Corante

Leadership Secrets of the Data Fudgers

2006-05-17T03:11:32-05:00

Derek Lowe: "... at many drug companies, a new fad comes rolling along every few years - some new buzzword-laden scheme that promises to re-invent, re-do, re-invigorate and basically make things work like it says in the three-ring binder that comes with the off-site course where you learn it all.

But there's something holding these ideas back at a lot of science-driven organizations. The contempt that most of the scientific staff has for "modern management techniques" is hard to underestimate..."

Wanted: Hominids for Clinical Drug Trials

2006-05-09T09:32:40-05:00

Carl Zimmer: "In March, six men entered a London hospital to receive an experimental drug. The men were volunteers, and the drug--a potential treatment for arthritis and leukemia--appeared from animal tests to be safe. But within minutes of the first round of doses, there was trouble. The men complained of headaches, of intolerable heat and cold. The drug made one man's limbs turned blue, while another's head swelled like a balloon. Doctors gave them steroids to counteract the side-effect, and managed to save their lives. But several ended up on life support for a time, and they all may suffer lifelong disruptions to their immune systems. "How could such a devastating disaster come from a trial that followed all the rules, including tests on both mice and monkeys? According to a paper published today, the drug developers might have thought twice if they had known more about our evolutionary history..."

Jane Jacobs drew the map for online community

2006-05-01T15:02:12-05:00

Alexandra Samuel on Jane Jacob's death: "Jacobs' pioneering work in urban planning changed the way we think about cities -- and by redefining our ideas about how cities work as communities, she set the stage for the best thinking about online community today... These still-early days of online community-building amount to explorations of the potential that Jacobs identified: the potential for supporting real human relationships with virtual ecosystems. And in a wonderful tribute to Jacobs' continued influence, many of these experiments feed back into twenty-first century cities by providing new tools for supporting urban sustainability. I've bookmarked a few of my favorite examples on del.icio.us with the tag JaneJacobsArchive; I hope others will contribute their own examples of how the Internet can support the kinds of cities that Jacobs so eloquently advocated."

An adoption strategy for social software in enterprise

2006-03-13T08:16:54-05:00

Suw Charman, with advice on the active steps organizations must take to encourage widespread adoption of social software tools: "There are two ways to go about encouraging adoption of social software: fostering grassroots behaviours which develop organically from the bottom-up; or via top-down instruction. In general, the former is more desirable, as it will become self-sustaining over time - people become convinced of the tools' usefulness, demonstrate that to colleagues, and help develop usage in an ad hoc, social way in line with their actual needs... Top-down instruction may seem more appropriate in some environments, but may not be effective in the long-term as if the team leader stops actively making subordinates use the software, they may naturally give up if they have not become convinced of its usefulness..."

From later in the piece: "As well as supporting bottom-up adoption, it is beneficial for there to be top-down support, but that support has to be based on openness and transparency. Managers and team leaders must trust their staff to use the tools correctly, but they must also be forgiving if mistakes are made. There is always a learning curve associated with any new software, and some people find social software daunting because they are scared of what they perceive as a high risk of public humiliation."

A reading list for aspiring knowledge workers

2006-03-09T14:26:54-05:00

Jim McGee offers up a useful list of books he recommends for individual knowledge workers looking for tips and insights. Amongst the 25 books: Louis Rosenfeld's "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web"; Thomas Davenport's "Thinking for a Living"; Peter Block's "Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used"; Twyla Tharp's "The Creative Habit"; and Peter Vaill's "Learning As a Way of Being". Click here for the full list which includes descriptive endorsements of each book.

But At My Back I Always Hear. . .

2006-02-28T07:45:39-05:00

Derek Lowe on outsourcing in the drug discovery business: "Fifteen years ago, you could make a living banging out huge combichem libraries, but you can't do that any more. Ten years ago there were a lot of small outfits in the US that were doing custom synthesis, taking on all kinds of nickel-and-dime work, but if they've survived until now they've done it by branching out into things that the Indian and Chinese firms can't undercut them on. I think that the methyl-ethyl-butyl-futyl type of medicinal chemistry work is perhaps about to be loaded into the same hopper..."

Powerlaws: 2006 Dance Re-mix

2006-02-23T09:15:18-05:00

Clay Shirky revisits the controversial discussion of blog popularity and the power law effect and finds much the same: "The basic truth of such ranking systems is unchanged: for you to win, someone else must lose, because rank is a differential. Furthermore, in this particular system, the larger the blogsphere grows, the greater the inequality will be between being the most- and median-trafficked weblog." Adds Clay: "In February of 2009, I expect far more than the Top 10 to be dominated by professional, group efforts. The most popular blogs are no longer quirky or idiosyncratic individual voices; hard work by committed groups beats individuals working in their spare time for generating and keeping an audience."

Lack of Blogging Policies for Employees Causes Employers to Grow Three Heads

2006-02-22T08:41:19-05:00

Dennis Kennedy: "I've read a whole bunch of articles on the dire need for 'blogging policies' and I'm forced to conclude that I'm just a dumb country lawyer who doesn't get what all the brouhaha is and maybe my experience as a blogger really has not given me any insights into these issues. I'm also a little more dubious of surveys than most people seem to be. Maybe someone can help me understand why I can't understand why having or not having a 'blogging policy' is such a cause for alarm..."

The Penumbra Effect: Designing the Bird-Flu Crisis Experience

2006-02-17T09:56:40-05:00

Bob Jacobson: "Our experience of the bird flu crisis is the ultimate in poorly designed experiences. The popular press sporadically highlights infestations in places seemingly out of sight and mind: rural Turkey, jungle Nigeria, the vast eastern spaces of China. It tells us just enough to make us think we know about the threat of pandemic, when of course we don't... Politicians -- including President Bush in the U.S. -- assure us that everything's being taken care of, again providing partial information... On the other side of perception, public health professionals tell us that while the situation may not be critical, it needs tending, now. (But their megaphones tend to be smaller.) It's a confusing melange of opinions. .."

British Invasion: The Tesco Test

2006-02-10T13:45:50-05:00

: "Get ready for an acceleration of intelligence-driven retailing in America. Indeed, this is one area of business in which the real innovators in customer intelligence have been overseas as opposed to the U.S. Now, one key retail player -- UK-based Tesco PLC -- is coming to the states to compete against other retail powerhouses such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Costco Wholesale Corp..."

Two Barriers to Global Online Sales are Falling

2006-02-10T13:40:56-05:00

: "For an online retailer, going global isn't easy. That's because retailers have to figure out how to deliver products to consumers around the world cost effectively and how to process payments online while minimizing risk. Now this sounds simple enough -- just take credit cards and use FedEx -- except that international shipping isn't exactly cheap and not all customers around the world are comfortable using credit cards. But these two barriers appear to be falling..."

Western Union sings its last telegram: The lessons for the media industry

2006-02-09T09:18:28-05:00

, in an article noting that Western Union sent out its last telegram in late January, 150 years after it sent out its first: "The media industry was much like banking for the first seven decades of the 20th century, staid and predictable. Newspaper publishers knew exactly who their competitors were—other newspapers. Broadcasters knew that once they got their sinecure from the FCC they were set. Book publishers came and went with easy entry and exit, but with the 'security' of knowing that 'the boo'” as a format was forever. Hollywood studios understood that the bottleneck of distribution and marketing would keep the number of major competitors manageable... But all that is out the window (or, perhaps, Widows), much as is the old telegram."

The Wisdom of Parasites

2006-02-02T10:40:20-05:00

: "I collect tales of parasites the way some people collect Star Trek plates. And having filled an entire book with them, I thought I had pretty much collected the whole set. But until now I had somehow missed the gruesome glory that is a wasp named Ampulex compressa..."

Role Playing at Fatherhood

2006-01-27T17:54:48-05:00

compares RPG play to parenthood: “Now I’m not going to stand here and say that everyone who plays RPG’s should have eight children. But the connection is obvious - the planning, item management, and exploratory focus are totally congruent with the core of RPG design. At a superficial day-to-day level the process of managing life with a young child can be viewed as a game, a steady process of learning the ins and outs of the event/response pattern of the world around you..."

Readers Must Be Transparent, Too: Anonymity vs. Pseudonymity

2006-01-25T10:58:10-05:00

: "What I'm about to state might seem farfetched, but a decade of studying online news media leads me to fear that it is true: I fear that our industry has fallen under the spell of a techno-utopian fallacy that says we can foster a renaissance in journalism, civic involvement, and comity simply by implementing new-media technologies... What we need are policies and practices to govern how our readers utilize these online technologies."