I read a little piece in the New York Times yesterday that postcards are staging a comeback, at least in the UK. 135 million were sent last year to British households—30% more than in 2003. The Times suggests that the rise in postcards is a sign of a “yearning for tangibility.” Postcards are clearly more tangible than emails, and they fill up our mailboxes nicely without requiring a lot of verbiage. Jay Dittman, a smart fellow from Hallmark, told me recently that their paper greeting card business is also holding up pretty well.

That got me to wondering whether we would see other yearnings for the past, and whether the next big thing in business can ever involve the past. There seems to be a slight rise in wishing for a less digital past; and several articles and books on that topic, including Nick Carr’s piece in The Atlantic (about which I blogged a few weeks ago), and Maggie Jackson’s book Distracted, are pretty popular. I wonder how far it will go.

What else (besides postcards) might come back? Non-working vacations are a possibility. Those organizations (such as IBM) that admirably allowed employees to simply take as much time away from their jobs as they needed are finding that employees often don’t take enough time, or spend all their vacation time working. There’s another Times article on this from last summer.

Another example of a possible return to the past involves re-regulation. The secular trend—particularly in the U.S., but to some degree globally as well—has been to remove regulation from many economic sectors. The result in the airline industry has been lots more passengers and lower fares, but (in case you hadn’t noticed) really crappy service. In electrical energy, deregulation seems to have led to electricity shortages (in California) and higher prices (at least in Texas). In consumer finance, deregulation is at least partly to blame for the current credit crisis. People are beginning to talk about whether we need more regulation in each of these sectors. I am hardly an expert on the economics of regulation, but it seems that it might stage a comeback, particularly if we elect Barack Obama as President.

We also might see a return to some of the management practices of yesteryear. Every once in a while I think that I should have been born when my parents were, so I’d have a lifelong career with a single company, and that company would treat me in a paternalistic fashion and give me a nice pension (though I would probably find that very boring). But there are still companies that treat their employees quite well in almost a 1950s-like fashion (Toyota, SAS, Google, Wegmans, etc.), and they all tend to perform very well. Maybe treating your employees well is simply timeless.

I don’t think we’ve ever seen a broad retreat from electronic behaviors, so I doubt that will be in the cards—postcards in the UK being an exception, perhaps. But other business ideas are more cyclical or even timeless, and I expect we will see some of them. What do you think? Is everything old new again?

I read recently that IBM was abandoning the term “knowledge management” for “knowledge sharing.” According to an article on the KnowledgeBoard site (thanks to Chris Johannesson from NBC Universal for suggesting that I blog about it), Chris Cooper, knowledge sharing solutions leader at IBM Global Business Services (GBS), deems it a “philosophical repositioning.” Cooper notes, “Management suggests control: control of process and control of environment.” Another GBS knowledge specialist, Luis Suarez, notes in the same article, "Command and control corporations are no longer going to be there. People need to be freed to share what they know."

Hmm…better tell all the world’s managers, schools of management, management consultants, etc. The term “management” is apparently a synonym for “command and control,” and we know that’s bad. “Command and control” is top-down, mean and nasty, and headed for extinction; “sharing” is bottom-up, nice and friendly, and the wave of the future. Maybe the Yale School of Management, for example, should become the Yale School of Sharing.

OK, I have no problem with giving something a new name when you are adopting a new emphasis. I don’t even have that much of a problem with the term “sharing,” although it is somewhat reminiscent of kindergarten. However, I do have a problem with overly simplistic characterizations of knowledge management, and management more generally.

Let’s talk about the more limited issue of defending knowledge management. As I said, I don’t really care what you call it, but if your organization really cares about creating, distributing (I’m sorry—“sharing”), and applying knowledge, you need to manage it. The last time I checked, “management” of knowledge could include some relatively structured, “here’s the knowledge we really need to do our jobs right” approaches, as well as some more emergent, Enterprise 2.0-oriented ones. If you only do the former, your knowledge workers will probably feel a bit stifled; if you only do the latter, things will probably feel a bit chaotic. If I’m a NASA astronaut, for example, and I’m sitting on the launch pad when something goes wrong, I’d rather have people looking for a solution in structured knowledge bases than mucking around in blogs and wikis.

But the broader issue is whether “management” is an outdated concept, or whether it’s the same as “command and control.” Frankly, I think those are nutty ideas. There may sometimes be a need for less directive approaches to management, as I argued with respect to knowledge workers in my book Thinking for a Living. But the right style of management, like the right approach to knowledge management, varies widely based on a number of factors—including the people being managed, the society in which you’re managing, and the task at hand.

In fact, I think we should ban the term “command and control.” It’s simplistic shorthand for a stereotyped approach to management. The world of management is much more subtle and multi-faceted, and any synonyms for it should reflect that complexity.

I’m in Warsaw, Poland for a conference put on by Harvard Business Review Poland. Last night they had a gala dinner for the 5th anniversary of the magazine in Poland. I was asked to give a toast—perhaps because they knew I could say the words “to your health” in Polish (Na Zdrowie)—and I said that the magazine was a national asset. I really believe that it is. One could easily see that it plays an important role in Polish business society. Businesspeople seemed to be aware of articles—particularly the Polish-authored ones—that had an impact on business practice. The magazine charges twice the cover price of the US edition, and it seems to get it.

I was a little envious. HBR in the US is a fine publication, but there are too many sources of management advice for any particular channel to dominate the business dialogue. Maybe things have become too fragmented. If you want to get an idea out into the world today, you’ve got to publish an HBR article, write a few blog posts about it, get a few business magazines to write about it, be interviewed by Maria Bartiromo, do a YouTube video, and perhaps even Twitter about it. Maybe publish your own book, as Dave Balter argues on this site in a recent “conversation starter” (yet another medium?).

These are the heavy burdens on business authors, but they also fall on business readers. If you were an assiduous student of new business ideas, to where would you devote your scarce attention today? How would you choose among the thousands of management-oriented blogs? If everyone is publishing their own books, which publishers do you trust? It’s both the best and the worst of times for readers—there’s a vast amount of content, but it’s hard to know where to turn.

This content churn is perhaps responsible for the fact that nothing much seems to stand out among business ideas today. The business best-seller list, for example, is a little depressing. Good to Great is good, but is it that great? OK, The Tipping Point is a fun read, but does it really deserve to be on the list for 8 years? And don’t get me started on Who Moved My Cheese. The reading public for business books isn’t brain-dead; it’s just dazed and confused from the fragmentation of content sources. And I’m not sure how Humpty-Dumpty will ever be put back together again. Maybe I should develop a taste for pierogis and stay in Poland.

Some of the more ardent advocates of Enterprise 2.0, such as Don Tapscott and Andy McAfee, have suggested that Intellipedia—a wiki-based environment for sharing human intelligence across U.S. intelligence agencies—is the key to solving the considerable intelligence problems of the Estados Unidos. I will grant that it is one key, but it is NOT A GOOD IDEA to think that Intellipedia, by itself, will lead to widespread and effective information and knowledge sharing.

First, a little background. It is widely acknowledged that one of the problems that led to 9/11 and other intelligence failures is that our various intelligence agencies (FBI, CIA, DIA, ONI, BBC [just monitoring your alertness], etc.) did not share knowledge of terrorism threats with each other. As one response to this problem, Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, and as another it created the Director of National Intelligence in 2005. Intellipedia was created in 2006 as a means of sharing information and knowledge across 16 intelligence agencies; some related blogs on a network called Intelink also serve this purpose.

Intellipedia is a good idea. However, it’s a bad idea to think that by itself it’s going to solve our information sharing problems. Fortunately the Office of the Director of National Intelligence hasn’t made that mistake. In their “U.S. Intelligence Community Information Sharing Strategy,” they note that, “Information sharing is a wide-ranging, multi-layered issue that spans governance, policy, technology, culture, and economic facets.” The document doesn’t even mention Intellipedia—and it shouldn’t, because it’s just one tool. The report focuses primarily on cultural and behavioral change—and it should, because that’s the hard part.

Garrett Hardin, perhaps the best-known ecologist in this world, has argued that ecology is based on the guiding principle, "We can never do merely one thing." If you want to encourage more information sharing in any organizational environment, you need to do a lot.

There are even some signs that Intellipedia is only somewhat successful as a single tool. At the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, some intelligence people who are working with Intellipedia said that only 10% of the eligible user population is actually using it, and that middle management isn’t comfortable with it. Of course, they probably need to get comfortable with tools like Intellipedia, but the mere existence of the tool isn’t going to make that happen.

Nick Carr has a thoughtful piece called “Is Google Making Us Stupid” in the July/August issue of The Atlantic. It suggests that the Web is shortening our attention span, and “chipping away [the] capacity for concentration and contemplation.” He cites research finding that users of the Web exhibit “’a form of skimming activity,’ hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would ‘bounce’ out to another site.”

If you haven’t already bounced to another site, I should say quickly that of course Nick is technically correct. This piece has his usual accuracy and perspicacity. The Internet is undeniably changing the way we read and think. Yes, you’ve shortened your attention span by reading this blog; you’re addicted to the literary cocaine that Google and the Web and email provide. If you’re younger than 25, you’ve probably already muttered “get over it” and moved along to Twitter.com.

But what, one might ask, is the point of pointing this out? Should a blue-ribbon commission be appointed to study ways we can halt the rotting of our brains? Should the Internet be banned in Boston? When George Bush finally leaves office and spends a lot of time on “the internets,” will he wish he had fought a war on online content rather than terrorism?

No. Nothing’s going to happen. Our neurons will continue to crave and be gratified by the stimulation they receive online. Once a new medium has been invented, we never go back to previous eras of literary languor. Despite many articles similar to Carr’s decrying the influence of television on the brain, we still watch, on average, 4 hours and 26 minutes a day of it.

The only possible way to take action, which Carr doesn’t even suggest, would be for individual readers to voluntarily change their own habits. Not much of this will happen either. For example, while Nick decries the fact that new emails appear on his screen while he’s consuming more substantial information fare, I’ll bet he hasn’t disabled that function (although it’s easy to do in most email clients). I know I haven’t.

All we can do is adapt. While Carr bemoans the fact that the first few pages of the print New York Times are made up of a news snippet index, it would be irrational for the Times editors to do otherwise. It would be irrational for Tolstoy to write War and Peace today. It would be irrational for The Atlantic not to put most of its content online. And it would be irrational of me not to make my next book shorter and snappier (let’s be candid; most books, including mine, shouldn’t be read word-for-word anyway). Informational nostalgia may have its partisans—and I sympathize with them—but they won’t prevail.

10. Lists don’t take a lot of human attention to process. Since we don’t seem to have much to spare these days (particularly online), that makes them popular.

9. Ranked lists imply a comforting order to the universe. People like to believe that some people, teams, or companies are simply better than others. Never mind that it’s all about the criteria the rankers use, and the niggling detail that there may be no significant difference between ranks.

8. Lists can be worded tersely. They’re easy to write.

7. We’ve gotten conditioned to the context-free sentences (or even less) in lists, perhaps because of the popularity of bulleted lists in PowerPoint.

6. Lists are popular online because they are amenable to the “slide show” web format, which artificially runs up the page view count. In other words, they help to impress advertisers. Readers hate slide shows, but they seem to be proliferating nonetheless.

5. You can get away with silly statements in the middle of the list, because nobody’s reading closely at that point. For example, it’s clear to me that lists are to Internet content what Paris Hilton is to acting.

4. Lists are a good way to present jokes. Witness their popularity on Letterman since September 18, 1985 (“The Top Ten Things That Almost Rhyme With Peas" was the first ever).

3. Lists imply that you have exhausted the possibilities for items in them, although the predominance of the decimal system in our society means that you usually have to have ten items. Sometimes that means a need for artificial list fillers or repeats.

2. Lists seem to come in 10’s, so be wary of repetition.

1. Particularly when the numbers in the list are in decreasing order, there is an expectation that the number one item will be particularly momentous. Sadly, the last item rarely meets expectations.