the encyclopedic era, was quite old school and spent a lot of time on the works of Plato, Aristotle, Mill, Locke, et al. In HRTB he shares the methodology and process he used for understanding them, comparing them, and vetting his own ideas and conclusions.

Much as Getting Things Done offers a framework for managing and prioritizing competing tasks, HTRB provides tools to manage and prioritize competing ideas. Also like GTD, the framework is intended to be active - that is, practiced in the pursuit of something else. For Adler this something else was understanding the relative merits and importance of arguments put forth in writing.

Today I keep the book around as a check list, to make sure I covered all the bases if I'm reading something important. It's most useful when I dig into a complex topic like privacy, identity, or copyright law where lots of people have strongly held, conflicting opinions. And where separating fact from opinion is challenging. Socio-cultural issues are another area. The conflicting ideas of people like William Henry (In Defense of Elitism,) Alfie Kohn (No Contest,) Robert Sheaffer (Resentment Against Achievement) are not at all helpful unless you can put them in context, vet them, and know why you agree or disagree. As Adler says, "The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks."

If you read lots of fiction or literature, where the goal is entertainment, you don't need HTRB. Likewise, if you read mostly simple books, or only one book on a topic, you won't usually want to invest the time the HTRB process takes. Where it shines is when you read a lot, and read multiple books on a single - or similar - topic. His idea that "reading should be a conversation between you and the author" only works when the author is trying to convince you of something. Adler's process ensures there's some rigor in that conversation. Frankly, Adler's reading process is more rigorous than many author's writing process. And, if used consistently, would probably lead to debunking the vast majority of books on today's bookshelf. But that's beside the point. The point is Adler gives you tools to be able to figure out for yourself whether a book is really worth reading, and to know you understand what it means when you're done.

Most useful to me have been the chapters with step-by-step instructions, such as Chapter 5 - "How To Be A Demanding Reader" - wherein Adler offers specific rules for "active" reading, as well as questions to ask and techniques to use at each step.

The four questions a reader should ask
How to make a book your own - conversing with the author, marking, thinking
Three kinds of note-making. Different techniques for inspectional, analytical, and syntopical reading - structural, conceptual, dialectical

Also Part Three (Chapters 6-11) on analytical reading, criticizing a book, and agreeing or disagreeing. Adler offers 11 rules in this section:

Classify the book according to kind and subject matter
State, briefly, what the book is about (doing this is actually hard)
Enumerate the major parts and outline them as you have the whole
Define the problem, or problems, the author is trying to solve
Come to terms with the author by interpreting his key words
Grasp the authors leading propositions by dealing with his most important sentences
Know the author's arguments by finding them in, or constructing them out of, sequences of sentences (not paragraphs)
Determine which of his problems the author has solved, and which he has not; and as to the later, decide which the author knew he failed to solve
Do not respond until you understand
Disagree reasonably, not contentiously
Respect the difference between knowledge and opinion by giving reasons for any critical judgements

I don't do all of these every time, as most books aren't worth the effort. But the nice thing about the framework is you apply it only as much as required. From scanning, inspecting, and analyzing to comparative research, just use what you need.

Personal Knowledge Management With delicious

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 21:59:22 GMT

I switched to delicious several months ago as my personal bookmarking tool. It’s a great Web 2.0 service that solves several previously intractable problems. I grew tired of having my bookmarks scattered across multiple browsers on multiple computers, and never knowing where to find the one I wanted. I’m also lazy and rarely changed the bookmark name to something that would make sense to me six months later. Worse, I never made note of why it was important because there was no convenient way of tagging bookmarks. In short, bookmarks were only useful for things I used regularly. Using them to mark reference material was nearly impossible. delicious fixed that, with a simple interface and universal accessibility (as long as I’m online.)

David Buchan began using delicious recently as part of his personal knowledge management toolkit, and highlights several key benefits:

On how del.icio.us is working for me
I started using del.icio.us a couple of weeks ago. I was initially hesitant at needing to match my tags with the tags of everyone else, so I didn't bother, and that's what has let me get to the power of the tool.

My del.icio.us account has taught me that:

Creating tags according to what is important to me is encouraging me to bookmark items I wouldn't have in the past (I've never really been a bookmark person because of the complexity involved - del.icio.us takes that away by mapping in a non-hierarchical direction.)

It is a great way to share my readings with others on my team. Now if we're talking about a topic which is new to them, I can simply point them at my research; which has already been collected in one place. I recently did this when explaining the benefits of RSS.
References for a training session can be given a common tag for the participants e.g. http://del.icio.us/quantumgardener/nct for a session on Newfield Conversational Technology

I can branch to the tags of others when I feel inclined, but otherwise how and what others tag is of no importance to me. This is critical because I don't have to filter through people's different understandings of use of a single word unless I have the time. That said, I may take up some of the practices in a recent Denham Grey article on Using Social Bookmarks

Using as many tags as possible to describe each item makes me think about its importance and makes for a richer retrieval experience

I especially like David's description of how and why tags work for him. As I noted in Why Tagging is Like Sex, tags are best served with some context – context that comes from having a shared understanding meaning. I almost never search for tags used by other people because they’re unlikely to have any relevance to me. For instance, I may want to tag with the word “georgia” because that’s where I live. It’s a geographic tag for me. But others may use the tag for the former Russian state of Georgia, artist Georgia O’Keefe, or the screen font Georgia.

Context only exists for those who know me, or know something about my interests. It’s unlikely my bookmarks will have any substantial value to random strangers. That’s why I see little benefit to massive tag search engines like technorati. But that’s another story…

Rip-off 101: How Textbook Industry Manipulates Prices

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 00:15:08 GMT

A captive audience, naked price manipulation, over-reaching copyright laws, an apathetic education bureaucracy, and a student body that is rapidly losing respect for big corporations who abuse the market have created new tensions for the textbook publishing industry. Right now, publishers have a cushy, protected, contrived environment that they will fight to maintain, but students and consumer advocates are starting to fight back.

Oligopoly Watch author Steve Hannaford recently addressed the state of the textbook industry and the inherent issues of price fixing and consumer abuse now that only a few suppliers remain:

Textbook prices

College students across the US have just been hit with sticker shock. No, not from rises in tuition at private and public universities alike, though that is bad enough. The shock comes at the bookstore, where textbooks in most subjects now cost hundreds of dollars, ratcheted up year after year.

We don't often talk about naked price manipulation by oligopolies on this site, but this is a clear case of a captive audience and a few publishers that have "agreed" silently to raise prices. That's the opinion of Yale law professor Ian Ayres, writing in the New York Times (Just What the Professor Ordered, 9/16/2005). He quotes a government report that states that textbook prices have risen at double the rate of inflation. This the report attributes to the high cost of adding supportive CD and online materials to college texts.

But that same government report, according to Ayres. The real problem is the lack of price competition. A series of mergers has ensured that although there are hundreds of textbooks to choose from, the five largest publishers control 80 percent of the market The competitors don't need a secret meeting; they just look at others' rising prices and adjust them upward in return.

Strong corroborating evidence comes from a recent report by CALPIRG, the California Public Interest Research Group Rip-off 101: How The Current Practices of the Textbook Industry Drive Up The Costs Of College Textbooks (link via Dave Pollard via Stephen Downes) was based on a survey of the most widely assigned textbooks in the fall of 2003 at 10 public colleges and universities in California and Oregon. Student volunteers and staff also interviewed 156 faculty and 521 students about the cost of textbooks and their purchasing practices. Key findings from the survey include:

Student textbook expenditures have risen 24% since the 1996/1997 school year
Textbook expenditures are now equal to almost 20 percent of the average tuition and fees for in-state students at public four-year colleges nationwide
Half of all textbooks now come bundled, or shrink-wrapped with additional instructional materials such as CD-ROMs and workbooks. Students rarely have the option of buying the textbook a la carte or without additional materials
Sixty-five (65) percent of faculty rarely or never use the bundled materials in their courses
Seventy-six (76) percent of faculty report that the new editions they use are justified never to half the time. Forty (40) percent of faculty report that the new editions are rarely to never justified

The inclusion of value-added materials such as CDs and workbooks is identified as a major factor in rising costs. But the study finds no demand for these materials from either students or faculty. Yet publishers continue with claims these materials are necessary to to attract students and be competitive. Again from Oligopoly Watch:

The companies try to justify higher prices, as reported in a Washington Post article (Textbook Prices on the Rise", 9/18/2004):

The $3.4 billion-a-year higher-education publishing industry says that it must keep its material current to win schools' support and that prices are competitive in each market. Industry officials defend new editions churned out by major higher-education publishers Thomson Learning, Pearson Education and McGraw-Hill. They argue that texts must be continually modernized if publishers want to keep the attention of today's college students, who are used to the graphics and interactivity of the Internet.

Though that does not explain why the same companies sell textbooks at lower prices in other countries.

Ayres points out the parallels between the cost of textbooks and those of prescription drugs, where the person "prescribing" has no need to pay for the texts/drugs and may not even be aware of their costs. The consumer, who does pay, is given no choice.

This parallel between the pharmaceutical and textbook publishing industries is important, with a key difference. In medicine there is a massive layer of intermediating healthcare managers that have grown to balance the market power of the pharmaceutical makers. Doctors may not know what your medicine costs, but your insurer does and works to drive that cost down.

No such intermediary exists in education, and the entire burden falls to students, who have no representation in the process. Publishers are completely insulated from the people who have to pay them, creating a perfectly inelastic market where demand is unaffected by price. This sort of artificial environment is a gold mine for publishers, and ripe for consumer abuse and anti-competitive behavior.

The first of the CALPIRG policy recommendations is to inform professors of the cost of textbooks during their selection process, force publishers to disclose full pricing for all products, and require unbundling of value-added extras. Unbelievably, none of this happens today. The publishers create an artificial scarcity of information that allows them to dictate market conditions rather than respond to them. The university bureaucracies offer little resistance, exposing how disconnected they have become from their customers. In the past part of this financial pressure was mitigated by liberal use of photocopies. Professors would order photocopies of small, but key, portions of textbooks for their course paks. But a full frontal assault on copyright and Fair Use by publishers, and intellectual property holders everywhere, all but eliminated this practice.

Abandoned by university leaders, students have taken matters into their own hands and are finding innovative, affordable ways to make their own full-text versions of books. Over at The Student Tablet PC blog there is a wealth of information on setting up your own scanning and OCR process. Everything from what hardware and software to buy to ideas on annotation, file formats, and cataloging. Its not much of a stretch to imagine a substantial black market popping up in scanned, annotated electronic books created by students. Theyve already shown a complete disregard for interests of record labels selling overpriced CDs. It seems unlikely that textbook publishers will get any more respect.

Picture the Process

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 17:25:38 GMT

Australian process guru and ontological coach David Buchan has begun using flickr and, as is usual with David, has begun to brainstorm specifics on how it can be a tool for improving the way we work. This would not have been an interesting conversation a month ago, but with Yahoo! buying flickr a stable future seems much more likely for the online photo service. I like Davids three points at the end, addressing what are likely to be common objections to his idea.

Using photos to job memories

Shawn Callahan extols the virtues of using photos to remember what has happened on a project.

Remember the last time you sat down to flick through a photo album and see the photo of Uncle Johnnie (substitute your own relatives here) building the sand castle with little Katie and you instantly recollect the story of how Johnnie got incredibility drunk that night and fell into the bonfire. The next morning he vowed to be a tea totaller. The same story recollecting effect can be created in your organisation with each each project you undertake.

I really like this idea and agree that flickr is a good solution. If you're reluctant to start a photo archive today it may be because you are thinking...

I don't have time to categorise everything so that I can find it again - well, flickr uses tags which are quick and sorts by date using the information from the digital camera itself. Photos of a project ar relevant to the people that were on it. They will remember the categories/stories themselves. For others it really doesn't matter so there is no need to invest the time

I don't have time to take good photos or I'm not a good photographer - who cares? You want to capture the moment as it was, not as you thought it should be portrayed.

The rest of the world will see us or the client will wonder why we are taking photos rather than doing work - injecting some humanity into work is always a good thing. And the rest of the world? Perhaps you will inspire them.