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reply to u/atomicnotes at https://old.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1fa0240/early_1900s_3_x_5_inch_card_index_filing_cabinet/

This is an excellent question. I strongly suspect you won't find a booklet or book from Macey after 1906 that does this, though there may have been something before that.

You'll notice that on page 9, the 1906 Macy Catalog takes what I consider to be a pot shot at their Shaw-Walker competition in the section "Not a kindergarten". Shaw-Walker was selling not just furniture, but a more specific system, as well as a magazine. Since there's something to be learned for current knowledge managers and zettel-casters in the historical experience of these companies and the systems and methods they were selling, I'll quote that section here (substitute references to enterprise and business for yourself):

Not a Kindergarten

Every successful enterprise knows its own requirements best, and develops the best system for its own purpose. We manufacture business machinery. Our appliances and supplies are boiled down to a few parts, and simple forms, and will accommodate any system in any business. The office boy can understand and use them. If we undertook to teach the whole world how to run its business, we would have to saddle the cost on those who buy for what we tried to teach those who do not.

System in business is desirable, but no system can make a business successful, where the management is deficient. So called ‘Systems’ often result in useless expense and disappointment. We retain what experience proves useful and practical; so far as possible, eliminating all complicated and useless features. This explains how we can employ the best workmanship and material, combined with pleasing designs, and sell our goods with profit at lower prices than the inferior articles offered by others.

There may have been some booklets at some point, but I've not run across them for any of the major manufacturers of the time. (I've only loosely searched this area.) Some of the general principles were covered in various articles in System Magazine which was published by Shaw-Walker, a filing cabinet manufacturer, in the early century. System Magazine was sold to McGraw-Hill which renamed it Business Week, but it is now better known as Bloomberg Business Week. In the December 1906 issue of System, W. K. Kellogg, the President of the Toasted Corn Flake Company, is quoted touting the invaluable nature of the Shaw-Walker filing system at a time when his company was using 640 drawers of their system.

To some extent the smaller discrete "system" was really a part of a broader range of information and knowledge of business and competition. This can be seen in the fact that System Magazine still exists, just under an alternate name, along with a much broader area of business schools and business systems. We've just "forgotten" (or take for granted) the art of the smaller systems and processes which seemed new in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Other companies had "systems" they sold or taught, much like Tiago Forte teaches his "Second Brain" method or Nick Milo teaches "Linking Your Thinking". However, most of them were really in the business of selling goods: furniture, filing cabinets, desks, index cards, card dividers, etc. and this was where the real money was to be found at the time.

A similar example in the space is the Memindex System booklet that came with their box and index cards. The broad principles of the system can be described in a few paragraphs so that the average person can read it and modify it to their particular needs or use case. The company never felt the need to write an entire book along the lines of David Allen's Getting Things Done or Ryder Carroll's Bullet Journal Method. Allen and Carroll are selling systems by way of books or classes. Admittedly, Carroll does have custom printed notebooks for using his methods, but I suspect these are a tiny fraction of the overall notebook sales for those who use his method.

Here's evidence of a correspondence course from the Library Bureau some time after 1927, which was when they'd been purchased by Remington Rand: https://www.ebay.com/itm/335534180049 . Library Bureau had an easier time as their system was standardized for libraries, though they did have efforts to cater to business concerns the way Shaw-Walker, The Macey Company, Globe-Wernicke and others certainly did.

I think the best examples in broader book form from that time period are Kaiser's two books which still stand up pretty well today for those creating knowledge management systems, zettelkasten, commonplace books, getting things done/productivity systems, second brains, etc.

Kaiser, J. Card System at the Office. The Card System Series 1. London: Vacher and Sons, 1908. http://archive.org/details/cardsystematoffi00kaisrich.

———. Systematic Indexing. The Card System Series 2. London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., 1911. http://archive.org/details/systematicindexi00kaisuoft.

In 1983, at the dawn of the personal computer age, Apple Inc. in promotional film entitled "Lisa Soul Of A New Machine" touted their new computer, a 16-bit dual disk drive "personal office system", as something that would do away with "the cluttered desk, index cards, file folders, the in-out basket, [and] the calculator." (00:01)

Some of these things moved to the realm of the computer including the messy desk(top) now giving people two messy desks, a real one and a virtual one. The database-like structure of the card index also moved over, but the subjective index and its search power were substituted for a lower level concordance search.

30 years on, for most people, the value of the database idea behind the humble "index card" has long since disappeared and so it seems here as if it's "just" another piece of cluttery paper.

Appreciate the rosy framing of the juxtaposition of "past" and "future" jumping over the idea of the here and now which includes the thing they're selling, the Lisa computer. They're selling the idealized and unclear future even though it's really just today.

Business Ledger

This section looks at index cards for communication to/from clients and appropriate follow up with respect to sales management in a manufacturing firm. It broadly represents some examples of how one would do larger scale project management and follow up with index cards.

Julius Kaiser contemporaneously posits that mass manufacture and maximizing efficiency (greater output for minimum input) are the primary drivers of card index system use in the early 20th century. These also improve both precision and accuracy in handling information which allow for better company or factory operation, which would have been rising concerns for businesses and manufacturing operations at the rise of scientific management during the time period.

Ed Catmull analogizes the idea of pithy business statements and aphorisms as old, heavy suitcases and their handles. It's easy to grab onto the handle and walk of only with it, particularly when the weight and inconvenience of the suitcase and its actual contents are no longer attached. One needs to make sure that their comfortable old suitcase handle is still attached to the case and the valuable, hard-won wisdom of the contents inside.

Curious that he might write this in a business book on creativity which is highly likely to fall trap to the same simple advice or catchy phrases.

Does he ultimately give his own clear cut advice that means something?

I'm reminded here of Dan Allosso's mention of the David Allen quote from Getting Things Done: "It is better to be wrong than to be vague."<br /> https://hypothes.is/a/yOFrNubcEe6AsafBDjDzBw

Are business books too often vague when it would be better for them to be wrong instead?

Catmull, Ed, and Amy Wallace. Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 2014.

Annotation link: urn:x-pdf:30663863383637656631613936313361656266663266383336636530383636623965393736396531323237383235353363353236653830623034366132373130

alternate annotation link

Crux - 1. Apple is not a company where general managers oversee managers; rather, it is a company where experts lead experts. The assumption is that it’s easier to train an expert to manage well than to train a manager to be an expert. 1. Whereas the fundamental principle of a conventional business unit structure is to align accountability and control, the fundamental principle of a functional organization is to align expertise and decision rights. 1. In a functional organization, individual and team reputations act as a control mechanism in placing bets. 1. So, that means if the camera team pitches an idea, but the same doesn't receive a good response from the users, for the next model the camera team's functionality will have a lower priority than suppose the touch team. 1. As is often the case with decentralized business units, managers were inclined to fight with one another, over transfer prices in particular. 1. Managers should be expertise in their fields. They should spend majority of their time either owning, learning or teaching, and less of delegating. Each piece they work on should be deeply thought of . 1. Squircle scenario. 1. Cross functional debates

Watts, Charles J. The Cost of Production. Muskegon, MI: The Shaw-Walker Company, 1902. http://archive.org/details/costproduction01wattgoog.

Short book on managing manufacturing costs. Not too much of an advertisement for Shaw-Walker manufactured goods (files, file management, filing cabinets, etc.). Only 64 pages are the primary content and the balance (about half) are advertisements.

Given the publication date of 1902, this would have preceded the publication of System Magazine which began in 1903. This may have then been a prototype version of an early business magazine, but with a single author, no real editorial, and only one article.

Presumably it may also have served the marketing interests of Shaw-Walker as a marketing piece as well.

Tangentially, I'm a bit intrigued by the "Mr. Morse" mentioned on page 109 who is being touted as an in-house consultant for Shaw-Walker.... Is this the same Frank Morse who broke off to form the Browne-Morse Co.? (very likely)

see: see also: https://hypothes.is/a/Sp8s4sprEe24jitvkjkxzA for a snippet on Frank Morse.

Arch Wilkinson Shaw<br /> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arch_Wilkinson_Shaw

• Founder of Shaw-Walker with Louis C. Walker,
• publisher of System: The Magazine of Business which was sold to McGraw-Hill Company in 1927/8 and renamed Business Week which was later renamed Bloomberg Business Week.

reply to IvanFerrero at https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/1740/anybody-using-this-approach-to-manage-contacts-how#latest

Many of the digital note taking tools that run off of text allow you to add metadata to your basic text files (as YAML headers, inline with a key:: value pair, or via #tags). Many of them have search functionality or use other programmatic means like query blocks, DataView, DataViewJS, etc. for doing queries on your files to get back lists, tables, charts, etc. of the data you're looking for.

The DataView repository has some good examples of how this works with something like Obsidian. Fortunately if you're using simple text files you can usually put them into one or more platforms to get the data and affordances you want out of them individually.

As an example, I have a script block in my daily note in Obsidian for birthdays in my notes that fall on today's date:

```dataview LIST birthday FROM "Lists/People" WHERE birthday.day = date(2023-01-18).day ```

If I put the text birthday:: 1927-12-08 into a note about Niklas Luhmann, his name and birthday would appear in my daily note on his birthday. One can use similar functionality to create tables of books they read with titles, authors, ratings, dates read, etc. or a variety of other data input which parses through your plaintext files. Services like Obsidian, Logseq, et al. are getting better about allowing these types of programmatic searches for users without backgrounds in programming and various communities usually provide help for pre-made little snippets like the one above that one can cut and paste into their notes to get the outputs that they need. Another Obsidian based example that uses text files for tracking academic journal articles can be found at https://nataliekraneiss.com/your-academic-reading-list-in-obsidian/; I'm sure there are similar versions for other text-based platforms.

In pre-digital times, for a manual version of a rolodex like this in paper, one could use different color cards as pseudo-tags (doctors are on yellow cards, family members on blue cards, friends on green cards, etc.) or adding edge notches or even tabs to represent different types of metadata. See for example the edge colored cards in Hawkexpress' Pile of Index Cards: https://www.flickr.com/photos/hawkexpress/albums/72157594200490122

https://www.wsj.com/articles/david-rockefellers-famous-rolodex-is-astonishing-heres-a-first-peek-1512494592

Is ITIL Losing Importance Due To SaaS? ITIL is a set of procedures and practices of IT service management when we mistakenly believe that we don't have to worry about that in SaaS. However, ITIL has many aspects and facets that encompasses running IT in an organization. Moreover, it is not a checklist for the implementation of specific services in specific environments. For SaaS, we can just use a different toolset to follow the general ITIL guidelines.

Why is it so common for engineering teams to be mistrusted by other parts of the business?

Part of that is definitely on engineers: chasing the new shiny, over-engineering, etc.

That seems unlikely to account for all of it, though.

Business strategy alignment and the secrets of strategic planning https://en.itpedia.nl/2022/01/02/business-strategie-alignment-en-de-geheimen-van-strategische-planning/ The Business Strategy stems from a detailed strategic planning process. However, the question we want to answer in this article is whether we can execute multiple strategies side by side while they do not interfere with each other. We compare multiple strategies for business, information provision and IT and focus on Strategic planning.

Jeff Howe - Crowdsourcing and the Crisis: Collective Intelligence in the Age of Covid-19 (ACM CI’20). (n.d.). Retrieved June 25, 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POPMMHyIoS0

Savage, M. (2020, May 10). A return to work is on the cards. What are the fears and legal pitfalls? The Guardian | The Observer. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/09/coronavirus-return-to-work-employment-law-logistical-nightmare

In context, these other dimensions of “online presence” in Higher Education take a special meaning. Reminds me of WPcampus. One might have thought that it was about using WordPress to enhance learning. While there are some presentations on leveraging WP as a kind of “Learning Management System”, much of it is about Higher Education as a sector for webwork (-development, -design, etc.).

This from a university which had dropped Blackboard for iTunes U.

Sign of the times? One part is about economics as the discipline of decision-making. Economists often claim that their work is about any risk/benefit analysis and isn’t purely about money. But the whole thing is still about “resources” or “exchange value”, in one way or another. So, it could be undue influence from this way of thinking. A second part is that, as this piece made clear at the onset, “education is big business”. In some ways, “education” is mostly a term for a sector or market. Schooling, Higher Education, Teaching, and Learning are all related. Corporate training may not belong to the same sector even though many of the aforementioned EdTech players bet big on this. So there’s a logic to focus on the money involved in “education”. Has little to do with learning experiences, but it’s an entrenched system.

Finally, there’s something about efficiency, regardless of effectiveness. It’s somewhat related to economics, but it’s often at a much shallower level. The kind of “your tax dollars at work” thinking which is so common in the United States. “It’s the economy, silly!”

Good thoughts on the hiring process for programmers: job descriptions, advertising, pair programming, blind evaluations, group interviews.

Bureaucratic cultures tend to discourage people from speaking candidly. Lack of candor can be a deterrent to success, before it ever reaches the level of outright lies. Lack of candor means:

• outright lies (saying something you know to be false)
• self-deception (believing what you want to believe)
• deliberate omissions of facts
• thinking one thing, but saying something different
• having an idea that may be of value, but saying nothing
• being called upon to give an honest opinion, but deciding to say what is easier, or what you think others want to hear
• obscure jargon, or meaningless platitudes that give the impression everything is going fine or great. (This is a big red flag when it appears in corporate reports.)

"Investing Between the Lines: How to Make Smarter Decisions by Decoding CEO Communications", L.J. Rittenhouse (recommended by Warren Buffet in his 2012 Shareholder Letter)

Truth-Telling: Confronting the Reality of the Lack of Candor Inside Organizations We need to build cultures where "opposing views are debated and more effective solutions and innovations are created." -- Lynn Harris