End of the metaphor?

I’m reading Jeff Jarvis’ book “What Would Google Do?” and have come to the part where he recommends that web content be put in a format that is easily identifiable by Google.

This has a subtle impact on written communication style. Just as speakers of global languages change to accommodate non-native speakers (using fewer idioms or slang, for example) so too are people changing the way they write in order to reach a wider online audience. This online change is very different from George Orwell’s rules on effective writing.

Jarvis recommends that dentists with an online presence not call themselves “smile doctors” or anything apart from dentist. In other words: remove the metaphors (whether they are elegant or not) in order to be indexed by Google. Orwell’s comparable rule was: “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” Orwell did not recommend against the use of metaphors, but rather recommended being inventive in their use. He never lived to see a search engine.

So now we have another potential point of change for global languages. The desire to optimize search engine results will remove some of the poetry from the everyday written language so that we may reach a wider audience.

Fool’s return?

Beatrice Otto’s book “Fools Are Everywhere” reintroduces the role of the Fool (or Jester) in history around the world. In many past royal and religious courts, Fools acted as a type of advisor to the leadership, having close access to the leadership and the context in which to say anything. Only the Fool could speak so directly, simply and humorously to the leadership and by doing so change accepted thinking and get results.

With the commonplace seriousness of many business organizations, this can a difficult role to reintroduce, though some organizations have attempted just that. A notable example was the Corporate Jester position that Paul Birch held at British Airways (until he was… dismissed). Smaller, more entrepreneurial organizations may take more kindly to the role, but then again, by being less hierarchical in the first place, they may not need it as much. David Firth, author of "The Corporate Fool" offers instruction on the roles that a Corporate Jester should take to make a positive organizational difference. These roles are: alienator, confidant, contrarian, midwife (creative thinking), jester, mapper (knowing who knows), mediator, satirist, truthseeker.

These are basically the types of behavior we would expect to be found informally throughout a healthy organization.

Would Fools have made a difference to the behavior of businesspeople engaged in dubious behavior, such as stock option backdating, sub-prime mortgage issuance, or accounting scandals? This is a tough question but I believe that the difference is that Fools in the past could absorb enough of an understanding of the issues to comment with clarity, direction and wit. Today’s business problems may be more complex (as in the financial scandals) and impenetrable (requiring technical knowledge).

Therefore, if the role of the Fool has a future in modern organizations, it must be spread out among the many, not concentrated in one person. I believe that some creative organizations have accomplished just that through selective hiring and an open culture. We’ll see where it goes.

Taylorism or Tailorism?

It’s been almost a century since the publication of The Principles of Scientific Management. Is there a new Frederick Winslow Taylor, a student of knowledge worker scientific management?

There are a number of drivers in knowledge work and a number of reasons why Taylor’s approach does not work well in this area. For example, there are cost savings arguments to standardization in more complex organizations. Contributing to this is lower employee tenure. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average employee tenure fell since 1996 (from the BLS study “Median years of tenure with current employer for employed wage and salary workers by age and sex, selected years, 1996-2006”). Tenures decreased the most for employee ages 35-44 (a drop of 7.5% to 4.9 years), ages 45-54 (a drop of 12% to 7.3 years), and ages 55-64 (a drop of 8.8% to 9.3 years). When employees change employers more frequently, they must spend more time ramping up in order to add value in their new organization. It would seem that lower tenures add to the benefits of process standardization for knowledge workers.

But there is a limit to how deeply an organization of knowledge workers will want to standardize processes. The problem is that knowledge work tends to be less easily compartmentalized and that knowledge workers, like the manual workers of Taylor’s factories, often resent being told how to do their jobs, especially as it may make them feel like cogs.

What do the stakeholders -- the organization, the employees, the customers – gain and lose from a process-heavy approach? To the organization: possible gains in productivity but less flexibility to act on creative ideas that produce future productivity gains. To the employees: possible improvements in efficiency in some tasks but lower job satisfaction, depending on disposition. To the customers: perhaps lower prices, but possibly less customized service.

Then I thought of my old tailor from when I was based in Hong Kong. His business was incredibly customer-centric. I would stop by his shop, have a cup of tea, talk about work, look at some fabric, talk about suit styles, talk about the family and then make a purchase decision. A very long, inconsistent and inefficient process. Behind the scenes, cutting cloth and sewing, he may have been efficient, but to the customer he gave a personal and, well, tailored series of interactions. I’d say that to some degree the knowledge worker is a customer of his/her employer.

Maybe not all of what passes as inefficiency is true loss.

New attraction to the humanities

I have enjoyed reading the recent defense of the study of philosophy and the humanities. In a New Generation of College Students, Many Opt for the Life Examined Stanley Fish’s blog from earlier this year has a different take.

It is heartening to me that these days more students are choosing majors in the humanities. One discipline of the humanities -- history -- has fascinated me since I majored in the subject at Cornell. Over the years I’ve found that you can have nice conversations about many things with people when you travel but if you discuss history, it is easy to get into an argument. Each country puts its own slant on the history taught in elementary and secondary school, stressing, ignoring, changing and reinterpreting events along with the times. And not everyone studies history at university, where there is more likelihood to be exposed to alternative viewpoints.

Many people have asked me how I made a transition from history to technology and business but for me this was never an issue. Many of the big problems in the world today are at some point a disagreement about the interpretation of a common history. Taken with that view, technical questions seem smaller.

In a time when we see worried articles stating that for example, US universities have too few engineering students and that many engineering graduates from emerging nations are not adequately equipped to work upon graduating it is intriguing to see articles like those cited above.

Cultural insight

I met Cathy Bao Bean recently at a Claremont Graduate University alumni event (I’m not an alumnus, but was there as a member of the Peter Drucker Society). Cathy is the author of a great book called “The Chopsticks-Fork Principle: A Memoir and Manual” as well as being a really enthusiastic and interesting conversationalist.

I read her book the day after I met her. Many of her cross-cultural stories reminded me of what I experienced while working in China over five years. Much of the business I did then (and even now) involved understanding the meaning behind peoples’ words (or lack of words) and cultural differences. I wish the book had been available before I went to China in the mid-90s, since it would have helped me understand some things more easily.

Toys of the times

I was amazed when I heard about this toy. Rather than using a toy metal detector to search for buried treasure, it's a way to educate kids about airport security. Now we just need knowledge worker toys for kids. There could be a toy kit for being a management consultant, investment banker, marketer... maybe not.

From their website: "This unique toy/teaching aid provides ample amounts of healthy fun along with education and awareness of the security measures that people face in real life."

http://lifesinventions.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&Product_ID=2385&CFID=17420493&CFTOKEN=53095688

Does social networking keep people from changing and developing?

When I grew up I didn’t know anyone who used email, cell phones were rare, and social networking websites were non-existent. As a result I had no simple way to stay in touch with most people I grew up with, especially when people moved. In the past I also knew a great number of people whose phone number or address I never learned, but whom I would see regularly. Staying in touch didn’t seem to be a problem.

Contrast that with a younger generation that will probably maintain some contact with most of their friends from high school throughout their college and working years. Even if the contact is passive via a social networking site, one potentially may maintain that network forever rather than losing it with physical distance.

On the rare occasions when I meet up with friends from more than a decade ago, the retelling of stories of the past and common memories means that we often temporarily settle back into the personas and styles of those earlier years. However, these situations are the exception for me since I only occasionally see my friends from youth as is probably typical of most people my age who have moved around.

Would one be less able to change if that cohort of friends followed one through life via today’s social networking tools? If so, will the generation that grew up with Friendster, Myspace and Facebook change less over time from its youth? Will the unbreakable threads of history keep this generation from evolving?

Memory as art

I saw something recently that reminded me of an earlier post (Your Brain Is Not a Closet). A month or so ago I attended a gallery opening at BUIA Gallery in Chelsea of Eve Tremblay’s “Becoming Fahrenheit 451”. Ms. Tremblay actually recited Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 from memory (ok, with some starts and stops, but still, what an amazing accomplishment). Like the characters in the novel who memorize books, Ms. Tremblay reminded us of how powerful memory is if we develop it.

All too common topic of conversation

It seems that an all too common topic of conversation is about the use and questions about the use of gadgets.

I do not imagine that previous generations spent the time we do – conversation time – sitting around discussing their difficulties using the rotary dial telephone or the post office. Or rather, while I do imagine people in the past discussing how the phone works or just how mail gets delivered, I imagine that these discussion would have been about the systems themselves and how they change the way we communicate. I do not imagine that the conversations were about how much time they wasted trying to figure out how to dial or how to address an envelope.

Gamelan and the foreign exchange trading program

When I was in Bali this past summer I took a couple of lessons on one of the Balinese xylophone-like instruments used as part of gamelan orchestral music.

My teacher was exacting in the subject of his expertise. He insisted on me getting the technique and notes correct from the start and only let me proceed after I memorized each part of the song. No written music is used in traditional gamelan orchestras. After a time, hammer in hand, I came to appreciate the commitment that he demanded from each stroke against the instrument's metal bars.

During a tea break, seeing that I wore an old Columbia Business School t-shirt, he asked me about foreign exchange trading, a subject I know nothing about except that it is exceptionally difficult to profit from it. The gamelan teacher wanted to buy a FX computer trading program which would trade for him based on preset parameters.

The whole idea seemed absurd. There we were in the courtyard of a home in rural Bali, chickens running around, someone making batik next door. I advised him against the trading and I hope that he did not start speculating. But now I wonder: to what degree does what today passes for cool business logic and modernity, say in the form of business research, actually differ from his FX trading program?

Name choice in the information age

When I hear new parents talk about baby names they sometimes ask a few things that I had not formerly thought of as important in a name.

They ask:
1. What is the arrangement of the initials? Are there other meanings that come out from the initials, both in first, middle, last order and first, last, middle order (the later sometimes used on monograms)?
2. Who do they want to celebrate? Family and cultural names and words are here mentioned.

How will this change in the future? Will naming a baby (already difficult) become even more so? Will it become closer to choosing a company's new brand name? Will parents avoid common computing issues, such as avoiding compound names or names with apostrophes that may cause database errors?

I ask for a number of reasons. Imagine what technological changes have done for the generation being born today. They are different in that most of them will likely not have the chance to register their name or initials as a domain name; those domains will all have been taken by the time this new generation goes online. Also, given the greater level of international focus today, will names that are difficult to pronounce in popular languages suffer? Will names that have poor connotations in other cultures suffer? Will English speaking parents adopt or find inspiration in names from other languages, such as Chinese, Hindi or Arabic just as biblical names were tailored to other languages?

Unintended Consequences of NYC's Cigarette Tax

For many years I have noticed smokers exchange cigarettes with strangers merely by being asked. To either "bum a smoke" from a smoking stranger or give one to someone who approaches seemed to be a natural part of smoking culture. This exchange that I once heard sums up the rationale for this familiarity among strangers:

Person 1: Could I bum a smoke from you?
Person 2 (smoking): Sure. Here you go.
Person 1: Thanks.
Person 2: No problem. I know it's coming right back to me later.

By exchanging what had been inexpensive cigarettes, smokers paid into and withdrew from a floating circle of goodwill without anyone keeping track of their standing in this balance of payments.

Now, with cigarettes at $7 per pack (officially) a different dynamic emerges in NYC. I now see smokers approach each other with $0.50 in change in their hands and rather than "bum" they offer to "buy a smoke".

In the current model:
1 pack cigarettes = $7. At 20 cigarettes to a pack, 1 cigarette = $0.35. A premium is applied (plus it is less unusual to offer $0.50 than $0.35) and the cigarette is bought.

In the old model:
1 pack cigarettes = $4. At 20 cigarettes to a pack, 1 cigarette = $0.20. Applying the same premium as above, a single cigarette should have been purchased for $0.29, or perhaps a quarter to keep it simple, but instead they were given freely.

What a difference $0.21 makes. Cigarette price increases led to a transaction based exchange. I would guess that less goodwill and kind words are exchanged among strangers in this scenario.

(I am told, however, that the $0.50 is not always accepted and cigarettes are sometimes still to be had for free. But I wonder for how long?)