I hate breaks in anything I do, blogging, work, sports, love, etc., because it’s always harder to return back into the zone. Similarly, I already knew subconsciously that it would be hard to return back to blogging after the proposed hiatus. Routines are good and when they are moved aside, they get replaced by something else.

The human body is a machine and everything, from hours in the day, to food and exercise, to making money, to relationships, are all pieces in the machine of life. There’s only so many hours in the day is a well-familiar phrase to most of us and reflects the difficulty in balancing different activities and responsibilities, with some just falling off the map.

I am not saying that I plan to stop blogging, but I do think that we all need to make choices in our lives which will affect other, previous ones, like domino blocks.

Dynamics…

I just bookmarked a blog post on delicious on forming sales teams in a startup. It’s a good one and you should all read it. As I tagged and bookmarked however, I immediately thought, hey, I’m pretty sure no one on my company will read it. Why? Maybe because we already figured it out… Maybe because we figure stuff out as we are doing it… Your choice.

Blogging or any kind of writing for public purposes brings several complications to business people:

• it is public knowledge, meaning that the competitive advantages are slim: I don’t think this is a major factor, as most innovations are combinations of different ingredients that may or may not be public knowledge. Great artists steal, as they say.
• Writing is processed explicit knowledge from something that was previously implicit and needs to be made implicit again by the reader for it to be useful in a practical context: I’ve written about the knowledge-generating company and the knowledge spiral twice before. Another phrase, “You can’t help yourself, because your *self* sucks!” also comes to mind.

It’s the latter that represents the greatest challenge to authors and consumers of their work. I’ve also previously written about the benefit of formal education, which, I think, tries to recreate the knowledge spiral, turning explicit knowledge into the implicit kind, to be used by students in their work later on.

The dynamics of business is that there are expenses—YOU, the team, the office, etc.—which need to be recuperated by your work—the work you do for customers, after which they pay you. It leaves very little time for reflection, e.g. through blogging, etc., and for making things explicit, e.g. through blogging, etc.

I’m still a big fan of Michael Gerber’s E-myth revisited, which is really about writing that franchise manual for your business, so you can both understand the processes happening in your company, and expand on those, by more easily passing on knowledge. It’s Taylorism, of course, or Scientific Management, or any of the other management methodologies that followed in the past century.

But these activities require time, time which people inside organisations usually do not have, and hence prefer to outsource to outside consultants, who then need to make their knowledge explicit and again implicit in the minds and methods of their clients’ organisation.

It’s a real nightmare for people (like me) who think to much and always aim for something higher. And who want to blog. And who want to do good business…

Thoughts?
Vincent

(Picture courtesy of Fisica & Psychica)

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