I was sad to read in the New York Times that Peter Drucker had passed away. I've had the good fortune to meet and work with many wonderful people in my career, but I put the time I spent with Peter Drucker as some of the most cherished.

I was hired in 1996 to help Peter Drucker's Foundation develop and produce an e-learning program on non-profit leadership. This entailed spending time with Peter at his home in California where we mapped out the design of the program and produced a video with Peter's thoughts on leadership based on leaders with whom he has worked.

I have read a number of remembrances about Peter Drucker and they all recognize his giant intellect and his immense contribution to our understanding of business and economics. But what they do not capture is how much fun he was. He had a wonderful sense of humor and was a great raconteur. Given all the interesting people he had worked with in his life, he was full of wonderful stories. His home was modest but lovely, filled with books and art from his collection of Japanese art. Peter was amazing. He would take on a three-year intellectual project–something serious that he could pursue for an extended period of time. He was in the midst of reading (re-reading) all of the great 19th novels. So we talked about Balzac and Trollope and Turgenev.

Peter Drucker continues to be an influence in my life and work. In a paper I delivered last year in Taiwan, I referenced Drucker's work in his last book, “Management Challenges for the 21st century:”

Peter Drucker, in his book, Management Challenges for the 21st Century, identifies knowledge worker productivity as the

“biggest of the 21st century management challenges.” His view of the consequences of ignoring the primacy knowledge is Draconian:

In the developed countries it is their first survival requirement. In no other way can the developed countries hope to maintain themselves, let alone to maintain their leadership and standard of living…. The only possible advantage developed countries can hope to have is in the supply of people prepared, educated, and trained for knowledge work…. Fifty years from now—if not much sooner—the leadership in the world economy will have moved to the countries and to the industries that have most systematically and most successfully raised knowledge-worker productivity.

He goes on to say that knowledge workers will have to manage themselves:

“They will have to place themselves where they can make the greatest contribution; they will have to learn to develop themselves…. They will have to learn how and when to change what they do, how they do it and when they do it.”

Drucker believes:

“managing oneself is a REVOLUTION in human affairs. It requires new and unprecedented things from the individual and especially from the knowledge worker. For in effect it demands that each knowledge worker think and behave like a Chief Executive Officer.”

This is a 180-degree shift away from how we were raised to think and work. But it is at the heart of where we are taking the Otter Group now. We believe that we need to learn to manage ourselves and in the process, re-learn how to learn. Everybody is a CEO these days–or at least everybody must think and behave like one. Thus the title of the book I am working on, “Everbody's a CEO, ” is directly attributable to Peter Drucker.

Although I had not seen Peter Drucker in many years, he has made an indelible difference in my life.

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We are proud to have been part of a new restaurant launched by my
friend and former neighbor Steve Johnson (formerly the chef at the Blue
Room in Boston). When Steve was just getting the restaurant going, I
managed to convince him that he should develop his web site in the form
of a weblog. Here is the new site
(designed by our talented designer, Aixa Almonte). The restaurant opens
next Friday, November 18. Steve is a very talented chef and we'll look
forward to spending many evenings at Rendezvous.

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“I thank you for your efforts in teaching this class.  It really opened
my eyes to how common conflict is in our daily lives and how we need to
work to resolve.  The way the class was structured, to keep us
moving and to update our plan every week really helped.”

- W. Barner, CDM Pittsburgh

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ATA Cycle is a full-service bike shop, with a first class selection of
bikes, parts, and accessories from kid's bikes to top-of-the-line racing
frames and everything in between.

Their website, atabike.com,
provided customers with a typical brochure of ATA's services and
products, with a simple banner and contact information at the top of
each page.

There were some attempts to further engage cycling enthusiasts through the Racing-Scene and Cycling News
sections; however it was obvious that these resources were being
underutilized. (The last team listed on the Racing-Scene page was from
2003).

Hussam, ATA's owner, knew that his growing, passionate, and
loyal clientele needed a website where they could find out more than
the basic information about the store, location, hours, etc. but felt
overwhelmed by the amount of work required. So, The Otter Group was
brought in to design strategies for a weblog/website to support this
locally and globally dispersed cycling community.

We began the design process by asking questions:

- What are your goals for the blog?

- What elements of the existing website are needed on the blog?

- Which sections of the blog will be updated daily? weekly? monthly? yearly?

- How do you want customers to find you on the web? what keywords, search terms, etc. do you want associated with your business?

Then, we developed a plan for the new ATA blog, which morphed itself into a hybrid blog/site, ATAbikeblog.com:

blog

website

Features:

- Header banner with contact and location information, logo, site navigation, RSS feed

- Left column with Best of Boston logos, weblog categories, “Recent Articles” from weblog, Login

- Right column with Search tool, customizable RSS radar headlines from selected news feeds

- auto-generated photo gallery: “What's New In Our Store”

- Footer with contact information

- Dynamic center column with display for webpages, article posts, images, etc.

New features:

- Weblog with these features

- Search tool

- Subscribe via RSS feed or email

- RSS news components

- Auto-generated “What's New In Our Store” photo gallery

- easily updated web pages and article posts (no need to install HTML editing software)

Benefits to moving to blog format:

- Create new and edit existing content: web pages, article posts, photo albums

- Content is tagged, indexed, and searchable by all search engines

- Built-in full-text search tool

- Each article post has its own unique URL

- Both article posts and web pages fully support HTML

- Article posts can be easily organized into categories, assign keywords, dis/allow comments, trackbacks

- Readers can subscribe to content via RSS

- Easy to upload and manage folders of photos and files

- Moblogging feature allows administrators the option to post to blog via email

- Easily secure categories or components for internal use

By combining content on the old website with new content on the
blog, ATA's new blog/site now functions in both capacities without
sacrificing the “look and feel” of a website. Content is organized
simply and is now easily updated and edited using Pingware's
best-in-class web-based software. Both blog and website are managed in
one place.

Thinking about a blog for your business? Contact us and we'll work with you to create a web presence that meets your goals.

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For the past five years we have had the honor of working closely with
Andrew Lo, a finance professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management.
This Sunday, Andrew was profiled in the business section of the Sunday New York Times on his new paper on how hedge fund returns can be deceptive in terms of predicting future performance.

We have been working with Andrew on a program for Merrill Lynch where
high performing employees learn Andrew's theories and ideas and then
work in teams to adapt what they learn to new product and service ideas
for Merrill.

One of the exciting aspects of this program is that Andrew has not only
brilliant insight into where things are headed in the financial
markets, but he himself runs a hedge fund. He is able to bring a
hands-on perspective to learning that is unusual coming from someone
with an academic background.

We have used digital publishing and collaboration tools to help a
global set of employees at Merrill Lynch work with Andrew and with one
another. The result has been amazingly powerful new ideas that are
being developed within the firm.

The full paper can be found at http://web.mit.edu/alo/www/Papers/systemic2.pdf.
Here's an excerpt from the New York Times article:

Andrew W. Lo, a finance
professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, has been studying hedge fund failures and
risks, and he says that another hedge fund industry shakeout is likely
in the near future. Mr. Lo runs a company, AlphaSimplex, that manages a
$400 million hedge fund - so he is not looking for a reason to say
hedge funds are in trouble. But that is exactly what he's saying,
backing it up with powerful data and a couple of unexpected theories.

Mr. Lo has been working on the economics of hedge funds since the
mid-1990's, but he started thinking seriously about how to measure risk
across the industry in 1999, when he was first approached by backers to
start his own hedge fund; it opened in 2003. He knew that sophisticated
investors would want lots of data about his fund's returns and about
the risk level he would assume, so he started looking carefully at the
return data provided by other funds.

Traditionally, economists have thought that big up-and-down
fluctuations in returns indicated risky investments, so many hedge fund
investors have hoped to see a pattern of smooth and even returns. But
Mr. Lo quickly saw that lots of hedge funds were posting returns that
were just too smooth to be realistic. Digging deeper, he found that
funds with hard-to-appraise, illiquid investments - like real estate or
esoteric interest rate swaps - showed returns that were particularly
even. In those cases, he concluded, managers had no way to measure
their fluctuations, and simply assumed that their value was going up
steadily. The problem, unfortunately, is that those are exactly the
kinds of investments that can be subject to big losses in a crisis. In
1998, investors retreated en masse from such investments.

……

ALREADY, his work has prompted hedge fund managers and investors to pay
more attention to the hidden risks of funds that seem to be performing
quite well. Clifford S. Asness, managing principal at AQR Capital
Management, a large and successful hedge fund based in Greenwich,
Conn., says Mr. Lo's work forces fund managers in general to confront
the risks: “He demonstrates simple models that generally show a winning
payoff but occasionally really die.”

So what should be done? Mr. Lo sees no way to eliminate the cyclical
nature of hedge fund investing, but he says we can learn from the
mistakes of funds that fail. He advocates the creation of a financial
equivalent of the teams at the National Transportation Safety Board
that swoop in to investigate airplane crashes.

The nightmare script for Mr. Lo would be a series of collapses of
highly leveraged hedge funds that bring down the major banks or
brokerage firms that lend to them. That's a possibility that the entire
hedge fund industry - secretive and fractious though it is - has a huge
interest in avoiding.

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Boston Realty Tours: The Internet's 1st Real Estate Vlog

We’ve been working with our client, Ari Ben Harav to build a state-of-the-art real estate weblog. Here is his description.

The Internet’s 1st Real Estate Vlog

A million thanks to Glen Mohr and The Otter Group for their help and direction on setting up this Web Vlog.

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