Translation in CMS

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If your web presence is international, and you’re using a CMS with multisite-management capability, you likely have to address translation. A common process is: webmasters extract the text into Excel files and send to The Translator, map the translated text in Excel back into the right places on the other-language copy of the website. In this process, The Translator might be a person, a group, a machine-translator, or a combination. Pure machine translation (MT) has been notorious for odd results like “turn lid around circle until grip” or the famous “all your base are belong to us.” MT has improved over the years, but it still needs significant human cleanup.

Human translation can be very efficient with translation memory (TM). TM sees a phrase it translated last Tuesday on a previous page, which had the correct translated phrase verified by a human in the system the first time around, so this time TM just plugs in the known correlated other-language phrase. It doesn’t have to re-translate the same phrase every time it’s encountered. This is a good blend of human-&-machine translation process. Note that in this human-&-machine process, there is actually no regular “Machine Translation” happening.

A drawback in these examples is the need for a webmaster or web developer to extract text, send it, then re-insert the translated parts into the right places. It’s a drawback because it’s expensive. Systems are maturing that provide an interface that does the extract-send-receive-reinsert process at the click of a button or two.

One example is ClayTablet, which is a CMS plugin. It doesn’t translate anything. It gives you a sub-menu inside your existing CMS. You open a page in English, click “translate this page,” select the other-language, and click send. Behind the scenes, ClayTablet sends the page (or many pages at once) out to your Translation Service of choice, collects the translated copy back again, and posts it for you into your other-language website in the correct location. You open your other-language website, and the newly translated page is done and posted for you.

If you do global multisite management, you’ve already faced the translation issue, and addressed it one way or the other. I have read blogs and forums arguing that Machine Translation is ready for primetime. My impression, however, is that MT is high risk for embarrassing outputs that make you look bad. MT has a lot of maturing to do before it can replace human translators, though it can work as a helper to a human. Still, your best bet today is human translation, human input into a Translation Memory system for efficiency, and an automated send-&-receive like ClayTablet. That translates to higher quality and less cost.

Dreamweaver vs WordPress

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I read web-tool-related forums and lately I’ve seen several “WordPress-or-Dreamweaver?” types of questions. WordPress is a GUI-like template-driven CMS. Dreamweaver is a hand-code-intensive Web Building tool. I wouldn’t compare them in the sense of “which is better.” I would contrast them because you don’t use them for the same purposes. Understanding that CMS/WordPress is different from Web-Production/Dreamweaver, changes the question from “which is better” to “when to use one and when to use the other.”

You don’t need knowledge of HTML/CSS to use WordPress. You can start simple and create a nice website with very little knowledge. But there is a lot of learning required to fully leverage the possibilities in WordPress. WordPress is template intensive, with lots of themes pre-packaged for you to choose from (customizing them is part of the extra learning required). Then getting comfortable with the widgets and plugins available with WordPress adds to the learnings and the possibilities. You can get up to speed enough to make a good, professional-looking website fairly quickly (if you have good design/aesthetic talents on your side).

You need knowledge of HTML/CSS to use Dreamweaver effectively. Preferably, you can hand-code well on your own, and use Dreamweaver’s features to code and build more efficiently. Dreamweaver lets you build and publish more effectively than, say, coding in notepad and posting with an FTP tool.

When your site display needs tweaking, I think it is still easier to fix display and behavior issues if you have HTML/CSS knowledge and use a Web Coding tool like Dreamweaver. There is some element of “take what they give you” in CMS systems like WordPress. Having said that, you can customize your WordPress site fairly well, but again, you need code knowledge for extensive customization, maybe even PHP, to do this in WordPress. On the other hand, WordPress lets you make fast massive progress getting a complex templated site stood up rapidly (no time-drag doing all that handcoding).

What do I use? I use both. I use WordPress for this blog. For my container site, bobzeen.com, I typed all of the HTML and CSS partly in notepad and partly in an HTML editor screen (earlier in FrontPage 97 through FrontPage 2003, nowadays in Dreamweaver CS6).

Bottom line is, learn to be a good coder with HTML/CSS (optionally some javascript, php, etc.), get comfortable with Dreamweaver’s features, learn to manipulate WordPress, its templates, widgets and plugins, get comfortable with customization in WordPress, and you’ll have all the bases covered. To be a proficient web builder or web manager today I recommend both kinds of skillsets. So don’t compare WordPress to Dreamweaver. Instead, learn a variety of skills so you can envision your end goal, identify the type of work needed to get there, and match your toolset to the work.

Active Minds and Adaptability

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Often in the face of the unexpected, the first response is disbelief or denial. You hear reactions like “wait, wait, wait, what did you say? That can’t be right!” etc. The unexpected evokes befuddlement, denial, irritation. Negative reactions to the unexpected are typical of a passive mind. I wrote last September about how Active Minds Make It Happen. Today’s entry highlights the active mind’s fascination with, rather than the resentment of, the unexpected.

Static Map of Reality
Passive minds want phenomena and people to behave predictably within pre-packaged perceptions of the world, a static map of reality. They are suddenly at sea, lost, when their accepted map of other people’s personalities, for example, is altered by new information. They need everything and everyone around them to be comfortably predictable.

Predictability saves the passive mind from the jarring impact of suddenly adjusting to something unfamiliar (whether it’s a family member changing political party, a friend getting a different haircut or changing style of clothes, someone getting a new hobby, a coworker eating something different at lunch, a friend announcing a wedding, or a divorce, a revolution in a foreign country, a parent changing a longstanding habit, a vegetarian friend suddenly eating a hotdog, or any other change from the largest to the smallest).

The Active Difference
The difference between an active mind and a passive mind is that an active mind is stimulated by unexpected behaviors of people and phenomena. It is automatically registered as an opportunity for seeing a new facet. The sudden change might be fascinating, or mildly interesting. But for an active mind, it is never jarring or befuddling. What stuns a passive mind gears up an active mind.

Elasticity of Mind
Perceiving a new facet of someone or something, no matter how small or large, is met with perceptive and active reassessment of past ways of organizing one’s surroundings. It used to be called “elasticity of mind,” the ability to adapt to and accommodate changing facts and impressions. This is a quality of an active mind. Unexpected information at odds with past assumptions is stimulating rather than jarring.

Conversely, a passive mind is typically irritated, defensive, confused, or in denial in the face of the unexpected. Information at odds with past assumptions is jarring. The unexpected thing hits a passive mind like a bonk on the head. Passive minds reel under an emotional gasp from the unexpected. It’s as though the passive mind feels injured, and needs time to heal from the blow, before it gradually wraps itself around the new development. Whereas the same sudden change feeds the active mind, nourishes it with stimulating process. The passive mind responds to the unexpected with, “Huh?”; The active mind apprehends the unexpected with, “Aha!”

A passive mind navigates through life with a static map. An active mind navigates through life with a fluid set of perceptions always alert for redefining and realigning.

Constant Motion
An active mind instantaneously wraps around the unexpected event, in the very moment it occurs, and reorganizes its concepts on the fly. The active mind is in constant motion perceiving facts, registering impressions, organizing information, reorganizing concepts. So it easily comprehends and sorts out the unexpected without skipping a beat.

Analytical Grasp Instead of Emotional Gasp
If you are easily unsettled by the unexpected, try changing your reaction. Make yourself respond to the unexpected with focus and curiosity. Try an analytical grasp instead of an emotional gasp. It is a change from passively “being pushed around” by the unexpected, to being actively engaged in the lives of others, and in the events happening around you.

This entry partly from my book
Potential of an Active Mind: How to Recapture the Magic of Everyday Life
© copyright Robert Rose-Coutré 2009, 2011, and 2012

CSS Weblife

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Remember when CSS was new and we all wanted to create lighter-than-air pure CSS websites? It seems like only yesterday. Browser quirks and complex flashy interfaces put an end to those dreams, at least in the realm of corporate and most business sites. CSS is far from finished, though. Here’s a link to a list of CSS Design award winners, many of them business sites:
http://www.cssdesignawards.com/

I like to use CSS as much as possible, especially when I discover special creative useful CSS. I use CSS for my 3-column expandable-width site layout (e.g., my bobzeen site). I use the once-semi-famous expandable-rounded-box left-nav menu, which auto-adjusts height when you insert more menu items (orange left-nav on my bobzeen site). I put a clever-plus-useful CSS-method top-menu layout that looks sort of like a hoverable tab menu (top nav on my resume site). Last and latest but not least, I put the awesome loveable hoverable CSS world map ( on my bobzeen homepage), for which fine piece of CSS scripting I give credit to the author, Jarod Taylor.

It would be nice if we lived in a world of pure CSS, but RL is laced with disappointments, boundaries, and exceptions. We confront bourgeois banalities like javascript and the egregious gratuities of ajax. It reminds me of the early film-art era devolving into formulaic Hollywood movies. Today website art is devolving into flashy UX entertainment.

Maybe I’m over analogizing/eulogizing/elegizing. After all, what’s the point of single-minded CSS when there’s so much more you can add to the mix for more complex, exciting features and functionality?

Still, one hangs on. Complexity has many faces. A page of sparse articulate code wrapped in flowing CSS, imbued with clean, bright lines of stylsheet magic, produces a pure lighter-than-air weblife that we all dream about and want for our children. My hope for today is to revisit the power of CSS and the aesthetic web to build a better web page, and a better tomorrow.

Adobe CQ5

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Adobe’s CMS “CQ5” is growing in popularity among larger corporations because of Adobe’s extremely effective acquisition, bundling, and marketing strategy around the product. The definition of CMS has grown more complex and comprehensive because of CQ5.

CQ5 has options such as integrated digital-asset management, Adobe Search & Promote (replaces Google Search Appliance), cloud management, responsive design, social media/collaboration, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Test&Target (optimization tool for ads and messaging) , personalized shopping, “Live Copy” for global reuse of resource, and easy integration with translation plugin Clay Tablet (I recently trained in this one).

CMS has grown more comprehensive because content management includes everything from design to video ads and messaging to social media to search result customization, as well as good old editorial and marketing copy. CMS has grown more complex because of the technical challenges around globalization/multilingual, reuse of sites and content without redundancy, responsive design for many device types, post-ajax interface (if that’s an allowable description), crowdsourcing mechanisms, personalized shopping experience, and the latest in test & target messaging on the fly.

The amazing thing to me is that CQ5 handles all the above. You can see how far Adobe has gone to dominate the CMS market, acquiring add-on companies and attaching those apps into every imaginable CMS bundling option. The acquisition strategy alone is a fascinating study in product development.

Most will never scratch the surface of what CQ5 can do. Seasoned content managers will need a week or so of training to get started. For what it does, however, the ease of use is above average.

Here’s a quick overview of CQ5:
http://websmart.tv/learn/what-is-adobe-cq5/
Here’s an Adobe video on the next upgrade to CQ5 being branded as Experience Manager:
http://www.adobe.com/solutions/web-experience-management.html

I’m also finding a lot of fascinating conversation around CQ5 in the Adobe forums and product-specific LinkedIn groups. The system is still relatively new so in terms of jobs (users, programmers, etc.), there’s more demand than supply. It’s a good time to get trained in CQ5. If you want to send comments or questions to me about CMS or CQ5, use my “contact” form on this blog (upper-right corner of screen).

Old Faces

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Getting older and having known so many people, I can look at a crowd and usually spot faces that “look just like someone I once knew.” It usually triggers a memory or two. It’s a comforting feeling, because there is something comforting about memories, old days, and old faces.

The older you get, the more you notice that places and situations, as well as people, start to remind you of something from the past. You’ve seen everything, so everything you see reminds you of something.

The best way to remember people is to visit in person, to see the actual old face of an old friend. I was single in midlife and decided to revisit an old friend from twenty years earlier. A month later we were married. That was ten years ago, and now I see my favorite “old face” every single day. It’s wonderful to share the present with someone who can also share the past that we have in common, living today, planning new days, talking about old days.

Seeing old faces doesn’t always lead to weddings, but it’s usually a welcome opportunity for reminiscing and maybe even realigning forgotten ideals, goals, and actions. Sometimes visiting, or accidentally bumping into, an old face is just a pleasant moment, a brief stand against the hectic stream of time.

Nowadays social media puts all those old faces right on your screen and you can catch up on the past twenty years, or the past twenty seconds, at the click of a message-button. To me that has been a good experience over these six or seven years of FB et al. But don’t let it fool you, you didn’t actually visit your old friend, you virtually visited, literally virtually, looking in a mirror dimly. There’s still nothing better than seeing an old friend in person, old-face-to-old-face, sipping coffee, eating lunch, talking amid the actual presence, the flavor, the tone, the scent, the color, and the texture of real life (RL).

I’ve moved around a lot, so I don’t live near my old friends and faces, except my wife, who has the freshest face I’ve ever seen. For my other old friends, social media will have to do. But if you live in the same town as your old friends, by all means take advantage of it.

Word for the Occasion

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Most everyone knows a malapropism when they see it, even if they don’t know it’s called a malapropism. Here are some malapropisms (followed by the correct form):

  • After ten years you pass the statue of limitations (statute of limitations)
  • Better times are in the offering (in the offing)
  • His behavior was incompensable (incomprehensible)
  • He cut off his nose despite his face (to spite his face)
  • He was inflammable and never lost a case (infallible)

Besides these obvious errors there are not-so-obvious misuses that occur all too often. Subtle word misuse passes unnoticed even in well-educated people’s conversations, in office meetings, on TV news. One commonly misused word is “misnomer,” e.g., incorrect usage: “Thinking economic benefits will trickle down is a misnomer.” Misnomer does not mean a misapprehension, or a wrong conclusion. Misnomer means wrongly named or inappropriately named, e.g., correct usage: “Calling the US a democracy is a misnomer, it’s actually a republic.”

Another example is “literally,” e.g., incorrect: “The song’s remake made the original artist literally roll over in his grave.” This increasingly common abuse of literally is literally draining the impact of the word’s proper usage.

Then there’s the popular misuse of “disinterested,” e.g., incorrect: “Let’s all be attentive in this meeting, I don’t want to see any disinterested looks.” Disinterested, of course, means without bias, as in, “We’ll bring in a disinterested party to help resolve the disagreement.”

Another unfortunate trend is to use refute to mean deny or argue against, e.g., incorrect: “She refuted allegations of misconduct by pointing to her many years of service and self sacrifice.” Refute, remember, means to demonstrate logical necessity or produce evidence that disproves an allegation or theory. Denial and counterargument do not constitute refutation.

Anyone would be averse to false accusations; unfortunately, people nowadays are too often “adverse to false accusations.” The word “adverse” is often used as a wrong substitute for “averse.” Used correctly, “I am averse to leaving jobs unfinished, and unfinished jobs have an adverse effect on my state of mind, which might affect people around me (bonus correct usage of effect/affect).

I call these “word approximations” and I’m getting used to hearing them, which is sad. If you would like to be part of the solution, look up any word you are not absolutely sure you’re using correctly. Flout the sloppy usage trends and flaunt your word awareness. I would go even further and recommend choosing the best word, not just a not-wrong word. Some examples: More physical distance is farther instead of further, as in farther down the road. The US comprises fifty states, instead of “comprised of” fifty states. I ensure high quality, I insure my car, and I assure my friend that things will work out OK.

My wallet contains less money than yesterday, but it doesn’t contain less dollar bills, it contains fewer dollar bills. I chose the alternate plan and was glad I had alternatives. Don’t call bad treatment maltreatment until the mistreatment gets very bad. One’s culture does not inculcate people with its values, it inculcates values into people. But it might indoctrinate people with its values.

A lot of words with different connotations are often used interchangeably. But that depletes meaning in life as well as the meaning of words. Connotations expressed accurately color conversation, speeches, arguments, and life with uplifting poignancy. Hearing the right word or the right phrase for the occasion improves meaning and happiness for everyone. You can contribute to the improvement of the human condition by being the person uttering the right word and the right phrase.

Getting back to the lighter side of word-fail, if you think malapropisms are entertaining, you might also enjoy searching the Internet for “mondegreens” and “eggcorns.” If you search on the phrase “word usage” you’ll also find a lot of sites eager to help you get it right. Happy word hunting.

Reference Note: The most fun and informative word-analysis blog I’ve found is James Harbeck’s Sesquiotica, or “Word Tasting Notes.” He has analyzed words in more than a thousand playful and erudite entries which you can peruse in his handy Word Tasting Note Index.

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Frankenstein and the Agile Casserole

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What’s Agile? The word itself sounds upbeat, fast, and flexible. In fact, it sounds agile. No wonder almost every company and person in the known world today declares that it “Does Agile.” The concept has been accepted and embraced almost universally.

So out of that set of “almost all companies” how many actually practice Agile? 60%? 30%? .001%? Like with most anything, it depends on how you define the concept. But in my experience the answer is in the lower range. That’s not necessarily bad. Misusing the word Agile doesn’t necessarily mean bad practices are threatening civilization.

I have heard a lot of people over the past ten years say “My company says it does Agile but they don’t know what they’re talking about.” That can be annoying to someone who is well versed in Agile methodology. Nevertheless, implementing a process that makes you more effective is to be encouraged, even if you are misusing a popular corporate-IT buzzword to accomplish it. Agile has its place. Hybrids of Agile methodology (“take-what-you-need-and-discard-the-rest”) have their place too, in my opinion. And their place is legion.

The important thing is that whatever patched-together-Frankenstein version of Agile a company employs, as long as it makes things work smoother, faster, in a flexible adapt-fast-to-new-facts kind of atmosphere, without compromising quality-control within process, then go for it. Call me anything you want, just don’t call me late for dinner (old joke).

Anyway, if your process borrows methods and ideas from Agile methodology, and if it fits in your project’s context, it feels Agile, and it really works, though it be not technically Agile methodology, then damn the torpedoes and call it what you will. I wouldn’t sweat the technicalities of the recipe if the casserole comes out yummy (and everyone is buying it). That’s my take on mixed metaphors and a footloose footnote in the perfectionist’s Agile Cookbook.

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Change Management

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Most things work better with planning, including change. Getting people ready for change is part of planning for change. Doing the people part, and then implementing changes as planned, is all part and parcel of change management (CM). There is nothing new in change management, except the label. The label is useful because as an official corporate buzz word, it generates awareness (and blog entries like this one). Awareness results in more companies doing it right who otherwise might not have done it right.

People get used to what they do, how they do it, and what management expected from them in months and years past. It is not easy to change those routines. CM is needed when a company is taking a new direction, significantly changing how people do things, changing who does what, and changing expectations. CM is hard work for managers, in order to make change less hard on staff, while avoiding disruption of productivity. CM can turn a potential morale liability and turn it into an uplifting experience for everyone.

Change management is not: “We’re doing this new way so you’re all signed up for training next month” (end of CM). That approach will hurt morale in most cases. Training is often a component of CM, but it is not the whole CM process.

Companies might adopt the buzz word “change management” without adopting the real meaning of the buzz word. In those cases, CM might be “declared” but not actually done. CM is a varied set of processes by skilled managers who know how to coach, know how to communicate, and have an intimate knowledge of staff as well as management, their needs, and their fears. CM comprises strategic decisions that ensure healthy results for the company and the people.

CM process lets staff know that a change is coming well in advance, why the change is coming, how it will benefit the company and keep viable jobs, when and how it will be implemented, impact on daily work, what each person’s role is, who needs what training, when/how the training will be made available, how people can help make it work better for everyone, what are the specific objectives, and what we hope to achieve in the long run. CM includes ample time and opportunity for people to broach their concerns, questions, and misgivings. The worst skeptics should be brought on board with courtesy and respect and with as much information and encouragement as possible.

When everyone is brought into the process, and all become active participants, from early warning through implementation through post-implementation retrospective, and the change actually works as planned, then CM happened successfully.

If you investigate the real meaning behind the buzz word, and learn what made it so great, you can reap the benefits of a hundred years of common sense that led up to such buzzworthy concepts. That’s my take on Change Management.

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Cicero and Lorem Ipsum

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Once upon a time in 45 BC, Cicero wrote “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” (The Extremes of Good and Evil), an essay on ethics. Among other topics, he talks about the virtues of seeking pleasure in the sense of long-term benefits that are good for you. One example he gives is in doing physical exercise that is painful at the moment, but returns greater pleasure in everyday life in the long run (coincidentally one of my earlier blog topics). Conversely, he disparages pleasures of the moment that are pursued from weakness and lead to negative consequences.

Cicero’s essay is also interesting in that it became the source for the “random filler text” that publishers have been using since the 1500s and still use today, sometimes called the “Lorem ipsum” text. When you are showing a newspaper, magazine, or website layout, and you don’t want meaningful text to distract from the focus on the layout, you insert random filler text. Almost all publishers in web and print use Lorem ipsum random filler text. Many people think it is truly random, artificially made to look like Latin; however, as we now know, has a real-life origin from the Latin of Cicero’s piece on ethics. Today there are Lorem ipsum generators that you can use to get this kind of “random” text to fill your layout pages.

To wit:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Morbi ultrices, felis eu gravida lobortis, odio quam ultricies tellus, vitae sagittis turpis mi vitae nulla. Fusce dolor nibh, pharetra sit amet iaculis eget, vestibulum commodo ligula. Nulla velit massa, porta in pharetra ac, elementum eu ante. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Aliquam odio lorem, consequat tincidunt facilisis vitae, ullamcorper sed lectus. Suspendisse lobortis diam eget lectus tempus at interdum massa semper. Vivamus eu diam non odio vulputate auctor id ac nunc. Nam convallis nulla id erat dapibus porta convallis ligula accumsan. Sed a molestie dolor. Etiam laoreet nisl vel nulla rutrum id tristique felis consectetur. In nunc mi, fringilla at malesuada vitae, pharetra ut metus. Duis non mattis eros. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.

Many thanks to the ethical thinker and writer Cicero for leaving us profound insights into life, as well as useful gibberish for the publishing industry.

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Wabi-Sabi

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Wabi-sabi is a Japanese word that evokes a minimalist beauty that is imperfect, unique, understated, authentic, and deeply felt. Hyphenating wabi and sabi merges two slightly different ideas of beauty.

Wabi emphasizes minimalism in beauty that is not obvious and not conventional. It might be the beauty of a crack in a table that brings back fond memories of the event thirty years ago that caused the crack, or an “imperfection” in someone’s face that makes the person more attractive. Wabi is the opposite of airbrush and polish. Airbrushing a photo destroys any wabi-traces of beauty. Wabi might mean the sparse beauty of a two-room house with a nonsymmetrical but meticulous interior, a few well-made pieces of essential furniture, with very tasteful but very little decoration.

Sabi emphasizes the beauty in the marks of aging in a person or object, or the effects of the elements. It might be an old pair of faded and patched blue-jeans. Like wabi, sabi emphasizes authenticity. So a brand-new pair of pre-faded blue-jeans would be the opposite of sabi. Sabi might be a quiet glowing smile of a 90-year-old man, the smile playing off the weathered skin and the character written on his aged face. Sabi might be in a piece of driftwood in its natural setting by the sea, but not that same piece in a giftshop.

A “perfect” example of wabi-sabi is old Persian carpets. Factory-output Persian-style carpets have geometrically even and symmetrical designs. This is not wabi-sabi. Handmade authentic Persian carpets show the uneven design inevitable with the uneven hues from hand-dipping different pieces of wool at different times into varying batches of hand-made natural dyes—then combining them to be woven and knotted together by hand over several months, possibly by the hands of several different individuals. This human expression and effort gives the final carpet an aesthetic depth that is spiritual and very wabi-sabi.

We came to expect symmetry and perfection of design during the industrial revolution’s mechanical exactness and consistent output, and even more so with computer-aided design, laser precision in factories, and geometrical balance to within a millionth of a millimeter. Colors are measured to the exact CMYK ratio. Automated perfection has deadened our appreciation for the beauty of the individuality that went into creating and producing objects. It makes us want to see humans as airbrushed and perfectly proportioned as a laser-precision factory product.

The takeaway from this entry is a suggestion: Find some good old-fashioned hidden beauty in the asymmetrical, individual, authentic, quirky, natural characteristics of people and objects. This beauty elevates authenticity, behaving in your natural way, uniqueness of appearances, appreciating diversity of talents, valuing different styles of expression.

This entry partly from my book
Potential of an Active Mind: How to Recapture the Magic of Everyday Life
© copyright Robert Rose-Coutré 2009, 2011, and 2012

Review of Karl Wiegers’ book Pearls from Sand

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People in the software industry know that Karl Wiegers has a wealth of experience in software engineering, quality assurance, and SDLC in general. But they may not know that he is also a wise counselor with life lessons to share. In his recent book Pearls from Sand: How Small Encounters Lead to Powerful Lessons, he parlays those lessons into an entertaining series of stories, each with a useful message.

Each story is a chapter, and each chapter is short, which makes for very convenient short segments of time required each time you pick up the book. A coffee break, for example, is a good time to read a chapter. Once you pick it up, however, you may not want to put it down.

Near the beginning, Wiegers launches into warnings about behaviors that reduce your credibility, and people’s perception of your character. One simple example is cancelling a commitment because something came up later that you’d rather attend. He quotes Oscar Wilde’s quip about cancelling for “a subsequent engagement,” which is funny in literature, but not in real life. Wiegers goes on to warn and encourage in areas such as “active listening” instead of converting someone’s story into my story (e.g., Oh yes that happened to me too and my experience was even more amazing than yours, etc.).

Karl talks about perfectionists, expectations (managing), exercise, helping others, heroism, knowing your limits, negotiating, quality (“crap gap”), fortitude, sharing credit, leadership, knowledge-sharer vs. knowledge-conserver, teamwork, and many other important topics, each illustrated with a story or two from his personal experiences. For example, on fortitude (“Keep Getting Up” chapter), he relates the story of his uncle who suffered an endless series of tragedies and defeats throughout his life. But he met each defeat with a new idea on “what to do next,” which consistently converted setbacks into triumphs. Despite a life plagued by crushing blows, the man kept up an unquenchable good humor, such that no one would ever guess the severe hardships he was enduring.

Every chapter is filled with great stories like the “Keep Getting Up” episode. One chapter is on commitment to lifelong learning (“For Whom the School Bell Tolls”). It serves to remind and inspire the reader to pursue education in life, in your special talents, in whatever fulfills you, and keep pursuing it while you still draw breath. Like the other stories, it is useful as a reminder of what’s important, and as an inspiration to go after what’s important. His stories also give useful insights on how to do things better, in almost every area of life and career.

I can’t summarize every chapter, but you get the idea. Each story pays back the reader amply for time spent reading. As in all Wiegers’ books, his lucid, compelling writing style helps keep the pages turning with pleasure. This book in particular adds a rich life-experience plot line that makes every page very meaningful on a personal level. Karl’s Pearls from Sand is sort of like a cross between Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea and Lao Tsu’s Tao Te Ching, adapted for the twenty-first-century professional. Whether you’re familiar with those other books or not, you’ll gain a lot of valuable Pearls of wisdom and entertaining stories from Karl Wiegers’ Pearls from Sand.

Go to Karl Wiegers’ web page for Pearls from Sand: How Small Encounters Lead to Powerful Lessons.

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Crowdsourcing

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Crowdsourcing isn’t a new concept but there’s been more buzz about it recently so I’ll write about it too. Crowdsourcing is two things: 1. a marketing strategy, 2. a way to generate community, to get community-generated enhancements, around a product or service (which is basically a marketing strategy).

Crowdsourcing starts by committing significant resources to engage with your customer base. There are three kinds of content in the digital marketing world, 1. paid (ads), 2. owned (traditional marketing copy), 3. earned (user-generated feedback and chatter, whether on Facebook, LinkedIn, Forums, sidewalks, coffee shops, etc.). Crowdsourcing is a way to leverage the latter type: earned content. You convert your customer base into a community (sounds easy!).

Crowdsourcing stresses inviting customers or potential customers to gather and offer ideas and suggestions, while company moderators keep up very active interaction with customers to keep them engaged. Reaching “earned” customer-generated chatter means strong presence on social media with full-time digital-marketing activity. An easy-to-use interactive website helps attract user participation. CMSs come with increasingly sophisticated social media components that can pave the way, although it’s still a big-ticket item. However you implement community drivers, inviting and collecting customer ideas should be followed with communicating back to the customers, with acknowledgment or with further questions about the suggestions submitted.

The process-cycle of crowdsourcing relies on corporate flexibility to adapt rapidly to its communities ideas and trends. LinkedIn, for example, constantly invites member input for improvements to the user experience. They are not always great at active engagement with customers, but then they have a massive customer base, most of them nonpaying. Nevertheless, you can see user-generated changes implemented on the site so you know they are listening.

Other B2C companies without such an overwhelming customer base communicate more directly and frequently with customers who offer ideas. This builds customer loyalty, good word-of-mouth PR, and more responsive product updates and offerings. The customer feels like the product is more customized to their needs, because it is. Active communication with customers helps your offerings stay relevant, and relevance produces revenue.

I did crowdsourcing before I knew it was called crowdsourcing in the early 2000s with our community-based QA site stickyminds.com and its satellite crowdsource-generator STQe-Letter (here is my earlier blog entry referring to STQe-Letter), for which I wrote a column twice a month (here is a best-of collection that my colleagues compiled and published).

This e-letter was constantly changing based on user comments, and stickyminds content was constantly updated based on the e-letter’s invitation to submit ideas. The proof that community efforts worked came at conferences when I always had enthusiastic customers/community-members approaching me at our booths, and attending our special events. We generated high-volume earned content in our early versions of user comment space, forums, and user-contributor areas, which we leveraged in print media and conferences, as well as online.

Whether you have a product like a washing machine or a service like health records management or most any other offering to other people or other businesses, you earned your earned content so leverage this high-value crowdsourcing asset. Converting your customer base into a community can give you a powerful engine for generating solutions that meet the needs of actual people much more closely and effectively. It’s good will and good business.

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Problem Solving Redux — Formal Methods

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To expand on my last entry, problem solving includes more than a disciplined pursuit of mentally active investigation as a consistent lifestyle. There are also several methodologies to help in the pursuit. They are all easier said than done, but cultivating the ideas leads to internalizing them, so they become second nature and you automatically use them without having to consciously apply them.

I already talked about one methodology in an earlier entry, root-cause analysis, so I’ll skip that one. A lot of people use trial-and-error, such as filling in numbers in Sudoku, then seeing if it works. Eventually you get good enough to “see” the right number and no longer need trial and error. Seeing the answer is really just sped up trial and error, or “Abstraction,” in which you calculate all the “no” answers in your head so quickly it seems like you just suddenly “see” the right answer.

You can also break the problem down to simpler parts and solve each part first to lead to the big solution. The problem of choosing a major in college might include breaking it down to “what are my interests,” “what are my talents,” “where those overlap, what career choices are there,” then “what are my lifestyle preferences” and see which ones fit into the career choice results, and narrow down from there (future income expectations, what doesn’t conflict with your values, etc.). This is also a kind of Output Analysis—what is my end result goal in four years, back to what college major to start with. This will also involve research skills as a problem-solving methodology.

Some people use brainstorming, which usually requires multiple people feeding off each other throwing out ideas, sparking ideas in each other, to get at an explanation or solution to a puzzle (what to name a new product, what to title your new book, how to spend a vacation, etc.). People associate the “hypothesis” method with science: assert a theory then try to prove it—or the reverse—disprove the theory, which leads to narrowing the theory to points that cannot be disproved, and go from there.

On TV mystery shows, you see the detectives saying, if I were doing something like this, what would I do? This is a “sympathetic” approach, putting yourself into someone else’s shoes/mind, as best as you can. It is also used by actors, known as “method acting,” where you go through a psychological and physical process to “become” the character. Solving problems can involve analogy methods, comparing to other similar scenarios that you’ve solved before, or reducing the problem to something more readily solvable.

Your effectiveness as a problem solver will match how mentally active you are, how persistent you are, and how serious a student you are of the formal methods of investigation. You can be a gifted intuitive problem solver, but still become much more effective if you learn, then internalize, the formal methods that others have already worked out.

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Problem Solving

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Problem solving is a kind of thinking similar to root-cause analysis. But you cannot be an effective problem solver by merely analyzing problems as they come along. You have to work in a constant state of active analysis, always investigating and discovering what connects everything together under the covers, behind the scenes. That means learning why things work, not just how. It means understanding how each piece of task and function relates to other tasks and functions. It requires fathoming big pictures and digging deep into minutiae and everything in between.

Then when a problem comes along, you already know where to start. You investigate from a position of deep and broad knowledge. With that knowledge, and a little luck, you instantly understand the problem, you know the solution or where to look for solutions. Even with truly wicked problems, you are still in the best possible position to find the best possible solution in the shortest amount of time.

Being a problem solver is an attitude, maybe even a personality type. It combines an active mind, a root-cause approach, a curious and exploratory disposition, a tenacious spirit, and a desire to learn more every day.

I read a lot of articles nowadays about students, especially in math, who memorize formulas but never learn why the formulas work, never understand the underlying math that is the foundation of the formula. My wife and my son have both taught math, and both have said it’s a pervasive deficiency. In my own brief foray into teaching, I found the same depressing absence of concentration and attention most of the time. The path of least resistance might get you through college, you might even memorize your way to a 4.0 GPA and get a good job, but it will never make you a problem solver.

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