http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/02/your-money/estate-planning/02wealth.html?pagewanted=2&sq=donations&st=cse&scp=1

This article in Saturday’s paper talked about the importance of making flexible donations to schools, adding a comment that if a donation 100 years ago was to pay for typewriters at a school, they still need to honor that specific purpose of the donation even though no one then could have anticipated how useless typewriters would be today (given the radical difference in “how” kids do their schoolwork).

Today we should be at least smart enough to know how much things can change.  Which is why this other article that appeared Sunday seemed like such a great insight into how to get the right education to the next generation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/fashion/03sexed.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Birds%20and%20bees&st=cse

As people talk more about how differently different age groups communicate and take in information despite using the same tools from cell phone text messages, to e-mail, to Facebook, Twitter, and others, many people have come to the realization that the teenagers of today will be our office co-workers before we know it, and their ideas of normal and acceptable communication styles will probably be very different from what we know today.

We have already seen shifts in office behavior.  Most of us used to use our office phones every day.  Now, other than conference calls, an inbound call to my desk phone has become a novelty because e-mail is the primary means of communication where I work.

So backing that up to how these kids will learn, since many of them already have a totally different way of communicating and taking in information, that implies that “how” we teach them will also need to change pretty profoundly if we want the outcome of educated people prepared to enter the workforce (or whatever they want to do).  It’s a good bet Amazon’s Kindle is a step in the future direction of textbooks (sorry backpack manufacturers).

That’s why this article caught my attention.  The piece “When the Cellphone Teaches Sex Education” about how the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Program of North Carolina set up the Birds and Bees Text Line to help kids answer questions about sex and sexuality.   I expect not a lot about the content of sex education has changed since I was a kid, but my guess is a lot of kids still aren’t crazy talking about every detail with their folks, this is a great solution to educate kids on this topic since it’s in a familiar format and in this case it’s fairly private.  Admittedly it’s a rapidly moving target, but educators need to start paying close attention to how kids take in information and start adapting their teaching methods accordingly.   I realize timeliness can be a key part of sex education and that’s a big plus with text messaging, teaching European Civilization or Calculus may not have as much time sensitivity, I think we are starting to see a new world of education and how people learn. Rethinking education isn’t going to happen overnight, but there’s a lot of opportunity out there right now.

-Ric

Trusted, yes.  Loved, not so much.  jumpstart.com, part of Knowledge Adventure, Inc.  makes fantastic products that my almost eight year-old son loves and has loved for years.  Their grade-specific products combine games with learning, with ideas of community and friendship, and they are just cool.  But when I mention jumpstart to friends, I always do so with a strong warning.  The way they make you pay for their products is a disaster, which is why I love to hate them.

The rules for kids computer games are pretty similar to what we expect from news, sports, and other internet content sites – there’s a lot that’s free, and then there’s a level at which you have to pay.  Some sites are more giving than others in that sense (Disney ToonTown and Pirates of the Caribbean are both great with free stuff, for example), but those are the rules.

So when I first saw Jumpstart at the toy store, I bought their “First Grade” program because my son was starting first grade and I thought some educational software would be great.  I honestly don’t remember exactly how much I paid for it, but it was more than ten and less than 20 dollars, which seemed like a decent deal for educational software, but not crazy cheap.  Then when we installed the software, almost immediately we realized the game wouldn’t work until we subscribed online and decided whether we wanted to pay the monthly fee or the annual fee.  So in  “buying” it at the toy store, what I really bought was the ability to pay more?!

Annoyed, I went ahead and subscribed and started to bark about it to some of my friends.  Then, if that weren’t enough I learned that “installing” the software on my laptop was only part of the bargain.  It won’t work unless the CD is in the machine AND the computer is connected to the internet.  Not only is this a drag, but since my son spends part of his time with his mother (not such a rarity), unless we each bought the software, the CD would have to go back and forth between us so he could keep playing it.

I am here to tell you, I think Knowledge Adventure Inc. would sell a lot more software if it solved these three problems:

1) Don’t make people pay for it twice.  No one else does that. Against the rules.

2) Don’t require the CD to be in the computer to play it.  No one else does that.  Against the rules.

3) Don’t require a persistent internet connection for a game that comes on a CD.  For internet only games like Disney’s ToonTown, I expect that, but one of the reasons I picked up the CD in the first place was so we could use it untethered.

My son loves your products, as do I, but these three things are annoying and the only organizations I can think of  that can annoy their customers and expect repeat business are government organizations like the Internal Revenue Service.

My work focuses on outcomes, “what” is being done, and in this case “what” we are doing is educating our kids.  At a time when education is in tough shape in this country, your products are so great for kids in helping them learn while learning computers, I ask you to please rethink “how” your billing and usage models are designed so more kids can learn using your great products.  When you do that, I am willing to bet that your Sell Products “what” will perform a lot better. . .

-Ric

Someone recently suggested that my work ignores quantitative analysis and relies solely on qualitative research, and that’s a mis-reading of the approach in the Rethink book.  I LOVE getting quantitative, but I have found two risks in starting there.

1) People will attach metrics and quantitative analysis to a block of work without any real knowledge or insight into the role of that work in the performance of the whole (which puts them at high risk of having the wrong measure)

2) Organizations simply look to industry benchmarks as their guide for quantitative analysis, which presumes the work is a commodity function that can just be compared to any other company in their industry.

I am not going to tell you that I am an expert in all industries, but manufacturing is one of the only industries I am aware of where you can just take industry benchmarks and apply them almost across the board to jump into the world of quantitative analysis, which is why the Six Sigma method is so fantastic for manufacturing companies.   For those not familiar with Six Sigma, in the simplest terms it eliminates variance in the performance of a specific piece of work. And to be sure there are parts of every organization where elimination of variance is a very helpful thing, but in my experience, in most other industries, starting with the assumption that you need to eliminate variance without first understanding the role of the work in the overall, is at least risky, and at worst potentially counterproductive.

I often compare the operating models of Costco and Sam’s Club.  Two companies in the same basic retail industry, and “what” they do is nearly identical, where “how” they do certain things is radically different because their brand and identity are different.  Sam’s Club cares a lot about whose products are on their shelves, and they work very hard to negotiate deals with those big name product companies so they can make enough profit when they sell them at great prices.  Costco  by contrast doesn’t care whose products are on their shelves, and they don’t make any money selling their products (by choice), they make their profits primarily from the membership dues that are required to be a member to shop there.  Because membership renewal is so key to them, they give away free food around most corners, the stores are well lighted, employees are very friendly.  So if I were to start with a quantitative approach and drive for standard retail industry metrics at Costco without first understanding what they value, I would literally destroy value.

So because most organizations are not as explicit as Costco about what they value at a high level, let alone at a more granular level, and because the risks are high that they already have the wrong metrics on a piece of work, I start with the heat maps that I do around value and performance to listen to what people think is most valuable (which I define in the book Rethink) and how they think it’s currently performing.  My heat maps always start with two colors per block of work, an outline or border color and an interior color (see the Key bel0w).  With these diagrams, we can be more explicit about where the high value and low value work is, and from there we start to get more quantitative and ask, what is the right metric, and which block or blocks of work will get us there, and once we have made those assertions, then we can get into the discussion of “how” we do it in terms of process re-engineerging, or Six Sigma, or Lean, or Agile, or some other method.

So yes I love the quantitative side, but it’s dangerous to start there unless you are sure that you are working with a commodity function that allows you to safely jump in with industry benchmarks.

-Ric

This morning David Brooks wrote a piece in The New York Times called “Globalism Goes Viral”  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/opinion/28brooks.html?_r=1&ref=opinion and in that piece I thought he did one thing very well, but strangely I thought he missed an obvious conclusion from that initial point.

The first point was that in this flat world we live in (and  he didn’t call it that, and since his office is right next to that of Thomas L. Friedman at that paper, my guess is that he doesn’t have any motivation to further boost Mr. Friedman’s ego), just as it can be great for business for things to happen so fast in a flat world, the dark side is that a virus like the swine flu can also spread just as fast now.  I hadn’t thought of it like that before, but he’s right and it is a little scary how important it is that we stay ahead of these things or it will get very bad very fast.

Then he went on to talk about the tradeoffs of managing this swine flu issue in a centralized vs. decentralized manner, concluding that the latter is more sensible.  My reaction is that better the solution is embedded in his thesis and that he needs to rethink the choices.

While it may seem like a gray area to some, I think that the right answer for this situation is a third option which is enabled by the flat world and that is a decentralized approach (each government and region figure out what’s best for them), but with a centralized virtual guidance board made up of the heads of the Centers For Disease control here, and their respective counterparts around the world, ensuring that the best and current information about the spread and the cure travel at the speed of light.  Literally.

I would love to hear your feedback on this.

-Ric

P.S. Despite the evidence to the contrary, I don’t get all of my ideas for things to talk about from The New York Times.