OK, I’ve been on a lot of vacation over the last two months. Coupled with a lot of administrative work. Now it’s time to get back to work and do some posting. The interest in Extension 2.0 and Web 2.0 work has continued to increase, so more info to post on these topics!
Last week’s Business Week covered Best Buy’s interesting venture about moving beyond flex time. The complete article is here. A 13 minute podcast interview of the author can be found here. Best Buy now allows about 60% of their corporate staff at their Minnesota Corporate Campus to schedule work as they see fit. Called ROWE (results-only work environment), the system focuses on specific metrics to determine each employee’s contribution. Time at the office is not considered as part of the evaluation. Whether the employee chooses to work at home, on the road, or at the corporate campus is up to the employee. A quote from the article: “This is like TiVo for your work.” The article does a decent job of trying to describe the difference between basic flex time and Best Buy’s approach. And why flex time is harder to implement (hint: think culture).
How well would this work in Extension settings? Our OSU Extension Center at Lima is currently allowing specialists to work from virtual settings. This could be their home, car, other offices or Starbucks. So far it seems to be working fairly well. We are completing an internal study of the process and hope to share it later in 2007. My guess is that many Extension offices already use some form of flex time, but could also use virtual settings to increase productivity and employee satisfaction.
It will be useful to look at some of the tech companies as they develop systems to address a “post-geographic” office. The tech companies seem to be on the cutting edge of developing these systems to meet employee needs and reduce turnover. Best Buy hopes to use a similar model with its retail stores next year. That will be an interesting experiment to watch.
I’ve had a very hectic past two months and have slumped a bit on the blogging front. To me it seems like only two weeks since my last post, but it’s been over two months. Oh well, more stuff to come soon!
While some of you have already heard the bad news, I understand that not everyone knows that the Extension family lost a member and leader in the ComAir crash in Cincinnati on August 27. Dr. Larry Turner, Associate Dean for Extension and Director of the Cooperative Extension Service at the University of Kentucky was among the passengers that did not survive. I did not know Dr. Turner, but several of the Ag Educators in Ohio had worked with him during this summer’s National Ag Agents’ Meeting in Cincinnati. All spoke highly of him.
More information is available at this UK Extension site and also in this
posting from eXtension.
Wow! I took what I thought would be a small break and have not made a post since late June. Time to get back in the swing of things and post a little more regularly. I’ll try to get more posts up over the next few days.
Two conferences of interest to Extension professionals are coming up this fall. The first is the 2006 Outreach Conference in Columbus, Ohio on October 8-10. See the conference site for more information. This is definitely a broader university outreach conference, but will still have information for Extension professionals.
The second is definitely an Extension conference. The National ESP conference is in Annapolis, Maryland from November 14-17, 2006. Here is the conference site.
I have attended and enjoyed both conferences in the past. I’ll be attending both this year and making presentations on using technology for outreach and to connect distributed workforces.
I accidentally stumbled across this collection of proverbs on entrepreneurship. I found it to contain good advice for Extension professionals that are trying to serve in entrepreneurial roles in their organizations. My experience is that Extension systems (like most large organizations) talk a lot about entrepreneurship but do little to acknowledge or encourage true entrepreneurs. Part of this comes from the human nature of wanting change, but only in others. Part likely also comes from institutional resistance. A quick scan through the list yields several interesting tidbits. For example:
I originally discovered this from a link on Innovation Creators that focused on this piece of wisdom: “Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.” Good advice for change agents.
I’m spending the next nine days splitting my time between conferences in Florida and hope to do a little blogging about each. First is the National Extension Technology Conference in Gainsville. This is an annual event and not a specific organization. I’m simply a participant at the conference (I’m subbing for a collegue at an eXtension meeting), but I’m really excited. I think Extension is on the cusp of either adopting and developing cutting edge technologies to help us reach clientele and organize ourselves or falling behind and becoming irrelevant. NETC has both technical and application tracks – the first more for techies, the other more for those interested in applying the technology as a tool.
The second meeting is the annual conference of the Association of International Agriculture and Extension Educators in Clearwater. I’m only hanging around for one day, but I’m giving a carousel presentation co-authored with Daney Jackson on Future Trends in Extension (see the link here for the title information). This conference draws an interesting cross section of Educators from around the world.
Two good meetings for Extension professionals to attend. See the respective websites for information about future meetings for each conference.
eXtension has set up a blog to keep folks informed of the various eXtension type happenings. You can find it here. Looks pretty neat. The blog also has some links to the various wiki’s that eXtension has set up. Of particular interest is the "main eXtension wiki". I’ve added the blog to my aggregator, and strongly recommend other Extension Professionals to do the same. The wiki does not appear to have the necessary feeds at this time to get it on the aggregator. Lot’s of activity on the various eXtension pages lately - be sure to dip in regularly and see what’s happening.
Be sure to also take a serious look at the call for engagement to create communities of practice.
In case you happened to miss it, Peter Drucker passed away late last week. Here is the NY Times obituary (free registration required). Drucker was one of the first to recognize the switch to a knowledge economy, changes in non-profit management, that we should focus on enhancing our strengths vs. correcting weaknesses, that employees were valuable assets and not costs, and and a host of other firsts. I still have a copy of The Effective Executive on a shelf next to my desk. It was the first book that I found that discussed personal management of knowledge workers. Still a valuable read.
Drucker’s passing is a loss for the world. If you have never read him, take some to do so now. It will be worth the effort.
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