Category: Uncategorized

On Saturday I went to see the Oscar Short Films (Live Action) nominations. There are five in this category. The sequence started with the showing of Kavi that tells the story of an Indian boy and his parents who are forced to work as slave labor in a brick kiln. It was very hard to watch and in a sense is a story everyone knows about. The movie site is well worth looking at as it, and the film, is a vocal advocate of ending slavery – making the point that:

"Today, slavery is illegal almost everywhere, yet it continues to flourish. Bonded labor, a form of slavery, often occurs when people are tricked into taking loans from creditors who have no intention of letting them repay the loan. The creditor then uses violent intimidation to keep his workers slaving with no hope of escape."

According to Anti-Slavery International:

"A person becomes a bonded laborer when his or her labor is demanded as a means of repayment for a loan. The person is then tricked or trapped into working for very little or no pay, often for seven days a week. The value of their work is invariably greater than the original sum of money borrowed. Millions of people are held in bonded labour around the world."

(Compare the thoughtful Kavi website with Slumdog Millionaire's purely commercial site).

There are certain groups and organizations working to inculcate principles of good and decent work. The International Labour Organization, for example, is running the Decent Work Helpdesk. The purpose of this is to help "companies to put decent work principles into practice". There is information to download on decent work and a lot of information on the website about work trends. The purpose of the ILO itself is to "advance opportunities for women and men to obtain decent and productive work in conditions of freedom, equity, security and human dignity."

A similar project is the GoodWork Project . This defines good work as "work that is excellent in quality, socially responsible, and meaningful to its practitioners" and the organization describes itself as "a large scale, multi-site effort to identify individuals and institutions that exemplify good work". The Project is a research unit of Harvard Project Zero, Stanford Center on Adolescence, and the Quality of Life Research Center at Claremont Graduate University.

On this website you can:

• Browse a timeline of our work
• Learn about our Developing Minds and Digital Media Project
• Read about our GoodPlay Project
• Download The GoodWork Project Overview
• Learn about The GoodWork Toolkit
• Explore The GoodWork Toolkit interactive website

The toolkit is an excellent resource as the blurb says "to draw upon whether you are framing an entire course about good work, enhancing existing instructional designs, or facilitating small-group discussion about excellence, ethics, and engagement". It includes a values sort activity that I got hooked into, and spent a fair bit of time on. (I wonder how the values of Gregg Helvey who produced Kavi, and Slumdog Millionaire's director Danny Boyle compare?). That exercise, in itself, would form the basis of a very good discussion on the values that underpin an organization. (Or that people would like to underpin the organization).

Although ending slavery feels like the classic 'boiling the ocean' task the Goodwork Project, and the Decent Work Helpdesk offer ways of breaking down the task into manageable pieces, starting from where you are and offering the possibilities of making a greater difference.

I've just come across a short piece about business culture and innovation that precedes an article to be published – date unspecified – in the Journal of Product Innovation Management (you can order a sample copy of this journal). The paper is written by William Qualls of the University of Illinois and Jelena Spanjol. (NOTE: March 3, 2010. My thanks to him for subsequent to my writing this sending the full paper to me).

This piece sent me in two directions. The first direction was a question to myself "Is there a Journal of Service Innovation Management'? The answer to this appears to be "No". There is the International Journal of Innovation Management which has some interesting looking articles in it. For example: Implementing Best Practices to Support Creativing in NPD Cross-Functional Teams "The use of cross-functional teams increases creativity in new product development leading to shorter development time and higher product innovativeness. Research in new product development [NPD] has identified a number of organisational practices associated with supporting organisational creativity in cross-functional teams including frequent and open communication, building organisational slack, attitude to risk and top management commitment."

And there is the Journal of Service Management this too has some interesting looking articles. One I skimmed Manufacturers forming successful complex business services: Designing an organization to fit the market says that "The purpose of this paper was to isolate and characterize organizational factors that enable the formation of high-performing business services in product manufacturing firms". (This uses Galbraith's Star Model of organizations as a starting point), and is a good discussion on organization design.

The second direction I went in related to the content of Quall's piece on business culture and innovation. This is summarized in the sentence "Groundbreaking ideas spring most from companies that stress technology, rather than customer needs or staying ahead of competitors." The short description of the about to be published article makes some standard observations e.g. "Customer- and competitor-oriented companies are more likely to come up with variations of existing products because they watch their markets closely and react to demands rather than building on breakthrough technology." But there is also the point (again fairly obvious but not always acted on) that launching innovative products or services depends on good marketing "If innovation and marketing don't get equal attention, good ideas might never reach the marketplace or firms could sink millions of dollars into innovations that will ultimately have no appeal to consumers," he [Qualls] said. The marketing angle should come in at the ideas stage of innovation generation he suggests.

Since I haven't yet seen the full article I don't know if there are any suggestions in it on how to help people make the link he implies is necessary between what are often functions operating independently of each other – R & D, marketing, finance, and IT (the last to get the systems enabled for customer input to the innovation process). Qualls then observes that the study "shows firms that fail to broaden their cultures or seek outside input will lag behind companies that do." Again I'm wondering if there are any ideas in the article on how to 'broaden their cultures' or 'seek outside input' – both potentially complex organization design tasks.

On Tuesday I went to the exhibition of the Terracotta Warriors in Washington DC (on until March 31). . It's captivating, not just beautifully curated but in the story that it tells. The story I heard and saw was one of focused organization design on a colossal scale.

The UK's British Museum website gives a very brief history of the establishment of the unified empire established under Qin Shihuangdi, its First Emperor (259 – 210 BC):

Before its unification under Qin Shihuangdi, its First Emperor (259 – 210 BC), China was made up of seven major states which were often at war with each other, vying for power and supremacy. Historians call this time the Warring States period (475 – 221 BC).

The First Emperor's ancestors were from a small state in the far west of the region called Qin (pronounced chin). The Qin were horse breeders for the ruling Zhou people (pronounced joe). After the Zhou gave them land for the task, they began to organise themselves and develop political skills. They gradually assumed power, giving their leaders the title of 'Duke of Qin' and then in 325 BC raising it to 'King of Qin'.

When they conquered and occupied the lands that belonged to the Zhou, the Kings of Qin also felt they had inherited the right to rule from them. That feeling fuelled the ambition of the 13 year old boy Ying Zheng, who became King of Qin in 246 BC.

In 221 BC the King of Qin defeated the last of the Warring States and gave his state's name to the unified empire. Historians believe that this is the origin of the western word China.

So here is a story of a man who united an enormous territory – a modern day parallel being mergers and acquisitions by a company. He did it (as far as historians can tell) by systematic approaches, some big, some small. Here's an eclectic list that I mentally compiled as I walked around the exhibition.

1. Establishing a rigid bureaucracy with merit points for moving up (and down) the hierarchy.
2. Indicating position in the hierarchy by certain features (e.g. number of tassels on hat)
3. Standardizing certain things – the coinage, the diameter and width of cart-wheels (so all carts could travel in the same tracks)
4. Instituting an assembly line production system with highly orchestrated quality controls, for example, there were a standard range of body parts for the terracotta warriors so they each figure could be assembled from the range but look slightly different as the parts were interchangeable. (Nose and eyebrow types for example).
5. Dividing military and civilian responsibilities.
6. Ensuring policies and procedures were complied with

All these are evident in today's organizations. The Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding, China Eye magazine Issue 13, 2007 has an article on the film 'Hero' set at the time of this First Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi. I haven't seen the film yet but it's now on my list. It's an article worth reading as it expands on some of the themes of organization. I came away thinking that the principles for organizing enterprises (empires or companies) haven't changed that much between then and now. The differences we're beginning to see are related to the advent of collaborative technologies and social media which along for different forms of organizing. I wonder how that will unfurl as tradition meets with opportunity to organize differently. (Just looking at Google v Italian government).

Yesterday I went to a Giant food store in my locality. I don't normally go there. But it's owned by Ahold, a Dutch Company, and I'd just met someone who works for them, so I wanted to see for myself what they'd said about it.

Giant is the same distance from where I live as my other choices of food stores: Safeways, Wholefoods, and Yes Organic so I have a several choices when it comes to food shopping. Thinking about the four I wondered how I compared them. Why did I choose one over another, why hadn't I gone to Giant before?

Right around this time an article dropped into my email How Categories and Environment Create Satisfied and Well-Informed Consumers. It's a summary of a new Pitt/USC study to be published in the June issue of Journal of Consumer Research .

It suggests that expert consumers like to be surprised by unusual product presentation, while novices crave familiarity and tackles the question "How can retailers help consumers become more informed about the products they use while also making them happy?" ask authors Cait Poynor, Pitt assistant professor of business administration in the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, and Stacy Wood, University of South Carolina professor of marketing. The answer seems to be in organizing products tailored to customers' knowledge levels. Their research indicates that simply organizing a store's existing stock in different ways can improve consumers' learning and their degree of satisfaction."

It is true in my case that I am influenced by the organization of the stores. Wider aisles, good signage, logical (to me) groupings of items make me happier to shop there. But following the argument about categorization here's an example of an illogical grouping in my view. Canned vegetables, excluding canned tomatoes, are in one aisle. So where are the canned tomatoes? In one food store I go to (Kroger's). They are in 'international foods' being classified as Italian alongside pasta. Does his make me an expert canned tomato purchaser or a novice one? I consider myself an expert as I buy them a least once a week and have done for the last 30 years or so. In that case, according to the research, I 'like to be surprised' by 'unusual product presentation'.

Authors of another article on categorization Categories Help Us Make Happier Choices argue that consumers are happier with their choices if their options are categorized, even if the categories are meaningless.

"People confronted with highly categorized large selections are happier with their decisions because they experience a sense of self-determination as a result of perceiving differences among the available options."

Going back to the wide aisles that I prefer, I read another article Feeling Cramped While Shopping? Variety Provides Relief "When consumers find themselves in stores with narrow aisles, they react in a surprising way: they seek variety. "Our results suggest that in larger, less crowded stores, manufacturers should be less keen to deliver a wide variety of products in a category, and should instead focus on stocking a few of their better-known or dominant product offerings," the authors write. "In contrast, manufacturers should prefer to deliver a greater variety to more crowded stores, as customers in those stores will be more likely to diversify their choices in a category."

None of the articles really answered my question about why I choose one store over another. But thinking back over my last trips I'm weighing price (for specific items), convenience – some are marginally closer than others, time of day (to avoid standing in line), "look and feel". I rarely think about categories except when I'm unfamiliar with the store and trying to work out their logic. That's one of the interesting things about research. It makes firm statements that don't stand up in individual situations (and it turns out that both categorization articles were simulated in laboratory settings). Nevertheless it provides another take on organization design to mull over.

Somewhere along the line I heard the word TRIZ. Always interested in new words I looked it up i.e. Googled it. (I don't think TRIZ appears in my print copy of the Oxford English Dictionary, but I'll check next time I'm near to it. To explain – my print copy of the OED is in a different location from where I currently am but Google is at my fingertips).

Once I'd looked up what it was I remembered that I'd been talking to someone about innovation and he had mentioned TRIZ, as it's a problem solving/creativity tool. Briefly, it works on the principle that someone, somewhere has solved a problem in an innovative way that is similar to the one you are trying to solve. I found a good beginner's article on the topic that explains this in much more detail but here's the headline explanation from that article.

"TRIZ is a problem solving method based on logic and data, not intuition, which accelerates the project team's ability to solve these problems creatively. TRIZ also provides repeatability, predictability, and reliability due to its structure and algorithmic approach".

Just as a sidetrack I also found out other definitions of TRIZ that were rather fun: like "Triz is a freeware Tetris clone for the Symbian OS", this one led me to wonder a) what a Tetris clone is and b) what the Symbian OS is (though I do know that OS=operating system). It's also the name of a village in Hungary.

Another explanation of what TRIZ is comes from the Bridgefield Group

TRIZ- The Russian acronym for Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, a technique that attempts to define a specific problem as a system and identify elements in the system that need correction to reach the desired solution.

As with all the things I start to investigate I am reminded that I know absolutely nothing about absolutely everything. Whatever topic I look at I find that there are worlds behind it that I never come in contact with. There is a TRIZ journal which points readers to the 40 principles that underpin the approach. And another interesting tool: The Contradiction Matrix. "The matrix tells you which of the 40 principles have been used most frequently to solve a problem that involves a particular contradiction." There's also an article called How to Help TRIZ beginners succeed which takes a bit of reading but I got the general idea.

(The idea of a contradiction matrix amused me for a moment as I thought of its application in domestic tiffs over things like the best way to load a dishwasher. I'm guessing that someone has already applied it in similar circumstances).

In the February 2010 TRIZ newsletter there's a lovely snippet on creativity and risk-taking competences for innovation that struck a chord as I'd just been reading a Harvard Business Review article 'The Innovator's DNA'. Which asks you to:

Imagine that you have an identical twin, endowed with the same brains and natural talents that you have. You're both given one week to come up with a creative new business-venture idea. During that week, you come up with ideas alone in your room. In contrast, your twin (1) talks with 10 people – including an engineer, a musician, a stay-at- home dad, and a designer – about the venture, (2) visits three innovative start-ups to observe what they do, (3) samples fi ve "new to the market" products, (4) shows a prototype he's built to fi ve people, and (5) asks the questions "What if I tried this?" and "Why do you do that?" at least 10 times each day during these networking, observing, and experimenting activities. Who do you bet will come up with the more innovative (and doable) idea?

The writers argue that the five skills of associating, questioning, observing, experimenting, and networking, are key innovation skills

These are similar, but different, from the competences that are discussed in Dr. Jacqueline Byrd's book (she is a co-author) The Innovation Equation but there does seem to be agreement that innovation skills can be learned, and combining these skills with systematic approaches like TRIZ could give good outcomes.

I was in Wholefoods on Sunday around 4:00 p.m. Foolishly I did not look at the length of the check out lines before I started to gather the things I had come for. I finished with 5 items in my basket and headed for the express line (maximum 15 items). In my local Wholefoods there are 4 of these and about 8 of the 'as much as you can load into a trolley' lines. Each check out station has its own line so you have to guess which is going to go most quickly.

In the event I judged each line to have a wait of around 30 – 40 minutes. I stood in my chosen line for 15 minutes trying to be an interested observer in the line process (who reads the magazines, who tells their boyfriend story loudly on their cell-phone, who munches stuff from their trolley – which may be unaccountable for by the time it gets to the till, who is texting or maybe emailing like crazy, who leaves their partner in line and goes off to cull more items, etc, etc). But after 15 minutes of this I got frustrated and left my basket with its 5 items on a shelf in the store. This was a pity as the items were all perishable and were probably trashed.

Not being a mathematical modeler I don't know if there is some formula to apply either to choose the quickest line, or to design check-out lines that are fast and efficient. What was interesting was that my Wholefoods (poor) experience followed my Enterprise (good) experience. What could Wholefoods learn from Enterprise and line control experts? Here are some ideas:

1. Have only one line with each person stepping forward to the next available check out person (as in Trader Joe's, airline check-ins, USPS, and Enterprise).

2. If the line is evidently going to take more than 10 minutes to get to the check out agent have someone combing the line to pull out people with fewer than 5 items, or screeching children, and sending them to a different, dedicated agent. But only people the comber pulls out can go to that one.

3. Have a manager come round the lines and apologize for the wait, and/or give random small goodies to people (in Enterprise's case it was bottles of water).

4. Offer people something to do while they're waiting e.g. (in Wholefoods case) a guess the carbon footprint of the tea you are buying or similar, or solicit information from them. They are captive in the line – they could be filling out a customer service survey. Airlines do this to passengers on their flights.

5. Recognize that people will leave and have a 'leave your full trolley' here point so that items can quickly be put back on the shelves, or if perishable or idiosyncratic (like a self assembled meal from the deli bar) offer it immediately as a 'mystery' shop at a token price $1 say with the amount going to a non-profit.

6. Have a service where people can leave their full trolley and come back for it later in the evening, or better, they leave their full trolley and the contents are delivered to their door. They then pay at the door. This may not work if they refuse to pay or deny ever having been in the supermarket (even though they have given a delivery address).

7. Have people who are willing to stand in line for a small fee while the shoppers go off for coffee or to read the paper.

I am sure there are other ideas. I guess the store manager's decision rests on whether it matters that people get frustrated with standing in line and then abandoning full trollies, and what the added value would be to doing something imaginative and innovative to design more effective check-out lines.

Yesterday I returned my rented car to Enterprise. I'd chose Enterprise because I had previously had good experiences with them and they were the cheapest for the period of time I wanted a rental. Again I left as a satisfied customer (and recommend them as a rental company).

I can't say that they 'exceeded' my expectations because it was already high. But they hadn't dropped their standards. Here are some examples:

• There was a short wait in the reception area – I was offered a bottle of water and the manager came over, introduced himself to people in line and apologized for the wait.
• The check in agent introduced himself by name, suggested a higher performing car in the next price bracket but did not press the point when I refused.

• I had a question on the insurance and he made a sensible suggestion of taking the package $34 to make the trip down, and then calling in to the Enterprise local to my destination to reduce the insurance package size. (I wasn't using the car during the week it was only for the up and back trip). He provided me with the phone numbers and addresses of the two dealers closest to where I was going.
• He asked if I knew my way to the interstate and both told me and gave me a printed sheet with directions.
• We walked out to pick up the car. He walked around with the check sheet to log any damage. Not all companies do this. He turned on the engine and noticed a warning light about tyre pressure. He got a different car.
• As I got in to drive away the manager came back out to check that I had everything I needed.

When I got to the Enterprise dealer at my destination it was the same approach. The desk agent introduced himself – understood the insurance piece – rang the DC office and confirmed it was 'all set'. The process worked exactly as promised: the insurance package was reduced.

Returning the car there was a longish wait (10 minutes or so), but someone came out to explain that they were running two computer systems which needed different information. I love this type of explanation – why were they running two computer systems? What he told me was that they had acquired Alamo and National Car Rental "about three years ago – it was in 2007, but it's only now that we're seeing some action on this." So, it sounded like organization design/redesign going on following an acquisition. I wanted to find out more – but didn't press the point with the agent as there was still a line of cars waiting to be checked in.

Finally the check-in agent came and again apologized for the wait. He noticed that I was returning the car with a slight shortfall from a full tank of gas but said he would not charge for this as I'd had the wait. He asked if I needed a ride to the airport and when I said I was taking the Metro he pointed out the quickest way. Finally he asked "How was our customer service in this rental experience?"

Enterprise, established in 1957, is a privately held company principally owned by the Jack Taylor family, it approach and style reinforces my view that publicly traded companies are all too often too preoccupied with shareholder value to offer good service. But privately held ones can take the manage without the pressure to conform to analysts expectations often with much better results as far as the customer is concerned.

Enterprise measures customer service and satisfaction rigorously but not with a number of questions. Just two. There was a write up of this approach The One Number You Need to Grow. Harvard Business Review. December 2003 by F.F. Reichheld, and it's well worth reading. One paragraph observes.

Taylor and his senior team had figured out a way to measure and manage customer loyalty without the complexity of traditional customer surveys. Every month Enterprise polled its customers using just two simple questions, one about the quality of their rental experience, and the other about the likelihood that they would rent from the company again. Because the process was so simple it was fast. That allowed the company to publish ranked results for its 5,000 US branches within days, giving the offices real-time feedback on how they were doing and the opportunity to learn from successful peers

The only thing missing for me is that they don't do one-way rentals. But maybe that will come.

Earlier today I was looking at McKinsey Quarterly's Risk Roundup for 2010. They ask the question "where will the greatest risks-known and unknown-flare up on the global business landscape this year?"

Looking at the three sets of information (the Economist Intelligence Unit, the Eurasia Group, and the World Economic Forum) they present it is alarming to see the wide ranging nature of the risks, and this is before the 66 (so far) people who have left comments weigh in with the additional risks they've spotted. It's all very gloomy and depressing.

But the Eurasia Group Report reminds us that 2009 has, in fact, been quite ok. So looking forward into bleakness we can remember happier times. It opens with the paragraph:

"We've just been through a year of enormous economic turbulence, and yet in most ways 2009 was mercifully quiet. The financial crisis hit the previous September and most things that could have gone wrong didn't, allowing the world to focus on the digging out. 2009 saw no big geopolitical crises, no tussles with North Korea or Iran. The war on drugs in Mexico didn't spill across the American border in a big way. Iraq didn't blow up. There were no massive terrorist attacks (though Christmas saw a close call in the United States). No killer hurricanes, no huge earth¬quakes, and the H1N1 virus didn't prove that threatening a pandemic after all. Govern¬ments around the world focused overwhelmingly on the domestic, putting tough policy decisions on hold. (And when they didn't, as with Obama's Afghanistan and healthcare plans, the results were seriously watered down, and actual policy risk was limited.)"

I couldn't access the Economist Intelligence Unit report on Key Issues for 2010 (because of an insufficiet subscription level) which I'm assuming is the one the McKinsey Quarterly was referring to. Although I see that the EIU does a very nice Global Forecasting Service so I took the tour of that – but again it's a subscription service. However, there are bits that can be read in the EIU without a subscription and I read the article on the New Normal. Back to feeling gloomy as I'm told that:

"In the "new normal", growth will be constrained by high debt, by irrecoverable losses in capacity, and by a weaker and more heavily regulated banking sector. It will be a tougher world, in short."

The third report mentioned in the McKinsey Quarterly roundup was the World Economic Forum's Global Risk Report. Like the others it is not encouraging

"Warnings of the long shadow of the financial crisis The result of extensive input throughout the previous year by experts from business, academia, and the public sector, Global Risks 2010 highlights a number of slow-moving risks exacerbated by the financial crisis and global economic downturn, and stresses the continued need to further enhance global resilience to risks. Global governance gaps, an issue already to the fore in Global Risks 2009, continues to be at the nexus of global risks and the need for coordinated global action is increasingly urgent.

Fiscal crises and unemployment, underinvestment in infrastructure and chronic disease are identified as the pivotal areas of risk over the next years. At the same time, the Report warns that there are also a number of risks to keep on the radar, including the economic and social costs of transnational crime and corruption, biodiversity losses and risks to critical systems from cybervulnerability."

What I'm wondering is how business enterprises are dealing with all this. And what does it mean for the design of these organizations. Having the list of what needs to be dealt with is one thing. Having the wherewithal to deal with it is another. I don't have any answers on this – although in the last few days I've been looking at some companies that appear to be looking at their design afresh i.e. not 'better sameness': Cisco and Nokia are two, and Tata Group seems to at a stage of thinking it through. It would be good to hear of other organizations who are thinking very differently about their business models and designs in as they prepare for the future.

I finally ordered one of the books on my Amazon wish list and it arrived yesterday. It's called How the way we talk can change the way we work. I haven't read it yet, so I can't comment in any detail on it. But the reason I had it on my list was because I read a review of it somewhere (although I don't remember where). It's part of the genre of work around the language people use to make themselves understood or get things done, or conversely the way the language they don't use gets them stuck in conflict or confusion.
Deborah Tannen (whose books I have read and find thoroughly recommendable) is another researcher/writer in this field, and then I also liked the book Change your questions change your life which has good, practical ideas in it.

Then I was looking through the strategy+business website looking for an article on the Tata family business which I'd just read in the strategy+business magazine but was a little baffled that I couldn't find it and then more baffled that the cover they have on their site as 'current issue' is not the same as the 'current issue' that's on my kitchen table. So I just have to work out what happened here. However, that is a sidenote because what I did find on their website – that I'd also previously read but forgotten was the piece on Fernando Flores who sounds a fascinating character. (Mystery solved: I have a hardcopy Spring 2010 issue and their website is still on Winter 2009 issue).

He is of the view that "most communication between individuals consists not of pure information, but of prompts for action. This concept was first articulated by Cambridge University professor J.L. Austin in a series of lectures published posthumously in 1962 as How to Do Things with Words. Just in the act of saying something, Austin proposed, people can create tangible change, as when the starter at a race shouts "Go!" Flores adds that by using language deliberately, a person can consciously shape his or her future – not in some fuzzy New Age sense, but on the more pragmatic level of constructing possibilities by giving voice to them. "Will you marry me?" opens up a potential life together, and "Write a marketing plan by Tuesday" might lead to a new business, even a new industry."

So this thread of learning how to change oneself and interactions with others for the better seems to be the one that has presented itself to me today. It matters to me because

a) I write a good deal and need to be clear. Thankfully in my current work the editor is terrific. He makes wonderful comments like "rest of this para comes across as a bit jargony and complicated: be good to use good old plain English" and "give a less gushy example".

b) I speak UK English and but live in the US – plenty of room for error here in what I say v what I expect people to understand from this.

c) I like the language aspect – at university I wrote a dissertation paper on George Orwell – another fanatic about plain English – which led me towards a little more clarity it writing. And I always remember William Empson (one of my teachers there) taking a red pen and crossing out all the redundancies in one of the long papers I'd written. It left about 4 meaningful sentences in the entire piece.

d) I am teaching a program in China in March and have started to mull over what I need to adjust in my language to make it understandable to the participants. I haven't had any formal training in working with people whose first language is not English – though I work a lot with them.

e) A lot of the organization development training that people in this field gets seems to miss out the linguistic aspects of organization development. I think it would be a useful addition.

So today – I'll skim through the Kegan/Lahey book, and continuing culling the draft of my book cutting out all jargon, gushiness, management guff, and other hurdles to making my point.

Three things brought social media to the front of mind this week:

First, I've been reading a lot in the last few days about Google's Buzz, a new social media site launched on February 10. Mainly I've been interested in the approach Google took to getting people hooked into it. The whole storm about automatically linking connections to the people someone has email conversations intrigued me and I can't imagine why Google engineers would think this was a good idea. I think it was the standard form of "cock up not conspiracy" – there's no reason why Google would want to invade the privacy of citizens lives and risk countless lawsuits – which is the consequence they seem to be facing.

The Independent has a calm report on the launch, including this paragraph that makde me laugh. "Further changes under consideration include setting up Google Buzz as a standalone website, to further untangle it from Gmail. But, even as it was dealing with its public relations nightmare, Google was trying to look on the bright side. At least many of the Buzz users who were venting their fury were doing so on the new social network.

"We've been getting feedback via the Gmail help forums," said Mr Jackson, [his is the Buzz Product Manager and posts on the official Buzz blog] "and we've also been able to do something new: read the buzz about Buzz itself."

However, I wonder what's going on behind the scenes in terms of "learning from our mistakes", "not assigning blame", "accepting responsibility", "being held accountable" and all the stuff that when things are normally stable look like sensible approaches, but when a crisis erupts usually turn into knee jerk reactions, swiftly followed by heads rolling.

Second, someone told me (via an ordinary email, not on Twitter or something) about a very helpful beginner's guide to why businesses should use social media. It is Euan Semple's series of one minute video clips that answer 15 questions like: How do social media affect the business culture? How practical is social media to business? How do I justify social media in terms of ROI?

He talks very well on the changes to management style that use social media implies. He says that the potential for the more connected conversational tools is that more people will be able to do things together with an awful lot less management. But, in his view, there's no real difference in the amount of control that managers will have – using social media may, in fact, allow them more but different control. Its value lies in giving them a place and a tool for expressing and discussing their challenges, what they're trying to achieve, how and why they are thinking of doing this – and getting support and involvement from their team members. In Semple's opinion, if managers become good at using the tools it's a much more productive way for them to achieve what they are trying to.

Third, I've had several invitations to be LinkedIn to people from my past roles, and two people have wanted to follow me on Twitter. One of the LinkedIn invitations came from someone whose name I remembered but couldn't think where/when I'd worked with him. As a memory jog I looked him up on LinkedIn before accepting the invitation. It transpired that we'd worked together 15 years ago and that he'd bought a croquet set from me which I had totally forgotten. But not only that, in a subsequent (email) exchange we found out that the person who taught him croquet I also knew but in a completely different forum. So that's all good fun and …. I'm wondering what the connection is for. What do I do with all these connections? It's not that I don't like them – I'm waiting to find out what happens next.

Which seems ok and is a tack that Semple suggests. In answering the question "How should businesses get involved with social media?" he says it should be slowly. People should be watching, learning, experimenting, and seeing what other people are doing i.e.don't rush in. That's good advice for me because I am not a committed user of any social media. I have Twitter and a Facebook account but so far I haven't tweeted once, and I can't yet see why I would want to and who would want any tweet from me, and haven't used Facebook at all either. (I guess it doesn't help that I have activated the highest level of privacy possible on both).