Turn Around Artistry
Maybe we need a turn around artist. You've heard of these guys who go into
a faltering company and bitch-slap them into profitability. They don't have
a great rep, but it's a nasty job few are good at.
The problem with super-organisms is that they're on their way to becoming
real organisms, but they lack the full-on coordination tools, like a teenager
in the awkward stage. Companies and nations are super-organisms that seem a
lot more super than they are. When a company or nation is foundering,
its internal fiefdoms start pointing fingers and avoiding blame. Sometimes
the internal competition is killing the company faster than the company's competitors.
Make that usually internal competition does more harm than the competitors.
But, at a macro level, aren't we seeing that all over our economy? Here's
Mitch quoting
Marc Canter, founder
of the core of what became Macromedia (Thanks, Mitch!):
There is an entire eco-system out there - surrounding the world of
media. I helped create one of the leading tool vendors 'in this space'
- Macromedia - but there are others as well (Adobe, Avid, Discreet, Sonic
- to name a few) - as well as hardware vendors (Sony, Phillips, Samsung,
Matsushita, etc.) all who profit from media in one sense of the
other. All of these companies have some sort of 'grand media
strategy' that usually includes the end-users and developers committing
to their platform, standards and/or 'solutions'. But when it's all
said and done, at the end of the day, they all don't want to work together.
They may begrudgingly commit or even create standards, but (surprise,
surprise) there's always some 'hitch' why this doesn't work with that,
or why we haven't
'supported' that standard yet or why - for only $49.95 - " you can
get this little widget, which will convert these incompatible files - into
whatever
format we decide you can, so that you can use your own files " - which
you paid for or created yourself.
It's a total scam - something we
call 'lock in' in our industry. It's
time that these companies realized that open standards are the future.
It's time that we showed them how to be open and still let them prosper. There's
a solution to all this mess.
(In the world of media that Marc's talking
about, his solution is a common
Media Object Model)
So I see internal managers missing their big picture, competing with internal
groups they should cooperate with, and Marc and Mitch see companies doing the
same
thing, trashing their tools' utility to support bizplans that probably
won't work anyway.
Then there's this apocalyptic insight from Mitch:
U.S. indicator? Japan's economy goes down, down, down
The Japanese economy slumped
for the third straight month because industrial
output (and demand) have slackened. And at the same time, attacking
deflationary pressure in Japan is becoming a major political issue. I think this is
a global trend and we'll be seeing calls for the same kind of anti-deflationary
actions in the U.S. within the year, even though this is stark contrast
to the Federal Reserve's policies of the past 20 years. The National
Bureau of Economic Research says we
are still in the 2001 recession or maybe just hitting the second recession
in two years -- either way, the
pressure to drive inflationary demand-side economic forces is on the
rise, as it is one way to address rising unemployment.
Of course, it wouldn't hurt for people to have a surfeit of opportunities
unmediated by the kinds of managements that prevail in Japan and here.
How About a Common Task Object Model – TOM Tomorrow?
This blog's favorite meme: managerial capitalism seems powerful
because it rigidly constrains our choices, but in fact managers are simply
not very good at their main job of growing the economy and deploying talent
(you and I wouldn't
be either, BTW).
We
don't
have
the Task Object Model protocols in place to hook the Frommet Company's new
data widget to the instantiation tool from Nick in Portland, using a Flash
presentation
tool
created
by George
in
Ann Arbor. So, Frommet hires a new team to do the whole solution which misses
the market; Nick's tool never gets used properly and George goes back to letting
his clients talk
him
into using Flash to piss off their web site users.
But, as Marc says regarding media, there's a solution to this mess.
Let's make it simpler to find solutions and work outside the company
than to develop it inside, following Joy's Law advising us that
the best expert for your most important project isn't in your company.
A Task Object Model will be common when it's trivial for someone
to describe a specialized solution or service and to offer it openly and freely
to those who are known to be skilled purchasers of such services (skilled in
building experts' reputations and paying well—the core skill of a sound economy).
Obviously, that's the Xpertweb goal, but I
never thought of the Task Object Model metaphor.
It's not obvious that Xpertweb
might be a tool for companies to develop products faster and more reliably.
One of
the
great
problems with in-house development is that you feel you have to use the people
you've already got and the tools they've already mastered. Naturally that
rarely works for new projects because the in-house skills haven't been developed
yet, but they are out there.
Xpertweb is designed
to let the most talented people use their own consultancies to do for many
what they now do only for their employers. With a viable Xpertweb system
in place, the most active and clever people will leave first, just as the most
energetic
water molecules leave your coffee first. In both cases, their escape increases
the reservoir of inactivity left behind. Companies will see this first as a
problem but it's really an opportunity—to link together ad hoc development
teams as skillfully as Hollywood does it to produce films.
1:50:36 PM 
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