Falling (back) in Love with the Future

I don’t know when I lost it, but I think I lost my way.  Somehow I lost my love of the future.  I became content to just be neophilic – to love the new.  If I was to put a date on it, I would say that some time in 2001, I stopped thinking about wonderful, possible, futures.

I was reading this free e-book: Life…what a concept!!!  Here’s the recipe:  Get a group of big-brained scientists who work at the leading edge of their diverse but related fields, put them on a farm retreat for a couple of days, give them license to speculate about the future, and publish the conversation.  It’s fascinating (and sometimes challenging) reading, and as I was reading it I realised I’d found my optimism again...welcome, old friend.

It’s published by Edge, and there’s much more on thier site to stimulate the grey matter.  Enjoy!

— Philip Greenwood

 

 

Tags: Life, Optimism, Future

Facebook Spam, Phishing? www.facebook.com.profile.php.id371233.cn

Breaking from the topic of Project Leadership for a moment, I was intrigued to receive this message on Facebook from a friend in London at 5:15 this morning:

lol i cant believe these pics got posted....its going to be BADDDD when her boyfriend sees these- http://www.facebook.com.profile.php.id.371233.cn

If it wasn’t from someone I trust and like to share the odd joke with, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near it.  But I did.  The link takes you to a page that requests you to log-in to Facebook – and when you do, you go to your home page.  Hmmm….peculiar.  So what’s it all about?

Unless you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ve probably already tried the link; I think it’s best to change your Facebook password.  This appears to be a spurious log-in page, and it’s possible that it is being used to capture log-ins and passwords – a technique known as known as Phishing.

When I changed my password, I was reminded that Facebook is willing to store credit card details – so there might be financial implications to this Phishing attempt.

If you receive this message from me now, please accept my apologies.  A new year, and a new form of web abuse.  Happy 2008!

— Philip Greenwood

Tags: Facebook, Spam, Phishing, Virus, Trojan

Computing Awards: IT Leader of the Year shortlist

The VNUNET.com shortlist is out, for IT Leader of the Year, and among it are many familiar names and organisations:

• Mark Akass from BT Global Financial Services;
• John Crane from National Australia Group Europe;
• Richard Cross from ITV;
• Rorie Devine from Betfair;
• my old colleague Benoit Laclau from EDF Energy;
• Gareth Nutt from Mouchel Parkman (I’ll have to look this up!);
• very unsurprisingly Al-Noor Ramji from BT;
• and Darrell Stein from Marks & Spencer.

Congratulations to all, and I’m sure you’ll now be expecting my call, as well as every other product and service vendor in the Kingdom.

I was intrigued by the synopsis paragraphs…each one incorporated a suggestion that the candidate had implemented a strategy and achieved results.  It implied, though without support, that the stategies were brilliant, and the results outstanding.

I found this curious, because this is a leadership award, and in only one case did the synopsis paragraphs discuss leadership behaviours – that of Rorie Devine – who runs ‘fortnightly “talkback” sessions to encourage feedback from engineers, and sends out a weekly email called “Rorie’s Ramblings” to share the ups and downs of a week as a CTO.’

Perhaps all the other candidates do these things too, and it’s VNUNET.com’s technical bias that is showing, but I’m pretty sure none of the brilliant strategies were fashioned, nor the outstanding results achieved, without the support of extensive project teams.  So why not talk about project leadership behaviours when you’re talking about IT leadership?

— Philip Greenwood

Tags: VNUNET, IT, Leadership, Shortlist

Project Management & Leadership Search Engine Enhancements

We’ve significantly enhanced the Google Custom Search Engine for Project Management & Leadership:  We’ve focussed it on content rich sites, and the number of selected sites is up to 46.

We’ve also been experimenting with how to get the best results from including or excluding general search results – trying to get bad matches from Wikipedia and other mega-sites out of the search results, while maintaining their valuable good matches!

The link for the search engine home page is here:

http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=011867071513363012666%3Atbng4tlbkso

The code for adding the search box to your web page is at:

http://gmodules.com/ig/creator?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fcoop/api/011867071513363012666/cse/tbng4tlbkso/gadget

If there are topics under-represented, or sites that you feel should be included, please leave a message in the comments.

— Philip Greenwood

 

Tags:  Google+Custom+Search, Search+Engine, Custom+Search+Engine, Project+Management, Project+Leadership

Explosive Changes in Open Source

Sourceforge.net has just launched a global marketplace  for buying and selling services for open source software.  Sourceforge.net is the biggest platform for managing open source projects, with over 100,000 projects, and 1,000,000 subscribers.  This is a big deal.

Say, for instance, you find a piece of software, but identify a piece of functionality it's lacking.  You can write up your requirements and get it added - that's nothing new.  But until now, you either had to code it yourself, or put it out to tender - usuallyon another web site, hoping and praying that someone out there has experience with the code base and the other necessary technologies to be able to fill your needs affordably.

What has changed?   Alignment.  You can now search for projects with services, and for services for projects.  As I write, the Marketplace is in beta testing.  Only one project has services, and no services are offered, but I can see this facility being absolutely exlposive.

Why explosive?  Because most of the licenses of open source software allow you to take the source code and adapt it, so long as you retain the freedoms and restrictions of the original license; you can branch the project into another project and you don't need the original author's permission (though it is nice to ask).  This means that ANYBODY can become a project leader - all you need is a vision of what needs doing, and an ability to communicate.  I believe that this will allow a much higher degree of "value based coding" - that is the pursuit of features according to their value, where previously much of the coding was technologist led.

How explosive?  It will change the nature of the Open Source movement; it will put a new lease of life into old, dusty, half forgotten projects that were created during some coder's slack period.  It will develop a whole new generation of software project leaders, who will utilise global networking tools to manage their ad-hoc teams.  And coders will finally start getting remunerated properly for their open source efforts.  Furthermore, if you change the nature of the Open Source software movement, through competitive forces, you also change the nature of the Closed Source software industry.

Well done Sourceforge.net; what a master stroke.

-- Philip Greenwood

Live Blog - Mindmanager 7

Be careful what you blog:  I mentioned Mindmanager, the mind mapping tool from MindJet on this site only a few days ago, and they promptly invited me to their product launch Webinar.  Actually I’m quite flattered because only around a thousand people visit this site – it’s no Trump University (currently the biggest business blog site) – yet.  I hope you find our content is a little more pithy though.

To try to boost our subscriber base a little, I thought I’d give live-blogging a go – to see if I could be the first blog to review the new version of MindManager.  My apologies in advance for any typos, grammatical flubs and non-sequiturs that this may cause.

52% Improved productivity

Most executives are rightly sceptical about the financial value of workshops, executive coaching, and leadership consulting. What is the real impact of an 'engaged' workforce on the bottom line? Recent research by respected U.S. survey house ISR provides some interesting answers...