McGee's Musings
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Sunday, January 30, 2005 |
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Looks as though it's just getting off the ground, but it could easily develop into an important resource. Check it out. Help build the GTD Wiki. Jeff Sandquist and some of his buddies at Microsoft just had a visit from David Allen.
Coming to the realization that there are so many sources of information
about the Getting Things Done system scattered about the net, they
decided a wiki would be a good idea. And they also decided that keeping
it tucked behind a firewall at Microsoft would limit the potential
value it might offer. So Jeff has issued a public call to help build
the GTD Wiki he's hosting.
I know many readers of this blog are avid GTD'ers. Please stop by Jeff's Wiki and see what you can contribute.
10:11:01 PM •
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Friday, January 28, 2005 |
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Let me add my recommendation to Martin's and add that the paper is authored by David Reed and Andy Lippman of MIT. I've mentioned David's work from time to time and Andy is equally brilliant and insightful. A fatal infection. I would urge readers to drop the baby, turn off the oven, sit down and read this MIT paper on viral networking. In a nutshell, it describes the future of mesh networks. There are two core results: Throughput increases with... [Telepocalypse]
7:30:31 PM •
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Thursday, January 27, 2005 |
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Solid advice from Brendon on how to get the most out of any non-fiction book. Some tips and tricks I will want to incorporate into my habits. How to read a business book.
I'll be honest here, this isn't just for reading business books. What
I'm going to cover ought to suffice for pretty much any physical text
from which you wish to squeeze maximum value. This isn't a how-to on
studying though...there... [Slacker Manager] UPDATE: Through a cut and paste error (mine) the original title on this made no sense - so I fixed it
9:44:36 PM •
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I agree. This is a pointer to an excellent piece on technology and business change, full of insight and good advice.
Spooky Action: Seldom updated, often re-read
Mike DeWitt is a guy who needs a kick in the ass. He writes such good stuff, then gets taken prisoner by work for 6 months at a stretch. (Disclaimer: We chat from time to time, but I'm serious, this is not blogrolling.) This here post alone will sort the boyz from the men, girlz from the women on an executive mangement team. And - gasp - it's fun to read.
9:42:52 PM •
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Part two of my column on Bridging the IT Cultural Divide, Part 2 is up at ESJ. This installment looks at the issue from the side of management. The first column, Bridging the IT Cultural Divide, Part 1, started from the techie's perspective.
11:01:08 AM •
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Tuesday, January 25, 2005 |
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Worth a few cycles of your time to decide whether you've got some resources worth sharing. Are you one of those people who has one or more computers running all the time? Check out the story posted on
The Cancer Blog today about a new effort to use
spare CPU cycles to assist the Human Proteome Folding Project, which will bring many insights into cancer
research.
4:48:07 PM •
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I've certainly been guilty of this kind of approach at multiple points throughout my career. The best techniques I've encountered for dealing with these challenges are the "contracting" conversations that Peter Block advocates so strongly in his excellent Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used. Regardless of which side of the table you are on, you had better become more adept at Block's contracting or you will be building or paying for entirely too many custom-made drywall saws. There's an amazing essay at The Spurious Pundit on "Picture Hanging." It's an allegory that explores how simple requirements in software aren't that obvious to folks who may not have context. The writing is wonderful, do check it out, it's worth your time. Subscribed. A highlight:
4:44:58 PM •
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I have worked for entirely too many perfectionists in my life. That includes times when I've worked for myself. In a world of potentially open-ended assignments, we all need to be giving a lot more thought to how we define and recognize "good enough." The perfectionist definition of "good enough".
A while back I was working with a client who had a serious
perfectionist streak. One session, as we were talking about the lack of
satisfaction with anything this client did, I said, "Do you know what I
think your... [The Occupational Adventure (sm)]
4:35:34 PM •
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Monday, January 24, 2005 |
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Another great essay from Paul Graham. What You'll Wish You'd Known. Paul's advice to high school students. [Paul Graham]
11:17:06 PM •
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I spent an excellent day Saturday with both old and new blogging friends at BlogWalk Chicago. Jack Vinson and AKMA have good overview posts and more can be found at BlogWalk TopicExchange and Technorati tag:BlogWalk. With some luck I will find some time to process much of the excellent conversation and output of the day. One conversation thread that wound in and out of the day was the relation of blogs and social software to large organizations. Tom Sherman struggled with this discussion and I thought it worth taking a few moments to try and articulate my perspective.One reality for most of us is that we can expect to spend a substantial portion of our time in and around large organizations. I believe they will be part of our work landscape for some time to come. The nature of the work expected of many of us is evolving rapidly. It's more fluid and less well-defined. Job descriptions, when they are available, don't provide a lot of guidance. At the same time the mythology around organizations and work is that there should be clear guidelines around what is expected of us. I know that I struggle with these uncertainties routinely. Most of the day to day work that leads up to knowledge products and deliverables is fundamentally invisible. The bits that make up email and draft documents and spreadsheet models are hidden and shared only among a handful of people until they are completed. More than anything else, what blogs and social software do is make it drop dead simple to make the conduct of knowledge work visible. To me this is of fundamental importance. Knowledge work depends on our ability to learn and improve as we go. That depends on being able to see what is going on and social software makes that feasible. Organizations struggle with the notion that they need to learn. Too often, learning is something that someone else in the organization needs to do. Moreover, real learning (as opposed to what passes for learning in too many training environments) is a social activity. These tools will be central to creating the environment in which necessary learning can take place. Today, that learning activity is almost exclusively the province of those who've retained their natural curiosity and inquisitiveness in spite of eduational and organizational systems that work overtime to suppress these natural instincts. The work that needs to be done will force the rest of us to adapt as well. Seems to me that working out this transition presents some interesting work to be done inside organizations.
11:10:38 PM •
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Thursday, January 20, 2005 |
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This week marks the start of a new sideline for me. Jim Powell, editor of Enterprise Systems Journal, has asked me to write a column for them covering the same kinds of material I talk about here. The first column, Bridging the IT Cultural Divide, ran earlier this week. In it I start to explore an idea I've been trying to work out about oral vs. literate styles of thinking as they relate to organizations. Thanks to the indefatigable Buzz Bruggeman for brokering the introduction. And thanks to Jim Powell for his efforts at edting.
9:27:47 PM •
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Monday, January 17, 2005 |
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Another "isn't the establishment evil and stupid story?" One paragraph after what's quoted here is the following from the original story: Actually, the museum guard was mistaken. There
was no copyright issue, and the museum apologizes and is telling
artists to sketch away as long as they do not interrupt the flow of
traffic in the always crowded gallery.
So perhaps we have a training issue or a somewhat overzealous and underinformed guard. Is this selective sharing of the story helpful? You know that this would have disappeared in a heartbeat if fully reported, while selective quotation gave it some blog legs. Isn't there enough actual dumb behavior out there that we can let this one pass? Stop sketching, little girl -- those paintings are copyrighted!. Xeni Jardin:
Museum security guard told a child to stop sketching paintings in a museum -- because they're copyrighted.
It is standard operating procedure for students of art to learn by example by sketching masterpieces in an art museum. A budding artist in Durham found that the time honored tradition was challenged while seeking inspiration at the Matisse, Picasso and the School of Paris: Masterpieces from the Baltimore Museum of Art exhibit in Raleigh.
6:35:28 PM •
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More insights from Tufte on how to be an intelligent consumer of data. At the same time, you would do well to take Tufte's observations with at least a grain of salt. The tools of rhetoric precede those of data analysis by more than a few centuries and Tufte is a master of both. Tufte appears to see malice and venality in settings where I see predictable organizational pressures of time and cost. With the luxury of tenure, Tufte can find the all too real flaws in analyses prepared in the face of these pressures. Tufte's guidelines and analyses are all worth contemplating. What would be intriguing is to understand what tools he would substitute for those (such as PowerPoint and Excel) he criticizes so harshly. Further, once we've learned to recognize the analytical flaws he identifies, what do we do next in order to learn to commit them less frequently? Tufte's new chapter, Corrupt Techniques in Evidence Presentations, from his forthcoming book Beautiful Evidence, is now online for a month. "Here is the first of several chapters on consuming presentations, on what alert members of an audience or readers of a report should look for in assessing the credibility of the presenter."
6:15:18 PM •
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Thursday, January 13, 2005 |
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An interesting interview with Bezos. To me the most interesting thing he said was: I'm not saying that advertising is going away. But the balance is
shifting. If today the successful recipe is to put 70 percent of your
energy into shouting about your service and 30 percent into making it
great, over the next 20 years I think that's going to invert.
I do think that current advertising models are obsolete and that few have figured out that that means for their businesses. Jeff Bezos on the Zen of Sales.
The cool head of Amazon.com talks about the rise of the obscure, taking
on Netflix and why he quit spending on TV advertising. By Chris
Anderson from Wired magazine. [Wired News]
11:02:15 PM •
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I miss Calvin and Hobbes.
10:58:50 PM •
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Who knew that AKMA was an organizational theorist in addition to being a scholar and a preacher? Profound insight into change and change management expressed far more succinctly and usefully than most of the organizational change material you will usually encounter. When trying to simplify a complex [bureaucratic] system, any change that does not result in an obvious quantum of simplification amounts to further complication — or, more concisely, “any attempted simplification short of a quantum change is always a complication.”
4:31:05 PM •
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Saturday, January 08, 2005 |
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Given that GM has started blogging, this made a well-timed appearance in my aggregator. If Cars Worked Like Windows.
This has been floating around the 'Net for a long time, but it's been a
while since I've seen it. I laughed out loud when I read it again, so I
thought you might enjoy it.
Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If GM ... [Blogarithms]
4:27:51 PM •
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Friday, January 07, 2005 |
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Not only does Shirky nail it, but Cory hones in on the money graf s for us. This is clearly one of a class of problems where scaling issues overwhelm other factors and force solutions to be somehow distributed. These are much like the situation in the early days of long-distance telephone service that needed operators to complete all calls. Analyses at the time predicted that the services would fail because your clearly were going to need to hire so many operators that the system would collapse. The solution, in that case, was to effectively make everyone an operator by inventing direct-dial long distance and area codes. Of course, we've now reached the point where area codes are an anachronism and have little predictive value about where the phone in question exists in the physical universe. Shirky: Pro metadata will lose to folksonomy. Cory Doctorow:
Clay Shirky continues to just totally nail the questions of metadata,
authority, and user-created content. Today's installment: why crappy,
cheap, user-generated, uncontrolled metadata will win out over
expensive, controlled, useful, professionally generated metadata:
Furthermore, users pollute controlled vocabularies, either because they misapply the words, or stretch them to uses the designers never imagined, or because the designers say "Oh, let's throw in an 'Other' category, as a fail-safe" which then balloons so far out of control that most of what gets filed gets filed in the junk drawer. Usenet blew up in exactly this fashion, where the 7 top-level controlled categories were extended to include an 8th, the 'alt.' hierarchy, which exploded and came to dwarf the entire, sanctioned corpus of groups. If you want to trace back to some of the items that launched this most recent disscussion, here are some of the key links: Lou Rosenfeld's Folksonomies? How about Metadata Ecologies?
Adam Mathes's Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata Peter Merholz's Mob indexing? Folk categorization? Social tagging?
11:27:37 PM •
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Thursday, January 06, 2005 |
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Whereas I score even higher - age and a mind for trivia seem to help as well.  Wow! I'm more of a nerd than I thought!. Another one of those silly quizzes but I was really quite surprised by my score in this one.
[The Office Weblog]
5:39:28 PM •
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Tuesday, January 04, 2005 |
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RSS bigots of the world unite! This is another of those 'you need to experience it to understand it' kinds of phenomena. "Syndication is key. I have become such a snob that I won't read a blog if I can't dump it into my BlogLines account. Okay, snob is a bit harsh. It is more about convenience. I don't have time to search out every nifty blog I come across every day to see if there is a new post. I want it delivered to me. When I find a new blog I enjoy, the first thing I do is scour the sidebars for a link to syndication. No syndication, no subscription. The blogger loses out on higher readership & I lose out on reading some awesome posts. And so I'll end with a simple plea to all bloggers - check your sidebar. Do you link to your feed? Is it easy to find? If not, why?" [so this is mass communication?, via Scripting News] Kaye, you're not alone! In fact, I think we need a badge.... Update: heh… Paul Beard answered the call. Here’s an “RSS Bigot” badge! I’ve added it to my pages at the bottom of the right-hand column. Thanks, Paul!
11:23:55 PM •
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A useful resource. Here's a nice collection of links on thesauri, taxonomies, ontologies and facets.
11:19:31 PM •
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Monday, January 03, 2005 |
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And thank you Suw! The purity of the English language.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that
English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow
words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways
to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." - James D. Nicoll "English is the result of Norman men-at-arms attempting to pick up Saxon barmaids and is no more legitimate than any of the other results." - H. Beam Piper (Thanks Kate!) [Chocolate and Vodka]
11:10:43 PM •
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Sunday, January 02, 2005 |
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As if I didn't have enough ways to procrastinate already. An Enormous Collection of Crossword Puzzles.
You like crossword puzzles? You REALLY like crossword puzzles? How
about over 32,000 of them? That's what you'll find at
http://www.crosswordpuzzlegames.com/ . The crossword puzzles are
divided up into several... [ResearchBuzz]
9:24:47 PM •
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Saturday, January 01, 2005 |
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Excellent set of reflections on David Allen's Getting Things Done thinking and adapting it to different kinds of knowledge worker. This is the final installment of a three-part series looking back on a year of doing Getting Things Done. Part 1: The Good Stuff; Part 2: The Stuff I Wish I Were Better At. [43 Folders]
6:38:18 PM •
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© Copyright
2006
Jim McGee
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Last update: 2/23/2006; 3:30:34 PM .
Last update: 2/23/2006; 3:30:34 PM .
