• Think differently
• Develop new links and networks
• Take action aligned with strengthening local economy

Submit / Suggest Content for the Cafe

The content for the “Practice of Change” cafe will come from real-world “change cases” in which P&B members participated, and we need your suggestion or, better yet, submissions.

The project or effort should have something to do with the local or regional economy. It could have succeeded or failed or done a little of both.

More on submitting a change case (plus, Robert's take) after the jump --->  

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I'm working out a new course that I hope helps improve website development. It's called HiPPO Training, and this is a sneak peak at what it's all about. If you think you are the HiPPO, this may be some fairly 'hard cheese' to swallow, but this course comes from years of experience working in a very difficult space.

What makes web development so difficult? Simple: it makes no sense to anyone but people on the inside. It's a question of experience. Web devs live on the web. HiPPOs don't.

What is a HiPPO?

HiPPO stands for Highest Paid Person's Opinion. The acronym indicates a situation where a single executive's opinion drives the decision-making in a project. The term was coined to describe those situations where the decision goes against the advice of expert subordinates and, potentially, a mountain of data. HiPPOs are mostly associated with website development projects where an uninformed or under-informed opinion supports poor design choices or forces user-frustrating changes in an otherwise perfectly good website.

How do HiPPOs affect website development projects?

There are two issues. First, the presence of a HiPPO rules out the preferred web development method of open collaboration among more-or-less equal partners. If one person gets to say what happens, it means that other, potentially more experienced workers are not empowered to do their best work. It's true that in most business situations, the most senior worker holds the ultimate veto power. Thus, if that decision-maker makes well-informed decisions, there's no problem and, for our purposes, no HiPPO.

Which leads to the second issue. HiPPOs are, by definition, wrong. An uninformed approach to website development produces sites where business objective are put ahead of user needs. Ironically, this nearly always results in websites that fail to reach business goals.

More about why the web makes no sense at all after the jump -->

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Some of you may not know about my obsession with food. I'm really into cooking because I'm really into eating. And fresh ingredients are the best ingredients. Hence I'm  buyer of, among other local RI foodstuffs, Rhody Fresh dairy products.

It's a smart brand. A good-sounding brand. A brand that makes you say, "Yeah, I want that." But, unless you can back up the brand with a consistent product that fulfills expectations, it works exactly once. 

So I had a minor a-ha moment reaching into the dairy case to get a half gallon of 2% while thinking about an innovation-related project I'm working on.

Rhody Smart - a tagline for the RI knowledge / innovation community. It's got a nice ring, if I do say so myself. But it comes with some major problems that would have to be addressed to make it "real".

First of these is getting people from the rest of the country not to laugh when you say it.

Disappointingly bland explanation of what that means and my Top 5 Rhody Smart game-changers after the jump -->

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Our longtime friend John Abrams has gotten off the island of Martha's Vineyard to talk to a full house at Providence & Beyond, our ongoing inquiry into Providence and the region. (For the record, we currently define the greater Providence region as extending from Provincetown, MA to Northampton or so.)

John is a founder of the South Mountain Company , a design/build firm on Martha's Vineyard that, as far as we knew this morning, didn't take any work off the island. He also wrote the book The Company We Keep about Somoco's employee-owned, cooperative structure.

Robert Leaver of New Commons asks the questions.

An old question raised a long time ago that shaped the way a career unfolded: How do you serve the world?

What I've actually done is to make a work environment that brings more meaning, esprit d'corp and excitement to people's lives.

More after the jump --->

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