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.

Delivered this to the Chicago Corenet Chapter, March 2009. Still needs a lot of work, but the audience was very kind.

THE DOLLARS AND SENSE OF CHANGE. from Burnett Communications on Vimeo.

Incredible question in the Harvard Discussion Leader article In 2009, Match the Urge to Purge with a Zest to Invest - Bill Taylor:

“For years now, as I have addressed executive audiences around the word, I have urged leaders to ask themselves one simple question: If your company went out of business tomorrow, who would really miss you and why? I first heard this question from advertising genius Roy Spence, who says he got it from strategy guru Jim Collins. Whatever the original source, the question is as profound as it is simple — and worth taking seriously as you evaluate how to navigate through this economic crisis.

Why might a company be missed? Because it’s providing a product or service so unique that it can’t be provided nearly as well by any other company. Because it’s forged a uniquely emotional connection with customers that other companies can’t replicate. Precious few companies meet any of these criteria — which may be why so many companies feel like they’re on the verge of going out of business, even in good times.”

For those of us who decided to launch businesses just before the reversal in economic fortunes, the question that we’ve got to answer is: “If your company went out of business tomorrow, would anyone know you existed in the first place?”

(Via Harvard Business Publishing.)

Execute, execute, execute!! The Economist has a great post on Obama’s earnest army. It contrasts the McCain campaign with its focus on traditional political campaigning and Obama’s relentless and highly focused machine.

For all its pretensions to be about “you”, the Obama campaign is strictly hierachical and impressively disciplined.

I’m an expat living here and feel fortunate to have great friends on both sides of the political divide and a ringside seat as the election has unfolded. It is really hard to not be impressed by such a focused (and well funded) mash-up of old school and new school leadership, culture and technology:

• Applied Social Networks - online forums, accessible downloadable information, on-line and real world collaboration opportunities……all focused on a very clear objective
• Supercrunching - action oriented mining of huge databases of information to drive action
• Crowdsourcing - sophisticated technology enabling campaigners to easily organize themselves to pound the streets and keep important voter intentions and tracking databases scarily current
• Detailed scripting at all levels - foot soldiers are told what to say and they say it
• Clear and unambiguous leadership - Obama stays on message, his team stays on message (well mostly) and when they don’t it gets drowned out

The result is a huge, focused army of unpaid supporters that is on-message, disciplined, working phenomenal hours and relentlessly getting one vote at a time.

Chris Spagnulo in Commons Blog reports that according to a survey 40% of CIOs are indifferent to the quality of software they produce. Chris rightly reports that the costs of failed software in a business are tremendous. I’ve heard horror stories of automated bank account payment systems pulling a monthly payment from an account more than ten times in one night due to a glitch and key systems dropping out on a whim.

I hadn’t quite realized how lucky I’ve been to work with a few of CIOs and IT professionals that are fanatical about quality and understand the that a workman is only as good as their tools, yet based upon personal experience I can’t say that these statistics surprise me.

Liam Tung reports in CNET on August 14 that HSBC may be considering an iPhone fleet:

Global banking giant HSBC is considering ditching the BlackBerry and adopting Apple’s iPhone as its standard staff mobile device, a move that could result in an order for some 200,000 iPhones

Although he goes onto write that HSBC state the decision has a fairly low priority at present and it is part of normal business to evaluate different technologies, it is pretty telling that a large financial institution would even consider switching.

One of the things that HSBC (and Apple) would need to consider is how would Apple deal with a batch order for so many phones? Even for a company of Apple’s size and considerable supply chain management skills, this would be a huge order with some pretty tight service level agreements.