I take a temporary break from web2.0 buzz and return to my quiet consulting niche for a moment.

I must confess I have always enjoyed reading about failures. If it is possible to learn anything from experience of someone else, I feel it’s much more likely to be the case with failures than with success stories.

Unfortunately, success stories are what the world is all about nowadays. As a result, interesting failure stories are difficult to find. Perhaps it’s just a matter of a temporary trend, as Tom Peters suggests in this interview.

Nevertheless, I have one failure story for today. What’s interesting about it is that it’s a consulting one. You can found it at kuro5hin.

I could quote the title but it contains a name of the company, so I would rather keep it brand-neutral. I was wondering for quite long if it’s not a fake, but it seems genuine at least from this comment of one of the consultants involved in the project. Not surprisingly, consultant’s view on the whole thing is different than that of the author.

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It was only a couple of days ago when I became a happy user of del.icio.us. My happiness did not last long, though, even if I thought I solved my bookmarking overload problem once for all.

Sometimes when you are hiking in the mountains, you can climb a mountain for half a day, then finally reach the peak… only to see the next one somewhere far above. I got kind of similar feeling when after couple of hours after posting about del.icio.us I saw this comment from Mike:

Since you are talking about taking bookmarking to the next level, I thought you might like to try our new service www.blinklist.com. No worries, you can just import all of your links from del.icio.us to give it a try. To compare BlinkList vs. del.icio.us you can just check out this page:
http://about.blinklist.com/category/general/blinklist-vs-delicious/

I started reading around first. Awful consulting bias towards researching instead of actually doing something yourself.

Finding a Blinklist review is hardly a challenge. Mike has been doing a heck of a job in terms of viral marketing. More difficult would be to find a reviewer unimpressed by Blinklist:

• Techcrunch: “Worthy addition to the ranks of social bookmarking services, and one of our favorites”.
• Blended Edu: “MindValley has created an impressive product with so many applications that learning communities–from grade school to corporate training?will be looking for ways to integrate BlinkList into their curriculum”
• TipMonkies: “It doesn?t have as many users as some of the other services, but considering the quality of the service, and the obvious level of attention which it gets from its developers, I?m sure this will change soon. Definitely an A+ site, for sure”
• Talkings of a Tyrant: “To conclude this rather short blog post, I hereby announce that I?ve switched over to Blinklist! No more ugly-looking del.icio.us for me!”

Reading these and a couple more got me interested in some Blinklist features that I thought I could like. They included ?starring? links to mark them out (I use this functionality in Gmail, though not very often), making links ?private?, and the social features in general, even if for me they are hardly a ?must-have? at this stage.

As a result, I eventually found myself ready to give Blinklist a personal try and sacrifice part of a weekend to evaluate it.

Fast forward: I?m still curious how useful in practice are Blinklist’s social features. The reason I don?t know it yet? Before you have the opportunity to play with them, you need to learn the basics, which in my case took a lot of time ? as a matter of fact more than it should. While I enjoy the idea of extending the social part of bookmarking, I have mixed feelings as to the way Blinklist handles the very basics. For now, I will stick with del.icio.us to cover my daily bookmarking needs, while keeping an eye on Blinklist, to get more used to it and maybe find a feature that would make me switch for good. Below I elaborate more on the experience that I had. (read more…)

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There came a time when bookmarking list of my browser got filled more quickly than I was able to create new folders. And subfolders. I looked at my “bookmarks” menu and realized that it was such a mess that it was no longer useful.

That’s when I decided to take a longer look at del.icio.us. It seems that everyone was using it, anyway.

Now I am bought as well. Given its popularity this may not be interesting for many, but if you haven’t tried it yet, maybe I can give you a picture what you are missing:

• The idea is to store your bookmarks online instead of in the browser
• Another idea is to let other people see what you bookmarked
• Now it may seem a bit weird thing to do at first glance, but thanks to this you can see how many people bookmarked the same page as you
• Also you can drill down to see who is in this group exactly and what else does he have
• You can use tags to classify each link (tag can by any keyword), and of course you can use tags for searching

There is also possibility to integrate my links into the blog somehow.. but I’m not there yet.

Nevertheless I felt it was a must to integrate it with Firefox - del.icio.us post works fine for me, simply adds an item to Firefox context menu. But you can find a lot more at Absolutely Del.icio.us - Complete Tool Collection.

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Andrew Orlowski wrote an interesting story related to Sony rootkit case (Sony unsinged by rootkit CD fiasco). I am personally curious about the bottom line aspect of all of this, so it was fun to compare someone else’s point of view.

My take-outs from his article:

• Sony’s sales were actually little affected despite a storm in the blogosphere and mainstream media
• The vocal blogosphere population represents in fact a minority of tech-savvy users, while most people are well served when their CDs can just play in stereo system and their car
• Lawsuits will hardly make any more difference since corporations learned to treat them as merely operational overhead, following Microsoft?s case
• Sony can just ignore geeks and lawsuits and move forward with its DRM strategy

It’s meant to be provocative reading and it serves its purpose well, at least as far as I am concerned. Couple of points that I was pondering upon are below. (read more…)

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Browsing through the blogs can be a lot of fun, even if the cost is massive information overload (but I am used to). Fun comes from directly taping into seemingly neverending source of human creativity. Serious pieces, which make you go to Google Scholar and find some smart PDFs to get more educated on the subject, or unpredictable stuff of someone who just went and acted on some crazy, useless idea.

I can?t help but share some experiences from the second group.

First was created by Thomas Mottl and brought to me by Boing Boing. You call it virtual reality thing, but the place it takes you to is quite unusual.

And a second one I owe to guys on Accenture podium in the Netherlands. It?s a journal of overheard conversations in New York city. Enjoyable reading, can be found here.

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If you are as new to the subject of blogging as me and trying to get some first insight, you might find this post useful.

After spending some time on looking around and reading various bits about the blogosphere, I looked back at what I was actually trying to find and created an issue tree. Let me present:

Now, this may not be the most perfect issue tree around. The main question is not exactly laser focused. And there are no hypotheses. Some areas may not be there, since I consider them out of my scope at the moment.

Still, it works for me. I can use it to see what areas I already know something about and which may be still worth further examination. It can also serve as an agenda for some more writing, with focus on a selected components of the big picture. And I can always refine it while moving on. For now I?m happy with what I?ve got. But, if you have any issues with my issue tree, I will be glad to know your comments.

Let?s see what?s inside the boxes. (read more…)

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One thing learned during the weekend ? reading blogs can be addicting. It reminds me time of writing my master thesis, when going into all the paths connected with the interesting (and broad) subject was so exciting that it seemed I would never actually get to write anything.

It underscores why it is so bad to do a research without a very precise agenda. In a consulting world, we usually use issue trees to clarify a question, break it down into components and drill down to a level detailed enough to already be suitable as an agenda. I?m planning to prepare such issue tree for my current investigation and share it, but it will not be today.

Currently subject of my ongoing interest is the blogosphere. The cases when it made a tangible difference in the real world are what inspires me, I guess. I would like to learn more how it works and how it can have influence.

I don?t regret being so little organized this weekend, though. I read a number of interesting things which hopefully help me build the big picture. Just to mention ?Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality? (PDF here) by Clay Shirky. Great introduction to skewed distribution in the blogosphere and issue of ?A-list? or elite blogs, which form the focal points of the whole system.

But I will leave it here for now and come back to the subject perhaps when I have some time to think through all this material and connect all the dots.

Among the things I did was trying to find those top blogs and see what they are. I eventually focused on top 100 Technorati Popular Blogs, as could be expected. Looking at top 10 blogs I found few familiar names.

I enjoyed Boing Boing, and especially PostSecret was a real gem. I invite you to take a look.. or perhaps you did long time ago and it is only me who lived under the rock. Anyway on the left you can see a sample.

With reference to connecting the dots and to be done with the subject of this regrettable weekend, at least I managed to watch Guy Ritchie?s ?Revolver? on Saturday. I was positively impressed by the trailer and so I decided to go. Only afterwards I learned that it attracts some rather awful reviews.

I liked it nevertheless. The storyline is so messed up that it makes you think hard to make anything out of it. After the lights went on a guy in the front stood up, turned and asked aloud ?Was it only me that didn?t get what was it about?? I think I have a clue but look forward to comparing my takeouts when some of the friends also sees it.

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I’ve been trying for some time to find some interesting blogs written by other consultants. With little success so far, which I thought was perhaps due to my little experience with this whole blogging thing.

However, it seems I’m not alone, as Steve Shu had a similar difficulty, specifically in finding McKinsey blogs (and an original post here).

Steve’s blog, by the way, has been quite helpful for me in getting grasp on what’s blogging is all about. And it led me to some further interesting reading, like this blog by Deloitte?s principal.

Steve is involved in blogs rather professionally, so he is more about corporate blogging. As a reason for relatively low popularity of blogs among management consultants he suspects availability of other established channels of spreading “thought leadership” (e.g. McKinsey Quaterly), risk management (handling of confidential information) and still low blog readership among corporate buyers.

Anyway, even though corporate blogging is fine, I would rather find some less formalized blogs of consultants like me. Distilled and filtered corporate communication I have enough, thank you.

I was able to find a nice blogging “podium” set up by Accenture in Netherlands here. My personal favorites are of course the girls - Maisey and Rieta. (note: I moved this paragraph here so its position doesn’t imply the podium is one of those sad, formalized and filtered places, which it is not)

I was thinking along the lines what personal features of consultants would make them less likely bloggers than other professionals. Below I listed some hypotheses, based also on my own experience with this webpage.

Because of their time constraints
As a matter of fact, consultants are usually not the ones leaving office at 5pm sharp. Objectively, they might have problems finding free time for blogging.

There may also be time management dimension of this. Consulting work allows you to develop quite rapidly by itself. However, I noticed that, sadly, consultants often lack drive to explore avenues of self-development other that the ones connected to work requirements. Work requirements are always urgent and it?s hard to devote precious time to something which is not, even if it?s promising.

Because they want it to be perfect from the start
Consultants may also be inclined to set the bar too high from the start. After all, we are used to maintaining high quality in everything we deliver.

It refers also to me, but as you can see on this site I managed to fight this urge to perfection quite effectively. I also have additional difficulty with my ?do-it-yourself? approach, which is to blame for this lousy home-made layout:) (updated: I changed the layout, there is a screenshot of my original one here)

To be serious, I still don?t know exactly what direction all of this should take, whether it?s light comments about consulting life, preferably illustrated with amateur photos not to write to much, or serious analyses full of insight and analytical rigor. Or maybe I leave this blog under my name for the latter and create another for anonymous complaints about consulting hardships and existential thoughts that get you in the airplanes.

Start small and learn what sticks, that much can be learned from Google.

Because they live in a world full of policies
And there is still the issue of policy compliance. If your blog is not anonymous, you would rather not want to be fired because of something in it. You impose some self-restrictions on what you write, which doesn?t make it easier.

As for myself, I still don?t know if my company has a policy related to private publishing. I never made an effort to look for policies. This was the first time I did but haven?t found anything.

Nevertheless, after some considering I removed all references to my company?s name, just to be on safe(r) side. And I will work on some nice disclaimer later.

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Last Wednesday was the day when I could finally see the show I was preparing for the whole week going live. Not only see, but rather perform part of it.

Actually, we had a kind of pilot day before, but three people that you know are different than an audience of 35. SGH audience especially, even if it’s my university after all.

What a relief to have it done. I’m not a natural presenter and you never know if you didn’t make some mistake with numbers when you generate some complicated scenario. So there was some nervousness because of this, but in the end, everything went fine. I would even say flawlessly.

And the feedback was also awesome- 100% participants think the case was well prepared. Most want to work for us after the case. And, well, one person definitely doesn’t want to work for us after the case. Overall, high grades in all areas.

It turned out the students appreciated our experiment to give a kind of “lecture” part before actual case study work. The idea was to pass on some knowledge and methodology that we normally use, so they can feel how the real work looks like. We thought there is a risk that they would be bored, but they weren’t. Feedback show they appreciated learning something they didn’t know.

Do they agree that they saw how consultants work? Now they don’t. They think it’s much more difficult than that. One more proof that SGH guys are smart:)

In line with company’s tradition, every relevant partner was soon informed about this newest business consulting success story and lots of appreciative patting on the back followed.

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Finally I found something that google/ig can be useful for. I used to get by just by manually browsing Google News on my favorite subjects, but now, when I try to keep track of many individual blogs, it just doesn’t scale.

So I took another look at this personalized homepage of Google’s. I added some Google News searches, a couple of online newspapers and some blogs that I regularly read. Now it’s all there and it is automatically updating as news feeds arrive (or so I hope). In the process I found Google Reader in the Labs, which may be even better and I plan to give a try (but not today). I’m sure there are some even more refined power-reading solutions, but for a while I should be fine.

Btw, it is really a shame that there is no Warsaw in the weather widget. Come on Google… even Windows Live has Warsaw in it.

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The sky is depressingly white and it’s becoming dark so fast. The Warsaw is not a very energizing place right now.

I am working on a case study for students and it takes more time that I expected, or perhaps I am not particularly productive for all this adverse conditions described above. Anyway, since I’ve never done this before, I would like the stuff to be as good as possible. How it will look in practice, I will see the coming week. And the next week - Russia, Ukraine, or something else - you never know.

Elsewhere in the world, interesting things are taking place. “Battle of giants” kind of things.

Let’s take my favorite app, Firefox browser. This open source (i.e. principally non-commercial) program has managed to gain ca. 10% market share (estimations vary and there is also significant geographical distribution) within a year. It generated a lot of noise in the process, for all its gains were mostly at the expense of the dominant Microsoft’s IE.

Firefox is fast, has some innovative features appreciated by power users (like tabbed browsing) and a clean interface. These virtues proved to be enough to allow it spread fast by a word of mouth, but there have been also certain grass-roots, gorilla marketing initiatives, like Spread Firefox. Firefox has always had a friendly relation with Google, to which it defaults its search box and a starting page. Google in return made sure its web properties were Firefox friendly and provided some hosting assistance. It refrained though from a more decisive support, even as people speculated about a possibility of some kind of “branded” Google browser based on Firefox code.

It changed now as Google offers bounty for every Firefox download through its “referral” program. Web publishers will place referral buttons on their sites and for each downloaded copy they will pocket 1$.

It will take some time to judge the outcomes. More innovative promotional activity can be expected now, when there is a tangible reward in place. Some examples are already there.
I like especially this battle cry (open letter on “Explorer Destroyer”):

Mozilla built us a wonderful tool. Google gave us a carrot. Now take the stick and beat IE’s a**.

Since I am happy to recommend Firefox anyway and so far didn’t have any contacts with Google’s ad program (hell, this site is not even indexed, still) I was curious to try how this new thing works. Referral program requires to join Google’s AdSense first, so I filled a form and got through verification process in something like 6 hours. So far so good.

It seems, however, that the Firefox initiative is limited to the US only. So my original reason for all of this is gone, but maybe I can make that up by having some fun with AdSense program. At least I can make referral to this one:

…Only it doesn’t work now. Ok, enough for one day.

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Microsoft announced it’s next “bet the company” move and declared embracing web services with its “Windows Live” platform. Even if I failed to see any value in MSFT’s site at this moment, the news got me interested in some of the web services guys whom Microsoft is targeting and trying to “innovate” from with this another “me-too” initiative of theirs.

I paid a visit to Salesforce.com, which had me quite impressed. In case you didn’t know it already, the company is providing an online CRM application. No software required. No integration projects needed. And it seems that it’s working:)

I wonder if someone is already doing this kind of stuff in Poland.

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Lolek pub quickly got full with people interested in careers in our company (hopefully) and free beer (certainly). I for one obtained two contacts to potential Russian teachers, so the event was productive at least from my perspective. I should probably say that it was good to drink beer with students again… still I don’t feel very different from them in the first place.

My only regret would be that a certain girl I met on the work fairs day before did not manage to get listed, for she was the only one who knew exactly what she wanted to do in her job. No such job probably exists, sadly, but I managed to get her interested in working for us instead - my greatest recruitment success so far.

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