Learn to Adapt

Ever since the first networked copier/scanner was installed in my office, I wondered how long it would be before the fax machine became obsolete. The copier/scanner makes it easy to scan any document to PDF and attach it to an e-mail - providing greater efficiency, privacy, and accountability than the old faxing process.

Today I received my fist “standardized corporate” business card that did not have a fax number. This was not from a techno-evangelist eschewing vestigial technology - it was from a salt-of-the-earth program manager. When I asked her about she said she wasn’t concerned that the number wasn’t there since she never uses the fax. Think about it. A program manager that coordinates scores of vendors, clients, events, contracts, etc. - and never uses a fax.

I take this as a sign that the fax machine has entered its golden years and will soon go the way of the telegram. My prediction is that we have about five more years before the need to scan paper-based transactions into digital form will become a relic as well.

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This week I have been in Milan delivering train-the-trainer for our Web 2.0 University™ (W2U) partners at Reply. Reply has license to exclusively deliver the Web 2.0 Executive Bootcamp, Enterprise 2.0 Bootcamp, and Ajax Bootcamp in Italy and Germany. It has been an exciting week working with the dedicated and experienced folks at Reply to localize our learning content for their target audiences.

During the training we discussed how many of the Web 2.0 ideals and applications play out differently in Italy and Germany. From the legal restraints that make music sites like Pandora impossible to the generally more conservative attitude toward social applications, Reply is customizing the W2U content to deliver outstanding learning to their clients. They have become quite Web 2.0 savvy and I’m sure they will do a great job leading the 2.0 revolution in Europe. So, if you want to leverage the competitive advantage of Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 in Italy or Germany, visit the Reply W2U site.

Unlike most trips abroad, I took some extra time to enjoy Milan. Friday evening I had the great pleasure of being treated to dinner by Piero Rivizzigno, the CEO of the soon to be released, Glossom.com. (This social website will focus on design and fashion – link to come soon where you can learn all about it.) Piero took me into the city center for the best fresh mozzarella I have ever had as well as traditional Naples pizza that was fantastic. Piero mentioned that the owner of the Buffalo Ristorante (I think that was the name - confirmation to come) is hoping to open a restaurant in Georgetown in DC. That would be a wonderful development! Piero was a great host and our discussion of the future of social applications was illuminating. We discussed data portability and Piero was spot-on in his observation that website-owners who benefit from the content we provide need to do a better job of sharing their revenue (at least a small portion) with us.

Saturday I got to play tourist in full glory and traipsed all over Milan city center. I visited the Parco Palestro, the Castle of Milan, and the Milan Duomo and the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. Sadly, the battery on my camera bit the dust at the Duomo, but here are a few pictures:

The Palestro in the Parco Palestro…

The drawbridge at the southern “Little Bridge” entrance to the Castle of Milan:

Inside the Caste of Milan (or as it should be called – the castle of cats – they owned the moat):

Approaching the Duomo Church (both inside and out, it is simply magnificent):

My personal favorite: A beautiful fountain fighting the unbelievable moss that it swallowing it with the Duomo behind:

Now it is on to the butt-busting flight from Milan to Frankfurt to DC and back to my family (hopefully my son will look up long enough from Adventure Quest to notice I’m home ;o).

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At dinner last night with friends, we discussed politics and many agreed that Barack Obama did not have enough leadership experience to prepare him for POTUS. So, I decided to do a quick scorecard of “leadership experience” of all the candidates. I decided after throwing it together to post it here.

First some disclaimers: This scorecard is entirely arbitrary, quick, and dirty. It is also really a scorecard of leadership/political/management experience instead of a true analysis of “leadership”. The list of qualities of “leadership” is lengthy and arguable, and I will leave that argument to the thousands of books already written on the topic. Finally, as shown below, the scorecard is simply a quickly-assembled list of 11 roles/experiences that might prepare a candidate to be successful as POTUS. The 11 are:

• VP
• State Governor
• Cabinet (heading any large federal government agency)
• US Senate
• US House of Representatives
• State elected official
• Local elected official
• Military officer
• CEO (or any managing executive role in a large company)
• MBA
• Political Science, Foreign Relations, or Public Admin degree

And then I checked Wikipedia to complete the scorecard for the three remaining candidates for POTUS (Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John McCain). For contrast, I included the previous four POTUSs (POTUSi?) as well. The results:

But, obviously, all these things are not equal. So I decided to weight the 11 categories like this: VP: 5, Governor: 4, Cabinet: 3, Senate and H of R: 2, every thing else gets a 1. I also spotted a few points for Hillary’s First Lady (3 points under VP) and gave Reagan a CEO point for his presidency of SAG. With that weighted scale, the leadership experience scorecard winners are:

So, if we are to judge how successful a candidate will be as POTUS based on their “leadership” experience, the best of the bunch would be both of the Bush boys. And the recent favorites from both parties (Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan) only score a 6 - half of the total for the clear winner, Bush the First. As for our current three candidates, it is a close race. The three points spotted to Hillary for for First Lady put’s her on top of McCain by one point.

Now, to wrap things up, I will spot one last set of (completely arbitrary) points. I start with the assumption that every day you are alive you gain wisdom that makes you a better leader. So, for every year in age, I will give each candidate one-tenth of a point. Hillary gets 6, Obama gets 4.5, and McCain gets 7.1. The final tally this increasingly arbitrary scorecard of leadership experience:

• John McCain: 12.1
• Hillary Clinton: 12.0
• Barack Obama: 8.5

So, when you do this (admittedly arbitrary) math, Obama is considerably less experienced for the job (30% less so than Hillary or McCain).

Now we just need to decide if leadership experience is what we need most in a POTUS now…

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Welcome to 2008! This is the obligatory first post to my blog. It offers practically nothing of any substance. You might want to ignore it.

Based on what I have seen of the 70+ million other blogs out there (Disclosure: I have not visited all of them.), in this first post I need to explain that I am new to blogging, that I’m excited to share my thoughts and that I hope you will share your comments. I should then plan to blog everyday and actually do so for the first two days. And then life will intervene (perhaps in the form of a suddenly incontinent pet) and I will miss blogging for a week. This will help me recognize that my life really isn’t interesting enough to share more than once a week any way. So, then I should resolve to blog one a week and will – for two weeks. After that, realizing that no one is actually reading my blog, I should drop in one or two posts before the blog becomes entirely dormant.

But since I hope this blog will not go dormant until I do (Disclosure: I do not actually have a dormant season, but during January and on most Sundays I am quite lethargic.), I will take a different tack. I have blogged elsewhere before, I have mixed feelings about maintaining my own blog, and I really only want you to share your thoughts if they add value (the exception being any comments that are really, really funny).

As for the purpose of this blog, I already put that on the About Page. And as you will learn there, I am a horrible typist so I am not going to repeat it here. That would be an insult to Tim Berners-Lee’s whole hyperlink concept anyway.

Congratulations! You made it to the end of the inaugural post. I would have lost interest midway through the second paragraph. (Disclosure: I have self-diagnosed ADD.) I do hope that you will read the other, more substantive posts and share your thoughts. Thanks for visiting – ya’ll come back, ya here?

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