Quote from Jimmy McDonough’s “Shakey”:

“The eighties found the country retreating into conservatism and gripped by economic woes. Musically, it was the decade of the mega-artist – Madonna, Prince, Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen. Figures who, however you feel about them, seemed a little less real and a lot more media-savvy. The black hole of MTV sucked everything through its vortex, demolishing the few barriers that remained between rock and other forms of mass media and erasing whatever tiny regional identity it had left.”

Lately some media savvy artists and fans have been using good relationship building skills and pre-fab software to form new social networks. These social networks are helping to redefine the regional identity of northern California music. Bay area sites include:

Pacific Noise
Deli Magazine SF
The Bay Bridged
BAGel Radio
Cool Waves SF
Mesh Magazine SF

These sites distribute MP3′s and podcasts, they’re involved in the net radio movement, they promote shows and create original video content, they’ve accomplished a lot in a short period of time. Expect them to do a lot more.

I’m sure there are others who deserve recognition too. Let me know who they are.

Update to a post from last month regarding RIAA’s legal actions. Two sites to be aware of:

* Electronic Frontier Foundation’s “EFF v. People”

* Ty Rogers and Ray Beckerman’s blawg “Recording Industry vs. The People”

Both sites offer a lot of information and many more helpful links.

FT’s Francisco Guerrero reported on the Aspen Institute’s clever Aspen Principles (PDF). The Aspen Principles are designed to help public corporations focus on creating long term value. The principles (and corresponding FT cover story) were published on June 18th. Both media pieces were accompanied by a strong endorsement from a substantial coalition of progressive minded business groups.

Aspen Institute calls the endorsers the “Corporate Values Strategy Group” (CVSG). The group includes leaders from a number of large scale brand name organizations.

The Aspen Principles story is an exceptional example of how powerful interests can employ a smart collaborative process to promote sane business practices.

From their principles document:

“CVSG members believe that favoring a long-term perspective will result in better business outcomes and a greater business contribution to the public good.”

It’s an impressive document. Consider how they frame their process:

“The Principles are not intended to address every issue of contemporary corporate governance, but instead are designed to drive quickly to action in areas that all parties agree are critically important. CVSG members share a deep concern about the quality of corporate governance and favor effective communication between and among executives, boards, auditors, and investors.”

I generally abstain from this type of obnoxiously well catered nonbinding corporate governance wonkery. Nevertheless and notwithstanding, the aforementioned principles are crafted well. Note the nonbinding exception to my anti-wonkery policy.

[tags]Aspen Principles, CVSG, growth management, FT[/tags]

Julia Moskin has conducted a brilliant and much needed study about the merits of cooking with cheap versus expensive wines (NYT). It’s a funny article and very well written:

“Next I braised duck legs in a nonvintage $5.99 tawny port that reminded me of long-abandoned Halloween candy, with hints of Skittles and off-brand caramels.”

Moskin is correct with her conclusions. It’s not necessary to cook with expensive drinking wines. Cheap table wines are fine for cooking.

We cooked with boxed Franzia wines at one of the fine kitchens where I spent my chef’s apprenticeship. These cheap wines were great for stocks, merinades, sauces, and deglazing. Often the taste of the wine is only sensible as a subtle acidic balance in flavor. With something so subtle, it turns out you can easily substitute a $6.00 bottle for a $36.00 bottle, and no one will notice the difference.

One other trick: leave the Franzia box in the walk-in and refill high class show bottles for use on the line. They’re easier to handle. Plus you never know when a customer will visit the back of the house.
[tags]Julia Moskin, cooking with wine[/tags]

MyTCorp Food Services will continue our role of providing innovative solutions with the successful implementation of a banana intelligence initiative. We’ll have all necessary hardware in place by the end of Q1 and kickoff a mandatory training workshop series soon thereafter. Remember to check the ProduceDashboard for RealTimeData and kindly refer all questions and comments to:

http://239486123.us.mytcorp.com/blogs/bananasinbrief/

[tags]banana hoarding, management consulting, problem solving[/tags]

Selection from “Writing Reports for Management Decisions” by David M. Robinson, Charles E. Merrill Publishing, 1969:

“How true is the oft-heard charge that too many business report writers simply do not know how to write effective reports? Casual observation of the poor quality of written reports in many organizations suggests that the charge may be totally supportable. Observation of reports in other organizations, however, may suggest that the charge is without a firm foundation. In all likelihood, enough observation may lead the observer to this conclusion: The difference between effective and ineffective reports usually can be traced to the differences between the effective and ineffective people who write the reports. The plain truth is that very often the people who do not know how to write reports have not been trained in the subject.”

Some people have complained in the recent past about the shortage of quality editing in new online media. Yet poorly edited content isn’t a new thing. Wherever you find people communicating in writing you’re going to find that some of them are better, and some worse. You’ll also find that good communication skills are as useful today as they’ve ever been. It still holds that training is helpful. Practice can be helpful too.

I know less than I should about formal grammatical structures and editing techniques. The results are occasionally charmless godawful wooden posts that read like outtakes from a corporate quality manual. Clunky language with no soul. Part of the permanent record. Shame.

And so I wonder, do managers need to understand the rules for relative pronoun use in restrictive vs. nonrestrictive clauses?

[tags]David M. Robinson, Writing Reports for Management Decisions[/tags]

There’s been a shift taking place in the world of diesel vehicles. We’re seeing a growth in awareness of certain technological advantages to diesel engines, especially as relates to fuel efficiency. Part of this change has come as a result of successful efforts to redefine diesel’s public image. Diesel isn’t only about farming equipment, supersized Cummins V12 grocerygetters, or radar jamming longhaul convoys.

Exhibit 1: Opel Eco Speedster (via Treehugger). Will GM bring these ultra-efficient diesel racers to the US?

Exhibit 2: Mercedes BLUETEC (via Jeff Nolan). Silicon Valley software executive Jeff Nolan makes a public request for this diesel engine technology to be made available in California. Link through Nolan’s site to check out the BLUETEC blog.

Exhibit 3: Diesel Technology Forum. An online community where corporate diesel enthusiasts share news and opinion including outlines of “each company’s greenhouse gas reduction activities, research related to their environmental initiatives and products, and memberships with environmental organizations and programs.”
[tags]diesel engine technology, diesel public image[/tags]

Couple months back I posted an idea related to data center cogeneration. It was part of the IBM innovation jam. Some people have come here looking for more information. I’m not an expert. If you are searching for that type of info, here are a few resources that might help you along.

First is an interesting forum thread about managing themodynamics in computers. I liked the suggestion that product designers might consider using the vertical plane of a laptop screen for heat dissapation. This seems like a likely future scenario, especially if designers could develop an approach that incorporated the CPU into the area behind the screen. There are pro’s and con’s to this approach, and computer designers ought to comment on the thread I linked to.

The simplicity of this design change is that using the vertical surface makes it easier for heat to rise and enter the surrounding airstream. It suggests that perhaps data center racks would benefit from physical reconfiguration to allow for better thermal management. Have they been designed this way already? Are they being designed to channel the heat to a specific location, or only “away from hot spots”? It seems like designers could aid the process by thinking about the next steps in the thermodynamic management chain.

I had the chance to explore this option recently as it relates to a power supply in a PV solar manufacturing site. The design of the system called for a power supply system to be located in a basement room, and the unanticipated amount of waste heat was causing problems for the designers. The concept now being considered is how components in the power supply can be designed to (A) reduce waste heat, (B) enable better heat dissipation, and (C) provide design features that facilitate waste heat management. The management concept is the part I’m most interested in now.

I’m beginning to understand now how a power supply transformer can be designed to channel and thereby better manage waste heat. It starts at the selection of raw materials, and extends beyond the transformer itself. I’d like to understand if similar thinking can be applied to server racks. Ideally there could be a system to manage waste heat at the processor level, server level, server rack level, room level, until it arrives at the heat exchanger or generator.

SearchDataCenter.com compiles information related to “The New Data Center: Strategies for Today and Tomorrow”. A search of their site for “cogeneration” yielded this 2005 article about cooling technologies by Luke Meredith. They suggest cogeneration as an option to reduce net energy expense by selling any excess power back to the local utility.

Quote from IT consultant Bob McFarlane:

“Overdone air conditioning in an attempt to cool isolated hot spots, by throwing air into a room, is an extremely inefficient and costly way of not accomplishing your goal, because in most cases it simply doesn’t work.”

The article goes on to discuss liquid cooling, fan boosting, and other technologies to mitigate server hot spots. These technologies tend to be optimized to move heat from one area (CPU) to another (heat exchanger). How would the design of these technologies change if the goal was not to dissapate the heat into the air, but to harness the heat energy into some type of power generator? Read the rest of this entry »

In 1920 Hermann Hesse published a collection of essays titled Blick ins Chaos (Glimpse of Chaos). I’ve been studying The Idiot recently, and below are few excerpts from Hesse’s essay on that work.

For those of you who are new to the Plan Resonate blog, this post is part of an ongoing series that looks at chaos from a management perspective.

Here’s Hesse (PDF):

“The “idiot,” I have said, is at times close to that boundary line where every idea and its opposite are recognized as true. That is, he has an intuition that no idea, no law, no character or order exists that is true and right except as seen from one pole – and for every pole there is an opposite pole. Settling upon a pole, adopting a position from which the world is viewed and arranged, this is the first principle of every order, every culture, every society and morality. Whoever feels, if only for an instant, that spirit and nature, good and evil are interchangeable is the most dangerous enemy of all forms of order. For that is where the opposite order is, and there chaos begins.”

“A way of thought that leads back to the unconscious, to chaos, destroys all forms of human organization. In conversation someone says to the “idiot” that he only speaks the truth, nothing more, and that this is deplorable. So it is. Everything is true, “Yes” can be said to anything. To bring order into the world, to attain goals, to make possible law, society, organization, culture, morality, “No” must be added to the “Yes,” the world must be separated into opposites, into good and evil. However arbitrary the first establishment of each “No,” each prohibition, may be, it becomes sacrosanct the instant it becomes law, produces results, becomes the foundation for a point of view and system of order.”

Hesse does not advocate chaos. His conceptualization polarizes chaos and organization to the extent that chaos is unlawful, immoral, and deplorable. This is one view, and it appears to draw heavily from the Laotse quote I presented earlier.

Absolute aversion to “classic” chaos doesn’t seem like a healthy management strategy. Management after all is a human endeavor. Work demands that we become comfortable with a certain amount of chaos while still holding our goals for higher states of organization. Sitting with the chaos is necessary. And then to really understand it we’d need a clearer description of what the U.S. business class refers to as chaos.

Ed. note: this small piece of research continues and it tends to get increasingly philosophical as it goes.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to Rebecca Blood for posting about the Visual Meaning project from Cornell. Here’s a link to Rebecca’s introduction to the project. Here’s a link to the project. And below are links to a couple of diagrams that I’m fond of.

My current favorite from the project:

http://martha.mannlib.cornell.edu/charts/?p=65

The power of the image is that it appears to be drawn with crayon. When I’m looking at it I can’t help but imagine the scholar working late in the evening, sitting at the kitchen table with a child, sharing crayons and ideas about life and biology. Funny how crayons can humanize science.

The question from Cornell was to identify a memorable diagram. The first that came to my mind was from Koshi. Koshi publishes a lot of his images at the Songbird blog:

http://www.songbirdnest.com/node/498

It’s a typical Wired type of diagram, and on it’s own it might not be that special; yet in the context of Koshi’s many other illustrations at the Songbird blog, it’s an impressive shift in style. His images are consciously cool, and super 2.0, mostly way too cute for my taste, and I still like them. Plus those guys are my neighbors and I hear great things about their software. Check out their webcast, it’s great, and it makes me want to start subscribing to MP3 blogs.

[tags]visualizing information, Cornell, songbird[/tags]