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For the last few months, I’ve been involved in Charles Wankel’s latest crowdsourcing project. He’s leading a team of several hundred managers and scholars who will contribute to Managing Through Collaboration. The paper edition of the book will be published in January 2010 by Routledge.

I’m editing Chapter 22 on information technology and e-business. Almost 400 of the contributors are at the Academy of Management meeting in Anaheim, and I’ve participated in several editor and chapter team meetings during the conference.

I’m also working on social media and a blog to support the project. Many of us are on LinnkedIn and Facebook, and I’m setting up a FriendFeed room for the project.

I’ve seen only 4 Macs at the 2008 Academy of Management conference. There’s free WiFi in the conference lobbies, and I’ve been using it to check my EMBA course and grade the final assignments.

The vast majority of these management professors and doctoral students use Windows laptops, Outlook and Microsoft Office as they study their papers and PowerPoint slides one last time before their sessions. 

I helped one of these users connect to the conference’s free wireless network. It’s just another day of ad hoc user support for Bill Sodeman, professor and CIO.

If I get more questions, I may set out a tip jar.

In the meantime, it’s fun to watch the parade of growl notifications that Little Snitch displays on my Mac.

I enjoyed watching Randy Pausch’s lecture on Time Management. It’s 87 minutes long, so start at the 12 minute mark to get to the actual lecture. Slides are available here.

I found this set of documents on Lifehacker, in an article called Randy Pausch’s Time Management Tricks. The Lifehacker link came through an article called Pausch’s time management tips on Sandee Oshiro’s excellent blog, Hawaii Hacks. This is one of the better blogs that I’ve seen from the Honolulu Advertiser, and I hope she posts more articles like this!

When you know your time is limited, time management should become a major priority. I doesn’t matter how you track your time… although using LEGO bricks to track tasks would make work seem more like play, I think. This tutorial called On LEGO Powered Time-Tracking; My Daily Column has details. I also found it on Lifehacker in this article called Time tracker: Track Your Time with LEGO Bricks.

IBM has been using an social network called Beehive to help employees share pictures, videos, links and meet in ad hoc groups. Users can post, share and reuse top 5 lists, which are called Hive5s. The ability to reuse or reshare lists has been a key feature. Over 35,000 IBM employees were registered on Beehive as of May 2008, with 15000 Hive5 lists and over 280,000 shared connections. 

The Associated Press called this a virtual watercooler in a recent article. Intrenet Blog has its own article called Behind Beehive’s social success @ IBM that has a screenshot of the application - the default background color is yellow, not blue. 

LinkedIn is developing intranet applications for enterprise clients, so employees can share contact lists and create private connections within a secure enivronment

Facebook is also moving in this direction, if the reports from this week’s F8 developers conference in San Francisco are credible.

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US drivers can’t understand fuel efficiency - at least when it is measured in miles per gallon (MPG). When I was growing up in the early 1970s, MPG became a national buzzword as gasoline prices soared.

But when fuel economy figures are presented in gallons per mile (GPM), more drivers were able to compare fuel efficiency between vehicles, partly because the GPM figure can be directly multiplied by the pump price. An owner can calculate the total gallons she will use in a week, month or year, along with the cost.

It’s a handy metric to remember, especially as some drivers wrap their cars with advertising decals to subsidize their commute.

If you’ve filled up your tank, and you know how many miles you’ve driven since the last time you added fuel, just divide the gallons purchased by miles driven to obtain GPM.

To make the GPM figure more understandable, researchers Richard Larrick and Jack Soll presented the figures as gallons per 100 miles (GPCM).

To calculate GPCM, multiply the GPM figure by 100, or divide 10000 by MPG.

The chart below compares MPG (left axis and the blue line) against GPCM (bottom axis and the red line). To use the chart, just find the figure you want to compare, and trace a vertical line up or down to find the conversion:

• A car that gets 10 MPG uses 10 gallons to drive 100 miles.
• A more efficient car that gets 50 MPG only needs 2 gallons to drive 100 miles.

As I was writing this article, I was pleased to discover that Rich Larrick and I both graduated from the College of William and Mary in Virginia in 1986.

See Reuters, the New York Times, Consumerist, the MPG Illusion site at the Fuqua School of Business, and the original article in Science.

Updated 23 June 2008 738 HST: Rick sent me these comments about my blog post:

“GPM is useful when deciding about buying a new car, deciding between cars, etc.  It guarantees that people see that improving from 10 to 11 MPG, 16 to 20 MPG, and 33 to 50 MPG all save the same amount of gas over  some distance — 1 gallon over a 100 miles or 100 gallons over 10,000 miles.  Without GPM, people expect larger linear improvements in MPG to yield more savings (that’s the illusion).”