On the Edge of Our Armchairs

Time has the reputation for being a clock. It's not. It's what you make it and the National Bureau of Economic Research has decided to make it disappear from recent memory.

They have collapsed all semblance of the time stamp continuum into the newly revised start date of our dark and stormy economic night. This leaves the media to fish through its Blackberry-world view for competing forecasts of a morning still seasons away. This leaves you and me to glint through our jaundiced eyes at what was happening a year before the Bureau had hindsight at its back:

* Investment houses that have since collapsed were lavishing their traders with larger-than-lifetime Christmas bonuses

* The Illinois AG inhaled the first public whiff of Countrywide a year ago next week

* Citigroup lost more money the last quarter of '07 than any team in the history of capitalism but the mullahs flush on $100 and rising oil are the rescue package of choice (back in the day)

No bailout package will go wide or deep enough to dig out the worthless debts piled at the fringes of our great ownership society. Could this new revisionist history be a step forward? Is it the prequel that spares the sequel? Prequels emancipate us from the present mess and what could be a worse sequel than a messy recession -- a really deep recession? Perhaps lengthening the unendurable by a year will make temporary the perils staring us down and make permanent the promises we've yet to keep -- and we will keep them, right?

I urge PE Obama to reconsider that the Bureau did not go far enough. What if the starting times could be pushed back to '06? Then we'd really be due for a rally. Two years? That's so ancient the Surge was just a glimmer on the horizon, as was an Obama candidacy.

It's as if the high-pressure tactics used to rush borrowers through their loan closings could be replayed ahead of the panicking herds. A positive ID could be made. The financial whizzes who engineered complex debt instruments would be stuck with owning the agreements. They couldn't honor them but there's nothing complicated about criminalizing their creative genius -- at least until gravity returns to the weightless and value returns to valuations.

What's the good in that? Look at the politics. The unimaginative middle class stops looking at its wanting to play by the rules as a serious mental flaw. That is the going price for justice. And it needs to be settled before a single innocent borrower plead for the same loan forgiveness as our competing titans of victimized industries.

As we lurch from the banks to the cars to the credit cards and the retailers we wonder what deadening balance can absorb another pendulum swing. A year ago we began to see "that the economy will pay a price for the speculative binge of the last two decades." What the last year has taught us is that the return of gravity doesn't usher in normalcy. It spirals us into a moribund orbit. Our shackles mire us in crisis mode --not moderation as Bernanke had hoped. The opposite of extreme is not moderation. It is the opposite extreme. The only way to achieve moderation is to subsume our excesses.

Say, we've got a nameless decade that's coming to a close a little more than a year from now? What would the National Bureau of Economic Research name the 00s ('uh-ohs") if we had 2010 hindsight today?

On the Edge of Our Armchairs

Time has the reputation for being a clock. It's not. It's what you make it and the National Bureau of Economic Research has decided to make it disappear from recent memory.

They have collapsed all semblance of the time stamp continuum into the newly revised start date of our dark and stormy economic night. This leaves the media to fish through its Blackberry-world view for competing forecasts of a morning still seasons away. This leaves you and me to glint through our jaundiced eyes at what was happening a year before the Bureau had hindsight at its back:

* Investment houses that have since collapsed were lavishing their traders with larger-than-lifetime Christmas bonuses

* The Illinois AG inhaled the first public whiff of Countrywide a year ago next week

* Citigroup lost more money the last quarter of '07 than any team in the history of capitalism but the mullahs flush on $100 and rising oil are the rescue package of choice (back in the day)

No bailout package will go wide or deep enough to dig out the worthless debts piled at the fringes of our great ownership society. Could this new revisionist history be a step forward? Is it the prequel that spares the sequel? Prequels emancipate us from the present mess and what could be a worse sequel than a messy recession -- a really deep recession? Perhaps lengthening the unendurable by a year will make temporary the perils staring us down and make permanent the promises we've yet to keep -- and we will keep them, right?

I urge PE Obama to reconsider that the Bureau did not go far enough. What if the starting times could be pushed back to '06? Then we'd really be due for a rally. Two years? That's so ancient the Surge was just a glimmer on the horizon, as was an Obama candidacy.

It's as if the high-pressure tactics used to rush borrowers through their loan closings could be replayed ahead of the panicking herds. A positive ID could be made. The financial whizzes who engineered complex debt instruments would be stuck with owning the agreements. They couldn't honor them but there's nothing complicated about criminalizing their creative genius -- at least until gravity returns to the weightless and value returns to valuations.

What's the good in that? Look at the politics. The unimaginative middle class stops looking at its wanting to play by the rules as a serious mental flaw. That is the going price for justice. And it needs to be settled before a single innocent borrower plead for the same loan forgiveness as our competing titans of victimized industries.

As we lurch from the banks to the cars to the credit cards and the retailers we wonder what deadening balance can absorb another pendulum swing. A year ago we began to see "that the economy will pay a price for the speculative binge of the last two decades." What the last year has taught us is that the return of gravity doesn't usher in normalcy. It spirals us into a moribund orbit. Our shackles mire us in crisis mode --not moderation as Bernanke had hoped. The opposite of extreme is not moderation. It is the opposite extreme. The only way to achieve moderation is to subsume our excesses.

Say, we've got a nameless decade that's coming to a close a little more than a year from now? What would the National Bureau of Economic Research name the 00s ('uh-ohs") if we had 2010 hindsight today?

The Call and Response of a Content-based Architecture

One of the prime points I'll raise tomorrow at the Boston Gilbane Conference: Where Content Management Meets Social Media is the garbage-in, garbage-out notion that post-Google content production is really all users about picking through the information scraps for that one unsuspecting gift of credible, airtight, leverage-worthy understanding.

It's about the yard sale of search results where my precious time is suddenly not billable because I'm no longer on the clock -- I'm on Google and anything that turns up is free and clear or I turn it down.

The idea that a corporate intranet could become the pleasure center of a redemptive search ain't gonna happen because of one vendor over the next or because our corporate intranets are rebranded as incubators for the soon-to-be monetized grand designs of our wannabe thought leadership elites. No one slaves over their best strategic thinking on a corporate intranet. No one honestly believes that the answer to better content is to pay a premium for it (or any fee at all).

The ultimate triumph over unlimited content in a time-sensitive world is to hook-up the content pipes to the quantifiable demand for knowledge (information worth putting to use). Do that and that surplus of supply can be a blessing. Of course that means understanding what your customer need to inform their decision-making. Does that mean invasive surveys? Does that mean reading the long tail of your search logs in dubious hope that a pattern emerges? Does that even mean that your users know what they want (in advance of seeing it)?

Here are a few pragmatic pointers:

1. Do that hookup maneuver in your metadata structure. Connect your taxonomy to how people complete their work (actions) -- not some unwinnable debate about what to call things (nouns).

2. Make your search tool do the heavy user lifting. They should not have to guess about where their next productive experience is coming from. Conversely you must be vigilant with your providers to make sure they are sensitive about where they locate their content -- otherwise your users have to care too (they're probably more interested in telling their life stories to Survey Monkey).

3. Create one dignified and significant workflow where an important milestone triggers the telling of those teachable moments that keep people like me employed as KM professionals. Maybe it's dissecting a win-loss. Perhaps it's an illustrious use case. Either way it's an instructive lesson about how to model success and draw important distinctions that were not obvious prior to when the story takes place.

4. Include in the storytelling the other relevant links and deliverables that document the life of the project in question. That's how to grow the content base in step with the knowledge deficits you're trying to balance.

The Call and Response of a Content-based Architecture

One of the prime points I'll raise tomorrow at the Boston Gilbane Conference: Where Content Management Meets Social Media is the garbage-in, garbage-out notion that post-Google content production is really all users about picking through the information scraps for that one unsuspecting gift of credible, airtight, leverage-worthy understanding.

It's about the yard sale of search results where my precious time is suddenly not billable because I'm no longer on the clock -- I'm on Google and anything that turns up is free and clear or I turn it down.

The idea that a corporate intranet could become the pleasure center of a redemptive search ain't gonna happen because of one vendor over the next or because our corporate intranets are rebranded as incubators for the soon-to-be monetized grand designs of our wannabe thought leadership elites. No one slaves over their best strategic thinking on a corporate intranet. No one honestly believes that the answer to better content is to pay a premium for it (or any fee at all).

The ultimate triumph over unlimited content in a time-sensitive world is to hook-up the content pipes to the quantifiable demand for knowledge (information worth putting to use). Do that and that surplus of supply can be a blessing. Of course that means understanding what your customer need to inform their decision-making. Does that mean invasive surveys? Does that mean reading the long tail of your search logs in dubious hope that a pattern emerges? Does that even mean that your users know what they want (in advance of seeing it)?

Here are a few pragmatic pointers:

1. Do that hookup maneuver in your metadata structure. Connect your taxonomy to how people complete their work (actions) -- not some unwinnable debate about what to call things (nouns).

2. Make your search tool do the heavy user lifting. They should not have to guess about where their next productive experience is coming from. Conversely you must be vigilant with your providers to make sure they are sensitive about where they locate their content -- otherwise your users have to care too (they're probably more interested in telling their life stories to Survey Monkey).

3. Create one dignified and significant workflow where an important milestone triggers the telling of those teachable moments that keep people like me employed as KM professionals. Maybe it's dissecting a win-loss. Perhaps it's an illustrious use case. Either way it's an instructive lesson about how to model success and draw important distinctions that were not obvious prior to when the story takes place.

4. Include in the storytelling the other relevant links and deliverables that document the life of the project in question. That's how to grow the content base in step with the knowledge deficits you're trying to balance.

Mad Men in the Aggregate

Here's what I find evocative about Mad Men, if not reassuring:

By the early sixties the U.S. was responsible for nearly one-half of the world's GNP. If there ever was an entire demographic close enough to being born on third base this was it. In the corner office or on the factory floor if you could drag yourself to work your kept wifey woman had at least another decade for domestic life emptiness to sink in. Why start a Me Generation? The Us Generation had so much pie it hardly needed carving up.

It's no accident that Mad Men takes place at the Apex of America -- the peak earning years of the Greatest Generation. They kept everything under their hats -- except apparently the same prurient lusts and cultural conceits that gave rise to Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts.

What I suck from the tail pipe of Mad Men is this: No matter how many family members we send into the workforce, feelers to the next venture that would have us, or, prescriptions down to the local Walgreens, we are cheated. We want it all. Small was never beautiful -- even in this post GOP world of the immediate tomorrow. And if we can't have it all we can crave what our folks took for granted: the autopilot obsolescence of fat cars, gender bifurcation, meat and TV potatoes (heart attacks, failed marriages, and foreign oil not sponsored, endorsed, or anesthetized by Sterling Cooper).

You look at the unattainables now of our borrowed dreams and it includes:

* Social job security
* Paper plates, plastic cutlery
* Medium health care without high fructose
* Network anchors that Fox/MSNBC viewers respect and trust
* Sports heroes who look like us

To this craven observer we're aiming for our toes (are your toenails as brittle as mine?) We don't want access to clean drinking water and quality education. We're willing to reprise familiar economic hits if you forgive us through a few upcoming mortgage payments.

Mostly I spend my Mad Men bonding time floating in a thematic pool of Flotsam Jetsons. The alternative? It would be texting away the night on Second Life immersed in anti-social media.

Mad Men in the Aggregate

Here's what I find evocative about Mad Men, if not reassuring:

By the early sixties the U.S. was responsible for nearly one-half of the world's GNP. If there ever was an entire demographic close enough to being born on third base this was it. In the corner office or on the factory floor if you could drag yourself to work your kept wifey woman had at least another decade for domestic life emptiness to sink in. Why start a Me Generation? The Us Generation had so much pie it hardly needed carving up.

It's no accident that Mad Men takes place at the Apex of America -- the peak earning years of the Greatest Generation. They kept everything under their hats -- except apparently the same prurient lusts and cultural conceits that gave rise to Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts.

What I suck from the tail pipe of Mad Men is this: No matter how many family members we send into the workforce, feelers to the next venture that would have us, or, prescriptions down to the local Walgreens, we are cheated. We want it all. Small was never beautiful -- even in this post GOP world of the immediate tomorrow. And if we can't have it all we can crave what our folks took for granted: the autopilot obsolescence of fat cars, gender bifurcation, meat and TV potatoes (heart attacks, failed marriages, and foreign oil not sponsored, endorsed, or anesthetized by Sterling Cooper).

You look at the unattainables now of our borrowed dreams and it includes:

* Social job security
* Paper plates, plastic cutlery
* Medium health care without high fructose
* Network anchors that Fox/MSNBC viewers respect and trust
* Sports heroes who look like us

To this craven observer we're aiming for our toes (are your toenails as brittle as mine?) We don't want access to clean drinking water and quality education. We're willing to reprise familiar economic hits if you forgive us through a few upcoming mortgage payments.

Mostly I spend my Mad Men bonding time floating in a thematic pool of Flotsam Jetsons. The alternative? It would be texting away the night on Second Life immersed in anti-social media.

Joe the Biden Went to a Bar

Just how unexpected could any turn take in the conversation at the White House last week when Bush hosted Obama? Could they really have cut through the chattering background niceties? Is it possible they had a man-to-man meeting of minds? A heart-to-heart discussion on the state of state?

Perhaps it's a little like comparing the work that's cut-out for Obama with the unfinished business of Bush. If the cut-out was any more unfinished you could argue that Obama was stepping into fill an eight year vacancy. A leadership vacuum sounds less insulting than another W dress-down. That "giant sucking sound" that stuck in Ross Perot's ear flaps during Recession '91-'92 sounds warmer and more definitive than the deepening silence of our yet-to-be-determined great bottoming out of '09-'10.

It's certainly less presumptuous than the expectation of a natural order of things. Such a rationale rights the ship of state as a race from super sub-average back to average. That's when you add the possible worst presidency in history with the fervent hopes riding on one of the best. Factor the two together and we're just about even.

Our two party political brands abhor a big hoover as much as my two skittish indoor cats. We've had Big Hoover leadership for the last eight years. We could count on it for tight-lipped, unquestioning loyalty to unwavering unilateralism. I mean what's there not to count on? But the secretive sauce is ripe for dipping. All we have to go on are the signing statements and Presidential orders. We're clueless about the unsigned declarations. But we know that the back legal channels are the shadowy work of non-fiction's grimmest of plot lines. Yes, the world is a dangerous place. But it's picnic time for sunbathing pigs compared to the darker recesses of the rogue government that's been running the show. I'm referring to the office of the Vice President.

Soon after the state heads locked handshakes the real pocket change was riding on Biden when Cheney invited him down into his bunker with a view. They drew the drapes and Joe began to dream:

* What would honestly happen if business as usual one day one meant that the Commander-in-Veep receded back into the Rose Garden bushes?

* What powers would be spilled on the lap of lady liberty if an Obama Administration re-embraced a Constitution made expendable by a time of two wars, no-bid contracts, and the mercenaries that flew under flags of their own profiteering?

* In addition to taking on the economy, health care, energy, and global warming, what if Obama took back the Constitution?

That sounds big -- bigger than the Department of Justice. Kinda like social justice -- no? That sounds like the wiretaps being rolled back to the post-Watergate barricades that Cheney fought so hard to crash. Surely they won't erode any further? Joe, wake up!

But is this an offer Obama really can't refuse? Particularly if it diminishes the reach of his own presidency? Especially if it marginalizes his nonpartisan unity platform? It will be a fascination to see how this plays out. Personally, I'll be watching through the lens of Joe the Biden. He loves the Senate as dearly as Cheney despises it.