www.nickhodge.com

In 1993 I star­ted on the road to a Mas­ters in Busi­ness Admin­is­tra­tion. More com­monly known as an MBA.

Com­pleted in 2002, the MBA has given me a deeper under­stand­ing to the­or­ies driv­ing busi­ness. MBAs are designed to provide a broad under­stand­ing of how organ­isa­tions work. I found the most enlight­en­ing top­ics related to Legal stud­ies and Account­ing. I can now read a P&L, Cash­flow and Bal­ance Sheet with confidence.

Within a year of tak­ing a man­age­ment role after com­plet­ing my MBA (est cost $16,000) I had recouped my fees.

What an MBA does not provide is how to man­age people.

If destined for a man­age­ment role, people man­age­ment where you spend most of your time. Not read­ing con­tracts, deal­ing with paper­work and account­ing. Each of these are spe­cial­iz­a­tions that have strict reg­u­lat­ory con­trols and there­fore organ­isa­tions employ experts to ful­fill the roles.

People Man­age­ment can­not be left up to HR. All man­agers are people man­agers first and foremost.

I con­tend that People Man­age­ment: keep­ing your team motiv­ated, work­ing together and pro­duct­ive is the hard­est job.

Learn this, and you have done your MBA.

The day the Microsoft announces this, Red­Hat goes and does this.

Has the world turned upside down?

Good news and Bad news Chris. You are on the radar screen.

Thanks to those 8 people I don’t know who voted for me. +1 to my Mum!

Lach­lan, Ajay, Mar­tin, Rene and Russ should really be ahead of me. Oh, and where is Mark Pesce?

Per­sonal organ­isa­tional skills. I can not has. They left me some time ago.

Microsoft has released some research on the gender dif­fer­ences of To Do lists.

About 70% of people have a To Do list.

20% of males keep their To Do list in their head.

Mine is a com­bin­a­tion of email (whatever is still in there needs to be done) and my head (flex­ible rearrange­ment) and cal­en­dars (so I know where and when I should be)

If I spent my time man­aging my time I’d have no time to do stuff. And I’ve decided never to be so busy and stressed that I’ve got to have pages full of things to do. Been there, done that. Oth­ers are bet­ter equipped to deal with myri­ads of lists of things to do, del­eg­at­ing, meas­ur­ing and motiv­at­ing. I do, not to do.

Enjoy­ing life is not cross items off a list. Life is in the doing.

Par­ents have this little internal GPS that sorta– kinda– knows where their chil­dren are in phys­ical space.

Why should it be dif­fer­ent with online?

The excuse that “com­puters are too hard” and “the kids are far ahead of me” just doesn’t wash any­more. This is like put­ting your kids on an unmarked bus to nowhere and hop­ing they return phys­ic­ally and men­tally intact. You are abandon­ing your children.

Howard Rhein­gold, recently in Aus­tralia for edu­ca­tionau, and Heath at Catall­axy recenly com­men­ted on the wastage of tax­payer money on fil­ters and a fear-mongering piece of dead-trees.

A well writ­ten explan­a­tion of what is online, and how to explore the world together would have been bet­ter. Edu­ca­tion, not fear mon­ger­ing. The main­stream media has over­played the fear of the unknown and new. I’d like them to spend that time explain­ing Phish­ing and 419 scams.

Par­ents need to learn. In 10–20 years time, the best way of com­mu­nic­at­ing to their grandkids will be online.

Learn with your kids, par­ents. Know where they are online.

Up, to work. Park­ing easy as every­one is some­where else. Frank­arr on the internal TV sys­tem not doing LOLCATS. Speak­ing Shakespeare to pro­mote TechEd. Even when Frank­arr is not in the build­ing, his Hamlet-ian ghost haunts us.

On way to desk, speak to Jeffa about his two way cool posts: Win­dows Server 2008 and the new cool road­show demo hard­ware case.

I’m how­ever, I am still Lost in Microsoft. Res­ol­u­tion: Need cof­fee. Need Neil Finn

Get a way cool email from my very own high school Fer­ris Bueller: Paul Dalby. Not only was he smart, he was funny. Every­one wanted to be Dalby. Paul sends me a link to Sam de Brito’s blog post: “Fer­ris Bueller’s Day Off and the secret to life”

‘…life moves pretty fast… you don’t stop to look around once and while, you could miss it.’

Crowded House and Fer­ris Bueller, and we’re away.

This is not the darkside, the moss is just greener here.

Up at 6:00am to get ready for a long day. Osaka JR train to Osaka-shin. Catch the Shinkansen to Hiroshima via Shin-Kobe and other sta­tions that mix together. The Hodge’s almost broke the whole sys­tem by insert­ing our Suica cards into the wrong machines. Friendly JR staff kindly help us for gaijin out.

Just like the blur of the Shinkansen passing in the oppos­ite dir­ec­tion, with many many tun­nels. And also like yes­ter­day, all land us used. Fukuyama has a large cath­olic cathed­ral clearly vis­ible in the centre of the town.

Avril and Liam had fun feed­ing me unknown Japan­ese foods. They tasted awful. Do not want.

Off at Hiroshima, and a short walk to the Street Cars. Choice: Y600 for a day ticket or Y150 for each trip. A pic­ture of the rail­way sta­tion from August 1945 clearly demol­ished, over 1.2kms away from the hypo­centre brings you back to the real­ity why Hiroshima is now a city name every­one recognises.

The street car takes you on a short 20 minute ride into history.

The Atomic Dome is a silent, yet stark reminder of our his­tory. Our shared his­tory. Not a pleas­ant his­tory at all.

The build­ing, right next to the Aioi Bridge, is one of the only build­ings to sur­vive. The hypo­centre (the ground nearest the blast, the blast being only 580m from the ground). The ori­ginal iron girders are now inside in the Peace Museum. There is a slight twist against the force of the blast. Touch­ing items such as roof­ing tiles that have bubbled; bricks that have fused together: brings home the blast.

The city of Hiroshima has left the Atomic dome as a reminder to us all of the effects of the bomb. The whole area of the Peace Park was once a bust­ling part of the city centre. Now gone. Vari­ous peace organ­isa­tions pop­u­late the edges of the park, along with statues. These organ­isa­tions present the Japan­ese per­spect­ive on Amer­ican mil­it­ar­ism — and vastly dif­fer­ent to the sit­ting on the fence of the Peace Museum.

The museum shows how Hiroshima was the home of the 5^th Divi­sion (note: this divi­sion served in Java and Timor dur­ing WW2) and alter the HQ of the Second Gen­eral Army. The task­ing doc­u­ments from US Mil­it­ary com­mand do not men­tion the mil­it­ary nature of the target.

No mat­ter how man jus­ti­fies his hor­rific actions to other men: reli­gion, ideo­logy, per­ceived dif­fer­ences; the hor­rors of war are clearly on show at Hiroshima. It is neither shrine nor temple. It is a liv­ing reminder of what humans can do to oth­ers. No mat­ter the couch­ing in stra­tegic, polit­ical or tac­tical terms: war is most unwanted.

There are many clocks in the Peace Museum at stuck on 8:15am. The time that the bomb blast hit. Hiroshima remains staunchly anti-nuclear weapons to this day. And with clear justification.

The Peace Museum, with its pur­pose­ful high­light­ing of the effects on chil­dren: show­ing the inno­cents in the war; height­ens the par­ent in all of us.  Whilst the tech­no­logy of the bomb is shown with a men­acing scale rep­lica of the bomb sit­ting over a part of the dis­play — all seem to dis­reg­ard it. The after-effects are rightly shown.

Another mov­ing place to visit is the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Hall. It has a down­ward spiralling walk­way into a room. This room has a 360degree pic­ture of Hiroshima, post bomb. How­ever, this picture’s dark/light is made from the names of 140,000 (vari­ous places in Hiroshima report 350,000) vic­tims. It is a power­ful display.

On our long return to the Shinkansen sta­tion, we pass through many malls and shops. Strangely, a Yel­low Sub­mar­ine store selling B29 mod­els sits dir­ectly under­neath the hypocentre.

We point at menus, get more strange food; and return to Osaka via Shinkansen and JR. Hotel at 9.15pm.

Hiroshima is no mod­ern shrine. It’s name is the shrine.

Grow­ing up on a farm in coun­try South Aus­tralia, I remem­ber the smell of the work shed. The work shed is not where vehicles or anim­als were stored; it is where the weld­ing, banging, fix­ing, wir­ing and gen­eral repairs were made. The smells of oil, grease, pet­rol, arc weld­ing and sea­sons waf­ted out of the nooks and cran­nies also con­tain­ing bolts of unknown vintage.

Out the back of the shed, engines from long decom­mis­sioned cars and trucks stood idle under­neath the gum trees and galahs. In sum­mer, the shed was a cool refuge from the 35 degree heat; and in winter a shel­ter from the rain and wind.

Farm­ers fix all their own equip­ment. From pet­rol and diesel engines to swap­ping the shears on ploughs. Black­smith, engine mech­anic, elec­tronic tech­ni­cian, radio engin­eer: all bases were covered with a myriad of tools and bit logic­ally organ­ized in con­trolled chaos.

Sheds migrated to the back­yards of many sub­urban houses at the same time as the pop­u­la­tion moved to the quarter acre block. Albeit smal­ler than their coun­try cous­ins, the same smells of two-stroke pet­rol for the mower and a half-repaired wash­ing machine from Auntie Joyce usu­ally shared the same corner as a fam­ily of mice who immig­rated from next door. The pool shed con­tain­ing nox­ious chem­ic­als just didn’t suit the poor noses of the domestic mouse.

The shed is a place of sanc­tu­ary for the blokes of the fam­ily. A hid­den esky or bet­ter yet, a small fridge, con­tains a col­lec­tion of beers and after the barbe­que is turned off – the men retreat to the shed to talk about whatever men talk about. Their castle, the house, may have a spare room – but the kids have taken this over with their board games, or the wife has star­ted a home busi­ness and the racks of stock just don’t mix with a good yarn and stories.

Also in the shed, are what are called “weekend shed pro­jects”. Apart from Auntie Joyce’s wash­ing machine – there is a half-completed rock­ing horse – prom­ised to the kids for their 5^th birth­day, but never com­pleted; a ran­dom inven­tion for the garden that just didn’t work and a bicycle or two from the vari­ous lengths of the kids. Each of the bikes has some­thing wrong: miss­ing seat, flat tire or a handle bar that’s found its way into the wash­ing machine. These pro­jects are never com­pleted as there will always be time at retire­ment to pot­ter around the shed.

Sheds, and week­end shed pro­jects, still exist in the online age. The human ima­gin­a­tion has taken us blokes from paint­ing anim­als in a cave to sort­ing out the 6000 digital images we cap­tured on our last trip to North Queensland.

What is your week­end shed pro­ject? I’ll give you a tip: start now. Retire­ment is just too far away.

Robert Scoble, now earn­ing a liv­ing deal­ing with PR people in the ‘val­ley, under­stands the dif­fi­culty of blog­ging from within large organ­isa­tions. Robert refers to one of the 4000-or-so blog­gers at Microsoft: David Weller.

The best way to learn about an organ­isa­tion, its plans and products is with a search engine. Mar­ket­ing and product teams are abso­lutely scared wit­less of the trans­par­ency that blog­ging provides. It’s not evil­ness, it’s the fear of inform­ing the com­pet­i­tion. Espe­cially in the online world where the small is as power­ful as the large, and products live and die within a 24-hour cycle.

Mar­ket­ing and PR prefer a “write-only” inter­net. Sadly, the inter­net as we see it today is read and write, read and write.

Maybe Microsoft is not “uber­cool” because it’s not obscure enough. Too much trans­par­ency, too many eyes, too many mouths. Please don’t for­get for each one of these mouths, there is a match­ing set of ears. We are listen­ing too. Blog­gers write, and see the response, feed this back into the cycle of product development.

One won­ders about other organ­isa­tions, and if the “eyes” to “ears” ratio also applies. Read and Write.

Hav­ing grown up on a farm, I saw what my Dad did every day. I saw it grow; and helped around. I learnt how to read clouds and the sky to determ­ine the weather, and what the time was without a watch. From memory, at about 12 years old pretty much any­thing that could be driven on the farm I’d driven.

In 2000 on the Adobe Pho­toshop 6.0 Road­show, Liam and Avril atten­ded a night ses­sion of my “1980s Music Trivia Pho­toshop Tech­nical Ses­sion”. No sales and mar­ket­ing here; dis­cus­sion of JPEG vs GIF, arte­facts and Flock of Seagulls.

In the IT industry, it’s tough to show your kids what you do for a liv­ing. So hav­ing Liam and Avril attend was a major buzz.

Liam then real­ised what I did for a crust.

Now he is teach­ing me about this online stuff. Strange world!

So, how do you explain to your Mum what your day job is?

Read­ing this Social Media White Paper from the Aus­tralian Blog, Bet­ter Com­mu­nic­a­tion Res­ults will help out. Send it to your Mum, too.