A few years ago my employer was heavily focusing on efficacy. I was struggling with that term back then, and at the same time had some bad feeling about this in my gut. But I never was ready to dig deeper for understanding why I was feeling bad about it. Until today, triggered by a piece in Fortune (“The Best Advice I ever Got” – Fortune, Vol. 160, July 2009). I thinks it’s a semantic flaw. Decades ago I was teached economic principles: Minimize resource consumption for achieving a given target, or achieve maximum results by utilizing the resources you’re given. Try to combine the two, minimizing resources and maximizing output at the same time for positioning yourself as a professional stupid – highly paid, admittedly.

Efficacy doesn’t take resource consumption into account. Increasing the efficacy of marketing campaigns is a good thing to do. But at the same time, somebody should monitor the cost related to such action. And that’s why I prefer “effectiveness” over “efficacy”. Yes, you should improve the efficacy of your action, but within the constraint that the resources you may invest are limited. Get the best bang for the buck.

Here’s the quote from Scott Sorbas, starting with the advice he had received early in his career, and to which I’m wholeheartedly subscribing to:

“’My advice to you is that you always serve the  best interest of your client. An industry will change in response to you, but it won’t do it willingly.’ ... If you’re really effective at what you do, 95% of the things said about you will be negative. Keep your head on straight, don’t get emotional, take the heat, and just make sure your clients are smiling.”

If you want to lead, you’ll need to accept this. Trust me: it’s true, and it’s going to be tough. Leadership is not a team sport.

"It's good to continue doing what you're doing. Buth there will be a time when you need to do what you want to do." (Dennis Quaid in 'The Rookie')

Happy 233rd anniversary. This document, not unanimously  approved by only nine of George III colonies, marks a milestone in modern history. The authoring group that supported Thomas Jefferson, mainly John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman, laid the foundation of what we know today as the U.S.A. The formal acceptance of this declaration by the continental congress, on July 4th, 1776, was later confirmed by the representatives of all thirteen colonies, starting with the signature of Massachusetts representative and congress president John Hancock. It redirected the trajectory of modern history.

Also good to see that New York, which originally abstained the declaration, now makes its French gift available to the public again today, thus renewing its endorsement of the declaration.

Earlier this week I had a nice conversation with some friends about the influence of different early American presidents (comparing Washington, Jefferson, Frankling and Lincoln), now I’m looking forward to visit Philadelphia to dig deeper into the archives. And I’m wondering how many millennia it will take Germany to expose – and embrace - its thousands of years of history before 1945.

RIP. Although I’m sure the digital natives don’t care much about the demise of this palaeo IT  service provider. “Compuwhat…”, as one of the commentaries stated.

Oh well, as somebody who has an 1200 bd acoustic coupler in his private museum, I shouldn’t throw any stones in the glass house: I didn’t even know that AOL still operates any of this stuff.

Compuserve shuts down - Boing Boing

Today my attention was caught by one of the most emotional obituaries I’ve ever read. Too bad if German is not your mother tongue because it’ll be unlikely that you’ll be able to capture the beauty of this announcement which was published in the ZEIT on June 18th.

Friederike-Maria Grashey died. So who was the fine lady? No idea. You’ll not find any traces of her in the cloud. Not in Bing, not in Google, not in Spezify, not in Yasni, not in Answers. She simply doesn’t exist in the virtual world.

And yet, she obviously not only existed in the real world but also had some impact on German history. I wonder if Tom Cruise ever heard of her while preparing for “Valkyrie”. The absence of information is even more astonishingly given the fact that there are nearly no digital traces to her husband, General Major Grashey, who was a former inspector general of the German Army (Bundeswehr). In the US, with that background, she certainly would have made the evening news.

The way I see it: This is just another example confirming the unreliability of digital information. Deep search? Forget it. Replacing human intellect with crawling agents? A joke. Semantic web? You’re kidding me. Trusting IT more than people was the root cause for the US’ second war with Iraq – they didn’t have any field agents, and technical intelligence was the only available alternative. That does not make any sense to me.

The good part of this story: Accidentally, when researching the lady, I found one of my older publications - also not visible in the mainstream net - which I had completely forgotten about. A funny coincidence.

To further stress my key point here: If you want reliable information, what exactly are you looking for? How trustworthy are your sources? How are you going to handle the issue of un-surfaced data? In ancient times we paid journalists for doing all this work, answering (most of) these questions. Michael Shermer had a good blog post and video about this issue: The Baloney Detection Kit.

Believing that the Internet is, or could be, a reliable source of information seems to be a stupid assumption in this context.

Here’s another example, published right aside above announcement: On June 19th, the public became aware of the death of Lord Ralf Dahrendorf (at least some people in Europe know who he was). But who was Ingo Dahrendorf? The WDR’s (one of the most important German radio and tv stations) former technical director the had died June 13th. Was he somehow related to Ralf?

I don’t know. Go figure out yourself. And then tell me about your experiences.