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Anybody who has been reading my blog for a period of time is probably aware that I am a big fan of the free videos made available of presentations at the TED conference.  The topics are great, the speakers are phenomenal and EVERY person who is required to speak in public should be required to watch the fantastic delivery.  If we could all be half as good as these presenters death by PowerPoint would be a thing of the past.

Just released in the TED podcast feed today was a presentation by Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia entitled "The Real Difference Between Liberals and Conservatives."  The presentation is an examination of the human moral mind, and begins with the hypothesis that we are not born tabula rasa and rather have an innate sense of morality.  As Hiadt shows, liberals and conservatives prioritize five different moral factors  differently, and that these differences are largely common accross national and cultural boundaries.   Take a look and hopefully you'll agree that, while remaining true to one's convictions, building an echochamber for ourselves or demonizing the political opposition is not a road to progress.  Let me know what you think.

Yesterday I had the chance to attend several of the sessions at Podcamp Philly 2008 in the City of Brotherly Love. I met several great people, including Shashi Bellamkonda, who has the awesome title of "Social Networking Swami" at Network Solutions. I wish I had a sexy title like that. I keep gunning for that Dark Lord of the Sith promotion at work to no avail.

Hopefully I was able to provide some valuable insight att Suki Fuller's session on Competitive Intelligence and Social Media. Several of the folks at the session asked what some of the best resources were for learning how to conduct competitive intelligence. With that in mind I thought I would provide some sources that I've found useful:

Kirk Tyson's Complete Guide to Competitive Intelligence
A great overview of the practice, complete with templates.

Early Warning by Ben Gilad
More of am examination of strategic blind-spots than a tactical how-to. A valuable reminder of how business leaders can retain or regain their external perspective on changing markets.

Business and Competitive Analysis: Effective Application of New and Classic Methods by Babette Bensoussan and Craig Fleisher
A great guide to some basic and advanced methods. Despite some of the advanced material readily accessible.

Always take a look at the resources available on the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals web site.

I would be remiss if I didn't also mention the Competitive Intelligence Podcast by yours truly. Some of the early episodes in particular go over some good basics about how to use the Internet to conduct competitive intelligence. Later episodes address using social media like LinkedIn, wikis and Twitter for competitive intelligence.

Commuting to and from work in the Washington, DC metro area where I live is a full-contact sport.  Regularly Washington is near the top of the list of America's cities with the worst traffic, and deservedly so.  For Washingtonians traffic has disproportional influence on our lives, and the locals have developed some very innovative mechanisms to cope with traffic.

I was excited to see the Carticipate application on the iTunes Application Store.  Carticipate is a social networking tool to find carpool buddies.  I was very impressed by this real-world application of social networking.  There's also a Carticpate application coming to Facebook.  The value of Carticipate obviosly increases as mor eusers come on board.  One complaint about carpooling is that it does not offer carpoolers flexibility for things like errands, after work happy hours and trips to the gym before and after work.  With a large enough social network a Carticipate user would be more likely to have a friend going from most points A to most points B at various times of day.  One might even be able to coordinate "transfers" among multiple carpooling buddies so that Bob rides with Carol from Washington to Tysons Corner and then catches a ride with Ted and Alice from Tysons Corner to Ashburn.

That, and I think the concept is just really neat.

In examinations of globalization and outsourcing there has often been a case made that certain categories of jobs will be less likely to be outsourced to markets with lower costs.  Medical services have often been included on that list by commentators such as Thomas Friedman.  Two trends that I have been reading about make me question this notion.  Medical tourism and online prescriptions are two options that lead me to believe that outsourcing and globalization will eat at the edges of even the medical field.  We'll all be better off for it in the end.

Medical tourism, like the name suggests, is traveling to a different location (usually a foreign country) for medical procedures usually in a lower cost environment.  Medical tourism has moved from sneaking off to Bogota for a nip and a tuck and now involves patients traveling to advanced facilities in "developing" countries for life-saving treatments.

Medical insurance companies often have very complex criteria for the coverage of certain procedures.  Elective procedures have a long-history of not being covered by medical insurance.  Some potentially lifesaving procedures have either been excluded from covereage or are covered only with very high deductibles.  Some of these procedures are available in advanced medical facilities in other countries for costs (including travel) that are well below the deductible charged by American insurance providers.  This lack of true medical coverage may lead some Americans to question the need for traditional insurance policies and look for alternative insurance products that reflect the possibility of travel for many medical treatments in non-emergency situations.  Certainly employers concerned about the runaway costs of healthcare are going to be desperate to find some sort of alternative.  Since employers are technically the consumers of health care we should look to companies large and small to take up this mantra for products that incorporate the realities of medical tourism to gain access to lower costs health care.

This trend injects a level of competition into the market for medical services that is long, long overdue in the United States and elsewhere in the developed world.  New facilities in places like India and Thailand have leapfrogged established health care institutions in terms of technology.  It's not just lower labor costs but also more effective use of information technologies that make health care more affordable in these markets.

Another interesting trend is online prescriptions.  This is not ordering your herbal Viagra over the Internet.  Rather, this is a medical practitioner that receives inquiries from patients, often in off-hours.  Based on the (admittedly limited at the moment) ability to consult on the patient's condition remotely a doctor can offer prescriptions and advice to patients.  Consultation will get better as we have ever-improving communications devices such as high-resolution web cameras and specialized medical diagnostic devices in our homes and more of our medical records will be in a digital format that is readily accessible yet secure. This is more immediate and flexible than a visit to one's primary care physician, and also saves patients from the need to resort to an emergency room visit.  The emergency room has become the after-hours catch all for all medical needs immediate or otherwise.

In the near term there will be winners and losers in these shifts in the market.  Near term medical facilities that cater to the rich and upper middle class will likely lose business to medical tourism.  Insurance companies are going to need to change their offerings to meet the needs of these consumers or run the risk of losing customers to non-traditional medical insurance schemes that reflect the new market realities.  Whenever you remove a segment of the customer population from an insurance pool the harm of that migration is pushed down to those who rely most heavily on the insurance, so their costs to retain coverage are likely to increase in the short term.  Small medical practices will have an opportunity to reform their businesses to move some of the day-to-day work to online offerings and save the office time for more serious cases, extended consultation between doctor and patient and delivering an altogether higher caliber of service.  Reforms to health IT will push the costs of health care management down.  Patients in the destination countries for medical tourism will benefit from improvements to their own local health care infrastructure, the influx of cash paid by medical tourists, and the job opportunities that the industry will create.  In the United States our current model of medical licensing is going to need to change to reflect the new realities.

Many of the benefits of these transformations will come from having a mechanism that suits the patient/customer need-- appropriate tools for the job.  Mis-use of emergency rooms for after-hours care and care of the uninsured is beyond disturbing.  Emergency rooms are being asked to handle a workload for which they were not originally intended, and their intended patient base pays the consequences for that.  If we're really concerns about things like quality healthcare and being able to respond to disasters this is a situation we cannot accept.  Note to Republican politicians: the ability to go to an emergency room does not constitute "access to healthcare" for the uninsured.

All through my professional life I have observed a set of truths that invariably end up introducing misunderstandings and underestimations.  It has never failed that when I look at what someone else has to do I find myself asking, "How hard can it be?  All she has to do is ____."  Or "Why does he say it will take him so long to get that done?  He only needs to _____."  I usually find that I am vastly underestimating the complexity of what I am requesting. 

I have this done to me all the time as well, much to my annoyance and consternation.  The lout who calls at 4:45 PM on Friday and asks for three days of research to be done and ready by Monday morning generally rebuts my annoyance, "All you need to do is _____."  No, Mr. I'm-Going-to-the-Beach-this-Weekend, what you asked for takes more than 15 minutes. And asking for something on Friday that you want done Monday is not "giving me a week to get it done."  I'm also not bitter, so stop calling me that.

This is one element of what I want to call Jackson's Law: People tend to underestimate the complexity of the tasks they themselves will not be required to complete.

A corollary seems to be that any task you are taking on for the first time requires more steps and takes longer than you assume.

I'm still working on these, and I welcome thoughts and advice.

I have a strange sense of humor. As evidence of that, I think the Barack Roll video is funny to a degree disproportionate to how funny it probably is to normal people.

Jon Lowder of the Competitive Intelligence Marketplace blog had some excellent suggestions on alternative business models for giving away conference content.  These are some excellent alternatives to my own suggestions from my previous post on giving away podcasts of conference content:

• Make certain videos free from the get-go.  Just one or two to keep the buzz of the conference going.
• Make all videos free to SCIP members behind the SCIP firewall, similar to what they do with magazine articles.  Perhaps there's a 3-6 month delay in doing this so that there's still a premium for attending the conference.  It's always a good idea to have more membership benefits.
• If you're going to charge for the video then forget what I said about lower quality being better than no video at all.
• Sell sponsorships of each presentation, and by extension the video.

Sadly, Jon was not able to post his suggestions in a comment to my own blog.  Previous run-ins with crazy volumes of SPAM led me to be perhaps a little overzealous in limiting readers' ability to comment.  I have made some changes to the blog srttings and hopefully have fixed this as an issue.  Just know that any offers for herbal Viagra you see posted in the comments of this blog do not come with my endorsement.

For one of the side projects I'm working on, I'm trying to sell the notion of giving away what could be considered "premium" content as a mechanism to raise interest and broaden an established brand among interested non-consumers.  Specifically I am trying to make the case that giving away some audio recordings of presentations from an annual professional conference will stimulate interest in the following year's conference.

In reality my concept is more nuanced than simply giving away content.  The conference will be held next April, and I am advocating that we make audio recordings of the sessions that will be presented (pending presenter's agreement, of course).  Paying attendees will be given access to the recorded content for no cost following the conference.  Those who did not register for the conference will be able to purchase the content as a price well under the cost of conference registration (I'm playing with price points between 1/10 and 1/5 of the cnference registration cost).  Three to four months before the next year's conference (set for April 2010) we would make some (probably not all) of the recorded content available for free.

Today a great example of using free content to broaden the appeal of a brand was brought to my attention: Tom Friedman is giving away audio recordings of the third edition of The World is Flat for free.  The audio book is being made available with an audio preview of Friedman's next book, and is likely part of a strategy to build anticipation and promote sales of the new book.

We've seen in the past years that diverse customer segments will pay varying prices for what is ostensibly the same product.  Almost every one of us have paid for a bottle of water often enough when tap water is generally conveniently available for free.  When the 9/11 Commission Report was published it became one of the best-selling tomes of 2004 despite the fact that the contents were freely available on-line.  Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have both demonstrated the benefits of giving away content or letting customers name their own price for music downloads.

With these and other examples in mind I'm not as concerned that freely-available content will cannibalize paying attendees.  I've been watching presentations from the TED conference for several years, and would still be thrilled to attend the event in person if I got the chance.  The real value of most conferences is in the face-to-face exchange of ideas, and you really do need to pony up the bucks to get the full benefit of a conference.  Hearing the quality of the material from last year's conference would, I am convinced, raise the interest of those who might not otherwise attend.

I'm very interested to hear what others think about this.  Help me make the case to a skeptical audience.  If you're skeptical, lay it on me so I can refine or revise this concept.  If you're sufficiently convincing you might get me to change my mind.  If you agree with the general concept of giving away content to spur interest among non-consumers then give me your take on this to help me make the case.

Earlier today I posted a comment to my friend Kevin Dewalt's blog about his finally getting on board with the Getting Things Done personal productivity framework.  I wanted to double-dip with that entry and post some additional comments here because I am overdue for a blog entry.

Kevin was specifically wondering aloud about the value of "inbox zero" and the concept that a person would empty his or her e-mail in-box every day.  I do confess to be someone who at least endeavors if not always succeeds at having an empty work and personal e-mail inbox at the end of each day.  To expand upon my reasoning I am going to do a very lazy thing and copy, verbatim, my comments on Kevin's post:

A good place to get some practical advice on using GTD is the 43 Folders blog started by Merlin Mann (hotdogsladies from YLNT).

For the e-mail in box I have to admit I find real peace of mind from emptying it out every day. I try to only check e-mail at certain times of the day (top of the hour, bottom of the hour, whenever) as opposed to responding to alerts that new messages have arrived. My infrequent time spent in my in box is like a triage to determine what needs to be handled immediately, what can be deferred, what can become an item on my to-do list and what irrelevant messages can just be deleted.

My archive in my work Outlook client consists of one folder into which all e-mails I am going to keep are filed. I don't bother with any sub-folders. I was inspired by G-mail's excellent archive and search functions. Outlook has a long way to go in this regard, and I still find it easier to look for individual messages in the archive folder instead of trying to remember which folder I might have stashed it.

I like having an empty in-box because it helps me avoid that nagging feeling that there's something I need to get done but haven't addressed. One of the ironies for me is that while I only check my e-mail at most once an hour, coworkers have commented about how refreshing they find my responsiveness. Many colleagues inside and outside my company jump like Pavlov's dog at the "You've got mail" ding, have thousands of old messages in their in-box and still manage to respond only very slowly if at all. I feel like the cognitive model modern corporate e-mail imposes on users is that of a treadmill that they can never get off. The GTD framework has given me the ability to get off that treadmill.

When I was getting ready to start my MBA, I knew that I was really going to have to step up my time management skills if I was going to balance full-time work, full-time school, engage in some level of professional development and still have a small sliver of life to retain a degree of sanity.  So I picked up David Allen's book and chose a number of aspects of the GTD framework that I thought would give me some mastery of my productivity: inbox zero, a revised approach to information filing, the physical invox and the "tickler file."

One of the best things that GTD gives me is a mechanism to be productive in my procrastination.  One of the leadership assessments in the MBA program provided a set of "executive derailers."  I was not surprised to find one of them was "leisurely."  If I am not genuinely personally engaged and interested in a task, it is very easy for my mind to wander. 

With GTD I have a ready list of action items (bite-sized tasks that can generally be performed in a few simple steps).  Each action item is attached to a project (the larger goal that needs to be completed) and a context (a place I need to be or set of resources I need to perform the task).  Projects are broken down into these small chunks, which makes them much less daunting.  "All I need to do is get done this next action item and I can take a break" keeps an unappealing project from becoming overwhelming.  I also have a handy list of actions that I can do that progress some other project towards completion if I should find myself just desperately wanting to do something else for a few minutes.

When it comes right down to it one of the productivity tricks for me has not been to stop procrastinating but rather to learn how to procrastinate right.  Now I just need to find away to turn those other executive derailers on their side...

As the vice-chair for SCIP's 2009 conference planned for April 23 - 24 in Chicago, I am happy to report that the call for proposals has finally been posted on the SCIP web site.

In the past I've had the pleasure to both present at a SCIP conference and serve on the program committee to choose the sessions that will be presented in a particular track.  If a CI professional has a topic that they would like to promote or explore, a session at the SCIP conference is a great way to do that.

We've tried to put together an innovative set of tracks and meet the needs of both new conference attendees and old hands.  The new tracks are as follows:

• CI Offense/Defense
• Professional Effectiveness
• Critical Skills
• Entrepreneurial CI
• Intelligence R&D
• Active Dialog

I'm happy to field any questions propsective presenters might have here on this blog or in e-mail.  At a high level I would recommend that you choose an interesting topic for which you can demonstrate an in-depth or unique knowledge.  I also highly recommend taking the time to put together a strong and detailed proposal.

Good luck!