Collaboration First, Then Knowledge Management
Matthew returns to CMS Watch to argue that you should endeavor first to support the practical needs of distributed workers for completing projects. Read more…
Archive for June, 2004
Jun 25
Consultants: A Necessary Evil?
I’ve read several books on how to negotiate in business. They all pretty much say the thing. Of course, the grand-daddy of all of these is “What Color is Your Parachute?” I read this way back when I was negotiating for my first job. Usually negotiating isn’t high on your priorities when you’re first entering the job market. At that time, you’re just happy to be getting some phone calls – I know I was. However, I didn’t enter the job market at just any old-time. I entered during that mythic period called “the bubble.” Anyone that made it through and is still doing today what they did then, can count themselves as extremely lucky – or just really brilliant. I think I fall into the former category.
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ESP is for New Age wackos?
Years ago, when I was a boy, I used to dream of finding a trilobite, the fossilized remains of a 300 million-year-old Cambrian creepy-crawly. One sunny day I happened to be walking across a field full of small, flat stones – thousands of them, all the same. It had been years since I last went fossil hunting, and the furthest thing from my mind was trilobites. Yet suddenly I knew that if I bent down to turn over a particular stone, there one would be. So I did. And sure enough, it was a specimen so perfect you could see its antennae and delicate feet. How did I know? Why did I pick up that stone, rather than another, in a field larger than a football pitch? Read more
Humanity’s Last Hope …
Last night I had the strangest dream. NASA was involved in trying to change the trajectory of a comet. Most of our comets originate out in the Kuiper Belt, far, far away. However there is some speculation that these comets somehow keep the Solar System’s gravity in check. It’s a sort of self-regulatory system. NASA was trailing one of these comets (as they have actually recently done) and accidentally knocked the comet out of it’s normal orbit. Instead of the usually figure eight around the Sun and around the Kuiper Belt, the comet was moved to the next closest star Alpha Centari.
A few months later it was made known by scientists that the orbit of the planets was going to disintegrate and that instead of orbiting around the sun like normal all the planets would drift out into space. There was nothing we could do about it. The world’s best scientists and politicians were selecting a lottery system for those that would be launched on the most sophisticated space craft to the nearest star system where they would hopefully be able to make a home. It was humanity’s last hope.
I remember the figure eight figured largely into the dream as I was watching CNN they kept emphasizing the figure eight orbit and how we had destroyed it accidentally. The new orbit was more of a normal ellipse or circle orbit but with no clear boundaries. The orbits just kept decaying more and more in the ellipse until all the planets were out in empty space just floating lifelessly. The process happened fairly quickly and only left us a few decades to figure out what to do.