The DOBlog

There’s an interesting post on Tuppenceworth from Fergal reviewing “Inside the Emerald City”, which is an expose of the shenanigans in the Green Zone in Iraq. I like the term “Green Zone”. It reminds me of of the recorded PA you often hear in US airports:

“The White Zone is for loading and unloading.”

I wonder what the PA would be for the Green Zone?

“The Green Zone is for hiding under you bed and praying they don’t come for you”

But I digress… Fergal points out that much of the book is an expose of how the American Management Consulting ‘culture’ which has been exported to Iraq has contributed to the rolling disaster there. W.Edwards Deming described American management thinking as the most dangerous thing that America could export. It wasn’t until the Japanese took Deming seriously and started making inroads into automotive market share that Deming (and other manufacturing quality gurus) were taken seriously in the US… and even then the biggest problem with making quality management and quality improvement stick has been a failure to have a clear constancy of purpose…

… for example, General Motors was one of the first US car makers to take quality of manufacturing seriously. Jack Welch famously told his staff that if they didn’t crack that challenge they’d all be out of work. Fast forward to 2007… GM is closing factories in the US while Toyota (whose CEO last year said that quality was his number one problem for the coming year) have opened four new plants.

But again I digress…

CelticTigger (who is that masked man?) has commented on the post - from the sounds of it he (or she) has been in the trenches with management consultants. Poor soul.

Occasionally I find time to read a good book. Unfortunately I don’t often know it is a good book until I’ve started reading it, at which time I’ve invested the effort in opening the book and ignoring the phone that I plough on regardless.

Three books that I read recently that gave me more than I needed to put into them are The Long Tail and Freakonomics, and finally Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. I thought I’d do a quick review of both here (and see if anyone might buy them - click on the images to go to Amazon.co.uk).

The Long Tail
This is a really cool book. The basic premise is that you can make money in the margins through the wonderous world of the Interweb thing which has removed traditional economic barriers to sales success (location, inventory storage etc etc). Apart from the thinking involved, which is explained very clearly, one of the biggest boons to me was the links and pointers to useful on-line services that I can use to support a professional Association I’m involved with (the IAIDQ) which has a need to develop merchandising and other ‘products’ and have them shipped world wide while avoiding the cost and hassle of a product inventory in some volunteers garage in Boston while we need the T-shirts (or whatever) at a conference in London.

Amazon is an example of a good ‘Long tail’ success. Through its business model it derives a sizeable chunk of its sales and profits from the margins of its business - the niche interest books, cds and stuff. Amazon’s model has been to push that model into other markets other than books.

This book made me think about how I can make my web-presence work for me. It also made me think about how to develop a few ideas I have in an on-line context as well as providing me with immediately actionable ideas about how to use the long tail industries to help promote the IAIDQ.

Buy this book on Amazon by clicking on the picture above.

Freakonomics
Where the Long Tail examines the infinite applicability of Pareto efficiency (read the book and that will make sense) Freakonmics examines the way in which we often assign root cause to things with out a sound evidentiary base. From why crime rates didn’t explode in the US in the 1990s to why drug dealers live at home, this book is a thought provoking romp through the fallacies of “conventional wisdom”. I like it because it shows the value of speaking with data - having actual statistics to back up your arguments as well as the impacts of jumping to conclusions about the real causes of any effect.

Well written and thought provoking, Freaknomics is a definite must buy for those of us looking at information in our daily jobs and trying to make sense of it all.

The Tipping Point
All of life is an accumulation of little things and eventually one little thing causes a situation to change dramatically. Be it the sudden popularity of a brand of shoe or the jump from a minor outbreak to a disease epidemic, everything comes down to a single tipping point. Read in conjunction with Freakonomics and The Long Tail, this book gives rounds out the macro implications of micro things - be they the small unit sales of niche books on Amazon (which add up to big money volumes simply because Amazon never runs out of room) or the impacts of seemingly unrelated issues on a chain of events (such as Roe vs Wade and the crime wave that never happened in Freakonomics).

Well written and thought provoking it makes one consider how the minor things you do (or don’t do) can have a snowballing effect.

Summary
Each of these books on their own has strengths and weaknesses (see the reviews on Amazon for some of those). However combining them together a cohesive view can be formed. We are living in interesting times where the ability of ‘the little guy’ to have an impact either through blogs and social networking etc as they feed a snowball effect of lots of little events in The Long Tail that reach a tipping point.

My advice - read all three.

Many moons ago I posted a piece on this blog about Information Quality Scrap and Rework in the Irish Electoral Register. This article was submitted to a number of Irish newspapers at the time (when it was very topical) and was referenced at length by tuppenceworth and others.

Earlier this year I was invited to write for Larry English’s column in DM Review magazine, an international trade magazine for Information Management and Business Intelligence. It appeared in the on-line ‘extended edition’ of the magazine. Here is the link to this month’s DM Review… I’m on page 5 (I’m credited as a contributor but the content appeared here first, and was picked up by B-Eye-Network last year also. For real afficianados of Irish Electoral Register issues, here’s a link to the paper I wrote on the issue back in the dim and distant past.

Thanks to Larry and his staff for helping with a minor re-write to make the article more ‘American-friendly’. (Larry’s profile that I’ve linked to above is from the IAIDQ website - www.iaidq.org)