Really, it’s how museums should be. The Storm King Art Center, situated on the mountain of the same name, is 500 acres of gorgeous former farm land, now creatively farmed with long grasses and devoted to the display of sculpture. We visited on a perfect Spring day and I can’t imagine a more beautiful place. It’s about an hour north of New York City and for me will lessen all other museum experiences. Wear comforable shoes and pack a picnic lunch.
More notes from Managing the Professional Service Firm…
Brett proposes the idea of worker-to-worker offshoring:
Just imagine: you get assigned to do two days of … competitive site audits for a pitch. Ugh. Why not sub-shore the work, W2W-style and take the day[s] off? It costs $15-20/hour…
I think PeterV has done this before, offshoring some personal programming work to a PHP programmer in India. I know it’d be nice to never have to do a content inventory again. Of course, we’d be training the offshore workers to do our jobs, but I think that’s inevitable. Move upstream.
(You know what I’d really like — and the socialist in me feels rather guilty about this — is a personal assistant. Boy, if I just had someone to take care of all the administrative crap in my life, I’d have time for, well, all the other crap (hopefully upstream crap). Could that possibly be offshored?)
OK, just one more blogger-blogging-about-blogging-tools post and then I’m done. We might view the MT price increase through the lens of the innovator’s dilemma. They moved upmarket, and the open source, free, and otherwise interesting competitors suddenly looked like compelling options to those of us on the leading edge of the blog tool curve.
What if SixApart had released MT as open source at the same time they started charging for it? It would basically follow the Red Hat model: get the raw (e.g. Linux) functionality for free but pay for easier installation, more features, and support. For companies, it’s a no brainer expense, and the rest of us happily run our software for free. It’s quite hard to convince our brains to accept the risk of giving away the software, but we’re starting to see enough examples to learn from experience.
More notes from Managing the Professional Service Firm…
Raspberry Jam Rule: the further you spread your marketing tactics, the thinner they get.
It’s always better to demonstrate than to assert.
In-person, individualized methods are always better than broadcasting.
More notes from Managing the Professional Service Firm…
So far How clients choose has been one of the most eye-opening chapters of the book. If were we to apply user-centered design principles to clients, we’d end up with this chapter.
From the consultant’s point of view, there are two main stages to getting clients: marketing (speaking to the entire market) and selling (speaking to one particular prospect). From the buyer’s point of view, these two stages are qualification (determining who has the technical skills to do the job) and selection (who do I like enough to do the job). The first is a technical evaluation, the second is much more personal. This is because of how the buyer feels during this process…
As a result, the buyer looks for these qualities in a consultant…
More notes from Managing the Professional Service Firm…
About a third through the book, Maister starts to repeat himself a little, hammering home one of his overarching themes of service. He says you must be client-centered, particularly interesting advice when you’re running a user-centered design firm. This is a balance we’re familiar with, and as designers learn more about business it becomes less a conflict and more a synthesis of the two goals.
A friend at Deloitte Consulting needs and IA for wireframe development for 1-2 weeks in NYC. The start date is next week (6/2) or as soon as possible. Send me an email (link in the nav) if you’re interested.
James Surowiecki’s Financial Page in the New Yorker has become a must read, a one-page column connecting topics such as macro-economic statistics, currency policy, and Argentina’s promptness policy in clear, concise, enlightening language. He’s coming out with his first book next week, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. Kirkus Reviews says,
Multitudes are generally smarter than their smartest members, declares New Yorker writer Surowiecki. With his theory of the inherent sagacity of large groups, Surowiecki seems to differ with Scottish journalist Charles Mackay’s 1841 classic, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which dealt with such stupidities as the South Sea Bubble, tulip-mania, odd styles of whiskers, and dueling. Our 21st-century author admits that there are impediments and constraints to the intelligence of large groups, usually problems of cognition, coordination, and cooperation. A group must have knowledge, Surowiecki states: not extensive knowledge, but rudimentary comprehension of basic fact with harmonized behavior by individual members. Finally, individuals must go beyond self-interest for the good of all. That’s how capital markets and Google’s algorithm work, and how science isolated the SARS virus.
Also see his article in Wired.
Chris Fahey and friends launch their firm’s v2.0 site. I’ll admit to disliking the previous version, and for all that lacked the new version more than makes up for it, in what is one of the purtiest-funktional designs for a design shop. They include their own original Venn diagram, and the nav bar is just plain fun.
WordPress and Textpattern, as previously mentioned, were fortunate to hit 1.x versions at approximately the same time as the MT price policy shift. If you were to try calculating the financial ramifications of this shift, you might fill one of your variables with the number 40,000.
Henrik Olsen points to readability.info which uses a variety of measurements to judge how complex your documents or Web pages are to read. It says my site is too complex for most people to read easily. I’m tempted to take that as a compliment, and if you’re a regular reader, so should you.
Roger Johansson uses a helpful “let me show you how I do it, step by step” way of explaining how to construct the XHTML and CSS for a simple but effective two column layout. It’s part of his excellent Developing with web standards mini-book.
I’ve hired a crack team of stylists, programmers, and librarians to re-organize my five+ years worth of blog posts from four different blogging systems. Work is in progress, but you can start basking in the sheer joy of:
Thanks for your patience while we strive to facilitate a pleasurable surfing experience.
Once in a while the Monopoly game of life tosses us Second Prize in a Beauty Contest card. Last night, courtesy of the nice people at the New Yorker and Johnny Walker, I saw a preview of the film The Clearing with Robert Redford, Willem Dafoe and Helen Mirren. The plot was thriller, but the genre was drama, focusing more on the characters than the suspense, which was fine with me as the extensive dialog between Redford and Dafoe is music to the ears. The event included hor d’oeuvres and scotch (of course) and capped off with a Q&A session with director Pieter Jan Brugge and writer Justin Haythe, all in the theater of the Tribeca Grand hotel. It all felt very priviledged and very New York.