Michael Padlipsky

In America everyone is entitled to an opinion. However you are not entitled to a professional opinion. Michael Padlipsky

What makes an opinion a "professional opinion?" It's not the qualifications of the person, that's for sure. We've seen too much junk come from so-called professionals.

I look at the form of the opinion as much as its content. Form and design tell a lot about the "professionalism" of a person. How often have you had to sit through "Death by PowerPoint" in recent years? How often do ideas fail due to poor design?

Michael Padlipsky is one of the original designers of what became the Internet. The Internet is hardware, the physical network of computers first developed in the early 70's. Padlipsky has written some interesting and humorous accounts of it's design and development. When the Internet was first designed the problem of different operating systems was huge. Padlipsky wrote of this problem in a 1985 paper "All Victims Together."

Tim Berners-Lee solved this design problem by inventing a common language-- the World Wide Web in 1989. He made the Internet functional and accessible to all of us through the common language of HTML. Yet even HTML has its design flaws: Berners-Lee recently apologized for creating the slashes that appear in every http://www/ URL. He admits the // were not necessary. It just seemed like a good idea at the time.

How often have we done that in our own presentations: Put in things that seem like a good idea, but are not necessary. The "professional opinion" is one that presents only the essentials in a good and interesting format. Here are three resources I use to improve my own "professional opinions."

1. Garr Reynolds has written a whole system for improving presentations in Presentation Zen. This should be required reading of all school administrators.
2. Daniel Pink is more than a little Left of me politically, but his ideas in A Whole New Mind are great.
3. Twitter is a great discipline for writing. It's like the Haiku of blogging. You must state your message in 140 characters. It's a good daily activity for posting ideas in a simple format.