To which I wrote the following:

Not adding any value to my life - my friends are just sharing links from the web; nobody is commenting on how awesome their holiday was, uploading photos, creating events or generally being 'social'. The UI tech is great by the way, but the UX is not compelling in the slightest.

IMO Google+ needed to launch locally (like FB) and spread organically, with people joining because their friends were already on it and being SOCIAL (not just sharing internet links). Instead it launched to the entire world simultaneously, who promptly all arrived to be greeted by...not much at all.

Oh and circles are way too much bother for most people

Why do you think Google+ failed?

After forgetting about the site, I received an email a couple of weeks ago informing me of all their whizz-bang new features. Unfortunately for them I took it as a reminder to unsubscribe, and requested that they delete all my info. Today I received a confirmation email apologising for the delay and asking for any feedback. Turns out I was in a feedback kind of mood...

Hi [name],

Was I too harsh? Probably. I am sick of half-ass tech out there? Definitely.

1. Improve the System of Innovation where I work

Currently we have 10% time (akin to Google’s 20% time). I’m thinking this isn’t enough. I’ll blog about any success I have changing it.

2. Improve Knowledge Management where I work

This one should be easy, because I’m pretty passionate about it. I started the first wiki in the company (to my knowledge) several years ago, and always thought they were a good idea. My Msc in Management has exposed me to all the academic stuff that an “enterprise collaboration tool” can enable like David Senge’s Learning Organization and Ikujiro Nonaka’s Knowledge-Creating Company. I am well placed to make this stuff a reality where I work.

3. Pass May/June Exams

Obvious, but necessary. They tell me one doesn’t get a degree unless one passes one’s exams. They do make it awfully difficult for one these days!

4. Write a decent dissertation

It’s going to be an exploratory case study on what happens (from the perspective of employees) when improved KM practices are implemented within an organisation. Stay tuned.

5. Pay off all debt

Since beginning my Msc I have had some considerable debt in rotation on 0% credit cards. Not the way those personal finance guru’s advocate the way to manage your money. Time to get rid of it, plain and simple, and get back to only using credit cards as a short term measure.

Context is that required effort to “keep this thing going”. It’s the overhead involved in keeping already existing services and products getting to market. Most obviously it’s the Operations department in most service organisations and the Marketing and Sales department in product organisations. But it’s also everything that supports those departments: Finance, HR, IT, etc. 

Moore talks about the organisational inertia created when increasingly more resources are invested in context than in core. Although he says inertia is not the enemy of innovation (since the inertia of the previous innovation allowed the firm to stay it’s course), it does resist things at the point of change. It is at this point where executive management needs to pay special attention to be able to deconstruct organisational inertia and repurpose the resources it consumes in favour of more innovative undertakings. To this end, companies create new departments with the aim of completely freeing them up from context. Sometimes they go a step further and create an entirely new spinoff company. Read Meeting the Challenge of Dispruptive Change by Christenson and Overdorf for more.

On the other hand, core “is that which differentiates your company to create sustainable competitive advantage”. Moore indicates that while context might outweigh core by organisational resource allocation, but core outweighs context in strategic importance. Putting resources into context pays off next quarter; putting resources into core pays off next year and hopefully for the next few years.

This whole situation can be applied to a software development team as well. We are constantly looking to “repurpose context for core” (or at least reducing the effort and attention required by context) by automating testing, automating deployments, reducing process friction, refactoring to a more agile codebase and reducing wasted effort like not building the right thing or the thing right. Doing these things successfully buys us the ability to spend more time and attention focusing on things that can increasingly set us apart from the mediocre, like better usability and quicker response time to market of newly developed features and products. Of course it is common to find that driving down the effort required by overhead is often done “to make life easier” or to “cut out mistakes” rather than with the explicit goal of freeing up resources to focus on differentiation.

I think it is a compelling argument to begin using time gained by doing things in better ways, to doing things that differentiate your product or service.

“There is no new technology in the iPod.”

- Geoffrey Moore