Think+Up

Open Source Software Offers Profit and Peril

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:07:16 +0000

In the beginning, there was IBM, and for years it dominated computer hardware and software. In the 1970s, the independent software industry emerged, spawning companies like Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle, which grew to be giants in their own right as corporations paid them ever-higher fees to license accounting and human resource packages, database systems, operating systems, and networking code.

But then, in the late 1990s, something entirely new hit the scene: the open source model. It harnessed the customers’ own knowledge and coding skills to create software that in many cases was superior to commercial packages. Now, not just a software firm but everyone could tinker with a program’s basic code and alter it to their liking—and share their enhancements with others, too.

How is open source faring? Has it conquered the information technology landscape, or is it confined to certain highly technical regions? Has “free software,” as open source is frequently referred to, made anyone rich? Have corporations embraced it, and if so, why? In short, has open source proven itself, yet?

Beyond Linux
The answers to these questions are a jumbled mix of yes, no, and maybe. By many measures, the open source model is thriving and winning new users every day. Every Macintosh computer sold is a win, for example, because Apple Computer has relied heavily on open source code to build the Mac’s OS X operating system and Safari Web browser. Likewise, more than half of the world’s Web servers run the open-source Apache program, and the open-source Mozilla program accounts for 23 percent of the world’s Web browsers.

The big question is: How well has the open-source model done in the enterprise software market? That’s where the bulk of spending for software takes place and where software gets put to the test in ways that hardly matter in the consumer market. Easily the most resounding enterprise-related success for open source is the Linux operating system, specifically as used on servers, not desktops. Linux is the basis for every data center at large Web outfits like Google, Amazon, and Yahoo, serving millions of people every second, and it’s the basis for virtually every other Web service such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Add numerous non-IT company adoptions and market researcher IDC estimates Linux to have captured at least 13 percent of the world’s server market.

Among the main reasons for this success is that Linux can be licensed at no charge, it’s rock solid in terms of uptime and security, it’s well suited for use in the cloud, and it’s enjoying much attention from software developers who constantly add layer upon layer of new functions. Perhaps equally important, many computer companies, including even IBM, once a bastion of proprietary software, have thrown their weight behind Linux if only in an attempt to counter Microsoft and its 85 percent share of the desktop operating system market.

Last July, IDC disclosed research showing that fast-growing enterprise acceptance and the global economic recession were driving worldwide revenues from open-source software to grow by 22.4 percent in 2009 and 23.6 percent through 2013, hitting a total of $8.1 billion. And that 2009 growth rate, IDC noted, was not only considerably higher than what it had measured a year earlier, it was 10 times the two percent growth rate for the general software market. Meanwhile, another IDC survey found that almost 75 percent of enterprise IT executives surveyed were actively evaluating or accelerating adoption of Linux.

Business applications
Another big open source enterprise success is MySQL, a relational database manager that has racked up six million installations worldwide. It’s used by many high-volume Web services such as YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, and Facebook and has become the darling of startups and enterprise groups seeking to quickly bring up new IT systems without the cost of licensing a commercial database package such as those sold by Oracle or IBM.

Still, it’s one thing for a disparate bunch of geeks to jointly create highly technical programs like Linux, Apache, or MySQL—it’s quite another for, say, physicians, or marketing managers, or graphic artists to collaborate on software specific to their jobs or industries.

It’s unlikely, in fact, that the people who understand marketing or doctoring inside and out are the same ones who know how to build good software.

Though, a variety of startup companies have been funded in defiance of this very notion. Easily the highest-profile of these is Sugar CRM, which has commercialized an eponymous customer relationship management (CRM) package. Funded by top-ranked venture capitalists to the tune of $46 million, Sugar CRM has seen its product downloaded more than four million times. The company’s software is available at no charge, but customers can and are encouraged to pay for technical support services. In 2006, company founder and CEO John Roberts talked of his firm—and others like it—eventually shrinking the enterprise apps market by 50 percent or more while keeping for themselves some significant percentage of what was left. After talk like that, Sugar came to be viewed as the open-source startup most likely to pull off a strong IPO.

All that was thrown into question last May, however when, with no explanation, Roberts suddenly left Sugar CRM. At around the same time, the company had begun to cut prices for its hosted CRM software, too—a sign of softening demand, some said. What’s more, while some 50,000 copies of the “free” Sugar CRM software had been installed, it turned out that only 5,000 revenue-generating copies were in use—hardly enough to win the hearts of investors, several observers noted.

Nonetheless, venture capitalists have not given up on open source applications. In late August, they poured $12 million into Medsphere Systems, which has commercialized software for managing electronic health records. Based on code originally developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Medsphere’s OpenVista product incorporates changes and extensions suggested by an active community of hospital managers nationwide.

Rockin’ the joint
Another open-source app firm with VC backing is Collaborative Software Institute (CSI), which helps companies jointly define and develop vertical-industry applications. Founded in 2007, the firm has produced three products: TriSano, which monitors and analyzes data about the outbreaks of infectious diseases; SIG, which helps financial services firms manage risk; and Feedhandler, for managing high-speed financial market data. Each app’s functions were originally defined by subject-matter experts from various companies or non-profits. “We built to suit,” says Lori Williams-Peters, corporate development officer.

Once an app was sketched out, CSI’s programming team wrote the code, tested it, and delivered a working product. The programs are available in community editions, at no charge, or beefed-up commercial versions that CSI sells for a profit. In each case, an online user community continues to contribute ideas for new functions and tweaks, just as in the traditional open-source model.

A quick look at SourceForge, a leading directory of open source activity, finds 2,862 enterprise-focused projects. Some of the most popular of these are Pentaho, a business intelligence (BI) suite that has seen more than two million downloads, and OxygenOffice Professional, an enhanced version of the free OpenOffice.org office productivity suite, with 1.5 million downloads.

The community-oriented, open-source way has caught on within large enterprises as a better way to develop applications internally, too. Venture-backed CollabNet sells an open-sourced product called TeamForge that helps dispersed teams of developers and domain experts collaborate across the whole process of creating, testing, deploying, and maintaining enterprise apps. The firm has some 800 paying customers and more than 1.9 million users.

By every indication, open source is succeeding in the enterprise world. But it’s too early to start shorting SAP or Microsoft stock. Those and other large, established software companies still have advantages—sheer size, financial and technical resources, customer relationships, and more —that will keep them viable and profitable for many years to come.

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Open source: software design at scale

Interdisciplinary studies of the open source model

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COMMENTS

How will enterprises make use of the open-source model for software applications?
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How Biometrics Is Changing Corporate Security

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:34:05 +0000

Almost immediately after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, huge expectations were place on the technology of biometrics: Political pundits, security experts, and seemingly every variety of talking head called for using computers more intensively to automatically recognize individuals and identify those who were potentially dangerous - at arrivals terminals in airports, at the entrances of baseball stadiums, and at the doorways of data centers, scientific laboratories, and other such sensitive installations.

Biometrics - a collection of techniques for identifying people according to physical and behavorial traits such as fingerprints, speaking voices, and the way they walk - promised to help secure America against even the most cunning of enemies.

But guess what? While the use of biometrics in many high-profile government applications has languished since the 9/11 attacks, Corporate America, driven by the need to cut costs and boost profits, has been slowly but surely embracing biometrics for all sorts of new applications. In 2009, according to Acuity Market Intelligence, in Louisville, Colo., public sector use accounted for 60% of the total global biometric market, leaving 40% to enterprises. But by 2017, the commercial sector will account for 55% of the market. Some of the driving factors: a highly mobile population, an ongoing decentralization of the workforce, and increasing usage of cloud-based computing. In 2009, Acuity estimates, global biometric revenues will amount to slightly less than $2.6 billion, growing to $11 billion in 2017 - a 20% compound annual growth rate.

Some but not all of these are directly related to securing facilities. As visitors enter Disney World, for instance, computers scan their fingerprints to make sure that only authorized purchasers are making use of discounted multi-day tickets. In scores of corporate data centers, hand-geometry readers work alongside card-keys, badge readers, and passcodes to authenticate workers trying to enter the most secure areas. Voice authentication techniques are helping banks such as ABN AMRO, in the Netherlands, to identify customers before they’re enabled to execute transactions over the telephone.

Clocking in
Arguably the most popular corporate uses of biometrics are in non-security applications, says C. Maxine Most, principal at Acuity. One of the most compelling of these, she points out, is in tracking employees’ time and attendance on the job. “This is a real bright spot,” Most says. “It’s an unsexy app but it provides definite ROI in 12 to 18 months, sometimes in just 6 months.”

By linking each worker directly to his or her labor record, aka time-sheet, employers can enjoy a host of significant cost-savings, market researcher Most says. Traditional methods of punching into a job, with a piece of paper and time-clock, easily lend themselves to fraud. Workers can enlist colleagues to punch them in and out hours after they actually enter or leave the workplace. But by identifying each worker through a fingerprint or hand-scan, for instance, this kind of “buddy punching” can virtually be eliminated.

“The cost savings are real,” Most says, including fewer conflicts between management and workers, less payroll processing, dramatic reductions in wages for overtime, and reduced administration effort. In a recent white paper, Most estimates that intentional and error-driven “time theft” ranges as high as 10% of gross payroll and costs Corporate America hundreds of billions of dollars a year. “Biometrics consistently deliver accurate, reliable, and auditable real-time labor data,” she says, and that’s “the foundation of effective labor management.”

The great advantage of using biometrics to confirm identity is that the technique does not require any special effort on the part of individuals. It’s not what a person has in their possession - a key or electronic token, for instance - or what he or she knows, as in a secret passcode, that distinguishes them from other persons. Those items are easy to forget or misplace. Instead, authenticating the person depends on some unique aspect of their physical being that can be measured or analyzed directly by a computer and accurately matched against previously-stored records.

The measure of man
Fingerprints were the first such characteristic to submit to computer analysis and matching, starting as early as the 1960s at the FBI, but since then, the field of biometrics has broadened to include almost a dozen other techniques. It turns out that there are unique patterns to be identified in the shapes of people’s hands, in the coloring that makes up their eyes’ irises, in the blood vessels of their retinas, and in the shapes and arrangement of their facial features. With the right equipment, unique patterns can be recorded even in the veins within fingers and hands. In addition, each person’s DNA, or genetic code, is unique.

Each individual also displays four unique behavioral characteristics that can be used for biometric purposes: the frequency characteristics of their voice, as shaped by their vocal tranct; pen pressure and speed while writing by hand; the timing of fingers typing on a keyboard; and the dynamics of their body and limbs while walking.

Choosing which of these various biometrics to use in a particular application is matter of weighing such factors as the cost of equipment, error rates, and susceptibility to fraud. Even DNA, thought to be as immutable and definitive as possible, is now suspect. The New York Times in August reported that an Israeli firm called Nucleix has shown that it is possible - indeed, easy, for “any biology undergraduate” - to fabricate DNA evidence at crime scenes. Quite likely, this has implications for using DNA as a biometric for security and other applications.

Permanence over time is another important factor. If a certain bodily characteristic changes as a person ages, it can’t be used without periodic refreshing of the master database holding biometric records. This is exactly the case with retinal blood vessels, which for some reason has become a particularly popular biometirc in sci-fi movies.

Biometrician beware
Experts warn that as unique and powerful as they are, biometrics should not be adopted as substitutes for traditional security measures. Because fooling biometric systems can be as easy as tricking a facial recognition system by showing it a photograph of a face it “knows,” these technologies must be used only in conjunction with other techniques. If people are required to provide a secret passcode or secure pass-key in addition to a fingerprint, the rates of false negatives - mistaking Joe for Bob - and false positives - identifying a photo of Joe as Joe himself - may be reduced to an extremely small number.

And because biometric records are not secrets, writes Bruce Schneier, a leading security expert and blogger, they need special attention when being captured and stored. First, there must be a way to make sure that, say, the voiceprint originally associated with Mary has actually been generated by Mary. And then, once digitized, that voiceprint must be stored in a higly secure way, because a purloined copy of its data could be used - by hacking into a remote terminal, for instance - to trick the biometirc system set up to check it. Equally important, Mary can never change her voiceprint or any other biometric, as she might a pass-key or other assigned credential, and that means that once a biometric is compromised, it is compromised for good and therefore unuseable.

For now, the industry sectors most heavily committed to using biometrics are health care and financial services, both of which are highly regulated. for instance, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, or HIPAA, sets out a strict set of rules governing the protection and privacy of medical records. Penalties for breaking these rules are quite stiff, so hospitals tend to pay special attention to securing their IT systems. Yet, they also need to make those systems especially easy for doctors to use, especially when it comes to logging in and out of different workstations as they make their rounds. Too many passwords to remember or fiddling to log in to these systems and doctors will move on to another hospital. Biometrics, though, and so-called proximity badges, make it possible to quickly log in to a hospital application - and perhaps even have it “follow” the physician from terminal to terminal.

Looking to the future, Acuity’s Most sees biometrics finding widespread use with mobile devices. With a technology called Near-Field Communications (NFC), cellphones can be used as electronic wallets to make purchases of soft drinks, for instance, or theater and transportation tickets. Without some form of biometrics to help associate each cellphone with its proper owner, however, the risks of losing the device would be so high that this scenario would likely remain more dream than reality. “Near-field is the application that will finally drive biometrics into corporate use in a big way,” Most says.

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An introduction to biometric security

From fingerprints to biometrics

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COMMENTS

How is your business dealing with data storage issues in an age of rapidly changing technology?
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Biodiesel Moves from Backyard to Mainstream

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:07:17 +0000

Long gone are the days when biodiesel was something your granola-eating neighbor brewed in his backyard using recycled cooking oil. Rather, biodiesel is fast-becoming a mainstream alternative to traditional petroleum-based motor fuel—and a prime business opportunity for entrepreneurs with an eye on renewable fuels.

According to Emerging Markets Online, a global energy and utilities market research firm, in the year 2007, there were only 20 oil-producing nations supplying the needs of the rest of the world. By the year 2010, most countries will be biodiesel producers.

In the U.S., biodiesel is powering more and more cars and trucks. For example, the city of Mesa, Arizona, switched its entire fleet of more than 1,000 diesel-powered vehicles—from high-performance fire trucks to lowly street sweepers—to biodiesel last summer.

Fueling demand
The appeal of biodiesel is easy to understand. Both biodegradable and non-toxic, biodiesel is a clean-burning alternative fuel derived from natural oils from plants like soybeans as well as other renewable botanical resources. Because it contains no petroleum, biodiesel is better for the environment and has lower emissions compared to petroleum diesel.

In fact, according to the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), a 100 percent soybean-based biodiesel can reduce global warming carbon dioxide pollution by more than half relative to conventional petroleum-based diesel. The emissions benefits are even higher for biodiesel produced from canola oil. In the future, non-conventional sources like algae may have the potential to provide nearly 90 percent reductions in global warming carbon dioxide pollution.

Josh Tickell has long recognized the benefits of biodiesel. Tickell is an environmentalist whose film FUEL won the 2008 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for Best Documentary. He is also the author of From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank—The Complete Guide to Using Vegetable Oil as an Alternative Fuel. “Biodiesel is energy positive, so no matter what you do, it contains more energy than it takes to make it,” he says. “It’s an efficient converter of solar energy into hydrocarbons so the promise is … that biodiesel will become the basis for a new generation of biofuels that can run in both gasoline and diesel engines.”

Better yet, the U.S. Department of Energy reports that some biofuels are less expensive per gallon than gasoline—slashing the average cost of gas by 20 to 35 cents per gallon. That’s good news to penny-pinching car owners: An average American family can save up to $300 per year by using pure ethanol.

Business is booming
Such eco-friendly and cost-conscious perks are opening the doors for entrepreneurs with an interest in alternative fuels. “The opportunity for entrepreneurs is a trillion-dollar-a-year industry in the U.S. alone,” says Tickell. “We’re talking about a world-wide multi-trillion-dollar-a-year industry, representing the largest single conversion of cash into jobs and infrastructure that we will see within a hundred years.”

Bob Schildgen agrees. The environmentalist behind Sierra magazine’s “Hey Mr. Green” environmental advice column, Schildgen says, “Everyone is looking for an alternative to fossil fuel. Anytime you have a new technology, you’re going to have people thinking about making money off of it.”

The promises—and pitfalls
But winning the race to bring biodiesel to the masses is tougher than many think. Because while “anything from hemp oil to soy beans to coconuts to rendering fats in meat processing” can be refined into biodiesel, finding just the right formula can be a difficult undertaking, according to Tickell.

“Biodiesel has been dismaying because it has large quality issues,” says Tickell. “There are so many different ways of making it, it has so many different producers, you never know what you’re going to get out of that pump.”

Another obstacle facing entrepreneurs is sourcing materials. After all, some critics argue that growing enough crops to meet the demand for soybean-based biodiesel may require diverting large amounts of soy crops from food use to biodiesel production and converting millions of acres of forests to agricultural land.

“If we took all the soybean acreage now and made it into biodiesel, we’d still get far less than we’d need—a fraction of the 160 billion gallons of fuel we consume,” says Schildgen. “Plus, the price of soybean oil is $3 or $4 a gallon, so it’s not economically feasible at this point.”

Even the much-ballyhooed approach of converting algae oil into biodiesel fuel has been hampered by high processing and water disposal costs. Says Schildgen, “Many times when a technology or a new idea is launched, investors put a lot of money into it, but it doesn’t necessarily pan out or fulfill its big promises.”

Even Tickell, who is driving the first algae-powered car across the U.S. for a nationwide tour promoting his film FUEL, admits that biodiesel fuel from algae “is still cutting-edge technology. It’s not as if you’re going to go up to the pump in two weeks and pump it. But it will be available for both gasoline and diesel cars within a 5–10 year period of time.”

Researchers have been hard at work making algae-based biodiesel easier on the pocketbook. Chemists at United Environment and Energy in New York have developed what they termed the first economical, eco-friendly process to convert algae oil into biodiesel fuel. Researchers say their process is at least 40 percent less expensive than that of others now being used.

The playing field
Innovations aside, there’s still stiff competition to consider. Earlier this summer, oil giant ExxonMobil announced that it would invest at least $600 million in algae-to-fuel research and development deals with biotech company Synthetic Genomics. Such deep pockets can make it tough for budding entrepreneurs to have any impact on the biodiesel industry.

But Tickell says heavily-funded research and development partnerships shouldn’t discourage entrepreneurs from vying for a slice of the renewable-energy pie. “As good as a large company’s research and development is, it has always been the entrepreneurs who have put forth all of the little solutions that lead to the big solutions,” he says. “There were other car manufacturers at the time that Henry Ford put the Model T on the road. He wasn’t educated; he had no engineering background; he wasn’t backed by the steel industry at that time. He was a man with a vision to put a car on the road.”

However, Schildgen says it’s important for entrepreneurs to continue looking outside the box for biodiesel opportunities. “If I were an entrepreneur, I’d put my eggs in the energy audit and conservation basket because I think that’s where you can make money the quickest,” he advises. “The real, most immediate, cheapest and lucrative solution is in conservation and efficiency. Not that we shouldn’t be looking at alternatives, too, but for the immediate future, we need to be tightening up our efficiencies to the point where we don’t need to be so concerned about developing [fuel] sources.”

In the meantime, the race continues to bring yesterday’s backyard biodiesel to the mainstream masses. “This is a wide open playing field,” says Tickell. “There will be leaders and there will be losers.” Let the games begin.

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The chemistry of biodiesel

Fueling change: A biodiesel documentary

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COMMENTS

Biodiesel is a buzzword-du-jour but can it really become a mainstream alternative to conventional petroleum-based motor fuel?
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Businesses Harnessing the Power of Complex Events Processing

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:24:41 +0000

A new approach to analyzing large volumes of data, something called stream processing, or complex-events processing (CEP), is changing how companies keep up with the world and react to it. The technology’s aim is to sift through large, fast-changing streams of data as quickly as possible and identify patterns and correlations in the data that signify meaningful events or opportunities to take profitable action.

In traditional database setups, which form the basis for virtually all enterprise software applications today, data first gets collected, then organized in a highly structured way, and then cross-indexed for rapid searching, and only after all that—hours or even days after its creation—is the data finally ready for any kind of analysis.

CEP systems, in contrast, are designed to analyze floods of data virtually at the moment each item is generated, with no pre-processing. That calls for highly specialized software and, in the most extreme cases, specially engineered hardware, too.

How fast is fast? Try several hundred thousand messages processed in one second using a standard, single-core microprocessor. But more processors helps: IBM recently unveiled a CEP product called System S that, running a 1,424-core computer, analyzes five million messages per second for customer TD Securities.

How it works
Potential applications for CEP run the gamut, from algorithmic trading in fast-paced financial markets to interpreting torrents of live battlefield data, from managing far-flung supply chains to enabling massive multiplayer Internet games to securing IT systems and networks against intruders. Curt Monash, principal at Monash Research, Acton, Massachusetts, identifies two broad classes of CEP apps: One, as used in financial trading, centers on low-latency analysis of data—identifying significant data and events near-instantly—while the other focuses on filtering data to find the most significant records, which may get stored for analysis at a later time.

In technical terms, CEP achieves its high speed mainly by analyzing incoming data records entirely in main memory, a.k.a. RAM, with no need to call on comparatively slow hard disk drives. Traditional database systems, in contrast, store data on the hard disk, organized as rows and columns, and swap selected chunks in and out of high-speed memory as needed. For more speed, extra processors can be ganged together to work in parallel. And for the most extreme applications, such as analyzing data packets on a network to detect hacker activity, specialized silicon may be required—network processors designed solely for that task.

Speed, in short, is of the essence. In fact, by jacking up the speed of data analysis, CEP brings companies a big step closer to what business theorists have described as the “real-time enterprise.” Ideally, the enterprise should monitor changing business conditions moment by moment and, in response, reorient its internal operations and change its business processes on a proverbial dime. Until recently, business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing techniques, building on traditional database management, have helped managers and executives to understand and delve into a company’s past performance, but with CEP, BI tools would illuminate current performance and alert executives to situations that need immediate attention and action.

Business intelligence 2.0
Such tools might even fuse data from a variety of independent sources and, in effect, create entirely new information and unanticipated insights. For example, data indicating a particular combination of bad weather and unexpectedly low inventories in a certain geographic region might trigger a call for special logistics to move extra quantities of a much-in-demand product to store shelves in time to support an important retail promotion already underway.

CEP-based BI may have especially big implications for Web-based companies, such as Google, Yahoo, and Amazon. They are able to collect mind-boggling quantities of information about their visitors’ behavior—every mouse-click on every Web page. And these firms try their best to keep up. Last year, Yahoo disclosed that it had assembled a 2-petabyte (or 200,000-gigabyte) data warehouse to analyze the activities of the 500 million visitors it serves each month. The Yahoo database processes 24 billion events a day, a huge stream of data. But with CEP technology, these events might be analyzed and acted on almost as they happen—selecting just the right content and advertising for each and every person using the site, say.

As usually happens with promising new software technologies, a handful of startup companies have been funded by venture capitalists to pursue the CEP opportunity, even as established database companies—including IBM, Oracle, Sybase, Tibco, and Microsoft—move into the arena. Among the startups are Streambase (founded by relational database pioneer Michael Stonebraker), Truviso (originally launched as Amalgamated Insight), and EsperTech. Though nobody expects CEP to rival the traditional database market in terms of size or importance, it is, for now, one of the fastest-growing and most exciting segments of the overall data management field.

More is better
One obvious reason for all the excitement is the near-exponential growth in the amount of data that’s becoming available in seemingly every sector of the economy. Thanks to advances in microelectronics, the cost of physical sensors has plummeted, making it more viable than ever to measure temperatures, pressures, and speeds on seemingly every kind of machine and vehicle. BMW, for instance, builds dozens of such sensors into its cars, along with banks of microprocessors to analyze feedback from them. One future scenario: A car might warn its driver of a dangerous driving condition, such as hydroplaning on a rainy highway, or it might alert the car’s dealer to schedule a service visit to check on what appears to be a faulty part.

What’s more, radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags are now low enough in cost to help track the movement of goods through complex supply chains—all the way from a factory in China to a distribution center in Illinois to a specific shelf in a Wal-Mart store. But with potentially millions of tagged pallets and boxes in the world, each one registering its location as it passes through a doorway or leaves a truck, traditional IT systems may easily be overwhelmed with data. That has made the RFID industry particularly interested in CEP, and companies such as SAP and Oracle are paying particular attention to the opportunity.

Another highly interested party, albeit mum on such matters, is the intelligence establishment. The National Security Agency could use some form of CEP to filter the mountains of data it gleans from phone taps and eavesdropping on global flows of email. The CIA could use the technology to find tell-tale correlations between items in the floods of data it collects from field agents, newswires, and spy satellites.

Trucking companies, as analyst Monash points out, are interested in the technology for monitoring the movement of their vehicles—each one equipped with GPS and a radio link back to HQ. “It could provide an early-warning system, discovering if a truck were off-course, lost, or involved in an accident.”

As with traditional database management, making pattern-recognition engines reasonably easy to set up and easy to modify over time is one of the major technical problems that CEP engineers have had to solve. It’s one thing to build a program that can search for a specified set of patterns at high speed. It’s quite another to produce a generalized solution whose search patterns can be altered on the fly and not lose any speed. These are difficult technical challenges that have intrigued academic researchers for many years, and it is from their projects that most of today’s CEP companies originate: Telegraph at University of California, Berkeley, for example, and The Aurora Project at Brown University.

Still, as technical problems get solved, CEP will likely weave its way into everyday life, perhaps even finding patterns in people’s daily activities and travels, second by second. After all, what is a cell phone but a potential sensor and source of rich data just waiting to be correlated with billions of others?

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Practical complex events processing

Saving lives with complex events processing

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COMMENTS

How will instant analysis of data change enterprise management strategies and consumers’ experience of the Web?
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The Growing Backlash Against Outsourcing

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:26:10 +0000

In a climate of economic entropy, many corporate pundits view outsourcing and globalization as necessary evils. They are seen as the alternative strategies that can rescue the bottom line by cutting operating costs, yet at the same time, they often coldly ax once-stable American jobs.

How are corporate honchos grappling with this catch-22? With caution, says Atul Vashishta, the CEO of neoIT, a leading global outsourcing advisory and management consultancy, based in San Ramon, California.

“The reason businesses are outsourcing now is because they’re competing with other companies that have a lower cost base elsewhere,” says Vashishta, who co-authored The Offshore Nation: Strategies for Success in Global Outsourcing and Offshoring (McGraw-Hill, 2006). “When the economy is not growing, the human impact is tremendous. People are being laid off, and there is significantly lowered compensation for them.”

Within the past three years, offshore outsourcing has become a catalyst for the productivity and growth of some struggling corporations, Vashishta says. CEOs are hiring service and technical professionals to take advantage of the low wages paid in some developing nations, while simultaneously slashing jobs on the home front. Recent college graduates from China, India, and the Philippines are being recruited to do the twice the amount of work as American employees, for about one-fifth the pay.

“The downturn has put higher pressure on lowering costs, and companies are desperately outsourcing because their volume is falling,” Vashishta says. “On the flipside, in an economic environment like this, these decisions become more difficult for companies, because workers that are laid off have a much harder time finding something else afterwards.”

Globalization and Greed at a Glance
In January, BDO Seidman, one of the nation’s most renowned consulting and accounting organizations, conducted its annual “Technology Outlook Survey: Economic Climate Affects International Growth Plans.” The aim: to evaluate America’s current demand for outsourcing and to gain insight into how intelligently businesses are handling it.

Researchers tapped 100 chief financial officers (CFOs) at technology companies throughout the U.S. and found that nearly two-thirds of them were outsourcing services or manufacturing. The companies in the random sample all had revenues of up to $30 billion, according to Doug Sirotta, the head of BDO Seidman’s West Region tax practice and an advisor to companies in the technology and manufacturing sectors.

One-third of survey respondents said their primary concern about international growth was the shaky business and political atmosphere. Because of this collective hesitancy to globalize, international outsourcing could be on the downswing this year as CFOs push for more in-country options, Sirotta says.

Less than half of the CFOs in the survey claimed they held operations outside U.S. boundaries, compared to nearly double that amount the previous year. Twenty-two percent said they were inclined to seek outsourcing avenues inside American territory, as opposed to combing China and India for workers.

“We are seeing global factors that are causing U.S. technology companies to pull back from traditional outsourcing locations,” Sirotta says. “These range from terrorist attacks in India to shipping cost issues in China.”

Seeking an in-country approach
Of late, the most common non-U.S. locations for outsourcing are India (50 percent); Southeast Asia, including the Philippines (31 percent, down from 50 percent in 2008); China (19 percent, down from 46 percent in 2008); and Western Europe (19 percent), the BDO Seidman report states.

If American companies can afford to keep outsourcing within country lines, the U.S. economy will enjoy greater buoyancy and fewer jobs will be lost, Sirotta says. While global outsourcing can result in greater labor savings for some companies, the long-term cons may actually outweigh the pros, Vashishta says.

Executives are looking deeper at the potential effects offshore outsourcing could have on their corporate reputations. In the short-run, CEOs may earn more money by taking advantage of cheap wages overseas, but they may also be scrimping on their quality of staff and, ultimately, losing worldwide prestige.

Still, Procter & Gamble, Cisco Systems, DuPont, and Marriott have respectively struck billion-dollar outsourcing deals in recent years with India, Mexico, and the Philippines. Information technology companies, from IBM Global Services to Microsoft, as well as Fortune 500 companies such as American Express, Citibank, Bank of America, and General Electric, are all firmly on the outsourcing bandwagon. Meanwhile, disgruntled American employees are waving farewell to their overseas-bound jobs and an anti-globalization uproar is brewing.

Outsourcing on the outs
Before it folded in 2007, the Organization for the Rights of American Workers (TORAW) spoke out against this type of American job give away. TORAW held a two-day demonstration in 2002 outside the Strategic Outsourcing Conference at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City to protest rampant outsourcing.

Today, the American Rights Network, a nonprofit organization that supports workers’ rights to free choice, is standing up against outsourcing alongside advocacy groups like the Coalition for the Future American Worker.

One of the looming questions among protestors is this: When it comes to job loss in America, should the blame be placed solely on cash-hungry corporations? Vashishta says no. The burden, he says, belongs to the government and the individuals, too.

“There has to be a renewed focus in our country regarding how we take on roles that may be getting globalized,” Vashishta says. “How do we take those workers and skill sets and transition them to jobs that are much more in demand in the U.S.? By creating new industries.”

Possible jobs in the fields of social services, education, and biotechnology are becoming more available, and it is up to the government to continue offering companies incentives to retain American employees. If a worker is laid off from the automobile industry, for example, the parent corporation should compensate that employee for schooling so that he or she may enter another industry with comparable skills. Out-placement, extended severance packages, and retraining opportunities must all be part of that bargain, Vashishta says.

“The government has to come up with a tax credit to make businesses grow—and make it possible for employees to move from one industry to another,” Vashishta says. “Outsourcing is creating a much bigger human impact right now than people may even realize.”

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Is outsourcing to blame for the lack of jobs?

Outsourcing to India

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COMMENTS

What are the human costs of outsourcing, both in the United States and abroad?
Leave your response in the comments below.

Is There Any Solution to Plastic Marine Debris?

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:20:00 +0000

Do you ever wonder what happens to the litter that washes down into storm drains?

Maybe it's the cigarette butt somebody drops to the curb and leaves there, or the plastic bags that fly away in the slightest breeze. When the rain runs courses down the streets, all these bits of debris float down through metal grates and into the sewers. And then what?

Peter Hill of the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative says, the water gushes through the sewers and “often runs straight into waterways, untreated.”

It's just one of the ways that trash gets into the world’s rivers and oceans, a global problem on a huge scale. In a single day in 2008, volunteers in 104 countries picked up nearly 7 million pounds of debris from beaches and waterways, including more than three million cigarettes, more than a million plastic bags, and nearly a million each of food wrappers and bottle caps.

“The thing to remember is that every single piece of trash has a face behind it,” says Seba Sheavly, an independent consultant who has worked on the problem of marine debris for more than 15 years.

“I often try to get people to realize that a six-pack ring does not take itself off of a six-pack of beer, open the kitchen door, jump out into the yard, and find its way into a river.”

Just like many other pollution problems, Sheavly says people are behind marine debris. But she says, this one can be solved on a person-by-person scale—by making people aware of the consequences of their behavior, showing them how to do better, and making waste management tools readily available.

More than just an eyesore
Anyone who has shaken a slimy plastic bag off their leg during an ocean swim can tell you how they're affected by ocean litter.

But the problem has much larger consequences for aquatic wildlife, for marine navigation, and even for people, says David Osborn, who works with United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) marine and coastal ecosystem's branch.

For one thing, a huge amount of the debris littering the oceans and coasts comes from plastic. Plastics are a particular problem, Osborn says, because they don't biodegrade. Plastic just sits there, or else it breaks down into tinier and tinier pieces—eventually microscopic pieces—of plastic.

These pieces create a number of problems, largely when they are ingested by wildlife or when wildlife become entangled in them. Plastic can carry invasive species, spreading another insidious environmental problem.

Osborn says plastics in the ocean have the potential to cause damage further up the food chain. “Plastics are pollutants,” he says. “They carry chemicals that can get caught in the tissue of the fish. We eat them, and we're ingesting those pollutants in their system.”

Commercial fishing nets—big, bulky, and incredibly durable—are another big headache. Sometimes they get lost overboard, and sometimes there is no good way to dispose of them when they're no longer usable. When they're left in the water, all kinds of wildlife can get trapped and killed. Plus the nets can get tangled in delicate coral reefs or in the machinery of boats.

Beyond the individual impact of specific debris, the health of oceans affects everyone, says Tom McCann, who works for Ocean Conservancy. “When we're trashing our oceans,” he says, “we're really harming not only our economic well-being and our social well being, but ultimately the health of humans both here in America and abroad as well.”

Cleaning up the mess
McCann's organization is one of the major players working to clean up the debris. Theirs is often a fairly low tech approach: mobilize squads of volunteers and hit the beach with trash bags.

But although Ocean Conservancy expends a lot of energy on cleaning up, most experts, including McCann, say the problem cannot be solved that way.

Cleanup, it turns out, can be pretty complicated. The low-tech solution is inefficient and ineffective—and doesn't really even begin to address the problem of debris that is circling far away from land in the open ocean.

UNEP's Osborn says even finding the debris in deep water can be challenging. The litter doesn't show up on satellite imagery or radar, and it moves around.

Even in the case of the “North Pacific Gyre”—aka the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a region of ocean northeast of Hawaii where currents converge to concentrate marine litter—it's not so easy to clean up. Osborn says depending on the season, the location of the patch moves. Sometimes the litter cycles down far beneath the surface, and often the debris is spread out over a large enough area that litter density becomes minimal and attempting a cleanup becomes a monumental task.

Moreover, Osborn says, the cleanup itself can have an ecological toll. Anything that catches litter runs the risk of catching marine life as well, and he notes that the by-catch of a clean up can be as damaging as the litter was to begin with.

That doesn't mean some people aren't trying to tackle the problem. George Orbelian, a lifelong surfer and oceans enthusiast, helped found Project Kaisei, an organization dedicated to studying deep sea debris and trying to clean it up.

Right now, Project Kaisei is in the research phase, in partnership with, among others, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. But Project Kaisei has also partnered with large-scale recycling companies, which think all that debris out in the water has the potential to bring in some profit.

Orbelian says there are a number of recycling possibilities. “We're actually looking at four or five different technologies that turn waste plastic into fuel and other things that can be used,” he says. “So we'll see which technology is most appropriate.”

In terms of collecting the plastic, he says one new possibility would be “to create a material that acts as a magnet that attracts the plastic or something that ends up connecting to the plastic bits.”

Going to the source
Osborn remains skeptical that an efficient solution can be found for collecting plastic. While he welcomes the effort—as well as the publicity and research—Project Kaisei is putting into the problem, he says finding a better solution for recapturing the waste “is extremely difficult and the primary reason why a market has not already appeared.” 

That's why he, like many other experts, says the real solution is prevention.

“[One step] many cities invest in is gross pollutant traps,” says Osborn. “Waste that goes into storm-water channels gets caught in effectively a big net, which stops it from going into the marine environment.”

Another technological advance that could help is to improve the composition of plastic so that it biodegrades in the marine environment. “There are a number of different variations of plastic bags,” Osborn says, such as “bags made out of corn starch or bags that biodegrade when they get wet.”

These may not be ideal from a consumer standpoint, Osborn points out—imagine walking home with your groceries in the rain—but could lead to a long-term solution that minimizes the number of bags floating around.

A less technologically advanced solution might be to use fewer plastic bags to start with. Osborn says “the UN has been calling for some time for governments to phase out those flimsy film bags, and move towards recyclable, reusable materials,” like cloth.

But given that we can't eliminate plastic 100 percent, some marine litter programs aim to make better use of plastic waste so it won't get discarded in the first place—for example, what to do with those bulky, durable fishing nets.

In many port areas, marine litter expert Sheavly says, there is no good mechanism in place to help fishermen dispose of the nets that don't work anymore, “so sometimes fishermen have no recourse other than to let it go.” Instead, some places have turned the nets into a resource. Hawaii has developed a program where derelict nets are collected, brought back to Honolulu, processed, and, in a special waste-to-energy plant, turned into electricity.

“Putting a fishing net into landfills is kind of worthless,” Sheavly says. “Being able to convert those nets into electricity, they now have a monetary worth to them, so that it makes it worthwhile to collect the nets and then process them.” And it provides an opportunity to convert the energy that was used to make that net into something else.

What you can do
Keith Criddle, a fisheries and marine conservation professor at the University of Alaska and the lead author on a congressionally mandated study on marine debris, points out, “All of the man-made debris in the oceans and on the coasts was put there by people, willfully or by accident.”

“It is important,” he says, “to acknowledge that the marine debris problem and its solution can be boiled down to simple individual and social choices about the disposal of waste materials.”

Sheavly says better education can play a big role in helping individuals make better choices. For instance, “most people have been told the caps on a soda bottle aren't recyclable,” she says, and so they toss them. But recycling technology is now capable of sorting the bottles, which are made from one kind of plastic, and the caps, which are made from another, and capturing and reusing both.  

Any real solution, she says, will attack the problem from a number of different angles, but the personal angle should always be included. 

“In some pollution issues people don't see how they could affect it.” Sheavly says. “This is one where you can.”

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World's biggest garbage dump: the oceans

Plastic marine debris

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COMMENTS

How do you contribute to the global problem of marine debris, and what are some ways you can minimize your impact?
Leave your response in the comments below.

Managing Long-Term Data Storage in a Regulatory Environment

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:35:02 +0000

Today’s regulatory environment is enough to make a data manager’s head spin. From legislation such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act to credit card processing security standards, data managers now face a dizzying array of regulations regarding what types of data must be stored and for how long.

But that’s not all. Thanks to a December 2006 amendment to the U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to encompass digital information, U.S. courts are now empowered to order companies to produce the right data in record time. Because e-discovery allows everything from e-mail to PowerPoint presentations to be called into evidence, companies must be prepared to preserve and sift through mounds of electronic data at breakneck speed or face possible legal penalties.

In response to such challenges, many data managers are upping the ante by purchasing vast amounts of data storage hardware. Research firm IDC reports the total amount of disk storage shipped in 2008 grew 40.5 percent over the previous year. According to research firm Forrester Research, 40 percent of enterprises said they plan to spend more on storage hardware in the coming year, with another 46 percent saying their spending on storage will be level. What’s more, Forrester estimates storage capacity requirements are growing at a rate of between 15 percent and 25 percent per year.

In addition to scrambling for the necessary hardware, many companies are adopting solutions that promise to help them better analyze, archive, manage, protect, and purge their data to meet long-term management goals.

Taking inventory
Take, for example, Vivisimo and its Velocity Search Platform. This data analysis software provides companies with easy access to information and content without having to rethink the way in which content is produced and stored. Using proprietary conceptual search technology, Velocity helps companies easily determine what information currently resides on a databases, how employees use and access this information, and how best to store this data on a long-term basis.

Setting data aside
Once companies have taken proper inventory of their data, the next step is deploying a data archiving tool. Data archiving works by removing and archiving master data from a database and storing it on a variety of storage mediums for future access.

After all, says Brian Babineau, a senior analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group in Milford, Massachusetts, “If data is being transacted upon on a regular basis, trying to figure out how you’re going to store that data, where you’re going to keep it, and how long you’re going to keep it is nearly impossible.”

Fortunately, by systematically extracting data from a primary environment, data archiving technology lets data managers store only the information needed to meet regulatory requirements while improving the performance and availability of critical systems.

Managing resources
Another approach data managers are taking to sorting out their data is through the use of storage resource management (SRM) technology. Tool suites such as the IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center help companies better manage their storage system capacity by centralizing, simplifying, and automating storage tasks. What’s more, not only can SRM tools better provision storage to optimize the use of existing storage resources, but they can also forecast future storage needs to prevent outages. For example, an SRM tool can automatically notify a data manager that storage capacity has reached its maximum threshold and that it’s time to acquire more capacity before disaster strikes.

Preventing leakages
Similarly, data-leak prevention products are helping companies keep better tabs on their data. Firewalls and encryption may keep hackers at bay, but a data-leak protection solution from vendors such as RSA, the security division of EMC, can serve as an early warning system that notifies data managers when employees are about to send out sensitive or classified corporate data. It’s a policy-based approach to data protection that, according to Greg Schulz, founder of StorageIO Group, a storage consultancy, helps data managers “monitor their networks, systems, and applications for vulnerabilities that will automatically set off an alarm when critical data is about to be leaked.”

New trends
Getting a better handle on data storage is also leading many companies to hot trends such as cloud computing and virtualization. Virtualization, for instance, pools storage from multiple devices into a single storage mechanism that can be managed centrally, enabling one computer to do the work of several machines. “The more tools that a company has to move data between physical devices, the better off they are,” says Babineau, highlighting the flexibility provided by virtualization.

The downside, warns Schulz, is that virtualization can introduce more issues. “With virtualization and cloud computing, all you’re doing is moving data around. That data still has to be stored and protected somewhere. You can protect it in the cloud, but guess what, you’ve just introduced another point of vulnerability.”

Internal checks and balances
Hot technologies aside, if data managers plan to cope with the regulatory requirements governing data storage today, then they must take a long, hard look at their internal policies and procedures. “Don’t make the mistake of assuming that your data and information are secure as long as they’re in your company,” says Schulz. “The headline news is always about a [storage] tape containing a million names getting released. But how about the 12,000 laptops that are lost or forgotten every month at Los Angeles airport—and the data on those [computers].”

For this reason, Schulz recommends that data managers establish and enforce stringent policies related to company-issued USB thumb drives, laptops, iPhones—any portable device that can transport confidential information and risk exposing a company to security breaches and legal liabilities.

“Policies are essential,” says Schulz. “Too often, we try to throw technology at the problem rather than create a policy or approach.”

Babineau agrees. He says that many companies make the mistake of leveraging technology to store too much data. For example, the Radicati Group estimates that the average corporate email user sends and receives a total of 84 messages per day and that the average size of a message without an attachment is about 22 KB. That can add up to a ton of non-mission critical data—and ever-expanding storage capacity needs. However, with the right data retention polices in place, a company can regularly purge its data while still sticking to the letter of the law.

“The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure allow you to expire content,” says Babineau. “You just can’t do it on a one-off basis. You actually have to have some consistent rules and policies to do it.”

Today’s data managers are facing stringent storage requirements at a time when companies are being deluged with everything from Word documents and email to business-processing applications and data-devouring digital content. In the end, overcoming these long-term data management challenges comes down to striking just the right balance between cutting-edge technology and internal policies.

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Surviving the data avalanche

Server virtualization 101

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COMMENTS

How is your business dealing with data storage issues in an age of rapidly changing technology?
Leave your response in the comments below.

Restoring Wildlands: Two Business Models

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:06:38 +0000

Many Americans think of parks and rainforest when they think of Costa Rica—an exotic vacation destination with scuba diving and hiking.

But not too long ago, the only creatures hiking through a large swath of northwest Costa Rica were farmers and cows.

Originally wooded with dry forest, cloud forest, and rain forest, by the 1960s and ‘70s, most of the land had become dry savanna. But from one couple's initiative and a many private donations, 500 miles of savanna has been restored into national parkland.

Restoration minimalism
Dan Janzen, the field biologist, who, along with his wife, fellow field biologist, Winnie Hallwachs, pioneered the effort to restore the land, said the most important thing they needed to do to restore the land was to buy it.

“We don't plant any trees,” Janzen says, “wind and animals bring the seeds. We don't plant anything. What you have to do is stop anybody or anything from stopping animals.”

Of course, the reality is somewhat more complex. The Area de Conservacion Guanacaste has a staff of 150 people and an operating budget of about $1.5 million. Among other projects, the staff fights fires, researches wildlife, educates students in the surrounding areas about biology, and yes, in some areas, even plants some trees.

But Janzen says all that is practically beside the point. “Biologically, restoration is a breeze,” he says. “If you're willing to let a large area restore itself, that will happen.

“The real world is that every square foot out there is owned by someone,” Janzen says, and they're using it for something. If you want to use it for something else, for instance, if you want to let the forest grow back, you just buy the land.

William Allen documented the restoration process in his book Green Phoenix: Restoring the Tropical Forests of Guanacaste, Costa Rica. “The restoration effort was incredibly successful,” says Allen. “There’s been nothing like it anywhere, as far as I’ve been able to learn by talking with a wide range of leading and lesser tropical ecologists who know this world.”

Janzen says in another 100 years, the average observer would never know there had been anything but forest on the land. (He says it'll take about 500 years for the true balance to be restored.)

He raised most of the money to buy the land through private donations—although he worked with the Costa Rican government, and the park continues to be run in cooperation with the government.

But he says whether you raise money through tax dollars or private investment or winning the lottery is irrelevant.

A wider look
A more important question might be whether this model—large-scale buy back of degraded landscapes for the purpose of restoration—can be repeated successfully elsewhere.

One of the elements that made Janzen's plan for restoration possible was that undisturbed parts of the forest remained. Janzen says almost all the old species still existed in pockets on the land. Perhaps equally crucial, Janzen was able to buy a large enough amount of land to allow the natural process of succession to restart.

Allen says Janzen was helped by the fact that “in the 1980s the farm economy, especially for cattle production, was experiencing a major economic downturn, and many folks were glad to sell off and get out. For many of them, the restoration project’s interest in buying their land was a godsend. The restoration project was fortunate to have such an economic scenario make the land relatively available.”

But in other places, agriculture is still profitable, or the land has been used for other reasons, like building people's homes. Those owners might not be so interested in selling—or the price might be too high no matter how many people click on the donation button.

This, says Rob French, is largely the case in the Florida Everglades. What was once a “river of grass”—a wetland that covered much of south Florida—now contains cities, roads, sugar plantations, and farms.

In order to make the swampy land ready for development, the army corps of engineers built canals, dykes and levees, and engineered the water to flow where they wanted, when they wanted.

French, an environmental engineer who has spent much of his 30-plus-year career in Florida, says he “thinks it is virtually an impossible task now to go back and restore the Everglades.” He says the best shot is to try to fix some of the damage.

For instance, the water quality in Everglades estuaries has been deteriorating, because of the way the water flow has been controlled. During the rainy season, water is stored in Lake Okeechobee until it reaches a certain level, at which point water is released toward the ocean. But the stored water is freshwater, and when a large amount blasts through the brackish estuaries (a mix of salt and freshwater), it changes the salt content of the estuaries. It essentially kills everything in there, says French.

A solution along the lines of the Guanacaste restoration project would be for someone to buy up all the land and destroy all the levees, dykes, and canals to restore water flow to its natural state.

Restoration buy-back in Florida
In some places, this is exactly what the Everglades restoration project, funded through a joint agreement with the federal government and the state of Florida, is doing.

Randy Smith, media relations specialist for the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD), gives an example: Picuyune Strand, in southwest Florida, a 55,000 acre tract bought by developers in the 1950s and ‘60s that was going to be a city.

The owners went bankrupt, Smith says, but before they did, they put in roads and dug canals. Smith says, “the state of Florida bought that and we have been very successful in filing in one of the canals, and removing roads and the handful of houses that were there. And in the areas where we've gone in and filled up the canal, the sheet flow of water has gone back to a normal state.”

Engineering restoration
But Fred Sklar, the director of the SFWMD's Everglades division says, “we often find that it's very hard to just let nature take its course.” For instance, he says, thanks to invasive species like the Brazilian pepper, the ecology is changing. Invasive plants and animals crowd out the ones that lived there naturally—and that can have consequences all the way up the food chain, when animals can no longer find as much of what they’re used to eating. “Right now nature is having a hard time, and it's on a trajectory that often it means we have to go in and do something actively.”

So to improve water quality in the estuaries, the SFWMD is engineering a new system of storage and release that would vent the water in a more natural cycle, rather than in bursts.

Their approach has its critics. Stuart Pimm, a conservation ecologist at Duke University says that, with the billions of tax dollars being spent—current estimates hover around $10–12 billion—they could absolutely do more.

Pimm says real restoration requires restoring the natural flow, not building ever more complex systems to manage the water in new ways. He calls the restoration at Guanacaste “spectacular” but says, “what's happening in Everglades is really a very, very different kind of event.”

Ultimately, SFWMD's Sklar says, “I think the idea that we are just engineering restoration rather than allowing nature to take its course is something that we struggle with everyday. We always are trying to create an environment where we can let nature take its course.”

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Everglades environmental restoration

Dan Janzen in Costa Rica

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COMMENTS

Can there be a balance between restoring an ecosystem and still letting the human population use it? Or do we need to keep ecosystems as close to their original structure, even if it means people can't live there anymore?
Leave your response in the comments below.

Creating Smart Electrical Grid a Daunting Task

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:06:08 +0000

A lot has changed since Thomas Edison invented the electric light bulb in the late 1800s. But while two-cylinder automobiles and glass milk bottles have gone the way of the dinosaur, many experts argue that the nation’s electric grid remains stuck in the Victorian era.

“Basically, we still have the same energy infrastructure that we had at the dawn of the 20th century. One-hundred years later, the technology has changed very little from what Edison and [Nikola] Tesla laid out as they started to create the large-scale distribution of electricity,” says Bracken Hendricks, a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

Grim statistics
The reality is, the current electric grid is beginning to fail the nation with greater and greater frequency. According to the Center for American Progress, there have been five massive blackouts over the past 40 years as a result of grid failure—three of these in the last nine years. In fact, in August 2003, the blackout in the Northeastern United States and Canada impacted 50 million people and 61,800 megawatts of electric load. It took four days to restore power to the region and caused an estimated $7 billion to $10 billion in economic losses. What’s worse, the Electric Power Research Institute estimates that power interruptions and fluctuations cost the economy more than $100 billion each year in damages and lost business.

Everyone agrees: It’s time to upgrade our national electricity grid in such a way that we shift away from carbon-based power sources such as oil and coal and move toward renewable energy alternatives like solar and wind power. A national clean-energy smart grid could make electricity more reliable, more efficient, greener—and perhaps even save Americans money.

That’s because a smart grid would allow new, renewable-energy projects to connect to the grid. The smart grid would also improve the distribution of energy via devices that monitor peak demand times and thereby improve the efficiency of electricity distribution.

Plenty of hurdles
But while a “green” grid sounds like an excellent idea, factors such as cost, consumer resistance, public opposition, and jurisdictional issues threaten the possibility of replacing age-old energy sources with eco-friendly fare. Consider this: The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that the total investment needed in electric utilities could be as much as $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion by 2030. That figure includes money for energy generation such as wind farms, as well as all of the power lines required to transport the energy from rural areas to urban centers.

“The biggest obstacle [to building a smart grid] is that it costs money—significant amounts of money. The question is whether there’s a payback if we were to invest such a large amount of money,” says Anjan Bose, professor of electric power engineering at Washington State University and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.

Getting ‘smart’ meters
Unfortunately, money is just a small part of what’s needed to bring a “green” grid to life. According to Ahmad Faruqui, an analyst with The Brattle Group, an economic and finance consultancy, the first step entails the nationwide rollout of smart meters—devices capable of automatically measuring how much energy a particular household is using and immediately relaying this information back to a utility company for monitoring and billing purposes.

“New smart grid technology should begin … with a smart meter that has digital information on how much power is being used on a 15-minute basis,” says Faruqui.

Currently, Faruqui believes that “it could take anywhere from three to five years to change all of the nation’s meters”—a timeline that greatly depends on the willingness of utility companies to replace traditional meters with high-tech devices. After all, he says, “Many of those utilities are very traditional in their outlook. Their view is, ‘We are in the business to sell more electricity, not less,’ so they may not be ready to go the next step which is to get the new technology out to the customers.”

Battling consumer resistance
But truth be known, not all consumers are gung-ho about making the sacrifices necessary to build an improved electric grid either. According to Bose, there is plenty of “public opposition against building new power lines or new generators. People don’t like to have power lines going through their backyard.” Not to mention those consumers that still aren’t convinced that renewable sources of energy are necessary to our survival.

Yet it’s precisely this mix of modern technology and consumer awareness that promises to bring about a smart grid in the foreseeable future. “Studies show that if consumers realized that it’s more expensive to consume energy in the afternoon [than in the evening], we would see usage go down by about 13 to 15 percent,” says Faruqui. “Because behavior alone can reduce afternoon peak demand by about 15 percent, if you introduce technology such as smart meters, now you can reduce energy consumption by 26 to 35 percent which could eliminate the need for about 150,000 megawatts of power.”

Working together
While such numbers are encouraging, the final step in the equation is convincing federal powers, state officials, and corporate entities to work together to usher today’s grid into the 21st century. After all, the current electric grid is a hodgepodge of parts governed by a wide variety of sectors of the energy industry, often with competing interests. As it stands, in a major address to the country at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, in early January, Obama cited the creation of a smart grid as a key ingredient in the economic stimulus plan.

“The jurisdictional and political issues are really the biggest hurdles,” says Bose. “The problem is, in the U.S., the electric grid, from the generators down to the household level, are chopped up and owned by hundreds of entities.”

What’s more, he adds, this “unwieldy” infrastructure is heavily regulated by a variety of government bodies and agencies. “So not only do you have hundreds of entities but you also have 50 states, as well as the federal government, all having a say on the rules under which these hundreds of entities must operate,” says Bose.

The ultimate solution hinges on building widespread consensus on how exactly we should go about building a “green” grid that benefits all parties—government, utility companies, and consumers alike. It’s a tall order but one that everyone agrees America can no longer afford to ignore. Warns Faruqui, “In about three years, we will see the demand for electricity grow by about two percent a year in the U.S. To meet that demand growth, you have to build new capacity. We just don’t have enough capacity lying around.”

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Bridges to the future: Smart electrical grid

Easy ways to conserve energy and save money

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COMMENTS

What steps are you taking in your day-to-day life to conserve energy?
Leave your response in the comments below.

Tales from Decrypt: Current Issues in Cryptography

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:48:47 +0000

The Cold War is over? Think again. Sure, the East-West geopolitical standoff may have subsided, but the cryptographic arms race rages on, largely behind closed doors, rarely shedding blood but affecting virtually everybody on the planet.

On one side are the white hats—academic and military researchers working on new ways of encoding information to protect it from prying eyes and guarantee its integrity. Working against them are hackers, criminals, and again, well-funded military researchers—black hats—all working on ways of breaking the latest codes.

And there’s the public, which these days has little choice but to trust that the white hats continue to maintain the upper hand—and can only trust that they’re truly white. The fact is, the mathematics underpinning most cryptographic techniques in use today are way beyond the average person’s ability to understand them, so it’s well nigh impossible to determine if the techniques actually work as advertised. After all, who but those privy to the most classified cryptographic research—which the government guards as strenuously as the designs of nuclear weapons—can be sure that common cryptographic programs don’t contain “back doors” that would easily enable government agencies, for instance, to read information that to others remains encrypted?

In short, cryptography demands a fair amount of trust. Like the atom bomb before it, it’s a technology that’s profoundly shaping the modern world but whose complexities only a few individuals, most of them sworn to absolute secrecy, fully understand.

Keys to the net
Though historically the purview of armies, secret agents, and governments, cryptography today is pervasive and pretty much everyone’s business. In a way, it’s what makes the Information Age tick. For without the ability to hide information from prying eyes—think credit card numbers—there’d be no e-Commerce on the Web. And without so-called hash techniques, which use crypto techniques to assure that the binary 1s and 0s of a digital object remain unaltered, only fools would run any software downloaded from the Web, even from known sources. Strong cryptography is obviously key to the viability of cash machines and retailers’ credit card terminals, but it also guards online consumer banking, transfers of money between banks, and wireless networking in homes and offices.

And that’s only the beginning. The general assumption is that black hats, if they care to, have no trouble tapping wires or snooping on wireless data transmissions, so it is always up to the senders and receivers of information to protect sensitive data through their own encryption efforts. As more personal computing gets done up in the cloud, so to speak—in remote computers available over the Internet—the public may demand better data protection and insight into how it works.

In mid-June 2009, in fact, 37 top security researchers publicly beseeched Google to beef up the security on its popular Web apps, such as Gmail and Google Docs. When not using their browsers’ crypto-based HTTPS option, the researchers said, Google’s users are left vulnerable to having their email messages and documents read by others.

“As a market leader in providing cloud services, Google has an opportunity to engage in genuine privacy and security leadership and to set a standard for the industry,” the researchers stated in an open letter to Google. Among the signers was Ron Rivest, who is the “R” in RSA, a widely-used encryption algorithm. Google, in response, agreed that HTTPS would certainly benefit users and indicated that it may widen the protocol’s use. But it also noted that because HTTPS’s encryption routines take some time to execute—around 1/4 second each time a Web page gets refreshed, according to others’ measurements—using HTTPS all the time could make cloud apps less responsive. Unstated was that HTTPS would also consume considerably more computing power at Google’s end.

Phony protection
Meanwhile, as an increasing portion of voice telephony moves to the Internet—a.k.a. Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP—cryptography is finding yet another use and arousing yet more controversy, too. In the past, only presidents and spies could afford to secure telephone calls against eavesdroppers, but now, anyone can do it—and perhaps ought to, considering that, compared to traditional, wire-based telephony (PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network), VoIP is potentially much more vulnerable to eavesdropping, spamming, and fraud, for instance.

Software called Zfone, currently offered at no charge but planned to show up as a commercial product, enables individuals to secure VoIP calls made directly between computers (though not over the popular Skype service, which employs non-standard protocols). In brief, Zfone uses a key, uniquely generated for every call, to scramble each packet of voice data before it hits the Internet—all in a way, the software’s makers claim, that’s simpler and more secure than other such schemes proposed for home and office use.

The controversy? Zfone’s encryption appears to be strong enough to thwart even the National Security Agency (NSA), the government agency that specializes in making and breaking codes of all kinds. And that means mobsters, terrorists, and other bad guys could, in theory, use it to hide their calls’ content from FBI, CIA, and local police. VoIP already presents a challenge to those agencies’ wire-tappers, because voice-data packets flow across the Net independently of each other, following potentially many different paths and mixing in with billions of other, unrelated packets.

White knight
The creator of Zfone, however, is not unfamiliar with government anxiety over his efforts. Philip R. Zimmermann is perhaps best known as the techno-political activist who invented and made freely available something called PGP (for Pretty Good Privacy), a crypto-based scheme for protecting email that’s strong enough to resist virtually any attack. Zimmermann has made it clear over the years that his ultimate aim is not to aid any bad hats but instead to help all citizens and especially political and human-rights activists around the world to communicate in a way that’s safe from government snoops. And with Zfone, he sees growing commercial opportunity in the business world, where corporations are waking up to the need to secure their telecommunications against industrial spies.

“We all know how organized crime has been taking over the Internet,” Zimmermann says, noting that it takes only a few minutes for an unprotected computer connected to the Net to be attacked and even shanghaied into a botnet. “When VoIP takes over from the PSTN, the Russian mafia will start attacking VoIP, too. It’s only a matter of time. Everyone knows that the future of telephony is the Internet. We have no choice but to encrypt our calls.”

Trust is a must?
Yet another area where cryptography is likely to have significant impact is in so-called trusted computing. Traditionally, owners of personal computers have been free to run any software they like—any operating system, any application, any digital copy of a movie. But conceivably, brand-name makers of computers and software—and users, too—might have an interest in setting up restrictions on what software runs where. Neither Hollywood studios, musicians, or software companies like to see purloined copies of their wares getting distributed across the Net, for instance. And no user wants to see his or her computer hijacked by malicious code injected by a criminally-run website.

Trusted computing attempts to eliminate those and similar scenarios by enforcing cryptologically-defined linkages between all hardware and software components. From a special, tamper-proof chip on the computer’s motherboard to operating system to applications to individual MP3 music tracks, for instance, a unique crypto-based digital signature would identify each component as being both properly licensed and unaltered since its creation, or not. Any code or content missing a proper signature could be disabled. In technical terms, the scheme prevents a computer’s owner from obtaining root access to the machine.

Freedom fighters
Critics, such as the Free Software Foundation and the self-styled Cypherpunks, an activist group, view this scheme as infringing on consumers’ rights, calling it “treacherous computing” and the “Mother(board) of all Big Brothers”. If one owns a computer, one ought to be able to run any software or content one likes, they argue—especially open-source programs like Linux. But some 170 companies, including Intel, Microsoft, and Seagate Technology, are backing it as a way to prevent pirating and to keep malicious and offensive programs from disrupting the computing environments for which they provide relatively costly support. For now, the idea’s getting used only sporadically: Certain Intel microprocessors have unique ID numbers burned into their silicon—a necessary first step in making trusted computing work—and Apple relies on trusted computing techniques to control apps for its popular iPhone.

Better living through better secret codes? There’s no question that cryptography’s role in everyday life has been widening over the past couple of decades and that it will continue to pervade more and more of daily life—even if it’s only humming away quietly in the background. And chances are, experts say, that from now on, its advances will be driven as much, if not more, by industry rather than the NSA and other government agencies. Zfone’s Zimmermann likens the technology to microelectronics, where the Pentagon surely funded early progress but which soon was being driven by the private sector. “At some point in the 1990s, things crossed over,” he says. “Today, there are way more technical people working on cryptography outside the NSA than there are inside. The U.S. government even purchases crypto gear that they didn’t design. We’ve all gotten better at it.”

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The theory and practice of cryptography

Verifying elections wtih cryptography

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COMMENTS

Cryptographic methods are pervasive now, but what risks does society face as it trusts more of its information to protection by this arcane technology?
Leave your response in the comments below.

Anger Management is Good Business

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:33:41 +0000

So Serena Williams let the f-bombs hurl at the US Open and it cost her the championship title. For those of you who are not tennis fans, just Google it or go to You Tube and you’ll know what I’m talking about. She got a $10,000 fine which is small potatoes for her. What was so much worse for her was that she lost a coveted championship title. Don’t you lose your cool in business. It will cost you. I’ve seen it and you’ve got to take steps to avoid flying off the handle at work.

I have a client who works in a stress-filled working environment. The pressure is on to produce and emotions are high in many meetings. He has a boss who is mostly good to work for. The only aspect of his behavior that’s a problem is that he has a temper. The boss is nice most of the time. In fact, he goes out of his way to do things that are generous and thoughtful. If he gets a gift card for a restaurant for his kids, he’ll buy a few extra and give them away at the office. He does other nice things, too. If only that were the entire range of his behaviors at work!

Then there’s the black cloud he brings to the office. In meetings, if he disagrees he explodes. He’ll yell at his subordinates in a tone of voice and a volume that manages to rattle them and make them feel horrible. This is what happened to one of my clients. The yelling made him more and more depressed.

Even though he was a star performer, he began to seriously think about leaving the company. This is despite numerous raises, a great salary and feelings of friendship for all of his peers. If the manager knew this, do you think he would change his behavior? I’ve got to believe he would. When I talked with my client, I asked him if he planned on telling his boss about the effect the boss was having on him. He said, "I can’t." Wrong answer!

My biggest mistake in business was not standing up to bullies or bullying behavior at work. Don’t you make the same mistake that I did. People who are behaving badly sometimes don’t realize what they’re doing. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. They also can’t read minds. So how will they know that they’re causing all kinds of distractions and pain for so many people? They don’t. That’s why you have to tell them.

It gets dangerous to confront them when they’re flying off the handle. That’s why you have to tell them what they’re doing in a setting without the emotions. If you don’t, you may lose your cool, too.

Here’s what I suggested he say. Tell your boss you need to meet with him. Then at the meeting tell your boss that you value him as a leader. It’s just that when he starts yelling at you, your perception of him as a leader is diminished. What you’re doing is tapping in to the boss’s need to be seen as an effective leader. Knowing that his behavior is costing him his personal power and prestige should be enough of a wake up call that he realizes that his behavior has to change. I’ll let you know what happens.

You’ve got to be able to control your emotions at work. The best way is to speak up before you end up exploding. You can do it without profanity if you’ve planned for the meeting. Unless you exercise prevention and operate when you’re calm, I can promise you that it will cost you. Just ask Serena.

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Maura Schreier-Fleming is president of Best@Selling. She speaks internationally about persuasion, selling skills and strategies. She successfully worked for over 20 years in the male-dominated oil industry, starting at Mobil Oil and ending at Chevron Corp. She was Mobil Oil’s first female lubrication engineer in the U.S. and was one of Chevron’s top five salespeople in the U.S. Maura writes several selling columns including the selling column for Jobbers World and the Insurance Record. Her column “Customer Connections” appears in the Dallas, Houston, and Austin Business Journals. She’s been quoted in the New York Times, Selling Power, and Entrepreneur.

Read more from Maura Schreier-Fleming at Allbusiness.com

AllBusiness.com provides resources to help small and growing businesses start, manage, finance, and expand their business. The site contains forms and agreements, expert bloggers, business directories, articles, expert advice, videos, podcasts and other resources. Material copyrighted by AllBusiness.com.

Nurture Shock

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:56:07 +0000

Po Bronson's new book, which he penned with Ashley Merryman, is shockingly insightful. NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children walks through the latest research on parenting and education.

It reveals everything from how our fear of discussing race with kids makes race issues worse to how new pedagogies for pre-k and kindergarten have breakthrough results.

Taken on the whole and through a public policy lens, the book clearly lays out some major changes we could make to our education system that would have a tremendous impact. These suggestions, coupled with the learning from programs like KIPP that were described in Gladwell's Outliers, really start to create a clear picture of what our educational system should look like going forward.

It is incredibly encouraging to imagine the potential of our education system, but one worries that despite this knowledge, politics will prevent progress.

For example, NurtureShock points out that starting high school an hour later has a significant positive impact. This was reported at least ten years ago, yet many school districts haven't made the change. The reasons for this range from additional busing costs to teachers wanting to drive to work before rush hour.

As a father, the idea of my kids going to schools where the teachers and principal don't act on this knowledge is beyond frustrating. It feels like they are hurting my kids for no good reason.

The challenge is partially political and partly just a product of the change management process. We can't change all the schools as soon as a new study comes out.

Reason is no longer the basis for policy decisions. Since when is teaching science considered liberal?

Obama spoke to addressing this but it is not clear to what degree he will. Clinton once talked about how the solution to every social problem has been solved somewhere, we just need to find it and bring it to scale. Newt Gingrich even created a site to capture these ideas.

There needs to be a new media model that is a hybrid between the New York Times and Wikipedia. It would catalog 'what we know' about every issue that is related to public policy. It would be comprehensive and ever-green like Wikipedia but have the editorial oversight of a world class newspaper.

This new media model could serve as a database to help voters make informed decisions. It would leave room for differences of opinion but not of facts.

This new media would need to be bi-partisan and able to report facts that are not popular. It would also have to be heavily marketed to have any power.

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Aaron Hurst founded the Taproot Foundation in 2001, 40 years after his grandfather, Joseph E. Slater, wrote the original blueprint for the Peace Corps. Inspired by the Peace Corps’ model for getting people to work together, Aaron created the organization to engage millions of business professionals in pro bono work building the infrastructure of the nonprofit sector. The Taproot Foundation has become the national leader in pro bono work, serving over 300 nonprofits each year and setting the agenda for the development of the field. Aaron has been recognized as a leading social entrepreneur for his work in civic engagement, nonprofit management and corporate social responsibility. Awards include the Manhattan Institute Award for Social Entrepreneurship, Fast Company’s 2006 Rising Star Award, the Draper Richards Foundation’s Fellowship for Social Entrepreneurship, and the Ashoka Fellowship.

Managerial Malpractices

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 20:49:30 +0000

The modern workplace is filled with stress, constant change, rampant conflict and employee disgruntlement. But managers frequently assume it can be remedied with a simple, even obvious, quick fix that will make everything alright.

But this assumes management can and will apply appropriate solutions to problems they themselves might or might not create. And the assumption that management can do this; that it is indeed the source of the solution and not the problem, is the first mistake.

A good deal of the malaise facing our workplaces is a direct result of managerial malpractices and the organizations’ inadequacy in dealing with them. Last month I wrote about employee malpractices, but we rarely hear much about their managers’ behavior. A sure sign that managers may be part of the problem and not the solution is their lack of knowledge about the vast management literature. Perhaps even more damaging is their unwillingness to involve their employees, many of whom are motivated and knowledgeable, in seeking solutions to the problems they face.

It is because of the importance of the managerial role in the social system of the workplace that the following managerial malpractices are such heartbreakers. So much potential is lost. So much energy squandered. So many successes deferred.

You may detect a tinge of anger coursing through the following descriptions of these all too common malpractices. That is because of the great deal of pain these practices cause for so many people. Indeed, managers behaving in these ways are doing more damage than if they did nothing at all.

First, An Inappropriate Attitude

There are a variety of ways incompetent managers destroy the potential of tens, hundreds, even thousands of individuals. First, we must understand an attitude that permeates the thinking and behavior of many of the malpracticing managers. The attitude is of “superiority over” without “responsibility to” the “subordinate” or colleague. Like governance, parenting, doctoring, and teaching, managers have a sacred responsibility to execute their duties without doing harm and in a way that enriches and enlivens those they touch as well as the organization in which they work.

While great pains were taken to cautiously assign powers to our political leaders to guard against what was believed to be the inevitable corruption of those in office, we have totally ignored these principles as they apply to power holders (managers) in the workplace. They are virtual dictators over all they supervise. The job of manager is thought to be a simple one-person affair which is unforgivable when, by so doing, he or she ignores the contributions and potential of their own organization and their workpartners – “colleagues and subordinates” – just because, given the power, they assume they are more knowledgeable, more creative, and more capable than others. This attitude is archaic and just an act of ego-gratification. Yet, this behavior is encouraged since tradition has created the mindset that the vast majority of the labor are virtual wage-slavers disempowered from making decisions regarding their work and their lives in the workplace.

Management As A Fringe Benefit

It is sad, to say the least, that while democracy and entrepreneurship are breaking out in some of the unlikeliest places on Earth, workers in the most open economies willingly subjugate themselves to unelected, virtually unaccountable bosses who tyrannize them daily. And, as Shorris (1984) reminded us long ago: “In business, [people] do not arrive at totalitarian methods because they are evil, but because they wish to do the good in what seems to them the most efficient way, or because they wish merely to survive, or with no more evil intent than the desire to prosper” (p.16).

As Scott Adams shows us each day in his syndicated Dilbert cartoon strip, managers are all too frequently malicious, bull-headed, unresponsive, ignorant, fearful and even violent. While the organization often survives such managers, the waste of human talent is a dreadful commentary on the system. Surely such organizations suffer more than they know.

Managerial abuse has become a form of acceptable corrupt practice – legal but unethical – especially when the manager sees the appointment to the position as anointment. These managers perceive themselves as masters of a fiefdom. Direct reports become servants expected to follow through and carry out every conceivable whim thrust upon them and to routinely be given assignments late Friday that are due on Monday, or to be sent to corporate Siberia for the pleasure of uprooting families just to test their loyalty. The truly disturbing feature of this behavior is that such managers are just modeling their own manager’s behavior and in so doing give the impression to the next generation that that is the way effective management is practiced.

Managerial Incompetence By Ignorance

Most managers have never formally learned how to manage people (to lead, coach, be with constructively, support, encourage, inspire). Unless they received training in the armed services or through extracurricular activities in school or, perhaps, in self-financed training programs, the people-management aspects of collegiate business studies programs and on-the-job opportunities are simply too trivial to matter.

This is the frightening and demoralizing fact of work life that is creating a tragedy of untold consequences for thousands of people in the workforce subject to the desperate trial and error methods used by most managers. The helter-skelter adoption of various strategies and techniques to lead and motivate, to communicate and inspire – in actuality, to cajole, control and intimidate others to perform for the good of the manager, the company and distant stockholders – have left professionals and union members fed up.

The constant process of reorganizing and instituting and reinstating short-lived “motivational” or “quality” or “efficiency” or “customer first” campaigns no longer fools anyone. Most managers using this helter-skelter approach only demonstrate their ignorance and whether or not they fail miserably their followers will be suspect of them and any “program” they try to implement.

Managers believing that management is their “right” will, of course, eventually destroy their credibility. And as this practice becomes widespread it destroys the credibility of the entire system. How long will it be before the many who have been subject to the capriciousness, arbitrariness and ineptness of incompetent “bosses” cry “enough!”

Raw Personal Power

(The “Bottom Line” Is Just The Excuse)

It is easy to understand an individual’s lack of skill to practice sound people-management. But, for some managers there is a deliberate, gratuitously malicious disregard of solid management principles simply because these do not reflect their personal preferences and inclinations. In few professional realms can an individual’s prerogative be so arrogantly exercised.

An accountant cannot choose to disregard the GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) no matter how personally objectionable the principles may be. Engineers cannot ignore the appropriate mixture of materials comprising concrete and expect to escape professional and legal sanctions. A lawyer cannot disregard court procedure when conducting a case. Yet anyone holding the position of manager can virtually do as they please in terms of the treatment of “subordinates.” If a manager believes it is “motivational” to threaten the workforce with dismissal, so be it.

Indeed, because we are increasingly subject to a system that unashamedly espouses the profit motive as the basis for all action, each decision is justified simply because it is thought to be the most profitable. Thus, the system itself encourages managers to disregard sound interpersonal behaviors and people-management processes.

The literature is replete with research support for the value of creativity and participation, of ownership and empowerment. The literature is also abundantly clear about the requirements for our collective satisfaction and survival. Resistance to practicing our knowledge is not due to the intellectual difficulty in understanding the concepts. It is due to the exercise of personal prerogatives, the expression of individual personality and the personal responses crafted (intentionally or otherwise) by individuals who do not practice valuing the collective and who choose to blame the constraints imposed by the system itself to substantiate this behavior.

For example, time pressure alone discourages, if not denies, many managers the means with which to practice what they know to be good interpersonal relations. This is so appalling to some people that the greatest pain suffered on the job is the knowledge that they are not living their values; they are caught up in a system which feels beyond their control. They live a demanding way of life requiring a sacrifice of part of their humanity just to “put food on the table.”

The Joy of Exercising Power

Over the last fifty years, actually since the Industrial Revolution began, there have been coops, self-managing organizations and a variety of participative management styles that proved successful on any and all empirical measures. Yet they are rare. It seems the need to crush change, even when it is demonstrably best for profits, is due to management’s attachment to the powers and perks of office. It is the rare manager who can turn away from the seductive trappings of power and privilege for which they have vied throughout their professional careers. Without a change in the structures of the workplace, the re-design of internal relationships, and the reformulation of assumptions about one’s appropriate role in the workplace, real reform and power sharing will likely remain an elusive goal.

Trial and Error Management Leads to a Fad Frenzy

Trial and error management embraces each new change-management fad with a fervor unknown outside cult circles. Even the most inglorious examples of the fads enter the bestiary of management techniques with only the slightest critical examination. A sure indication of nascent fad fever is hearing the refrain, “What’s the latest?” at professional gatherings. These events result in thoughtless incantations of current buzzwords rather than real understanding and implementation of management change strategies with intentionality.

Lack of attention to the system is the reason managers experience so many and varied symptoms driving them in a frenzied search for panaceas. Even managers who are capable, sincere and willing to treat breakdowns simply have not become aware that the locus of most problems is in the system itself or due to the inadequacy of their people management skills.

The Bully

A case comes to mind of the CEO wanting to make a quick, powerful first impression. A family brewery turned to an outside individual to become its CEO. His first two acts almost caused a revolution. After the company had devoted a long time instituting teams, he unilaterally declared that there was “no time for that anymore.” Attention first had to be placed on “improving the profitability picture” as if teamwork and profitability are unrelated! Second, to get new ideas he believed it was necessary to “churn up the organization.” His plan was to fire the “bottom ten percent” of performers each year even if the entire workforce was exceptional. It was this particularly nasty and misguided effort that the brewery owners refused to agree with, “After all, we have been like a family for generations.” While his second act was reversed by the family, the CEO remains at the helm, and the efforts of the organization development department to build self-managing, high-performing teams was obliterated over night.

Not long after that adjustment the CEO was successful in disbanding the entire organization development (OD) department because it was no longer justified in light of the streamlining policy – “to do only those activities directly related to brewing and selling beer.” This act generated doubts in the workplace spawning questions like, “when is the accounting department going to be laid off?” Here we have a combination of bullying behavior and managerial incompetence by ignorance. These actions represent a failure to understand the role and value of the OD department. Disbanding the OD department without discussion, sent a message that the new CEO planned to “motivate” his staff solely through fear. These events created a massive morale problem and the psychological on-the-job withdrawal of hundreds of people from the workplace.

Finally: It Is Really About Character

It is not taught in business schools and seemingly not taught at home anymore either, but the lack of character exemplified by the low integrity in organizational relationships (“Sorry, but this is a business decision, nothing personal. You’re sacked. You have ten minutes to clear out your desk.”), declining respect for others and a studied unwillingness to communicate authentically: (“If I tell people what I really think, they’ll use it against me.”), are the underlying reasons for the widespread demonstration of managerial malpractices. There is widespread disregard for, or blindness to, building reciprocal, balanced relationships.

These malpractices can be dealt with and eliminated from organizations willing to act with integrity, intentionally and for the good of each person involved. But it takes courage and that is another omission of the business schools and doesn’t count much in business.

Shorris, E. (1984). Scenes From Corporate Life. New York: Penguin, p. 16.

BSR (Business for Social Responsibility) 2009: Sustainable Consumption

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 03:12:36 +0000

The title of the last session of the BSR conference presented an oxymoron in the shape of a conundrum: sustainable consumption. Sustainable consumption is a phrase suitable for The George Orwell Dictionary of New Speak. Clearly there is an internal contradiction – there isn’t any way we are going to consume ourselves into a sustainable world. At this point the only sustainable consumption is declining consumption. Anything else is misleading – even when factoring in cradle to cradle recycling, reusing, repurposing. Here’s why: we are told that if we were to create a universal standard of living equal to how the average American lives, we would need at least seven Earths of resources to do so. But the world is on an inexorable march to demand just that. China alone builds 20 new cities a year and each city will hold at least one million people. India is following suit, as is Brazil, and every rise in the standard of living anywhere in the world propels more people into the more comfortable, but resource-demanding, middle class. And that is unsustainable.

But look at it this way; even if this growing middle class can be built on recycled, repurposed and reusable materials, the population of the world is expected to rise by 50% by mid-century. Under current conditions there just doesn’t seem to be any reasonable way to meet everyone’s basic needs from sanitation and potable water to clean, safe and economically viable habitats let alone limitless consumer wants. Thus, to talk about sustainable consumption just doesn’t make sense – no matter how you spin it.

But there is always hope – new technology, new processes, maybe even a new lifestyle choice that reduces materialism as a defining force in our lives will sweep over the world and reduce demand for “stuff.” But it’s not going to happen in the short term and it’s doubtful that market forces alone will provide the solution in any event. Talk of eco-friendly products, new design, conservation, and shifting demand to renewable materials will help, but the magnitude is just too big for these efforts to result in anything more than a short term palliative at best.

New thinking is necessary if any of these efforts, or others, will do more than make the business community look like it is just being less bad instead of being part of real solutions. The challenge is great, the current state of our resources is tenuous, the rate of change is spinning out of control, and it is time for systems thinking among business, government, international bodies, and NGOs, but it must result in bold new ideas, long term commitments to address the issues, and media support to educate and enlist viewers about the need for personal as well as institutional efforts. Ultimately, we’ll all need to take part in this effort.

BSR (Business for Social Responsibility) 2009: Ethics in Business

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 03:46:09 +0000

Say you are GE Healthcare and sell ultrasound machines in India. Say that your machines are so good (they are easy to use, priced right, portable) that you capture 51% of the market. But then you get wind of how your machines are routinely being used in inappropriate ways that could land you in criminal court, as well as challenge your values at a fundamental level. In this particular case, GE learned that female feticide was rising and that its machines were being used to discover the gender of the fetus. Even though purchasers of the machines were trained and certified and were aware of the laws prohibiting its use in this way, the problem has grown. Under the law, all manufacturers were potentially culpable in the crime, though no charges have been filed as yet. What do you do? This is the kind of conundrum routinely faced as globalization marches on and, as companies cross borders, managers find themselves in a new and unfamiliar environment. Their role involves more than doing business as it has been done “at home” but includes dealing with vast cultural differences that challenge their underlying values and assumptions. In this case, how much shall you get involved? You scrupulously obey the law, you train your sales staff to insist that new users obey the law, you assure all technicians are certified, but what else can you be expected to do? What else must you do? Remember, this product is not only legal; it is a valuable technology that helps detect irregularities in a pregnancy, the kidneys, and the heart and is often used in physical therapy.

Not so easy; at least not if you want to stay in business and support a useful product performing a useful service in the society.

This is a real case and GE hasn’t determined how best to limit its product’s use in inappropriate and illegal ways. It has participated in a publicity campaign in support of the anti-feticide movement but feels that isn’t enough.

It seems natural to want to do something, yet there is also an argument that it isn’t the responsibility of GE or anyone else except the government and people of India. Yet, according to the International Humanist and Ethical Union, “Female fetuses are selectively aborted after pre-natal sex determination, thus avoiding the birth of girls. As a result of selective abortion, between 35 and 40 million girls and women are missing from the Indian population.” Add your comments below. Suggest possible actions GE can take that are appropriate to the situation and culturally appropriate.

This is the kind of case, the 1,000 attendees at the 2009 Business for Social Responsibility conference grappled with in an effort to understand the dynamics of responsible business and behaving appropriately while living and working abroad.

Social Media Will Not Save You

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:48:47 +0000

I would be remiss if I did not share one of the best presentations (all done without powerpoint or a mic, BTW) of the year. On Thursday, I attended a local event co-sponsored by our own RAMA and PRSA (public relations and marketing, to be exact) at which Peter Shankman (of HARO) spoke to a room of about 200 local people. Local is a relative term - I saw at least one person from out of town.

Peter admits to being ADD -but, he was quick to note that his condition is much worse, "Me," he said, "I have ADOS - that's, Attention Deficit - ohlook, shiny thing!" Quite the joker. But, his fast-paced talk proved him right - he spoke non-stop for almost an hour, and shared some gems that will stay with me, forever. Gems I will share with you.

Here's what I took away that I think is so valuable - "Don't get behind a brand," he said. "Get behind a concept."

"Everything is personal," he said. "Everything you put online is part of your personal brand." That means, not only website content, blog posts, and white papers, but also tweets, Facebook updates, interviews, and anything anyone writes about you. We have become a society of "micro-journalists" - and we are held accountable only by understanding that everything we do is part of our personal brand. If you have "bad stuff" out there, create the good stuff to rise to the surface. Never be afraid to say you messed up. Apologize.

Donna DeClemente, a writer here on Lip-sticking, did an overview of Peter's 4 Basic Rulse of Common Sense and I invite you to hop over to her blog to read them.

In closing, he recommended, no, he admonished us to "make your customers addicts." Be unique, be relevant, create something that is not easily copied.

And, short is better. Write short, to the point, focused, relevant, engaging content. (the teachers/professors in the room just about cheered like schoolgirls) I'm going to have to work on that one. As you see, this is probably already too long.

So, are you ready? Are you ready to admit social media will not save you? Are you ready to differentiate? Are you ready to stop relying on social media and save yourself? I am.

______________________________

Yvonne DiVita is the author of Dick*less Marketing: Smart Marketing to Women Online, a book about getting those baby boomer icons Dick and Jane to buy at your website.

Following publication of her book, she founded Windsor Media Enterprises, LLC. all about Books, Blogs and Beyond. Yvonne maintains a blog at http://www.lipsticking.com supporting her work in the women’s market online.

Yvonne is the VP of Web Communications at the Rochester Chapter of the American Marketing Association. She is quoted throughout the net on marketing to women, blogging for business, and publishing.

Don't Mention ROI for Social Media

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:32:53 +0000

One is often told that getting the buy-in for a Social Media initiative requires some solid ROI calculation. One would have to weigh the pros and cons, how much it costs, try and evaluate the effort which is required, measure it and translate it into pounds, shillings and pence. And profit should also come into play, since it is deemed inappropriate for a new project to be set up without a clear definition of how much revenue it brings.

It is indeed a well known fact of Corporate culture that no IT project has ever been implemented without delivering great benefits… well, maybe not. And another well known fact is that, similarly, all systems which have led to losses in productivity should be banned… well, maybe not either.

Let’s take email as an example. We have already described at length the pitfalls in which many corporate email users are falling and how to preserve your productivity and lifestyle by better using email. Yet, email is also responsible for stress, and waste of time and money and effort. On average, Managers spend 40% of their time doing email according to the authors of the Hamster Revolution. I’m not mentioning examples of those who spend 100% of their time on this but I know a few who do. Yet, despite all these productivity issues, the requirement for email is not questioned, barring a few exceptions such as IBM’s 2.0 expert Luis Suarez who declared war on e-mail and almost succeeded (lucky him!).

So is ROI a valid way of showing how useful Social Media can be?

My take is the following:

1. One doesn’t engage in a Social Media project because it brings profit but because it enables one to do things in different ways and that these ways – listening, adapting, innovation – are beneficial to the brand, to your ecosystem, your image, and above all, the well-being of your clients, partners etc.

2. One doesn’t need to spend too much time on understanding how much Social Media will cost because the fact is that it doesn’t cost that much, and it may even cost too little (I have seen many a project valued because of the cash it sank, not the one it never generated),

3. It is very difficult to measure precisely what tangible profits can be achieved from using Social Media, although there has been examples with many SMBC members,

4. User generated content is also a major source of production of high quality content which can then be used in many instances such as client-facing meetings and lead generation. And God knows content is expensive. Any one video could cost from €1,000 to €15,000 but I have seen some instances in which a very talented consultant generated 8 videos worth at least €6,000 each for… nothing. Thousands of views later, he helped the company save approximately €50,000. In the past 12 months, my assessment of the money that was saved by fostering user generated content (UGC) in the past twelve months is in the regions of €200,000 if I include all the top quality articles which all our users have produced and the 1000+ comments which they have generated, some of which have even helped us improve dramatically some of our services,
5. Eventually, my prime advice to those who’d like to spread the word about how Social Media can help a brand engage in passionate discussions would be to suggest to them that they speak to their boss about it and ask him/her to write things for the company blog. I did this and guess what: I never had the ROI question anymore because he understood immediately that he too could spread the word across about his own pet subject (Green IT) and that was – as he himself admitted – invaluable.

Maybe the final reason for not falling into the ROI trap is that ROI is often used by execs to get rid of subjects they don’t like even though there may be no other rational reasons for them to do so.

Original Post: http://visionarymarketing.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/selling-corporate-blogging-to-your-boss-dont-mention-roi/

______________________________

Serial intrapreneur Yann Gourvennec has dealt with Marketing and innovation for 20 years. He created the Visionary Marketing.com website in 1996, which he has maintained and animated ever since. Yann has a 20+ year international experience in the fields of marketing, business development, Internet and e-business, strategy, product/services marketing as well as team management (direct and cross-organisational) in complex international environments, especially in the UK, Continental Europe and the middle-East. His contact details and resume can be found at http://visionarymarketing.com/engcv.html.

Investing in Knowledge

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:22:01 +0000

In a 21st century world where jobs can be shipped wherever there's an internet connection; where a child born in Dallas is competing with children in Delhi; where your best job qualification is not what you do, but what you know – education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity and success; it is a prerequisite.   That is why workers without a four-year degree have borne the brunt of recent layoffs... And that is why, of the thirty fastest growing occupations in America, half require a Bachelor's degree or more. By 2016, four out of every ten new jobs will require at least some advanced education or training.

A call to action delivered by President Obama to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce demands the support of furthering the education of our workforce. You can no longer count on the value of your own degree and education level to prove the worth of your business – your business is only as good as the education level of your workforce as a whole. Managers who want to take their organizations to the next level need to recognize the importance of their firm’s intellectual assets - the importance of top talent - and be sure to provide mechanisms to enhance human capital so that they can innovate and develop products and services that create value.

Now, more than ever, it is evident that knowledge is the primary means of wealth generation in today’s economy. In fact, today, more than 50% of the gross domestic product in developed economies is knowledge-based). That is, the market value of goods and services is heavily dependent on knowledge put to good use. In the U.S. intellectual and information processes create over 76% of the value in service industries.

It is in this context that employee development becomes not only a function housed in Human Resources, it becomes a strategic decision resulting in an added value to an organization. A study in the late 1970s compared the market value with the book value of more than 3,000 companies in the U.S. over 20 years. The study demonstrated that the book value and market value gap was greater for knowledge-driven organizations than for firms which based their value on assets, meaning that organizations where knowledge and management of knowledge workers is the asset are considered more valuable in the market than those who concentrate their assets in tangibles (Roberts and Dowling, 2002).

If organizations are aiming for high growth as well as high quality, training plays a big part in this endeavor. Measuring the ROI of training is difficult, but Motorola, for example, has calculated that for every dollar invested in training there are $30.00 in returns. But educational development in the form of training programs or tuition assistance for higher degree programs need to be delivered at every level, not exclusively to top leadership. In order to become competitive players in the marketplace with improved overall performance, organizations need to have the smartest, most qualified people in each layer of the business.

When budgets are tight, it’s hard to talk about investing in employee development programming, but the numbers show it pays to invest in the talent you already have. It is well known that in certain industries (e.g. high tech) knowledge becomes obsolete even after a year. And, since recruiting new talent every year would be a costly and inefficient way to keep up with the demands of a constantly changing market environment, it is more necessary than ever to invest in developing our workforce.

The hesitation to encourage employees to take on a commitment such as a degree program that will draw attention away from keeping up with their jobs is completely understandable. But nowadays, universities are stepping up to their end of the deal to make programs accessible to working adults, offering evening, weekend or online programs. Online programs are particularly attractive to more seasoned working adults to honor family commitments and prefer the pay-as-you-go approach while maintaining full-time work rather than taking time off work to pursue a degree and seeking loans.

The beauty of these programs is that you set the tone and pace. You can pay registration and tuition for your employees from the get-go, or you can wait to see what kind of grades your employees manage to get and pay based on their academic success. Often, higher education institutions will offer specialized discounts to employers that send several employees into their degree programs, so you may think of limiting the options for which school or program you’ll support.

Another very important element of employee development is mentoring programs. One of the barriers individuals cite to enroll in higher learning institutions has been the lack of role models within their communities and families. Through mentoring not only can your employees gain insight into business tactics and how to comport themselves in a business setting, but they can develop self-confidence and competency and set higher standards for themselves in their education and career paths.

To those of you bottom-line thinkers, employee development has been proven to have a positive impact on your numbers. For those of you who are believers in the American dream, and as entrepreneurs I have to believe you are, investing in the knowledge of your workforce will help to expose your team to the opportunities for success. And individual success can only lead to a better economy as a whole.

Sources:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-of-the-President-to-the-United-States-Hispanic-Chamber-of-Commerce/anic Chamber of Commerce, March 10, 2009.
The New Titans: A survey of the world economy.(2006) The Economist, September 16, 3-8.

______________________________

Dr. Ivonne Chirino-Klevans joined Walden University in 2005 as a professor of organizational psychology and currently serves as Program Director for the Center for International Programs. The International Management Certificate is a post-bachelor business certificate designed to give business professionals in Latin America international business acumen and English language skills. Her extensive experience includes years of working with Fortune 500 companies in designing training and development programs and serving as Program Director for Duke Corporate Education.

Dr. Chirino-Klevans received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Universidad Iberoamericana, and also holds an MBA from Universidad de las Americas, and a Masters in Psychology from Georgia College and State University. Earlier in her career, she also served as the psychologist for the Mexican national rowing team, and contributed to the team winning a silver medal at the 1991 Pan Am Games. She herself is a Pan American games medalist in gymnastics.

BSR (Business for Social Responsibility) 2009

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 05:53:18 +0000

I'm at the BSR 2009 conference and expo in San Francisco. It is a picture perfect day "by the bay" and in front of the Hyatt Regency hotel the cable car fills with passengers and that iconic clang reminds me that I love this city I once called home.

But I'm feeling weird. There are 250 corporate members in BSR. Most are among the Fortune 500 largest corporations in the world and about 1,000 delegates have come here today to focus solely on doing the right thing. Maybe that's why it feels so odd. I don't usually think of corporations as doing the right thing unless they are forced to, or because they'll make an inordinate amount of money in doing so, but today they have come to network with one another about the kinds of things they are doing around the world to address climate change, human rights abuses, supply chain irregularities, and the need to develop sustainable business practices.

So, on the one hand I am delighted they each have spent at least the $1500 early bird registration fee per participant and then at least $169 room fee per night plus plus plus to send each freshly scrubbed professional to gently, very respectively, and even deferentially discuss ways of dealing with the worsening crisis in the environment and the many stresses and strains on the economy - especially as it impacts people around the world – that were caused by the very companies that sent them here to sort it all out.

On the other hand it just feels like a stunt.

I know I can't have it both ways. I want to believe they are sincere in doing the right thing. Monsanto is here touting their genetically modified organisms (seeds used to produce what are sometimes referred to as Frankenfoods) to build upon the green revolution that has added new crop cycles to the food supplies in much of the world. How can you argue with that? But it is also those crops that overburden farmers already suffering with depressed commodity process while the middlemen and food processors make tidy profits. Some of these seeds don't propagate, thus requiring ongoing purchases from Monsanto. I know there’s nothing wrong with doing business if it raises the income of the farmer, but the costs for some GMOs also asks Mother Nature to play roulette with a new entity in the biosphere. That's not all it's about either; it's also the arrogance of a narrowly applied technology being touted as THE answer and governments being strong-armed by their lobbyists to allow the use of the GMOs before we really know what the full spectrum of risks is. Something is better than nothing, though, right? Even GMOs have to be an improvement over losing half a crop to bugs and crop disease; right? And then I see why there is resistance even when the "solution" seems so darn obvious - like DDT, Thalidomide PCBs, nicotine. We've been there so many times before.

It's complicated, of course. And uncomfortable. That’s the kind of conference this is, and why it is important for me to be here to grapple with these paradoxes and dilemmas.
This is what happens at these kinds of conferences, but sometimes it's a little like listening to the fox talk about fixing the hen house.

This is just day one. Tomorrow I'll share some more tales from the frontier of how the world's biggest corporations try to moderate some of the nastier effects of their own impact on the planet.

The War for Your Company's Reputation

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:21:16 +0000

I was in Boston recently caring for my sister, who underwent surgery at one of the city’s major medical institutions.

The team of doctors and nurses at the surgical center was knowledgeable, extremely caring, and worked at a very impressive level of efficiency. My sister went into surgery fully informed on what to expect and experienced minimal anxiety. Recovery room care was also world-class.

Once she was transferred to the overnight wing of the hospital, however, the story changed. The overnight nursing staff was surly to patients and family, didn’t answer calls for help, and didn’t get my sister at least two medications that had been ordered hours earlier. They also neglected to administer an important IV solution to my sister’s hospital roommate, who now has to spend an extra night in the hospital because of it. As I type this, the poor woman is also lying in soiled sheets that were ordered changed at least four hours ago.

It’s enlightening to observe how one department of a hospital can be an enviable model of healthcare while another is a petri dish of potential lawsuits.

When it comes to your business, are all departments achieving the same high level of performance?

It’s easy – and comfortable – to focus on sales if they’re hitting the goal of serving the customer in a meaningful way. But if shipping, returns, and customer service don’t really give a rip – and show that they don’t – that is what the customer will remember and talk about with her family and friends.

Maybe it’s time to take a sweeping look at your company’s bedside manner. If quality control has turned into a tug-of-war between departments, it’s definitely affecting your reputation and your bottom line.

______________________________

Michele Miller is a classical musician by training, holding degrees in education and business administration. She has worked for companies as small as Diapers Unlimited delivery service (where she discovered the true meaning of customer service and loyalty) and as large as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and Sirius Satellite Radio. Michele is the author of "The Natural Advantages of Women" (Wizard Academy Press), the audiobook that has been hailed for its concepts, principles, and new scientific information that explains how the female brain is "hardwired" for personal greatness." Her blog on marketing to women, WonderBranding, has won awards from Marketing Sherpa and Forbes.com, and was featured in Seth Godin's ebook, "Bull Marketing." Michele is also the marketing columnist for Inc.com.

Read more from Michele at her blog, Wonderbranding.

Education for sustainability

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 13:10:52 +0000

International Greening Education Event in Karlsruhe , Germany (About Ecologizing Education)

A three-day International Seminar on Greening Education will be held from 30th September to 2nd October 2009 in the "green" city of Karlsruhe , Germany . This event will take education and environmental policy makers, government and non-governmental organisations, education institutions, teachers, international agencies and environmental professionals through the need for greening education, and then discuss effective initiatives that governments, education institutions and development organisations need to take and can take to provide sustainable knowledge, skills, values and practices in the classrooms and in the communities.

Further to the knowledge sharing on greening education including topics such as ecologizing curriculum (incorporating sustainability in curriculum), greening delivery of courses (sustainability compatible education delivery) and low carbon education institutions; the upcoming event also provides an excellent networking opportunity with education institutions, international agencies, governmental and non-governmental organisations, sustainable development practitioners and other stakeholders in Europe and beyond.

You are cordially invited to attend this international event and/ or nominate the member(s) of your institution.

For further information, please see the event details .

http://www.etechgermany.com/GreeningEducationEvent.pdf

21st Century Cultural Competency

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:39:16 +0000

It is more than "celebrating diversity" it is about intellectual diversity and not about what people look like at the work place. Now days, businesses are taking advantage of intellectual diversity by having their staff contribute to ways of solving company's problems and finding diversified solutions. Diversity and cultural competency are not longer seeing as your "HR requirements" if not a way of doing business in today's world.

What to do about drug-resistant tuberculosis?

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:09:17 +0000

From NPR Radio Diaries:

Our friend and diarist, Thembi Ngubane, died June 4, 2009 from drug-resistant TB. She was brave and open about living with AIDS at a time when most South Africans were quiet about the epidemic. We learned so much from her and for that we are eternally grateful.

Thembi leaves behind her four-year old daughter, Onwabo. Many of you contributed in the past to Thembi's family, helping them to purchase their own house in the township. Radio Diaries has set-up a fund for Onwabo. If you would like to make a contribution in Thembi's honor, please consider a donation. We thank you for being a part of this journey with us.

You can hear our remembrance on NPR.

And you can also listen to her diary, which aired in 2006, here.

Here is the link to make a donation for Onwabo.

10 Hardest Jobs to Fill in America

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:16:59 +0000

For the second year in a row, engineer is the hardest job to fill in America.
Why are engineers so hard to find? "We have whole generations of people loving liberal arts, not going into science and math," says Larry Jacobson, executive director of the National Society of Professional Engineers.

What's second on the list? Nursing!

Source: http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/03/hard-jobs-fill-leadership-careers-employment.html

RE: A Promise to be Ethical in an Era of Immorality

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:58:21 +0000

An interesting article about how some MBA graduates are taking an oath to "serve the greater good". Pity it's only 20% of the graduating class at Harvard but you have to start someplace. :)

Those graduating today, they say, are far more concerned about how corporations affect the community, the lives of its workers and the environment. And business schools are responding with more courses, new centers specializing in business ethics and, in the case of Harvard, student-lead efforts to bring about a professional code of conduct for M.B.A.’s, not unlike oaths that are taken by lawyers and doctors.
“I don’t see this as something that will fade away,” said Diana C. Robertson, a professor of business ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s coming from the students. I don’t know that we’ve seen such a surge in this activism since the 1960s. This activism is different, but, like that time, it is student-driven.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/30/business/30oath.html?_r=1&em

Leadership Advice for the Class of '09

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:54:38 +0000

A fantastic collection of wisdom and insight on leadership from Defense Secretary Robert, Madeline K. Albright, Johnson & Johnson CEO William Weldon, and Steve Jobs.

A few of my favorite excerpts:

I would start with something I tell all the new generals and civilian executives that I meet with at the Pentagon. It is a leadership quality that is really basic and simple – but so basic and simple that too often it is forgotten: and that is the importance, as you lead, of doing so with common decency and respect towards your subordinates. Harry Truman had it right when he observed that one of the surest ways to judge someone is how well – or poorly – he treats those who “can’t talk back. (Defense Secretary Robert)

“Your effectiveness as a leader will be judged by the extent to which you have allowed others to contribute to your success… and the extent to which you have contributed to theirs.” (William Weldon, CEO, Johnson & Johnson)

Source: http://www.greatleadershipbydan.com/2009/06/leadership-advice-for-class-of-2009.html

Leadership Deconstruction:

Tue, 26 May 2009 00:07:53 +0000

The ability to evaluate and critically address assumptions hinges on the ability for information to be passed in essence from synergy to synergy. This information should forge man into the center of cognitive thought and change. The only means of accomplishing this goal is to spread dissect intrinsic thought using reflection. Reflecting must be diligent to see the implications of such a realized effect of hypothesis or the lack thereof. For societies to continue to advance, it will be imperative for the breakdown of common conjectures specific to one’s own leadership to channel the streams of man. This article seeks to deconstruct selected leadership assumptions from a scholarly appreciation.

Assumption 1

Assumption: The goal of a leader is to inspire others to allocate the leader’s principles and bond with the leader’s initiative.

This notion is made clear through the authentic apprehension the leaders have for their supporters and the supporters giving their confidence in return. Bass (1990) concluded that leadership can be learned, and it can and should be the subject of management training and development. This assertion is predicated on the basis of the leader who can increase social identification can thus influence a subordinate’s willingness to contribute to the group’s goals (Kark, Shamir, Chen, 2003). This assumption is an autocratic type of leadership allow leaders and followers ascend higher than their individual inhibitions in favor of the betterment of the entire group. Applying the leadership style enables one to communicate and possibly confront the status quo. They are focused on inspiration, to search for principles, more resourceful means of creation, and sever from the proverbial while making others transform through change. Leaders of this style seek to be visionaries, full of passion, and boundless energy and seek transformation from subsidiaries in the process of achieving organizational goals (Kirk, 2006). Identified strength and weaknesses are used to sustain the present leadership skills and to turn the leadership weaknesses into strength.

Refined Assumption: The goal of a leader is to inspire, allocate and influence collaboration.

There exists argument that suggests that leadership is broader than the basic assumption. Yeo (2006) contends that leaders at different organizational levels help steer the actions, rules, values and perhaps worldviews of their employees and not a narrow base. He further asserts that their height of influence cannot be exaggerated as have a say to an effectual working environment and organizational achievement. Accepting management approach and their equivalent views are vital to scheduling the suitable leadership development series. “Interaction dynamics and productiveness of employees depend on their leaders' management styles and the way they view the world” (Yeo, 2006, p.63). In order to achieve a harmonious relationship within the office setting, one should identify this broad base of leadership.

Assumption 2

Assumption: Every leader has integrity

Successful leaders take advantage of opportunities to provide direction and mobilize people to undertake tough challenges. A leader’s control is less in their purview and the one thing over which a leader has unconditional control is integrity. Handling tough situations is one of the best ways to widen ones’ leadership skills. Integrity is further broken down to being consistent in principles. To make a pronouncement based on principles and values, an individual must possess integrity. Integrity factors encourage some styles and discourage others. Badaracco & Ellsworth (1992) postulates that integrity engrosses functioning towards organizational norms and tough calls are invariably part of the job description of any leader. To get the most out of potential in a rapidly changing global economy, people are aware of the need for leadership integrity more than ever before. To be a leader, numerous of leadership theories and styles can be followed which will be based on different assumptions, theories, beliefs, values, and preferences. These factors are the root of integrity and the bases for this assumption.

Refined Assumption: Every true leader has integrity

Enron, WorldCom and Adelphia have shown that individuals may be leaders, but unless they are true to integrity, they may not hold integrity. The integrity in individual followers assembles the integrity from other followers to generate transformation at a advanced stage (Bass & Avolio, 1997). A leader’s integrity not only gives confidence others to follow but also creates a reliance on the leader. Lack of engrained fundamental integrity can subject a leader to integrity issues. Kirk (2006) described this issue as a wavering tide, easily tenable to faultier under pressure.

Assumption 3Assumption: Teams work more effective than individuals

By understanding the individual goals, strengths, and raising self-awareness, a deeper understanding of how the individual goals fit the larger organizational goals. Hansen (2004) postulated that teams work more effective due to collaboration. Team effectiveness can be dismantled into smaller components. Beal et al. (2003) showed that team cohesion affected overall team effectiveness of performance. In particular, Beal et al. (2003) noted that mechanisms of efficiency such as interpersonal lure, task commitment, and group pride, were all found to be related to group performance. Individual effectiveness is geared toward a narrow based outcome and longer synthesis process. Independent variables are characterized vs. the collective whole of a team. The illustration of having 50 apples vs. one orange, the chances of picking the orange diminishes dramatically. Task commitment, group pride, interpersonal attraction all seek to attribute collective thought and disposition.

Refined Assumption: Collective collaboration that is cohesive may be more effective than a single individual
The topic of cohesion seems to equalize the effectiveness of teams. Knouse (2006) looked at the dynamics of task cohesion to create a better team effectiveness. His argument that effectiveness would be measured more if the team focused on each task and less on the diverseness of the team. By breaking the team framework factors down, the assertion of effectiveness are expounded. This was further implicated by Kirk (2006) who postulated that the breakdown of teams would be more on the diverse backgrounds and to focus more on task orientation would minimize the subjectivity and enhance the quality of the team.

Implications on Leaders

Varying views on leadership assumptions and how organizational leaders refine goals have been studied and implemented for centuries. “Organizational leaders plan, organize, provide direction, and exercise control over organizational resources, material and human, in order to achieve the organization’s objectives” (Kanungo, 2001, p. 257). These assumptions of leadership take into consideration the motivations, strengths, collaborative efforts, and shared vision of team members, they fail to address the strategic (long-term) and tactical (short-term) processes associated with task completion and definitive rationale for the initial assumptions. Deconstructing mobilizes one during initial phases, stabilizes through development of individual strengths, and revitalizes common assumptions of lull by introducing the established common vision. The realized value of deconstruction is for one to be able to conceptualize and base an argument from both viewpoints and logically refining one’s own basis and approaches based on the initial assumptions. This reflective process teaches one to always be mindful of the threat of narrowing a viewpoint and not looking from a holistic approach.

ReferencesBadaracco, J. L., Ellsworth, R. R. (1992). Leadership, Integrity and Conflict. Management Decision, 30(6), 29. Retrieved from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 603458).Bass, B. (1990). From transactional to transformational leadership: Learning to share the vision. Organizational Dynamics, 18, 19-31. Retrieved from Gale database

Bass, B. M., & Avolio, B. J. (1997). Full range leadership development: Manual for the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire. Palo Alto, CA: Mind Garden.

Beal, D., Cohen, R.R., Burke, M.J. & McLendon, C.L. (2003), Cohesion and performance in groups: a meta-analytic clarification of construct relations. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88, 989-1004. Retrieved from EBSCOHOST databaseHansen, M. (2004). Virtual Teams That Work: Creating Conditions for Virtual Team Effectiveness. Review of medium being reviewed title of work reviewed in italics. Personnel Psychology, 57(1), 243-246. Retrieved from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 597781151).Kanungo, R. (2001). Ethical values of transactional and transformational leaders. Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences, 18(4), 257-266. Retrieved from ProQuest databaseKark, R., Shamir, B., Chen, G. (2003). Two faces of Leadership: Empowerment and Dependency. Journal of Applied Psychology. 88, 2, 246-255. Retrieved from ProQuest database

Kirk, P. (2006). Developing transformational leaders: the full range leadership model in action. Industrial and Commercial Training: 38 (1)

Knouse, K. B. (2006). Task Cohesion: A Mechanism for Bringing Together Diverse Teams. International Journal of Management,2 23(3), 588-596. Retrieved from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 1146757801).

Yeo R. K. (2006). Developing tomorrow's leaders: why their worldviews of today matter? Industrial and Commercial Training, 38(2), 63-69. Retrieved from ProQuest database

RE: Important Lessons on Leadership

Sun, 24 May 2009 01:30:59 +0000

Simple, straight-forward and practical.

Q. What is the most important leadership lesson you’ve learned?
A. Walking the talk is the most important lesson I’ve learned. There’s nothing that destroys credibility more than not being able to look someone in the eye and have them know that they can trust you. Leadership is about trust. It’s about being able to get people to go to places they never thought they could go. They can’t do that if they don’t trust you.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/business/24corner.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Emotional Intelligence and Wisdom

Wed, 20 May 2009 01:57:46 +0000

It's my view that the most successful organizational leaders are those who exhibit high levels of wisdom and emotional intelligence. Nonetheless, most corporate development programs focus largely on functional and tactical skills. As you consider leadership wisdom and emotional intelligence, what do they mean to you, and what ideas do you have for cultivating them in others?

Personal Knowledge Theory: A Reflection on Leadership

Sun, 17 May 2009 16:43:19 +0000

In society, one cannot read a business paper without stumbling upon articles that deal with knowledge and the power of a knowledge. They are knowledge builders that make it possible for us to make our knowledge even stronger around the world. Knowledge exhibits the self determination that is put totally on us as individuals as it relates to critical thought. We can only evolve our knowledge in the minds of businesses and consumers when we all speak the same language of personal philosophy. To fulfill these tasks one has to incorporate critical analysis of personal experiences and have ownership of our successes. Society models personal attributes of knowledge through internal reflection of tacit knowledge. One evening while visiting the Martin Luther King museum in Atlanta, Georgia, I begin to reflect as the crowds poured in to visit this monument. The enduring legacy of King was to promote equality and to live to the truth that all men are created equal. In those moments, I saw Caucasian, Black, Hispanics, Asian, and other origins. I wondered if this was the truths that Mr. King spoke of and believed in. The quest in life as I believe is to be your own self, believing in knowledge that you chose to believe in. This experience challenged that thought process and I wondered if this ability to evaluate knowledge and critically address assumptions hinges on the ability for knowledge to be passed in essence from synergy to synergy. As we strive to integrate the masses of men, I realized the goal that MLK was trying to realize and that my personal approach to knowledge and this experience was one of contrast. The notion of this inclusion experience forged me into the center of cognitive thought and change. I conceived that I was no longer guilty of “unconsciously absolutizing that which is objectively relative” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 52). The only means of accomplishing this goal is to spread dissect intrinsic thought using reflection. Reflecting must be diligent to see the implications of such a realized effect of hypothesis or the lack of. For societies to continue to advance, it will be imperative for the breakdown of common conjectures specific to one’s own leadership to channel the streams of man. We are uniquely positioned to help people make, manage and move visual and mental images. In my estimation, personal philosophy is the core of success. In the corporate environment, doing something new, different, unique, and innovative are keys to selling your product or idea and maintaining your knowledge equity and position within the minds of your target market. Personal philosophy is different than change. People in general dislike and resist change. Changes are events, while personal philosophy is a process. Innovating involves changing philosophies, methods, practices, and overall functions of thought. Knowledge management skills are now being considered as part of the competencies any individual can have. But as all current trends and concepts have become part of the ever changing role of leaders especially in cultural assumptions, where knowing how it has evolved from past considerations. Personal philosophy leads to fundamental changes in strategy, particularly how one operates, and sheds light on why an entity operates the way it does. By understanding personal knowledge and its strengths, and raising self-awareness, a deeper understanding of how the individual knowledge fit the larger spectrum of self collaboration. The experience at MLK showed that effectiveness can be dismantled into smaller components. Individual effectiveness is geared toward a narrow based outcome and longer synthesis process. Independent variables are characterized vs. the collective whole of a team. The illustration of having 50 apples vs. one orange, the chances of picking the orange diminishes dramatically. Knowledge commitment, personal pride, and interpersonal attraction all seek to attribute collective thought and disposition. Knowledge conceptualization exhibits and creates an environment that fosters effectual transcultural elements, using intervention and diagnosis to ensure the highest level of competency to meet the demands of strategic business and organizational success. Interacting in the MLK museum allowed for me to use deductive reasoning to exploit introspective integration to enable dynamic precision of my personal philosophy. Use a practical approach, I reflected on my occupation and how this exploration at the MLK museum could help my personal philosophy as it relates to work. I defined this knowledge into the following: Approach- Be a premier individual who shall be responsible for business policies, measures, and regulatory statues, which prescribe and certify a higher level of professional competence in strategic management.Qualities- Be a thinker that exhibits and creates a knowledge environment that fosters effectual transcultural elements, using intervention and diagnosis to ensure the highest level of competency to meet the demands of strategic business and organizational success. Practice- To become a knowledge acquisition base using best practices in deductive reasoning to exploit introspective capabilities in large-scale systems integration to enable synergy for dynamic precision network-centric advancement. Use a practical approach to developing and evaluating personal knowledge to sustain collaborative involvement of operational excellence. Moser & Vander Nat (2003) presented the dispositional view which are beliefs are just dispositions to behave in a certain way. The concept of thinking of knowledge as defined by Browne and Keeley (1986) refers to as a filtering – separating the relevant from the irrelevant. Knowledge (Aranda & Molina-Fernandez, 2002) also has been associated with management skills such as Planning, Leading, Organizing and Controlling. Why are some populaces better than others at sustaining their knowledge and measures with good reasons? I would assert that knowledge is a process. Dewey defined the nature of reflective thought as "active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusion to which it tends" (1933, p.9). While differences of cognitive argument are based on social condition, similarities are found to be universal such as emotionality in exercising critical thought, and reasoning. This development in my assessment is a direct correlation to an individual’s ability to process knowledge critically. The attribution of this emotional and logical attrition is the effect of critical analysis. The way a person will be intuitive in their thought provides a type of acquisition of higher level knowledge.