The art of blame

Skimming through some preliminary research on how to dissolve business partnerships, I noticed a correlation between two things: 1) common mistakes made by businesspeople looking to separate with a long-term partner, and 2) my shoe.

I stepped in canine fecal matter last week. The smell wafted up in errant waves throughout the day, and I eyed my coworkers and fellow transit passengers with suspicion and disgust. Someone, everyone, had horrible breath or a vile hygienic routine.

On discovering the offensive blob mashed into the treads of my shoe, I felt sheepish, to say the least. I had spent the entire day unwilling to consider the offensive odour could possibly be coming from me.

So goes the human condition.

Most of the people I’ve interacted with tend to unwittingly blame things little and big, on a scapegoat instead of identifying how they contributed to the problem. For whatever reason, be it ego or id, humans like to pass the burden of accountability to others when times are rough. The irony is that although it’s easy to point fingers, few of us are actually equipped to handle the accusations of others, which means hackles are raised and the bitch sessions begin. It is impossible to take the high road once you’ve labeled someone as the culprit for any of your personal or professional woes.

You become firmly entrenched in the sloppy battleground of suspicion, launching grenades of reproach and condemnation. It almost always ends badly, so the message is clear—when faced with a difficult situation, look inwards before blaming those around you for whatever mishap has befallen you.

Lamenting one’s actions in crisis after the fact can only go so far in righting the wrong, especially when it comes to laying blame.

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Killing the middleman

I ran across an article about a new Vancouver company, TheJobMagnet, that’s going to help fill entry-level job shortages by mass advertising on social networking and other Internet sites.

This came right after a note from a fellow consultant that he was moving back permanently to B.C. because modern communication tools meant he really didn’t have to have offices near clients any more.

And this came while I was working with a company in the New Ventures B.C. contest that is going to use the web to help small businesses create their own advertising.

The common theme here: Disintermediation.

Disintermediation is the removal of intermediaries who stand between knowledge services and those that need them, and thus control the flow of that knowledge. The advent of the Internet has broken that control.

Think travel agencies, or retail services that moved on to the net early. More recently, we’ve seen the Net disintermediate traditional media (or, frankly, in the media’s case, explode it), legal services, marketing, learning and training, and service outsourcing.

And now as Web 2.0 continues to evolve with Internet-based Software As A Service (SaaS, or on-demand software) models seemingly springing up daily, we’re on the threshold of something even more disruptive.

Most disintermediation is still guerrilla, in that it’s done by fast-moving small operations. But many large companies are starting to use the new Web 2.0 collaboration tools for performance enhancement, often through crowd powering – turning thousands of people into instant focus or brainstorming or problem-solving groups.

And, while their purposes and uses might differ, the commonality between most disintermediaries is long-tail thinking – they can access a mass group at relatively low cost.

This is where the real disintermediation occurs – in the bypassing of those intermediaries who have for generations been the gatekeepers of knowledge, and usually charged a pretty good buck for it.

So while some traditional business people look down their noses at Web 2.0 and social media as the plaything of narcissistic kids, from it is emerging a revolution that’s going to forever change business as we’ve known it.

I’ve only mentioned a few cases of disintermediation, but there probably many more. So I’ll try a little crowd powering myself: I’d love to hear your examples.

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Slipping on the green collar

Some time ago, there was a lecture rocketing around the Internet about the pace of change. An interesting point it made was that something like half the jobs in 2010 didn't exist in 2005.

I thought of it when I recently found an analysis that said the renewable energy and energy efficient industries would provide an astonishing 40 million jobs in the U.S. by the year 2030. There were only about 8.5 million of these “green-collar” jobs in the U.S. in 2006.

Now, while these numbers are eye-popping, they actually aren't surprising. The trend toward “green-collar” jobs has been emerging for a while, but it's really ramped up worldwide as realism about energy prices and global warming have taken root.

Heck, even here in B.C., the cleantech industry, which is really a subset of the general technology industry, is estimated to employ around 16,000 people. There are probably thousands more working in environmental operations that don't involve pure technology.

So what's a green-collar job? The definition is fuzzy, since it could involve anyone who touches energy or environmentalism. But colleges and universities—in the U.S. and even at Royal Roads and BCIT in B.C.—have an idea. They're cranking out specialized degree programs in areas like eco-commerce, environmental accounting, green and social marketing, and ecological economics.

And, according to headhunting firms, other popular jobs include urban planners, forestry professionals and environmental lawyers. There is also a growing demand for architects and engineers with Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification.

But that’s right now. There will be countless other new jobs springing up in a few years that haven’t even been dreamed of yet.

So, all you parents out there who are pressuring your kids to become lawyers, doctors, and accountants – the traditional professions – you might want to think about letting them follow their hearts and feed their environmental passions.

There’s apparently a future there.

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New MBAs don't know jack

I've helped several people in MBA programs before, and so have been contacted by a slew of recent MBA grads in recent months inquiring about opportunities in the B.C. business scene. After congratulating them for completing the rigorous program, I had to give them some deflating advice.

Get over yourself, I tell them. You still don't know anything about today's business.

This is my standard view of MBAs. They've bought the whole package that the training confers on them a kind of priesthood status, and they can move right in and run or manage a business.

This is the underlying message in b-school marketing: Shell out 50 to 80 Gs a year for our program, and you'll instantly become a high-level manager earning bundles.

In some cases, that's true – if you work for any arm of government, which automatically raises your pay grade for any advanced degree. But in most cases it isn't.

Big companies – especially banks – usually hire MBAs because they know they've been trained in the best practices of big companies and so make good functionaries and maybe even analysts – some day.

But business is changing, and today, more and more companies want strategic or innovative or entrepreneurial thinkers who can see the big picture as well as individual details. I'm thinking of the chief of one of the biggest business intelligence operations in the world who bluntly told a consulting firm he kept his company private because he didn't want some "know-nothing 25-year-old investment banker with an MBA" running his company.

BC especially is an entrepreneurial business scene. But I haven't met too many MBAs who were pleased with the entrepreneurial training they received, if they had any at all.

So if your aim is to be a cog in a big company, and fight your way up, great, go for it.

If you want to work with entrepreneurial businesses, you're going to have to start learning all over again.

Am I alone in this kind of thinking?

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The myth of pixelheads

David Jordan is associate editor of BCBusiness.

I can’t help but respond to Susan Hollis’s post of August 6: “A bookish balance.”

Thanks, Susan, for speaking up on behalf of those of us who still find time for the printed word. Your suggestion that maybe the Internet hasn’t done away with the printed word is a refreshing correction to all the blather about how the Internet has set the globe spinning in a new orbit.

But you write as though the printed word is a historic relic to be preserved as a museum curiosity, as though pre-Internet research was akin to scratching glyphs on a cave wall. Yes, it’s hard to comprehend today, but we did manage to do research in the dark ages, 10 years ago, before the proliferation of personal computers and Web browsers. I worked in a pre-Google newsroom way back in 1998, and it was a little inconvenient at times, but turnaround time was hardly “Paleolithic.” We somehow managed to meet our daily deadlines. (Yes, newspapers actually came out every day—not every eon.)

Rather than suggest that today’s reader may be a hybrid of pre-Internet troglodyte and modern pixelhead, I’d go even further, and suggest that this "new generation of readers and writers addicted to the immediacy and interactivity of the Internet” is entirely mythical. Attention deficit disorder has always been with us, just as there has always been a time to browse for quick entertainment, and a time to read for more substance. These aren’t unique phenomena spawned by the Internet.

I can understand why talk of this “new generation” has gained such traction. Primarily, it makes the new generation feel important. It also makes for entertaining reading and keeps talk-show hosts in business. But ultimately, it’s just fluff spun out of nothing. Yes, the Internet marks a milestone in the history of mass media. But no, it hasn’t spawned a new species of human, unlike any that preceded it.

So here’s to you, Susan, for putting a damper on talk about the death of print. But let’s take it a step further; let’s call a moratorium on talk of this “new generation of readers.”

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