Not faster than a bear experts

There's that old joke: two men hiking come across a bear. One man says I'm going to run. The other man tells him he can't run faster than the bear. His reply: I don't have to, I only have to run faster than you.

I got to thinking about the disappearance of deep expertise. I am finding most of the consultants and other self-proclaimed experts in various fields are taking the approach of the bear joke. If they are one step ahead of the client, but only one step, they can tout themselves as experts.

I've seen it in SharePoint development, in data warehousing and BI. You and your staff have a certain level of expertise in these things. But something comes up, and you feel like you need to hire the big guns. The trouble any more is the big guns are hard to find! And so you often end up with someone who is only marginally more knowledgeable than you are. In many ways you end up teaching them.

I suppose a part of this is the fear of specializing. If you spent a decade becoming a deep expert in a narrowly focused area only to see that technology wane and die (Novell, 3 Com wizards), then you are at deep risk of losing your livelihood. And so today - is SalesForce or SAP something you want to gamble your career on? Or do you have a set of general skills - a jack of all trades, master of none?

But now as a hiring manager and CIO, I am on the hunt for the bears themselves, not the people who can outrun me.

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Then: Military to Consumer Now: Consumer to Military

When Sputnik launched, the US was so alarmed that it formed, within the week,  the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). One of ARPA's early successes was to create the Internet. The goal was to have a self-healing network that could survive major portions being taken out by nuclear strike. It didn't start being called the Internet until 1984, but instead and in recognition of who created it, it was called the ARPAnet

The ARPAnet's first 4 connections were at Xerox PARC and 3 Universities. And so the next place the Internet took hold was in Academia. It was at the Swiss particle physics accelerator at CERN that the World-Wide Web was created. I think you could argue that CERN is a bit military in origin.

And then the Web made it into business and then made it into personal use.

The same trajectory is followed by most technology advances (see my post for more on this topic). Take for example the computer itself.

But I think a subtle reversal is taking place. The ubiquity of the web, the cloud, mobile devices and the ease of writing mobile device applications are all leading to a much more "consumer first" delivery. Social networking's first real example might be the old Bitnet broadcasts of what happened at Tienamen Square. Facebook and Twitter took social networking to new heights, and now there is SalesForce Chatter and Yammer and other forays by the business sector. Social Networking is now a way for the military to boost morale. I think it is also a way for them to increase surveillance.

Which will bring things full circle. Warfare will now be cyber-warfare. Attacks will be on economies, which is pretty much nothing new. The U.S. outspent the Soviets in the cold war, and that war was won on an economic basis. Old warfare would be won by who ran out of money to build armaments first. New warfare will be more about directly disrupting the economy.

But maybe the "consumer first" reversal of technology origins will have a calming effect on societies. It is easiest to hate the "unknown other," to treat them as somehow less than human. But now that we are in daily contact with people from all over the world, they are becoming less unknown. Those very first Internet-broadcasted images of the flower in the tank at Tienamen Square may have very well changed the world much, much more than the tank.

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