Off Course-On Target

Mashups in Miami Beach

I’m in Miami today finishing up my most recent set of business trips around the planet and catching my flight back to El Salvador. I had the great fortune of spending last night and this morning with a business colleague who lives on the waterfront of the always interesting Miami Beach area. Thanks Eric!

For me, Miami is one of those grand cities of the world that exemplify uniqueness. As with cities such as Istanbul, NYC, and Paris, it is truly a unique combination of cultures, architecture, experiences and people, with little connection to the country it is in...a world onto itself, a city that you need to simply enjoy and try to learn from.  As so we did just that as we walked around the South Beach area, enjoyed some local food, people watching, architecture and the pulse of life. 

While exploring this area, I ran into what struck me as an interesting example of how to combine customization with standardization. In this case, it came in the form of a Publix supermarket, which is part of a chain of supermarkets that is very popular in the southeastern USA. As best as I can tell, Publix is popular with those who shop there because the reputation they have built up for consistent quality, large selection of mid- to high-end food items and the overall design and ambience of their stores.

What I’ve picked up on in my visits to several of these stores in the past few years (and from talking with friends and others who shop there) is that they have built up a very loyal following of customers who seek out these stores wherever they are. That’s the “standards” part of the equation—delivering on the expectation that you will have a consistently good experience in any one of their stores. However, this particular store is located in a very affluent and “stylish” residential marina area on the waterfront of Miami Beach, and so there were significant concerns by those living in the neighborhood (and those looking to move there) that this store would be very out of place architecturally and at odds with the feel of the neighborhood which is filled with condos, waterfront walkways, parks, etc. 

The solution that Keene Construction came up with was to take a very standard Publix building and layout and wrap it in a very unique exterior that fits well with the neighborhood. As you can perhaps make out in the photo above,  the exterior is very striking, based on a nautical theme with the suggestive shapes of boat hulls, sails, and decks. Yet when I passed through the exterior doors, I walked into a very familiar and standard Publix supermarket. I thought it was a great mashup of the best of both customization and standardization. From the outside, the store is a delightful part of the area and it's ambiance both fits in and stands out at the same time, adding value rather than subtracting from it.

It was also interesting to read some of the comments on this store on Yelp, the community review site, by those who shop at this store. Interestingly some of the comments were from people living nearby and others were from those visiting the area from far and wide.

This is just the latest example of the growing importance of design: how to mix opposite ends of the spectrum, such as old/new, standard/custom, or consistent/unique. It has left me asking my usual question, “What is this trying to teach me?” and so I’m pondering how we could abstract from the lessons here and apply this type of mashup to things beyond architecture, stores, etc. How could we apply this to human interactions, to software development, to content development?

Our goal is to figure out how we can use the concept of mashups to create solutions that are not a compromise, thereby avoiding mediocrity, and instead creating unique combinations of the best aspects of otherwise opposing ends of these spectrums that are truly greater than the sum of their parts. This approach ties nicely into the Snowflake Effect where our goal is to get it all “just right”. *

*  Just the right things, for just the right people, at just the right time, in just the right place, in just the right context, etc.

Don't Mean to Bug You, but .......

Jonas Salk, the man who developed the polio vaccine, once said "If all the insects on earth disappeared, within 50 years all life on earth would disappear. If all humans disappeared, within 50 years all species would flourish as never before." There would be some debate as to the precise figures and outcomes here but the point is well taken I think. No reason to despair either, but humble pie should probably be a regular part of our diet, and here's chance to gain some more IQ points from taking this new perspective.

The earth without people

If you're curious about a scenario of the earth without humanity, check out "Earth Without People, an essay by Alan Weisman in the February 6, 2007 issue of Discover magazine. Weisman describes some possible scenarios. His article includes the the chart shown here, which lays this out on a timeline. 

His essay concluded with the following:

"During that same span, every dam on Earth would silt up and spill over. Rivers would again carry nutrients seaward, where most life would be, as it was long before vertebrates crawled onto the shore. Eventually, that would happen again. The world would start over."

And one bit of good news to some is that if all humans were to disappear, so too would some other species that have become dependent upon us, most notably the cockroach!  But for all of you cheered by this thought, remember that it requires that we leave first! 

Recommended Reading:

For more on this perspective, as well as a good read, I'm recommending you consider reading Alan Weisman's book The World Without Us. To help you decide if it's worth your time see Starting Over, the recent review (Sept.2, 2007) by Jennifer Schuessler who describes Weisman's book as

"wherein he imagines what would happen if the earth’s most invasive species—ourselves—were suddenly and completely wiped out."

"When it comes to mass extinctions, one expert tells him, “the only real prediction you can make is that life will go on. And that it will be interesting. Weisman’s gripping fantasy will make most readers hope that at least some of us can stick around long enough to see how it all turns out."

Next up for your reading consideration and taking us back to insects, check out  Buzz: The Intimate Bond Between Humans and Insects. For some "decision support" with this one, read the excerpt and review in Discover called "Bzzzzzzz: Why insects are vital to human survival."

Bee-ware

Let's do another one of those "inverted thinking" flips we covered in my posting "New Perspectives: The Benefits of Looking Up!" Rather than consider our elimination, imagine what would happen if all the insects were to disappear?  According to Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson:

"If all insects were to suddenly vanish overnight, it’s likely humans would be endangered. All the plants that insects pollinate would disappear. All our detritus would pile up to colossal heights. Even the oceans would be affected. Nutrients would pour down off the increasingly denuded land into the sea, triggering massive algal blooms, which would exhaust the water of oxygen and threaten fish. And the impact on terrestrial ecosystems would be enormous."

“If insects were gone, you would break a large part of the terrestrial food chain. A number of birds would starve in no time at all. Those birds and other animals that depend on birds for food would disappear. Small mammals in the soil that depend, in part, on insects would disappear. It would be a catastrophic chain reaction around the world.”

Not to be confused with extinction which is the much more gradual decline, does it sound too far fetched that entire species could suddenly go missing? Well, as you may have read, this is exactly what has been happening in the past two years to the  honeybee. Millions of bees all over the world, representing in some areas over 70% of their population, have have been disappearing. They leave their hives, never to return nor to be found. In the USA, the wild honeybees have all but completely disappeared. This been labeled "Colony Collapse Disorder" (CCD) and remains an unsolved mystery.

BTW, don't be distracted by the erroneous reports that linked the disappearing bees to cell phone radiation!  However the research into this very serious problem of CCD may also be leading us to even greater understanding. For example it has been noted that just as industrial agriculture has created problems with pollution, antibiotic resistance, mad cow disease, etc., colony collapse disorder may be a result of a number of poor practices, including the fact that they've bred a superbee and most of the bees hauled around the country for pollination purposes are genetically identical, making them more susceptible to a bacterial or viral attack. On the plus side, InfoShop News has a related article "Organic Beekeepers Not Affected By Colony Collapse Disorder", which goes on to say:

“The problem with commercial operations is in pesticides used in hives to fumigate for varroa mites and antibiotics that are fed to the bees to prevent disease,” she said. “Hives are hauled long distances by truck, often several times during the growing season, to provide pollination services to industrial agriculture crops, which further stresses the colonies and exposes them to agricultural pesticides and GMOs (genetically modified organics).”

Even if the biology side of a world without bees is of less interest to you, consider the economic and human perspectives. In just the USA alone, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture has estimated that CCD has the potential to cause a $15 billion direct loss of crop production and $75 billion in indirect losses. CCD has caught the attention of Fortune magazine with three articles in the past few months including this quote from "As bees go missing, a $9.3B crisis lurks";

"We wouldn't starve if the mysterious disappearance of bees, dubbed colony collapse disorder, or CCD, decimated hives worldwide. For one thing, wheat, corn, and other grains don't depend on insect pollination. 

But in a honeybee-less world, almonds, blueberries, melons, cranberries, peaches, pumpkins, onions, squash, cucumbers, and scores of other fruits and vegetables would become as pricey as sumptuous old wine. Honeybees also pollinate alfalfa used to feed livestock, so meat and milk would get dearer as well. Ditto for farmed catfish, which are fed alfalfa too. 

And jars of honey, of course, would become golden heirlooms to pass along to the grandkids. (Used for millennia as a wound dressing, honey contains potent antimicrobial compounds that enable it to last for decades in sealed containers.)"

Bees for Pets?

Perhaps the insect world has its own version of outsourcing and offshoring?  As you may know, honeybee originated in Europe and are not native to North America. This bee has put undue pressure on the native bees, whose populations until recently were in decline. They're still sorting out why the native bees are making a comeback, but interestingly, native bees called Mason bees have been successfully used by some farmers for pollinating crops. As noted in this Wikipedia entry on Mason bees:

"Most mason bees live in holes and can be attracted by drilling short holes in a block of wood. They are excellent spring season pollinators and, since they have no honey to defend, will only sting if squeezed or stepped on. As such, they make excellent garden "pets", since they both pollinate the plants and are safe for children and pets."

Wait!  Don't Buzz Off Course Just Yet!

But enough of insects for now. You may be asking what this has all got to do with YOU? As usual, I'm leading you along a path and toward a target, however unexpected, convoluted, and latent. In the next few posts. I'll provide a few more varied examples which have common powerful and pervasive patterns lurking beneath which will help provide new perspectives and new models for all of us to use to solve today's complex problems with innovative solutions. If, as I hope, you've previously made some great discoveries here at Off Course - On Target, please follow me a bit further, and I promise to do my best to lead you to more great discoveries along the way, and make it all worth your precious time.

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Technorati tags: insects, bees, colony collapse disorder, CCD, perspectives, books, patterns, research, Jonas Salk, Alan Weisman, Earth Without Us

del.icio.us tags: insects, bees, colony collapse disorder, CCD, perspectives, books, patterns, research, Jonas Salk, Alan Weisman, Earth Without Us

Cooking up a Snowstorm!

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As someone who just loves food, eating, and cooking, I've often been struck by the parallels between eating and learning. Feeding the mind and feeding the body have lots in common. So I have used their similarities as the basis for many of the stories I tell onstage, because they help illustrate the Snowflake Effect of mass personalization. 

While we've obviously had to pay attention to food as one of the basics of existence (food, clothing, shelter), interest in food seems to be escalating to whole new levels these days. I'm delighted, for example, at the veritable explosion of television and web-based shows that cover everything about food:

• The production of food sources, farming, fishing, gardening 
• Cooking, baking, and meal preparation 
• Finding great places to eat, delicious new recipes, new culinary talents, etc. 

Heck, now there are entire television networks dedicated to food and drawing huge audiences of all ages! And just take a look at the magazine rack when you next visit a bookstore to see how many magazines are dedicated to these topics.

So I thought you'd be interested in some new sites about food that have popped up recently. Webware.com has a number of recent posts and commentary about food-related sites. Here are three that I  think exemplify these food trends and what else we can learn from them.

IM cooked

This site is an interesting example of the trend away from "mega sites" to more specialized ones. More of the Snowflake Effect from my point of view. IM Cooked provides a place for people to share their knowledge, interests, and passions for cooking via video.

To get a feel for IM Cooked, you might want to take a few minutes to watch one of its currently top-rated videos "Man Makes Chicken with Pears" presented by the always quirky and fun Christopher Walken.

There are lots of videos available about cooking on the Internet, and even YouTube is an option for posting food-related videos, but the challenge with any general purpose site is how to find both content and the people who share your specific interests.

Another challenge is how to make these information sources more pro-active, so that you are constantly assisted in your quest to discover new ideas, ingredients, and recipes, and the people who share your passions. Or as I often like say, "Doing more finding than searching." 

But having too many niche sites also gives us a new problem in this age of abundance—the challenges that come from so much choice. I think the solution is neither a matter of going for even larger mega sites nor moving towards more niche sites. Rather, we need to move toward creating better social and automated recommender systems and having more pattern recognition that helps us mine the exponentially exploding volume of "stuff" out there, so we can zero in on just the right individual people, files, content ,and ideas that match our unique situation at any moment in time.

BakeSpace 

This site puts the focus on the food rather than the technology, something that is "so yesterday" as my kids used to say to me, but it is also so relevant that BakeSpace doesn't use Ajax or other latest "gee whiz" technology. Instead, this site helps to connect people who share a common set of interests and enables them to pursue their passions better alone and with others. As Caroline McCarthy put it nicely in her review on Webware "after all, if it doesn't taste good, it doesn't matter how well it's arranged on the plate."

I also think the tag line for the BakeSpace site is very apropos: "Come for the food. Stay for the conversation."  I'd be so much happier if we were putting more focus on conversations than community!

GroupRecipes

Over ten years ago, my daughter Lia, who was 13 at the time, hit upon a great technique to figure out what to cook up for dinner or some other meal. She would check out the contents we had on hand in the kitchen, decide what she felt like eating at the time, and then she would fire up a browser and enter these ingredients into a search engine. Her request would return a list of recipes that contained some or all of these ingredients. Inevitably, it helped her to discover a great recipe, which she'd print out, and then she would head back to the kitchen to whip it up. Worked great and it is something she still does now that she is living on her own.

GroupRecipes takes this same basic idea, but makes it even more personalized. For example, they have a StumbleUpon-like feature that is one of my favorites (you have tried StumbleUpon, right?!).  StumbleUpon increases what I call the "serendipity factor". You enter a food you'd like to "stumble upon" and then GroupRecipes uses these to find matches and provide ratings of probability that you will like a given recipe. Think of it as the "page rank" (what makes Google searches work so well) for food.

By helping you discover not only other recipes, but other people who are more like you in this very specific context, GroupRecipes adds the social aspect and improved discovery of those things you like. 

In this age of abundance, the problem is so much great food, so little time!  So this ability to have some "decision support" is a huge help.

So as you can see there really are tremendous parallels between feeding our minds and our bodies. It's also worth noting that the upcoming Learning 2007 will feature chef Bobby Flay as one of the keynoters. Elliott Masie plans to interview Bobby on this same topic of the parallels between learning and cooking, and how both can benefit. I'll be there and will have more to report back to you at the end of October.

Hope this post helps to feed both your mind and your body. As you do so,  I hope you will feed the rest of us with your comments and suggestions. (sorry, couldn't resist!)

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Brazil or Bust! (Part 2 of 2)

In my previous post, I told you about my adventure getting to this year's eLearning Brasil 2007 conference in São Paulo. The theme of this year’s event was The Influence of Leadership and Technology on Organizational Learning and Performance.

The conference itself was (and always is) very interesting for me and for all the attendees, based on past and present conversations and comments I have received. Obviously the majority of the attendees are from Brazil, but a growing and significant percentage of attendees are from other South American countries, such as Argentina, Chile, and Ecuador, as well as from Europe and North America. A full range of academia, especially universities and trade schools, commercial businesses, government personnel, and technology vendors are also well represented and are similarly diverse geographically.

Along with the eLearning conference, there is an awards ceremony for an annual competition t on technology that supports the visually impaired. The results are always amazing, and this year was no exception. So you can see why this is one of the only events that I regularly attend and why I get so much out of it.

As I mentioned earlier, Elliott Masie came to the conference via Internet-based video from his home in Saratoga Springs, New York, which worked extremely well. Elliott covered a range of key issues that he sees coming up over the next few years as well as some that are appearing now.

For example, he noted how people worldwide are feeling overwhelmed and distracted and the impact this is having on learning and performance. In this context, Elliott posed the question of whether good learning can take place at your desk and particularly, at work or on the job.

Next we discussed with the audience how there are similarities between cooking and eating, and learning and training, a comparison Elliott and I have found fascinating and valuable for several years. We reached a consensus that there are deep similarities between these two very human practices, so much can be learned from comparing them. The connection between learning and the world of food and eating appears to be so strong that Elliott is having master chef Bobby Flay join him at Learning 2007, where he will be cooking while Elliott is interviewing him about the design, innovation, and evolution of cooking, and how it relates to our world of learning. Best of all, we will get to sample some of what Bobby has cooked up. Now THAT is performance and learning at their best, don’t you think? ?

Next, we kept Elliott on line and on the screen and brought two other global leaders—Dr. Alistair Benson, Academic Director of Manchester Business School Worldwide, and Eric Shepherd, President, Question Mark Corporation—onto the stage for a Socratic Dialogue on “The Influence of Leadership and Technologies in Organizational Learning and Corporate Performance”. In a wide-ranging discussion, we covered observations such as:

• Contrary to the rhetoric that large numbers of workers are retiring and so we should be concerned about the “brain drain” that this would produce, we are seeing the opposite happening in several ways. First, just because people are eligible to retire based on age and years of employment, doesn’t mean they will, and indeed many are choosing not to. While in many cases, this change in the age of the population may involve a change in the kind of work and conditions, such as shorter work days or weeks, more flexibility, different roles, or more of a facilitative and consultative role, the real change is that people are living longer and working longer…A LOT longer.

Secondly we noted that this change would produce a broader range of chronological age among individuals on a team and in an organization. In many places, for example, we are seeing people enter the workforce earlier, sometimes because they are sought out by employers and are convinced to leave their education and training programs earlier because they already have sufficient skills and the knowledge that is so badly needed. Combined with the people from other end of the age spectrum, we can expect teams whose membership spans teenagers to centenarians. A good discussion ensued on what this means for learning and for working.

• An audience member from the São Paulo area talked about the challenge his company is facing from the lack of people with engineering talent and what should be done about this. The ensuing discussion found that this phenomenon is broad-based in most countries in the Americas and Europe and quite the opposite in developing regions, such as India and Asia.

The discussion included the trend of “mass contribution” by increasing numbers of people. Knowledge and expertise is now being captured through e-mail and instant messaging to blogs and wikis. There is, however, a missed opportunity to “mine” the growing repositories of such communications for the nuggets of knowledge, patterns, and other value within.

After a short break, I had the audience to myself—a wonderful opportunity. Beforehand, I had them choose one of several themes that they’d like me to talk about and to my delight, they chose “The Snowflake Effect”. We took a fun hour or so going through what is currently my favorite topic: uniqueness and the Snowflake Effect. Here are the slides from my talk:

One of the things I value about the support I’m afforded from Autodesk is being able to spend time with bright. eclectic people in different locations on this planet every day.  This gives me the chance to test just how broad and applicable are the trends that I see. This diverse range of people from Brazil and South America confirmed once again just how powerful these notions of mass personalization, mass contribution, and the Snowflake Effect really are and how well these translate into their context. 

Given this tremendous validation and confirmation from so many locations and so many contexts, my close colleague and friend Erik Duval and I are hard at work developing the Snowflake Effect into a full conceptual model and articulating this in much greater detail. Please stay tuned for upcoming announcements when we will have a site dedicated to the Snowflake Effect where we will be asking for your input, reactions and critiques.

For now, I hope you find some good value from my most recent experience in the great metropolis of São Paulo. And my sincere thanks to Francisco and the super staff of MicroPower for the great job you do of making eLearning Brasil somehow better every year. It’s an honor and a privilege to be a part of the whole experience.

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Hot Shanghai is VERY cool in Taipei

To cap off an excellent day of presentations and conversation, my hosts treated me to an evening out in the downtown "cool zone" of Taipei, where the entire city's young (20-somethings) workforce seems to go after work. Best of all, my hosts somehow managed to get us into THE restaurant in Taipei, called Din Tai Fung, for one of THE best and most beautifully presented Shanghai-style dim sum, and it was some of the best I've ever had. As you can see by the photo with the tower of bamboo dim sum steam baskets, a literal army in the kitchen is busy hand-forming each little treasure to be served.

The evening was made even more complete when the team who are creating the national metadata standard, which is based upon the IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) Standard, met with me back at my hotel. This exceptionally talented and energetic team has created a full Chinese translation of the IEEE LOM document, and even more impressively, a very detailed Taiwanese application profile to meet local needs. Their work is slated to become the national standard for educationally-oriented metadata for all of Taiwan in 2007, and they wanted to meet to get more guidance and suggestions for their final work on this national standard. A fabulous and dedicated team, and we talked late into the night.

A full day and most productive visit to say the least.  Keep your eye on Taiwan for a continued flow of great examples and experiences in all things metadata for both digital archives, learning and performance. Unfortunately there is still no sign of my lost voice yet, which certainly added an extra challenge to my presentations and meetings! Now I'm off to Ecuador to see if I can find my voice there. Stay tuned and I'll let you know where and when I find it.

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