If you're new here, I just want to say how much I appreciate your dropping by! Oh, and you may want to subscribe to my feed. Thanks, and a tip o' the hat to ya!

A fascinating place to kill a few (or a LOT more!) minutes can be found at the Phrontistery (FRON-tis-te-ri, n. a thinking-place [Gr phrontisterion from phrontistes a thinker, from phroneein to think; applied by Aristophanes to the school of Socrates]). It’s a site dedicated to “obscure words and vocabulary resources”. (Actually, that could describe the last meeting I attended.)

Well, if you want to entertain your friends with your ability to come up with words no one has ever heard of, then this is the place! Here are some of my favorites (definitions provided by the proprietor, Forthright, and example sentences humbly contributed by yours truly):

Aegrotat ee’gro-tat, n (Latin aegrotat, he or she is sick, 3rd person singular of aegrotare, from aeger, sick) A medical certificate of illness excusing student’s sickness. Rarely used today except in Britain, and then only in the context of degrees and courses considered as passed by a student too ill to finish the appropriate material. Aegrotat is the only surviving remnant of the Latin verb aegrotare.

“Doc, it’s such a great day for golf, do you think you could give me an aegrotat for my boss?”

Barathrum ba-rath’rum, n (Latin, from Greek barathron) An abyss; an insatiable person. The second meaning, probably more popular than the first, derives from the metaphor of a bottomless pit, which characterises the stomach of some people, such as my brother.

“Never get stuck buying that guy lunch. He’s a real barathrum.”

Carfax kar’faks, n (Latin quadrifurcus, four-forked) A place where four roads meet; an intersection of main roads at the center of a town. Despite its appearance, it has nothing to do with cars or faxes, but is an anglicisation of the older Latin term. Now largely forgotten except in a few place names in the UK, but there’s no other word to represent the main intersection in a town.

“I’ll meet you at the carfax and we’ll have lunch.”

Delenda de-len’da, n pl (Latin, neuter plural of gerundive of delere, to delete) Things to be deleted or destroyed. The term is best known from the Latin phrase “Delenda est Carthago”, or “Carthage must be destroyed”, spoken by Cato the Elder in 157 B.C. after perceiving that Carthage might pose a threat to the Roman Republic. In this age of censors and shredders, delenda is rare, but most definitely not at risk of being deleted from dictionaries.

“Hey I appreciate the to-do list! I’ll make sure it gets on my delenda.”

Famulus fam’yoo-lus, n (Latin, a servant) A private secretary or attendant. Used especially to describe an assistant to a magician or scholar. I particularly like this word not only because it sounds more refined than ‘lackey’ or ‘Hey, you’, but because of its applicability to graduate students in a modern context.

“I’m sorry Joe, but your position as CEO is being outsourced, but I hear (name of competitive firm here) needs a new famulus.”

Farrago fe-rah’go, n (Latin farrago, mixed fodder, from far, grain) A confused mass of objects or people; any disordered mixture. This is an excellent term to describe the chaos evident in a crowd, jumble sale, or any drawer in my home. It’s not just a mess, but adds the extra context of confusion and clutter.

“This project is definitely a farrago.”

Galimatias gal-i-may’shi-us, n (French, gibberish) Nonsense; a confused mixture of unrelated things. This very cordial-sounding word is extraordinarily useful in contexts where one wishes to inform someone that their ideas are bafflingly ridiculous and incoherent without seeming overly impolite. It combines the senses of ‘incoherent’ and ‘ridiculous’ into a unique and useful term.

“I appreciate your ideas, Mary, they’re really quite galimatias.”

There are plenty more, along with lots of other interesting resources. Now I think I’ll retire to my growlery for some dedicated omphaloskepsis. Hey, don’t ultracrepidate unless you’ve tried it!

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

Let’s take a journey today.

First, a hop across the pond for an article from the Times Online (in England, old bean) titled “Report: The next step in brain evolution” discusses how our brains may be changing, and the findings are, as Spock would say, “fascinating” (don’t forget to lift your eyebrow when you say it.) It’s a long article but I highly recommend it.

Then, pop over to David Armano’s L+E blog today where he adds some very interesting commentary.

Finally, I humbly add my own comments:

It’s a fascinating article and I like the additional thoughts added by David. But there may be some serious consequences to this phenomenon. Are we really ready for this? (Oops - did I just give myself away as an “immigrant”?)

For instance, could that “rapid digital change” continue to widen the gap between each of the three cultural groups mentioned (old world, immigrant, citizen) as the pace of change in the digital world continues to increase? Will the gap eventually get too great to bridge? Let’s hope not! Cultural divides are already the cause of many conflicts we experience right now.

The point about this being something of a “grand experiment” is a good one, though. But that begs the question: are you personally happy being a subject of such an experiment? Some people won’t mind, and some people will – and maybe that’s an even better illustration of the developing cultural gap mentioned above.

Orson Scott Card, in his excellent sci-fi series of books starting with “Enders Game” described a future Earth where “the Nets” were all pervasive computer networks of people. The main characters of the book built their influence by simply gaining a following among the participants. One character then leveraged his influence to control the world’s political power.

Isn’t that basically what is happening right now with blogging and other types of social networking? Well, not exactly “king of the world” stuff, but the person with something valuable to say develops a following, gains influence, and pretty soon, it’s just possible to change the world - all because of the connections made with people.

Pretty sobering stuff, when you see it happening right before your eyes!

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

From the Marketing Profs Today newsletter, there’s a small bullet that reads:

“Here’s a great way to look for a job. Start a blog and then create a fun, engaging, surprisingly honest PowerPoint (look in the right column under “Downloads” or click here).”

After skimming the blog and downloading the PPT file, I was struck by something truly remarkable. This is, in fact, is the ultimate demonstration of the new paradigm: one single person’s ability to broadcast their particular message to the entire world – for free! Can you imagine the possibilities here? (If you can’t, then crawl back under your rock and go to sleep.) For the rest of us, we’d better start taking notice.

Are you looking for work? Are you looking to reach a particular audience? Are you trying to communicate better with your team? Are you ready to change the world? Well, the power, as they say, is in your hands.

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

Well, it’s moving day at the old homestead, so I’ll be taking a short break from posting here at the Zone. Please keep your sense of humor - I’ll be back next week!

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

Ted Mininni, President of Design Force, Inc., a metro New York consultancy, has some interesting things to say over at Marketing Profs today about how innovation and creativity are changing today’s business climate. In his article, “Left Brain, Right Brain: Creating a New Business Model”, he begins by pointing out “In fact, business leaders are embracing, with great impact, the concept of integrating analytical abilities and creativity.”

(Right brain thinking, for those who have been living under a rock, is associated with creativity, innovation, intuitiveness, subjectivity, and big-picture thinking. Left brain activity, by contrast, is where the logical, rational, objective and rational thinking occurs.)

Ted takes it even further, and argues that organizations should use creativity and design (right brain thinking) to revamp the entire organization. “Imbuing an entire company with a design-centric (read: creative) culture,” he writes, “can make a profound difference in the way companies meet these new challenges.”

Fortune magazine is talking about it. President Bush, in his most recent State of the Union address, announced a new “American Competitiveness Initiative. Even B-schools such Harvard, Stanford & Northwestern are getting in on it, offering courses like product design, product innovation, or even an Institute of Design (Stanford) in order to enhance right-brain capabilities in new graduates.

What we’re talking about is design (organizational design, process design, etc.), which is inherently right brain activity. Perhaps a useful way to combine right + left brain thinking is to consider, as Tom Peters wrote in a Fast Company article, that “all work is project work.”

I suggest engineering firms may have a leg up on this one, and it’s because in the engineering world, essentially all work (at least all core business work) is project work. And what makes a project work is the fact that it is usually executed according to work processes that are designed from the ground up. (This also helps identify lessons learned when things go wrong.)

It takes a combination of right and left brain thinking to make project work successful. All projects start with specific goals (otherwise it’s not a really a project), but to meet them successfully requires considerable creativity on the part of the design team. After all, there’s a lot more to designing and building a facility than cold hard calculations. Creativity, innovation, big-picture view – these are all inherent in good engineering.

My suggestion: when it comes to redesigning your organization, take some pointers from companies that do project work well, and consider adding project management techniques to your work processes. You may find some useful tools in unexpected places.

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

Tapping into the knowledge inherent in a group of people within an organization seems to be the current “holy grail” of knowledge management. But what exactly does that mean, anyway?

Before I began my research into the subject, to my admittedly narrow view the term “knowledge management” meant categorizing knowledge areas, then identifying appropriate experts in each of those categories. Thus, when a situation arises beyond my capability, I always know whom to call upon as the expert in that area. But that’s not all by a long shot.

Jeffrey Phillips’ blog entry Centralize Data, Decentralize Knowledge suggests there are two critical paradigms to consider in the execution of knowledge management.

On data, he says:

From a documents and data standpoint, it makes sense to centralize this stuff… once a document is created or data is generated, it rarely changes and if it does there’s probably a record of the change. Many people have greater access to data that is centrally stored and managed. Additionally, data in these forms usually has “meta-data” associated with it that helps individuals search and find the information. That makes the information more accessible and more useful.

Management of knowledge, he says, is much more difficult:

Knowledge is situational and specific to certain contexts and events, and changes frequently. Rather than attempt to consolidate knowledge, we should attempt to keep knowledge decentralized but understand “where” it is and “who” has it. To a certain extent we are trying to create a “hub and spoke” system for managing corporate information assets. Hard, physical data and documents are stored at the center and constantly consolidated and aggregated. Knowledge provides the spokes to connect the data and how to interpret it with the users of the information.

Now it seems to me from a strictly formal point of view, this is essentially correct. But what is being described is a system of “knowledge capture” that encourages “knowledge sharing” and it’s important to realize the two are very different animals. Knowledge sharing is dependent upon networking to function – the more connections, the more knowledge is shared. Social networking has demonstrated this quite well (see the picture above.)

The hub-and-spoke model he alludes to means the flow of information depends on the knowledge expert (the spoke) knowing exactly where the knowledge is and how to get it. But there is always some lag there. What if the expert is on vacation, or just away from their desk? To whom would you turn?

What if you could tap into the knowledge of entire organization? Imagine this scenario:

Project Manager Joe has a small project that entails replacing an obsolete piece of equipment for a client. The equipment is critical to the function of the plant, and there are no viable alternative technologies to use, so the only solution is to build an exact replacement. This requires special materials which are not commonly available. When a search is begun to find vendors, no one he knows can help, so the circle of inquiry gets wider and wider, until finally he hits upon someone who had a similar need previously and could direct him to an appropriate vendor. Start to finish on this one question alone: three months!

What if there were a system whereby Joe could post his question to a central site viewable by everyone in the company? (Nearly 50% of the company is in the engineering department, so Joe has effectively asked a huge number of people at once.) Because everyone in the company regularly scan the postings, very quickly that same employee above answers Joe and directs him to the needed source of material. Elapsed time: 4 hours. The additional benefit: suddenly everyone else knows the same bit of information!

Say, wait a minute, there is such a system - it’s called a blog and it’s available now! Now all that has to be done is find a way to link this to the knowledge base. Oh, wait, we can do that too – with tagging, categorization, and linking.

So what’s the holdup?

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

Authors Paul Adler and Charles Heckscher hit the nail on the head in the latest copy of ask (Academy Sharing Knowledge, NASA’s excellent project management publication). They focus on that favorite word of innovators everywhere: collaboration.

We have reached two conclusions. First, this kind of work requires a strong sense of community that allows contributors to trust each other… Second, the kind of community needed today is very different from the traditional community based on loyalty; it takes a new form we call “collaborative.”

-To which I say, Bingo! Voila! Eureka! By Jove! (feel free to add your own expression here).

Not that the collaborative form is all that new, but in the new world of work, an organization’s (or a project team’s) sense of community can, and probably will, be a driving force in allowing groups of all types and sizes to not just keep up, but to stay ahead of the pack. And, to add even more urgency, the extent that organizations can adopt processes that encourage community will go a long way toward determining their longevity.

How can a sense of community improve work processes? One word: Trust. Successful businesses, the authors found, “restructure” community into a new (collaborative) form, where trust is established more quickly. The new form is distinguished by several characteristics:

By its organization, which supports horizontal interdependence rather than relying on top-down control or autonomous self-interest guided by financial incentives

By its values, which emphasize interdependent contribution to a collective purpose rather than loyalty or reliability

By the social character of its members, which is tolerant of ambiguity and conflict rather than comfortable with fixed roles and status

Thoughts on the above list

Financial incentives have less influence. More and more research indicates that financial incentives to perform are less important that once thought. Actually, more use of cognitive abilities may produce a greater sense of satisfaction in today’s workers. People want to know they are of more worth than as just a cog in a machine.

Interdependence, not loyalty, is the defining characteristic. Nothing wrong with loyalty, but it is by definition limiting and inflexible. Flexibility is a defining factor in successful collaborations.

Tolerance of ambiguity and conflict are a natural outcome of socializing work, and to be expected when different backgrounds, viewpoints, and influences come together to accomplish a task. Rather than being a hindrance, these will provide new insights that can help.

The tools for building this sense of community among groups and organizations are just now coming into the mainstream: blogging, wikis, social networking, just to name a few. And, as they become more widespread, they will likely evolve and spin off into even more useful tools.

But the time to get started is now! As Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) put it, “This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.”

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!