Typical interaction: I called Rogers today regarding a letter asking me, as usual, to sign up for their internet services. The person who answered asked for my account. I don’t have an account. He asked me to stay on hold. He came back and asked for my name and address. Then more time on hold. He came back and told me to call the Do Not Call list of the CRTC (in Canada). I explained that I was calling about mailings, not telemarketing, and I was already on all of the do not disturb lists I could find. I was put on hold. He came back to explain that there was no way I could get off the mailing list since no-one had a clue about where it was developed or who was responsible. He suggested I email corporate public relations. So I did. No response yet.

The same thing has been happening with Bell.

I just hate this. I travel a lot, and my mail is forwarded or opened and faxed to me. I’ve been able to get off almost every spam list except for Bell and Rogers, the communications experts.

Does anyone have any idea about how to stop it? If so, I’ll share it here. Email me at news at realworldsystems.net.

There are thousands of free internet radio stations that you can get through Screamer Radio, but I prefer to select specific albums and artists rather than listen to someone else’s playlist. Actually, my favourite way to listen to music is to start with some songs I like and then generate an automatic playlist based on the characteristics of the selected songs using a recommendation engine.

So I was delighted to find Imeem and then, even better, Grooveshark. In both you can select the songs, artists and albums of your choice and create your own playlists. Grooveshark, which is much easier to use, also gives you the option of selecting any song and pressing ‘Radio’, creating a personalized stream of songs based on their user database. You can give feedback on each song that the Radio lists, which will refine future recommendations (they say). Now I’m just hoping that they don’t start barring Canadians.

A Harvard University Library news story updates the great news of the Harvard research community’s leadership of open access to scholarship through DASH. The release begins:

September 1, 2009—Harvard’s leadership in open access to scholarship took a significant step forward this week with the public launch of DASH—or Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard—a University-wide, open-access repository. More than 350 members of the Harvard research community, including over a third of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, have jointly deposited hundreds of scholarly works in DASH.

“DASH is meant to promote openness in general,” stated Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library. “It will make the current scholarship of Harvard’s faculty freely available everywhere in the world, just as the digitization of the books in Harvard’s library will make learning accumulated since 1638 accessible worldwide. Taken together, these and other projects represent a commitment by Harvard to share its intellectual wealth.”

Visitors to DASH (http://dash.harvard.edu) can locate, read, and use some of the most up-to-the minute scholarship that Harvard has to offer. DASH users can read “Anticipating One’s Troubles: The Costs and Benefits of Negative Expectations” by Harvard College Professor Dan Gilbert.

Smart Mobs » Blog Archive » Harvard’s DASH for Open Access.

A vicious cycle is leaving nonprofits so hungry for decent infrastructure that they can barely function as organizations—let alone serve their beneficiaries. The cycle starts with funders’ unrealistic expectations about how much running a nonprofit costs, and results in nonprofits’ misrepresenting their costs while skimping on vital systems—acts that feed funders’ skewed beliefs. To break the nonprofit starvation cycle, funders must take the lead.

Stanford Social Innovation Review : Articles : The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle (August 18, 2009).

• Aspirations
• Strategy
• Organizational skills (including performance management, planning, fundraising etc)
• Human resources
• Systems and infrastructure
• Organizational structure
• Culture

Feeling the Heat: The Effects of Performance Pressure on Teams’ Knowledge Use and Performance  HBS Working Knowledge.

Why do teams often fail to use their knowledge resources effectively even after they have correctly identified the experts among them? Project teams are a prominent feature of the knowledge-based economy, and member expertise has long been recognized as an important resource that can greatly affect team performance, but only to the extent that it is accurately recognized and used to accomplish the objective. The step between recognizing others’ expertise and then actually applying it to achieve a collective outcome, however, is highly problematic: Even when individuals know who holds relevant task expertise, they are often unwilling or unable to give the experts appropriate influence over the group process and outcomes. HBS professor Heidi K. Gardner takes a multidisciplinary approach to develop theory explaining how interpersonal dynamics in teams affect members’ use of each other’s distinct knowledge, ultimately leading to differential performance outcomes. Key concepts include:

* Teams facing significant performance pressures tend to default to high-status members at the expense of using team members with deep knowledge of the client, with detrimental effects on team performance.
* The more important the project, the less effective the team: Excessive performance pressure results in the team reverting to less effective ways of divvying up influence over its end product, in turn leading to lower performance ratings for the whole team.
* Team process is important in enabling organizations to harness knowledge resources for the benefit of maintaining strong relations with their clients.

Should companies organize outside innovation through collaborative communities or competitive markets?

Findings

* Communities are useful when an innovation problem involves cumulative knowledge, continually building on past advances. Markets are effective when an innovation problem is best solved by broad experimentation.

* In general, communities are more oriented toward the intrinsic motivations of external innovators (the desire to be a part of some larger cause, for instance), whereas markets tend to reward extrinsic motivations (such as through financial compensation).

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the former editor of the Harvard Business Review, writes:

I hit upon this law of management (and life) after observing hundreds of major changes slide into lethargy following the pep rallies and press conferences, as grand promises gave way to the tough challenges of implementation. That’s the point in the middle when true believers have doubts. And that happens even without throwing in a gigantic global economic crisis.

All new initiatives – big new government directions, business turnarounds, new venture start-ups, new products, or internal process changes – can run into trouble before reaching fruition. Troubles increase with the number of ways the initiative differs from current approaches. The more innovation, the more problems. Problems tempt people to give up, forget it, and chase the next enticing rainbow. But stop the effort too soon, and by definition it is a failure. Stay with it through its hurdles, make appropriate adjustments, and you could be on the way to success. Though some ideas are dead-ends, many simply need mid-course corrections.

Change Is Hardest in the Middle – Rosabeth Moss Kanter – HarvardBusiness.org.

would open the door to social change to the most powerful economic force known to humanity: the entrepreneurial spirit — a spirit which is effectively eradicated in any nonprofit setting by

1. The obstructing power of Boards of Directors, which are notoriously risk-averse
2. The inability to offer stock options to attract a kick-ass team
3. The inability for entrepreneurs to own any of their creation themselves
4. The inability to hire without interference from an outdated moral code on compensation

The entrepreneur bets everything on her dream and is free to pursue it in a for-profit setting. Enter non-profit governance, and the entrepreneur is suffocated and demoralized — she no longer has say over her dream. Her board does, and the IRS, and the charity watchdogs.

My goodness. What a lot of dogmatic, ideological, non-evidence-based junk.  

Want to Change the World? Change the Tax Code – Dan Pallotta – HarvardBusiness.org.

PYLL works like this: If a male lived to age 60, but average life expectancy was 69, 9 years of potential life would have been lost. PYLL is an interesting number to economists because it is a measure of opportunity cost: how much life is foregone in different healthcare systems. […]

The United States gets the smallest bang for the buck in terms of life itself amongst developed countries: it realizes the lowest level of “life returns.” The U.S. healthcare system returns the fewest life years for each dollar spent. The United States, for example, has invested an additional 8.3% of GDP in health since 1971. That investment yielded a PYLL reduction of 5157 years. America realized a return of 621 potential years of life gained for each additional percentage point of GDP invested in health. […]

Canada, in contrast, has invested a marginal 2.6% of GDP in health since 1971. That investment yielded a PYLL reduction of 5393 years. Canada realized a return of 2074 years for each additional percentage point of GDP invested in health. The Canadian healthcare system delivers life returns more than three times greater than those of the American healthcare system.

How Effective is American Healthcare? – Umair Haque – HarvardBusiness.org.