Business Insight Zone

Perusing the virtual newsstand.

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Dan Markovitz of TimeBack Management makes some excellent points in this post:

How do you change lousy work habits?

I’ve pointed before to the article “Infomania,” which lays out in detail the real, honest-to-goodness, cash-money business costs of e-mail overload and constant interruptions. The intellectual framework is there: we know that bad habits around e-mail and meetings and interruptions cost money. Yet still we don’t change.

As Dan rightly points out, we have to get beyond the logical or intellectual reasons why this is true, and start changing the societal habits — the psychological frames — that we put around these habits.

Think of all the unhealthy social practices — whether something as historically serious as blatant racism or as incidental as spitting in public places — that we now regard as uncouth, unsociable, uncivilized. Organizations that want to improve their performance need to build up some of the same stigmas around unhealthy information practices.

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Social-media P.R. pioneer Brian Solis offers an interesting conversation-starter with this piece:

The Social Revolution is Our Industrial Revolution

There are terms here I would alter (”peoplenomics”? yecch), but I like Brian’s emphasis that not everything is changing, and his observation that much of the overheated talk about “social media” is coming from folks inside the social-media echo chamber; for most folks, social media is just “media” that’s taking on new forms and enabling new, more highly distributed, means of conversation. If you’re interested in what Brian says here, you might also like my earlier take in a related vein, “Western Union and record labels.”

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Joe Romm at the Climate Progress blog stumps for the power of energy efficiency:

Energy efficiency, Part 2: The limitless resource

People who have little experience with what serious energy efficiency investments can do for a company or a state [...] think it is a one-shot resource wherein you pick the low hanging fruit. In fact, fruit grow back. The efficiency resource never gets exhausted because technology keeps improving and knowledge spreads to more and more people.

Particularly compelling is Joe’s assessment of the energy-efficiency actions of Dow Chemical in the 1980s under manager Ken Nelson. You might think that a big, smart, capital-intensive company like Dow would be all over energy efficiency from the get-go, but it’s just not so. My own take on this is that energy was so cheap for so long — and our cultural practices around energy use were so entrenched — that even many big companies didn’t find it worthwhile to pursue efficiency.

The comments thread of Joe’s post is also worth reading. I left a couple of comments there, comparing energy efficiency to Moore’s Law rather than a fruit tree. Here were my last words on the subject there:

My summary: as we get better and better [at energy efficiency], I predict, we will see more and more that we can be doing. Yes, there will be diminishing returns at some point — but we’re so very far from hitting that point that it need not concern us for at least several decades.

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After a long, ridiculous delay, the FCC has finally approved the merger between Sirius and XM Radio. As we’ve discussed before, the National Association of Broadcasters and others have portrayed the deal as creating a monopoly. But, as the Washington Post’s article on the approval notes,

“The merger’s completion is a relief to shareholders who have expressed frustration with the prolonged approval process. XM and Sirius have struggled financially and have said that joining forces is the only way that they can survive. Music-enabled cellphones, iPods, music Web sites and traditional radio stations all provide increased competition.”

In almost every case, I’m against monopolies. But this isn’t a monopoly. If Popeyes, Church’s, and KFC joined forces into one mega-chain for fried chicken, they wouldn’t have a monopoly on fast food; they’d still be competing with McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Dairy Queen, and every other fast-food chain in the world.* That’s what’s happening in the Sirius-XM deal.

( * Sure, sure — in real life, YUM! Brands owns both KFC and Pizza Hut. But please humor me while I spin out this hypothetical.)

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(Picture by ernop.)

Category: Energy, Media, Social media, The working life