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Management — Comments Off
30
Jun 10

The Long Term. The Big Picture.

I’m a big fan of O’Reilly Radar; it’s a great place for really smart writing.

One recent piece by Nat Torkington, Clue is a Renewable Resource, is particularly smart to me because it represents someone who’s looking to take a long view on an employee. (It should come as no surprise that I got this link from Rands, a very smart guy who writes really well about managing people.) Unfortunately, we as a society seem completely incapable of taking any sort of long view right now and it’s something we’ve really got to start thinking more about.

Short-term thinking is, of course, necessary in dire times like these just to keep the lights on and a roof over your head, but we have to remember that short-term actions have long-term consequences. We have to stop treating people like robots and we have to stop thinking about the small picture to the exclusion of all else.

We have to start thinking long-term and big-picture.

Field Shadow
(Photo by Helen Richard.)

Ask yourself, right now: “How much time have I spent this week on things that might not pay off for several months…or longer?”

I know it’s difficult to, say, find X dollars to cut from our budgets just to make it through the next year, but we have to stop robbing the future just to pay for the present (or worse, just to cover the interest on the past). Short-term thinking, by its very nature, will only get you through the short term.

Development is going to carry us out of these doldrums. I’m not talking about software development, but rather people development. If you’re reading this, I want you to stop, close your eyes, take a deep breath and say this out loud a few times:

The people who work for (and with) me are valuable. It is my responsibility to help them to become better. It is their responsibility to help me to become better.

You’ll need to repeat this every once in a while for it to really stick.1

Most importantly, “better” doesn’t just mean people who are below you on an org chart; it means everyone and it even extends beyond what’s written in a person’s job description. It means that people aren’t robots or cogs, so they need a chance (on a regular basis) to stretch themselves, to try new things, to be given responsibility, some trust, a chance to take their own initiative and some understanding and support if they mess up. People who are reduced to machines in their workplace (or who are watched like hawks by their bosses for the slightest deviation from “maximum productivity”) have fundamentally less satisfaction at work and are less productive, too.

So ask yourself: does this paragraph from Nat’s article sound like your workplace?

Very few…human needs are well-met in the typical organization: someone else chooses your projects, someone else tells you how to do it, you rarely interact with anyone or get praise from someone you respect and your public reputation goes straight down the toilet as you vanish behind the firewall. The work inside the firewall can, sometimes, rarely, be interesting and humanly-rewarding, but the emphasis is on “rarely”.

We end up chasing short-term goals so often–increased circulation, higher quarterly sales, cutting costs, whatever–that we forget how creative people are, in our never-ending quest to pigeonhole everything we can and we shut out everything we can’t. We treat our organizations as though they’re monoliths, when they’re really just a bunch of people.

Some organizations understand this. Google has a policy that employees spend 20% of their time on projects unrelated to the ones they’re assigned to. Netflix actually allows its salaried employees to take as much vacation time as they want, provided they’re getting “amazing amounts of important work” done. This slideshow by the CEO of Netfix on the company’s culture is required reading for everyone, because it’s one of the best examples I’ve read of how to create a culture of excellence. This will be on the test.

Culture

Even something as small as allowing someone to spend a couple of hours a week working on a pet project can have major long-term benefits. In the short term, they’ll be happier and feel less trapped by their job, but in the long run, they might just come up with an idea that saves your organization millions of dollars.2

There are tons of great opportunities out there for you and your employees to grow. Your organization doesn’t necessarily need a formalized policy on what gets posted to its official Twitter or Facebook pages, but it does need the flexibility that allows an employee to make the case for sending them to a conference or workshop on something about which they care passionately. People who have the opportunity to stretch themselves a bit will often stay with you for longer because they feel more like they have a measure of control over their lives. Sometimes they’ll overextend themselves and screw up, but you can’t really learn to ride a bike until you take off the training wheels and fall a few times, so that’s when you have to understand and support them. Sure, a few might use that conference to escape to another job, but if that isn’t a large, blinking LED sign telling you to make some changes, nothing’s going to get through.

And you know what? Growth is additive. Maybe learning Drupal won’t come in handy this week, but if you move up the ladder or get a job somewhere else–maybe at a place where the whole online system is held together with duct tape and static HTML files or is using a content-management system that went “end of support” four years ago, that time spent learning Drupal will make a big difference for you and the people around you.

  1. Maybe put it in Word using 18-point Times New Roman, so you can print it out, photocopy it into oblivion and email it to everyone you know. I’m just saying. ↩

  2. Even if they don’t, you’ve still got a happier employee with lower stress levels…and all it cost you was a couple of hours a week. Can you really not afford that? ↩

Web Design — Comments Off
16
May 10

Dump the WWW!

Here we are, in 2010, and I’m still seeing ads and other links to websites that include the “www.” at the start of the web address. Now, thankfully, most people have gotten the message already that there’s no need for the “http://” in front of a URL, but I am still baffled as to why we’re still hanging on to the “www.” part, which is about as useful to a web site as the appendix is to the human body.

The worst part of it all is that “www.” was never really necessary in the first place. Back in the early- to mid-1990s, when the Web was just starting to take off, we were all using relatively simple web browsers. Even so, I remember that the first browser I used heavily, Netscape 1.1, would automatically fill in the “http://” protocol if you didn’t specify it. That was an obvious call, because hey, you were using a web browser, so the odds were pretty good that you were going to a web site if you didn’t tell the browser otherwise, so the of course the browser should go ahead and fill in the protocol.

The “www.” part of a web address is actually a subdomain of the main domain, which was supposed to help separate the web server (the part of the server accessible via HTTP) from other protocols, like Gopher, FTP, email and the like. However, if you tried to connect to servers using HTTP, the servers were almost entirely capable of noticing what protocol or port was being used and answering correctly. Unfortunately, no one at the time had any idea that the Web would become one of the most transcendent ways of sharing information, ever, so sysadmins everywhere just gave the Web server a subdomain (e.g., www.somesite.com) as they did with, say, mail servers (e.g., mail.somesite.com).

Fast forward fifteen years and the Web is not only still around, but it’s going strong and still growing…which is more than anyone can say for poor old Gopher. However, we’ve been stuck with “www.” add-on, even though web servers are smart enough to perform a simple forward if it’s been set up.

It’s time to drop the “www.” from our domains. Don’t worry, though; your sysadmin can set up a simple forward so that if people still type in the “www.”, they’ll just get shown to the right URL.

There are several reasons I’m advocating this:

  1. There’s no need for the “www.” part. As I said above, it’s completely vestigial in terms of the Internet. There’s virtually no chance any more that someone’s coming to your site with Gopher.
  2. Less is more. Leaving off the “www.” gives you four characters back and these days—with social networking sites like Twitter being as popular as they are—the shorter your URL is, the easier it is for people to remember it and pass it along.
  3. It looks better. Okay, this is a personal reason, but I happen to think that a shorter, more readable URL looks a lot better on an advertisement than one with the “www.” included. Whenever I see an ad with it still included, I feel like the company behind it doesn’t quite get the Internet. (Embarassingly, when Chicago Public Library started their “Not What You Think” ad campaign and had ads all over the city referring people to “chipublib.org”, they discovered that their web server was not set up to handle automatic redirects from chipublib.org to www.chipublib.org.)
  4. It’ll do better in search engines. Google, for example, ranks http://somesite.com/ slightly higher than http://www.somesite.com/.

So brush up on your .htaccess terminology and drop the useless “www.” from your domains.

Broadband — Comments Off
26
Feb 10

Whither Broadband?

Broadband in the US is lagging (no pun intended) behind the rest of the world, both in terms of adoption rates and in speed. According to the OECD, the percentage of American households with broadband Internet is ranked fifteenth in the world. Even worse, the OECD defines “broadband” as “256 kbps and up”, which many would probably agree is a pretty paltry speed in this day and age. The FCC even used to define it as a mere 200 kbps—which isn’t even four times as fast as an old 56K modem—although thankfully, it seems to have been bumped up to 768 kbps or higher, which is a bit better.

Now, if you follow that link and read the first two Excel spreadsheets (curse you, OECD, for not providing PDF or HTML versions of this data!) you’ll see that it isn’t quite as bad as it sounds: first, the US has the highest number of overall broadband subscribers of any country; second, most of the countries with higher adoption percentages are countries far smaller than the US (Britain, France, Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, S. Korea, etc.). Naturally, it’s a lot easier to wire up the entirety of small countries than it is a continent-spanning nation that’s quite spread out, as much of the US west of the Mississippi River is.

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Search — Comments Off
20
Nov 09

The Smart Firehose

I’m an unabashed Google user.  I think Google has long provided the best search results on the Web and I don’t see any sign that’s going to change any time soon.  The reason I think Google has so totally eclipsed its competitors like Yahoo!, Ask and Excite (remember them?) is that Google is the search engine that follows what I like to call the “smart firehose” principle.

Google spends millions and millions of dollars every year on tweaking their search results to make them better.  Engineers at Google constantly ask themselves:  How can we give people the information they want in as few clicks as possible?  Can we add context-relevant information such as a map, movie showtimes or images in order to make the search results more useful? In other words, Google would rather just give you the information you need if it possibly can, instead of sending you somewhere else.

When you search for something using a standard Google search (that is, at Google.com or through your browser’s search box), the search engine doesn’t separate relevant results, forcing you to click various sections of results. Instead, Google just gives you a list of the best results, depending on what you’re searching for and regardless of what type of result it is; consequently, a Google search results list will include links to web pages, maps, images, videos and more, all in one list. This “smart firehose” model works well for Google because it gives good results and then trusts people to make the right choice.

Libraries, in comparison, are woefully behind in search. Catalog searches are almost always totally separate from research information, so in order to find good information about, say, diabetes, a user will need to do multiple searches; one for the library’s catalog and at least one for the research databases. Often, users will need to go into several different research databases and perform individual searches.

Library users need a smart firehose.

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