Image by Tony the Misfit via Flickr

As we watch the sordid cavalcade of media gaffes – from Anthony Weiner‘s MMS messages to Chevy’s “slip of the tongue” (someone tweeting on behalf of Chevy mistakenly thought they were using their personal account when they declared that Detroit was full of terrible drivers) we are seeing  a society that is coming to terms with the blurring line between text and speech.  That is, the ephemeral nature of all speech is being given the permanence of text.

We will spend the next generation coming to terms with the consequences.

Once something is said it cannot be unsaid.  True.  But historically it couldn’t be shared to a wider circle of listeners.  Speech is not permanent.  Speech gives way to time and passes into the fog of memory.  Therefore the social norms governing speech are more forgiving.  We are expected, allowed even, to say things  without due consideration, in close company, knowing that we will regret some portion of what we say.  We are able to use the full context of a conversation (who is there, what has been said before etc.) to nuance our speech and say things that wouldn’t look good when reduced to text.

And yet on social networks we speechify, we talk and we are saying plenty of things we might regret.   Such speech isn’t meant to be a permanent record.  But it is. As Meghan Garber writes in a Nieman Lab post:

As a culture… we tend to insist on categorizing our communication, drawing thick lines between words that are spoken and words that are written. So libel is, legally, a different offense than slander; the written word, we assume, carries the heft of both deliberation and proliferation and therefore a moral weight that the spoken word does not. Text, we figure, is: conclusive, in that its words are the deliberate products of discourse; inclusive, in that it is available equally to anyone who happens to read it; exclusive, in that it filters those words selectively; archival, in that it preserves information for posterity; and static, in that, once published, its words are final.

We are hurtling towards a world of total information capture where email, texting, instant message and mobile video are documenting our everyday speech and action – in effect rendering all speech as text.    There will be few places to “talk” without that talk being given the weight and permanence of text.

We are then faced with two options: Either give up the liberties that speech allows – thinking “out loud,” using the context of the conversation to add meaning to a comment and so on – or become more lenient with speech that happens to become text.  In the case of Weiner, his behavior is unacceptable in any context.   As a society we understand his transgression and he is being punished for it.  Fair enough.   In the case of Chevy, a mistake was punished through Chevy firing both the Tweeter and the entire agency he worked for.

I hope in future we are able to see the distinction and dole out our punishments accordingly.   We all say things we regret.   Now we all write things we regret.  Perhaps as a result of this shared reality we will learn a bit more forgiveness for each other.

This originally appeared as an  O’Reilly Radar post .  Subsequently this issue came into sharp relief again when “Duke Nukem Forever” publisher 2K Games fired its PR agency for threatening (on Twitter) to blacklist journalists who gave the game a negative review.  While the threat was subsequently retracted the PR agency is still fired.

Originally posted on Forbes.com

“We need better collaboration”  That phrase is hard to deny in any corporate setting but what exactly does it mean and is it any more important now than it was in the past?  Here are several reasons why I believe collaboration in business today is more of a survival trait than a buzzword:

The supply chain of work is getting longer.

Getting any product or service into the market is the result of a much larger set of people, organizations, places and processes than before; a dizzying number of interfaces with people who all seem to speak a unique dialect – even within the same company: finance, legal, HR, engineers, marketers and so on.   They are quite independent in how they see and speak about the world and yet wholly dependent upon each other to get anything done.      The more moving parts required to get work done, the more chance there is of creating confusion, rework, variance and other inefficiencies.   The only known remedy is structured communication (aka collaboration) across the supply chain.

Communication increasingly requires insider knowledge.

A business used to do the bulk of its internal communication via the meeting room and memo, its external communication through print and television – technologies that were static over decades if not centuries.   No longer.  Some examples of the questions organizations are asking:

• How does the wiki we are using to write our job descriptions work?
• How do Facebook pages function so that I can market there effectively?
• What type of programming skills are needed to develop the iPad application we are building?
• How does the new calendaring system work when booking meeting rooms?

This list is expanding daily.  This type of knowledge is buried within your organization (or suppliers) and getting at it quickly is a matter of connecting the right people at the right time.

Teams are global, the workplace is virtual.

The more multicultural, multilingual, multinational you are, the harder it is to achieve knowledge exchange and timely decision-making.   You may not be in a global organization but telephone, email, telepresence and real-time messaging have allowed the under-one-roof workplace to diffuse into a loosely-joined workforce.  Even when in close proximity we may not be together.  How many of us send email to a colleague down the hall?.  As our organizations slowly diffuse across timezones and space, collaboration is a glue to keep people together.

The world of the future will not be served by the organization of the past.

The delineations that allowed us to have very separate functions within an organization (R&D, Marketing, PR, Product Development, Customer Service etc.) and across the entire value chain of stakeholders begins to break down when the customer’s view of your company becomes the prevailing reality.  With the customer’s new-found communications power that is exactly what is taking place today.   Any weakness across the complex customer relationship is potentially exposed to the world.   You may have a brilliant marketing campaign but if the product is a loser – you are lost.  You may have a brilliant product but if your customer support is appalling, your potential buyers will be forewarned.   Therefore any planning exercise in one silo will necessarily require collaboration with the others to have any chance of success.

While the drivers that make collaboration vital are technical, the solutions are not.  Collaboration is, at its root, a social activity.  It is founded on generosity, sharing and openness.   As such collaboration begins in organizational culture.

Fundamental to the Internet as a many-to-many communications network  is the notion of disintermediation.   Everyone has their own broadcast tower and doesn’t need a middle-man to  put their voice into a public forum.  What’s more is the ability to turn a monochromatic broadcast event into a multifaceted, interactive experience.   Strange case in point,  I am right now watching the coverage  of the Royal Wedding live on the couple’s YouTube channel.   While it is being broadcast in the mainstream television stations, the YouTube channel provides something quite different:

• It has provided an always-on prelude to the main event – enabling on-demand access to the story as it unfolds: wedding plans, musical schedule, costume design and so on.  Whatever piques your interest becomes the path you take into the story and enriches your sense of the main event.
• It goes well beyond broadcast by connecting to a host of Internet service such as Maps of the wedding route, wedding book etc. providing a richer set of interactions
• It enables viewers to convert well wishes into positive action through donations to charity
• It allows you gain a semblance of intimacy by  “Send[ing] your Message…” to the couple

It is one more example of how the Internet can put you at the center of a multifaceted story – allowing you to choose what interests you, and participate beyond the broadcast.  I am not much of a royal family watcher – but it is a great example of tapping the potential of the internet to put people at the center of a story.

Related articles

• The Royal brand engagement (econsultancy.com)
• YouTube to stream royal wedding live (macworld.com)
• Prince William and Kate Toss Fans a Digital Bouquet (livescience.com)
• Royal YouTube channel to stream wedding live (news.nationalpost.com)

Image via Wikipedia

This was originally posted on O’Reilly Radar.

In business “Faster is Better” is better for more reasons than you might think

For the past several years I have been thinking about the role of speed in customer experience and business strategy.    We live in an ever-accelerating world and the competitive terms of business are built upon achieving speed for many reasons.  Here are just a few, from the obvious to the more speculative:

Speed is our default setting
Human beings live and operate in a constant state of now; we processes extraordinary volumes of information in real time.   The acceleration of technology is simply an effort to catch up to our zero-latency experience of being.   Whenever given a choice we will opt for a service that delivers response times as fast as our own nervous system.

The technology and processes around us are nowhere close to catching up – yet wherever they do, we see incredible value creation.   Any information processing technology that moves from batch to  “real-time” experiences a quantum leap in value – especially for those who adopt it first.   Consider the arbitrage opportunity in financial systems capable of receiving market prices (or other data) in real time or the efficiency of inventory management occurring in real time across the supply chain and you get the idea.  All of the systems that surround and support modern life are accelerating into real time systems.

Speed is money saved
Walmart’s revolution lay in accelerating inventory information to near real-time throughout its supply chain.  The result was incredibly efficient – huge cost savings  that were the basis for its domination of the American landscape.

Speed is gratification delivered
When I worked in e-commerce in the mid 90s we quantified the obvious;  faster page load times equaled more revenue.  Our analytics showed that milliseconds spelled the difference between a sale and a lost customer.

Today we see the rise of Flash drives in consumer electronics not because they are more reliable or durable (they are not) but largely because they wake your computer from sleep faster.  The magic of the new iPad 2 (which uses a flash drive) is it’s cover which will automatically wake the device and bypass the estimated 3 seconds it takes to click-and-swipe to turn on the device.

Speed is loyalty earned.
Money is a metaphor for our use of time.  We pay attention and we spend time.  Taking too much of a customer’s time is a form of theft that can cost your business.  Conversely, if a product or service saves us time, costs less in attention – we feel rewarded.

Speed equals certainty – delay equals doubt
I have heard it argued that Google won the search battle as much due to the speed of delivering  results as the vaunted relevance of those results.  They put their response times in milliseconds on every results page.   In a social interaction, any pause before responding to a simple question  ( “does this dress make me look big?”) qualifies the inevitable response (“absolutely not”) as less certain.  My example is a stereotype and a bit whimsical, but it is emblematic of how we transfer these same emotions to our interactions with people *and* services.  In other words, speed/responsiveness engenders feelings of trust, certainty and comfort.

Speed is a key facet of business strategy
All of this amounts to a simple edict: consider speed as a dimension to your business strategy; not as a by-product of seeking efficiency but as a means of winning customers.  I have used examples from the digital domain but the same premise applies to any offline experience – from hotel check-ins to the “out-of-box” experience of your new product.   In more ways than one speed can deliver advantages beyond quality, or efficiency.   Speed can deliver intangibles like trust and loyalty.

Speed is a pain in the ass
Delivering on the speed manifesto puts stress on an organization and, more importantly, on people.  Our schedules get compressed, our deadlines tighten and the bar for competitive productivity keeps going up.   While many lament the increasing pace of  modern life – it is a futile complaint because it focuses on the effect rather than the cause of increasing speed.  Over and over, we reward speed with our attention – and with our business.  As customers we demand speed from the products and services we purchase.  The consequence is that as employees  or business owners we find ourselves subordinated to an accelerating pace of work to deliver on that demand.

Speed is a choice we make
I believe that the terms of success for people in the world will increasingly reside with managing their own pace and flow of attention *against* the demands of speed.  Those capable of strategically disconnecting and applying selective focus will be at an advantage in business or in life (hasn’t this always been the case?) because exercising foresight and judgment, two critical life skills, are not necessarily improved by speeding up.  Quite the opposite.

But this isn’t the same as saying that we must slow down in business wholesale.  As long as society rewards speed with equity,  it will be the fundamental basis for competitive advantage and worth paying attention to.

Image by Bert Meert via Flickr

Simon Sinek‘s book “Start with Why” revolves around a single, elegant premise – successful leaders and businesses follow a common course — and it is the exact opposite of the way all other leaders and businesses proceed — This is the Golden Circle… a series of three concentric circles.  In the outermost ring is “what” you do” followed next by “how” you do it and in the center, “why” you do it.

Sinek makes a convincing case  that successful leaders or businesses move from the inside out – they begin with a powerful sense of “why” – their purpose, mission and reason to exist.   Only then do they move to “how (how I achieve my purpose) -and finally “What” they do.  Starting With Why is exemplified by leaders such as Martin Luther King or Gandhi.  In Business, Apple is a paragon.   The rest of the horde of followers start with what they do:  I make laptops… or I am a consultant when they should be starting with why.  The trouble is, most people and companies lack a clear sense of purpose in the first place.  In its absence they seek a proxy.

There are many ways that companies find a substitute for having a purpose.  Research and measurement is often one of them.  As the Golden Circle suggests, they are approaching their business from the wrong direction.

As science begins its march into every discipline – including marketing, under cover of the overhyped (and less understood) buzzwords of “listening”  – I see companies falling into the trap of driving their business from research (customer insight) while still lacking any sense of purpose.   We now have the capacity to measure and predict a whole series of outcomes that were once the domain of speculation.   What will move people to buy a product?  What conversations are they engaged in?   What matters to them most?  how exactly did people respond to a given message and so on.   Making sense of data – as valuable as that can be – will never bring you closer to finding a purpose that centers your actions, guides your people or shapes your culture.

Don’t get me wrong – measurement is valuable and a needed skill in today’s organization – but it is no surrogate for understanding what you stand for.   Measurement can reveal the “what” – what types of products or services are needed, what customers think of you, what customers say to one another and so on.   Allied with purpose, measurement can open a whole new field of play.  Yet it can never yield the Big Why.  And without a why – an organization cannot achieve greatness.

note – after having just spent an inspiring week working with @donbart – aka Metrics Man thinking about how we keep our measurement aligned with clear objectives, I should be clear: this post is not intended to diminish measurement – but to elevate the need for purpose in today’s organizations.

Related articles

• “People don’t buy what you do! They buy why you do it!!!” (enablersnetwork.com)
• A conversation with Simon Sinek, author of “Start with Why” (asable.com)

It was just before 9AM  GMT +2 on Friday and I was working in a client’s conference room.   I happened to look at my Twitter feed and saw this – “Japanese Tsunami is live on Al Jazeera English”  Japanese tsunami?  I hit the link and there it was – live images of automobiles bobbing like bottle-tops upon the sea – then of an airport being flooded.

Doing the math:  When I clicked on the link at 8:52AM my time – it was 3:52 PM Tokyo time.  The earthquake hit at 2:46PM and the tsunami roughly 15 minutes later.  This means that in less than an hour I was watching live coverage – and not from a television set – but from my  laptop.

There are many milestones in the annals of communications; moments when things seem to irreversibly shift into a new present age.   This was another one for me.   An event thousands of miles away triggers a flurry of people sharing information and within seconds I am watching a live broadcast on my laptop.   This last part is what feels so new.    We have had live video feeds to the Internet for some time but usually they have been planned ahead of time – a simulcast.   But the speed at work here is different;  without any planning we were able to be patched into various sites to watch an event unfold in real-time.   As more connected cameras cover the globe this will become more the norm than the exception.  And as mobility takes over – where most of us carry highly connected portable computers with video-streaming the norm – this information will be brought to you wherever you are – the television being the least convenient option.

Paradoxically the milestone is thrilling while the event itself is tragic.

Related articles

• 5 Raw Videos Of Japanese Earthquake And Tsunami (buzzfeed.com)

Image via Wikipedia

About one year ago I gave a talk at Stowe Boyd’s Social Business Epicenter conference titled, Towards a New Metaphor for Business.   I had wanted to post the basic outline of the talk but never got around to cleaning it up enough to post.   Here it finally is.

As more and more of our friends, customers and business colleagues begin participating on the web it has become a fundamentally social medium; its operating principles follow social norms more than they do traditional business norms. This truism legitimizes the massive (and often annoying) proliferation of the “social” prefix that found its way in front of nearly every noun over the past year; from social web, social computing, social media, social CRM and finally social business. The term Social Business fits precisely because it characterizes a new metaphor that helps frame the way we will conduct business in the age of blogs, Facebook, Twitter and whatever comes next.

Over the past century business has been dominated by metaphors of war and aggression:

• The survey tool is our Tip of the Spear

• We will establish a Beachhead with this client

• How do we take the undefended Hill (HP strategy).

• How do we outflank them?

• We killed our competition.

• We lost the business.

Business is War is not a one-off metaphor or literary flourish – it is systematic and coherent; that is to say the metaphor pervades nearly every aspect of business language. And metaphors matter. We are born into a world where language, expressions and idioms already exist; they reflect our culture and their influence upon how we see the world – and take action is profound.

The problem with Business is War and with all metaphors is that they obscure the truth as much as they reveal it. By its very nature a metaphor helps you understand one thing (e.g. business) in terms of another (e.g. a war with combatants and clear winners and losers). But the truth is that a metaphor is only  a partial match at best.   As much as a metaphor helps shape our understanding it can also hold us back from realizing other possibilities.

Business is War casts the corporation as a fortress with hard, fixed boundaries – who is inside, who is outside – with tight control of information to ensure that only authorized personnel have the right to speak. On a personal level the organizational outcome of Business is War has been a premium on obedience and conformance to command. Business is War strips transactions of their social quality – and thus we do not consider if what we are selling has any inherent value to society. It even strips us of our individuality as we come to dress in uniform and adopt a very narrow standard of acceptable behavior and speech in the workplace. When the business environment was one of mass industrialization – and competitive edge was a matter of efficiency and scale – “Business is War” served a purpose (albeit a rather cold one). Military mindsets may be good if you are in a commodity business competing purely on cost but if your business relies on innovation in a rapidly changing environment, or on customer and employee loyalty. – that mindset will increasingly be a liability.

The recent language that has accompanied the rise of social networks seems to rest upon a  different metaphor:

• Markets are Conversations

• All media are social

• Are you “listening” to your customer?

• We need to promote open innovation

• The web is built upon an architecture of participation

The language here (participation, dialogue, listening, open source, open innovation, “coopitition” etc.) seems to be marking a new metaphor.  While others will claim how tiresome the buzzwords are (and I can often feel the same way) I see an incipient systematicity at work here that is worth paying attention to.

What might moving from “Business is War” to “Business Is Social” look like?

Social contracts are very different from the business contracts that dominated the 20th century corporate mentality. In the business contract, the organizing principle is the binding, legal document (the treaty, if you will), and the motivator that constrains bad behavior is the lawsuit. By contrast, the organizing principal for the social Web is relationship, and the building blocks are trust, reciprocity and authenticity. The motivating force that constrains bad behavior is social pressure and cultural norms.

This is not to say that we will see the disappearance of legal contracts or fierce competition within business.  There are legitimate reasons for security, privacy, and some controls over information within a social business. But with social technologies the “field” has changed. Value is being created by more open models such as Zappos.com (which is religious about quality of customer service and company culture), Best Buy, (who views every employee as a potential leader and innovator [disclosure, BBY has been a client]) and Salesforce.com (who open their product roadmap to customer input and host an ecosystem of developers to earn money on their platform). Further, I look more hopefully towards what Umair Haque elegantly calls “thick value” as becoming a building block for how successful businesses operate with a social conscience

The good news?

Human beings are innately social. We are designed to share and connect with others. Period. What’s more, we are born into cultures that provide a blueprint for how to communicate and organize. We know how to join a conversation at a party, meet new people and make decisions and organize in a social setting (with varying degrees of competence). This long road to the industrial organization with its business is war mentality isn’t a permanent state… or a rule of nature. It is an historical contingency. As our communications infrastructure “goes social” so too will our operating rules. On the positive side, I think Business is Social will feel more like a return to principles we already abide by in our social lives.

Business is Social creates a human-scale organization – one with more points of contact with the outside world, one where information flows more freely in all directions, one that is responsive to community, one that inherently cares about those it engages in business with; one that deals honestly and constructively with the world around it because it is part of (and depends upon) the same social group. A social business builds awesome products, designs awesome services because (1) it actively seeks to know and care about its customers and (2) it relies on customer communities to carry the flag (to borrow another military metaphor). In a world dominated by networked communications where a laptop or mobile device is a broadcast tower and we are all in constant contact, I believe that businesses will need to adhere to social norms or face being ostracized. As we see this shift I believe that we will continue to see the very language of business adopt a new underlying metaphor. Business is Social.

Image via Wikipedia

In  Enemy at the Gate, a detailed account of Ottoman, Hapsburg relations centered on the 1683 siege of Vienna, historian Andrew Wheatcroft notes that by the late 19th century both empires were decrepit and nearing their turn to exit from the world stage.  In response they began developing rich narratives about their past. They were the first to develop what Wheatcroft calls, “heritage cultures.”

“Both the Hapsburg monarchy and the Ottoman empire turned their attention inwards.   France, Britain, Germany and Russia could anticipate a great, imperial future.   The two second rank European states had only one good option, make the forlorn grandeur of their past the central principle of their present and future status.”   These states began to market themselves based on elaborate rituals of commemoration and history.

I think heritage cultures exist in business and they are usually easy to spot.   A  “heritage company” touts its past in order to legitimize its present and credential its future.   Heritage companies spend a fair amount of time using words like “history” (“A long history of innovation…”) and legacy (“with a legacy of caring for the environment…”).    These phrases litter their brand and marketing communications.  More importantly, (and from personal experience) they are often used as internal mantras to bolster opinion among a skeptical workforce.

The problem is that people transact with a business based on a belief about what that relationship means now and in the future.   The past may credential a company but like the song lyric (“what have you done for me lately?”) the “past” in a customer’s mind extends only a few years back and the shelf life on reputation is spitefully brief.

Forward looking companies do not spend much time referencing the past.  Do you see a company like BMW, GE, Apple, Nike or Starbucks touting it’s heritage?  Heritage is great for craftsmen, less so for innovators helping build our future.   If one cannot make the case for the future it is natural to cling to the past.  But in business past is never prologue.  Making claims on the future by citing your past is a sure giveaway that something is missing at present.

The longer I stay in my career the more wisdom I find in this compact little phrase: Be Committed but Not Attached; be committed to the work that you do, the purpose you have, the intentions and integrity of your actions.  Don’t be too attached to the results.

On its face it sounds absurd. How can you be committed to your work and not attached to whether you achieve results?    I have two answers.

The first is that whenever you work in large, complex environments the final results are often outside of your control.  Especially when working on big projects you rely on an alignment of many stars – vision, right leadership, adaptive culture, budget and resource availability, skills-match and so on.    Fretting over that which you cannot control is a waste of energy and time.

The second is that our personal measure of progress is often quite radical when compared to an institution’s measure of progress.   At an individual level we can accept a fairly radical amount of change in a very short period of time  – totally new haircut, deciding to bike to work instead of drive etc.   Extending this analogy, it might take three years for an institution to get its haircut (think about how long it takes an organization to go through a rebranding exercise).    When observing this process from a personal perspective it seems absurd – but it is the reality of large organizations.   Moving an organization 5 degrees into the future is huge progress.   What’s more, even false starts are sometimes the first attempt that “loosens the lid” giving the next project better hope of success.  Your sense of a failed project might just be the one that allowed the next attempt to succeed.

So be committed but not attached.

I have been in three countries and four cities within the last 6 days. Nearly every moment has been spoken for – whether preparing for meetings or attending meetings, in client dinners, waiting for taxis, planes or sitting in taxis and planes, packing, unpacking, shaving, flossing, brushing… waking up and beginning all over again.

The supply of our time remains fixed, so when demand soars you are left with but two options; cut back on the demands or reduce wasted time anywhere you can find it. If you opt for the latter – as I have – then your life becomes centered on a kind of ruthless efficiency; reducing any friction that wastes time or saps energy. You fly business class, you outsource any routine that you can – expense reports, travel arrangements… eating out instead of cooking, a single line email response instead of a more thoughtful, courteous one.

This approach works and, by and large, is the one taken by everyone I know who is in similar circumstances. And yet, for me, there are enormous long-term consequences of such a reordering of one’s relationship to time.

The pace of work becomes consuming, often to the exception of family, friends and the good things at hand. Present living is sacrificed for an ill-defined future (that’s the only kind of future there is). Paradoxically, the more money you make the more pressure there is on your time and the more you generally need to reduce friction – which in turn costs money. Thus you can find yourself in a strange loop where you value and seek more of the very things that are both cause and consequence of this way of life.

What’s more, it makes you eminently susceptible to annoyance – the taxi driver who doesn’t yet know the city, the coworker who replies-all to a staff email just to say “LOL” is wasting your time (as are all staff emails by the way!) and on and on.   Your inbox moves from discreet, incoming messages to be processed, to a river flowing past that you selectively address based on a hierarchy of personal importance.

Modern life in the way I am describing it is probably best summarized by this relentless demand on our attention. How we manage that demand is not just a mark of our character – it marks our character. Like being deprived of oxygen, I am not sure how long anyone can live in such an environment before these side-effects become more or less permanent.     I have observed myself with some alarm over the past weeks as I have internalized these external pressures with less grace than I would like.

Time will tell how I continue to manage.

This was written last month during a particularly hectic few weeks. I held off posting it until now.   I am feeling a bit better now but still thought the general observations were worth sharing.