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.

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.

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 5th 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.

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.

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.

QuT has a Bachelor of Gaming and Entertainment. Coolness does not begin to explain this course. More than C++, it is also about the social aspects, history, design — the whole works.

Dr Ross Brown and Penny Drennan are really cool: passionate about their areas of expertise (and geeks from deep in their lives) — and pass on this to the next generation of games designers.

At the Hill and Knowlton “Surviving and thriving in the next decade — Technology Publishing” Breakfast Bytes this morning, a group of eminent panelists in picture above, from the left:

• James Tuckerman – Publishing Editor, AntHill. New relatively magazine about ideas, money and skills. Previously more print than online, but adding new online projects later in 2007.
• Heather Craven — Director of Marketing & Communications, Circulations Audit Board,
  Australian Circulation Bureau. Sub-committee researching digital.
• Brian Haverty – Editorial Director, CNET Networks Australia : Readers first, video and text style publishing.
• Tony Sarno – Editor, APC. Adding new online APC projects later in 2007.
• Peter Roberts – Managing Editor, BRW. Part of the Fairfax group, around since 1857. Noted that http://www.afr.com/ relaunched this week, and closed content model AFR Access continues.
• Andrew Kirk, Hill and Knowlton: Chair

The theme from the morning’s panel and Q&A is that “there will be a mixture of online and print” and that “online and print” readers are treated as different readers by the big-names. My perspective as a corporate online/citizen journalist is slightly different.

Like the quintessential investigative journalists: Woodward and Bernstein learnt: follow the money. In the above listing of panelists, notice where their stated investment is going. It’s online.

From a traditional publisher’s perspective, the business is about employing journalists to gather hidden facts, connect, analyse and write stories. People buy the paper (atoms) to read the stories and maybe their eyeballs will stray onto an advertisement. The marketing groups of companies buy these positions on the paper in the hope that the right eyeballs are enthralled by the product and/or service — and buy the product. The core of a publisher’s job is managing the compelling content such that a specific audience is created that advertisers value.

The web is no different, except that anyone can be a publisher, and outsource the revenue side (advertising) to Microsoft or Google. Large publishers, such as Fairfax, are unhappy that their expensive infrastructure is subverted online: Peter Roberts mentioned twice that Google made $200 million in Australia without investing in the content-side.

Peter Roberts also commented on one of his competitors, Alan Kohler’s Eureka Report, having only an online mechanism but successful business model. My perspective is that Alan’s business is successful as he is seen as a respected and independent entity within Australia’s financial community. Alan Kohler is a trusted brand.

The Gadget Guy, Peter Blasina’s question near the end summarised the morning for me: What does the future really look like? Each of the represented panelist’s organisations (maybe with the exception of cnet) have their business strategies weighted toward print, and the brand-value that print brings.

Peter Blasina comes at this with credibility as a true multi-channel brand and personality: print, online and TV — and surmised that the coming generation will change the face of the print publisher’s world. And they know it.

The future for publishers is where the eyeballs are. And eyeballs are not going to be in print, it is going to be online. Eyeballs stay longer where this is trusted value, and most importantly where there is a community. Reading a magazine is an almost high-latency feedback medium; where two-way interaction is slow if attempted at all.

Demographics of the eyeballs are changing to more online: younger readers being digitally native and older generations having more time to explore online; with more females than males desiring a community and interaction rather than passive acceptance; high bandwidth connection to permit TV, Radio and Print being equal online mediums.

Whilst I have no research to back this up, I am going to state it here. A common refrain from print publishers is that “Radio did not replace newspapers, and TV did not replace radio” as their backwards looking perspective on why online will not replace these old media. My argument is that the internet can replace the media styles: with web pages, podcasts and vidcasts. As Rupert Murdoch is quoted as saying: “Big media no longer controls the conversation” 

James Tuckerman knows his readers, and I think has a plan to create value in Anthill’s community. He understands the emotional connection that he has with his readership. James also stated there are “population lumps” at birth-years of 1949, 1974 and 1985. According to the ABS, there is another population lump in the 2005–7 range too. My suggestion is to watch Anthill as a publisher. They are starting a conversation with their community.

A Question about SecondLife, the current “craze” in Australia potentially due to a visit in meatspace by a Linden Labs persona, resulted in Tony Sarno saying that “many PBL management have visited SecondLife”. I fear it is because of the gambling dens rather than the community aspect. About 20% of the audience of largely PR and technology industry attendees had logged into SecondLife, of which most had logged in once.

So, in industry parlance, what is the tip-on for online? It’s the community. Community is the new Brand.

It seems my twittering on the Eurovision song contest has inspired Paul Foster to blog. Dude, I thought you were all over this European Union stuff!

New word: obscurantist. Used both by Paul Keating in relation to John Howard, and by Thomas Freidman in The World is Flat. The good news is that I’ve finished the book. It seems that both sides of Australian politics may be grokking the need to invest in education.

Lessons learnt: Stockholm Syndrome and Lima Syndrome. I realise the key variable here is time, and that the emotional hold works both ways.

Two key editorial comments in the last day put a religious slant on the use of technology: Howard Anderson in Computerworld IT in “A cynic rips open source” and Michael Singer in “Why doesn’t Microsoft Have a Cult Religion”. Microsoft, with thousands of bloggers and far-reaching impact, does not really foster a cult-like following. In Australia, it is called the Tall Poppy Syndrome.

The culture of information exchange with Microsoft is extremely open. Anti-obscurantist. It is difficult for cults to survive where knowledge is spread. Putting spin and machiavellian manipulation just doesn’t work. I think Microsoft is missing a cult following because it not obscure enough.

Maybe that is why the spinmeister Tony Blair and over-spun Scooch are the losers of the week. As quoted from Chris Saad over on the Particls blog: Rupert Murdoch on Media 2.0 ‘Media companies don’t control the conversation anymore’

Strangely, I wonder if his ecommerce will extend to cyber-enforcing.

URL to register: http://www.donotcall.gov.au/

As per the Government’s web site:

Will it stop all telemarketing calls?

Registering your telephone number on the Do Not Call Register will not stop all telemarketing calls to your number. There are some exemptions which enable certain public interest organisations to make telemarketing calls. Exempt organisations include charities, religious organisations and registered political parties. You can also still receive calls from market researchers.

Hmm. I’ll still get push-polling recorded calls from politicians, and people asking for “market research”. All I want is no fricken’ calls from people I don’t know, fullstop.

Now, the site is broken and melting down. Ooops, Coldfusion just went hot. Dear webmasters: always overestimate the stresses on your sites. (Fixed at around midday.)

I’m with Leslie: the mobile phone networks in Australia suk0Rz. Big time. The devices are like bricks in pretty colours and think the world revolves around some backend that locks you in via your goolies.

There is all this talk about open source software, open source protocols, open source content, open source file formats — yet we have no alternative and freedom in the airwaves. Ham radio isn’t going to cut it.

TCP/IP is going to be everywhere one day. It isn’t going to matter what device you have. You’ll be online streaming up and down “stuff”

Oh well, thanks to Twitteresce, It’s not so bad. (ooh, 0.6. Time to upgrade)

366 days ago today, my body reminded me of who is in control. I’ve told close friends. family and employers of what occurred; but I think its time to “go large”.

Slurred Speech

On the 25th April 2006 I woke up, and my face felt funny. Droopy, and numb. Having had a sinus infection for the previous few days, I thought it was just a side effect. The 25th of April is a holiday in Australia (ANZAC day) so resting was easy.

Technically, I was on sick leave from Adobe for a few days at the end of a 2 week holiday. There was something inside that said I really didn’t want to go back to work.

By the mid-afternoon, I was slurring my speech, and my left hand side of my face ached like nothing else, whilst also being numb. I couldn’t taste on the left side of my tongue, and there was a loud ringing in my left ear. Oh, and I was drooling from the left side of my mouth.

Avril saw me in the afternoon and was not happy. The first thought, especially with slurred speech is “stroke”. For some reason, I was in a haze of pain and had not really thought through what was going on.

A quick “home stroke test” showed that whatever it was, I hadn’t popped a brain vein. Yet. We went off to our local Doctor’s clinic, seeing the locum who was working on the public holiday. All I remember of that visit was “thanks for coming, you’ve made my day as Bell’s Palsy isn’t all that common.”

A quick course of Cortisone tablets on the 25th were administered to “shock” the body into recovery. Cortisone causes the adrenaline gland to go into overdrive. A nasty side effect is that it doesn’t cure the pain, just makes you stay awake to feel it. From memory, I slept for 4–6 hours in total over a 4–5 day period. sidenote: JFK was reported to have multiple cortisone injections per day, as he had Addison’s disease. How he got through daily, I do not know. This drug’s side effects are not good!

Further investigations with the Doctor on the 26th with a CAT scan showed that (a) I do have a brain and (b) no blood vein damage/clots could be found. So, no stroke.

The diagnosis is by a process of elimination. The pain on the side of my face indicated Bell’s Palsy.

Picture: taken 26th April 2006 by Liam. This is me attempting to smile normally, you will notice that your right (my left) is not moving up normally.

Bell’s Palsy

Bell’s Palsy is an infection of the Seventh nerve of the face. This nerve runs from the top of your cranium into your ear and across your cheek bone ending in your eyelids, nose, lips, tongue and chin.

Side effects from Bell’s Palsy are numerous: ringing in the ears, soreness/aching of the face, loss of sense of taste, loss of sense of feeling on the face, watery eye (cannot fully close the eye), inability to control the effected side of your mouth (you drool over yourself)

To others, the most visible side effect is the droopiness and “unbalancedness” of the face: your face drops on one side as the muscles no longer get instructions from that 7th nerve.

Now having suffered this, I look at faces much closer and can see the difference left-to-right of people’s face. Bell’s is more common in older people. A famous sufferer was George Clooney. Repeated questioning of medical professionals indicated I would not look like George after Bell’s. Bummer.

Bell’s Palsy and a bit of history is at the link. Well worth reading

Bell’s Palsy is the effect of a weakening on the VII (7th) Cranial Nerve. The most common to least common: viral infection of the nerve, and in my case it was a simple infection that “appeared” sooner with the pain at the top of my skull: which was thought to be a simple sinus infection.

It looks like there is going to be residual pain for some time: which is manageable.

Getting Better.

The best cure for Bell’s is complete rest. No stress, no work. And that’s what I did. It took 3 weeks for the physical visible side effects to go away — that is, my face muscles moved normally; my eye could shut and I could talk without slurring my speech.

However, the long term effects of Bell’s are still with me today: aching left-hand cheek and ringing in the left-hand ear. Over the past 12 months, these side effects have lessened to a point where I can live and work with them comfortably — and know the best way to manage the reduced energy levels that accompany the pain. The muscles on the left hand side of my face are wired differently. It takes a different “control” to smile normally, so I just smirk from the right side as it takes less effort. You cannot explain to people how its changed, it just has.

I returned to work in early June, having not been at work for April and May 2006. By mid-May, Avril and I had decided that to fully recover, decompress and not have further valves go “bang” in my body — it would be best to make a mid-life course correction.

Taking the Bell’s as an indicator of inner body health has probably added multiple years to the end of my life. Stress, a much used work, shows itself in funny ways. Essentially, I was a work-aholic in a job that I hated. Double bad.

The Work Thing

Not sleeping much during this episode, I had plenty of time to think. Thinking and time are a dangerous combination.

I was not happy with the job, position, stresses and many other things as Channel Sales Manager at Adobe. Even more dangerous, I wasn’t hungry enough — or had the energy level to do what needed to be done. I was out of juice. The company’s local culture was changing; and it just didn’t suit me.

Returning to work part-time, I offered Adobe my position back, and asked for a Leave of Absence for at least 6 months, unpaid and with no benefits so I could fully mentally and physically recover. Also, I would use this time to “re-educate” myself to go back to what I really loved: doing technical stuff with end-user customers.

Due to various “shenanigans” with Adobe HR, the Macromedia ‘merger’ and other legal guidance it was recommended that I resign. It was easier for Adobe this way.

So I resigned.

That felt so good.

Recovery

I didn’t feel 100% until mid-September-ish. That is, I could do a full-day without getting too tired. Now, if I go too hard for too many days — I get the same aches in the face; but know how to manage the pain and the associated tiredness.  Essentially, when I am not tired I work at 125+% to be 100% productive. Finding an appropriate, and less-stressed and probably less financially beneficial job was my goal.

By this time, Adobe had nothing on the plate for me fulltime, so I started looking elsewhere for stuff to do. A small gig for Adobe came, I took that and completed that contract.

What you will read in my posts of that time: I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my working life.

This “Enthusiast Evangelist” job at Microsoft appeared. Knowing Frank Arrigo through Mike Seyfang, thanks to http://linkedin.com, I applied and the rest is now history. It’s the first job that I saw that I really felt I wanted, and would be at >100% at.

So, that’s the story of the last 12 months. Some people heard that I was “seriously ill” and just experienced me not being at work all of a sudden. Speaking to these people since, it was if I had fallen off the face of the earth.

Not quite, just my face had fallen, that’s all.

I hope this post helps someone else in the future. There is life after, and with Bell’s. It will just be all different.

Update 2nd June 2007: strange cramp in the left-hand side of my neck/face today. Resulted in a slight dipping of the nerves around my mouth and soreness. The muscles seem out-of-place and aching along my cheek-bone.

I use your products daily. A Corporate Charge Card, a personal Gold Card and your travel services are excellent. I pay my bills on time, and use the online services to reduce the load on your call centre staff. Where I have called your staff, they’ve been helpful and solved my problem.

The online services help me correctly calculate the forex charges, and the ability to use my Amex points as Qantas Frequent Flyer is good too.

But for the love of god, please stop sending me junk mail attempting to sell me another “financial product”. And please stop calling me, on my unlisted phone number, attempting to cross sell me a product from this junk mail your latest tie-in. “I’d like to ensure you understand the information we’ve just sent you.”. Guess what. I chucked it out before reading it. Have been for 5 years.

And those people at shopping malls and airports who are pushing your credit card (For the 20th time, I do know the difference) on me is starting to tarnish your name. In fact, because of this pushiness, I refuse: repeat refuse to ever own one. Sometimes backing off might actually sell more.

Yours

Nick

Last night, Jeff McMullan did a standard “journalistic show” wrapped as debate on new technologies, and the impact on community on “Difference of Opinion: Growing Up in the Digital Age”. Captured inthe freshness of the moment, this Podcast captured by Chris Saad of Particls. Discussion boards on the topic are interesting to read.

Another essence is that people’s online and digital life is real. It is a part of generation-y identity. The base-level morals and ethics still apply; and probably more so in a world that is flat and always on.

• Life in Chippendale, Steven Noble.
• Roy Porter: Social History of London
• English: definition of virtual. Is virtual a pejorative? Maybe my language is a little too 1990’s

Next time I am in the UK, I reckon it’s time for a beer. My shout.

The top is a picture of Nick P Hodge near the US Whitehouse, and Nick J Hodge near the UK Big Ben in London. Nick P is from the UK, and I work for a US company.

(and thanks to Bruce Satchwell for prompting me to connect!)