All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

How lazy was I over the Thanksgiving weekend? So lazy that not only didn’t I write a new column but I didn’t even carefully choose the re-run. Instead, what follows ran ten years ago today. Hope you enjoy it … even though I didn’t choose it carefully I still liked what I read when I looked it over.

– Bob

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The wood thrush sings beautifully. The ring-billed gull does not — it squawks. Don’t blame the gull.

Blame the gulls. There’s a difference.

Thrushes sing without interference. This gives males room to produce complex vocalizations. Female thrushes decide whose song they like best, which more or less determines who mates with whom … the whole point of birdsong.

Gulls, in contrast, live in crowded colonies. With so many males vying for mates in such close quarters, it’s all a male can do to even get noticed. Amplitude is the name of the game. Subtlety has no place in it.

Any parallels between different work environments are purely the reason I brought the whole thing up. This isn’t, after all, an ornithological or sociobiological blog, and I’m certainly not going to compare either gulls or thrushes to our political campaigns.

I don’t, after all, gratuitously insult birds.

So let’s stick to the workplace you’re responsible for. Among the reasons: you can do something about it.

The question, of course, is whether the communications environment your employees work in is more thrush-like or gull-y.

It boils down to what someone has to do to get someone else’s attention, whether it’s a peer, someone in another part of the company, or, for that matter, you.

Some work situations have far too much in common with gull colonies. Crowded and frantic, everybody has too many demands on their attention and no time at all to absorb messages that require serious thought and analysis. This being the case, everyone flags every email they send as Urgent! while preceding their executive summaries with brief abstracts, and the abstracts with catchy subject lines.

Even worse, in situations like this, where every signal contributes to the overall cacophony, everyone involved has a legitimate reason to ignore everything … except, that is, for the small number of messages they receive from a trusted few (analogies do eventually break down).

Compare this to a more thrush-like situation. The background noise level is low. Messages have more depth. Recipients have more time to absorb. The occasional shrill voice gets urgent attention, which, if the urgency turns out to be artificial, leads to quiet coaching regarding the value of quietude.

Sound idyllic? It might be idyllic. Or, it might go beyond idyllic, reaching the realm of utter fantasy.

In the world of the professional management consultant, organizations thrive when everyone focuses their time, attention and energy on the few things that matter most, ignoring the trivia that constantly tries to distract them.

It’s entirely possible this view of the world can actually work. It is, however, just as possible that it works for the people who adopt it only because there are others hidden in the background who handle all of the so-called trivia … a flock of tasks that really do have to get done, but which have no glory attached to them.

The two possibilities aren’t mutually exclusive either. It’s likely most work environments have to be complicated but don’t have to be as complicated as they are.

Here’s what I know for sure: Almost without exception, everything … everything … is more complicated than it looks at the surface. And if it isn’t, it will be soon, because a competitor will add to the complexity by enhancing their next-generation product or service.

Often, government regulations also add to the complexity load. Not that they’re unnecessary — that depends on the regulation. But they do generally add to the complexity, although there are exceptions.

Someone has to handle it all. And in many situations, adding enough staff to let everyone concentrate on just a few important priorities would be completely unaffordable. The conclusion: Some employees are valuable precisely because they don’t focus on a few important matters … they multitask, juggle, keep track, and muddle through somehow.

When they need help, or discover something that calls for higher-level attention, they’re going to sound inelegant, more gull than thrush, because they’re competing for attention with quite a few others who also have to multitask, juggle, keep track, and muddle through somehow.

Take two lessons from this. First, from a purely personal perspective you’re better off being a thrush than a gull. The stress is lower and everyone will admire you more.

And second, do everything you can to keep the complexity to a minimum.

You might not be able to eliminate it altogether. But only a birdbrain would make it any worse than it absolutely has to be.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Sometime in the mid-1990s I discovered the difference between a premise and a plot.

The premise of the brilliant science fiction novel I planned to write was that what we now call augmented reality glasses had become popular, and cybervandals figured out how to plant what we now might call real-time deep fakes onto them.

In the first chapter an innocuous accounting clerk, having breakfast in a diner, is killed by an augmented-glasses-wearing vigilante who sees, via deep fake, the clerk pulling out a Glock, preparing to shoot everyone in the diner. A wave of similar crimes ensues.

The novel’s protagonists – Detectives Frederick Baltimore and Richmond Alexandria (named after two highway signs near Tyson’s Corner, VA, which at the time I thought was clever) – were charged with figuring out what was going on.

This was the premise, but at best all I had was the barest sketch of a plot.

Welcome to Meta, nee facebook, which wants us all to spend most of our lives in its “meta-verse.” It owns Oculus, the world’s most popular VR platform, along with most of the world’s social media audiences. And, it stands accused of not caring in the slightest whether the “information” it distributes to its audience bears any resemblance to actual reality.

Maybe it’s time for me to dust off the premise.

I’m also thinking it’s time for the world’s reputable fact-checking services to incorporate machine-learning AIs into their methodologies in order to scale their work to keep up with Meta’s reality-neutral content dissemination.

But mostly I’m thinking it’s time to make Frederick Pohl’s classic The Age of the Pussyfoot required reading for policymakers concerned with the various gaps we have in our society.

I don’t mean to minimize the significance of the wealth, income, and education gaps that are matters of immediate and serious concern.

But if Mark Zuckerberg succeeds in making his vision real, most people will spend most of their lives in a world that excludes the poor and disadvantaged from the augmented capabilities most of us will have at our disposal.

Call it the reality gap, and its leading edge is already upon us.

I’m not meaning to demonize either Zuckerberg or Meta (assuming the two are separable), or even Kellyanne Conway and her reality-gapped world of alternative facts. The leading edge has nothing to do with any of them.

The leading edge is the smartphone – the portable gateway to all the capabilities the Internet makes available. Those who can afford them are better communicators, more knowledgeable, and have superior access to potentially life-saving resources than those who can’t.

Awhile back I suggested the technique of asking questions backward, using as an example asking what the privileges of wealth should be rather than what our obligations to the poor are.

It isn’t too early to ask whether affluence should be allowed to become the prerequisite to participating in a society that’s increasingly virtual.

The Buried Lede: It’s also worth asking whether corporate information security departments have a role to play in all this. After all, most intrusions these days are the result of phishing attacks and related forms of social engineering. And phishing attacks are a form of disinformation.

On top of which, employees routinely use Google or facebook to look for information they need about one thing or another, which means the quality of day-to-day business decisions is affected by if and how well the organizations they work in are able to protect them from the misinformation, disinformation, and outright falsification they’re exposed to.

Sounds like an information security responsibility to me. Or else we need a new C-suite member – the Chief Reality Officer.

Bob’s last word: We have a word … malware … to cover all the various forms of attack bad actors make use of. We need but don’t have a single word that covers all the various forms of deceptive content.

I propose we call it malinfo. Use it three times and it will become part of your day-to-day vocabulary.

Bob’s sales pitch: My “IT 101” series continues on CIO.com with publication of the third and last article about technical architecture – “The secret art of technical architecture improvement.”

In case you missed them, the first two were, “Technical architecture: What IT does for a living,” and “Evaluating technical architecture: 11 key criteria and how to apply them.” I think you’ll find them both practical and useful. Whether or not you do, please let me know what you think of them.

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