Simon Palmer’s blog

You can see mine here.

I’m not convinced it has any value whatever, but I do like it.

Toronto is a city dominated and ruined in equal measure by cars.

Cars, and their insane drivers, prevent Toronto from being the world-class lakeside city it should by all rights be.  Instead it is a crucible of collisions with a cowering population stuck in the middle on an ugly traffic island.

Here are some thoughts for Torontonians:
1) The average stopping distance for a vehicle traveling 100kph is 80m.  You don’t need to leave 80m between vehicles traveling at 100kph, half that will do.  However, bear in mind that judgment and reaction time alone means you cannot stop within 40m from 100kph.  Nobody leaves 40m.  If you do, at least one car, and probably two, will pull into it.

2) If you travel at 120 while I am traveling at 110kph, and we both have roughly half an hour journey, you will arrive less than 3 minutes before me.  On the other hand the risk you introduce of an accident goes up as the square of the difference between our speed.  That means, if we both travel at 110, we both arrive at the same time and there is minimal risk.  Your extra 10kph buys you a couple of minutes – at the most – at the cost of dramatically increased risk.  In reality you’ll never recover those additional minutes, I’ll pass you again later as the traffic speeds vary during the journey, or we’ll both be held at the same light as we get off the highway 50m apart.  IT’S INSANE.

3) While you may accept the additional risk for 10kph, I do not.  Very few accidents at speed on a highway involve a single car.  You are making a choice for me.

4) More roads = more traffic, not less.  Countless studies prove the conclusions from the original British study about trunk roads (Google Trunk Roads SACTRA).  “An average road improvement, for which traffic growth due to all other factors is forecast correctly, will see an additional [i.e. induced] 10% of base traffic in the short term and 20% in the long term”.  The answer is public transport.  If Toronto is going to be a world class city and not drown under the weight of its own traffic as it is currently doing, you have to improve public transport.  Someone tell the new Mayor when he gets into office.

5) You will never have a usable lakefront until you get rid of the Gardiner Expressway.  It is an ugly monstrosity born out of an outdated and disproven philosophy which prevents Toronto from being a lakefront city.  Think Boston.  Think Big Dig.  Start now.

I want to shake Toronto by the shoulders.  WAKE UP!  Stop driving like morons.  Stop crashing into each other every day on your journey to work.  Stop killing thousands of people on the roads every year.  STOP DRIVING!  Press your public officials to build public transit.  Reclaim your wonderful, beautiful, majestic lakefront.  Be less Birmingham and more Sydney.  Less Shanghai, more Boston.

oh, and before I forget…

6) If you drive a Pontiac Grand Am or Grand Prix, please go to the nearest Police station, surrender your license to an officer and hold your hands out ready to be cuffed.  You are not in a sports car and you do not own the road.

Bit of a shameless plug, but I really like the work that’s coming out of our social media team.  GoRecommend started as a tactical integration point so our customers could track, and to some extent guide, where their brands ended up in Facebook following shopper taking a survey about customer experience.

The positioning of a brand is a delicate process which is jealously guarded and heavily invested by companies who care about how they present themselves to the world – which is pretty much every company.  The fact that, driven by loyalty, and perhaps unfettered by it, shoppers can question, criticise, re-position, evangelise, advocate your brand in a selection of forums with enormous networked readership means that the power balance between companies and their customers has changed.  This scares the willies out of most marketing departments and is the sort of discontinuous change that, unless embraced, could spell disaster.

On the other hand, what if you could properly embrace it?  What if you could understand and watch what people are saying?  Done badly it is Orwellian interference, done well it is game-changing connection to your audience and customers.

Enter GoRecommend.  We’re at the friendly fun end of understanding what shoppers are saying about brands.  We provide the infrastructure to make a positive message easy and a negative message contextual and beneficial – after all how can a brand improve unless it listens to its critics?  We’ve extended out beyond Facebook and into Twitter and email and are getting a huge amount of market traction from our customers who are excited and slightly bewildered by the implications of social media.

Come take a look…

http://gorecommend.net/

I read this OnStartups post with interest and tried to figure out my mixed emotions.  Here were my emotions:

Envy… frustration… annoyance… realisation… blog libido

So here I am blogging about it.

I recently joined a great company just outside Toronto (locally referred to as TO) and one of the first issues I face is getting a handle on where from, and how, we can attract talent into our business.  We have a great proposition, a great workplace atmosphere, a great customer list and a great set of backers.  Still, we struggle to attract technical talent from the pool available in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area for those of you outside Canada).

The GTA contains a large number of potential people and some great schools (Waterloo, UofT, Ryerson, McMaster to name but a few) turning out bright grads, docs etc.  It also contains some very different working and living environments, from Waterloo/Kitchener in the West to Markham in the East and Richmond Hill and Thornhill in the North.  And then there’s downtown Toronto, which is a vibrant international city with a diverse cultural and intellectual mix.

Basically there’s something for everyone, and you would think that in an environment like that a company like ours ought to find it easy to attract talent.  But we don’t.  In fact it is devilishly difficult to get a good stream of people into the front of our recruitment pipeline and I have been looking at why.

At this point I need to say that we are in West Mississauga (click for a Google map) which is not in Toronto. The GTA also has the worst traffic of any city I have lived in – by a long margin.  There isn’t really an alternative to a car for a lot of journeys and Toronto also sits on a major Canadian artery running East-West across the country, HWY 401.  Put this all together and if you are travelling into TO with the rush hour traffic, or out again, you can set aside a minimum of an hour in the car each way, and much more if there is any sort of traffic congestion, such as roadworks or accidents.  There are always roadworks and accidents.  I can’t understate how bad the traffic can be.

So, after a number of conversations with local recruiters I was in the process of accepting the obvious, which is that our location is the reason why we can’t mine the rich seam of talent that clearly exists around us.  I was also looking at the feasibility of an office downtown or in the K-W area to drop ourselves into the middle of the melting pot.  This is risky and expensive if it doesn’t work, so I’m not apologizing for thinking carefully about it.

As I did so I realised I was looking at location in the wrong way, it isn’t the cause any more than salary, package, working environment or technology choices are the cause.  In fact all location does is place another constraint, just like all those others, on the sorts of people who may be interested in working for us as a business.

Then the OnStartups blog post emerged and my cycle of emotions kicked in and this is where I got to.

I reject the notion that all good tech companies must, by definition, be staffed by young people, and that you have to create a workplace which panders to their very specific social needs.  In fact, those exact same people grow into mature adults with kids and a different set of needs.  As that happens none of their talent goes away – in fact it is augmented with experience and broader skills which make them more valuable, not less.  Why do they have to go from a loft downtown to a scrapheap in the suburbs?

So I wondered, what does the adult version of that set of (non-)policies in the OnStartups post look like?  I ask partly because this is a tier of the workforce that these sorts of businesses are clearly ignoring and partly because I am a crotchety old 40-something who resents the notion that all the talent exists below a tree-line which ends at 29, and I secretly harbor the notion that they are actually a bunch of  lazy and self-possessed children who have had very easy lives and think that the world owes them something.  Plus none of them have yet proven much.

If we can’t attract the kids to Mississauga because they are drinking beer and playing foosball downtown, then what about them in 5 years time when they have succumb to their girl/boy/friends and have moved out to a house with a minivan, a dog, a school round the corner, a back yard and 2 years of 3 hours sleep a night?  They are the same talented people but they don’t work as long and they care about a more structured set of policies on vacation, working hours, etc.

They may also have been dumped unceremoniously out of Utopia.com because the fancy office couldn’t be paid for out of revenues and their financiers called in their warrants when the hockey sticks turned out to be wooden spoons.  So they are more realistic and perhaps less productive – but they carry all the skills and talent, and they can’t all be managers.

I wonder what an ideal workplace and set of policies looks like for them…. (being provocative)… I want to create a “post-juvenile culture”

1. Vacation policy = closed for Christmas
   …and 2 weeks in August
2. We care which 37.5 hours a week you work
   …because we think you should spend quality time with your kids, because they’ll be happier and you’ll be happier, more loyal and will work harder while you are here – plus experience tells us that you’ll probably do better if you are mostly here – which aligns with the Agile manifesto which we espouse in reality, not in theory.  And we also know that a motivated, but otherwise committed, person like you will do whatever is necessary to make yourself, and us, a success.
3. Extreme filtering
   If you want to know what’s going on in the heads of management come and ask.  We don’t want to blur your very busy, and slightly shortened, day with a load of irrelevant information for decisions in which, ultimately, you are unlikely to have much say.  It’s not because we are trying to hide anything, and where legally permissible we’ll fully disclose.  Instead it’s because there is always a strata of information which matches your role and makes you more effective, and a whole load of other stuff which is largely irrelevant to you – and we understand that and see it as part of our role to protect you from it
4. Some doors policy
   We acknowledge that there are moments when you deserve some privacy to talk about things which are important to you.  As management we face this every day and don’t want you to feel like you have to air your dirty laundry with us as we sit between two developers.
5. Free breakfast
   You probably squeaked out of the house with no time to grab a bite, come and have it on us at your desk
6. Free beer
   Once a month at a bar/restaurant.  We’ll help you organize a babysitter and either a DD or a taxi home.  Please don’t drink in the office and drive home.
7. Partnership with a local crèche and daycare
   We understand that the biggest challenge you face with young kids is what to do with them while you maintain some momentum in your career and how you deal with finding good quality care that you can both trust and afford.  You may not have a fancy office and a really great healthcare plan, but we’ll help with childcare costs – especially beyond the hours that the providers normally offer.  That means you don’t have to feel like you have to rush away at 2.30pm to drive the 45 minutes to daycare to pick up the kids while you do two conference calls on your earpiece in the car and wonder how long it’ll be before it becomes a career limiting issue.
8. Social media policy = whatever
   Really, we care as little as you do
9. Dress code = be respectful
   We are a professional organization and you are a professional person, your attire should reflect that.  We also have customers in the building on occasions with whom you will have worked very hard to establish the professional credentials of yourselves and our business.  We know you would not jeopardize all that hard work by dressing inappropriately.

That’s as far as I got before I realised that it was compelling enough to make a very nice workplace proposition in its own right.  I’m actively pressing this agenda with the people we think we would like to attract.  I’m also pursuing it internally to see how practical we think it would be for us as a business – we have to balance this agenda against our commercial business objectives – which are always missing from this sort of discussion.  I like it because it doesn’t necessarily mean we have to get a loft downtown to attract the talent – some of it is probably living within 20 minutes in the car, we just have to find it.

I was talking to Jack this morning and he was repeating back to me what I said. Then he suddenly started changing the odd word so that it was funny. This is a nice little game that he and I play quite often and I’m sure is quite common between parents and kids. It causes him to belly laugh when he finds a word which changes the meaning of the sentence and makes it funny.

If you think about it a sense of humour is a very sophisticated layer of communication which sits above mastering the mechanics of speaking, the detail of language and the meaning of words.

I was amazed. 6 months ago he was in nappies and barely able to talk. Now we are playing word games and he is deciding what is funny. That sort of transformation must belie a huge change inside his head.

I think I subscribe to the Noam Chomsky, Stephen Pinker view of the world that we have an innate ability to master language, and I suspect that the real key to it all is the development of memory. If you consider everything that is necessary to be able to communicate, vocabulary, syntax, grammar etc. it is all predicated on being able to remember things. I suspect that the transformation I have witnessed in Jack is the development of his memory.

He suddenly has an amazing vocabulary. Yesterday as he was struggling with unzipping his coat and he said quite clearly “absolutely ridiculous”. Later that day he was sitting on the loo and he looked at me and said “concentrate”. These are very sophisticated ideas and there is a complex context necessary for them to be applied appropriately, which they were.

Memory development is supported by the other amazing things he has started to do which is remember directions and locations. If we drive out from our home towards the North of London he can now tell whether we are going to the shopping mall, the chinese grocery store or Nanny’s house by the route we take right at the last moment.

So I’m obviously a proud dad – he’s only 2 1/2 – but I am also an amazed observer of the rate of development of the human brain.

My wave account is now a month old. I have about 20 fellow waving friends. We don’t use it. As far as I can tell they don’t use it either. In fact, who does use it, other than the development team who built it? I never remember to check it and it doesn’t flag activity to me via email, which I’m sure is deliberate and would be tautological in the eyes of the wave creators.

I was talking to a software friend based in California at the start of this week. She has people developing software in pretty much all the major centres in the world. I asked whether she either used, or intended to use Google Wave and she didn’t. Not because it may not be the best thing since sliced bread, but primarily because she already had processes and systems in place which worked perfectly well and which were embedded into her teams.

Of course that presumes that she had concluded what it was that Google Wave does, and when I asked she waffled a bit but basically said “collaboration”. That’s a big space, but it seems to be where most people place Google Wave when thinking about mapping it into their world.

It is generally a big ask to have all your teams switch working practices, especially core traits like how they communicate with peers and document that communication. Contemplating such a switch generally requires a backdrop of discontinuous change or profound dysfunction, to make it worthwhile, and I guess Google may claim ground as agents of discontinuous change with Wave. I’m not convinced though.

I’ll keep my account of course, but until I find a need it remains a Faberge egg. A fascinating, if useless, enigma.

So I got my Google Wave invitation today (from the same person who invited me to GMail many moons ago – mucho gracias fooch) and I logged in for the first time today. Here are my first observations…

Ouch, scrollbars don’t work properly in Firefox 3.0.15, pretty fundamental and visible feature and surprised they don’t have a commodity widget like that working. Even more surprisingly, when I try to run it in IE to see if it works there I’m asked to install the Chrome Frame plug-in. Small things perhaps, but shop-window problems which make it feel pre-beta.

Layout is simple and clean and in the Google mould. Bits of my gmail profile, picture and contacts for instance, have made it across. It is obvious how to create a new Wave and add people to it and I have started a couple with the contacts I have which appear to have wave accounts. I have a simon.palmer@googlewave.com address, which mirrors my gmail address, so I try and send an email to it to see what happens. So far nothing has happened. It didn’t bounce and nothing arrived.

Weirdly I was expecting to see my gmail inbox in here. I don’t know why really, I was just expecting it. And that leads me to the obvious question. If this isn’t email, then what is it? What can I wave that I can’t email?

I have a couple of waves already set up, several welcome ones from Dr Wave (c’mon, are we really patients? or does it need a PhD to figure it out) containing video clip tutorials and explanations. After watching a few the idea seems to be a cross between multi-party email and chat, with sharing of documents, pictures etc. and the whole in a chronological sequence of evolution of the interaction. You can (apparently, and eventually) use it for collaboration on documents, creating events and the like. I’m beginning to get the picture.

Trying to map it into the MS Office world, I think it sits somewhere between Sharepoint, BPM, MSN, Word and Outlook. It is certainly a different take. I think my main issue at the moment is that the benefit is not clearly articulated. How is it better than working the old way, because let’s face it, most of us do most of these things today, and there is overlap between them already?

It may make corporate buyers look again before investing in collaboration infrastructure like Sharepoint, although it is the smaller players in that market, and the open source projects that are likely to feel the ripples from the wave, not Microsoft.

So those are my first immediate impressions and I’m going to hedge my bets at this point. There may yet be something very illuminating underneath it which I am yet to see. Maybe, as we all take to smaller devices, there is some new way of working which wave is anticipating.

However, it has more than a little of the segway about it, and unfortunately a bit of the Sinclair C5 too. Innovative and clever? Undoubtedly. Challenging to established norms? Certainly. Paradigm-shifting? Hmm, maybe not. I have the feeling that we are all still going to be emailing in 5 years time. Google Wave will almost certainly find a niche in some CaliTechy communities, as has the segway, but I’m still walking and driving rather than segwaying, and I can’t see my wavebox displacing my inbox. Yet at least.