Tag Archives: organization

Organizational complexity »

December 28th, 2012

Dalton Caldwell, co-founder of App.net, does some thinking about organizational complexity. He contrasts how a simple demonstration of Artificial Intelligence does not necessarily mean that model is scalable to do more complex tasks. The model needs to change with the growth. The same too with a company. The organization needs to change as it grows in order to best serve external complexities but only when those exist.

How do you determine if your organization is complex before it needs to be?

“When you talk to employees of a large company, it seems as if their entire world is made up of byzantine internal politics with no relation to customers in the external world… a large percentage of every day is spent attempting to navigate ever-shifting politics surrounding the org chart. It would seem that the larger a company gets, the more the company tends to allocate resources towards inwardly focused (as opposed to outwardly focused) issues.”

A company doesn’t even need to be that large before this starts to become an issue. If you’re at a company that talks more about what they will do than what they actually do, that worries about their titles more than their product, or has a bunch of people that don’t know what their job is… you’re already there.

Viddler, now with multi-user sign on »

December 11th, 2012

The Viddler Blog:

Decide who can access your dashboard, setup their own Viddler username and password, and choose what they will have access to in your account. Select who can view and/or manage certain videos or playlists, who can edit account or billing settings, and for those customers with sub-accounts, you can set permissions for accessing these accounts as well, which makes managing your content easier and more productive.

This is huge for publishing organizations that need to allow multiple people within one organization to upload, edit, or manage their video library. Even better, if a single organization has more than one Viddler account (say, for different publications or departments) – they can set up access to each of those sub-accounts as well. The importance of this feature can not be overstated.

Any company doing video publishing should take a serious look at using Viddler if they haven’t already.

Simplifying life

April 18th, 2006

Living simply isn’t simple. You can quote me on that if you’d like.

I’m not saying that living simple is difficult because you wish to have more “stuff” than you need, it is the fact that if you don’t pay constant attention to things, “stuff” creeps up on you.

Take for instance some old reference books I have laying around. In front of me I have Beginning PHP 4, and the Javascript Bible 3rd Edition. Neither of which I’ve bothered to open for years. Both of which are out dated. Both of which hold little more value than kindling for the next fire (if I even had a fire place). And both are taking up space in my apartment.

These aren’t the big space wasters in our apartment though. Winter clothes, jackets, air conditioners (in the Winter especially), half-full freezers, shelves of extra bathroom products, golf clubs that could use to see some grass, old computer equipment, bins full of cables and wires, and hundreds of DVDs are just a few things that are taking up space in our apartment almost needlessly. Granted, some of these things are time specific necessities, but like I said – if you do not keep a critical eye on your things they can get out of hand.

Why live simply? Eliza and I enjoy the freedom of living simply. Less bills, more fun we always say. We’ve done fairly well so far too. We both have our hobbies and interests, and so we have things to quench those thirsts, but overall we’re not the type of people to try to get involved in “everything”. Some people, and we know a few, try to do everything everyone else does. Not only is that expensive and a waste of time, it’s boring. Get your own interests, do your own things, and be yourself. Much funner that way. Yeah, I said funner.

Anyway, back on topic. Eliza and I have been chatting about chucking some things, cleaning up the rooms and going through each thing to weigh its value to space ratio and giving it to the garbage men if need be. Can you tell it is spring? Again, we don’t have a lot of stuff, but we don’t have a lot of room either. And, we both think it is time to be out with the old, and in with the new.

For instance, we’ve been wanting to make our own wine for a very long time. This spring we’re taking a trip to the Finger Lakes again, so we’ll be able to stock up when we are there, but we still want to have some space to make our own batch or two of wine. To do this, we must make room. To make room, things must go.

I think we’ll start tonight, with the kitchen. Not necessarily to get rid of things, but more to take stock of what we actually have and perhaps move things around a little to fit better. As we buy things, like new pots and pans, our organization sometimes goes a little haywire. Time to rethink that.

Do you find yourself having too much “stuff”? Do you purge?

Note: Some have been having problems leaving comments. Not sure why, but I reuploaded the worpdress commenting script, even though I think it was an issue with the server. If you are having trouble commenting, please contact me and let me know.

[tags]life, organization, cleaning[/tags]