I know - you'd think the man would have his own high-rise, but nope - his offices are in the building.
Only time I ever saw him was when I stood in line next to him at the building's cafeteria. It's weird because the second he's grabbing a piece of cherry pie, you're forced to think "oh man, now I gotta go short chocolate futures!" or some such thing.
Travel. At a company like that, in my job, you went where the work was. I'd spend six months at a time traveling five days a week and my wife finally said "enough." Ironic, since I end up traveling even more now that I work for myself.
You're correct that the stock ownership was for a minority of employees and didn't include craft employees or admin; those personnel were eligible for profit-sharing, however, and that seems (to me, anyway) a philosophically consistent way to reward employees who aren't in direct P-and-L positions.
I'll also grant you that good management was at the heart of a lot of what they did (and do). However, "good management" in Kiewit's case focuses on training and education that treats every just-graduated engineer to think like a company owner, with a near-obsessive focus on project management and cost control. Because they educated future owners like current owners, they created a culture of equity that serves the company well even when it's implemented by non-stockholders.
Bottom line: I agree with your skepticism, but I also think there's a causal link between how they structured basic ownership and the downstream impact of that structure throughout other management functions.
Look around outside the tech field, there are actually quite a few meritocracies - and they work well.
Consider my former employer, the largest heavy civil construction firm in the U.S. Warren Buffet called them "the greatest meritocracy in American business," and with good reason - the company made something like $5+ billion in revenue the last year I was with them, but there were only 1,300 or so stockholders, all current employees.
Here's how it worked: If you were in a position with profit-and-loss responsibility and were doing a good job, you'd be invited (after a few years with the company) to purchase stock. No options, no gifts - you were invited to make a purchase at the current share price and told exactly what the maximum was you could buy. Couldn't afford it? Then they'd hook you up with a bank in town that would happily loan you the money, since the stock (which had earned double-digit returns for decades) was great collateral.
What happens when everyone on the team is an actual owner, and the only way you could become an actual owner is through doing a good job? Several things:
There's a lot less corporate B.S. Everyone on the team is working toward the same goal - profitability.
Loyalty improves. People are less apt to leave when they're invested. Combine that with a good system for capturing and teaching best practices, and you end up with a spooky-smart organization that makes fewer mistakes.
You were beholden only to yourself and your fellow employees. When you retired, the company bought your shares back - you could only own them as a current employee. That meant that they people you bumped into in the hall were the very shareholders that other companies always claim to be working for... the difference was, they were always around, and the company culture encouraged direct questioning and accountability.
It sounds like I'm just reminiscing, but it was a great place to work and (if you stuck around) a great place to get rich - it's a shame other companies don't follow that model.
I gave up life in Chicago (and L.A. before that) for life in a Missouri town of 2,300 people. A lot of the arguments (pro and con) for doing I.T. consulting from a rural environment apply to my line of work (marketing - go ahead and jeer!) as well.
Overall, clients care about value more than location, and (if you're picking your clients correctly) they care about results a lot more than cost. Deliver value and results, and they don't care where you live - they'll pay you to travel if you need to be on-site for a while, and when you don't you can sit on the porch with your laptop, listening to the crickets chirp.
Pros here: Just about zero crime and good schools (I'm told - I don't have kids). Cheap housing (my painted-lady Victorian cost $145k) and a major metro area is less than an hour away.
Cons here: Limited connectivity (there is exactly one option for DSL) and something as simple as going to get fast food is a 20-minute drive.
Someone way up in the thread was raging on about how the poor, dumb idiots in flyover country are just killing themselves because they're economically illiterate and make bad choices. That might the case in some places, but small consulting businesses (many are one-person shops grossing $150k a year or more) are popping up all over around here, most of them by people who've just decided they'd rather live in the country and work for themselves.
I can't tell you the number of times I've seen lobbyists put togeher "instant grassroots opposition" to an issue - often with the assistance of the disabled community. Heck, I've had to do it myself a couple of times.
All it takes is the right rolodex, some phone calls and maybe some donations, and you can get disabled people to show up and rail about an issue. Maybe their concerns are genuine - and maybe not. What matters is that they make for good press coverage and no one wants to fight them.
Understand the geek mind and you can manage 'em!
on
Best Way to Manage Geeks?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'll never forget an article over at 43 Folders about how Getting Things Done could work for nerds (substitute "geek" for "nerd") and organization - it had a lot of wisdom about this topic rolled up in to a few generalizations:
* nerds are often disorganized or have a twisted skein of attention-deficit issues
* nerds love assessing, classifying, and defining the objects in their world
* nerds crave actionable items and roll their eyes at "mission statements" and lofty management patois
* nerds like things that work with technology-agnostic and lofi tools
* nerds like frameworks but tend to ignore rules
* nerds are unusually open to change (if it can be demonstrated to work better than what they're currently using)
* nerds like fixing things on their own terms
* nerds have too many projects and lots and lots of stuff
In my experience (and I'm not a programmer, but I am a solo consultant), the ability to thrive requires that you know how to price and manage work. Not simply *do* the work, but manage it and price it correctly as well.
If you can do that, you can be a so-so programmer (or any service provider) and you'll still have plenty of inbound work.
Dungeon, the predecessor to Zork and the mother of all text-based games!
In the early '80s I'd leave my after-school job (night manager of a McDonald's - ugh!) and drive to the local Cal State campus, where you could log into the mainframe's public account and play games in the 24-hour computer lab - but only if there were 25 or fewer users on the system, campuswide. Lots of nights, I'd leave the computer lab at 7 a.m. and drive back to high school for a day of classes.
I installed Dungeon it on my FreeBSD server a couple years ago and *still* play the damned thing.
You're right -- meth is a problem. But here (and I mean within-my-city-limits here), at least, it seems like we've largely dodged the bullet a lot of other rural communities haven't. Part of that has to do with being the county seat, I suppose; you've got two layers of law enforcement rather than one, and the County Sheriff doesn't want things looking bad in his back yard.
According to 2003 data (the latest I could find), Plattsburg's crime index (a number based on crimes per 10,000 population) is 322; that compares with a state average of 599 and a U.S. average of 472.
So we're not Gower (a nearby, even-smaller town with an index of 134), but we're not Kansas City (933), either.
Um, wrong. I'll grant you exurbs, but not suburbs. People in the KC area generally don't like to commute and anything more than about 15-20 miles away is considered the absolute edge of the universe.
I was roundly panned as insane for moving "off the face of the earth" by co-workers when I moved out there.
There are a few white-collar commuters in Plattsburg, but the primary occupations are farming, farming and, um... being retired from farming.
{shrug} Depends on what the criteria are, I guess. KC has lot of arts/culture, headquarters (read: jobs) for a lot of top-tier companies (H&R Block, Hallmark Cards, AMC Theaters, etc.) and a wealth of diverstiy.
Manhattan is a "real" urban area, but it's 100% unlivable unless you're making north of $150k, IMHO.
God, I love it when people talk about all the horrors of moving to scary, unconnected "rural" America.
A few data points from Plattsburg, Missouri (pop. 2,375), where I call home... based on what I can tell (and I've lived in Chicago and SoCal, as well as other rural areas) these data points could be duplicated in many areas:
Wages are lower, but the variance in housing prices and other cost-of-living items far outstrips the wage differential. The wage thing doesn't faze me because I'm self employed and, before that, I drove into Kansas City (higher wages) for work. Still, it shows up in a lot of small ways, like the fact that it's cheaper to get your car fixed or your air conditioning unit installed. Housing, on the other hand, is a shocker for anyone who isn't used to these sorts of prices. I paid $145k for a fully restored Victorian painted lady; there are small-but-cute houses in town for about $80-90k and I think the nicest Victorian on the market right now is about $225k. Compare that with the metro market of your choice.
"Rural" doesn't mean "no access to a major metro area. I'm 35 miles (and 35 minutes - there is no traffic) from the Kansas City metro area.
No crime and good schools. 'Nuff said.
Yes, Virginia, there is connectivity in the boonies. You just have to shop for it. We had to have DSL and we had to have it with a provider that wouldn't get its corporate panties in a twist if we wanted to run mail and web servers. It wasn't that hard to find.
One downside: The housing market isn't very liquid. A house put on the market in my town will take about six months to sell. That number is trending down as people discover the area, but it's still a far cry from the sell-it-in-a-weekend character of a hot metro market.
Another downside: Less access to fast food. We don't have any fast food in town -- the closest is about 13 miles (and 13 minutes!) away. On the upside, I've dropped 20 lbs. since I moved there.;)
A variation on a theme: build a FreeBSD toaster based on Matt Simmerson's recipe at www.tnpi.biz. There's a very large user community that helps out via mailing lists, the instructions are outstanding and it's got all the goodies: Webmail, tarpitting, antivirus/antispam, web-based config or command-line config, etc. Matt and others offer for-fee troubleshooting and/or set-up, but chances are you won't need it. And it is secure as hell.
Yeah, I run it -- consider me a satisfied customer/fanboy.
When I initially said this was a boneheaded move, several Slashdotters disagreed. They made great points in rebuttal, but HP still disregarded a lot of basic branding wisdom when they tried to become iPod sellers.
Having said that, the question is: Are they any smarter now? If you look across their total product landscape, it's hard to see how.
HP, like Coca-Cola, is one of those brands that's both massive and powerful -- but not especially smart or self-aware.
I've used both - had a Treo 600 for just over a year and dropped it one time too many. The speaker broke, and I made a decision to get Sprint's PPC-6600 with the slide-out keyboard.
Essentially, the Treo is an outstanding phone and a so-so PDA. Most of the functionality has been designed so you can get to it quickly with just your thumb while cradling the device in your hands. More than 1,000 contacts in the phone (like me)? Four keystrokes (Contacts > two initials of the person's name > one extra stroke to pick the right number > push to dial) get you a connected call -- and you can do most of it without looking at the screen.
In contrast, the Pocket PC devices (mine included) are terrific PDAs but so-so phones. The same functionality I did in four strokes with my Treo takes a lot of clicks and movement -- some of which cannot be practically done without the stylus. On the other hand, I can run a lot of apps I couldn't run on the Palm and memory management seems better for apps that consume a lot of RAM.
I'm probably less of a menace to society with my Pocket PC, if only because I can no longer email and SMS while driving.
Ryan, you're dead-on right about this: It's the wrong specific application of the right general idea.
The right general idea: We are an increasingly siloed society, with individual interactions outside of narrow, self-defined communities (the folks you work with, the geeks you code with, the people you see in church on Sunday, etc.) few and far between. Broad engagement in civic life is on the wane at best and nearly dead at worst. Newspapers (and yes, blogs and wikis too!) have a role to play in fixing that because they can become a platform for engagement rather than just reporting -- in effect, they can potentially become the civic square that's lacking in modern life.
Newspapers have a particularly strong interest in this, because they've long since ceded rapid-response reporting to TV, radio and the internet. If a major daily like the LAT can't shore up its role as a leading, thoughtful voice of the community, then there's going to be a lot of scaling back as readers (and subsequently, advertisers) leave the paper.
The wrong specific application: Letting people post the equivalent of counterpoint graffiti on an editorial page isn' going to fix things.
Follow me on a ramble here -- we'll get back to the LA Times in a minute.
Naysaying in policy and politics has grown louder for years on the basis of a common refrain -- Americans are apathetic about politics and public life. But in my work (I do public outreach and involvement for big infrastructure projects, in addition to my more straightforward marketing practice), I've found it's not as simple as that:
Americans are not apathetic, but they feel impotent when it comes to politics and public policy. Many citizens believe they have been pushed out of the policy and political processes by lobbyists, politicians and the media, and left little room to make a difference.
Citizens will get involved if they believe they can make a difference. The compact many Americans subscribe to is fairly simple, but devastating from a traditional political and policy viewpoint: The majority of people will get involved if they believe there will be at least the possibility to personally contribute to change.
Reconnecting citizens and the public square will take more than tinkering with the system. Citizens want to be more than bystanders who are told the policy game is open and fair -- they want a way to participate in public life themselves. Both the political process and the media have to change to make this happen, but the truth is the media (traditional as well as new) can lead this change.
That's a steep challenge for policymakers -- and journalists. Consider how a public issue typically plays out.
The conventional approach to public debate on big issues is based on publicity, with everyone staking out positions and trying to sell the public on plans. It's not a bad model, but it's not really how most people form opinions on big issues:
People like to talk to their peers. This is the area where newspapers have failed the most. By intentionally walling themselves off from the public in a shroud of objectivity and through the conflict-driven, Smith-says, Jones-retorts nature of the news-story format, newspapers have become less relevant to decisonmaking.
Emotion is always part of the equation. Newspapers have gotten better at this, but most are still uncomfortable with inserting the author's or the publication's emotional stance into the story. Even worse, the featurization of the news pages means this is happening in a sort of haphazard way that leaves readers confused. Blogs get the edge here because most are exceptionally open about the dog they have in the race.
Readers reject us/them, yes/no, now/never choices when they're offered up on a silver platter. People aren't stupid -- anyone who's ever had something they personally know a lot about reported in the paper understan
Kinko's isn't the cheapest or best option for the simple stuff, but they've got two advantages:
A huge number of offices; and
The ability to do consistently do complex documents.
I do a lot of public-sector proposals that have to be delivered to the (potential) client by a very specific date and time, often with strange formatting requirements that boil down to "well, you have to use numbered tabs in a certain color scheme, or we won't consider you for this $500k piece of work!". I ship the proposal (and crazy-detailed instructions) off to Kinko's and they handle the production and delivery. Their integration with FedEx has meant that, a couple of times, the finished job got loaded onto a FedEx Custom Critical truck for four-hour delivery.
Very cool, and a long way from the old days of actually needing to get something done in a timely manner.
(My comment is from a discussion about this topic made to a listserv... sorry if you've already read it.)
Emergency communication is a big problem beyond the brittleness of useful services like Indian River County's e-mail. While it's good to see renewed federal and state spending on something as basic as making sure the population knows what to do in a crisis, there's considerable misdirected effort.
After 9/11, a lot of federal money flowed into the states for emergency/bioterror preparedness. Some states have focused on systemic planning and others on broad media campaigns designed to "generate awareness," a vague term that translates too often into ominous billboards and bullet-point brochures.
When I worked with the Commonwealth of Kentucky on their planning in this area, some of the themes emerged that have turned up in other states as
well:
The press, all media bashing aside, is significantly more trusted than the government when it comes to transmitting information in an emergency. But an audit of reporters and editors in Kentucky showed very, very little knowledge of the state's emergency preparedness plans or, indeed who reporters should turn to for information in time of a public-health emergency. Kentucky analyzed the media audit and subsequently set up media workshops across the state that trained reporters in the details of emergency preparedness, types of emergency scenarios, etc.
Groups falling under the heading of "special-needs populations" -- those who have language barriers or disabilities, as well as those who are very poor and/or cut off (by choice or circumstance) from most mainstream communications channels -- turn to their own for information in times of public crisis. The reality for government is that a lot of the pre- emergency awareness building (as well as the more important communications required in an actual emergency) misses the most at-risk populations unless the effort is made to create a lot of secondary, direct communications channels to these groups.
Bottom line: Public officials like media campaigns because they're visible and make it look like "we're doing something." But, just as with a lot of the efforts currently thrown at security, the appearance action is a long way from real effectiveness.
I can't speak to Friendster or any of the others, but I gravitated to LinkedIn pretty early on because it seemed fairly business oriented. And it's paid off
I think a lot of negative FOAF experiences come from the fact that people use them like a digital yearbook/mash book -- "Oh, I'm on such-and-such a network. Join, and we can connect!" Do that, and you end up with a pretty isolated network that's not much different from the circle of colleagues and friends you have now.
When I joined, I made an effort to find people whoL
were geographically near me; or
had a strong background/career connection.
I'd ususally introduce myself to these people with something along the lines of "I don't know if all the benefits LinkedIn talks about are true, but I do know that we have some things in common and it might be beneficial to swap some e-mail." No pitching myself as a consultant or employee. No hard sell. And no touting the value of "linking our networks." After all, the person you're contacting probably doesn't know you from Adam -- why should he or she care about your network?
Mind you, it helps if you can write a polite, light, maybe slightly humorous email; as with so many aspects of the internet, it's not the meek but the communicators who will inherit the earth.
I've met good friends, current clients and connections who have led to projects. Hard to complain about something that produces results and costs nothing!
President of the Consumer Product Services arm: Stephen R. Williams
The chairman of the board and President is Lawrence Richenstein of
Peak Ventures in Farmingdale, NY
Any slashdotter worth their salt can socially engineer or otherwise hack their way to an email address for these folks. When you get one, be polite and direct. Lay out the situation and a reasonable solution and show regret (not frustration, not rage) that their company didn't perform to the standards that you're *sure* they expect.
You'll likely get a very fast and very satisfactory resolution to your issue.
Several in-flight magazines have ads from law firms that say (and I'm paraphrasing -- but only a little -- here): "Properly invested, it's hard to lose money in the stock market. If you've lost money, then perhaps you should sue your brokerage firm."
As with so very, very many things, it's probably a good idea to castrate all the lawyers.
Slashdot Mirror
Only time I ever saw him was when I stood in line next to him at the building's cafeteria. It's weird because the second he's grabbing a piece of cherry pie, you're forced to think "oh man, now I gotta go short chocolate futures!" or some such thing.
Travel. At a company like that, in my job, you went where the work was. I'd spend six months at a time traveling five days a week and my wife finally said "enough." Ironic, since I end up traveling even more now that I work for myself.
You're correct that the stock ownership was for a minority of employees and didn't include craft employees or admin; those personnel were eligible for profit-sharing, however, and that seems (to me, anyway) a philosophically consistent way to reward employees who aren't in direct P-and-L positions.
I'll also grant you that good management was at the heart of a lot of what they did (and do). However, "good management" in Kiewit's case focuses on training and education that treats every just-graduated engineer to think like a company owner, with a near-obsessive focus on project management and cost control. Because they educated future owners like current owners, they created a culture of equity that serves the company well even when it's implemented by non-stockholders.
Bottom line: I agree with your skepticism, but I also think there's a causal link between how they structured basic ownership and the downstream impact of that structure throughout other management functions.
As I recall, it was determined annually via independent audit. Not exactly a liquid market, but all the buyers knew that going in.
Consider my former employer, the largest heavy civil construction firm in the U.S. Warren Buffet called them "the greatest meritocracy in American business," and with good reason - the company made something like $5+ billion in revenue the last year I was with them, but there were only 1,300 or so stockholders, all current employees.
Here's how it worked: If you were in a position with profit-and-loss responsibility and were doing a good job, you'd be invited (after a few years with the company) to purchase stock. No options, no gifts - you were invited to make a purchase at the current share price and told exactly what the maximum was you could buy. Couldn't afford it? Then they'd hook you up with a bank in town that would happily loan you the money, since the stock (which had earned double-digit returns for decades) was great collateral.
What happens when everyone on the team is an actual owner, and the only way you could become an actual owner is through doing a good job? Several things:
It sounds like I'm just reminiscing, but it was a great place to work and (if you stuck around) a great place to get rich - it's a shame other companies don't follow that model.
Overall, clients care about value more than location, and (if you're picking your clients correctly) they care about results a lot more than cost. Deliver value and results, and they don't care where you live - they'll pay you to travel if you need to be on-site for a while, and when you don't you can sit on the porch with your laptop, listening to the crickets chirp.
Pros here: Just about zero crime and good schools (I'm told - I don't have kids). Cheap housing (my painted-lady Victorian cost $145k) and a major metro area is less than an hour away.
Cons here: Limited connectivity (there is exactly one option for DSL) and something as simple as going to get fast food is a 20-minute drive.
Someone way up in the thread was raging on about how the poor, dumb idiots in flyover country are just killing themselves because they're economically illiterate and make bad choices. That might the case in some places, but small consulting businesses (many are one-person shops grossing $150k a year or more) are popping up all over around here, most of them by people who've just decided they'd rather live in the country and work for themselves.
All it takes is the right rolodex, some phone calls and maybe some donations, and you can get disabled people to show up and rail about an issue. Maybe their concerns are genuine - and maybe not. What matters is that they make for good press coverage and no one wants to fight them.
* nerds are often disorganized or have a twisted skein of attention-deficit issues
* nerds love assessing, classifying, and defining the objects in their world
* nerds crave actionable items and roll their eyes at "mission statements" and lofty management patois
* nerds like things that work with technology-agnostic and lofi tools
* nerds like frameworks but tend to ignore rules
* nerds are unusually open to change (if it can be demonstrated to work better than what they're currently using)
* nerds like fixing things on their own terms
* nerds have too many projects and lots and lots of stuff
If you can do that, you can be a so-so programmer (or any service provider) and you'll still have plenty of inbound work.
In the early '80s I'd leave my after-school job (night manager of a McDonald's - ugh!) and drive to the local Cal State campus, where you could log into the mainframe's public account and play games in the 24-hour computer lab - but only if there were 25 or fewer users on the system, campuswide. Lots of nights, I'd leave the computer lab at 7 a.m. and drive back to high school for a day of classes.
I installed Dungeon it on my FreeBSD server a couple years ago and *still* play the damned thing.
According to 2003 data (the latest I could find), Plattsburg's crime index (a number based on crimes per 10,000 population) is 322; that compares with a state average of 599 and a U.S. average of 472.
So we're not Gower (a nearby, even-smaller town with an index of 134), but we're not Kansas City (933), either.
I was roundly panned as insane for moving "off the face of the earth" by co-workers when I moved out there.
There are a few white-collar commuters in Plattsburg, but the primary occupations are farming, farming and, um... being retired from farming.
Manhattan is a "real" urban area, but it's 100% unlivable unless you're making north of $150k, IMHO.
A few data points from Plattsburg, Missouri (pop. 2,375), where I call home... based on what I can tell (and I've lived in Chicago and SoCal, as well as other rural areas) these data points could be duplicated in many areas:
Yeah, I run it -- consider me a satisfied customer/fanboy.
Having said that, the question is: Are they any smarter now? If you look across their total product landscape, it's hard to see how.
HP, like Coca-Cola, is one of those brands that's both massive and powerful -- but not especially smart or self-aware.
Essentially, the Treo is an outstanding phone and a so-so PDA. Most of the functionality has been designed so you can get to it quickly with just your thumb while cradling the device in your hands. More than 1,000 contacts in the phone (like me)? Four keystrokes (Contacts > two initials of the person's name > one extra stroke to pick the right number > push to dial) get you a connected call -- and you can do most of it without looking at the screen.
In contrast, the Pocket PC devices (mine included) are terrific PDAs but so-so phones. The same functionality I did in four strokes with my Treo takes a lot of clicks and movement -- some of which cannot be practically done without the stylus. On the other hand, I can run a lot of apps I couldn't run on the Palm and memory management seems better for apps that consume a lot of RAM.
I'm probably less of a menace to society with my Pocket PC, if only because I can no longer email and SMS while driving.
The right general idea: We are an increasingly siloed society, with individual interactions outside of narrow, self-defined communities (the folks you work with, the geeks you code with, the people you see in church on Sunday, etc.) few and far between. Broad engagement in civic life is on the wane at best and nearly dead at worst. Newspapers (and yes, blogs and wikis too!) have a role to play in fixing that because they can become a platform for engagement rather than just reporting -- in effect, they can potentially become the civic square that's lacking in modern life.
Newspapers have a particularly strong interest in this, because they've long since ceded rapid-response reporting to TV, radio and the internet. If a major daily like the LAT can't shore up its role as a leading, thoughtful voice of the community, then there's going to be a lot of scaling back as readers (and subsequently, advertisers) leave the paper.
The wrong specific application: Letting people post the equivalent of counterpoint graffiti on an editorial page isn' going to fix things.
Follow me on a ramble here -- we'll get back to the LA Times in a minute.
Naysaying in policy and politics has grown louder for years on the basis of a common refrain -- Americans are apathetic about politics and public life. But in my work (I do public outreach and involvement for big infrastructure projects, in addition to my more straightforward marketing practice), I've found it's not as simple as that:
That's a steep challenge for policymakers -- and journalists. Consider how a public issue typically plays out.
The conventional approach to public debate on big issues is based on publicity, with everyone staking out positions and trying to sell the public on plans. It's not a bad model, but it's not really how most people form opinions on big issues:
That is all.
Kinko's isn't the cheapest or best option for the simple stuff, but they've got two advantages:
- A huge number of offices; and
- The ability to do consistently do complex documents.
I do a lot of public-sector proposals that have to be delivered to the (potential) client by a very specific date and time, often with strange formatting requirements that boil down to "well, you have to use numbered tabs in a certain color scheme, or we won't consider you for this $500k piece of work!". I ship the proposal (and crazy-detailed instructions) off to Kinko's and they handle the production and delivery. Their integration with FedEx has meant that, a couple of times, the finished job got loaded onto a FedEx Custom Critical truck for four-hour delivery.Very cool, and a long way from the old days of actually needing to get something done in a timely manner.
YMMV, but they're very good some some things.
Emergency communication is a big problem beyond the brittleness of useful services like Indian River County's e-mail. While it's good to see renewed federal and state spending on something as basic as making sure the population knows what to do in a crisis, there's considerable misdirected effort.
After 9/11, a lot of federal money flowed into the states for emergency/bioterror preparedness. Some states have focused on systemic planning and others on broad media campaigns designed to "generate awareness," a vague term that translates too often into ominous billboards and bullet-point brochures.
When I worked with the Commonwealth of Kentucky on their planning in this area, some of the themes emerged that have turned up in other states as well:
- The press, all media bashing aside, is significantly more trusted than the government when it comes to transmitting information in an emergency. But an audit of reporters and editors in Kentucky showed very, very little knowledge of the state's emergency preparedness plans or, indeed who reporters should turn to for information in time of a public-health emergency. Kentucky analyzed the media audit and subsequently set up media workshops across the state that trained reporters in the details of emergency preparedness, types of emergency scenarios, etc.
- Groups falling under the heading of "special-needs populations" -- those who have language barriers or disabilities, as well as those who are very poor and/or cut off (by choice or circumstance) from most mainstream communications channels -- turn to their own for information in times of public crisis. The reality for government is that a lot of the pre- emergency awareness building (as well as the more important communications required in an actual emergency) misses the most at-risk populations unless the effort is made to create a lot of secondary, direct communications channels to these groups.
Bottom line: Public officials like media campaigns because they're visible and make it look like "we're doing something." But, just as with a lot of the efforts currently thrown at security, the appearance action is a long way from real effectiveness.Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything
I think a lot of negative FOAF experiences come from the fact that people use them like a digital yearbook/mash book -- "Oh, I'm on such-and-such a network. Join, and we can connect!" Do that, and you end up with a pretty isolated network that's not much different from the circle of colleagues and friends you have now.
When I joined, I made an effort to find people whoL
- were geographically near me; or
- had a strong background/career connection.
I'd ususally introduce myself to these people with something along the lines of "I don't know if all the benefits LinkedIn talks about are true, but I do know that we have some things in common and it might be beneficial to swap some e-mail." No pitching myself as a consultant or employee. No hard sell. And no touting the value of "linking our networks." After all, the person you're contacting probably doesn't know you from Adam -- why should he or she care about your network?Mind you, it helps if you can write a polite, light, maybe slightly humorous email; as with so many aspects of the internet, it's not the meek but the communicators who will inherit the earth.
I've met good friends, current clients and connections who have led to projects. Hard to complain about something that produces results and costs nothing!
2200 Hwy. 121, Ste. 100
Bedford, TX 76021
Phone: 817-354-0095
Fax: 817-436-6151
Toll Free: 800-544-9510
CEO: Joel San Antonio
President of the Consumer Product Services arm: Stephen R. Williams
The chairman of the board and President is Lawrence Richenstein of Peak Ventures in Farmingdale, NY
Any slashdotter worth their salt can socially engineer or otherwise hack their way to an email address for these folks. When you get one, be polite and direct. Lay out the situation and a reasonable solution and show regret (not frustration, not rage) that their company didn't perform to the standards that you're *sure* they expect.
You'll likely get a very fast and very satisfactory resolution to your issue.
Several in-flight magazines have ads from law firms that say (and I'm paraphrasing -- but only a little -- here): "Properly invested, it's hard to lose money in the stock market. If you've lost money, then perhaps you should sue your brokerage firm."
As with so very, very many things, it's probably a good idea to castrate all the lawyers.