Best friends boxing

Two dogs boxing

I love it when they do this.

To get this picture I probably had to take and discard a 1000 images.

Now were those previous attempts failures I wonder?

The great thing about digital photography is that it is really inexpensive to fail.

You could say the same thing about web 2.0.

Which leads me to want to say something about how failure is good.

But that is the subject for another post.

Till then, enjoy.

Engagement anyone?

There is a lot of talk about employee engagement these days. In management circles we talk about strategies and best practices for achieving high levels of employee engagement. Perhaps this is in response to reports of a general malaise and historically high absenteeism, or maybe because we are finally waking up to the fact that we really do need to “do better with less” if we hope to leave the world a better place.

So what is this thing called engagement?

For me engagement is a personal thing, it is an organic network of relationships, messages and memes. It is about rallying around some of the common themes and goals in an organization. It is about giving permission to staff to take responsibility for finding new and better ways of doing their jobs.  It is about demanding intellectual accountability and value for every salary dollar we spend. It is about enabling staff to take small risks and implement ideas directly. Most importantly it is about trusting each other to do what we think is best. Accepting some risk and celebrating early failure.

Engagement isn’t something you can outsource. It comes from sincerity about working for improvement and a tolerance for many points of view.

So how do we improve engagement?

Attitude.

The #1 factor that will determine the success of an engagement effort is the attitude of the people involved. This means that:

  • Staff need to take on their leadership responsibility by speaking up and pushing their organizations to improve.
  • Middle Management needs to accept the fact that control is an illusion and be willing to trust their staff. And they need to define themselves in a away that does not require the control of information. They need to listen very carefully to those pushing for change.
  • Senior management needs to promote leadership at all levels and demonstrate that appropriate risk taking is acceptable.
  • We all need to be tolerant and listen to multiple points of view. Perhaps most importantly we need to approach the monumental tasks in front of us with a positive attitude.

Engagement isn’t something you design and build so much is it something that you cultivate in your relationships. Certainly we can design processes, polices and reward systems that create an environment that is engagement friendly, and we must continually work to reduce systematic barriers to engagement, but ultimately it comes down to the attitude of the people in the system.

And that starts with you and me.

Authenticity – how much is enough?

Recently I was part of  an interesting conversation about executives participating in Social Media.

The question that came up was how much of the executive’s posts had to be made by the individual themselves. My first response was that if the post had their name beside it then it should have been the executive at the keyboard. After some discussion however, I began to realize that maybe that is not realistic. After all senior executives frequently have assistants send email under their name, and memos, directives, etc are usually written by a staffer and then distributed under the executive’s name.  So maybe the same rules should apply.

We talked about several scenarios:

  1. Only the executive posts under their name.  Even if most of the posts came from staffers, only the posts actually typed by the executive would carry their name.  Staffers, who would probably make most posts would post under their real  name and their profile would identify them as part of the executive’s staff.
  2. An organizational user would be created to make most posts. For instance the “Office of the Executive” .  In this case the user profile would identify the individuals using that account. Only posts actually made by the exec would carry his or her individual name.
  3. Staffers would be allowed to post as the executive assuming her or she had approved the message. This model is similar to what happens today with email and other correspondence.  Readers would never really know if the post was actually typed by the executive, (does that mater?), but they would know it had been approved by them.  In addition there may be staffers identified as authorized contributors, who would post under their own name.

There are likely variations on the three scenarios above that we did not explore. I would be very interested in hearing your thoughts. What other approaches have you run across? What approach has the best balance of authenticity and practicality given the incredible time pressures on most senior executives?

Guest speakers wanted

As many of you know, I teach part time. This year it is 4th year students in the BIT Program at Carleton University. The course is called Advanced Topics and the idea is to explore new topics, add depth to some already covered in the program. Students will be graduating at the end of this term and looking for work.

At our first class last Friday,  we talked about some of the areas they would like to explore in more depth.  These are listed below.  I am looking for folks with experience in these areas to speak to the class for 60-120 minutes. Depending on the topic and your style, it may be a lecture followed by Q&A , a demo, or simply a discussion. There is no payment.   The class occurs on Fridays from 2:30-5:50 until April, at Carleton University in Ottawa.

The Topics:

  • After Effects
  • Flex/Air
  • Mobile programing
  • 3D projection, TV and other technologies
  • Interactive interfaces with reality
  • How to find a job using the internet
  • Audio; music, SFX, and production
  • Promotion, of the tradeshow variety
  • Professional networking
  • Social Media (Ap Dev for)
  • Branding (partly covered, but could use more)
  • Open source
  • other topics relevant to Interactive Multimedia and Design

If you are interested please let me know and we will organize something.
Here is the Course Outline for more detailed information.

Thanks

Thom

Simple password rules…

This is a bit of a rant after a wasted evening.

Recently I attempted to create an account at an educational institution that shall remain unnamed.  (I am associated with four similar institutions and they all take different approaches to creating user accounts.)  This one I found particularly interesting when it came to creating passwords. The following are the rules for creating a password that were presented after my first unsuccessful attempt. I particularly like numbers 4 and 5.

    1. Must be between 6 and 8 characters long.
    2. Must not match anything in your account information, (i.e. 3 consecutive characters from login name, fullname…)
    3. Must not have more than 3 repeated characters (For example, aaaa).
    4. Must not match certain patterns (i.e. license plate number).
    5. Must not fall into any of the above categories, when reversed, pluralized, or truncated.
    6. Must not contain the characters ‘&@#{}’.
    7. Must contain at least 4 unique characters.
    8. The first 6 characters must contain at least 2 alphabetic and at least 1 digit (0 – 9) or 1 special punctuation character.

      Now is it just me, or do these sound like someone is getting carried away?  My banking password instructions are not that complex! Don’t get me wrong, I understand the need for strong passwords but this kind of thing makes me crazy.  Surely developers can find a reasonable compromise between security and usability?

      Oh yes, I never did access my account, I now await a response from tech support,  I wonder what the cumulative cost of these rules is to the institution in terms of support calls?