I moderated a panel today at Gather on the topic of “Work”.  We had representatives from different types of work: self-employed, salaried employee, startup, and investor. As moderator, my role wasn’t to share my opinions. Fortunately, on the Internet I’m also blogger, and my role as a blogger is to share my opinions. So: opinion follows.

The whole concept of “work” is fraught. We treated it as “how you make your money”, but that’s a concept that comes with a pile of baggage. If I make money from a lot of things (one panelist had her IT business, her music, and her writing all contributing) then which, all, or none of those are my “work”?  Our language opposes “work” with “play”, but what if I like what I do? If I volunteer, is that work? If my partner earns money and I contribute my labour to upkeep of the family and house, is that “work”? Each of those is a set of dissertations and an argument waiting to happen.

Telecom New Zealand is changing its name to Spark. Most commentators regard it as a backward move, most recently Lance Wiggs who diagnoses marketing capture, distraction from executive and board, and the death of a valuable brand.

I’d like to respectfully disagree.

I might be a contrarian, but I think it’s a good idea. First, let me quickly disregard that idea that Telecom New Zealand is a good brand. It’s a fucking terrible brand for what they want to do with the company. They do NOT want to be a dumb pipe, a commodity provider of connectivity—particularly now they don’t have Chorus. They’ve announced Internet TV and there’ll be more to come, I’m sure. The branding lets them get as far away as possible from the idea that they’re a telco.

I caught up with Jesse Robbins at Foo Camp, and he gave me a great line that I remember as being something like: “I’m going on an adventure. The outcome is uncertain, there will be setbacks along the way, so I’ll surround myself with good travelling companions.”

I’m going on a new adventure. This week saw me join the fast-growing Kiwi education startup, Hapara as something like “Head of Partnerships”. I say “something like”, because when Jan recruited me, he said “we’re growing so fast that each fortnight there’s a fresh challenge we haven’t seen before, and there’s always more work than there are people to do it.” In my first week I’ve arranged for us to go to NZ Pycon, met the head of education at Google for Asia-Pacific, and chewed on the coffee at Point England school (Russell makes it strong).

The NZ Arts Foundation has launched Boosted, a way to crowdfund arts projects. Now, if you’re like me, you’re probably wondering “don’t we already have several ways of doing that? I mean, Kiwi artists have already used Kickstarter and PledgeMe to fund projects.”

Boosted’s key point of difference is that, being operated by a charitable non-profit, your donations are eligible for 33% tax rebate. So everyday punters like us can enjoy the tax advantages of philanthropic donation, the same way that the millionaires do. To get that tax rebate, however, you can’t receive anything for that donation: no tickets, no hip flask, no signed postcard, no posters, no “flown to Austin for lunch at a fancy hotel with me and my artist friends”, and all the other rewards that Kickstarter and Pledgeme and other crowdfunding sites are built around. Your only reward, so far as I can tell from careful study of Boosted site, is the inner glow of donation and a tax rebate of 33% of the donated amount.

Things I learned while I was too busy to write week notes:

1. if you don’t do it, it won’t get done (“delegate” qualifies as “doing”);
2. learning to delegate is as hard as learning to do the task itself was, and you’ve got to learn to delegate NOW;
3. (related) setting it up so it can be done without you is much harder than doing it yourself;
4. it’s great to watch lines tracking up, unless they represent debt or complaints;
5. you’ll get the first sale to a friend because you’re you, but in general repeat business only comes from giving actual value;
6. high-touch enterprise sales needs people inside the organization who see the value and make your case for you at the internal debates when you aren’t in the room;
7. know what you want, know why you want it, and then ask for it – shouldn’t be hard, yet it is;
8. “it is a good thing and should happen” is different from “it will be good for you”;
9. food at events is an expensive hygiene factor;
10. the perpetual feeling of guilt at things you should be doing but aren’t is the psychic manifestation of opportunity cost;
11. value in the eye of the customer is ALL that matters;
12. “marketing” and “market research” is about understanding and changing the dynamics of the marketplace (the identity of and relationships between buyers and sellers), and solves a problem that you only understand when you have something you want to sell but which nobody knows about;
13. ditto “branding” and “compliance”;
14. offline holidays are essential for maintaining mental attitude.

It’s always seemed strange to me that local broadcasters would hold off broadcasting Dr Who, Mad Men, and other high-profile shows. Viewers chatter about it as soon as an episode airs in its country of origin, so regional fans either have the episode ruined by net spoilers or disconnect until the episode airs locally. The situation has improved enormously from the days of six month or multi-year lags, but the experience is still a bit shit.

Pondering the New Zealand fishing industry, I had an insight today. Forgive me if it’s old news to you.

You have three options to make more money:

1. Lower costs.
2. Sell more of the same stuff.
3. Make new types of stuff to sell.

In quota-limited systems such as fishing, you can’t catch more fish because you don’t have the quota to do so. So option 2 is out. All you can do to make more money is lower costs or find something new to sell.

There’s a trend now to question the value of a university education. It used to be that simply possessing a university degree gained you access to a Better Class of Job. That is no longer the case; now you have access to The Same Class of Unemployment Benefit. Even degrees in subjects without immediate business application (classics, art history, etc.) were valued as a sign of studiousness, discipline, etc. at least in so much as they put the possessor into the class of People Who Have A Brain. These days so many people are emerging with degrees that a degree alone isn’t enough to separate you from the herd.

I was honoured to give a talk of career advice to the 2010 Summer of Tech students. I appear to have let a few f-bombs fly, so don’t watch if that sort of thing offends you. (In fact, you should probably stop reading my blog if that sort of thing offends you. For fuck’s sake.)

No transcription, as my notes consisted of a scrawled mindmap. Talk embedded below.

What do you want to do when you grow up? with Nat Torkington from SummerOfTech on Vimeo.

Text of notes for a talk given at the 50th Anniversary Conference of the New Zealand Computer Society in Rotorua, 17 September 2010. I will link to video when it’s posted by the conference organizers.

Hello everyone. Thank you for the kind introduction, and thank you to the New Zealand Computer Society for having me here.

Let’s get nostalgic for a bit. It’s the 50th anniversary, we can afford to be nostalgic a little.