So far in this series, I have been discussing how innovators would be identified and worked with. And I have at least touched upon how important it is to select, train and manage and cultivate managers who work with creative and innovative employees too, to make this work (see particularly Part 3 in that regard.) But in doing so, I in effect set innovators apart and in a way that can be misleading.

• Everyone in your organization, and at every level and position in it holds within themselves a creative and innovative potential. So while I have been writing in this series up to here about innovative employees, I point out here that this potentially includes any or all of the people in your business.
• Here, the goal is to be open and supportive of your business’ community of members for when they have their great ideas.

A hands-on employee who works on a specific set of tasks in your business and who sees what is and is not working effectively there, is likely in the best position to see where improvements would be beneficial, and they might be in a best position to see at least in outline how those improvements might be framed. To take this out of the abstract, a janitor who cleans up at the end of the day after work might very well be in the best position to see which doors are locked or left unlocked – and even when they are supposed to be locked. That janitor might be the employee who comes up with a better procedural approach for non-confrontationally encouraging people to leave doors unlocked when they should do that for easier maintenance access, but locked when that should be the higher priority.

I cite this type of example for several reasons:

• Janitors go everywhere in a business and at least potentially see a lot in every one of those places. But they are generally not considered as possible sources of insight or best practices solutions.
• In this case a janitor is – and to make their insight work and to develop that new best business practice approach out of it, they would have to be able to work collaboratively with others – Security comes to mind here, but any such solution might very well require buy-in from others as well. And they would need managerial support in order to do that, or even to be listened to in the first place.
• And this brings me back to Part 3 and what I wrote about innovators and managers there. To take my points in that series installment out of the abstract, don’t just think in terms of how a manager would work with “the inventor/innovator” on their team, but rather about how they would work with any team member who has a great idea – but who comes up with this from their standard day-to-day work and while carrying out basic support activities that are not thought of as being sources of innovative insight.
• That is precisely what “disruptive” means in disruptively innovative – arriving unexpectedly and from completely unexpected directions to offer new and novel sources of value.

And this might mean coming from a consistently creative and innovative employee who is in fact explicitly an inventor/innovator on the team and it might come from a member of an explicitly organized inventor/innovator team, or it might come from a more routine-function employee who has a flash of insight.

• It is the hallmark of an innovative organization that the potential for this type of insight and innovation is supported wherever it comes from, and employees are both listened to and included when they seek to offer innovative potential and its fruits.

I am going to continue this discussion in my next series installment, there turning to consider the organization and its policies and practices, and its corporate culture. And at least one of the working examples that I will cite is provided by Google. Meanwhile, you can find this and related postings at HR and Personnel and also at Business Strategy and Operations and at its continuation page: Business Strategy and Operations – 2.

Early in this series I conceptually and operationally divided businesses built around acquisitions and divestitures trading, as fitting either of two fundamental business model patterns: the chop shop model and the value added model (see Part 8: the chop shop acquisitions and divestitures business model where I define both terms, and where I at least begin a discussion of the chop shop model and how it is most certainly seen as the public face for acquisitions and divestitures now, at least as of this writing.

I stated at the end of Part 8 that I would continue that discussion here, this time delving into at least the primary features of value added model businesses. And I do so here, by picking up on a scenario that I briefly touched upon in Part 8 where the acquisitions and divestitures per se consist of salvageable resources from a failing business that could not successfully recover through change management approaches and remediation.

• Admittedly oversimplifying here, a chop shop model business that acquires a failing company for saleable parts is not likely to attempt to turn it around to see if it can in fact be salvaged as an overall business concern.
• Premium would be placed on packaging, marketing and selling off anything of marketplace value and as quickly as possible, and at as little direct expense or risk (indirect expense) as possible to the acquisitions and divestitures business that sets up and manages – and profits from those transactions.
• A value added model business would calculate risk and benefits determination from a wider perspective and along a longer timeframe. If they could save the business and turn it around to be profitable again, the value receivable there might not be as high on a short-term basis as what could be realized from selling off the parts as scrap, but longer term value would in many cases be higher, and over time even considerably higher.
• Here, a salvaged business acquired by such a management and development oriented company, sees at least a potential worth considering of developing long term, new revenue streams. And a recovered business could always be spun off and sold and for a return on investment there too, if it did not fit into that acquisitions and divestitures portfolio of held resources or fit into its long term strategic plans or priorities.
• The basic approach is fundamentally different, with the value added business selling quickly if necessary, but also pursuing longer term investment strategies in what it acquires. And in this, the words “value added” become centrally important. The more an investment acquisition can be increased in marketable value and the more competitive a market can be developed for businesses and entrepreneurs who might want to acquire it, the higher the price point it can be marketed to and the more it can be successfully sold for.
• Here, the calculus of risk and benefits in play balances costs for preparing an acquisition to be profitably marketable and to some likely specific selling price range, against returns actually receivable after making that investment. And the goal is to develop a divestiture offering so as to realize the greatest possible profitable return on investment from it, and under circumstances where that greatest return on investment or at least a return close to it is most likely to be achieved.
• This can best be done by developing an acquisition to show significant value and even defining and distinguishing value for any business that acquires if from the value added model business. That is where competitive interest can be developed when divesting this repackaged and perhaps reorganized business asset, and that is where the greatest return on investment can be achieved.
• The chop shop business is quick to take out up-front service and related fees from any liquid assets available in an acquisition they take on. They in effect gut the business of its immediately available liquidity and then walk after extracting any other removable value. The value added model business seeks to increase value in what they acquire then sell off, creating new value for everyone involved – as that makes their transaction processes sustainable and supports long term gains.

It is easier to find acquisitions and divestitures businesses that run closer to the chop shop model as most businesses in general think and act short-term. Whatever their basic business models, more should think, plan and act with more of a long-term awareness.

I am going to finish this series here with this posting. Meanwhile, you can find this and related postings at Business Strategy and Operations and at its continuation page: Business Strategy and Operations – 2. I have also included this series installment in Startups and Early Stage Businesses.

I began a discussion of how big data serves to redefine and expand the types of hypotheses that can be tested from empirical population data in Part 8, where I offered a societally positive working example. My goal for this series installment is to continue that discussion, here focusing on the types of negative examples that can and do provoke pushback against big data as a developing capability.

• At the end of Part 8 I stated that I would turn here in this posting to consider the ways that “Big Brother” authoritarian states are coming to use big data to “identify and crush political dissent and open public discussion” and I will at least briefly look into that here.
• But more than that, I will at least begin to look into how a legion of “Little Brothers” such as major corporations can and at times do misuse big data capabilities too, and certainly when their policies and practices for collecting, organizing, using and commoditizing individually identifying and tagged information puts them at odds with the needs and wishes of the people they develop all of this big data content from.

But I begin here with Big Brother, and I begin that by making a basic foundational observation:

• Governments that accumulate big data about their own nationals and about foreigners who interact with them, with a specific goal of tracking them to control them – governments that play a true Big Brother role, do this as a perceived survival requirement, and not out of intentionally malicious or evil intent. “Malicious” and “evil” are traits that might be attributed to them, but they are not ones that they would embrace or accept as accurately applying to them. They do this out of perceived overriding need.

And with that in mind, I turn to consider the People’s Republic of China as a first working example.

• China is widely known, at least in the West for its Great Firewall – its Golden Shield Project as it is more officially called there. But this should only be seen as one half of a larger and more comprehensive system, as simply tracking the online conversation and blocking or allowing online access can only be seen as half of a solution to controlling and managing their population so as to stifle the possibility of dissent.
• The other half of this comes from knowing who is doing what online and off and in being able to predict who might do what, and with tracking online activity attempted and pursued only constituting a small part of that. This other half is where China’s one allowed Party and its government seek to in effect predictively know their entire population and on both a fine-meshed population demographic basis, and on an individual basis.
• This approach to population management at a demographic and individual level goes back much farther than do computer systems or computerized databases, of course but the advent of those systems have made it possible to know and to predict with a level of detail and at both levels, never previously even conceivable let alone possible.
• Publically and openly, big data systems development are still in a relatively early stage in China with the bulk of this activity appearing to be taking place in their internet industry, with for example, companies such as Taobao, Tecent Holdings and Baidu developing big data applications on open source software frameworks. Financial sector institutions and others are also beginning to actively, publically enter this arena in China too now.
• And of course, China’s big data objectives go far beyond simply accumulating data about individuals and population groups. They are also collecting data about and from businesses and organizations, private sector and public and of all sorts too. And some of this also has a more public face as well.
• Here, it is crucially important to remember that the boundary between China’s true private sector with its privately owned businesses on one hand, and its government and government owned enterprises on the other is porous and hazy at best, and not just from the way that its People’s Liberation Army controls and even directly owns a larger share of China’s overall business and industrial sectors than any other participant. So in a fundamental sense, China’s private sector big data initiatives are governmental big data initiatives too. And that government can and does collect together as much as it can from all of these data accumulators and processors and more for its own use too.
• China’s government is still, by all appearances, at an early state in developing a Big Brother big data capability but that is clearly one of their highest priority information technology and knowledge management systems goals. I expect to see more and more of that news story to come out as these capabilities continue to be developed and put in place.

And what China is doing, others are at least attempting to do too, and that in at least embryonic stages of development includes initiatives arising in countries such as Iran and North Korea too.

• Whenever you find a country is developing or seeking to develop its own counterpart to China’s Golden Shield Project, you can be sure it is also at least planning and prioritizing for building a matching computer systems-based big data population oversight and control capability too.

But with that said, I would argue that the “Little Brothers” of corporate big data accumulation and use, as noted above at the top of this posting are going to at least collectively be both more pervasive and more impactful than any of their perhaps more visible Big Brother counterparts. And while Big Brother does this for survival, Little Brother does this for profit. I am going to look into the issues of Little Brother in my next series installment, there focusing on concerns that have continuously seemed to have arisen regarding Facebook and its development and use of big data. Meanwhile, you can find this and related postings at Ubiquitous Computing and Communications – everywhere all the time and its continuation page.

Even when we are thinking and planning long-term, we live in our immediate here and now. That holds for our work lives and our career paths as much as it does for anything else in our lives. But if we are going to find and pursue our own best possible career path and take the steps that would make it our reality we still have to think and plan long-term too. So career planning involves juggling two very different types of timeframe. And each has its own purposes and contexts where it offers value and each: long-term and short-term carries its own assumptions and limitations too. Either can lead us off-track if we pursue them in the wrong contexts.

My goal here in this posting is to explore timeframe issues and challenges, and I would begin with the immediate here, and now and short-term timeframe.

• When we are working at a job we need to think and act short-term in addressing our immediate here and now work responsibilities and the goals and priorities we face, and that we will be performance reviewed on.
• When we are actively looking for a new job, and whether or not we are already working, we take a fairly specifically short timeframe approach there too, when mapping out and carrying through upon job search campaigns (for a discussion of that see for example the series Finding Your Best Practices Plan B When Your Job Search isn’t Working, at my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development, as postings 56-72.) The goal in all of this is to keep moving forward and with a search momentum that can help us to succeed in securing that next-step job.

But at the same time, we need to think long-term when visualizing and planning for a career path.

• When we are out of work and looking with a compelling need to find that next job now, long term considerations can easily be set aside, no matter how important they are.
• And it can be easy to slip into a pattern of never really looking all that much beyond the short-term here and now – in which case our career path and our work life are simply what happens as we are busy doing something else, and actually a long succession of immediate here-and-now something elses.

The day to day pressures and realities that we face tend to favor our over-reliance on short-term planning more than long, but problems can arise if we try only planning and thinking long-term too. I have probably seen more of this in the context of startup planning than career planning, but either way the result is building with gaps and with prioritization failures.

• Short term planning can help us define our priorities as we have to address them.
• Long term planning shows us where all of that should be taking us.

Keeping track of what timeframe and what type of timeframe assumptions we are pursuing is key to making both our jobs and our careers work for us.

I am going to turn in my next series installment to consider the issues and challenges of long-term unemployment. Meanwhile, you can find this and related postings and series at my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development – 2 and at my first Guide directory page on Job Search and Career Development.

Up to here, I have been discussing the development of the first automobiles, and how Henry Ford reinvented the car for the general public, and certainly for its emerging middle class. And in Part 3 I began a discussion of how the public began to demand variety and choice in the cars they bought, and for both practical reasons and for variety that would reflect their individuality. I also at least noted how economy of scale made assembly lines more cost-effective for production of product variety that would support consumer choice.

I refer here, back to Part 1 and Part 2 of this series where I wrote of the importance of standardization in making assembly lines work at all, and how end product variety serves as a stressor to assembly line cost-effectiveness per se.

So in a fundamental sense, I left Part 3 with a contradiction in needs and a fundamental challenge to the assembly line production system per se.

• Yes, it is true that a company such as Ford’s could maintain much of the efficiency of single process and single product-type work flow in its assembly lines by scheduling single type runs for producing different specific product builds.
• And with production scale they could essentially recapture all of the potential of a single process and work flow system by running separate and parallel production lines, one for example producing a coupe model car and another a Model TT truck design.
• And for real efficiency, every part and process going into assembling one of these vehicles that could be, would be standardized and fit equally well into any other Ford vehicle produced – and across vehicle lines and from year to year too.
• But the middle class and their expanding consumer base that came to want and need cars and trucks wanted more and more variety, and new models and designs.
• And the increasing competition of other businesses that also built for this growing and demanding market offered more and more variety and choice too.
• Annual new model releases became a basic fact of life for the mass production automotive industry and the pressures became intense to offer wider and wider variety in any given year too. And something had to give – either the basic price point that a car would have to go for would have to go up, or the profit margin per vehicle assembled and sold would have to go down, or consumer demand for variety would have to be thwarted.
• But competitive pressures made it difficult to simply increase the price of a car or truck, and it made it difficult to simply ignore consumer demands too. This, among other things meant a rethinking of the assembly line per se and its cost centers and how it could become more streamlined and effective.

And with this, I cut away from the early days of the mass produced automobile to much closer to today.

• Employee salaries and benefits are expensive, and I have to add that pension systems can with time become even more so as the major auto manufacturers in the United States all found out the hard way.
• Skilled employees and the human eye and touch are needed and will remain so for a significant time to come, but automation of more and more rote production processes, from spot welding to painting and more, have transformed the assembly line completely – and some assembly line systems are already fully automated except for quality control and managerial oversight.
• But for purposes of this discussion, I would focus on a none-of-the-above for rethinking the assembly line: rethinking what product variety and even personalization mean.
• And in that regard I note that the one, and in many respect only place where variety of product really has to show a distinctive difference is where you see it.

Let’s say, to take that out of the abstract that you are building cars with three different types of seating for the driver and front passenger: a standard model bench seat and two different bucket seat styles, and with each available in three cover materials, and each of them in five colors that would be coordinated with paint color selected. Just considering seating, this means 45 different combinations and 45 different model differences that would have to be supported in an assembly line system. But let’s also say that everything that goes into those seats and both for design and materials, that can be standardized across all of them are standardized.

• So they all connect to the chassis of the car at the same basic assembly points, and with the exact same bolts and brackets too. And the seat padding is the same for materials used – just the seat covers differ.
• So you set up your assembly lines to be supplied for parts and materials using lean just in time strategies and operational approaches for managing what you need to have in inventory, and for getting that where it is needed when it is.
• And you automate as noted above wherever possible.
• And you leverage this with smart information technology for tracking and preparing for demand for each and every product variation that you would produce, and as close to real time as possible so you can produce and ship as quickly as possible, and with the right balance of product output produced, and shipped to the right dealerships at the right time.

Now expand out the range of options that can be modified and even customized across the entire vehicle and allow for the customer to buy any of a huge range of options and choices, depending on how much they would be willing to pay to get that extra special feature or build. And this brings me to the Scion: a Toyota Motor Corporation brand manufactured primarily for their North American market, which for purposes of this posting and series, I would hold up as being as much a benchmark at that first Model T.

• The basic idea behind the Scion is not that you buy one of a select set of basic, preconfigured models with for example one paint color going with one seat cover color – it is that you be able to buy a car that you can see as personalized to you, as the range of options and combinations of them available to choose from, expands past the “standard options” range to a personalization range for the variety that can be selected from.
• So going back to the first true assembly lines and the first mass produced Model T’s and with this in mind as an evolutionary descendant of that, with the modern assembly line as exemplified by the Scion, assembly line meets what amounts to artisanal for variety and even individualization of products possible – but with assembly line efficiencies and costs.
• And I see the Scion and its production in this as just a first step in what is going to become much more the basic and standard assembly line and mass production approach – mass production of the individualized and personalized, and for what I expect to be a progressively wider range of products and product types.

I am going to turn in my next series installment to consider 3-dimentional printers and single copy-friendly printing kiosks for on-demand book publication while you wait. Meanwhile, you can find this and related postings at Business Strategy and Operations and its Part 2 continuation page.

I wrote Part 1 of this series with two goals in mind: to set up a basic foundation for a more detailed discussion to follow, and to raise some basic and still open questions that have to be addressed, and that do not have simple, standard, algorithmically applicable answers. I began addressing them with Part 2, where I wrote about group marketing demographics in a globally reaching online context. And I continue that here in this posting where I address some explicitly identified open questions, beginning here with this:

• When is pursuit of a true blue ocean strategy and business model realistic and how might a new business’ chances be improved for succeeding there in an online context?

There is a reason why I started this overall discussion of open issues in Part 2 with a discussion on defining and understanding group demographics and using that insight in marketing more effectively in a geographically and culturally open online context. Any valid answer to the above question on blue ocean strategies has to be at least partly grounded in how you address that set of issues. So I begin addressing this question of blue ocean strategy and opportunity in terms of marketing demographics and from the fundamentals about both: blue ocean strategies and businesses and the development and offering of the disruptively novel, and the demographic groups that you would have to reach to make that work.

• When you think and plan and develop a business with a blue ocean strategy and performance goal, you do so with an objective of offering something to the overall marketplace that is disruptively new and that breaks away from what is already out there and also from consumer expectations as to what is out there for them to choose from. That is what blue ocean means – if you pursue this goal of moving past and away from any current competition, that calls for coming up with and successfully offering something that no one else provides or can provide, at least now and through the near-term future and that no one has provided before. (As a basic reference on blue ocean strategies and businesses see:
Kim, WC and Mauborgne, R. (2005) Blue Ocean Strategy: how to create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant. Harvard Business School Press.)
• And this means you are going to be building into uncertainty. That includes uncertainty as to what precise marketing demographic to market to and uncertainty as to how best to present and represent your new product or service even where you do have a clear idea as to who to market to. And I add the people you would want to reach also start out unaware of the existence of what you would offer them or the possible value to themselves from what you would offer them.

I have written a number of times in this blog about the issues of that last bullet point and about adaptor curves and finding and bringing in involvement and interest among pioneer and early adaptors. I have also written about the role of social networking and viral marketing there, so my goal in this posting is not to simply recapitulate what I have already written on these issues. The question that I would address here is actually a core risk management issue.

If you offer a completely novel and disruptively new product or service to the marketplace, you might or might not succeed in bringing it to market and generating revenue flow and profit from it.

• A novel product for example, might or might not cost-effectively scale up for production and with sufficient quality control for you to want to ship your new products out the door.
• Assume you can build your new offering at a commercially viable scale and cost-effectively and with good, solid, consistent quality control. You might or might not actually know what your best target market is, and who would, by demographic characteristics, be your best marketing audience and most reliable customers. Experience shows that truly novel offerings tend to attract unexpected primary buyers and markets.
• Assume you do have a clear idea as to who you should market this offering to. You would have to be able to effectively reach these prospective buyers with a marketing message and a sales opportunity, but simply offering a new idea or product on the internet in general, and even with carefully selected and targeted pay per click and similar marketing might or might not cost-effectively work.
• The issue that I write of here can all be reduced to burn rate challenges, where you need to develop a business out of a new offering and with all of the expenses that involves before you run out of the funds you have available to commit to this – before you run out of liquidity for this venture (see my series: Understanding and Navigating Burn Rate at Startups and Early Stage Businesses, postings 67-78.)
• So the question that I noted towards the top of this posting is about what else you can and should do that might not offer as much prospect as a successful blue ocean venture, but that is fairly certain to bring in a steady stream of revenue that can among other things help bankroll that blue ocean attempt.

And this brings me to what can perhaps be seen as a fundamental paradox:

• Established businesses can approach blue ocean novelty opportunities from a position of having significant cash reserves, and having successful if more standard business lines that can serve as sources of new venture support. But an established business might not be as nimble in what it could consider doing, in taking a blue ocean strategy risk. And their business-as-usual systems might thwart the innovative exploration of new possibilities that would make their trying to develop a blue ocean venture possible. Established businesses can become set in their ways and anything but agile in having an ability to conceive or pursue new.
• Startups might start out with less organization and strategic rigidity and with more openness to the possibility of developing and offering something dramatically new, but they generally lack the cash reserves and the supporting, stable business lines that an established business could tap into in support of innovative advancement.

I am going to continue this discussion in a next series installment where I will address this paradox where:

• The businesses most able to support innovation financially, can be the least able to do so strategically and organizationally, and those most able to do so strategically and organizationally can be least able to do so from a firmly supportive financial base.

And the goal of any such discussion is to explore and present approaches for combining sources of necessary strength so “able” and “willing” can come together in support of innovative excellence.

Meanwhile, you can find this and other related postings at Startups and Early Stage Businesses. You can also find related material at Business Strategy and Operations and at its continuation page: Business Strategy and Operations – 2.

In a very real sense this is also a posting where I find myself writing out of order from what I have been intending, as circumstances intervene and provoke a rethinking of that. I had been planning to write to this blog about the internet of things for several months now, and I am still planning on doing so. But I see reason to start addressing that more general topic area here, and before building a more organized framework of discussion on it, with at least a brief discussion of its information security implications coming first.

In anticipation of that fuller discussion, I would divide the internet of things paradigm into two distinct if connectible approaches:

• The Internet 1.0 of Things where more and more items and objects are tagged and in ways that can be connected into the internet and tracked through it.

This is, in its extreme, where every item or object that can be RFID tagged is and if it is not RFID tagged then it is either standard 1-dimensionally, or 2-dimentionally barcode tagged. Think of this as enabling a universal supply chain capability and this is where the number of nodes on the internet could conceivably expand out from the billions of computers, tablets, handheld and smart phones and the like of today to include trillions and more connected points – with all of those tagged items passively interacting as they are tracked and remote inventoried for identity and position.

• The Internet 2.0 of Things where more and more nodes and types of node are added that do communicatively, 2-directionally interact with the internet and with other nodes, and more actively and even proactively than would be possible with simple ID tagging.

This is where the dream house of tomorrow comes in where a smart refrigerator would know that you have only one egg left in and that you are about to run out of milk and that you always want at least six eggs and a half quart of milk on hand – so it orders them as per routine programming from Fresh Direct, verifying that you have not already done so first. More real-world and here-and-now this is where you can use a smart phone app and a smart and connected thermostat to raise the temperature of your house back up to the “return home” setting, from a colder “away” setting on a Winter weekday when you realize you will be getting home early. And for purposes of this posting that also includes an increasing number of devices that we do not think of as computers or as being connected to the internet per se at all – but that are. And as an example there, I cite the cable box that so many of us have hooked up to our televisions for accessing and connecting into a programming content provider service such as Time Warner Cable. We tend to think of those boxes as being nodes in dedicated, special use systems – in this case limited to accessing television programming service. But those same set-top boxes can be used in combination with an internet service such as Netflix’s instant viewing service, to access a streaming version of a movie – via the internet and directly to our televisions.

• The primary source of vulnerability that we all face in online and information security, and in computer systems security is always “the unexpected.”

When we as end users do not think of those cable boxes – or other online connected and connectible resources as computers and as being at least potential internet nodes we do not think about securing them from outside access or control. When the cable service provider and others who send these resources out and set them up for their customers do not think about them that way either, each and every single one of them set up and connected in becomes a target of opportunity for black hat hackers.

The internet of things, and particularly in its 2.0 form creates a whole new world of exploitable opportunity for black hat hackers and particularly when the potential for this is left open and unexpected. And this brings me to the specific threat assessment topic of this posting: the emergence of a whole new type of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) that capitalize on the, in this case distributed vulnerabilities of cable boxes and more, as new sources of third party controllable online activity – and with the capabilities for assembling larger botnets than ever before out of them.

We are already beginning to see this new and emerging arena of vulnerability being exploited, and certainly for those set-top cable boxes. The prospect of the fully wired home with refrigerators and thermostats and more able to connect online for remote home-SCADA management indicates that this arena of emerging vulnerability will only become more important. Imagine all of this as being vulnerable to outside botnet control – and that just takes household devices and resources into account that on their own, number far more at least potentially than all desktop, laptop and other computers that are suborned in a traditional DDoS attack – and all servers that would be targeted. Now add in the still wider potential for expanding this out in a more general internet of things, and particularly an internet 2.0 of things that is more generally and globally developed. And of course DDoS attacks only represent one possible form of attack here.

As I noted at the beginning, my original intent was to delve more into what an internet of things is first, and then with that as foundation turn to consider its security issues and how they might be addressed. But the order I am presenting this in here may in fact be the best, as:

• It is vitally important that potential information security and related issues be understood and addressed from the beginning, and from initial design and implementation rather than waiting until systems are in place and infrastructure built – and any response would have to be piecemeal and reactive.

I will add in that context and as a historically all too well known example, it is all too easy to spoof the actual identity of an email or other online content sender. That, in principle at least, could have been addressed and forestalled early on and even at the very beginning ARPANET stage of internet development when the initial core connectivity protocols were first being developed. That was not done, and source authentication was not built into the core networking architecture of the internet and from the beginning, and we are still dealing with the consequences of that lack of foresight as they continue to unfold.

I am going to start a series on the internet of things soon now, in follow-up to this posting. Meanwhile, you can find this and related information security-related postings at Ubiquitous Computing and Communications – everywhere all the time and its continuation page, and at Social Networking and Business.

• I began a discussion of working with individual innovators in Part 2, primarily considering there how innovator employees fit into and contribute to a business in keeping it competitive.
• And I sketched out very briefly how innovation and the work activities of innovators can be disruptive and how this can provoke pushback.
• But even as a business’ leavening of creativity and the push for new disrupts and creates new costs and risks, these employees also create that business’ long-term future too.

I finished that posting with recognition of what can be considered the first of a series of, and even a gauntlet of challenges that the innovative business faces:

• How do you as a business owner or manager identify creative and innovative potential in perspective new hires and in employees already in place?
• And beyond that, how do you best cultivate their potential?

I would argue that there are no set, absolute, universally applicable answers to either of those questions, and that point can be considered the first and perhaps most important part of my responses to both of them. Don’t just think in terms of rote standardization. Even if you do need to standardize your business and its operations, and for most businesses that is a necessity – always leave room for wild card variability and flexibility in identifying and managing innovation potential too, and approach innovation and innovators with an open mind. That said, I offer some general principles that I have found to work.

• Value and look for the novel perspective and for people who can view the issues and circumstances that they work with from unexpected directions.
• Particularly look, in this regard for people who can bring their perspective and understanding into sharable focus so others can see and understand it too. In this, a great idea that cannot be coherently developed and explained is not likely to go anywhere even if its creator is given full and active support. An idea or understanding that can be cogently and intelligibly conveyed, holds potential for being developed into practical and marketable products or services, or into functionally valuable new supporting business practices or approaches.
• Look for a balance of being able to communicate with and work with others, coupled with an ability and a willingness – and even a drive to seek out next possible steps and steps forward in unexpected directions.
• This places some very real demands on managers and at all levels, that they be willing to listen and with a more open mind. Managers who can only do things or allow things “by the book” and with no variations or deviations from standard and tried and true, do not work well in an innovative environment, and creatively innovative employees do not tend to work comfortably or creatively with them either.
• So finding and bringing in and supporting and cultivating creative and innovative employees, calls for a matching effort in finding and bringing in and supporting and cultivating managers who can create a more open and innovative work environment.
• Functionally, this is all driven by how both these hands-on employees and their managers are performance reviewed, and how this insight in turn is used in determining and allocating raises and bonuses, and promotions and other benefits.
• Even if every employee in a business is required to meet certain standard types of performance goals as a core performance objective and even if everyone at a business has a list of goals and stretch goals to work towards that fit into the business’ ongoing here-and-now, creative and innovative contributions that are made outside of that framework should always be rewarded too.
• And when these contributions make a clear and demonstrably monetizable contribution to the business, the reward shared from that with that innovator should be proportionate to the new and novel value created.
• At the same time, it is also important to remember that an innovative proposal does not always work out. They can die early in initial attempted development. They can appear promising at the bench testing and initial develop stage but fail to prove cost-effective or even fully functional at a more formal prototyping stage, or they might not be cost-effectively scalable to full production or implementation.
• Be quick to reward success but be much slower to penalize failure and particularly when the development and testing efforts employed were well thought out and well documented so this effort at least offered a real learning curve opportunity.
• And remember that innovators can be difficult to work with but so can your more rote-process and unimaginative employees too. Support and encourage open mindedness and creativity but require that everyone meet at least minimal and I add significant standards of civility and cooperativeness, and when working with in-house colleagues or with outside participants such as vendors and suppliers, or customers.

I am going to continue this discussion in a next series installment where I will return to the two questions at the top of this installment, but from a different direction. There, as a foretaste of that next installment I note here that some employees might best work as full time innovators and inventors, but that every employee is at least occasionally a valuable source of innovative insight and effort. Both ends of this innovative spectrum should be supported, and all points in-between. Making that work in a fundamentally lean and agile business context is the topic for my next installment.

Meanwhile, you can find this and related postings at HR and Personnel and also at Business Strategy and Operations and at its continuation page: Business Strategy and Operations – 2.

• Part 1: putting change in perspective and
• Part 2: finding and taking a first positive step forward in the face of job loss and career disruption.

I began this series with an initial focus on the disruptive nature of sudden change, and of how loss of a job and for all too many, even a career path can be disruptively stressful. I cited other series and resources that I have been developing in this blog, and particularly in my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development (see its first directory page and its continuation page.) I turn here to consider issues of mental outlook, and more specifically our sense as to whether we shape and control our own fate, or whether we are significantly influenced and even controlled by outside forces: luck, chance or the decisions of others.

• Successful job and career planning and follow-through call for a sense of personal control, and an awareness of the fact that we can shape our destines, and that we in fact have to do so if we are to know, let alone reach our own best personal career goals.
• Someone else, chance and fate, unpredictable circumstances … outside factors and even unpredictable outside factors might arise that open unexpected doors for us. But we have to be prepared to pick up on those opportunities from our own planning and preparation and our own willingness to take a leap into the New if we are to benefit from them.
• Someone else, chance and fate, unpredictable circumstances … outside factors and even unpredictable outside factors might arise that close doors, end jobs and that in extreme cases can and at times do end career paths as viable options. Once again, we have to be prepared and ready to take the initiative from there in finding a new way forward and taking that first step, and the next and next after that.

And here is the really important point to this posting:

• Even people who are basically self-motivated and who see themselves as masters of their own fates and lives and who tend to take ownership of their actions and of their consequences, can slip into a pattern of seeing themselves as being outwardly limited and of being controlled by outward forces when hit by a major life disruption such as a sudden and unexpected job or career path loss.

The effect of that can at times, even amount to what amounts to paralysis. As an extreme consequence of job and career loss, I have seen that happen to people who I have worked with and who I know to be real assets wherever they do work and for any business they work with. They lose their job and through no fault of their own and then, absent the structure and purpose they have experienced in their lives, they spend their time in disarray when they could be more effectively planning out and executing upon targeted job search campaigns. They slip into patterns of activity that keep them moving and busy and that take up their days, but not necessarily in ways that would help them to move forward, or move anywhere in particular. And they slip into self-doubt and depression; they go into mourning for what they have lost as I briefly touched upon in Part 2 and they need help to pull out of that.

I admit here that I have seen this up close from directly working with, and counseling and mentoring colleagues who were out of work and looking, and add that that is what prompted me to start writing my jobs and careers Guide in the first place. I actually wrote a number of my early postings for that from notes and handouts that I had written while trying to help some of those colleagues to get more organized, so they could increase their chances of job search success. And some of those early postings grew out of emails I sent out and from talks I have given to groups. But to shift back more directly to the topic of this posting I add, consistent with all that I have written there:

• Even when outside factors and forces throw a disruptive turn into our work lives and career paths, finding a new direction forward out of that disruption and moving on from it has to come from us. That is the good news; we can do that and move forward in changing and even restarting our careers if needed, ourselves.
• We can also do this with others, including search buddies – colleagues who are also looking and who we can collaborate with in this, each helping to keep the other motivated and taking next job search steps, reviewing and offering third party advice on resume and cover letter effectiveness, etc.
• We can seek out mentors and counselors who can give us focused advice as we run into questions we need experienced and even expert help with.
• And networking is of paramount importance for essentially anyone who seeks to develop and pursue an effective career path and whether they are working or searching or both (see my series: Jumpstarting Your Networking at the top of the Social Networking and Business directory page.)

But the core point here is that this all comes about as a result of our taking the initiative and from the fact that we can in fact shape our own careers and lives – not always in everything but in enough. And at this point I openly admit that this series in in fact a direct continuation of my just completed Career Changes, Career Transitions series (see my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development – 2, postings 285-305), here focusing on resources and perspectives that might be needed in order to find and pursue a Plan B career planning (or a Plan C or D.) This posting and this series in general are about understanding and clearing away the clutter that we can mentally bring to the table with us, when we need to do that more effectively to succeed.

I am going to continue this discussion in my next series installment where I will consider the issues of job and career timeframes, and of knowing and understanding what type of timeframe you are planning and carrying out your career path along – and the consequences that can create. Meanwhile, you can find this and related postings and series at my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development – 2 and at my first Guide directory page on Job Search and Career Development.

I stated at the end of Part 7: divestitures in a troubled selling-business and change management context that I would turn in this posting to consider:

• Businesses that acquire other businesses and functional areas of them,
• To sell off those assets as marketable products, and with that acquisitions and divestitures process and any intermediate steps added in constituting their basic business models.

And in that regard, I noted that such businesses can be at least roughly divided into two camps and as pursuing two very different basic types of business model approach.

• One of these models, starting with the negative side of this overall phenomenon, is what I call the chop shop model (after businesses that “acquire” cars to dismantle them and sell them for parts – see chop shop as this term is used in its more standard automotive context for perspective.)
• The other basic model focuses on creating overall systematic value, and generally that means creating unique new sources of value for the acquiring companies they sell to as a means of creating value for themselves. This, I call the value added model.

The former and more negative and even pernicious of these two approaches is, unfortunately, all too often the only approach that comes to public mind for acquisitions and divestitures businesses and I will at least begin this part of the discussion by addressing that and by citing a still current news example, as of this writing, as a case study.

When Willard Mitt Romney ran for President of the United States as the Republican Party candidate in 2012 he did so claiming to be a successful businessman and a job creator from that. One area of his work experience that quickly became a very active topic of debate and I add point of contention was his leadership of a private equity spin-off of Bain & Company (where he worked for an earlier part of his private sector career) called Bain Capital. The point of controversy that developed out of Romney’s role at Bain Capital and that I add followed him through his years there included how Bain acquired controlling interest in, managed and sold off other businesses. And in some very significant cases that meant acquiring solidly performing businesses with good cash reserves seemingly just to gut them with massive fees while selling off their key assets until there was little of real value left – except the red ink value of debt. Charges and accusations were made that like the chop shop of the business model name, Romney and this company that he led acquired to break and take – and that for too many of its business acquisitions the goal was simply to bring large returns on investment into Bain Capital’s coffers, even as those acquisitions themselves died off as viable businesses and their employees lost their jobs as a result.

My goal here is not to take a position on whether or not Bain Capital in general or Mitt Romney in particular made their fortunes out of breaking up businesses for scrap, or if this was true, how much Bain Capital built its business around that approach during Romney’s watch. I cite this story and briefly note this political conflict and debate here to raise the specter of a very real phenomenon and how it sits in the public mind.

To put this business model in a fuller perspective, consider a business that is failing and that cannot be recovered through change management – and a discouragingly high percentage of businesses that enter change management processes still do fail anyway. The chop shop model as I call it could under those circumstances also be viewed as a liquidation model where whatever value that can be recovered in a business failure is.

• The problem that arises here is when this same approach is applied to sound businesses, and more specifically to businesses that are undervalued but that are basically sound and that could become better positioned in their markets again and more highly valued there too.

And this brings me to the driver that makes the chop shop model work, when it is actually pursued as such:

• Businesses that are targets of opportunity for chop shop model acquisitions and divestitures firms are essentially always undervalued. Their intrinsic overall value as determined by reasonable and prudent measures of resources held, debts held and on what terms, and ongoing business performance exceed and even greatly exceed presumed values assigned to them through their publically traded stock prices and related measures – the price they could be acquired for, at least as a matter of capturing controlling interest.
• Think leveraged buyouts and hostile takeovers here as mechanisms deployed to make that work.

Concerns that Mitt Romney was this type of businessman and that he pursued that type of business model did as much as anything to unravel his presidential bid – and whether or not this view of him is valid. And the political dialog revolving around Bain Capital and his role there over his 17 year tenure solidified the image of acquisitions and divestitures as a business model as being tantamount to “corporate raider.” But that should only be seen as one part to a larger and more complex story.

With that as complicating background, I come to consider the second basic approach to the acquisitions and divestitures business model: the value added model – which is all too often lost as a possibility under the press coverage and public opinion that chop shop model businesses and their threat create. I am going to more fully discuss the value creating model in my next installment in this series. Meanwhile, you can find this and related postings at Business Strategy and Operations and at its continuation page: Business Strategy and Operations – 2. I have also included this series installment in Startups and Early Stage Businesses.