sociology

Have you ever noticed that in business, every manager, director, VP, and C-level person honestly believes that strong teamwork makes for a strong work environment and business? However, have you also noticed that this type of teamwork rarely happens? Why is this? I think it's by design. We are still products of the Industrial Revolution, like it or not, and as such have not figured out how to actually run businesses as an organization of true teams. Do NFL, NBA, or my favorite, soccer teams, operate by forming a huge organization with lots of individual players all playing different games? Not if you are talking about the TEAMS that play the games, but even in these organizations there are a lot of individuals playing their own games against no direct competitors - physical therapists, marketers, managers, etc. And yet, this structure is perpetuated throughout modern businesses.

April 1st is an increasingly annoying day for one reason, and that is that the signal-to-noise ratio of that day goes WAY up (or down, depending on how you wish to measure it) with each passing year. In the past, and I mean before the Internet, the April 1 noise ratio was pretty well contained. But with the rise of the interconnected communications of the Internet age, now EVERYONE can pull a prank with a few tappy taps on the keyboard or touchscreen. This isn't funny. It isn't funny because with all of the additional communication options these days, my available time to pour through all of these communications is very short. So I simply don't have time to waste an entire day sifting through what's true and what's not. It's not that I'm a curmudgeon, a gullible idiot, or just a cranky guy - I just can't stand the importance this non-holiday is taking on due to the ease of communications these days. It's not even a flipping holiday, for goodness sake!

The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage by Gilmore and Pine has quickly become one of my favorite books, alongside another very popular book, The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris. Both books feature what I believe to be some of the more unique, and applicable, thinking about the world in the new millennium that we find ourselves now a part of in everyday life. Let me describe to you, briefly, why:

Microsoft apparently doesn't like to listen and then dialog with their most sophisticated users when it comes to security issues, to name just one way they are failing as a business in the Information Age. A security vulnerability in SQL Server, Microsoft's premier database management application which competes with products like Oracle, MySQL, and others was discovered and reported in the linked article.  In a nutshell, this security vulnerability allows a user with administrative priveledges to SQL Server to access other user's passwords, but not without some "hacking" to do so.  In any case, Microsoft has refused to fix the problem because they don't care about their users.

I asked the question, "How much personal information should we allow online?" in a previous post titled, Online Personal Information - How Much Is Too Much?. This question has been weighing heavily on my mind this entire week, so I have decided to expand on some of the ideas that I touched on in that previous post, in this article. I will explore the implications of online privacy, transparency, redundancy, accountability, and risks in this article. You will see that there are benefits to walking a tight line of balance between complete online transparency, and the far more prevalant ultra-privacy that our current American society expects in everyday life.