brentashley

Well, not over nothing, I guess, but over the wrong thing. Seems there’s a lot of people peeved that Google changed its PageRank formula. They no longer fall as close to the top as they once did.

Trouble is, they’re all using examples that their rank as the definitive Bill or Ted or Bob or Dave or Mark or whatever is out of whack, like as if anyone goes searching for them on the net purely because of their Daveness or Billness.

Have any of these people thought to look at their rank based on their content?
I don’t know where I stand in the Brent list on Google, and I don’t care. I’m still the top if you look for “remote scripting” or “blog chat”, and that’s as it should be.

I can’t imagine my Brentness interests anyone.

Matt Mower comments on my altruism as a cultivated resource comments:

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I listened to a Geoffrey Moore webcast recently titled “Provocation Selling: Making quota in a downmarket” (via Rick Klau’s site) and it was very interesting. Basically he says the only way to sell software to large corps today is to fix “leaky pipes.” So knowledge logging must become a wrench.

My current angle is that internal communications and awareness is the “leaky pipe.”

I am trying to develop a line that sells business weblogging as a way to make corporations more responsive to internal changes and data “at the edge.”
…

The difficuly with providing technology solutions to this particular leaky pipe is that it’s not a technical problem. It’s a problem of an entrenched culture of insecurity that results in hoarding of knowledge and attempts to steer personal and corporate destinies by controlling knowledge flow.

Everyone’s standing around knee-deep in water, leaky pipes all around, but either unwilling to recognize that the excess moisture is what’s bogging their company down, or unwilling to act and possibly become a casualty to the process.

The only lasting solution is to promote a culture of openness and sharing, as Phil Windley is doing, and through hard work and small wins, build a grassroots awakening to the power of altruism. The technology is just the wheels to transport us there – the entire trip has to be mapped out and deftly navigated by enlightened management.

Our problem is that we’re trying to sell sets of fancy wheels to people who don’t know how or why to drive, let alone have a map of where they’re going. They get in, crash into the first obstacle they find, get out and slam the door, muttering about how this damn car can’t drive straight.

We as wheels providers will have to team up with business analysts who have the ear of the executive layer and can teach them how to drive and map a path towards enlightenment. They will have to, like Windley, lead by example, at which point we can ride in their wake and spread knowledge tools and concepts.

I firmly believe that the way out of the mess of corporate untrustworthiness that’s miring this dark economy is for organizations to become visibly approachable and believable in the best Cluetrain fashion.

My laptop case has always been a bit of a Mary Poppins bag – I can pull all manner of surprising things from its depths to solve problems here and there – I carry an ethernet hub I modified for battery power, for instance, which comes in handy in contracting situations where there are no extra LAN connections. Be prepared, I always say, with enough bits and pieces to glue together what you might need on a whim.

So i’m in downtown Toronto, driving from one appointment to the next, and thinking about a third place to visit, but I don’t know the address – it’s in Outlook on my home PC. Damn. My wife isn’t home to check it for me, so I gotta think of something else.

So I pull into an alley at Queen St. and Spadina where I know I can get a wireless signal, get my laptop out of the trunk, fire it up, insert the 802.11b card, and walk towards the street. Halfway up the alley I get a signal so I squat against this drainpipe where I can still see my car, ssh into my home linux box, start a tunnelled vnc session from my laptop over ssh/wireless/internet/sshd/homenetwork to my Win box at home, run Outlook, get the info. Check my mail and news aggregator for good measure.

People are walking by without a second thought to this guy squatting with his laptop in an alley. All in a day’s work, you know.

Phil Windley notices my post about sharing and talks about the altruistic “abundance mentality” that is a prerequisite to becoming an effective blogger. That certainly describes me and many other people I know who regularly share knowledge whether or not it’s via blogging.

Of course, it also *doesn’t* describe a much larger lot of people that make up most organizations, and that’s problematic to the introduction of knowledge sharing tools.

With my recent plugging of Open Source collaborative content management tools, I’ve done a lot of thinking about what it takes to make knowledge sharing work in an organization. What it takes is enthusiasm, altruism, optimism. For it all to really sing, you have to attract a critical slice of the target audience who will participate fully and happily.

But you can’t simply decree that everyone in the organization will tomorrow become lucid, concise, insightful writers or will feel enthusiastic about their work. Some people will never have it in them, some just need to get bit by the bug.

Traditional Knowledge Management too often involves a top-down command and control restrictive model. In contrast, Knowledge Sharing is a grassroots bottom-up empowerment model. The effective way to grow it is to introduce it, find evangelists, and let it grow. That can only work in an organization where people feel like they’re part of a living organism working towards a common goal, not in a politics-ridden cube farm.

It’s pretty hard to find that in a large organization, especially in government. I worked for 10 years in the Ontario government in 3 different ministries, and there is absolutely NO way it’s ever gonna happen soon there.

Makes a guy wanna move to Utah. But it’s so much warmer in Toronto. Well, today, anyhow.