Book Review: “Undress for Success: The Naked Truth about Making Money at Home”

April 15, 2009 at 10:42 am · Filed under Web 2.0, Web Commuting, Work Design

I’ve just received my copy of “Undress for Success: The Naked Truth about Making Money at Home” by Kate Lister and Tom Harnish. As someone who writes about e-working (or teleworking) often, I can understand why, in the first part of the book, the authors brought up the fact that most surveys and studies don’t usually agree about the number of Americans e-working today. Why? Because different researchers and companies define the word differently. An excerpt from the book:

Some researchers count small businesses, others don’t. Some surveys include people who work from home as little as one day a year, while others focus on people who primarily work from home. Some fail to distinguish between paid and unpaid work. None separate out those employees and business owners who work at home from those who work from home.

To address the many incarnations of e-working available, the book is separated into several sections that address the concerns and needs of the following kinds of e-workers:

1. Corporate telecommuters,
2. Online freelancers,
3. and home-based business owners.

Each of those three sections contain informative starter guides for beginners. I’m glad that they separated the sections distinctly so that, for example, those who are interested in convincing their supervisor to allow them to telework don’t have to read the section on how you can apply for freelance work online. There’s also a section on how to set up the technology needed for working at home, which can come in handy if the reader is intimidated by the technical stuff.

Although the book quotes several statistics, it also contains anecdotes from actual e-workers. These stories makes the idea of e-working more real to the reader, rather than a theoretical situation. This is essential for people who want to become practicing e-workers. After all, these numbers and stories are what bring the “fantasy” of e-working into reality.

As an e-worker for my entire professional life, I often forget how overwhelming the idea of working from home can be to people who aren’t used to it. With all the information available on the web, it’s hard to separate practical advice from scammy, short sighted ideas. Fortunately, the authors do a good job of providing a clear, concise guide in the form of this book.

Social architecture

April 9, 2009 at 8:08 am · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Culture, Enterprise 2.0, Intranets, Web 2.0, Work Design, social media, social networks

I’ve been working lately on two projects with companies building social networking platforms with a purpose. While some aspects are clearly around technology, features, and the like, there are also the subtle aspects that go into understanding how these sites will be used. In a meeting with one of the clients, we talked about this difficult area of how to ensure that the use of the site aligns with its purpose: will people interact on the topics that we want them to, will the site discourage irrelevant content or social tourists from joining?

The word “social architecture” came into my head (or all of our heads simultaneously, it’s always hard to tell, isn’t it, when an idea emerges from the collective consciousness in a conversation?).

Like a good web 2.0 doo-bie, I tweeted that I was interested in using the term but needed to understand it more. My friend and colleague, Andrew Gent, tweeted back a definition, but then went on to do much more: he researched it, thought about, and has written a wonderful blog post, Social Architecture, that offers the definition that he tweeted back to me:

Social architecture is the conscious design of an environment that encourages certain social behavior leading towards some goal or set of goals.

Andrew’s blog details the current use of the term with respect to social media as well as its history in the field of architecture. When I began my own superficial search, the thread I followed was biased toward the design of the interaction of various social media (Sam Huleatt: “To me, social architecture is best thought of as a cross between three elements: interface design, social media functionality and user engagement strategy.”) which didn’t reflect what I needed. Andrew has, I think, hit on the more sociological and social engineering (without the negative connotations of that term) disciplines needed to shape a user’s experience.

While Andrew’s context is the corporate intranet, where it is possibly simpler to design intent and purpose into the environment, my work is currently leading me to social networks in the world, a case where an individual company wants to draw people into a network to expand its field of vision and expertise.  No answers yet, but Andrew’s exposition is a terrific start and I thank him very much.

What Happens When Two Bloggers Actually Meet Face to Face?

April 6, 2009 at 5:52 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Collective intelligence, Communities, Distributed Work, Management, Work Design, social networks

The answer:  good things.

I’m just back from a conference in Vancouver, BC, where Jon Husband just happens to live. I was smart/lucky enough to have announced publicly that Charlie Grantham and I would be in Vancouver for a few days, and Jon was gracious enough to get in touch and suggest we meet (since we never had).

The three of us ended up having breakfast together last Friday, and then Jon was the perfect host, offering us a ride out the airport for our trips home.

Of course, Jon being the champion of Vancouver that he is, the ride took a little extra time (which we had plenty of) as he gave us a mini-tour of the downtown and surrounding area.

I had been in Vancouver before, but not for over 20 years, so it was an eye-opening tour. I’ve always had good feelings about the city (stemming from a wonderful summer in the mid-80’s characterized by many late evening dinners down near the harbor).

But even more important than enjoying Vancouver was enjoying getting to know Jon. We (including Charlie) discovered way more in common than any three older gray-haired guys who had never met before have any right to expect. As Jon described on his own blog last week (”Back to the Future . . .  of Work“), we share many intellectual curiosities and probably even more views and values about organization, work, people, and even politics.

So here’s to the value of face to face meetings. In spite of our mutual fascination with what Jon calls “wirearchy,” we also agree wholeheartedly in getting together physically to share a real space, not just a virtual one.

Of course, that f2f meeting never would have taken place without the AppGap blog and our e-newsletter (where I’d announced the Vancouver trip in the first place), so I guess we owe some thanks to Hylton Joliffe and the folks at Intuit too for originally making Jon and me aware of each other.

But the nice part of now having “pressed the flesh” is that I’ll have a whole lot more context from now on as I read Jon’s blog comments. And I suspect we’ll see each other again in the not-too-distant future.

Thanks, Jon, for your hospitality and for your always-stimulating questions about the future of work and of management.

Will the retiring workforce retire?

March 30, 2009 at 9:43 am · Filed under Tips for Tough Times, Work Design

I was on an information exchange teleconference last Friday with engineers from one of my clients and engineers from one of their partners. The topic was the generational shift in the workforce and a general knowledge sharing about techniques each is using to support both the newer and the older generations in the shift.

I was struck by a comment made on the call that the anticipated “brain drain” from the retirement of baby boomers (a much discussed topic several years ago) was not as imminent as previously thought. Why? “It’s the economy, stupid.” Having seen their 401Ks cut in half by the recent economic crisis, many workers are opting to stay longer in the workforce.

Curious, I checked in with my friend Dave DeLong, whose seminal 2004 work on the topic, Lost Knowledge,  put all the pieces together along with recommendations for companies to prepare themselves for the (at that time thought to be) inevitable exodus. Dave, of course, has been thinking of this himself and describes the phenomenon as “all these retirement-eligible engineers piling up at the door” (nice image). He also offered the following food for thought:

• If those engineers (or other types of experts) are not retiring, they probably recognize that their knowledge is their meal ticket, so why should they be sharing it? I would be on the watch out, then, for more knowledge hoarding, which can be done is a variety of discrete ways.

• If all these engineers have decided to stick around because the economy is poor, what is to prevent them for all leaving at once, when things do turn around. My argument is the problems we had before this recession are going to come back to hurt us with a vengeance when business becomes strong again and people start feeling they have other options.

• I have heard a consistent story of many organizations currently experiencing older workers delaying retirement. But I have also heard growing concerns about this mass exodus when things turn around. If managers have been lulled into a false sense of security by the current delayed retirements, organizations may be hurt even more in the long term.

• Equally problematic is in most organizations resources have been cut for knowledge sharing/transfer activities because of the downturn, which makes implementing solutions even more challenging. I argue for the need to balance the short term “snake pit” of budget cuts and layoffs against the longer terms needs to sustain strategic capabilities.

Dave and I would both be interested in hearing more about what is happening on the ground with companies that were planning to lose workers — what has the impact been?