Facebook and Radical Transparency – A Rant
Via Andrew Boyd on Facebook.

Given my recent annoyance with Facebook forcing me to share it or lose it, I am not surprised.

This definitely goes against what CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a recent Time magazine article “What people want isn’t complete privacy … It’s that they want control over what they share and what they don’t.”

With the Internet, …

I upgraded to Picasa 3 recently and was shocked to discover it’s Face Detection functionality crawling through my photos and pulling out faces – without my knowledge and without my permission. And I had to struggle to find out how to stop it.

The technology is impressive of course. But I found the whole thing rather invasive and nasty for some reason. Faces are …

Someone said there are no original ideas. Certainly in the practice of design, it is inevitable that designers from around the world will hit on similar ideas and themes when tackling similar problmes.

But these grabs from TotallyLooksLike.com seem to show that some designers do prefer to copy rather than create.

The Internet has …

This article Chickens Cry Foul! on Voiceless – The Fund for Animals‘ website referred to celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s recent highlighting of the appalling conditions under which factory farmed chickens are “manufactured”.

The business impact of such a realisation is sobering indeed:

Within weeks of it airing, sales of factory farmed meat chickens plummeted by an estimated 10 million, while sales of non-caged eggs shot …

Reflecting on my post and the ensuing in-depth discussion
Fostering involvement and buy-in – what the cat taught me

The very act of us discussing the very topic of transparency is transparency at work! Isn’t it ironic.

If I were a more conventional business, I would not be engaging in this discussion. And certainly not in public and with someone who could become a potential customer (ie someone I have …

I had this thought during a conversation with Stilgherrian last week after a meeting – fairness is about being transparent.

Regardless of a person’s actual intentions, if they are open and transparent with you, they are giving you the choice of engaging with them further or not. More info = more empowered choice for you.

Does all this make any sense to you?

As I am sitting here putting the final touches on a seminar on business blogging, I caught this “magic media moment” on the news: “an unscripted and unleashed punter giving some big wig in a suit a large slice of his mind on the state of Sydney trains.”

It was a classic moment. One moment there’s the “big wig” spewing the usual PR-contrived rhetoric about …

From AdPulp, by way of Stilgherrian:

The tall towers that house our corporations are the new palaces of our day, the places where real power resides, but those towers are full of paradoxes. Made of glass, you can’t see inside. They’re pillars of our democracy, but they are run as totalitarian states. Their names are reduced to a set of initials. Their leaders are …

Often when I am making dinner, the cat would want to know what I am doing. If I ignore him, he usually gets more insistent and annoying.

So I simply show him or let him sniff at the carrots (or onions!) I am chopping up. He then knows what I am doing and loses interest. (Or if it is meat, he gets more excited and …

Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the originator of TQM (Total Quality Management), put forth 14 points of organisation behaviour change towards better performance.

Stilgherrian’s post on being real on the web brought to mind Deming’s eighth point: Drive out fear.

Point 8: Fear is a barrier to improvement so drive out fear by encouraging effective two-way communication and other mechanisms that will enable everybody to be …