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Sierra Club’s global cooling

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I listened to the yammering in Sierra Club committee meetings 20 years ago, before I got into technology, and thought that the “real” world knew better.

One little incident convinced me. At one meeting of the group overseeing the Sierra Club’s old ski lodge, Clair Tappaan Lodge, someone wanted to change the name of a room, the Puce Room. A woman who’d just redecorated in there wanted to rename it after the just-passed folk singer Kate Wolf.

I really liked the old name, especially apt for the room’s cold concrete walls and rusty dripping pipes. The committee, though, was about to approve the change.… Read the rest “Sierra Club’s global cooling”

Risky projects need the “electricity” of heterarchies

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The business people didn’t show up to the meeting. They’d been invited to come and talk with IT about the new BI project and in the same stroke help launch it.

This is one of the first stories I ever heard about BI. Though daddy of data modelers Steve Hoberman didn’t say what happened next, I can imagine: all the usual suspects in business were soon rounded up for a later attempt.

The usual suspects are almost always the ones with positional power, the ones with staffs and budgets. But an article in a recent strategy+business magazine says that sometimes—such as when creating a politically risky new system, such as in BI, where powerful people fear embarrassment—what matters most is trust.… Read the rest “Risky projects need the “electricity” of heterarchies”