image from wikipedia, used under creative commons license

“thank you for coming out here today; i appreciate you all being here at the lincoln memorial with me.

“first i want to talk to you about abraham lincoln and his emancipation proclamation just to give you a little back story on what we’ll be talking about today. next i want to introduce the concept of ‘the bank of justice’ before moving into the urgency of now — why we need to act now to make a change. finally, i want to discuss my dream for the future.

“so, with that, let’s get started…”

if martin luther king, jr. started off his ‘i have a dream’ speech with that kind of introduction, in what ways do you think the impact would be different? would his speech be as famous as it is today? would we teach it to our kids in middle school? in college communication classes?

i don’t need, nor do i want, a purpose or agenda slide from you in your presentations. if there’s a specific purpose, i’m sure that i probably already know what it is. i was either sent an invite to your meeting — which hopefully, for both our sakes, has already mapped out the reason — or i found your talk whilst reading through the program list of breakout sessions at a conference. what i want from you is a story. i want a reason to believe in what you’re talking about.

we’ve already taken care of the purpose long before you took the stage. right now — with you standing in front of me — it’s your time to shine. it’s your time to share your story.

i want to know: what’s your dream?

image from wikipedia

a friend and colleague asked me a question regarding some internal communications within our firm last week. during our conversation, she said, ‘i don’t know why [my team] won’t just ask everyone on yammer.’ i said it’s because on the internet, no one knows you’re a suit.

every day, in corporations all across the world, people go to work wearing a mask — sometimes more than one. like the billy joel song, they’re the faces of the stranger but we love to try them on. the marketing specialist. the associate. the senior vp of sales. but when you’re on the internet, no one can see that mask; all they can see are the contributions that you make. to put your ideas out in a public forum is to open yourself up to all kinds of criticism.

in business, you used to be able to hide behind your title. the senior tech said this is why we’re taking a certain approach, and that was the end of discussion because who would stand up to him? now the first-year analyst out of college can raise questions about, and disagree with, that approach. the person from accounting can share her thoughts on the marketing specialist’s ideas on the name of the redesigned newsletter. these enterprise 2.0 systems like yammer cause a flattening of the hierarchy and a cross-pollination of teams that we have never before seen in business.

and that scares the shit out of people.

but if we’re going to get the most out of our organizations — if we’re going to really excel in what we do — we’re going to have to become more agile and we’re going to have to look for solutions outside of our normal channels. each person has to pull on the same rope. the only way to really accomplish that is if we put down those masks, get over the fear, and go into work tomorrow as ourselves ready to work openly with each other.

i’m john scardino. i have a few ideas that i’d like to explore.

i hope i can explore them with you.

i got nothing.

after that failed, i sent a question out on our yammer network to my colleagues and friends asking the same question. roughly 2 minutes and 30 seconds later i had a colleague of mine forward along an example document with exactly everything i was looking for. this was a colleague whom i’d have never even known existed if it weren’t for social networking within the enterprise.

but here’s the kicker…

the enterprise system we’ve developed has cost the firm countless thousands of dollars (probably millions), meanwhile the yammer network we’re using is the free version — no cost at all to us. using this high-cost technology outfit provided me with no answers at all and was actually a time-suck when you look at it, meanwhile a free system available to anyone was able to connect the person who needed information with the person who had the information.

the moral of the story is this: business needs to rethink where it’s spending its money. high cost IT departments in organizations don’t have to be high cost anymore. there was once a time when machines could do things that we mere mortals couldn’t, and so we developed these new systems to supplant humans. the problem is that that paradigm has shifted.

the focus needs to not be on what the technology is capable of, but on what the technology enables us to do.

at the end of the day this change in focus is better, faster, cheaper, and more efficient.

not easier, but better.

midterms were going on, everyone was studying, and the lab was packed with people, so i looked over at the two rows of empty imacs and thought to myself, “why the hell not?”

when i grabbed that mouse and first logged in to OS X, it was like i was using something that was years ahead of its time. oh, of course it was odd at first — the feel of the keyboard, the click of the mouse, the simplicity of it all — but as i used it to write that paper i began to fall in love.

with a computer.

after that day, whenever i was in a lab, i’d always choose the apple machines unless i was working on a project for class which required something windows-specific. god, how i hated those days. the year after, my brother — a graphic design student at the time — would get his first powerbook, a titanium g4. there was a special kind of awesome in the air on the day he unboxed it; a feeling that you honestly were touching the future.

i secretly envied his new computer whilst i continued to do the geek things i did on my dell — running my own apache web server, checking visitors logs, creating web sites in macromedia flash, playing battlefield 1942 — and running away to one of the computer labs to use an imac whenever i could just to get my fix of apple. and as time went on, an interesting thing began to happen: the rows of macintosh computers were suddenly being filled, and empty seats began to appear around the dells running windows.

i finally after a few years (and some begging and pleading with mom and dad) got my own powerbook, an aluminum g4, and an ipod photo. hot shit! this was the big time, people! and it was at that point when my perspective on things really began to change.

i used to love the windows platform because i loved the control i had. i could customize anything i wanted to customize, install web servers, log readers, hack registry items — i could do just about anything i could think of doing. but just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should. that’s the greatest impact steve jobs had on me. he showed me what design really means.

suddenly, the web sites i was creating got a lot more simple. i took out the needless animations, simplified my color palettes, switched to web standards, and thought first and foremost ‘what can i remove from this to make it better?’ while classmates were still talking about — and having problems with — their windows machines and how the latest hack they applied fouled up the hack they implemented the week prior, i was using a stock setup on an apple laptop with no bells or whistles. and not because i didn’t have them, but because i didn’t want them.

my computer was perfect the way it was.

i learned that simplicity can be beautiful and that it’s more about the user experience than it is about the development experience. [honestly, it's fun as shit to play around with animations and 3D objects and pushing the technology to the max, but at the end of the day it's not about you, it's about the user.] that’s a lesson that i apply to my life still to this day.

and what an apple-filled life it has become.

i’m writing this right now on a 13-inch macbook, listening to music streaming to my stereo via an airport express, riding on wi-fi waves from my time capsule router/wireless storage device while getting updates from twitter on my iphone 4. and while my digital apple life all seems so commonplace now, i am still amazed sometimes when laying on the couch swiping through blog posts, videos, and more my ipad. because every now and then, i have flashbacks to that day — freshman year, 2002, in a penn state computer lab — logging into an imac for the first time.

because every now and then, i look down at my hands and truly feel like i’m holding the future.

image by scootie, flickr artist

i like trance music. a lot. in fact i’d say that i truly love it. the reasons why are many, but aside from being good music it’s the trance community surrounding it which makes it so special to me.

in a musical genre categorized by well defined characteristics, the level of innovation and collaboration is off the charts. to use such common musical elements and structures as other artists and rearrange them to form entirely new tracks takes a great deal of creativity. add to your original mix countless mashups and remixes from other artists and your EP is — the vast majority of the time — largely filled with someone else’s work.

what i love so much about trance is that these artists not only create their music but they actively invite people to take it and make it better — to put their own spin on it (sorry for the pun).

the business world could use a little trance influence.

you never see the giants of industry partnering together to create something special. when was the last time you saw facebook and google working hand-in-hand on anything? or microsoft and apple? or sony and samsung? for that matter, sometimes we even have trouble getting our own internal teams to collaborate together — like information security and the end users.

we were always taught that competition makes everyone better, and there may be some truth to that. business has no doubt followed in that tradition ever since history can remember. but what if we took the time to collaborate a little more? what if we partnered more between business and charity for instance? what kind of mashups and remixes could we make?

that would be some kind of beautiful music.

image by cheukiecfu, flickr artist

work is a lot like racing cars.

the one’s who go full throttle all the time are the ones who surely wreck. the key is being smooth around the track, easing into and out of turns and knowing exactly when to shift.

there’s this thought that if you’re not writing code all day, or you’re not editing powerpoints all day — if you’re not on the throttle the entire time from 8 to 5 — that you’re not really working.

and it’s bogus.

if you’re doing nothing but ‘taking care of business’ all day long, you’re forgetting about the most important part: you. if you don’t slow it down every now and then, you’re going to end up in the wall, and that’s not good for anybody.

i believe that everyone is motivated by something. i’d say that most accountants have a natural love of working with numbers. i’m sure that stock brokers get a special kind of high out of making the deal that nets their clients big returns. and i’m sure that if you spent even just a little time with three of my colleagues as they talked about solving linear programs and differential equations you’d be amazed at how much they can geek out over it. but when was the last time, as a manager or leader, that you had a discussion with your employees to find out what drives them?

some of you might answer — if you’re being honest with yourself — “the job interview”. how long ago was that? people change over time, and so you must be willing to spend the time to really watch and track how your people are changing and the kinds of people they’re changing into. you might have someone with a modeling and simulation background whom either suddenly or even gradually falls in love with data visualization. you might have a history teacher whom has a newfound love of english literature. but you’ll never know any of this unless you take the time to know your people.

do you have carrots (bonus structures, awards systems) or sticks (hard deadlines, performance reviews) in place because they actually work? or is it just because it makes your job simpler?

everyone is motivated to do something.

find out what that is. then have them do that.

image by a.drian, flickr artist

universal healthcare might be the only thing that can save the united states from total meltdown, and it’s not about keeping healthcare costs low.

i firmly believe that the only way to do that — keep healthcare costs low — is for people to stop being irresponsible stewards of their own bodies. we need to exercise more (myself included), eat better, cut down on the fast foods and preservatives (and bullshit ingredients like red #40), and find a way to remove ourselves if only briefly from the non-stop stress that engulfs our lives.

that being said, i’m not talking about universal healthcare keeping costs low, i’m not on a crusade to save every low-income family from having to pay for basic healthcare screenings, or any of that. in short, this isn’t some sociopolitical argument.

i’m talking from a strictly business perspective.

america is facing some difficult times presently because of a large disparity between the people at the top and those at the bottom. our chief ‘whatever’ officers are taking home billions of dollars a year while the lower level girl with a few years of business experience, working her ass off for 50+ hours a week to actually keep the business running, gets barely enough money to cover her living expenses — house, car, insurance, groceries — and her student loans. hardly seems fair. worse yet, she has great ideas for new products and services and processes that could make the business better, but they all fall on deaf ears because they require a bit of financial investment, and business is about one thing and one thing only right now: optimization. how do you do the same things for cheaper than your competitors do? this question is the key problem with america today.

ask our hypothetical girl why she’s working at a job she doesn’t care much at all for and she’ll probably give you these two reasons in this order: (1) i need money to pay the bills, (2) i need the benefits. the first reason is an easier problem to solve: reduce the amount of things you need to pay for. there are other options for owning cars, paying $200 for digital cable each month, and mega feature rich cell phone plans. the second is a bit more difficult to get a handle on and the reason why i feel universal healthcare is so vital.

having universal healthcare would make it easier for people to quit their jobs.

yeah, i said it.

the sooner people quit their boring, dull, hardly meaningful jobs they’re currently working in, the sooner those people can start their own small businesses and get back to real innovation and doing what they love to do. maybe they’ll even forge that non-profit and start making some positive change in their communities and in their world because they’ll be able to afford to live off of a little bit less. these small, local businesses are also better for higher, long-term growth of the communities they operate in. and the sooner we get back to generating meaningful jobs and promoting innovation in this country instead of finding ever more creative — and sometimes unethical — means of pinching pennies, the sooner we’ll actually make a difference in the world market again.

it’s not as simple as bringing the manufacturing jobs back to america. frankly, we don’t want to do that because there’s no long-term growth in making tube socks and there’s not much return on investment from cranking out $0.05 nuts, bolts, and washers. we need to find the next thing; we need to be working on bigger problems. there’s not much of that big thinking going on in corporations in america today because we keep some of our most creative minds chained to an inbox all day long in a cubicle lit with only one fluorescent lightbulb because the company doesn’t want to pay to replace the other one that burned out last month.

our current way of conducting business absolutely has to come to an end.

and i think universal healthcare will help get us there.

but be wary of not giving enough credit to correlation. as an old proverb says, “everything that happens once can never happen again. but everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.”

it was reported some months ago that the united states was in a jobless recovery — where macroeconomic indicators showed progress while the jobs market remained stagnant. a lot of people have wondered where are the jobs? how can businesses be making so much money, but at the same time adding such few new hires to ‘fuel the furnaces’?

unfortunately things don’t work that way anymore.

manufacturing doesn’t happen that much in the united states — we just don’t make many things now a days. no, we’re an information and knowledge based economy now, and that’s exactly where the issue comes in at…

enter the mba graduate.

we’re graduating an ever increasing amount of mbas every year and application numbers continue to rise. and what are we teaching these graduates to do? with pressure to keep wall street happy, we’re teaching optimization: how can you manage your resources properly to get the most utility with the least amount of cost? how can you drive your profits up while using less? that’s a dangerous position for us to be in as a nation when you consider what it is we’re building… information.

in an information economy the people are the resources, and just so happen to be the largest cost drivers for any organization. in order to keep costs down, we have to keep the number of people down — or at least the cost of those people. anyone who has been working for 20 years and suddenly found themselves out of a job because they were replaced by a freshly minted college graduate knows this very well. why would a company, looking to maximize profit, choose to keep or hire an experienced professional with a higher market salary when they can pay a fraction of that for someone much younger? so, joe america, if you’re reading this during a break in between your job searching — understand that the fact that you haven’t been hired isn’t because you’re old, but because you’re expensive!

so where are the jobs at?

technology has increased drastically, we’ve gotten really good at doing certain things, and — believe it or not for all the problems with our primary schooling systems — our education system is pumping out more and more college graduates each year. where are the jobs? in short: we don’t really need them. not with the focus of the economy right now: bigger profits and happier investors. we’re mba’ing ourselves out of an economy. with no one at work, there’s no money at home to spend on those things which keep our economy afloat. no houses, no cars, no $100 cell phone bills, etc.

so how do we fix this? you can’t just take the billions of dollars that organizations’ c-level executives are making right now and reinvest that money into growing the workforce because you’re going to blow up the system. you’re going to have a lot of people getting paid to do nothing because they won’t have any work to do. we’ve already optimized what it takes to turn a profit; we can’t get any better than we already are. we need an economic revolution. we have to fundamentally change the way that we think about business. we have to embrace risk again (and reward it). we have to invent. we have to innovate. we need companies and organizations that are focused on helping people and improving the quality of life in our communities rather than being focused on turning a profit.