by Charles Plant | Nov 22, 2011 | Management
I attended a trade show last week that was part of the Canadian Society of Training and Development (CSTD) conference. Very interesting as it had been a couple of years since I had last been there. The thing that surprised me most was how little the trade show had changed since I had last been there. It seemed as if the same firms were presenting the same things that they had been talking about a few years ago. Given the changes that are being tried in education and the rapid increase in digital media, I was expecting to see a great deal of innovation. I guess like in many industries, innovation is occurring at the fringes, at companies that are not yet part of this mainstream activity. I would love to meet firms that are trying new approaches, that are innovating in management education so if you come across any, please let me know.
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 | Aug 23, 2011 | Management
It’s no wonder that the average employee is overwhelmed. If you look at technological advances in the last 30 years alone, we have gone from getting phone calls and letters and a bit of data to getting:
- Data
- Voice Mail
- Email
- Instant messages
- Text messages
- Facebook Messages
- Tweats
We have gone from reading the newspaper, listening to radio and watching TV for our news to:
- Websites
- Blogs
- Videos on YouTube
- Pictures on Flickr
Where we once used a phone to communicate, we now use
- Cell Phones
- Blackberries
- IPhones
- IPads
- Computers
If you put together the statistics on the average user who uses these devices and for the most part these are the younger employees for communications alone and not including media or data, the average user sends or gets:
- 110 Emails
- 53 Instant messages
- 80 Text Messages
- 100 Facebook posts
The email alone is enough to swamp an average employee but when you add in all of the websites, blogs, tweats, videos etc, it is a wonder that we have any time left to work.
by Charles Plant | Jun 23, 2011 | Management
According to statistics from AOL’s Corporate Newsroom in their 45th (?) Annual Email Addiction Survey in 2009, 62% of at-work email users check work email over the weekend, and 19% check it five or more times in a weekend. More than 50% said they check it on vacation, with the highest amount coming from mobile device users at 78%. In another AOL Opinion Research Study in 2007, they reported that:
- 15% of Americans say they are addicted to email.
- 59% of those using portable devices check email as it arrives.
- 43% of users sleep near their email unit to hear incoming messages.
- 40% consider email accessibility when they plan a trip.
- 83% check their email once a day while on vacation.
- 43% check their email first thing every morning.
Statistics published by the Radacati group state that the typical corporate email user sends and receives about 110 emails per day. This breaks down into 74 email messages received, 61 of which are legitimate and 13 of which are spam. The average number of emails sent is about 36. Being a bit of a nerd, I went and looked at my own email usage over the last six months and found that on average I sent 25 a day. Because of the way I file emails, I was unable to figure out how many I received but I was able to determine that I deleted 67 per day on average. This means that 67 emails were not important enough for me to save them in folders that I set up for all projects I am working on. Given the total volume I could count, of 92 emails per day, it is likely that I am working at the average of about 110 per day.
Oddly enough 110 emails per day does not sound like all that much. Could you imagine though if you got 110 letters in the mail each day or you got 110 phone calls in a day. You would be absolutely swamped. And guess what? Many of these email users are actually swamped.
by Charles Plant | Jun 7, 2011 | Management
The industrial revolution changed the way work was done in the same way that the technology revolution is changing work today. The old cottage system of work migrated to larger units of production, particularly as the availability of centralized power made it possible to work on a larger scale. Not only did the nature of the enterprise change but the entire support structure of work was modified as a result. The need for significantly larger amounts of capital to support the new scale of industry changed the worlds of banking, insurance, exporting.
This new format of working changed the lives of workers forever. The craftsman working in his cottage making blankets, sweaters, hats or working as a blacksmith on iron could no longer survive as a result of increased competition and lower prices. This cottage worker now had to either step up and become an employer and owner of one of the factories or as was more common, become a wage slave in one of the factories. While in luxury goods, there was still a very hands on element and cottage style workers merely migrated to a new location where they did much of the same work as they had before, the introduction of powered machines radically changed the organization of job functions from the old handicraft tradition.
Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1776) described the new production system in a pin factory:
“One man draws out the wire; another straights it; a third cuts it; a fourth points it; a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business; to whiten the pin is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is in this manner divided into about 18 distinct operations.” According to Smith, a single worker “could scarce, perhaps with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make 20.” The new methods enabled a pin factory to turn out as many as 4,800 pins a day.”
