Over the years we’ve seen some really good Project Management Offices, and we’ve seen a whole lot more which just don’t cut it.

If you’re the manager of a PMO or a concerned team member, what are some of the better traits and things to do?

1. Be clear about the services you provide – what are the key activities?
2. What value do you add to projects in the business?  Or are you just gatekeepers and form checkers?
3. How does the business engage you?
4. Do you provide Project/Program Managers to the business? Or do you provide coaching of the business Project/Program Managers?
5. Are you a center of Project Management Excellence?  Or do the Project Managers know more?
6. Get out from behind your desks and get out into project land.  The more successful PMOs keep a very high profile in the business.
7. How do you help with scope formulation, estimating, budgets, risks, issues, scheduling, KPI reporting, benefits realisation, config and document management?  Innovation and workshop facilitation? Requirements management and change management?
8. How clear are the processes for project managers?
9. How is your success measured?  Who measures it and how often?
10. How effective is your PMO Manager/Executive?  Do you have representation on the board or executive steering committee?
11. Do you have a complete view of current projects and programs being run?  Those being planned?  Or are there skunkworks in existence which may impact staff availability?
12. How can you assist in helping projects along the value chain and through the life cycle?
13. Could you describe in 2 sentences what you (personally) do and how you contribute to the business?

One of the documents considered around the Malmo meeting of ministers is the Smarter, Faster, Better eGovernment, 8th Benchmark Measurement report by Capgemini etc for the European Commission. Its available on the Capgemini site.

I’ve not taken much notice of the previous seven for the very fact that they are focused on central government so much and, as in the case of this report, not all the services being benchmarked are delivered centrally in the UK. In fact, in the UK we need to remember that 80% of interactions with the public are delivered by local government (according to one academic report I read recently!)

In the context and content of the report, Capgemini place the control for e-government in the UK to the Cabinet Office – I wonder where the ODPM were in 2000 – 2006, then the DCLG, or for that matter the 300 plus local authorities?

One thing the report has finally started to pick up on is citizen satisfaction and the need for feedback channels. Unfortunately, they seem to have got the impression that this is somehow a strongpoint in the UK, whilst it’s still really only in its infancy.

I’m not sure what the value of such a report is, apart from shoring up the egos of those ministers in the top few, or highlighting the dismal failure of those less successful, but I’d like to see another report examining those countries whose citizens are most satisfied with service delivery across the channels – now that would be interesting!

Ridin' the range and ropin' the headlines so you don't have to.

Your biweekly roundup of media coverage on the world of nonprofit and philanthropy (yee-ha).

Local:

Business Forum: Give Thanks and Help
(The Star Tribune) As the holiday season roles in, let’s not forget those Minnesotans in need.

Minnesotans Gave So Much, Now Givemn.org Needs Help
(Kare 11) The success of GiveMN.org’s recent “Give to the Max” day was truly unprecedented. Over 3,500 nonprofits received $13 million in donations through the GiveMN site. The sheer scale of this outpouring of generosity has sent GiveMN funders and staff scrambling to cover all transaction fees.

Northwest Area Foundation Awards $2M in Grants
(Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal) The Northwest Area Foundation has announced over $2 million in grants awarded to 14 different organizations. The focus of NWAF’s recent grants was on organizations helping reduce poverty and promote prosperity.

Partnerships Are Key in the Economic Recovery
(Albert Lea Tribune) Tim Penny, president and CEO of the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation, reflects on the importance of partnerships in fulfilling SMIF’s mission to invest in the region’s future growth.

National:

Opinion: Are Metrics Blinding Our Perception?
(The New York Times) Anand Giridharadas discusses Western society’s preoccupation with metrics to the exclusion of other methods of perceiving, and speculates about the costs of using only numerically quantifiable evidence to guide our decision making about everything from what music to buy, to what charities to give to.

Clicking for a Cause
(The New York Times) Using social media as a tool for increasing engagement and giving has been created a lot of excitement and skepticism in the nonprofit and grantmaking sector. This article has a nice overview of some of the successful efforts, as well as reflections from social media big wigs like Randi Zuckerberg.

Grappling with a Wealth of Guilt
(The Washington Post) Young heirs wrestle with the advantages and responsibilities of their inheritance, and the question of how to use their wealth for the greater good.

I was reading this article in the New York Times around Metrics and the increased role it appears to be playing in our daily lives.

Did you know that there’s a site to quantify your sexual performance? bedposted.com. And so on.

The article raises a few fundamental questions.

The first is whether the rise of Metrics means the death of Instinct. Or death of ‘feeling’. Will we no longer do things because we feel like as there is no data to support. I feel like a pizza this evening. Will there be a dashboard that maps calories, enjoyment, cost and create an index that recommends what I do? Will your affection for someone be measured by a weighted index of calls, gifts, holidays, flowers etc? And will this lead to frequent reviews based on the performance of the index?

The second question the article raises is whether organisation, or even government, action gets directed more towards actions that can be measured. Will investment decisions be governed by what data can be found to support it? In my industry ie advertising, we see this sort of ‘errant’ behaviour in the mad chase for awards. The only way to judge the creativity of an agency seems to be number of awards won. And, as I mentioned in my earlier post, the chase for awards sometimes puts the agency in conflict with its raison d’etre.

Good article, the one in NYT.

I just started reading the book The Diamond Cutter where the author in the introduction talks about how he took on a role in the company and his negotiation with the owners/managers was that he would deliver the numbers but he should be given a free hand on staffing, salaries etc. Many companies today operate with different versions of the same process. ie we care only about the numbers. Not how you get it. This is obviously flawed as there is no way of replicating success nor identifying faults when things go wrong.

A balanced scorecard is important to understand not just the end result but how the result was obtained.

I don’t have a recommendation on this but the insanity of ‘let’s put a score’ against everything should be tempered with ‘do we need to measure it’ and ‘is that the right thing to measure’. The responses will vary on a case by case basis and that is where human intervention and thought come into play. Else computers that can measure far better than us could run the world. If not already!

Want to end with this rather sad story of a teacher in the UK. I heard this from a teacher friend so it is true! Apparently in the UK they recently decided to score the teachers. So this teacher who was rated as one of the top teachers in the school and a student favourite was one of those that got scored too. Now apparently, her style, was to start her class with some sort of dramatic opening. Quite like what they tell you at presentation skills workshops. However, the person doing the scoring had in her chart that ‘Teachers must start with a greeting before they do any thing else’.  Hence the teacher got scored down and instead of excellent, she got a good. Frustrated with this, the teacher quit her job, to the great loss of the school and the students.

So measure what is relevant. Marry it with the results. Use your own judgement.

My neighbour is taking the GMAT tomorrow at 8a.m., so she’s waking up at 6 in the morning. I wouldn’t want to be her. Even if she gets to do management stuff and has a boyfriend waiting for her back home, I still wouldn’t like to be her. Figuring out what you want to do with your life is tough, and having everything in limbo is tough.

But then again, nobody would want to be me too. The metrics stuff isn’t the easiest thing on earth, and the ridiculously high failure rate? – I don’t even want to go there. Sigh, another Tuesday and 2.5 more weeks to the break. I wonder how is it that I can look forward to Friday so much when I’m just a student. After all, the weekend is just another round of massive catching up and doing problem sets.

On the brighter side of life (actually it was all gloomy and rainy today), EMS tracking says my gmarket stuff has arrived! I think this is the start of long long shopping streak!

A few weeks back, I shared a story about a meeting in which the accountable manager said that he would know if his current campaign was working once the final results were all in.  In other words, when the organization would have no ability to influence the outcome.

My last six posts were inspired by that incident:  first, a post about the importance of early warning indicators (also called leading indicators), and a five part series about easily-implemented tactics because it’s not too late to influence the outcome of a holiday fundraising campaign.  (Here’s a link to the first post, if you’re getting this by email.)

Besides evaluating progress against your own week-by-week 2008 results, here are some benchmarks that may help you to evaluate how well your holiday campaign is going – so you can decide whether or not to turn up the heat.  Remember my focus is always on small, local non-profits.  I’m drawing here on the M+R Strategic Services/NTEN report, “2009 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study” (available free online), and my own anecdotal experience from working with several non-profits as a pro bono consultant here in Sacramento:

• Email frequency:  According to the M+R report, organizations send 3.5 emails per month on average.  My own experience is that most small, local nonprofits assume they shouldn’t send more than one or two emails per month.  Yes, a few more people unsubscribe over the holidays, but there’s good evidence that non-profits will net more contributions by increasing email frequency some.  For email tips, read that first not-too-late post.
• Email open rates:  Open rates have been dropping over the past three years, according to M+R.  In 2008, the open rate for local nonprofit’s emails was 20%.  This number includes a wide variety of email content types:  appeals, advocacy and news.  Nationally, open rates are lower for fundraising appeals:  only 14%.   M+R points out that open rates are understated, “…open rates are a notoriously unreliable metric… because the technology that allows us to measure an ‘open’ is affected by factors — spam filters, preview panes, image-blocking — that have little to do with whether someone is actually opening (or reading) an email.”  Here in Sacramento, one organization that has been sending e-newsletters for over a year had an open rate of 23.8% on its last email.  Another, sending its first email, had an open rate of 21.1%.  Neither subject line was as compelling as it could have been, and we are hopeful to increase open rates for the next emailings.  The drop in email open rates over the past three years does not mean this tactic has run its course or is not worth the return; to the contrary, response rates are often higher and more immediate than snail mail appeals, not to mention the lower cost of the tactic.  And P.S., don’t panic.  Email open rates typically decline a little in December.   That may well be because the average number of email messages increased from 3.5 for the year to 5.5 in December, according to M+R’s 2008 data, possibly saturating some constituents.
• Click throughs: Click through rates have also been dropping, down to 2.4% according to the M+R metric.  Click  throughs to local nonprofits were a little higher, 4.7% in 2008.  But here’s where my experience is far different.  For the two organizations I mentioned above, the click through rates – that is, the percentage of people who followed a link to the home website or another website linked in the email – was a whopping 22.6% in one case and 19.6% in the other.  So there’s another argument for email:  links make it easy for people to investigate something further on the website and increase engagement, immediately.
• Email fundraising response rates: For local organizations, the national M+R benchmark is 0.09%.  Roughly speaking, if a small non-profit sends a email asking for donations to 1,000 constituents, and 10 people give a gift, it’s hit the national benchmark.  If no one gives, you should do some thinking about why.  But remember, this response rate is for emails with a clear “give money” kind of subject line and content.

The Oxfam case study on page 26 of the free downloadable M+R report is worth the read, and a good not-to-late nudge.

Numbers and research to bolster your position during your next client talk about ROI and that wacky, never-done-before digital idea your creative team desperately wants to do.

Click on this, “Digital Brand Experience Study” to see the full data which Razorfish has made available to all.

Users who engage with brands in digital experiences of almost any kind are more likely than not to turn into actual customers of those brands, according to new research from digital agency Razorfish.

And what’s most persuasive in getting them to turn from friend to buyer? Special deals.

Fully 64% of 1,000 “connected consumers” surveyed in August 2009 by the agency for its Digital Brand Experience Study said that they made their first purchase from a brand because of a digital experience, either with a Web site, a microsite, and mobile coupon or an e-mail communication.

For the study’s purposes, “connected consumers” were defined as those with certain characteristics:
- Broadband access
- Spent $150 online in the previous six months on travel, tickets, shopping, entertainment, etc.
- Visited a community site from Facebook or MySpace to YouTube or Yelp
- Consumed or created some form of digital media, including photos, videos, music or news

The Razorfish research finds high proportions of this group are very social online. For example, nearly 40% say they have friended a brand on a social network and 26% say they have followed one on Twitter.

Training with more metrics can be a god send and dagger in the heart at the same time.  There is a phrase that goes something like, “all things in moderation.”  It applies to your training metrics as well.

Max heart rate, average heart rate, distance, time, pace, speed, drill counts, elevation, power, and cadence are all wonderful to know and really make you feel like a numbers geek.  The point of this post is not to list the metrics, but to ask the question if it is possible to have one number to rate all athletes?

Whether you are a swimmer, a runner, a bungee jumper, or a skier, can we rate each type of athlete on a scale based on their fitness ability?  Maybe, maybe not as fitness ability is a subjective thing.  Endurance athletes would get their asses kicked by basketball players in a sprint competition.  On the other hand, the basketball players would run out of energy half way through a marathon and get their asses kicked by the endurance runners.

So, what constitutes fitness.  Maybe it is someone that excels the best at all sports.  A triathlete perhaps that can handle three different sports in, not only endurance, but speed as well.

VO2 max doesn’t really help us much.  It is really the body’s ability to perform within a certain range… so a variable of max or average heart rate multiplied by distance.  Sounds too simple and it probably is.

The assumptions will have to be made.  There are people like Joe Friel that is really great with training and calculating index figures.   Perhaps his calculations are too complex. heck the last time I tried to calculate my TSS (training stress score), I got so frustrated that it almost drove me insane.

The answer must be in the middle.  I hereby announce my quest to help the fitness industry find the ideal training metric that every athlete and human can be compared against.

Stay tuned…

Although apparently in Beta for several weeks, today was the first time I noticed the Intelligence Beta in my Google Analytics accounts.

Intelligence Beta

The Google Analytics Intelligence Beta can be set up to deliver Daily, Weekly, Monthly automatic and custom website performance Alerts to webmasters.

Intelligence Beta Daily Alerts

Although I haven’t yet set up any custom alerts, the Automatic Alerts self report signicant changes in visitor activity for the time period through either metrics or dimension.

At a minimum, the Google Analytics Intelligence Beta can servce as a rudimentary back up Alarm for web site up time and performance by enabling email alerts when visitor traffic drops 25% below a normal daily level.

I was reading a cool little piece on the AMEX OPEN Forum this morning and liked what I saw.  I enjoyed it mostly because it reinforces some similar feelings to mine with regard to Social Media, marketing with SM and branding.  It is important for people experienced in SM and marketing to help others that are new to marketing and social media tools to save their time when starting out.  Helping noobies avoid these mistakes helps us all avoid a lot of SM clutter.

The piece mirrors some of the advice within my Branding Series by covering goal setting via figuring out your needs (or brand), developing a plan (aka. a marketing strategy) to meet those goals and then figuring out how to use the tools of SM within your plan.  Finally, it talks about coming up with metrics to determine ROI on your investment, and, of course, executing on your plan.  Basic branding and marketing can help you to build your business by increasing sales, but it can also help prevent you from wasting time in SM without a foundation to build upon.

Also, take a look at the tips for avoiding daily SM distraction for you and your employees.

Also, here are the links to my Branding Series:
Tier 1 – Choosing your “Brand” – http://ow.ly/F2bS
Tier 2 – Marketing Strategy – http://ow.ly/F2bn
Tier 3 – Execution and ROI – http://ow.ly/F29v

Ryan Lucia
recruitment@voyagemtg.com

The recent tragedy at Fort Hood was only the latest in a series of crises that would likely have been prevented if the U.S. Government had adopted a logical holistic system design when I first began making the argument more than a decade ago. Since that time we’ve witnessed trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives lost; 9/11 and two wars, Katrina’s turf battles and incompatible communications, the mortgage bubble and global financial crisis, and now the Fort Hood massacre. The current trajectory of systems design and dysfunction isn’t sustainable.

While this particular tragedy is still under investigation, patterns are emerging that are very similar to previous crises, including 9/11. So let’s take a closer look at this event relative to what is currently possible with organizational design and state-of-the-art technology in order to better understand how to prevent the next crisis, for it will surely occur unless prevented by a logical holistic system design.

Crisis prevention by organizational design

It is true that some crises cannot be prevented, but it’s also true that most human caused crisis can be, particularly those that are systemic, including all cases cited here. In fact many tragedies are reported to have been prevented by intelligence agencies without our detailed knowledge, some of which would undoubtedly help inform our democracy if declassified, but we are still obviously missing preventable catastrophic events that we can ill afford to endure as a nation; economically or otherwise.

In each of the cases mentioned here, including Fort Hood, actionable evidence was available either on the Web or within the content of digital files residing on agency computer networks, but were not shared with the appropriate individuals or partners in the decision chain, usually due to careerism, turf protection, and justified fear of retribution.

It is difficult for leaders to understand that members in a hierarchical bureaucracy are often punished by micro social cultures for doing the right thing, such as sharing information or taking action to prevent tragedy. A good report from the field on 9/11 is Coleen Rowley’s Memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller in 2002.

Interests are not aligned: Denial does not a better system make

The reality is that interests of the individual and that of the organization are often not well aligned, so system designs need to include intentional realignment. However, in the case of the Fort Hood massacre, red flags were so prevalent that many of us are asking the logical question: How explicit must a threat be before the systems will require action?

Red flags were hidden from those who need to know

In the case of Fort Hood, as was the case with 9/11, the U.S. Government apparently again experienced a data firewall between agency cultures, supported in previous cases by fear-induced interpretation of regulations and defensive micro cultures within agencies. The Washington Post reported that an FBI-led task force was monitoring emails of the suspect Army Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, some of which were shared with a Washington field office, but were not shared with the military, to include apparently Hasan’s supervisors who clearly were in the camp of ‘need to know’. A properly designed architecture as described in our recent hypothetical use case scenario for the DHS would have automatically alerted those in the decision chain who were pre-determined to ‘need to know’ when certain phrases are present, including the base commander and security officer in this case who may have prevented the tragedy in a manner that did not compromise the subject’s rights to privacy or freedom of religion.

One such semantic phrase for example that should probably be immediately shared with base commanders and counter terrorist experts would be: “communicating with known terrorists”. No one in the chain of command, including criminal investigators, should be empowered to prevent that information from reaching those in a position to prevent tragedy, whether a national security threat or localized. Indeed, logic suggests that local surveillance might be necessary in order to define the threat, if any.

Crisis Prevention by Technical Design

Among the many academic disciplines influencing modern enterprise architecture are organizational management, computer science (CS), and predictive theory, which manifests in the modern work place environment as network design, computer languages, and mathematical algorithms. The potential effectiveness of these disciplines depends primarily on three dynamically interrelated factors:

1. Availability and quality of the data

The problem reflected in the decades-old phrase GIGO (garbage-in garbage-out) used in computer science influenced the holistic semantic design of Kyield more than any other factor. Rather than attacking the root of the problem at the source and investing in prevention, CS in general and consumer search in particular have teetered at the edge of chaos by combining clever algorithms and massive computing power to convert unstructured data (GI) to relevance (GO). While search and conversion of unstructured data has improved substantially in the past decade, it cannot compare to a logically designed QIQO (quality-in quality-out) system. Evolving to a QIQO environment from GIGO in organizational computing requires a holistic solution that is focused on prevention, improving work quality, and enhanced innovation.

It became apparent during several years of extensive applied R&D shortly after the commercialization of the Internet and WWW that embedding intelligence in files would result in far more functionality and efficiency, particularly within enterprise networks.

Without availability of high quality data that provides essential transparency while protecting privacy, the potential of enterprise computing is severely hampered, and in some cases has already become more of the problem than the solution. Once essential data is collected containing carefully tailored embedded intelligence, the task of preventing crises can be semi-automated.

2. Interoperability through data barriers

Unlike other industries in previous technical revolutions, the U.S. has generally embraced a laissez-faire approach to technical standards, resulting in proprietary standards that are leveraged for market share. Unfortunately, the result in technology has been much like that in finance, although largely invisible with costs of inoperability transferred to customers. Unfettered innovation can have tragic consequences. In the network era, inoperable systems have increasingly contributed to some of our greatest challenges; including crisis prevention, cost and inefficiencies in healthcare, and reduced innovation and productivity in the workplace. So in our case, even though voluntary standards are less than ideal, we’ve embraced the W3C standards for public transactions.

3. Data constructs and analytics

Once the essential data is collected, many of our current great challenges in organizations become within reach:

• Red flagging can be automated while protecting jobs and privacy.
• Realignment of interests between the individual and organization.
• Accountability and meritocracy is far more achievable.
• Original work by individuals and teams can be protected.
• Information overflow can finally be managed well.
• Creativity and innovation can be enhanced.
• Predictive and ‘what if?’ modeling /algorithms are much easier.
• Formerly essential unknowns about the org become known.
• The organization can become more adaptive to change.
• Cultural management and continuous learning is manifest.
• Rich visual metrics of formerly unknown patterns become routine.

Crisis Review

To his credit Secretary Gates has called for a system-wide review of the Fort Hood tragedy, which will coincide with reviews by the Army, White House, and Congress.

However, it would be irresponsible not to emphasize that the underlying stresses that likely contributed to this tragedy are directly related to failure in preventing previous crises. The result of previous failures to adopt logically functional systems is that our macro-fiscal situation in the U.S. is now so degraded that future prevention requires a much greater effort than would have been the case a decade ago.

Preventing systemic crises and related security (economic and warfare) are the foremost reasons for our government agencies to exist, and was the primary motivation for creating Kyield, even if the holistic design provides many other side benefits. The system problem has now been solved by design; but it has yet to be adopted.

In his new book, former vice-president Al Gore says we have in hand all the tools we need to solve the climate change crises, except the collective will to do anything about them. I respectfully beg to differ. Finding the will is not the problem. We already have it and we have it volumes sufficient to the task. Gore is also wrong in claiming we have the tools we need. There are entire classes of scientific and economic tools that we are missing. It is because we lack the right tools that we are unable to focus and channel our will for solutions.

The short version of my argument is that we don’t have scientific, universally uniform, and ubiquitously used metrics for measuring overall environmental quality. Because we don’t have the measures, we can’t and don’t effectively and efficiently manage our natural capital and environmental assets. Without metrics akin to barrels of oil or bushels of grain, we don’t have markets for matching environmental quality supply with demand for it.

Without tools as essential as metrics and markets, we can’t harness our existing will to improve our relationship with the earth. What will do we have, you might ask? Our collective will is expressed in the profit motive. What we need to do is set up metrics and markets to harness the energy of the profit motive. We need to create systems for trading natural capital (and human and social capital) so that we generate real wealth and drive happiness indexes north by realizing human potential, building thriving communities, and nurturing sustainable environments. The profit motive is not our enemy. It is the source of energy we need to deal with the multiple crises we face: human, social, and environmental.

Now for the long version of my argument. The problem is the problem. We restrict our options for solving problems by the way we frame the issue. Einstein supposedly pointed out that big problems, ones framed at a level where they define the entire paradigmatic orientation to a class of smaller, solvable problems, cannot be solved from within the paradigm they emerge from. We tend to define problems from the modern point of view, in a Cartesian fashion, from the point of view of a subject that is separate from, and in no way involved in the construction of, the objects it encounters. What I want to point out is that it is this Cartesian orientation to problem definition that is itself the problem!

Set aside your opinions on the basic issues concerning climate change, and think about what’s going on. It is undeniable that human activities are implicated in changes to the environment, and that we have to learn to manage our effects on the planet, or they will feed back on us in potentially harmful ways. This is the nature of life in the flux and flow of ecological relationships. It is one of many ways in which observers are inherently implicated in constructing what is observed, which is recognized as holding true as much in physics as in anthropology. These are uncontroversial facts, quite apart from any concern with climate change.

And what these feedback loops imply, as has indeed already been pointed out by generations of scholars and thinkers, is that there is no such thing as a pure Cartesian subject separate from its objects. We shape the things in our world, and those things, in turn, shape us. Subjects and objects are mutually implicated. All observers are participant observers. It is inevitable that what we do and think will change the world, and the new world will require us to think and act differently.

The plethora of environmental crises we face are therefore situated in a new non-Cartesian paradigm. It is a fundamental error of the first order to approach a non-Cartesian problem as though it were merely another variation on the usual kind of thing that can be addressed fairly well from the Cartesian dualist perspective. When we think, as Al Gore does, that we should be socialistically organizing resources for a centrally-organized 5-year plan of attack on environmental problems, we are missing the point.

This approach can be put to work only in terms of an authoritarian form of control directed by a dictatorial panel of experts, a military junta, or a self-appointed czar. Framed from a Cartesian point of view, no democratic process will ever compel voters to do what needs to be done. As was illustrated so dramatically by the fall of Communism, the socialistic manipulation of the concrete particulars of human, social, and environmental problems is unsustainable and socially irresponsible.

The fact is that non-Cartesian problems are only made worse when we try to solve them with Cartesian solutions. This is why non-Cartesian problems are often described by philosophers as “hermeneutic,” a word that derives from the name of the Greek god Hermes, known by the ancient Romans as Mercury. Like liquid mercury, non-Cartesian problems merely split and multiply when we grasp at them clumsily ignoring our own involvement in the creation of the problem.

So we can go on trying to herd cats or nail jello to the wall, but to be part of the solution and not just another way of being part of the problem, we need to set up systems of thought and behavior that are not internally inconsistent and self-contradictory. No matter what we do, if we keep on marshalling resources to attack problems in deliberate and systematic ignorance of this cross-paradigmatic dissonance, we can only make matters worse.

What else can be done? Just what does it mean to go with the flow of the mutual implication of subject and object? How can we explicitly model the problem to include the participant observer?

“The medium is the message,” to quote Marshall McLuhan. As was pointed out so humorously by Woody Allen in his film, “Annie Hall,” this expression is often repeated and often misunderstood. Though all can see that the news and entertainment media are ubiquitous, the meaning of our captivation with the media of creative expression has not yet been clarified sufficiently well for generalized understanding.

Significant advances have occurred in recent years, however. The media we are captivated by define and limit not only how and what we communicate, but who and what we have been, are, and could be. Depending on the quality of their transparency and of the biases that color them, media convey moral, human, and economic values of various kinds. The media through which we express values include every conceivable technology, from alphabets and phonemes to buildings, clothing, and food preparation, to musical instruments, and the creations of art and science.

Media are at the crux of the lesson we have to learn if we are to frame the problems of environmental management so that we are living solutions, not exacerbating problems. Media of all kinds, from pen and paper to television to the Internet, are fundamentally technical. In fact, media are the original technologies. The words “text,” “textile,” and “technique” all derive from the Greek “techne,” to make, and have even deeper roots in the Sanskrit “TEK.” Technology is our primary medium of shared meaning. Technology embodies the meanings we create and distributes their values across society and around the world.

What we need to do to effect non-Cartesian solutions then is to dwell deeply with our shared meanings and values, and find new ways of living them out, ways that embody the unity of subject and object, problem and solution. Nice rhetoric, you might say, but what does it mean? What is its practical consequence?

Put in academic terms, the pragmatic issue concerns the nature of technology and how it provides measures of reality serving as the media through which we experience the world in terms of shared universals. Primary sources here include the works of writers like Latour, Wise, Jasanoff, Knorr-Cetina, Schaffer, Ihde, Heidegger, and others cited in previous posts in this blog, and in my published work.

To do more to cut to the chase, we can start to think of language and technology as embodying problem-solution unities. Words and tools are situated within ecologies of relationships that define their meanings and functions. We need to be more sensitive to the way meanings and values become embodied in language and technologies, and then are distributed across far-flung networks to coordinate collectively harmonized thought and action.

To get right down to where this all is leading, though it is probably far from obvious, the appropriate non-Cartesian orientation to the problems of environmental management raised in Al Gore’s new book ultimately culminates in creation of the technical networks through which we distribute measures of what we want to manage. These networks comprise the ecologies of meaning and values that we inhabit. Not coincidentally, they also create the markets in which human, social, and natural capital can be efficiently and effectively traded.

When these networks and markets are created, finding the collective will to deal with the environmental challenges we face will be the least of our problems. The profit motive is an exceptionally strong force. What we ought to be doing is figuring out how to harness it as the engine of social change. This contrasts diametrically with Al Gore’s perspective, which treats the profit motive as part of the problem.

Technical networks of instruments traceable to reference standards, and markets for the exchange of the values measured by those instruments, are what we ought to be focusing on. The previous post in this blog proposes an Intangible Assets Metric System, and is related to earlier posts on the role of common currencies for the exchange of meaningful quantitative values in creating functional markets for human, social, and natural capital. What we need are these infrastructural supports for creating the efficient markets in which demand for environmental solutions can be matched the supply of those solutions. The failure of socialism is testimony to the futility of trying to man-handle our way forward by brute force.

Of course, I will continue living out my life’s mission and passion by continuing to elaborate variations, explanations, and demonstrations of how this could be so….

I don’t do pain, even in my imagination

In my last post I described an exercise for testing the depth of our positive attitude: write a novel about myself and make myself feel pain.  I tried it.  It was hard!  I’m glad to know that I am not a masochist.

But I learned a little.  I learned that we hate to lose our ‘role’ and that I hate to be around people who are just pretending to have a ‘role’.  From there, I found myself listing the HR procedures for increasing belonging and the metrics to show how much value these procedures add to a company.

A manifesto for HR!

My worst nightmare

My worst nightmare is being in zombie-land.  I hate being in places where people have become cynical and at best are just “deteriorating as slowly as possible“.

Of course, I don’t really hate it ~ I am terrified by it.  We are terrified by anything which assaults our personalities.  I’m an INTFJ or a shaper/completer-finisher/resource-investigator.  I don’t do incoherent, lazy, out-of-it.   I may be misguided.  I may be slothful about many things.  But I will always have a purpose.  If I am going to be rudderless, I do it on purpose!

Our nightmare is not to have a role

This was my insight from the novel-writing exercise.   We are all terrified by the prospect of not having a role, or not belonging to our communities and workplaces.  We are very sensitive to rejection.  Even the nuances of rejection send us into a flat spin.

Many things that can lead us to feel that we don’t belong

A lot of things can lead to a sudden feeling that we are out of place.

• Our general confidence
• Policies of the firm which signal who is in and who is out
• Cliques and favoritism
• Mismatches with our own hopes and dreams
• And storming – good old crises of confidence

Recraft your way to belonging

• Heaps has been written in the last few years about recrafting jobs to meet our personal needs.  A waitress tenderly sweeping the floor of the cafe with good music playing in the background is recrafting her job just as the young guy who also works there recrafts his job by trying to sweep as fast and vigorously as possible.  Both put their personal stamp and sense of meaning on the job.

• Poet David Whyte gives the same advice.  Begin with the ground, the hallowed ground on which you start.  Find meaning and belonging in what you already have and build from them.

• Positive psychologist,  Christopher Petersen calls expanding from what we have “building a bridge while we walk on it”.

• And for a good speech showing this is not just for me and you, but for the smartest and the brightest, listen to Dr Rao on Googletalk (YouTube).

Recrafting when we feel rejected

It is tough to recraft when we feel rejected though ~ for this reason.  We hate being rejected and we are loathe to admit that we have been excluded.

• One, it hurts.
• Two, we catastrophize and think that if this person rejects us, then everyone else will too.
• Three, we worry that if we dismiss rejection, we may dismiss feedback that will help us manage future relationships.
• Four, we catastrophize and think that if this relationship is not worthwhile, none will be worthwhile.
• Five, we worry that the information that we have been rejected will be used against us!

Rejection put us in an emotional spin and bullies know it!  They’ll use rejection to keep you off balance.

That said, how do you work on finding the good in situation when you are feeling lousy?

Recrafting when we we are afraid

I would say we should do three things.

• Make an objective assessment of the situation, as clinically as any staff officer in front of a paper map miles from the front line.
• As you are not sitting behind the lines and you are actually in the thick of things, do as you would in battle. Move yourself, everyone else and everything you need out of the firing line.
• Consider all the options including the options for negotiation and resumption of pleasantries.

This is really hard to do.  Believe me ~ being rejected by people like employers and teachers, on whom you depend, will frighten you almost as much as getting shot at.  In many ways it is worse.  You can allow yourself to be frightened by bullets as long as you act responsibly.  But to admit you are being “dissed” by your own side rips the guts out of you.

So you do the three steps: you take defensive actions, you try to be pleasant, you take time to make an objective assessment.  And guess what 90% of your energy is going into defending yourself from your own team!

Time spent on mending relationships in a firm

You are now being defensive and so is the next person and so is the next.  Guess what?  Anyone who wants to overrun this outfit, or take on this company, is going to win!

The firm is now in peril

This is my biggest nightmare.  It is quite clear once the spiral of defensive starts, the only thing allowing this firm to survive, is the incompetence of the opposition.  Anyone wanting to ‘take’ them would only have to distract the staff more for the whole ’shooting match’ to fall apart.

What is the alternative to a firm where we are all watching our backs?

Inevitably, things do wrong in companies.  People do bump against each other quite unwittingly.  Feelings are hurt.  If we want to be successful (survive),we need to establish is a working culture where people are able to deal with shock and surprise without passing it down the line.

How do we stop defensiveness spreading?

Good HR departments, generally in larger firms work hard to keep a positive atmosphere  (I did say good.)

• Good firms develop strong systems to minimize the management by whim. The reason they do that is to remove the objective threat to one’s employment that accompanies disagreements.  When there is no objective threat, then people can attend to mending their fences.  Good firms don’t allow people who are party to any “dissing”, in either direction, to take part in decisions about each others employment contract.

• Good firms go to great lengths to manage the assimilation process ~ known as on-boarding or induction. They work with people through the forming, storming and norming stages and then take a watching brief during the performing stage coming back in when there are changes in a team or when someone leaves.

• Good firms take some trouble to build diverse teams and to educate people why they need the very people who seem very different from themselves.  HR also takes some trouble to make sure that a team is not made of people who are too similar too each other and that the important bridging roles of team player and chairperson (the lazy roles!) are also present.

• Good firms insist that everyone has an active career plan which is reviewed with you openly by committees chaired by senior members of the firm.

• Good firms monitor diversity assiduously and keep a watchful eye on the formation of cliques.  HR is quick to intervene to minimize behavior that is rejecting and removes people’s attention from their own job.

• Good firms design jobs carefully making sure that is is easy to get down to work (autonomy), that growth is possible in the job visible (competence) and that jobs allow us express ourselves meaningfully (relationships).  Work has goals, feedback built into the task itself, adequate resources, dignity, respect, physical safety, contractual safety, mentors and coaches.  We don’t want people so confused about how their jobs fit into the wider whole that they cannot think straight.

This is what I do for a living

My job is to make a system so that we are able to work together even when we are rubbing up against people.  I will see the effects of my systems in several ways:

• People attempt to resolve difficulties without fear of their contracts.  People take the initiative; people don’t use the employment contract as a threat; negotiation of the employment contract is kept separate from other decisions; there is no fear in the organization or cynicism.
• The output of people does not vary significantly when they move from group to group.   Nor does the output vary between people with different demographic characteristics.
• The time taken for people to settle into the organization is known and the process is monitored and taken as seriously as quality on a Toyota assembly line.
• Everyone has an active career path, we are mindful of who should be seriously thinking about progressing onto other firms, and we treat their onward progression as part of our competitive edge.
• Deployment of individuals is not only done for and to individuals.  Teams are deployed so that they are balanced.  They are given time to bed down and their boundaries are respected.  Team work is not disrupted without investments being made in the time it takes to reestablish a team.
• We have designed each job so that it has clear goals measurable by the incumbent, they can see how well they are doing and they can step-into the job in an orderly way sharing their successes publicly with others.

HR Metrics

To monitor my system, I have metrics on each process.  I also monitor HR Costs/Sales in each business unit and over time.  When people have the time to attend to their jobs, I would see small improvements in the ratio.

Take for example, the HR Costs/Sales ratio in manufacturing which is usually around 10%.  If people are able to do their job only 10% better, then the ratio will increase from 10/100 to 9/100 or done the other way from 10/100 to 10/110 or a 1% in Gross Profit.  That is generally going to be “pure” profit ~ that is, it is money that comes available for new equipment, training and even medical insurance and holidays.

When we are making more money because we aren’t worrying, then that is good profit indeed!

We do what concerns us and we are terrified by its loss

So it seems making a role for everyone comes from greatest concern -that we are going to have to sit around faking it.  That  led me to think that everyone wants a meaningful role.  Not everyone wants to sit around making meaningful roles. Who would make the money if we did?  While other people are off making things and selling things, it is my job to create an organization where we can get along without needless friction.

An emotionally healthy company requires good systems.  We must be able to work without fear.  Problems must be refereed as they arise and early.  And we must trawl our systems looking for emotional bruising that is getting buried.  If we continue to hide the casual rejection of people “because we can”, it will eventually cost us our livelihood. While we are all protecting ourselves from each other, our opposition will be taking over our business.

Simply, I am doing my job when you are able to do yours and I do this job because I cannot imagine what it is like to live defensively all day long!

PS I still don’t think I did the exercise properly.  It is very hard to imagine pain ~ even on a make-believe character that looks, moves and talks just like us!

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• Do you live restlessly in the shadow of adrenaline-inducing goals? (flowingmotion.wordpress.com)

Let me be clear. I am not placing blame for all the healthcare problems in the United States at the doorstep of the advertising industry. There is plenty of blame to go round–insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, physicians, lawyers, patients and legislators all deserve a measure of scorn. That being said, there is no doubt that the practitioners of the dark art of marketing have contributed their fair share, and perhaps a bit more, to the crisis. I don’t wish to write a book on this subject, so allow me to shine a light on three particularly shameful points:

1. As a percentage of revenue, drug companies spend more on marketing than they do on R&D. That’s right. They spend more money on selling drugs they have already developed than they do trying to create new drugs that could treat or cure cancer, AIDS, arthritis, drug-resistant tuberculosis, etc. In fact, marketing their products has such a high ROI that they’re willing to spend billions of dollars paying criminal fines and penalties for marketing their drugs illegally. Yves Smith, in “Drug Marketing Continues to be Criminal” on the Naked Capitalism blog, details the fines by major pharmaceutical companies for repeatedly marketing their products to treat conditions for which they were not approved by the FDA: ”Since May 2004, Pfizer, Eli Lilly & Co., Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and four other drug companies have paid a total of $7 billion in fines and penalties. Six of the companies admitted in court that they marketed medicines for unapproved uses….” Fines of this size would destroy most companies. Drug companies just pass along the cost to consumers and shrug.

2. Television advertising for prescription drugs is indefensible. “Ask your doctor about Cialis.” Or Lipitor. Or Flomax. Or anything else. Who could possibly think this is a good idea, other than pharmaceutical companies and the healthcare advertising agencies who are lining their pockets by creating and running the ads? Essentially, we are encouraging janitors, secretaries, farmers and fry cooks to suggest prescription medicines for their own treatment. Last time I checked, one had to go to school for rather a long time to be qualified to do this. And so great is the pressure this advertising brings to bear on physicians, far too often they give patients what they ask for rather than what they need.

Please bring me in argument in favor of television advertising of prescription drugs. I’m begging you. Anyone who does will be flayed with ease and joy. I realize this is the bedrock of the gigantic healthcare advertising industry–one of the only areas that continues to generate enormous profits during tough economic times. It’s still wrong.

3. The practice of medicine in this country has been perverted by applying totally inappropriate marketing metrics to the healthcare industry. Today hospitals and doctors fret about “patient satisfaction.” What’s wrong with that? Plenty. We shouldn’t be measuring whether patients are satisfied. We should be measuring whether they’re healthy as a result of the treatment they receive. But aren’t these things related, you ask? Not necessarily. One reason healthcare costs are out of control in this country is that patients insist their doctors “do something” even when it won’t do any good. Doctors send patients with headaches CAT scans they don’t need, write them prescriptions for antibiotics they don’t need, and give them drugs they saw advertised on TV because they’ll be angry if they don’t. It all costs money, and we all pay.

What’s coming with health care “reform”–the quotation marks seem appropriate given what is in the 2,000-page bill currently in the Senate–that no one wants to talk about is doctors beginning to say no when their patients ask for treatments, drugs or diagnostics they don’t need. If we want to reduce costs, it is unavoidable. Universal healthcare will mean less healthcare. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, even though it will not result in higher patient satisfaction.

Viral Marketing is no easy feat. It’s very hard to predict what’s going to become viral. Actually naming anything “viral” even before it becomes viral is an oxymoron. So, if anyone tells you – I am working on a viral marketing project, do this for me, roll your eyes. “Viral” cannot be created, it happens.

But it’s not just art; it’s science as well. Most importantly, if you are working on a “viral” project, make sure you can track the metrics from the top of the funnel to the bottom so that you can show success or failure. Many marketers forget that and focus too much on the creativity part. Remember, even if you are not successful, it is important that you have some key learning from the campaign or else how will you objectify the investment.

Also, most of the time, marketers don’t think about the end-result. What’s the goal of the viral marketing campaign? Do you want to raise awareness? Generate Leads? Based on your goal, the vehicles you use and the tactics you implement will be different.

Let me walk you through a very successful campaign we did here at Cisco to illustrate that. The power of networking and communications solutions is not necessarily well known among small business (5 – 250 employees) decision makers. They know Cisco, but may not know what we do, and specifically, what we can do for them. The idea of the campaign was to raise awareness among small business customers around Cisco small business solutions and pique their interest to provide contact information so that we can nurture them and entice them to buy our solution in the future.

Our objectives were straightforward:

1. Educate small business decision makers on the power of networking technologies to enable their businesses to succeed using humor

2. Demonstrate that these robust capabilities are well within reach of a small business’ budget and resources

3. Build a scalable marketing program that would enable us and our partners to drive demand, close sales opportunities, and create broader awareness for Cisco as a solution provider for small business.

4. Generate interest and excitement in Cisco’s solutions where you find small businesses—not at conferences once or twice a year, but on-demand, on the web.

We posted the “Peace of Mind” viral video on multiple video syndication sites across the web like MetaCafe and YouTube. It was also posted on internal Cisco sites, Cisco.com and partner sites. The concept of the video was to relay using humor how the Cisco small business portfolio provides peace of mind with reliable and trustworthy networking solutions.

Small Businesses who watched the video were enticed to come to the “Peace of Mind” landing page to watch more such videos. We also used banner ads with the theme “Peace of Mind” and Google paid search to direct traffic to the landing page. In the landing page, we had two offers – one for customers interested to buy the networking solution and one who were still not ready to buy.The customers who were ready to buy Cisco solutions were qualified by a third party telemarketing firm and passed on to partners to be followed up. The customers who were not ready to buy subscribed to our monthly Innovators newsletters to be further nurtured.

The end-results were phenomenal:

• 500,000 video hits on metacafe.com; digged 113 times; 58 comments
• More than 200,000 video hits on Youtube; 33 comments
• More than a million video hits on the internet; syndicated in more than 100 sites and 25 languages
• More than 5000 additional visitors on Cisco.com in 3 months and 88% new traffic
• 5000 new “Innovators” Subscribers
• More than 200 networking solution leads in the US
• Featured on UK and France small business Web sites
• 64% more traffic on Latin America Web site and 27% more online leads

Some key takeaways from this campaign:

• It is very important that you think through the objective of the campaign
• You measure every single touch point with your audience
• The audience has a pay-off at the end of the video as well as the landing page
• The landing page has compelling offers to engage the audience
• You deliver on your promise and experience throughout the customer journey

In my opinion, more could be done to effect meaningful and effective health care reform with legislation like that proposed below, which has fewer than 3,800 words, than will ever be possible with the 2,074 pages in Congress’s current health care reform bill. What’s more, creating the infrastructure for human, social, and natural capital markets in this way would not only cost a tiny fraction of the projected $847 billion bill being debated, it would be an investment that would pay returns many times larger than the initial investment. See previous posts in this blog for more info on how and why this is so.

The draft legislation below is adapted from The Metric Conversion Act (Title 15 U.S.C. Chapter6 §(204) 205a – 205k). The viability of a metric system for human, social, and natural capital is indicated by the realized state of scientific rigor in the measurement of human, social, and natural capital (Fisher, 2009b). The need for such a system is indicated by the current crisis’s pointed economic demands that all forms of capital be unified within a common econometric and financial framework (Fisher, 2009a). It is equally demanded by the moral and philosophical requirements of fair play and meaningfulness (Fisher, 2004). The day is fast approaching when a metric system for intangible assets will be recognized as the urgent need that it is (Fisher, 2009c).

At some point in the near future, it can be expected that a table showing how to interpret the units of the Intangible Assets Metric System will be published in the Federal Register, just as the International System units have been.

For those unfamiliar with the state of the art in measurement, these may seem like wildly unrealistic goals. Those wondering how a reasonable person might arrive at such opinions are urged to consult other posts in this blog, and the references cited in them. The advantages of an intangible assets metric system for sustainable and socially responsible economic policies and practices are nothing short of profound. As Georg Rasch (1980, p. xx) said in reference to the stringent demands of his measurement models, “this is a huge challenge, but once the problem has been formulated it does seem possible to meet it.” We are less likely to attain goals that we do not actively formulate. In the spirit of John Dewey’s student, Chiang Mon-Lin, what we need are “wild hypotheses and careful tests.” There is no wilder idea with greater potential impact for redefining profit as the reduction of waste, and for thereby mitigating human suffering, sociopolitical discontent, and environmental degradation.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2004, October). Meaning and method in the social sciences. Human Studies: A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences, 27(4), 429-54.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2009a). Bringing human, social, and natural capital to life: Practical consequences and opportunities. In M. Wilson, K. Draney, N. Brown, B. Duckor (Eds.), Advances in Rasch Measurement, Vol. Two (p. in press). Maple Grove, MN: JAM Press.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2009b, November). Invariance and traceability for measures of human, social, and natural capital: Theory and application. Measurement (Elsevier), 42(9), 1278-1287.

Fisher, W. P. J. (2009c). NIST Critical national need idea White Paper: Metrological infrastructure for human, social, and natural capital (Tech. Rep.). New Orleans: LivingCapitalMetrics.com.

Rasch, G. (1980). Probabilistic models for some intelligence and attainment tests (Reprint, with Foreword and Afterword by B. D. Wright, Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Copenhagen, Denmark: Danmarks Paedogogiske Institut.

Title xx U.S.C. Chapter x §(100) 101a – 101k
METRIC SYSTEM FOR INTANGIBLE ASSETS DEVELOPMENT LAW
(Pub. L. 10-xxx, §x, Intangible Assets Metrics Development Act, July 25, 2010)

§ 100. New metric system development authorized. – A new national effort is hereby initiated throughout the United States of America focusing on building and realizing the benefits of a metric system for the intangible assets known as human, social, and natural capital.

§ 101a. Congressional statement of findings. – The Congress finds as follows:

(1) The United States was an original signatory party to the 1875 Treaty of the Meter (20 Stat. 709), which established the General Conference of Weights and Measures, the International Committee of Weights and Measures and the International Bureau of Weights and Measures.

(2) The use of metric measurement standards in the United States was authorized by law in 1866; with the Metric Conversion Act of 1975 this Nation established a national policy of committing itself and taking steps to facilitate conversion to the metric system.

(3) World trade is dependent on the metric system of measurement; continuing trends toward globalization demand expansion of the metric system to include vital economic resources shown scientifically measurable in research conducted over the last 80 years.

(4) Industries and consumers in the United States are often at competitive disadvantages when dealing in domestic and international markets because no existing systems for measuring intangible assets (human, social, and natural capital) are expressed in standardized, universally uniform metrics. The end result is that education, health care, human resource, and other markets are unable to reward quality; supply and demand are unmatched, consumers make decisions with no or insufficient information; and quality cannot be systematically improved.

(5) The inherent simplicity of the metric system of measurement and standardization of weights and measures has led to major cost savings in certain industries which have converted to that system; similar savings are expected to follow from the development and implementation of a metric system for intangible assets.

(6) The Federal Government has a responsibility to develop procedures and techniques to assist industry, especially small business, as it voluntarily seeks to adopt a new metric system of measurement for intangible assets that have always required management but which have not yet been uniformly and systematically measured.

(7) A new metric system of measurement for human, social, and natural capital can provide substantial advantages to the Federal Government in its own operations.

§ 101b. Declaration of policy. - It is therefore the declared policy of the United States-

(1) to support the development and implementation of a new metric system of intangibles assets measurement as the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce involving human, social, and natural capital;

(2) to require that each Federal agency,by a date certain and to the extent economically feasible by the end of the fiscal year 2011, use the new metric system of intangibles measurement in its procurements, grants, and other business-related activities, except to the extent that such use is impractical or is likely to cause significant inefficiencies or loss of markets to United States firms, such as when foreign competitors are producing competing products in non-metric units; and

(3) to seek out ways to increase understanding of the new metric system of intangibles measurement through educational information and guidance and in Government publications.

§ 101c. Definitions

As used in this subchapter, the term-

(1) ‘Board’ means the United States Intangible Assets Metrics Board, established under section 101d of this Title;

(2) ‘engineering standard’ means a standard which prescribes (A) a concise set of conditions and requirements that must be satisfied by a material, product, process, procedure, convention, or test method; and (B) the physical, functional, performance and/or conformance characteristics thereof;

(3) ‘international standard or recommendation’ means an engineering standard or recommendation which is (A) formulated and promulgated by an international organization and (B) recommended for adoption by individual nations as a national standard;

(4) ‘metric system of measurement’ means the International System of Units as established by the General Conference of Weights and Measures in 1960 and as interpreted or modified for the United States by the Secretary of Commerce;

(5) ‘full and open competition’ has the same meaning as defined in section 403 of title 41;

(6) ‘total installed price’ means the price of purchasing a product or material, trimming or otherwise altering some or all of that product or material, if necessary to fit with other building components,and then installing that product or material into a Federal facility;

(7) ‘hard-metric’ means measurement, design, and manufacture using the metric system of measurement, but does not include measurement,design, and manufacture using English system measurement units which are subsequently reexpressed in the metric system of measurement;

(8) ‘cost or pricing data or price analysis’ has the meaning given such terms in section 254b of title 41; and

(9) ‘Federal facility’ means any public building (as defined under section 612 of title 40) and shall include any Federal building or construction project: (A) on lands in the public domain;(B) on lands used in connection with Federal programs for agriculture research, recreation, and conservation programs; (C) on or used  in connection with river, harbor, flood control, reclamation, or power projects; (D) on or used in connection with housing and residential projects; (E) on military installations (including any fort, camp,post, naval training station, airfield, proving ground, military supply depot, military school, any similar facility of the Department of Defense); (F) on installations of the Department of Veterans Affairs used for hospital or domiciliary purposes; or (G) on lands used in connection with Federal prisons, but does not include (i)any Federal building or construction project the exclusion of which the President deems to be justified in the public interest, or (ii) any construction project or building owned or controlled by a State government, local government, Indian tribe, or any private entity.

§101d. United States Intangible Assets Metrics Board

(a) Establishment. – There is established, in accordance with this section, an independent instrumentality to be known as a United States Intangible Assets Metrics Board.

(b) Membership; Chairman; appointment of members; term of office;vacancies. – The Board shall consist of 17 individuals, as follows:

(1) the Chairman, a qualified individual who shall be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate;

(2) seventeen members who shall be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, on the following basis-

(A) one to be selected from lists of qualified individuals recommended by psychometricians and organizations representative of psychometric interests;

(B) one to be selected from lists of qualified individuals recommended by social scientists, the scientific and technical community, and organizations representative of social scientists and technicians;

(C) one to be selected from lists of qualified individuals recommended by environmental scientists, the scientific and technical community, and organizations representative of environmental scientists and technicians;

(D) one to be selected from a list of qualified individuals recommended by the National Association of Manufacturers or its successor;

(E) one to be selected from lists of qualified individuals recommended by the United States Chamber of Commerce, or its successor, retailers,and other commercial organizations;

(F) two to be selected from lists of qualified individuals recommended by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations or its successor, who are representative of workers directly affected by human capital metrics for health, skills, motivations, and productivity, and by other organizations representing labor;

(G) one to be selected from a list of qualified individuals recommended by the National Governors Conference, the National Council of State Legislatures, and organizations representative of State and local government;

(H) two to be selected from lists of qualified individuals recommended by organizations representative of small business;

(I) one to be selected from lists of qualified individuals representative of the human resource management industry;

(J) one to be selected from a list of qualified individuals recommended by the National Conference on Weights and Measures and standards making organizations;

(K) one to be selected from lists of qualified individuals recommended by educators, the educational community, and organizations representative of educational interests; and

(L) four at-large members to represent consumers and other interests deemed suitable by the President and who shall be qualified individuals.

As used in this subsection, each ‘list’ shall include the names of at least three individuals for each applicable vacancy. The terms of office of the members of the Board first taking office shall expire as designated by the President at the time of nomination; five at the end of the second year; five at the end of the fourth year;and six at the end of the sixth year. The term of office of the Chairman of such Board shall be six years. Members, including the Chairman, may be appointed to an additional term of six years, in the same manner as the original appointment. Successors to members of such Board shall be appointed in the same manner as the original members and shall have terms of office expiring six years from the date of expiration of the terms for which their predecessors were appointed. Any individual appointed to fill a vacancy occurring prior to the expiration of any term of office shall be appointed for the remainder of that term. Beginning 45 days after the date of incorporation of the Board, six members of such Board shall constitute a quorum for the transaction of any function of the Board.

(c) Compulsory powers. – Unless otherwise provided by the Congress, the Board shall have no compulsory powers.

(d) Termination. – The Board shall cease to exist when the Congress, by law, determines that its mission has been accomplished.

§101e. – Functions and powers of Board. - It shall be the function of the Board to devise and carry out a broad program of planning, coordination, and public education, consistent with other national policy and interests, with the aim of implementing the policy set forth in this subchapter. In carrying out this program,the Board shall-

(1) consult with and take into account the interests, views, and costs relevant to the inefficiencies that have long plagued the management of unmeasured forms of capital in United States commerce and industry, including small business; science; engineering; labor; education; consumers; government agencies at the Federal, State, and local level; nationally recognized standards developing and coordinating organizations; intangibles metrics development, planning and coordinating groups; and such other individuals or groups as are considered appropriate by the Board to the carrying out of the purposes of this subchapter. The Board shall take into account activities underway in the private and public sectors, so as not to duplicate unnecessarily such activities;

(2) provide for appropriate procedures whereby various groups,under the auspices of the Board, may formulate, and recommend or suggest, to the Board specific programs for coordinating intangibles metrics development in each industry and segment thereof and specific dimensions and configurations in the new metric system and in other measurements for general use. Such programs, dimensions, and configurations shall be consistent with (A) the needs, interests, and capabilities of manufacturers (large and small), suppliers, labor, consumers, educators,and other interested groups, and (B) the national interest;

(3) publicize, in an appropriate manner, proposed programs and provide an opportunity for interested groups or individuals to submit comments on such programs. At the request of interested parties, the Board, in its discretion, may hold hearings with regard to such programs. Such comments and hearings may be considered by the Board;

(4) encourage activities of standardization organizations to develop or revise, as rapidly as practicable, policy and IT standards based on the new intangibles metrics, and to take advantage of opportunities to promote (A) rationalization or simplification of relationships,(B) improvements of design, (C) reduction of size variations, (D) increases in economy, and (E) where feasible, the efficient use of energy and the conservation of natural resources;

(5) encourage the retention, in the new metric language of human, social, and natural capital standards, of those United States policy and IT designs, practices, and conventions that are internationally accepted or that embody superior technology;

(6) consult and cooperate with foreign governments, and intergovernmental organizations, in collaboration with the Department of State, and, through appropriate member bodies, with private international organizations, which are or become concerned with the encouragement and coordination of increased use of intangible assets metrics measurement units or policy and IT standards based on such units, or both. Such consultation shall include efforts, where appropriate, to gain international recognition for intangible assets metrics standards proposed by the United States;

(7) assist the public through information and education programs, to become familiar with the meaning and applicability of metric terms and measures in daily life. Such programs shall include -

(A) public information programs conducted by the Board, through the use of newspapers, magazines, radio, television, the Internet, social networking, and other media, and through talks before appropriate citizens’ groups, and trade and public organizations;

(B) counseling and consultation by the Secretary of Education; the Secretary of Labor; the Administrator of the Small Business Administration; and the Director of the National Science Foundation, with educational associations, State and local educational agencies, labor education committees, apprentice training committees, and other interested groups, in order to assure (i) that the new intangible assets metric system of measurement is included in the curriculum of the Nation’s educational institutions, and (ii) that teachers and other appropriate personnel are properly trained to teach the intangible assets metric system of measurement;

(C) consultation by the Secretary of Commerce with the National Conference of Weights and Measures in order to assure that State and local weights and measures officials are (i) appropriately involved in intangible assets metric development and adoption activities and (ii) assisted in their efforts to bring about timely amendments to weights and measures laws; and

(D) such other public information activities, by any Federal agency in support of this subchapter, as relate to the mission of suchagency;

(8) collect, analyze, and publish information about the extent of usage of intangible assets metric measurements; evaluate the costs and benefits of that usage; and make efforts to minimize any adverse effects resulting from increasing intangible assets metric usage;

(9) conduct research, including appropriate surveys; publish the results of such research; and recommend to the Congress and to the President such action as may be appropriate to deal with any unresolved problems, issues, and questions associated with intangible assets metric development, adoption, or usage, such problems, issues, and questions may include, but are not limited to, the impact on different occupations and industries, possible increased costs to consumers, the impact on society and the economy, effects on small business, the impact on the international trade position of the United States, the appropriateness of and methods for using procurement by the Federal Government as a means to effect development and adoption of the intangible assets metric system, the proper conversion or transition period in particular sectors of society, and consequences for national defense;

(10) submit annually to the Congress and to the President a report on its activities. Each such report shall include a status report on the development and adoption process as well as projections for continued progress in that process. Such report may include recommendations covering any legislation or executive action needed to implement the programs of development and adoption accepted by the Board. The Board may also submit such other reports and recommendations as it deems necessary;and

(11) submit to the President, not later than 1 year after the date of enactment of the Act making appropriations for carrying out this subchapter, a report on the need to provide an effective structural mechanism for adopting intangible assets metric units in statutes, regulations, and other laws at all levels of government, on a coordinated and timely basis, in response to voluntary programs adopted and implemented by various sectors of society under the auspices and with the approval of the Board. If the Board determines that such a need exists, such report shall include recommendations as to appropriate and effective means for establishing and implementing such a mechanism.

§101f. – Duties of Board. - In carrying out its duties under this subchapter, the Board may -

(1) establish an Executive Committee, and such other committees as it deems desirable;

(2) establish such committees and advisory panels as it deems necessary to work with the various sectors of the Nation’s economy and with Federal and State governmental agencies in the development and implementation of detailed development and adoption plans for those sectors. The Board may reimburse,to the extent authorized by law, the members of such committees;

(3) conduct hearings at such times and places as it deems appropriate;

(4) enter into contracts, in accordance with the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949, as amended (40 U.S.C. 471et seq.), with Federal or State agencies, private firms, institutions, and individuals for the conduct of research or surveys, the preparation of reports, and other activities necessary to the discharge of its duties;

(5) delegate to the Executive Director such authority as it deems advisable; and

(6) perform such other acts as may be necessary to carry out the duties prescribed by this subchapter.

§101g. – Gifts, donations and bequests to Board

(a) Authorization; deposit into Treasury and disbursement. – The Board may accept, hold, administer, and utilize gifts, donations,and bequests of property, both real and personal, and personal services, for the purpose of aiding or facilitating the work of the Board. Gifts and bequests of money, and the proceeds from the sale of any other property received as gifts or requests, shall be deposited in the Treasury in a separate fund and shall be disbursed upon order of the Board.

(b) Federal income, estate, and gift taxation of property. – For purpose of Federal income, estate, and gift taxation, property accepted under subsection (a) of this section shall be considered as a gift or bequest to or for the use of the United States.

(c) Investment of moneys; disbursement of accrued income. – Upon the request of the Board, the Secretary of the Treasury may invest and reinvest, in securities of the United States, any moneys contained in the fund authorized in subsection (a) of this section. Income accruing from such securities, and from any other property acceptedto the credit of such fund, shall be dispersed upon the order ofthe Board.

(d) Reversion to Treasury of unexpended funds. – Funds not expended by the Board as of the date when it ceases to exist, in accordance with section 105d(d) of this title, shall revert to the Treasury of the United States as of such date.

§101h. – Compensation of Board members; travel expenses.- Members of the Board who are not in the regular full-time employ of the United States shall, while attending meetings or conferences of the Board or while otherwise engaged in the business of the Board, be entitled to receive compensation at a rate not to exceed the daily rate currently being paid grade 18 of the General Schedule (under section 5332 of title 5), including travel time. While so serving, on the business of the Board away from their homes or regular places of business, members of the Board may be allowed travel expenses,including per diem in lieu of subsistence, as authorized by section5703 of title 5, for persons employed intermittently in the Government service. Payments under this section shall not render members of the Board employees or of the United States for any purpose. Members of the Board who are in the employ of the United States shall be entitled to travel expenses when traveling on the business of the Board.

§101i. – Personnel

(a) Executive Director; appointment; tenure; duties. – The Board shall appoint a qualified individual to serve as the Executive Director of the Board at the pleasure of the Board. The Executive Director, subject to the direction of the Board, shall be responsible to the Board and shall carry out the intangible assets metric development and adoption program, pursuant to the provisions of this subchapter and the policies established by the Board.

(b) Executive Director; salary. – The Executive Director of the Board shall serve full time and be subject to the provisions of chapter 51 and subchapter III of chapter 53 of title 5. The annual salary of the Executive Director shall not exceed level III of the Executive Schedule under section 5314 of such title.

(c) Staff personnel; appointment and compensation. – The Board may appoint and fix the compensation of such staff personnel as may be necessary to carry out the provisions of this subchapter in accordance with the provisions of chapter 51 and subchapter III of chapter 53 of title 5.

(d) Experts and consultants; employment and compensation; annual review of contracts. – The Board may (1) employ experts and consultants or organizations thereof, as authorized by section 3109 of title5; (2) compensate individuals so employed at rates not in excess of the rate currently being paid grade 18 of the General Schedule under section 5332 of such title, including travel time; and (3) may allow such individuals, while away from their homes or regular places of business, travel expenses (including per diem in lieu of subsistence) as authorized by section 5703 of such title 5 for persons in the Government service employed intermittently: Provided, however, that contracts for such temporary employment may be renewed annually.

§101j. – Financial and administrative services; sourceand reimbursement. - Financial and administrative services, including those related to budgeting, accounting, financial reporting, personnel, and procurement, and such other staff services as maybe needed by the Board, may be obtained by the Board from the Secretary of Commerce or other appropriate sources in the Federal Government. Payment for such services shall be made by the Board, in advance or by reimbursement, from funds of the Board in such amounts as may be agreed upon by the Chairman of the Board and by the source of the services being rendered.

§101k. – Authorization of appropriations; availability.- There are authorized to be appropriated such sums as may be necessary to carry out the provisions of this subchapter. Appropriations to carry out the provisions of this subchapter may remain available for obligation and expenditure for such period or periods as maybe specified in the Acts making such appropriations.

To be successful at generating leads for a complex sale, marketers can’t rely on one specific tactic but rather they need to leverage a portfolio of channels. To illustrate, take a look at the below map of what multi-modal lead generation looks like or what I call a “fully integrated lead generation campaign”.

It begins with a mindset that sees lead generation as an ongoing conversation – with human beings – that’s both multi-modal and iterative. This isn’t about doing random acts of marketing hoping something sticks.

Here are a few tips for creating a mult i-modal lead generation approach that will positively affect your bottom line:

View your Lead Generation Program as you would your financial portfolio. If you can’t measure channels or programs in terms of return on investment to the organization (leads generated, business closed, opportunities in the funnel) then the company should not be expected to invest in them. Maintain an assortment of researched and/or proven best-fit channels that can be drawn upon whenever needed.

Assess the number and mix of channels required. The model above shows a vast number of ways to generate leads for the complex sale. As you look over it, ask yourself a few questions: Which of these channels are we using? Which are our competitors using? Now think of what you know about your prospect’s buying process. Identify the gaps.

 Adopt a flexible and iterative approach.  Your program should allow marketing and sales to retrofit messages whenever a prospect’s position in the buying process changes. What worked yesterday may not work today. Complacency is not part of the marketing game. Well-performing or under-performing tactics should be quickly identified and dealt with accordingly. If a tactic fails to deliver, be ready to modify it or replace it.

Understand the synergies of various tactics for best ROI. Do you know how your tactics are performing? Are they working together in a complementary way to connect each step in the customer’s buying process? Try to detail a lead generation calendar for the year that maps out anticipated programs and tactics by month and quarter. Employ an effective closed-looped feedback system to structure information from the sales force than can be converted to actionable tactics. Collect sales feedback regularly and as rapidly as possible.

Not only do the disciplined integration and maintenance of a history of touches in the database aid relevancy, they open doors to tactical personalization.

Test and improve every tactic in your portfolio. The best way to maximize your budget resource is get more out of what you’re already doing. I don’t know a CEO or CFO that doesn’t already think this way, so why should marketers be any different? When was the last time you looked at your program and asked, “how can I make this a channel perform better?”  Are you testing how you can optimize your lead generation results? 

We know that in the complex sale most contacts do not become immediate leads so once dialogue has begun, other tactical modes should be set up to keep the conversation going. Remember, every touch should represent and communicate value. The tactics you choose should ultimately help your future customers (aka leads) form their opinions, directly or indirectly, as they proceed through the buying process.

Courtest Brian Carroll

The very interesting publication Article-Level Metrics and the Evolution of Scientific Impact Export by Cameron Neylon and Shirley Wu (PLoS Biol 2009(Nov); 7(11): e1000242 [Epub 2009(Nov 17)][PubMed Citation]) is receiving attention on FriendFeed [here] and Topsy [here] and has been bookmarked on Connotea [here].

There’s also a related blog post, A brief analysis of commenting at BMC, PLoS, and BMJ by Shirley Wu on her blog, I was lost but now I live here, November 18, 2009. Excerpt:

One of the many issues Cameron and I touched on was the problem of commenting. Most people probably aren’t aware of the problem; after all, commenting is alive and well on the internet in most places you look! But click over to PLoS or BioMed Central (BMC) and the comment sections are the digital equivalent of rolling tumbleweed.

Comment: A major long-term benefit of OA seems likely to be the development of a much more efficient and equitable system that will make full use of the potential of the Internet to facilitate the quality-filtration of new knowledge. The available set of relevant online resources continues to evolve rapidly.

This doesn’t have much to do with economics.  In formula 1 racing it’s hard to determine who the best driver is, because there is a significant difference between the cars.  The most talented driver might be driving a lousy car; the World Champion may simply have been driving the fastest car.  One thing you can look at is how a driver fares against his teammate.  But that doesn’t tell you how they all compare against each other.  What I’ve done, for the third year now, is analyze drivers’ change in position during races.  And here are the results:

My methodology has been streamlined since I first tried this.  Using information from Formula1.com, I’ve made a spreadsheet of the starting and finishing position for each driver, for each race.  I then make what I call an adjusted grid:  if a driver doesn’t finish a race he’s not counted, and those who started behind him are moved up.  For example, if you started in 10th place, but the driver in 5th place didn’t finish, I say that he didn’t start, and that you started in 9th place.

Every year the results have been interesting, but I still don’t know whether it’s a good measure of who the best driver is.  The biggest drawback is that the driver in first place has no opportunity to improve his position–and a driver who often starts at the front will probably have a lower score in this ranking because of that.

What I’d like to do now is take data from many years and do an analysis of that, the same way.  Then I’ll be able to average out some more car-based variance.  For example, having Fernando Alonso in a McLaren and in a Renault.