Workplace Engineering

Another sad demographic and economic trend reported in the WSJ.

Today, more and more children are being raised by their grandparents. These grandparents provide a crucial safety net, allowing children whose parents can’t provide for them to remain in families, instead of winding up as wards of the state. But as the recession hits “grandfamilies,” that safety net is under stress.

I’ve been missing my Fracking Friday routine now that Battlestar Galactica is finished. Clearly Robert Strohmeyer is missing it too:

10 Business Lessons From ‘Battlestar Galactica’ - Business Center - PC World

Of Strohmeyer’s 10 lessons from BG, this one resonated the most with me:

“3. Some things can’t be outsourced.
Pretty much every terrible event that befalls humanity in Galactica is the direct result of an overzealous push toward outsourcing human labor to robots. The business lesson here is clear: While outsourcing may save short-term costs, outsourcing the wrong jobs can ultimately destroy your business, the economy, or your species.”

One of the tenets I’ve followed during a career of working in heavily outsourced environments is that you can’t outsource your problems either. The twelve colonies were pretty fractured and instead of tackling the issues befalling their society they outsourced the labor instead.

This is one of the great risks of outsourcing generally. Once you’ve outsourced it you’ve to a large extent hidden it too. If your processes don’t work and your teams are dysfunctional it won’t be any better after you’ve ceded control and it will be a whole lot more difficult to get inside and solve them before like the Cylons, those broken systems come back with vengeance.

Of course you can do something about it. If you are going to outsource, make sure you understand what you are outsourcing and the full context. If you can, solve your problems before you outsource. If you can’t, at least tell the outsource partner and make them a part of the solution.

(Via: Guy Kawasaki)

I’ve been sitting in a number of educational sessions at the IFMA conference. A number of the lecturers have been talking about the coming crisis as the industry ages. I’ve just looked around the room in the one im at now and it looks like only a handful of us are under 40 and not that many more are under 50.