by Charles Plant | Oct 18, 2011 | Learning
I thought that this PeopleSkills.pdf was just on the mark. There is nothing worse than trying to teach somebody something and having them forget it. I remember thinking the same thing while teaching at Schulich. While students typically had to do something up to seven times to learn it for an exam, the type of learning without further reinforcement was of questionable value. Having kept in touch with students for several years after teaching them I was able to assess how much they actually learned. Much to my surprise, I found that if they could use the teaching outside of my classroom shortly thereafter and if they could continue to use it then they remembered it. Otherwise, nothing. One key takeaway for me from that experience was”if you don’t use it you lose it.”
by Charles Plant | Oct 12, 2011 | Innovation, Management
Today’s service outages from RIM did not cause me any issues as I’ve been sitting at my computer all day trying to write. It did bring to mind though, similar issues that customers of ours had at Synamics. We built mass calling platforms for telcos and the expected level of service from us was referred to as 5 nines reliability. 5 nines meant that our systems (along with every other in-network telecom system) had to be available 99.999% of the time. Clearly RIM is not achieving those levels of reliability as 5 nines reliability means that you are allowed to be out of service something like 5 minutes per year. It will be interesting in the days ahead to see if this service outage is material to RIM’s customers. If they start leaving in droves it will be because this was a material problem. If such is the case then RIM has forsaken what is material in their business for something that is immaterial such as creating new tablets. Apple has been great at figuring out what is material. Now let’s see if Rim can be just as great.
by Charles Plant | Oct 11, 2011 | Management
There is a great video on TED that talks about Life Editing. Watch it here and then think about how it can be applied to business. Less stuff in business means only dealing with what is material. Now materiality is a complex issue. Something is material if it makes a difference, if its existence or absence would cause someone to act differently or form a different opinion. The problem is that http://www.ted.com/talks/graham_hill_less_stuff_more_happiness.html is material to you may not not material to me. In business your job is to find out what is material to your customers or your boss. After finding it out, don’t spend any time dealing with stuff that is immaterial, only that which is material.
by Charles Plant | Sep 23, 2011 | Uncategorized
Some remarkable statistics in the Globe and Mail last weekend got me wondering about productivity. While the technology revolution has been good for productivity, it may not be true that productivity has been good for the average worker. Right now, about half of the 14 million or so Americans who are unemployed, have been unemployed for more than 6 months. Furthermore, recent census statistics have shown that the median income for working-age households fell 10 percent between 2000 and 2010, even as women worked more hours. The real nail in the coffin is that the average real wage for working men is now lower than it was in 1973. I suspect that the technology revolution has really only benefitted a few of us and it has widened the income gap as it resulted in the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
by Charles Plant | Aug 30, 2011 | Innovation
I gave myself a birthday present of a new Kobo as I have gotten tired of carrying all sorts of books around. My first reaction was quite negative as I turned it on and found that the page was only showing around 50 words. If you read 500 words a minute, a device that only shows 50 words means that your reading will be slowed down to a crawl as you flip the page every 6 seconds. Now I have been accused of being rigid in my thinking so reminding myself of that, I vowed to give it a further try.
Once I found it was possible to change fonts and layout, things began to improve and once I had finished my first book I was hooked. Not so much on the layout, form factor, techno mumble jumble or anything else but by the ease of getting the next book. Finishing a normal book means that you likely won’t start another for a while until you replenish your stock at a store some time later. The great thing about Kobo is that it takes only a couple of minutes to get another book. At 11 at night when you are looking for something to read, you can easily download something and be reading within 5 minutes. Not so of regular book shopping. In fact I hazard to guess that I’ll read more with a Kobo than I did with real books and if many of us do so, this will be a boon for the publishing industry but alas, not so much of one for the retail bookstore.
