Blog Away

In my various leadership roles in government, engineering, law, teaching, and executive entrepreneurship I see evidence of students who accumulate on lists such as school enrollment who are mentioned (name, email address) but fail to engage until after they graduate. It's like they expect to flower only after they've been crowned with credentials. However, the one who gets my dollar is the one who has already picked up the broom-- because its their nature to be a 'doer'-- without first asking for payment or credit to do so.

Greybeards in a recent board meeting murmured how we can learn about applicants by picking through chunks of social vomit such as are written on Facebook. I disagreed but said blogs are our 21st Century version of a white paper or any manner of professional publishing. Blogs are (to me) is one form of volunteerism, and I know I am enriched by others who unselfishly make time to share insights, such as Tom Kuhlmann's The Rapid eLearning Blog or Hack A Day creative engineering site to crack open everyday wireless, cell phone, and electronics.

Blogs encapsulate and personify someone's pith and personality, coupled with their desire to freely generate output, and expect it to contain insights into the measure of what occupies their minds. They're unlike the typical fat-faced "gimmie gimmie gimmie" Jabba The Hutt types.

Blogs, I submit, are the bona fide measure of irrepressible value measured BEFORE someone thinks they merely get an award for survival, or because they've endured elective coursework. More accurately, the absence of independent action as demonstrated through blogs or white papers are good indicators of intelligence insolvency, which, for me, precludes any serious hiring considerations.

Cheers!
Lee

Medal versus Mettle

"Let's be honest-- 'standards' are cubbyholes for the fearsome."

I wrote that when approached recently about how I felt concerning ISO standards proposed for market research (e.g., ISO 20252).

What nonsense. In our frenzied run towards government-controlled lives, we are really becoming sheeple.

In market research there is always a trade-off between doing good quality research versus the speed of doing research at all. These things drive marketing efforts, which are always based on creativity... theoretically, unbounded and unbridled. ISO standards will not help deliver better "quality" research. We're always out to deliver a product to the buyer seeking their objective, NOT to comply with a bureaucrat whose purpose is to rubber-stamp an application.

That is how market research firms work. We should not shift focus just to navigate some false gamut of check boxes so we can gather ISO approvals like a collection of scout badges.

It's a sad western proclivity to look to the medal before the mettle. We turn off our brains to value by looking to the chintz. In the same way that schools eliminate all kinds of benefit for the students by insisting an instructor have a teaching certificate, we limit-- not increase-- veracity and value with false "standards."

In so doing we thereby ensure mediocrity propagates when we exclude the wild-eyed creative someone who didn't know the plodding rote of "the system."

Cheers
Lee