I received my beta account from Foldera and have just up my account. Excellent job on the part of the U/I team for building a sleek initialization process, help screens, and how-tos. Now to start playing. I won’t blog on the process and start posting screen shots, but as someone who was looking at the alpha three years ago, I am very impressed by the progress of the tool. Thanks to Michael Sampson for getting me set up.
[disclaimer: I am on Foldera’s advisory board and have been since 2003. I hold shares and options in the company.]
Month: June 2006
Corporate Journalism
As an ex-journalist inside of a corporation, I’ve been giving more thought lately to a concept I dubbed “corporate journalism” when I joined McKinsey & Co. six years ago. While my initial assignment was to create an online experience for the firm’s clients, a site focused on so-called “horizon” technologies, the popping of the dot.com bubble doomed that initiative — woefully named — TomorrowLab — and I soon found myself wondering if I’d have to crawl back to Forbes.com and debase myself to get my old job back.
One McKinsey partner, Lowell Bryan, evidently saw some value in keeping me and a former PC-Week colleague : Rob O’Regan on the payroll, so we were re-pointed in the direction of a problem that had been nagging the firm since Powerpoint overtook Word as the Firm’s preferred communications medium. In the good old days, a McKinsey consultant would share his or her learnings with the rest of the firm by writing up a white paper sanitized to keep any one specific client’s identity confidential. That document, which took several forms, could hold huge intrinsic value to the firm if it contained a framework or solution that could be reapplied to another client’s problem.
Alas, along came Powerpoint, which, when combined with McKinsey’s famous “up-or-out” policy, which gave the average consultant an expected tenure of little more than two years, meant a huge amount of the firm’s knowledge was being lost. Once the topic of admiring case studies by the Harvard Business School for its pioneering efforts in the new science of “knowledge management,” McKinsey was confronted with a huge loss in its institutional wisdom due to the pernicious evils of Powerpoint and the high degree of ongoing turnover. The expertise wasn’t getting written down — Powerpoint requires a presenter to narrate the pretty waterfall and boat charts — and moving to a horizontal, presentation formation meant the old vertical Word documents of old; those classic narrated case studies which could be read without the guidance of the original author, meant the firm was losing its edge.
Bryan understood this and stepped up to the plate to reform the system. My job (and O’Regan’s) was to provide some journalistic instincts to the process of figuring out how to “capture” (that was the verb) what was locked inside of the heads of the Firm’s partners and consultants before they made the transition to the real world as the CEO of a company like Enron or IBM. Continue reading “Corporate Journalism”
What I’m reading ….
For work …
Well, if it from O’Reilly and it has the word Linux on the cover. I am reading it.
I thought about a CSS primer, but then I snapped to my senses and realized I don’t need to learn a new page description language. Learning Linux is nasty enough.
One of these days I’m going to read a business self-help book, such as “Who Cut the Cheese?” etc. I can’t believe people read such dreck.
For recreation ….
Tom Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simmons”, a Robert Stone I somehow overlooked — “Bay of Souls”, and an old John McPhee which is amazingly relevant to anyone who wants to understand why Katrina trashed New Orleans, “The Control of Nature.”
Dvorak rules
Dvorak Reveals Old Formula, Panic Ensues
I love John Dvorak. One of the driest, caustic, funniest and smartest men ever to write about technology. I love him so much we hired him as a columnist at Forbes. We had a rollicking good evening drinking Forbes wine on the Forbes yacht one balmy summer evening long ago while on a three-hour tour around Manhattan, and he made me laugh. A lot.
Having managed to thoroughly antagonize the Mac-goons a couple times myself in my day, I started spotting my boxer shorts reading his formula at PCMag.com for how to call in the Mac Marines (his classic was calling a Mac “girly”) and then milking the assault for another column or two.
“The Mac itself is apparently the moral equivalent of their mom. I’m surprised that some of these people actually do not weep reading these columns: “Oh! Why does he say such things?””
“The worst of the mob all tell the others to stop reading me and linking to me (a boycott was recently proposed), but they never stop. They are just encouraging it, and they all know it. Then come the personal attacks, as if I were an abortion clinic in Pensacola.”
I especially loved his final zinger at the new black MacBook:
“And just so you know: Yes, I do think the new MacBook is pretty jazzy. And hey, it’s black, just like my ThinkPad! Cool!”
[update: Jim Forbes has discovered the third leg of Dvorak’s Rule of Mac Baiting. 1. Get ’em mad. 2. Do a column on their ire. 3. Occasionally admit you were wrong and get more mileage.]
test
Testing why I can’t blog photos out of Flickr into WordPress anymore. I see a little black frame but nofoto.
Shame, it was a cool foto too. Ah, I see the problem, it doesn’t like to live flush right for some reason.
Originally uploaded by dchurbuck.
I am in Raleigh this week …
In case anybody cares. It’s been a little more than a month since I was last here — trip to Europe and then bicycle crash have kept me away from the mothership.
Southwest — the Greyhound of the skies — boned me by boarding me onto a flight from Providence to Baltimore that was predestined to miss its connection to Raleigh. I found myself wandering the halls of BWI looking for a hotel room but none were to be found. Southwest’s response to my predicament was a shrug and a little green slip with an 800 number on it. I called the 800 number and the person said, “Nope. No rooms around Baltimore.” So I kept at it, made friends with Matt at the Holiday Inn Express in nearby Arundel, buttered him up using the Jim Forbes technique of being nice to those most under siege, and finally snagged a last minute cancellation. In bed at 1 am and back up at 5 for the shuttle ride back to the airport. I paid $30 an hour for the mattress time and the shower.
Business travel utterly, absolutely, positively sucks. Wheeled luggage, headset borgs, USA Today, the aftershave stench of hazelnut flavored coffee … I feel horrible, as if I rushed back to work too soon, find that brain medications like Fioricet do not mix well with spreadsheets … whine, whine, whine.
Foldera Adds TechCrunch Editor and Web 2.0 Authority J. Michael Arrington to Board of Directors: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance
Dang, I missed this one from the PR newswire on Friday: TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington joins Foldera’s board. Good stuff for Foldera — founder Richard Lusk is building an all-star team. This is the big week for the company — the beta goes public, Richard et al are in Boston at the CMP Collaboration conference — and me, I’m still waiting for my fricking beta invite (you’d think being on the advisory board would count for something … just kidding Richard, just kidding).
VentureBlog: Who Owns Scobleizer?
VentureBlog: Who Owns Scobleizer?
David Hornik asks the question of whether or not Microsoft got screwed when Scoble bailed for PodTech, taking with him their “intellectual property.” (and Scoble deftly tosses me under the bus by citing Hornik’s post in a post of his own titled “Who owns Churbuck’s blog?”)
Hornik cites one of those hysterical pieces of boiler plate that the attorneys sneak into the Human Resources Welcome Pack which essentially say “all your base belong to us” and anything you create, think of, ruminate over, or otherwise concoct during business hours is the property of the Man.
“Ever since Scoble left Microsoft, I’ve been thinking about the question of who owns Scobleizer. After all, didn’t Robert write Scobleizer during work hours, using Microsoft’s computers? In fact, wasn’t it Robert’s job at Microsoft to write Scobleizer? Didn’t Microsoft pay him thousands of dollars in salary, and thousands more in travel expenses, to represent Microsoft in the blogging world and to do so, at least in part, by writing Scobleizer?”
David raises a valid point. I am blogging on a piece of company property, (a nice one too, a sweet Lenovo x60s Thinkpad with EVDO wireless.(note the shameless advert))Â Since I am presently 300 miles from the time card machine, (you know, the bird-punch model that Fred Flintstone used when he clocked it at the quarry) I guess I am blogging off the clock. Of course, one must understand I only work Monday through Friday from nine to five with a half-hour lunch break. I never work during non-work hours. I never check my email on weekends.
Sheesh, I don’t blog at work. I have too much other stuff to get done and blogging for the company is not on my list of to-dos. I will, from time to time, mention my employer’s name, but not a lot, because I have no interest in going down in history as the “guy at XYZ corp. who blogs about customer service.” I’d prefer to be known as the guy who wrote a great book about technology standards, or that guy on Cape Cod who blogs about clamming. But, dreams of literary immortality aside, I am resigned to be just a guy who blogs because he misses being a full-time writer. I suffer from the malady caoecethes scribendi and this is my cure.
I do have a reasonably healthy obsession with my professional life — it keeps the wolf from the door after all — and our professional lives are — at least on a time basis — the bulk of our lives. But assigning ownership of a blog to one’s employer on the basis that the employer’s brand enhances the brand of the blogging employee? Or that the blogger used precious CPU cycles on a company machine?
It was always 100 percent clear to me during Scoble’s Microsoft tenure that his gig was at Channel 9 videotaping geeks and that Scobleizer was his and his alone. He blogged about whatever the heck he felt like, and if that turned out to be Microsoft …. well, sure, he’ll go down as the Microsoft blogger.
Bloggers are bylines. Nothing more. Bylines move around. If my employer were to say, “please don’t blog about us” then I’d never blog about them. For now, Churbuck.com lives off of my employer’s servers, is managed by me, designed by me, the domain name is renewed and paid by me, and predates my relationship with my employer by about three years. So there.
Imagethief: brilliant summation of the Great Fire Wall issue
Imagethief is Will Moss. A PR pro in China. I like his blog a lot. So does, CNET, which recently picked him up for CNET’s Asia editions. Anyway, the whole American Internet companies operating in China ethical debate thing? He writes an excellent post which puts it all into great, speculative, perspective:
“So far, US Internet companies have been scrupulous in not suggesting that their prime benefit to Chinese users is access to controversial material, a move that would likely be poorly received by the Chinese government. But nor have they done a good job of articulating what benefits they do bring to Chinese users. Combined with their failure to adequately address the moral conundrum of operating in China –as opposed to the legal conundrum, which has been beaten to death– they have left a nifty vacuum for for their detractors to fill. They do not, nor have they ever, controlled this debate.”