The Professor's Notes

Update:  The Citizen, Bobby Maguire, was given permission to use a 33′ right of way.  In exchange for his use (not ownership) of 1/2 an acre of land, he has voluntarily given to the state 1 full acre, and $15,000.  More than fair, I would say.

I enjoy, no LOVE, my place at Rose Valley Lake in PA. Perhaps you have seen some of my photographs that I have posted here ocassionally, or visited my  sets on Flickr (around Rose Valley Lake and  creeks and rivers)  The beauty remains despite reasonable and rational development.

I love it so much that I am, In fact, disappointed every time I have to leave here to return to “Civilization.” That said, I also understand that private citizens have a right to use their private property in ways that they see fit, so long as the proposed uses are in line with the general guidelines and zoning of the area.

The “Friends of Rose Valley Lake” are stepping beyond the bounds of good citizens, as they are now seeking to block an individual from using his property in accordance with the zoning laws of the area. They are asserting that by granting this man access to his property (through the State fish commission property) he will somehow be violating the law.

They write on their homepage that:

” The ‘intent’ for Rose Valley Lake, was to ‘prevent developments . . . and retain the area in generally primitive conditions,’”

They then are somehow complaining that this citizen is willing to “trade with the PFBC one acre of land (generally inaccessible to the public) and $15,000 in exchange for an expanded farm lane right-of-way through Rose Valley Lake.”

Apparently the fact that he isn’t asking for a flat trade of one acre for another, but rather giving the state the land, AND $15,000, isn’t sufficient. Also, apparently the statement that the one acre of land is “generally inaccessible to the public” is meant to imply that is somehow a negative. Interesting in that many believe that in order to meet the objective of maintaining land in “generally primitive conditions” we should keep people from going there. (Remember, the biggest enemy of National Parks tends to be visitors to those same parks….)

One final comment from them. They are argue that the proposed trade would be for an “expanded farm lane right-of-way through Rose Valley Lake public lands in order to facilitate private development.”

Note this citizen isn’t proposing to DEVELOP public lands. He is simply seeking access to his privately owned property, so that he can exercise his legal right to develop his property as he sees fit, in accordance with the local zoning ordinances.

I ask–who are the unreasonable ones?

Also, they are requesting people sign their petition, but there exists no comparable avenue to elicit support for the land owner.  I have created a form, and would appreciate your taking the time to respond.  And for the record, I am interested in learning about BOTH sides of this.

I have many thoughts on digital textbooks, and you have all had an opportunity to read them here.   Apple has made their “big move” and I am both pleased to see digital moving forward, and also a bit concerned about what could become the “only” platform on campuses.

I actually presented a paper on the challenges of digital textbook pricing at the Western DSI (Decision Sciences Institute) conference in 2011.   You can read the paper here.  In that paper, I point out that by driving the logistics costs of moving, handling, and returning paper products out of the system, along with other costs such as maintaining a bookstore, one can drive the costs down to about (surprise!) $15.00 while maintaining the 2 year profits of the publisher. And by withdrawing the pressures of the resale market, the profits only go up from there.

First thoughts that led to that paper were written about here  and here.

Most recently I wrote about  consumer driven markets. Who should make the  choice? Digital textbooks are able separate the content from the medium, and allow flexibility–unless we are locked into a hardware platform.  I also wrote about this in this post.

I would welcome other thoughts on those posts and on the paper.

E-Book PDF: Open in New Window | Download

Amongst all the anger, hurt, and raw emotions surrounding the Jerry Sandusky and the toppling of the Penn State Leadership (including the forced removal of Joe Paterno), the “new” Administration came forward with a few promises.  You would expect a few of the promises. Integrity.  Honesty. And then… Transparency.  59 days later the new Coach was announced and the outrage and cries of treachery began–”So much for Transparency” OnwardState.com had as their headline.

The first two were aimed to address the issues at the heart of the charges being levied against Penn State in the scandal–that there was a cover-up, and that leaders of Penn State perjured themselves–lying in court rather than allegedly tell of the evils revealed to them.  The last one? Transparency?  Where did that one come from? Read the rest of this entry »

Transparency has been in the news not only with the occupy movement, but also with penn state following the big scandal.  But what is transparency?

Does transparency mean that you tell everyone everything you do and why do it?  bust you violate all levels of confidentiality?

It seems to me when people an organization promise transparency, they are acknowledging a problem and suggesting they can no longer continue doing things the way they have always been done.  I realize this is not always the case, in that sometimes we’re just promising to foster an environment of trust, but that trust is based on the concept of sharing information.

reach leads me to ask these questions is the reality of organizations promising transparency while then defending your actions as being consistent with how things have always been done. If things have always been done this way how is that being more transparent?  Or to put it another way, if you have always been transparent why promise transparency as if it is something new?

I welcome your thoughts on these questions.

Genesis 10 is a company that focuses on delivering performance and matching the right people to the right tasks for companies. They have also started an outreach effort to help returning Vets transition to the workforce. From a recent email:

On Veteran’s Day, Genesis10’s founder and CEO Harley Lippman and newly appointed Manager of Diversity and Veterans Relations, Richard Sanchez, were interviewed by MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan about the challenges American Veterans face transitioning their careers from the military to corporate America. Watch the clip here:

Working with Genesis10 means working with a company that is dedicated to serving our community where and when we can. Veterans Outreach is our latest initiative whereby Genesis10 will partner with clients to identify opportunities for U.S. Veterans. Using training and mentoring programs in place internally and through external partners, Genesis10’s Veterans Outreach will prepare and support Veterans during their career transition from the military to the private sector.

If you know a Veteran who may benefit from this program, we want to know. You or the Veteran can send a message directly to G10Veterans@genesis10.com. Please share this message with your network. We ask you to help us spread the word – because by working together we can connect and support the men and women who served to protect our freedoms with new career opportunities in business and technology.

I would encourage everyone to share this post, the video link, and the email address with anyone who is either a veteran, or knows a veteran–or knows someone who knows… (you get it–tell everyone!)

One of the challenges I face is figuring out how to share my various [work interests/hobbies] in a way that shows the relationship between them.  Especially as an academic, trying to show how my various apparently dissimilar research efforts were related posed a specific challenge.  Enter the concept of Venn Diagrams!

While perusing Gina Trapani’s blog from Smarterware.org, I saw she too struggles with sharing her varied, yet often inter-related, interests.

She writes:

It’s a tough question to answer, especially when you’re not working on a single thing. Last weekend at Foo Camp I failed miserably at explaining myself and my slash careers and how they all intersect. But at that same conference, I had the pleasure of attending a session by David Eaves, who eloquently explained that his goal is to apply his experience and training in negotiation skills to open source community management. On his site, he published a map of his past, current, and future work, and how those activities all interrelated. Cool!

When I read this I had one of those “DUH!” moments. It’s a brilliantly simple idea.  I like the way it forces some things into reductionism (you have to determine a fixed set of spheres–how many do you REALLY have?).  In addition, this approach can even help one find relationships between work that seemed “intuitively” there, but were never explicitly stated, even to oneself.  And finally, the approach David and Gina have both taken is to show how they are seeking the “greater good” (or a “Better world”) through their work.

The Venn Diagram David Eaves created is below.  To see the one Gina put together about her interests and work, go visit the link (really–you should!)  To see mine…. well, that may take a while longer.

Feel free to share yours here, or just put a link to yours in the comments!

My son wrote (using twitter) quite elegantly about not only the jubilation that he and 15,000 others felt Sunday night upon hearing that the US Navy Seals had finally “done in” Bin Laden, but also about why for his generation this is part of the defining moment.  He wrote, in part,

“For those questioning the appropriateness of the celebrations on Sunday night, especially at PSU, keep in mind that many of us were In middle school. Those were the most impressionable days of our lives. It completely changed our lives and views.”

He wrote much more, and I took the liberty of making it more readable, and posting it over at our joint blog, http://thefathersonchats.com.

Please, go read his thoughts, and share yours. These thoughts are the ones we need to share, and preserve.

I have been a proponent of the “Presentation 2.0″ style as a generic term and concept since attending the PodCamp Pittsburgh 2 in 2007.  In that PodCamp we heard from Chris Brogan who reminded us that the power of the presentation slides was to emphasize what the speaker was saying, not to take your attention off the speaker.

We don’t like PowerPoint and we don’t like presentations.  But as much as we want to blame the tool we find we cannot leave this crutch behind.  Perhaps it is because we do not see it as a tool that assists in our delivering content but rather as a surrogate, a stand-in,  so that we aren’t the ones being observed, but rather it is our slides.  Too often we expect (or are required) to have our presentations “stand alone” or worse “speak for themselves” (I say worse, because when given this mission it rarely actually means including the voice of the presenter, but rather that the written words must contain all the thoughts.)  Yes, we cannot leave the world of wordy slides.

Chris Brogan at the time reminded us of the importance of “big pictures” (real images) that convey the emotion, or the sense of the topic discussed, but that we as the speaker should deliver the content.  He also shared that we should remember that presentations are about the audience and our connecting with the audience.  If we are to connect, we cannot have them getting lost in reading the words (the many, many, often forced to be tiny, words…) on the screen.

Here is another take on just that very thing:

So my question for you is this:  What sort of presentation do you prefer? Do you want all the information laid out before you in verbose slides, ensuring you have all the information at your fingertips for later, or are you instead a person who learns best by listening and asborbing?

Leave your comments, or tweet me @SCMProfessor

I am once again about to talk at a conference about Twitter.  In this instance, I am asked to sit on a panel and discuss Twitter in the context of “Social Media an Exploration of its impact on Both the IMC ^{Context and Content” Please, read and share your feedback.}

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Twitter has proven itself to be an amazingly useful tool.  Remarkable considering it was only introduced at SXSW in 2007.  We have seen Twitter move from a discussion about “what I had for lunch”, into a tool used by people daily to find topics of interest to them usually because their friends view them to be interesting as well.  And recently-well, we have seen Twitter used as a tool for social and political change.

This is what’s most interesting about twitter.  Twitter is not one thing.  It’s not even a couple of things.  Twitter is an amorphic tool, that is shaped by the way each and every user will use that tool.  Individuals use twitter to share information or thoughts for the day.  Corporations use twitter to monitor what people are saying about their product and in the case of Comcast stepping in and fixing problems customers are having.  Some corporations are even using twitter as a marketing tool offering free products through drawings.  Many even blend twitter with face book to create a more socially aware, new media presence.

Herein lies the challenge: there is no quote user end quote of twitter.  There is no specific use case of twitter.  Where many predicted the death of twitter once britney spears and Ashton kutcher arrived we have seen twitter continue to thrive and grow.  What these doomsayers failed to understand is that while the arrival of these celebreties to Twitter may have removed them from the “most followed” ranks of Twitter, people were not forced to follow these people.

The magic of twitter is that we choose the people we follow.  We can even block the people we wish to have not follow us (sort of).  We create our own tribes as Seth Godin would say.  I personally have several tribes if you will that I view as my friends, or people I follow, on Twitter.

Here are my tribes:

1. Educators
2. Real people who use technology
3. Supply chain people
4. Family and friends
5. People who discuss politics (on all sides of an issue)

So what lessons can we take from this as marketing people looking at twitter?  I think you can walk away from twitter knowing that everyone there are seeks information that is of value to them.  Not everyone uses twitter in the same way, but everyone is there to gain value for themselves.  For some the value comes in being able to share information they have, while for others the value is simply seeing what people they respect are thinking on specific topics.  These range from political viewpoints, to the latest cool tech application, to experiences as a diabetic or even sharing a favorite restaurant.  We need to find the value that we provide to those who want to follow us.  What would make someone want to follow me on twitter, and how can I deliver that to them?

So as we step forward I suggest we keep in mind my following “main points of twitter”:

1. People follow you on twitter-so while it is transmit not everyone will receive
2. People follow you because you do or say something of interest.  Stay on topic!
3. Provide value in your tweets.  Give information, insights, links, or all of the above.
4. The twitter stream is just that-and it flows past people.  Don’t expect them to see everything you say
5. You can reach people that are not following you when engaging in popular topics.  Watch the hash tags.
6. Don’t hijack a hash tag!  Be relevant.

It’s TAX TIME again, and  now is the time we often think about making Charitable donations (to help with NEXT year.)  It’s funny how that works, right?

You might think about donating your computer to a school, or other charity. And when you do, you know the conventional advice, right? “Be sure to completely wipe your hard drive.”

(More after the break!) Read the rest of this entry »