Confessions of An Economic Refugee

Check out the latest video by Green Day and U2:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seGhTWE98DU

"U.S. IRAQ TROOPS REDEPLOYED TO NEW ORLEANS"

Albeit a somewhat unrealistic account of the full scale military intervention in New Orleans to save Katrina victims, the point made is quite clear – what if the might US Army was home instead of being mired in Iraq?  Could they have been able to help the Katrina victims then?  Good food for thought.

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So I can imagine the conversation at the marketing team meeting on how to sell the release of the new XBox 360 game Gears of War:

Let’s see – ultra-violent first person shooter? check.  Mad graphics? check.  Hella big explosions?  check.  Okay, let’s load up the TV spot then – something loud, brash, in your face, lots of explosions and lots of attitude. 

Instead, they execs at Microsoft decide to do something like this instead.

No explosions. No attitude.  No loud Metallica-like soundtrack. Not even the sound of gunshots. Just Gary Jules’s ‘Mad World’ playing as backdrop against a lone soldier trying to survive in a post apocalytic world. 

In otherwords: Not. Your. Typical. First. Person. Shooter.

Brilliant.

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It’s Autumn again and the end of the year – what the hell happened to 2006, or 2005 or 2004 for that matter.  This years flying by is way not cool – or as the kiddies nowadays say – hella bad.  But I digress…

Both The Killers and Evanescence both released their long awaited follow-up albums to their respective breakout debuts ‘Hot Fuss’ and ‘Fallen’ these past couple of days.  Like any slightly obsessive-compulsive over-marketed worker/consumer/peon, I dutifully went and downloaded the albums today.

I don’t normally follow music but The Killers and Evanescence just happened to my 2 favourite bands of the past 2-4 years matched probably only by…hmm – Green Day’s American Idiot and She Want’s Revenge.  The Killer’s ‘Mr Brightside’ is the ringtone on my phone for crying out loud and I’ve probably listened to Evanescence’s ‘My Immortal’ like a thousand times.  (I think that’s lot but I guess that doesn’t hold up to one of my buddies that listened to American Idiot for 18 hours straight on the drive up to the Northern BC and can tell how long he’s run by figuring out which song on the album he’s listened to.)

Okay – so net net on the new releases – eh no.  Let’s start with Evanescence ‘The Open Door’ – this was an album that took 4 years to release…and sounds like the b-sides from ‘Fallen’.  It kinda sounds more a band trying to sound like Evanescence instead of Evanescence being Evanescence – the songs originality and genuiness in the sound.  Amy Lee’s vocal’s also seem a little off and over powered by the vocals – is this  mixing issue?

The Killers – well they’ve definitely gone in another direction – I’ll reserve judgement here – but there’s nothing on either album that really jumps out and grabs you on first listen but I hold out slightly more hope for the The Killer’s album.

It’s funny – but when I first moved down to San Francisco my first playlist on my ipaq was something like:

• Maroon 5 – She will be loved
• Franz Ferdinand – Take me out
• Snow Patrol – Run
• Keane – Somewhere only we know
• Avril Lavigne – So much for my happy ending
• Nelly Furtado – Try
• The Killers – Someone Once Told me
• Evanescence – My Immortal
• Justin Timberlake – Cry me a River
• <some random Chinese stuff>

Fast forward 2 years and all of Franz Ferdinand, The Killers, Snow Patrol, Keane, Nelly Furtado, Evanescence and Justin Timberlake have all release new albums and songs…none of them have really taken to me yet.  (I hate the Nelly Furtado drrty album – where did that come from?)

Here’s hoping Maroon 5, whenever they release their next album can break the dry spell.

Or here’s to finding the Killers, Franz Ferdinand, Snow Patrol of 2006/07.

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Knowledge Management (or ‘KM’ as it was known to be called) was a buzzword and nebulous management best practice that received considerable attention in the late 90’s as a panacea about the then pending ‘Knowledge-based Economy’ reached new heights of media overexposure. I remember reading a business plan about a KM solutions company a few of my peers in our New Venture class had written about some 8 years ago now.

KM as a concept, like B2B ecommerce and application service providers was a concept that overpromised and underdelivered at least in it initial iterations.  A KM strategy for an organization is especially difficult in that

1. it’s ROI can be difficult to measure and therefore difficult to justify spending on and
2. that in order to execute properly, requires a wholesale change in attitudes and culture of the organization.
3. the tools did not existing, even conceptually, to cost effectively perform knowledge management

While the first obstacle remains and probably will remains until a visionary CIO and saavy product marketer can coalesce a Mooreian ‘tornado’ around the concept.  What is interesting is that a whole new generation of workers reared on Internet technologies – specifically – Google, IM, mySpace, blogs and podcasting are set to enter workforce in the next 5-10 years. 

Organizations that can successfully harness the ‘net saavy of this generation to remake their organizations into inherently knowledge-creating, highly collaborative and scalable organizations will be able to achieve a (relatively) lasting competitive advantage against their competitors. 

I think many organizations are correct in studying the organizational culture of Google (‘Controlled Chaos’ as a recently dubbed by Fortune magazine) or its predecessor ‘W.L. Gore & Associates’ for clues on the future of the KM organization.

It is also in my mind – the only path of salvation for American companies desperate to seek a way to compete against the more cost effective and determined yet more hierachical Chinese and Indian competitors of the future.

To the subject of knowledge management tools – it is unsurprising that consumer Internet technologies should lead the way.  There is a rule of them that Internet technologies typically start in the consumer space and after some time (typically for cultural acclimization and securing of the technologies) are adapted and adopted for the corporate environment.

So too will this be for KM.  Consider the following hypothetical scenario some 10 years from now and evaluate for yourself how realistic this will be in the KM-practicing organization of the future:

• email *yawn*  ubiquitious and generally accepted form of communication.  Check out Yahoo Desktop search as a great tool for the easy search of your e-mail communication – so much better than Outlook’s native search.
• corporate and departmental intranets allow companies to quickly disseminate information about the company and department to its employees.  This has already come to pass in most large organizations and some medium companies – notably in the technology industry.  The rollout will continue
• Instant messaging to allow employees to make short work related inquiries with each other
• corporate based search engine technology will be perfected allowing employees to easily search on documents on past projects as easy they search for escoteric topics on the internet using Google.  Currently the key challenge in corporate search, besides lack of content, is finding a new method of determining relevance as the current algorithm of using the volume of backlinks to determine relevancy on the Internet is less relevant in the corporate world.  What might work best is something akin to the ‘I found this article useful’ rating feature found on popular B2C websites to help rank consumer-generated links
• employees work blogs allow employees to track notes in realtime and share findings and thoughts with colleagues and store role related knowledge ensuring continuity even as employees change positions or leave the company
• podcasts and web recordings that are posted on the corporate intranet to allowing a new media of knowledge capture and dissemination away from the typical staid offerings of Word document and powerpoint slide decks
• corporate social networking sites (the label is an oxymoron I know) but the infrastructure for employees to allow determine the interests and skill sets of their peers, identify their current and past projects so they can  easily identified and leveraged for new and existing initiatives.  Our company is so big we can are bound to have the knowledge on almost any technology topic we can think of – the trick is identifying that person in the organization
• project management websites such as sharepoint and sourceforge to faciliate the management of ad hoc projects for informal work teams in the future.

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