Kudos

A few years ago I’ve read a book by Roger McBride Allen in which he presented a concept he named knowledge breakdown. McBride predicted that as technology and science continued to advance, the human society would reach a point in which it could no longer effectively use any new information it created.

His argument was that the length of time needed to train a given professional would be so long, that it would require most of his professional life, and would result in cases where people went straight from training to retirement without actually working a single day.

I found knowledge breakdown to be a very cool idea, and not one that is impossible to envision in the far future; After all, training times are becoming longer. Furthermore, the time an employee needs in order to settle down in a new company is also becoming longer, as her tasks become more complex.

Last July I attended Microsoft’s Partner Conference in Boston and had the pleasure of sitting in a session presented by Beverly Kaye, the owner of Career Systems International. She spoke of employee retention in an environment where skilled employees are becoming both scarcer and less easy to motivate.

Mrs. Kaye presented research that indicated a global trend towards employee dissatisfaction which results in 70%-80% of employees being either not engaged (not enthusiastically pursuing their goals and targets) or disengaged (actively poisoning the workplace atmosphere). Only 20% of employees were happy, motivated and full of drive (engaged). As a manager I can attest that it is more difficult to engage and drive your team forward, when the job market is sizzling with new offers on a daily basis. The result is shorter average employee tenure.

Combined with the ever increasing amount of time it takes for a new employee to integrate into the workplace I am reminded again of McBride’s Knowledge Breakdown, with a twist; If increasing employee integration time collides with ever decreasing tenure, the result could be a Production Breakdown, where an employee leaves her job for a new one before producing enough to cover the expenses of recruiting her in the first place. Sounds like something that will never happen? That’s what they said about global warming.

The marketplace will have to adapt to these trends. Businesses will demand proof from candidates that they have a high average tenure; perhaps sign contracts that include fines for early quitting. Employees that can show a track record of holding down a job will have an advantage and would probably get better terms.

The crunch of it is that although businesses consider the candidate’s average tenure in the past as a factor when hiring, we will see a drastic increase in the importance given to this parameter in the future.

I’ve been recently commenting on a post by Andrew McAfee regarding my concerns about attention allocation when implementing Enterprise 2.0. John Howard answered my comment with an interesting comment of his own clarifying to me how information workers adapt and participate in E2.0 in the normal run of business, or as John described it:

In my experience, people didn’t get side-tracked from their day job, they used their normal coffee, water-cooler, smoke break (!), waiting for edits to render, moments to dip into the Q&A going on in our discussion system

Johns comment really helped clarify things for me, yet it also led me to think about all of those employees that don’t have free moments to dip into the discussion system – Customer service representatives for one are monitored on a minute by minute basis, and yet they have a collective understanding of the customer and real time access to customer issues that are valuable. I have commented about this on the original blog post.

But then I began thinking about all of those other people that don’t even work in front of a computer, yet have a lot of know-how that is truly valuable to the organization. I was reminded of the local store I go to when I need meat. The store is part of a large chain and they have an employee on duty to help customers that have specific requirements (I like to buy pounded veal schnitzel). One of their employees has a lot of knowledge and he helps me sometimes pick what I need.

However, more often than not other employees are on duty that don’t really know a lot about food (although they try their best). When my “favorite employee” is not on duty I simply don’t buy at that store, and not because of his character but because of his knowledge.

So I was wondering how a corporate wiki could help that chain propagate knowledge between employees that work the meat section. Since they have an employee who is passionate about food, why not encourage him to write a blog about it and let other employees read it? I for one might start buying more meat from them.

I’m thinking about the implications of E2.0 on porters, nurses, doctors, clerks. I’m thinking about how people selling shoes can benefit from E2.0. I’m thinking that there is a lot more to E2.0 than solutions for information workers, or rather, that everyone seems to me to be an information worker.

A pause from my usual posts; I need to share a revelation:

I like to browse the web, looking for interesting blogs and exciting new services. Mostly, registration is required when accessing a new web service and, with some apprehension, I usually acquiesce and provide my details.

I have come to realize that I feel the same nagging apprehension during another kind of exploratory operation – installing a new piece of software on my computer. During long years of using windows, I have come to fear nothing more than bogging down my box with toys and utilities. Each new installation increases the size of your windows registry file which leads to a slowdown of your system’s performance. Install enough applications and your system will crawl. Furthermore, 1 in 10 applications will install nasty hidden thingies onto your box, compromising privacy, hijacking your machine and generally making your life miserable.

When registering to an online service, you do risk being spammed and you do risk a certain loss of privacy but current anti-spam technologies are so efficient (at least in my experience) that generally the risk will be fairly low – and you can register to as many services as you like and your computer’s performance will not be affected at all.

Think about all of the misery people went through in the last 15 years waiting for windows to start, reinstalling the system every couple of months, suffering blue screens and system failures and the universal “why oh why did I have to install that piece of crap utility just when everything was stable” hymn. This must be the single most important benefit to be derived from Web 2.0 and yet I’ve never read or heard anyone comment about it; so I’m naming reduction of system clutter as the forgotten advantage of Web 2.0 and declaring it a general blessing to mankind.

I have recently come across several interesting ventures and opportunities that have made me think of the long way we need to go until we reach the level of competitiveness you can find in the U.S. Market (let’s face it, most successful companies are either American, or are based in the U.S). It all starts with education and attitude.

I came across this blog post by Emily Chang a couple of days ago. She writes about interesting initiatives related to women and girls in technology. One of those is Entrepreneurial Night by Girls’ Middle School. Ten teams of 7th grade girls (12 years old), presented Powerpoints on stage to a panel of Silicon Valley judges and an audience of parents, teachers and students. In a post on BusinessWeek Rob Hof writes:

It was pretty amazing to see these young entrepreneurs slinging PowerPoint slides in front of a huge conference room screen in front of more than 400 people–including the VCs from whom they were asking for real investments of $100 and up. I’d be scared to death, but they all had their pitches down cold

Go and talk to any number of employees, students and managers in the high-tech industry in Israel. You will find that our so-called “entrepreneurial” industry is actually rather conservative. The notion of quitting your job and starting a new company is still considered by most to be an act of supreme self-confidence (or foolishness, take your pick). Our education system inspires innovation only within the corporate or military environments and the truth of the matter is that while people realize money can be raised for a venture, they don’t believe that they themselves can raise it. Instead of thinking in terms of success, people are thinking in terms of failure.

Those 12 year old girls are certainly not going to think in terms of failure. To them, building a business plan and presenting it to potential investors is something to be learned along with math, literature and sports.

VCs want talented, experienced and motivated people to approach them with great ideas. Give them that, and they will provide funding and coaching. That is very understandable; I wouldn’t want to give out my money to someone who has a low chance of success. But, such people are relatively hard to find. We need to invest in avenues for talented, motivated and less experienced entrepreneurs to learn and develop their skills. I believe that there is a huge difference between an entrepreneur’s first and second ventures (even if he fails both).

Personally, I am waiting to see a venture such as Y Combinator started in Israel. What they do is quite simple: they have a website where you fill out an application form (not a business plan, mind you) and after reviewing all of the forms they pick out any team that seems to have potential to build something. Each team gets 5000$ plus another 5000$ for each member. They also take care of incorporating a company for you and provide counseling along the way. Selected teams are expected to move to Cambridge for the duration of the venture and should demonstrate an initial non-trivial product within 3-4 months. I like their attitude:

How do we choose who to fund? The people in your group are what matter most to us. We look for brains, motivation, and a sense of design. Experience is helpful but not critical.

Your idea is important too, but mainly as evidence that you can have good ideas. Most successful startups change their idea substantially.

The downside is that the VC will ask for 1%-10% of holdings in the new company, which is rather a lot for such a small sum of money.

I see Y Combinator as a representation of an entrepreneurial spirit that thinks in terms of success rather than in terms of failure. I am positive that many current employees from various high-tech companies would be willing to quit their job and give it a go if they could get $20k-$30k for the couple of months it takes to see whether you have a good business or not. And VCs have control because they get to review the team and the idea before committing to anything.

I think this “lightweight” funding model could work very well here in Israel. Let’s hope someone picks it up.

I have a friend who’s in charge of marketing and business development at a local services company. He reviews various start-up companies looking for business opportunities. Yesterday, someone sent him a “Web 2.0 toolbar” for his review and he accidentally forwarded it to me (instead of information regarding a different company he wanted to talk to me about).

The first impression I got looking at that email was that people are not fully aware that Web 2.0 is not a technology. It is an idea.

Yes, technological tools are used to implement the concepts behind W2.0, but they are not its substance. The substance of W2.0 is in what leading technology and academy gurus call emergent, freeform networking effects.

I won’t go into the formal definitions of these concepts, but I’d like to write about emergence, because I think it’s a very interesting idea. Basically, emergence can happen when a system has the ability to use a few simple rules to build structures. These rules will define what kind of structures are built, and what their level of complexity is.

I always think about evolution in this regard. Life, too, is built out of a relatively simple set of building blocks with rules that allow those blocks to be combined into structures. These structures are then combined into larger structures, more complex with each new cycle.

You have amino acids that make proteins. These make sub cellular structures that go on to create cells, organs and blood vessels, until you get an animal, which is a very complex organism.

Evolution has a tendency to give us unexpected solutions to natural obstacles. This is because of the unpredictable factor of mutations and their impact on the organism. Web2.0 follows these guidelines as well, and a true W2.0 application shows signs of emergence because of it’s very own unpredictable factor – the way human beings decide to use and link the information on the web to other bits of information.

Because of this, no one is ever really able to predict which W2.0 application will be successful. We cannot predict if and when a blog will have many readers, nor can we know which wikis will attract enough people to become successful. Sometimes a W2.0 application reaches critical mass, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Similar to the natural world, in W2.0 we see unexpected results to natural problems. Emergence dictates that the organism will adapt and mutate, sometimes in a counter-intuitive manner, to overcome obstacles. I was amazed once I read this blog post by Don Dodge. It describes search efforts after database guru Jim Gray who went missing while sailing his yacht. Here is a quote found in the post:

A number of folks on the distribution list have discussed the possibility of acquiring satellite data…The Microsoft Virtual Earth Team is working with GeoEye and Digital Globe to acquire imagery on the next pass…NASA is working on getting there vis/ir camera on an ER-2. All of our satellite friends are concerned about fog and clouds; and/or ability to find a little red-hulled / white deck boat in a sea of gray pixels. Still, all of us with any bit of satellite experience are willing to take a shot regardless of the low probability of success.

and this as well

Please visit the Amazon Mechanical Turk site to help review satellite images. You will be asked to look at 5 images and determine if they should be examined more closely by the search team.

Jim’s friends have accessed satellite information which is usually used by Google Earth and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth along with a bunch of other data and created a blog site on amazon which gives web users the ability to help locate a missing person at sea. I am fairly certain this has never been done before.

The information was mostly already there, and no new technology was used here. But, a bunch of new connections were made between existing bits of data and the word was put out to thousands of people on the web.

To me, this is a good example of a set of existing structures being linked into a newer, more complex structure. Emergence.

Here is what some people from the coast guard said about it:

Coast Guard officials said they had never before seen such a concerted, technically creative effort carried out by friends and family of a missing sailor. “This is the largest strictly civilian, privately sponsored search effort I have ever seen,” said Capt. David Swatland, deputy commander of the Coast Guard sector in San Francisco, who has spent most of his 23-year career in search and rescue

Of course, Jim has a few powerful friends (Amazon CTO and Google CEO among them) but I think this example is valid since it shows the evolving complexity of Web2.0. Other examples may not be as extravagant, but the principle is the same.

So, next time you talk about user generated content, wikis, blogs or (god forbid) Ajax, XMLHTTP and other techno-geek-talk, remember that underlying all of that is a basic concept that has been discussed and researched since the time of Aristotle.

Objects and patterns can arise from simple interactions in ways that are surprising and counter-intuitive.

(Emergence, Mitchel Resnick and Brian Silverman, MIT Media Laboratory)

Jim was never found. After exhausting all possible leads, the coast guard and his friends called the search off.

For a good visual example of emergence, go here.

Got my electric bill today, courtesy of the IEC (Israel Electric Company).

Along with the bill I got one of those brochures where the IEC details average nation-wide consumption and what they are doing to cope with it. They explain that when demand is higher than production shortages happen. Fine. They say they’re working on boosting capacity. Wonderful.

They go on and say how important it is to backup your computer and protect sensitive equipment during outages. That’s very considerate of them.

They advise that consumers should use heavy-duty appliances during the night to even-out the load on the network… err… huh?

And then, they conclude by saying: “together we will reduce the power outages”.

Hey, I don’t want to reduce power outages together with you; I’m paying a ton of money to use your precious services. That’s exactly the kind of national-socialist talk they had during the 50’s when food was being rationed out because the state of the economy was down the toilet. That’s exactly the kind of talk you get when a monopoly is holding you by the balls.

Can anyone imagine one of the cellphone companies telling a subscriber that “together we will reduce call disconnections”? No way. Because by the time they reach ‘we’ the customer will have switched to their competitors.

The interesting thing here is that the IEC have a marketing department the size of a small town and not a single soul (bless them all) thought it strange to put something like that into the brochure. And in bold, no less.

…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it

(Simon 1971, p. 40-41).

Our attention span is a resource that can be measured in terms of scarcity. That is, the less attention we can spare, the higher we need to price it. It would be good to note that although most of us do not price our attention, there are businesses out there that price it for us.

Whenever we watch a TV commercial we are paying the owners of that channel with our attention in exchange for content. The channel owners then sell our attention to the advertisers which pay them “real” money in return. If you think about it, you’ll see that this example is valid across the board. Everyone wants a piece of our attention (usually in order to sell us something).

So, if attention is worth money, why go through a middle-man? Why not sell our attention directly?

This is what Root markets does. It’s a start up founded in 2005 by Entrepreneur Seth Goldstein. It allows us to track our own browsing habits (our click-stream) in a secure and accurate fashion and then posts it to a vault. We can then let advertisers/businesses buy our attention from us on the attention exchange market.

Instead of trying to lure us into clicking on an ad which advertises real-estate the advertiser will buy the identity of people that are browsing on real-estate sites, and the rights to offer them a business deal. They call this kind of technology MyWare (as opposed to SpyWare).

Or, as Mr. Goldestein put it:

Everybody else is spying on me, so I want to spy on myself.

Kudos! to that.

The model proposed by Mr. Goldstein will make it hard for businesses to bid for a person’s attention if they don’t know how much the attention of a single person is worth. It’s safe to assume that a student conducting research is worth less than a multi millionaire looking to buy land for his winter lodge. This problem will prevent us from actually trading with our attention because the buyer (the advertiser) won’t know the true value of our attention.

To solve this, Goldstein suggests that we can make other bits of information available along with our click-stream in order to become attractive to the advertisers. We can add our credit rating to our surf habits in order to raise our attention’s worth. I’d assume we can also add other bits of info such as our academic achievements, current employment status etc.

I’m guessing that companies like VeriSign could make big money selling user-certificates that validate our “attention rating”.

Regardless of whether an attention market will catch on or not, ideas such as this one provide a glimpse into the possiblities of the future web. And while true there is room to oppose the notion of selling our credit rating to the highest bidder, we need to remember that someone out there is already using this information whether we like it or not.

Personally speaking, I’d rather have control over what kind of information is made available, and I would certainly want to be paid for it.

There was a person living in my apartment building up until today. His name was Meir, and he suffered from Asperger Syndrome, or so I think. I never really had a chance to ask his uncle (who looked after him), but the symptoms match.

I came back this afternoon from the Squash club and there were three police cars and an ambulance parked on the curve outside the building. I could see them taking his body away on one of those wheeled beds they have, all wrapped up in a white body bag.

Meir was an Icon in central Tel Aviv, where I live. Everyone knew him. Most of the day he’d prowl the streets, the eternal cigarette in his hand, repeating over and over the same lines with vehemence:

- “Stay healthy!”
- “Have a cigarette?”
- “I’m not a bad person!”
- “Do you love me?”

People used to call him “Meir- stay-healthy”. You could overhear a common conversation that would go:

- “Meir was restless last night”
- “Which Meir?”
- “Meir-stay-healthy”
- “Oh, Meir”

It was always funny seeing innocent passersby’s stumble into him in the neighborhood for the first time. They must have thought the devil himself came for a visit. He’d approach them, real close, and start repeating those lines over and over again.

Personally, I always thought he was a gentle soul. My wife used to say he’s kind of scary to bump into during the night and I’d always say to her – “He’s harmless”.

And he was.

Once, one of the neighbors in the building complained about him to the authorities and he was taken away for a couple of months. When he came back, he had a new line to his repertoire:

- “Abarbanel is bad”

Abarbanel is the name of a Mental Health Center. Don’t get me wrong, I am positive he was well taken care of by a dedicated staff but I guess he didn’t like it there.

I wouldn’t.

During the last month Meir looked worse each day. He was thinner, and you could hear him wheezing when he talked. He started cursing, which was previously rather rare.

One evening when I was coming home with my wife from a trip to Jerusalem (see my post about that in “Talk about a shitty week“) Meir swooped down upon us in the stairwell. He asked the usual questions, went through his usual lines.

He was wheezing. It was obvious he had trouble breathing. I guess the ever-present cigarette in his hand was finally catching up to him. I remember saying to my wife, “I don’t think Meir is going to last a lot longer”.

That was two days ago.
I think I’ll miss him.

Here is some info regarding Asperger Syndrome:
http://www.udel.edu/bkirby/asperger/aswhatisit.html

I was visiting Jerusalem a couple of days ago with my wife. I was contemplating going up to my mother-in-law’s apartment in order to take a leak when my brother-in-law suggested that I should simply step aside to the nearest bush and conduct my natural affairs there, being a “guy” and all.

I concurred. Wouldn’t want to be accused of being a wuss, now would I?

Once back in the car I noticed an awful smell. A thorough investigation concluded that I had stepped into a rather large pile of shit, courtesy of a friendly neighborhood dog. My wife didn’t like that.

I didn’t like it either.

Two days later I’m walking along the Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv with my wife and a friend when I feel something wet hitting my forehead. Did I mention there are bats in the trees at Rothschild boulevard in Tel Aviv?

Bat guano.

Luckily for me we were heading towards a restaurant nearby. I went into the bathroom and cleaned myself up when a guy came out of the toilet booth wanting to wash his hands and had to wait until I was done with the wash basin. Naturally, I explained the situation to him.

He was rather amused.

After 10 years of working non-stop in the information technology industry, I’ve decided to take a break; Kick back, catch up, cook for my wife and think.

Not that the past 10 years have been without intellectual and personal challenges. But, there is a time in one’s life where momentum kicks in and new experiences become old habits and the willingness to try new stuff is diminished.

I want to re-kindle that childlike aspect in me that made me stick a wire into the nearest electrical outlet (that gave me a good jolt), learn to ride the skateboard or read the human body encyclopedia cover-to-cover. When we don’t have time for ourselves one of the first things to go is curiosity and without it something important is gone from us.

But curiosity is a renewable resource, given the will and the time.