Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, technology, and snowmen. Hal Stern: The Morning Snowman

I'm convinced that "productivity" is a dumb word. It presumes some magic metric for how people create value in the workplace, and that metric is usually, inexorably tied to a clocking problem. Work faster, work harder, work more hours - and my favorite - waste fewer hours! I hear Tock's admonishments ringing in the back of my head every time I see the red flag of Facebook notifications. The open question: is Facebook the new Solitaire?

In short, Facebook is a valuable business tool provided you treat it as a context creation vehicle and not actual work product (for most people; Sun has people whose primary work product is created via Facebook and that's because they're primarily recharging employee workplaces). If you spend hours a day creating goofy groups and inviting random friends, or searching for the transitive closure of your friend(friend(cousin(high school buddy))) relationships, then you probably do have a time management problem. But the problem with casting any activity as a "bad use of hours" infers that there's some sorting and prioritization of hours that belong to your employer versus your friends, family or co-workers. Whose hours are they, anyway? The subject is at the heart of what is typically called "work/life balance", but I've more recently heard simplified to "life balance". That's the right emphasis -- when you're always connected, always thinking, frequently Tweeting to inform your e-crew (and self-selected marketing bots), there's no thick-drawn line separating the two. While Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and their social relatives are heavily colored by non-work relationships and content, they can improve rather than impair productivity.

How?

Productivity is about reducing problems of time, geography, and knowledge. Who can help me with a problem, where is the information (or the expert) that I need, how quickly can I find the best answer? There's a negative side the scale as well - what's impairing progress, what if I take the first answer that later creates a myriad of issues, what if I follow a bad link (people, website, or driving directions)? Building -- and maintaining -- relationships drives the positive side of productivity, because they help you navigate to a suitable win more quickly. Actually paying attention to the content traversing those social graphs sometimes addresses the productivity impairments.

This was brought home, literally, last week when I twittered that I was "pissed off." Immediate Facebook status comments echoed Journalism 101: What upset me? Why? When? My status wasn't work-derived, only the after effects of a bad conversation with someone who sent me a very incorrect bill, but without the context it was an attention-grabber. I even got a ping from my boss, who readily admits that he follows me on Facebook as a way of managing me. There's probably some obtuse managerial treatise in that statement, but his outreach kind of snapped me to attention and quite honestly -- got me back to work. Well within the usual hour long damping factor needed to get productive again after such aggravation. Whose hour was it? No need to debate ownership: it was a useful chunk of time.

I was talking this week to a company that builds communications technology. More than one, actually, and their definition of "communications" is as broad as it should be in a world of wireless, digital, social, and voice flavored bit streams. We had a great sidebar on who they believed their developers are: their in-house team? An outsourced team hired to complete a project? Customers? Integration partners? And I couldn't resist bringing up: What about open source communities?

Somewhere in this story is a moral about balancing protein and caffeine before afternoon meetings, but I missed it. I suggested that perhaps the Asterix community was a good leading indicator of how complex communications systems would be built in the future. For the reaction I got, I might have suggested the other Asterix as a source of modern technology insight.

But let's face facts: the hacker culture has thrived on being able to play with phones since day one. Taking a platform that was in-band and invisible for so long and making it a developer play is just a natural evolution -- one driven by the growth in power, performance, and real-time capabilities of general purpose operating systems, availability of general purpose hardware on which to run them, and application level communications software. Put another way: Any comment about software not being "ready" or "capable" has been proven untrue over time.

We saw it happen with Linux, MySQL, and Drupal, and now we'll see it happen in the classic embedded spaces as well. All you need to do is follow the hobbyist space to sense the edges of the market: Linux on Linksys in the hackable router market is a perfect example, and it leads to creative applications of open platforms, like turning the Internet upside down. Go ahead and laugh, but there's an entire suite of access control, identity management, and auditing applications waiting to be built in slightly less user-inhibiting ways.

For true star power not related to the star (asterisk) key on your phone (calling by name, not by value), check out Sun's own Brian Aker discussing how he builds (current tense, as in work in progress) his own PBX - his musing on Asterix are even funnier than the Francophone Asterix. [note: Four letter words, Pecha Kucha style, mash-ups, and Brian's love life. Simultaneously.]

If you aren't thinking broadly about where your developers will come from, they'll surprise you and possibly your product plans.

Hanging in the garage of my parent's house were two very large-toothed tree saws. Not your normal wood-cutting blades, measured in teeth per inch, as these monsters had inches per tooth, required at least two if not four hands to operate, and were intimidating to a 6th grader scraping by (no pun) in wood shop. They would have terrified the little saplings planted in my parents' front yard into their very best Ent-personation: uproot and get away. What I didn't understand was why those saws were in the garage in the first place, as there were no old-growth trees to cut and section anywhere in our neighborhood.

Sometimes you have to see the whole family tree in perspective to understand the details.

My father's family were tree-cutters in what is now the Ukraine, then part of the Austria-Hungary empire, coming to the United States in the very early part of the 20th century. The family brought the tools when they emigrated, not having to pack much else. They left the towns of Yarmolinits and Kamanayenech-Podolsky because they were, in the wise words of my aunt, "complete mud holes." I have visions of my family in Elbonian-era scenarios, minus the technology, but with impressive hand tools. Starting with little, they arrived in a country that was about to enter a Depression, and yet they managed pretty well. I often joke about "old world" values and attitudes, but they lived them. And survived really tough economic times, raised kids, built a local small business, and kept a house that kept all of the grandchildren entertained on Sundays.

Sadly, I don't remember talking to my grandfather that much. He worked hard. He lived across the street from his general store, and there was a buzzer strung from the store to the front foyer, a remote door bell that announced a potential customer was looking for gas, even if something resembling "closing time" had arrived. It never did. He had a warm, great smile, and he and Grandma would frequently switch to Yiddish to talk about the grandchildren, their own friends, or anything else that we weren't supposed to repeat to our parents.

So here's what I remember of his style, which seems appropriate for the current economic conditions:

1. Do what you do. Former Princeton basketball coach Pete Carrill used to say "if you do something well, do that a lot; if you don't shoot well, pass the ball to someone who does." You could make my grandfather's day by asking for some obscure dimension of machine screw, which would have been stored in a cardboard box, neatly arranged on a shelf with no apparent order, but he'd find it. Every time. It's what he did. Very back to basics - have spent most of this week getting out and talking to customers, sketching out ideas for clouds and analytics while also discussing how open source software is changing the landscape of developer availability. Large-bore tree saws for large-scale data problems.

2. Laugh. There's a reason I start out each day with a 5-minute dose of web comics. Not only do I injure myself less frequently than starting out on the elliptical machine, but a good chuckle sets a good tone for the day.

3. Family (and friends) first. "It's on the way" was something of a watchword on family trips. Before MapQuest, we had navigation that would have made Charlie Daniels' "Uneasy Rider" proud -- triangulating towns in central and eastern New Jersey because they were only a few miles off of a straight-line shot, in an attempt to do the travelling salesman's tour of relatives, friends and bakeries in a single trip. My grandparents always put the family first. As I told someone the other day, a really bad day in the market or at work is offset by watching an hour of youth sports or a school function.

4. Indulge in the little things. Late one Sunday night, Grandpa arrived at our house looking for a piece of fried chicken. He liked my mothers's fried chicken (the backstory is that my grandmother's fried anything involved baking, boiling, frying, more baking, and perhaps some roasting for good measure). He had a comfortable chair -- the only big, stuffed piece of furniture that the grandchildren would fight over -- from which to watch TV. Maybe that's the way to bootstrap the US economy -- get everyone to indulge in something small and consumable, whether it's books or movies or a good piece of fried chicken. Personally -- I just bought "Slap Shot Original", the somewhat goofy autobiography of Slap Shot character Dave Hanson. My lone purchase won't rescue the big box stores from the edge of a bad holiday season, but if everyone indulges maybe the news won't be as bleak. Or we won't care because we're laughing.

5. Somebody else has it worse. Owning a general store, Grandpa saw more "local color" than most people. He was quick to extend credit or payment terms in an age before credit cards and a well-distributed banking system. It's important, as nasty as the economic climate is, to ensure that we don't lose sight of those who need help in either emotional or financial flavors. It's that time of year in New York when the homeless need a hot cup of coffee for survival in the literal sense. It's worth skipping the high-end brew and getting two doses of Dunkies - one for you and one for someone who has it worse.

Sometimes all it takes is a simple acknowledgement that, as Cheech Marin once said, "things are tough all over." A full generation before my grandparents arrived from a not-quite-but-later Soviet republic, Abraham Lincoln sought to offer the nation a bit of solace from strife, conflict, political unrest and tension that had literally put the United States on the edge of dissolution. In 1863 he declared Thanksgiving a fixed, national holiday in recognition of the blessings of "fruitful fields and healthful skies". Small details to consider as we sit down with family and friends to view the larger perspective next week on the last Thursday of November.

In four years of blogging, I have rarely ventured into the political arena. I see this space as a place to discuss technology, life at Sun, the socialization of technology, and to provide commentary on music, books and comics. I am way under that long tail of content, and happy to be there.

But - four years ago, I appealed for people to vote, and on Election Day 2008 here in the US, I feel compelled to do the same. And this time it's another friend that prompts me to get politically active with the keyboard.

Tom is one of those friends who makes it feel like you've known him your whole life. I can go two years without talking to him on the phone, but the next call has the social context of a weekly update. We keep up with each other through blogs, email, pictures, holiday cards, and lifecycle events. I got him to play ice hockey (no small feat for a Los Angeleno who believes cold is a place you go skiing, not a weather pattern); I assisted on his first goal; I consider him my linemate for life. Been like that for 26 years. He's the kind of guy you want to have every happiness life can afford. And I'd like to see that happiness legally extended to Tom's husband George.

Which is why I think Californians have to vote "no" on Proposition 8 today. Tom and George are a happily married couple who should be afforded every Constitutional right to their own pursuit of happiness. More important, they should have every legal right to take care of each other "until death do us part." The bulk of the effort in making a marriage work is dealing with life's curve balls. Why would you want to regulate that?

Taking away that right - and that's what laws do, they tend to regulate what you can't do - scrapes too close to the Bill of Rights and I personally find that notion very wrong. At Sun, I'm the executive sponsor of our Asian Diversity Network, an employee resource group that makes sure we recognize, celebrate and benefit from diversity in our workforce. I am not technically identified as Asian, but a large number of engineers who work for me do affiliate with the ADN, and I take their representation at Sun quite seriously. Change the wording in Proposition 8 to affect any other employee resource group and you have a scary set of laws -- but as Terry McKenzie points out, laws that were on the books in California during our lifetime. Why reset such legal precendent?

You can read more of Tom's thoughts on California newspapers urging "no" votes, on the reasons he and George got married, on the myths and distortions hiding in a variety of rhethoric, and most important, get a sense of why legal recognition of same-sex marriage is critical.

It's important to Tom and George, so it's important to me - another of those long-tail recommendation effects.

At Sun's recent internal nerd fest, I participated in my first pecha kucha night. Having once failed miserably at play by play basketball broadcasting, I didn't think any other form of public speaking could be as challenging. As Yoda would say, wrong I was. The 20 seconds per slide cadence eschews anecdotes, extemporaneous thoughts, or anything less than a highly collimated focus. There are play stoppages in basketball but the slide timer has no wait states.

But that doesn't mean I can't fix it in post-production. Here is the tabular version of "My Internet Life" pecha kucha in less than a dozen frames.

In 1995 I started looking at how the Internet, then defined by AOL dial up and email, might change the types of relationships I built. I scribbled this Gartner-esque 2x2 grid for mapping relationship types, spanning those based on facts to those surrounding or stimulating emotion (think work versus religion although those lines are blurring); those that are purely personal versus those that are community driven.
I'll upset the magic quadrant afficionados by starting there. It's what Carol Cone called the "ribbonization" of America. If you're not about something, representing, excited, incensed, pitching, shilling or voting, you aren't engaged. According to NASA's Gen Y rocket riders, everything you know about causes is wrong. Not to quote bumper stickers, but if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.
The Talking Heads' David Byrne sang the attributes of facts, including among them being lazy, late, simple, straight, and not doing what he wants them to (It's in the bridge of Crosseyed and Painless). Technical facts have a time value problem: they become worthless quickly. If your relationships are built on hoarding information, then they decay in value over time. Knowing something in isolation is useless.
Facts and emotions meet on Facebook, and dance in the form of short status updates. Create a group for just about any cause you can invent, and within three weeks your friends will forget what it's about. Probably because it's not about anything -- there's no output.
Output provides a segue to work: fact based and somewhat community oriented (unless you're the resident "doesn't play well with others" type). The classical view of work product defined by a company is rapidly being replaced by work product represented by an open source community. It has value, community, facts, economics, and usually a technical cause attached to it.
When you attach emotions to communities, they become long lasting institutions. Add in special clothes, chants, and traditions, and you have either higher education or religion, and some would argue there's little difference. Institutions forge remarkably strong, life-long connections; someone once told me that "Princeton" is like a second surname.
Challenges to these long-lived institutions arise from the same revisiting of intellectual property rights that fuel the growth of open source communities. We can use intellectual property to define the boundaries of today's institutions, or use it as a foundation for developing new ideas, broadening participation, and encouraging the ideas of others. That's true whether it's Disney, Princeton, Sun Microsystems or the religion of your choice.
Proof that you can remix media and and mediums: web comics are a growth industry. No matter how miserable the economy, everyone wants a good laugh on a regular basis. And if the comic remixes pop internet culture then it's rich on multiple levels.
Networked relationships have given rise to network memes. Our relationships that span the personal and community spectrum give us a sense of identity and worth: we know who we are and how we provide value to a group; those that run from facts to emotions provide a sense of belonging. And they intersect in an oblique pop culture reference.
Being in sales, I have to end with an ask: Do you grok the snowclone? If not, or worse, you stopped parsing at "grok," it's time to upgrade your science fiction canon from Heinlein to Doctorow. It may not make you or your causes more attractive on Facebook, but it's likely to help us understand how our companies and their work products matter in the networked market.