Edge Perspectives with John Hagel

The Real Significance of the Dubai Ports Controversy

There’s been a lot of controversy in the past week over the Dubai Ports World acquisition of terminal facilities in US ports.  With all the coverage, though, no one has zeroed in on one of the key issues that is a real red flag for the direction of US policy.

I posted about the original acquisition deal (Dubai Ports World acquired P&O) in "Dubai as Router for the World" well over two months ago.  At the time, I focused on this deal to highlight the growth of highly specialized infrastructure management businesses on a global scale. I also discussed the role of containerized shipping in reshaping global commerce. In a separate post on "Dubai - Global Talent Magnet", I discussed Dubai’s strategy to attract talent from around the world to help build global leadership in key business sectors, starting with ports management and tourism.

The current controversy allows me to focus on implications for the US.  Let’s leave aside the obvious points that have been well-discussed, starting with the fact that Dubai Ports World would not be managing US ports, but only selected terminal facilities within ports managed by US entities, and that there are profound issues with security management at US ports that have nothing to do with who operates terminal facilities.

Let me propose a different lens for viewing this controversy, one that has largely escaped MSM attention. In the Epilogue to The Only Sustainable Edge, JSB and I outlined a different way to view public policy.  We suggested that public policy in many different domains should be reassessed in terms of implications for accelerating talent development.  So, what does the acquisition of US ports facilities by DP World have to do with talent development?

Well, US ports have been falling behind many other ports around the world in terms of productivity improvement for years. Here’s what a New York Times article (registration required) this week said:

American ports are considered somewhat backward by shipping experts outside of the country.  For example, most major ports overseas operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  But in the United States, ports were shut down at night until very recently. And transmitting shipping orders electronically to some American ports does not necessarily save time because the orders need to be rekeyed into the ports’ computer systems, a concession to unions trying to preserve jobs.

In contrast, DP World got its start by developing highly productive management techniques in Dubai’s own port at Jebel Ali, which has emerged as a major global transshipment center.  DP World built its business by applying this talent to manage terminal facilities at ports around the world. In seeking to block the acquisition of US ports facilities by DP World, policy makers in Congress are helping to insulate these facilities from the talent that this company has developed in managing similar facilities around the world.

Of course, there is a need to balance other public policy considerations like security, but who is speaking out forcefully for the compelling need to access global talent to improve the productivity of key infrastructure operations?  To the extent that this acquisition is defended, it seems to be in terms of the need to support a key ally in the war on terror or the much more diffuse value of free trade. Who is speaking out for the need to freely access global talent as a way to accelerate talent development domestically?

Now, here’s one irony. Many of the key executives of DP World, including its Chief Operating Officer, Ted Bilkey, are American executives.  They are refugees from American companies who could not offer comparable opportunities to accelerate talent development.  If you look through the management ranks of DP World, you will find many executives from other countries in Europe and Asia, similarly lured by the opportunity to get better faster by working for an aggressive global competitor.

There’s an even deeper irony. In my earlier posting on the rise of containerized shipping, I noted that an American entrepreneur, Malcolm McLean, came up with the innovation of containerized shipping back in 1955. McLean founded SeaLand, the company that used to employ Ted Bilkey.  The background story is that a host of non-US companies, including DP World and Hutchison Whampoa, a Hong Kong company, have been far more aggressive in developing the management talent required to exploit this innovation. They have built leadership positions on a global scale in contrast to American companies that have either been acquired or marginalized by these global competitors. SeaLand itself was eventually acquired by another global competitor, APM Terminals in Denmark.

So, a US based innovation leads to an explosion of global shipping activity.  US companies are slower to exploit this innovation than global rivals.  American management talent gets lured away to join these global rivals. When one of these global rivals seeks to acquire US terminal facilities and apply their leading edge management techniques back in the US, policy makers in Congress seek to block this from happening.

The saddest part of the story is that DP World didn’t buy P&O to get access to these US terminal facilities.  The real reason they acquired P&O was to gain access to P&O’s port operations in China, a much more rapidly growing market than the US.

Of course, this would be alarming enough if we were only dealing with talent development in port operations.  But choices we make in this arena ripple through a much broader swath of the economy.

Ports represent a significant edge in any economy.  In a world where “90 percent of the world’s goods are transported by ship, and 90 percent of these goods travel in standardized shipping containers” (from the New York Times article), the productivity of port operations can make a significant difference in global competitiveness for a broad range of other products.

If we don’t accelerate talent development in these key infrastructure operations, we will make it more difficult to build talent in other business sectors as well. Hampered by inefficient port operations, it becomes more difficult for companies in these other sectors to build domestic manufacturing operations and compete on the global stage.

To see an extreme version of this playing out, we need only look to India. It faces a severe competitive disadvantage in building global manufacturing operations relative to China at least in part because of the relative inefficiency of its port operations.  In a world where bits become more and more important, we need to remember that atoms still matter. Ports, as grimy and unglamorous as they might be, represent a key gateway into the global economy.

So why is it so important to reassess public policy in terms of accelerating talent development? There’s a simple formula: talent development drives productivity improvement and productivity improvement drives economic growth.  If played right, this becomes a virtuous cycle: economic growth creates more opportunities for talent development and the process spirals forward.  On the other hand, as the saga of American shipping ports illustrates over the past 50 years, a vicious cycle can also take hold. In the face of lower growth, motivated talent will seek out opportunities to get better faster, even if it is in the deserts of Dubai, and the talent drain will erode productivity and growth opportunities.

Who is making these points in Washington? To use George Lakoff’s terminology (but not his substantive views) in Moral Politics, we desperately need a new frame for public policy. Alas, neither the Democrats nor Republicans appear willing to break the existing frames and focus attention on talent development.

Hamel on Management Innovation

Gary Hamel’s latest article in Harvard Business Review, “The Why, What, and How of Management Innovation” (purchase required) is a useful but puzzling piece.  It’s really two articles in one – and there's an underlying tension between the two articles.

The HBR article broadly deals with the topic of management innovation and it helps to expand our view of innovation. As he notes at the outset, many companies understand product innovation and process innovation, but few companies focus on the form of innovation that matters the most: management innovation.  Hamel observes that:

While operational innovation focuses on a company’s business processes (procurement, logistics, customer support, and so on), management innovation targets a company’s management processes.

So far, so good. But here’s the tension that pervades Hamel’s article(s): are we focused on breakthrough management innovation or continuous management innovation?

At one level, Hamel falls prey to the American executive’s obsession with breakthrough innovation. Witness his definition of management innovation:

A management innovation can be defined as a marked departure from traditional management principles, processes, and practices or a departure from customary organizational forms that significantly alters the way the work of management is performed.

Hamel’s stories at the outset, focusing on DuPont, Procter & Gamble, Visa and Linux all tend to reinforce this search for breakthroughs - fundamentally new ways of organizing and managing a business that support the success of the company for decades. This is his “first” article and it represents his primary focus in the HBR piece.

At another level, though, there is a “second” article that is struggling to break free. Hamel seems to really be trying to articulate a set of management principles to support continuous management innovation rather than breakthrough management innovation. On the first page of his article, Hamel complains that “few companies have a well-honed process for continuous management innovation.” Unfortunately, this second article gets buried in the HBR piece.

Both articles are interesting.  Hamel does a nice job of articulating a framework for coming up with “bold management breakthroughs”:

• Commitment to a big management problem – here he proposes three leading questions:

"First, what are the tough trade-offs that your company never seems to get right? . . . Second, what are big organizations bad at? . . . Third, what are the emerging challenges the future has in store for your company?"

• Novel principles that illuminate new approaches – here he offers two questions:

"What things exhibit the attributes or capabilities that you’d like to build into your organization? And what is it that imbues those exemplars with their enviable qualities?"

• A deconstruction of management orthodoxies – here he recommends testing every management belief with two questions:

"First, is the belief toxic to the ultimate goal you’re trying to achieve? Second, can you imagine an alternative to the reality the belief reflects?"

• Analogies from atypical organization that redefine what’s possible

Now, these are great ways to get executives to think creatively about new approaches to management processes but, on their own, they are unlikely to lead to much more than some creative workshops.  Hamel doesn’t really tackle the most challenging aspect of management innovation – moving from creative ideas to sustained and broad-based impact – especially in large, traditional enterprises. His final section “Get the Rubber on the Road” is particularly unsatisfying and conventional – detailed management process maps, low risk trials and portfolios of initiatives.

Lurking beneath this first article is the second article.  Hamel repeatedly comes back to a deeper question: what are the management principles required to support continuous management innovation?  He never uses this term, but think of it as meta-innovation principles.

The HBR piece offers some insight on this. For example:

These management principles – variety, competition, allocation flexibility, devolution and activism – stand in marked contrast to those we’ve inherited from the early decades of the Industrial Revolution. That doesn’t make the old principles wrong, but they are inadequate if the goal is continuous, preemptive strategic renewal.

Or:

Create a market for judgment that harnesses the wisdom of a broad cross-section of employees to set the odds on a project’s anticipated returns.

Since this is not the primary focus of the HBR piece, Hamel does a much less systematic job of exploring this topic. In the end, though, this may be the most significant breakthrough management innovation of all.  Rather than focusing on one breakthrough, why not focus on crafting a reinforcing set of management processes and practices that enable continuous management innovation?

Hamel would deny that there is any inconsistency between the topics of breakthrough management innovation and continuous management innovation.  In fact, he suggests that one (but only one of several) of the ways for a breakthrough management innovation to deliver long-lasting advantage is for it to be “part of an ongoing program of invention, where progress compounds over time.”

Hamel is certainly right as a purely logical exercise. The two forms of innovation are not inconsistent and, if done right, can be powerfully reinforcing.  Yet, in practice, I find that American management is much too focused on breakthrough innovation and seriously neglects the much broader opportunity for continuous innovation. Hamel’s article reflects this broader bias.

As I read the article, I was also struck by how enterprise-centric Hamel’s view of management innovation is.  Virtually all of the examples he cites of management innovation are confined to innovation in management processes within the enterprise.  My own sense is that most of the interesting management innovations that are emerging today involve new approaches to management across enterprises.  Once again, Hamel’s article reflects the bias of a lot of Western executives of large enterprises who are focused much too inwardly when seeking to be innovative.

While executives in the 20th century concentrated on perfecting scalable management within the enterprise, the 21st century riches may belong to those executives who focus on developing scalable management techniques across enterprises.

One more thing. Hamel reveals a surprisingly narrow and ethnocentric view of where innovation is occurring.  Virtually all of his examples are American companies and he offers this amazing observation:

It’s tough to build eye-popping differentiation out of lower-order human capabilities like obedience, diligence, and raw intelligence – things that are themselves becoming global commodities, available for next to nothing in places like Guangzhou, Bangalore, and Manila.”

Now, he just named three of the places where some of the most significant management innovation in the world is going on today. The management innovation being pioneered in these areas is precisely the kind of continuous management innovation that he claims is so important.  In some cases, like certain entrepreneurial companies in China, it is built upon a breakthrough management innovation – global process network management.  Rather than focusing on breakthrough management innovations within the enterprise, Hamel could benefit from understanding the continuous management innovations across enterprises that are emerging in Asia.

Invention versus Innovation

As part of our continuing quest to expand the focus of discussion from invention to innovation, JSB and I have contributed an article on "Funding Invention Vs. Managing Innovation" on Business Week's web site. Check it out.

Reflections on Davos

I have been scrambling to catch up on many fronts since returning from Davos, and I am still reeling from five days of intense meetings at the World Economic Forum stretching from 7am until well past midnight.  I already posted some comments about the themes of innovation and the emergence of India and China at Davos.

Before even more time passes, I wanted to reflect on some of the experiences and encounters during the time at Davos.

As always, Klaus Schwab and his team do an extraordinary job of orchestrating an extraordinary array of discussions. These sessions capture the “gestalt” of world leaders and at the same time seek to provoke their thinking (and, increasingly, their action) on key issues facing the world.  This year’s theme official theme was “the creative imperative” and there was rich engagement on various facets of this topic.

More fundamentally, a curious mixture of complacency and dread seemed to pervade the formal and informal discussions at Davos.  On the one hand, things are going pretty well in the global economy and the participants kept coming back to the strong performance of key economies around the world.  As one economist observed on the opening day, “the outlook for 2006 is basically another goldilocks kind of year.”

On the other hand, executives in particular seemed to have a lot of anxiety about a myriad of challenges and frustrations, ranging from the possibility of pandemics to the intensifying economic competition on a global scale.  On the latter topic, there seemed to be growing recognition that the cost cutting strategies that have largely driven corporate performance over the past couple of decades are delivering diminishing returns.  At the same time, executives expressed considerable frustration about the difficulty in getting large organizations to deliver more significant and sustainable innovation to the marketplace.

Participating in these discussions, I was struck that certain themes kept surfacing.  At one level, these themes seemed to make a lot of sense, but I found that they often distracted attention from the real issues. Here are some of the themes that shaped a lot of the discussion at Davos:

Integration

This is perhaps the hallmark theme of Davos.  People from incredibly diverse backgrounds around the world come together, united by the desire to achieve greater integration on a global scale.  This desire defines what Samuel Huntington termed the “Davos man”. At one level, this is an admirable goal.  We all benefit from establishing richer connections with diverse people around the world.

At another level, though, participants kept talking about the need to eliminate boundaries.  I take a different view. Boundaries are healthy – in fact, they become the catalyst for innovation.  Without boundaries, we would not have different experiences and perspectives to bring to bear on the issues confronting us. We actually need more boundaries and more friction across boundaries. As JSB and I have written, the challenge is to harness productive friction across boundaries instead of allowing friction to become destructive or wasteful.  Rather than eliminating boundaries, perhaps what we need is more respect and willingness to engage constructively across boundaries. If we can do that, then boundaries in fact become a source of great richness.

Balance

This theme came up repeatedly.  Economists in particular seemed to be worried about “imbalances” threatening the global economy.  Americans are not saving enough. Chinese are saving too much. Coastal areas of China are growing faster than the Western rural areas.  Demand for global energy supplies is rising faster than supply.

Again, at one level, it is hard to argue with balance.  Who wants to be imbalanced?  I fear, though, that this obsession with balance betrays a static, equilibrium view of the world.  Growth is rarely balanced. Indeed, it tends to throw things out of balance. The imbalances that occur in dynamic economies and societies are not a cause for concern as long as economic and social adjustment mechanisms are permitted to operate.

There’s a cynical side of me that notes those who are most concerned about imbalance are often those who have the most assets at risk. Equilibrium is great if you have a lot of money – it means you get to keep it.

Jobs

There was a lot of talk in Davos about jobs – especially how to continue to create jobs in the West to compensate for slowing economic growth and offshoring trends.  I participated in one of these sessions, where I suggested that framing the issue in these terms tends to miss the point.

Of course, we are all concerned about the availability of jobs, but the more fundamental issue is talent development.  If people don’t develop appropriate talent and don’t continue to refresh that talent, there will be no sustainable jobs and certainly few, if any, high value jobs. Reframing the issue as talent development also highlights the increasing importance of talent as a source of comparative advantage in global markets.

JSB and I have written about talent development as a public policy issue in The Only Sustainable Edge (that in fact is the reason I was invited to participate in this session at Davos).

Most people immediately assume we are talking about educational policy when we focus on the importance of talent development.  In fact, we argue that education is becoming more marginal as the bulk of talent development occurs outside of traditional educational institutions.  As one example, the rationale for the corporation is shifting from reducing interaction costs to accelerating talent development. As we begin to recognize that talent development is a continuing process and not confined to one stage of life, we will have to broaden our view of the institutional platforms required for talent development.

We will also need to re-conceive broad swaths of public policy in terms of its ability to accelerate talent development.  Everything from immigration policy to intellectual property rights should be assessed through this lens.

Bottom line, I came away from Davos with a renewed appreciation for the role of the World Economic Forum in creating a vibrant platform for debate and discussion on a global scale.  But I also saw the importance of challenging some conventional wisdom.  Integration, balance, jobs – who could question their value? Yet, by focusing so heavily on these themes, we fall prey to a static view of the world. We risk losing sight of the dynamics that will continue to shape global prosperity.  The creative imperative that served as the theme for the Davos meeting depends on boundaries, generates imbalance and renders existing jobs obsolete.  By focusing more on these dynamics, world leaders may overcome some of their complacency and begin to see more clearly the opportunities, as well as the challenges, that lie ahead.

Disney, Pixar and Jobs

Disney’s purchase of Pixar is exciting a lot of media attention, including a cover story from Business Week. The coverage generally welcomes the acquisition. What’s interesting to me, though, is that most of the attention seems to be on the energizing effect that Steve Jobs’ arrival at Disney (as Board member and the company’s largest shareholder) might have on the company, rather than the specific creative assets being purchased at Pixar.

Here’s what Business Week had to say:

The alliance between Jobs and Disney is full of promise. If he can bring to Disney the same kind of industry-shaking, boundary-busting energy that has lifted Apple and Pixar sky-high, he could help the staid company become the leading laboratory for media convergence.

Let me offer a somewhat different perspective.  Pixar is a great product company. The creative talent at Pixar offers great potential in strengthening Disney’s product offerings in the animation arena.  But I am frankly skeptical about the broader benefits of this acquisition that seem to be exciting the reporters and analysts covering this event.  In particular, I am skeptical about the role that Jobs can play in a broader turnaround of Disney.

There’s no question about it, Steve Jobs is an extremely accomplished entrepreneur – he is brilliant, energetic and has an instinctive feel for great product design. In many respects, though, Jobs’ greatest strengths are also his greatest weaknesses. These weaknesses could undermine the turnaround that Disney so badly needs. Here are four concerns:

Jobs is a product guy when large media companies need to figure out how to become relationship companies. As I have written before, today’s large media conglomerates emerged in an environment of scarce distribution.  Scale and scope mattered in negotiations with distribution channels. Distribution scarcity is rapidly eroding and being replaced by attention scarcity.  As these changes play out, if media companies want to maintain scale and scope, they will need to build relationships with specific audience segments (and use the Internet to build relationships with individual members of the audience segments). They will then need to develop the skills required to use the deep understanding of these audience members to become ever more helpful in connecting them with content (and other relationships) regardless of who produced the content. The mindset shift required to do this should not be under-estimated.

Pixar produces great content that appeals to broad audiences, but its entire culture and mindset is that of a product company: build insanely great products and audiences will come.  The notion of offering somebody else’s products to their customers would be anathema, yet this is the hallmark of the customer relationship businesses that will sustain scale and scope in the next wave of the media business.

Don’t get me wrong. Great product companies in the media business will still be enormously profitable. The question will be whether they can scale.  Creative talent generally seeks smaller, more intimate organizational homes.  Many of the most creative folks at Pixar today are refugees from larger organizations (including, ironically, Disney). As competition intensifies in the media business, it will also be harder to sustain success as a product business – continuously coming up with compelling products that can rise above the flood of other products will become more and more challenging. Unless Disney plans to unbundle into a set of independent product businesses, it has to find a way to leverage scale and scope economies.

Jobs knows and loves products.  In his mind, relationships only exist to support products.  He will help Disney to create great products, but he is likely to undermine efforts to shift the focus to audience relationships. The irony is that Disney’s early success hinged on a very clear audience segment focus (parents with small children) and its ability to mobilize great content across many different media to serve the needs of that audience segment. Through a series of acquisitions and diversification initiatives, Disney has lost its audience segment focus. Disney needs to re-discover that heritage. Jobs is not likely to help Disney in this quest.

Jobs is a product guy at a time when media products need to become platforms. In a world of scarce attention, creators of media products will need to compete with those who re-conceive media products as platforms.  What is the difference? Products are designed to be used on a standalone basis – you buy it and you view it or listen to it in the specific way the content creator intended.  Platforms are designed to be built upon – they create opportunities for the original creator, third parties or the customers themselves to extend, enhance and tailor the content in ways that the original creator never anticipated. Offered as a platform, content can create far more value than any equivalent standalone product.

Jobs is such a passionate product guy that he has trouble embracing platforms.  After all, if the product is perfect (and he won’t tolerate anything less), how could anyone possibly make it better? Perfection is the enemy of platforms.

The story of Apple’s decline as a computer company can be traced to Jobs’ efforts to close up the early Apple computers in the transition from the Apple II line to the Lisa and Macintosh product lines.  Jobs had similar instincts with his NeXT Computer venture – a beautiful but largely standalone computer that made it difficult to connect peripherals. The iPod is tied to a service (iTunes) but it steers far short of being an open platform.  In working with Disney, Jobs is likely to push the company to create insanely great media products, but not platforms.

Jobs builds tightly integrated products when the future of large media companies hinges upon the mindset and skills required to build loosely coupled products. In a world of distribution scarcity, the game was all about creating large, integrated products that could justify the large distribution expense involved in reaching the customer.  As just one simple example, this is why singles gave way to albums in the music business. As distribution scarcity erodes, the advantage shifts to content creators that can modularize their products to facilitate broader reach and re-use – what Umair Haque refers to as micro-chunking (in fact, a lot of my concerns about Steve Jobs could be summarized in his lack of “edge competencies” – another Haqueism).

From the beginning, Jobs resolutely resisted efforts to unbundle the Macintosh operating system from the hardware. This contributed significantly to the long-term erosion of both Apple’s hardware and software market share in the computer business relative to more focused players like Microsoft and Dell.  From his perspective, perfection requires tight integration. In working with Disney, Jobs is likely to push for larger, more tightly integrated content – exactly the opposite direction from the one required to maximize returns on content development in a world of attention scarcity. 

Jobs tends to focus inward in building talent rather than creating networks to get better faster. The media business has always relied on assembling creative talent.  The trend in the media business over time, though, has been for creative talent to unbundle from larger institutions and establish more loosely coupled relationships, coming together for specific projects but maintaining independence.

My colleague, John Seely Brown, pointed me to an interesting article by Bill Taylor and Polly LaBarre entitled “How Pixar Adds a New School of Thought to Disney” that appeared in the January 29 issue of the New York Times.  In this article, Bill and Polly explain how Pixar took a different approach to organizing talent relative to Hollywood:

In the Hollywood model, the energy and investment revolves around the big idea — the script — and the fine print of the deal. Highly talented people agree to terms, do their jobs, and move on to the next project. The model allows for maximum flexibility, to be sure, but it inspires minimum loyalty and endless jockeying for advantage.

Turn that model on its head and you get the Pixar version: a tightknit company of long-term collaborators who stick together, learn from one another and strive to improve with every production.

The article quotes Randy S. Nelson, the Dean of Pixar University, the company’s education and training arm, as follows:

The problem with the Hollywood model is that it's generally the day you wrap production that you realize you've finally figured out how to work together. We've made the leap from an idea-centered business to a people-centered business. Instead of developing ideas, we develop people. Instead of investing in ideas, we invest in people. We're trying to create a culture of learning, filled with lifelong learners.

Wow!  This is a big red flag.  Don’t get me wrong, it is really great that Jobs and his colleagues at Pixar have such a great focus on attracting, developing and retaining talent. Jobs in particular has a reputation for recruiting and motivating teams with great talent, pushing them hard to discover and go beyond their performance limits.

But the red flag is the narrowness of the vision.  No matter how many smart people Jobs manages to recruit, there needs to be a recognition that, in the words of Bill Joy, "there are always more smart people outside your organization than inside." The challenge is to find ways to connect with as many smart people as possible, wherever they reside, and to develop relationships that motivate and enable all participants to get better faster by working together.

The quote from Randy Nelson paints a much too narrow picture: either you bring talent inside and hold on to them or you are doomed to live in a project world where relationships are short-lived.  The challenge and opportunity for all companies, not just media companies, is to develop a much richer network of long-term, trust-based relationships extending well beyond any individual firm that can accelerate capability building.

Disney desperately needs to build these kinds of relationships to tap into creative talent wherever it resides. If Jobs leads Disney to focus primarily on internal talent, he will distract Disney from another key imperative.

A key lesson out of all of this is that companies need to approach acquisitions explicitly in the context of the most basic question of all: what business should we be in?  The acquisition of Pixar and the arrival of Steve Jobs in the halls of Disney suggests that Iger and Disney’s Board believe Disney’s future is ultimately in the product innovation and commercialization business.  If they are right, Jobs will be a great addition. He is a brilliant product guy.

On the other hand, I believe scale and scope economies in the media business are migrating away from products. Media companies that want to remain large and drive even more growth need to focus on establishing platforms and relationships designed to more deeply connect with specific audience segments and individual audience members.  If that is the most promising direction for Disney, then Jobs may not be the man for the job.    

Centennial

I’m not even sure this is the right word for it. I certainly haven't been blogging for one hundred years (although sometimes it feels like it),  but I noticed that I just made my 100th post to this blog.  It struck me that this might be a good time to step back and solicit some feedback from those of you who frequent this blog.

I view this blog as a work in progress.  I am still trying to find the right formula that works for me and hopefully works for you.  I have to admit that I find significant personal value in writing here so I would likely continue even if no one came by to read it.

At the same time, I view this as an exercise in connecting with others who share my interests.  While I certainly welcome feedback on the substance of my postings on an ongoing basis, my primary interest at this point is to solicit any reflections regarding the style of the blog.

• Is the scope of the blog too far ranging in terms of the topics covered or (hard to believe) too narrow?
• Are the individual postings too long or (again, hard to believe) too short? Am I posting with the right frequency?
• Does the blog have the right balance of theory and stories?
• Is the writing clear and compelling?
• What are the things that annoy you about the blog?
• What could I do to make the blog even more interesting, useful and engaging?

Any input would be greatly appreciated.