I’ve come to the conclusion that meetings are good.   And we need more of them – not less.

Most executives have a knee-jerk reaction against meetings; they are a waste of time.   Employees couldn’t agree more; let us get work done.

And yet if you are a manager, a major portion of your job is dedicated to communication… your time is  spent either in meetings or preparing for meetings.   Most meetings are a mashed-up bag of confusion that leaves people with the mistaken impression that meetings are the problem.  They aren’t.  It is the way we have meetings that is a problem.  The failure of meetings is an indictment of process and leadership… not of the concept.

A well organized meeting  in which people are prepared, the process has structure and the desired outcomes are clear (we need to decide X) is second to none in terms of efficiency.   Our businesses are the sum product of decision-making; “this is our business”, “this is our customer”, “this is how we reach them”, “this is how we measure value creation” and so on.   These decisions are constantly being reassessed and are rarely made alone, they are made in meetings.

I cannot count the number of times in which I have realized after the fact (why do you think I am writing this today?) that a two-week back and forth over email could have been resolved in an hour during a structured meeting.  Just as often I am aware that (as a consultant) I have tried to go extremely light on the meetings due the fact that my client(s) hate meetings.

Finally, despite my full embrace of social technologies, we still do not have a surrogate for face to face contact.  It  contains a density of actionable information that can’t be rivaled.  In that regard the most successful technology yet developed for collaboration is the table and chair.

Flickr image: mnadi

Last week at Web 2.0 Expo Danah Boyd , a well-respected researcher at Microsoft took the stage to deliver a keynote. In most respects the stage was what you would expect: lights, podium, giant slideshow to accompany the talk etc. In one respect the stage was totally different – there was a live, unedited Twitter stream coming from the audience being projected for everyone (except the speaker) to see.

Danah’s talk was difficult – you should read her post on the subject.  She had a rocky start – couldn’t see the audience (lights), couldn’t see the Twitter stream (projected behind her) and the podium made it difficult for her to see her notes. When critical comments began coming through on Twitter it began a downward spiral. The audience laughed at inappropriate moments, throwing Danah off her game.  The audience then fed on her increasing anxiety and so on.

Danah’s post is remarkable in that she makes a painful personal experience even more public in order to foster dialogue on the sort of culture we are creating with social technologies.   Hats off to Danah.   The whole spectacle seems to present a great learning experience for all involved; event organizers, public speakers, audience members.

Architecting a Proper Social Experience
In my opinion (and with the benefit of hindsight of course) the architecture of the experience was bound to create problems. Speaker facing audience but can’t see them. Audience facing speaker and having the ability to project their thoughts onto a screen for everyone except the speaker to see. It doesn’t help relate the speaker’s intent, it doesn’t clarify anything for the audience (presuming they came to listen to the speaker), it makes the false equation that the speaker’s well planned presentation allies well with the spontaneous commentary of the crowd, and ultimately it alienates both parties from each other. I have moderated panels by fielding questions in real time from the audience using Twitter. It worked extremely well because it didn’t divide the panelists’ attention, but it allowed a richer, more diverse set of questions to be posed.   In each case we need to ask ourselves how the technology will serve our communication goals.  Which brings me to the next point…

Thinking the Trend is the End Game
The mistake above is part of a larger mistake that is being made everywhere; embracing a trend without thinking of why you are doing it. In this case the trends are (1) the audience is now part of the conversation and (2) we consume content in smaller, faster bits. These trends are not applicable to every situation. In the case of a large public event where the audience is coming precisely to see a roster of well-known speakers (that is how all conferences do their marketing), there is an inherent and justified asymmetry in the flow of attention. Large audience pays attention to a single speaker.    Just because “the audience now has a voice” doesn’t mean it should be exercised without interruption.  There is still value is prolonged focus, there is still value in the art of the lecture, there is still value in simply listening. In fact I have argued that being able to focus and having a capacity to sit still and listen will be the traits of the next generation of leaders in our staccato-signal world.

The Audience is Responsible
We don’t have much experience with simultaneously being able to be present in a group setting, heard by our peers and yet relatively anonymous to that same group. Previously, if we wanted to raise our hands to say something – we had to pay the price of being identified with the comment or question that we asked. This is why your professor always said, “there are no dumb questions” – to encourage people to accept the price of being identified with a dumb question by reframing the equation. Yes, you have a Twitter handle and someone could look you up… but this doesn’t carry the same stigma as being publicly identified in-the-flesh.

Recently I listened to a Fresh Air interview with Mike Judge, creator of King of the Hill, Beavis and Butthead etc.  In a very thoughtful, funny interview Judge stunned me by saying that he was most proud of Beavis and Butthead. He thought they were cultural archetypes; two un-self-aware do-nothings heaping criticism upon the outside world, while remaining completely oblivious to their own sorry condition. Perhaps it is a bit harsh – but often the Twitterverse allows us to be Buttheads – free to heap scorn upon public figures from the safe, cozy confines of our computers.   As a frequent audience member at conferences I am recommitting to the act of giving my attention and focus on the speakers I have paid to see.

Full Disclosure:  I have worked at O’Reilly Media (co-organizers of the event) and know both Web 2.0 Expo Conference chairs.   I have nothing but respect for how well they do their job and continually push the boundaries regarding how to enhance the event experience.

Here is a link to a transcript of Danah Boyd’s talk.  It is worth paying attention to.

This post is part two of the series, “The Question Concerning Social Technology”. That appeared on Radar. Part one is here. These posts will be opened to live discussion in an upcoming webcast on May 27.

In January 2002 DARPA launched the Information Awareness Office. The mission was to, “ imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness (emphasis added)” The notion of a government agency achieving total information awareness was too Orwellian to ignore. Under criticism that this “awareness” could quickly migrate to a mass surveillance system the program was defunded.

Fast-forward to last week and my near-purchase of Libbey Duratuff Gibralter Glasses (the perfect bourbon glass one might speculate). Over the course of the next few days I was peppered with exact-match ads for Libbey Duratuff glassware on several other websites; A small example of information awareness at work.

Personal data is the currency of Web 2.0. Knowing what we watch, buy, click, own, what we think, intend and ultimately do confers competitive advantage. Facebook possesses your social graph, your personal interests and your full profile (age, location, relationship status etc.) not to mention your daily (or hourly) answer to their persistent question, “what’s on your mind?”. Reviewing the “25 Surprising Things Google Knows About You” should give anyone pause. And it’s not just the Web 2.0 set. Credit Card Companies, Telcos, Insurance , Pharma… all are collecting vast stores of personal data. If you watch the trendline it is moving toward more data and more analytic capability – not less.

So why is it that we seem to have more comfort when the capacity for total information awareness lies with corporations as opposed to government? Experience shows that there is a very thin barrier between the two. To wit, the release of thousands of phone records to the U.S. government - and, conveniently, government immunity for those same corporations after the breach. Google and Yahoo! and Microsoft have all been accused of cooperating with the Chinese government to aid censorship and repression of free speech. What happens if/when we encounter the next version of the Bush administration that sees no problem abrogating civil rights in pursuit of “evildoers”?

What’s more, when we deliver our personal information over to corporations we are giving this data over to an institution that is amoral. Companies are not yet structured to deliver moral or ethical results – they are encouraged to grow and deliver “shareholder value” (read money) which is a numb and narrow measure of value. Do I want my data to be managed by an amoral institution?

To be clear – I want the convenience and miracles that modern technology brings. I love the Internet and I am willing to give over lots of data in the trade. But I want two fundamental protections:

First, change the corporation. The structure of the corporation continues to be driven by 20th century hard goals of efficiency and scale – not by more complex measures of environmental sustainability, value creation and the commonweal. These are simply not adequately factored into any structural, organizational, incentive or taxation systems of business today. Profit and profit motive are fine – but hiding social and environmental costs is no longer acceptable. I want to deal with institutions capable of morality. This is no small task – but if we can build the Internet….

Second. We need a right to privacy that matches the 21st century reality. As a friend of mine likes to say, “privacy is now a responsibility – not a right.” While it is pithy (and perhaps true), the reason we grant rights – and laws to enforce those rights in society is the simple fact that people do not generally have the wherewithal to protect themselves from large, institutional interests. In the same way that regulatory structures are needed to keep a financial system in balance (alas even the Ayn Rand acolyte Greenspan finally agrees with this truism), we need new rights and regulations governing the use of our personal data – and simple sets of controls over who has access to it.

The true work of the 21st century lies not in refining our technology – this we will achieve without any political will. The work lies in re-imagining our institutions.

I just appeared on an NBC affiliate in San Jose along with Guy Kawasaki and Dave McClure.   The Green Room and studio experience with those two was worth the price of admission.   The cameras are mounted on robotic bases and controlled somewhere else.  This makes the whole scene oddly reminiscent of Silent Running.   The entire sequence is available here.  My portion appears below:

The last time I saw Charlene Li was in the speaker’s lounge of the Web 2.0 conference.  It was March 2008 and her  defining book on social technologies, Groundswell, (co-authored with Josh Bernoff) was just being released.   There have been tectonic shifts in our economy (and Charlene has moved from Forrester to found the Altimeter group) since then so I wanted to get her sense of the state of social media today.

A couple of points from our conversation stand out to me.

• Social technologies (blogs, wikis, social networks and Twitter) are being utilized by more companies.   We are seeing these tools begin to go mainstream in the enterprise.
• When it comes to social media it is not about getting it right all the time.  It about the leadership and how they deal with failure.
• Salespeople natively understand how to work from relationships – Marketing departments don’t.  ( see Listening beats Talking on this point).  The real question now is how do we move those skills towards the center of the organization.
• In trying to allay the fears that come with employing social technologies Charlene performs a classic risk mitigation technique:  What are five or ten worst-case scenarios?  Are they realistic?  How might they be mitigated?  You can usually mitigate risks once you identify them.

Thanks to the good people at FastFoward for producing these videos during the FastForward 09 conference.

Roughly one year ago I was in conversation with the CEO of one of the largest online portals for Human Resources.  My pitch:  Human Resources should be leading the charge in helping businesses understand the possibilities and implications of social technologies such as blogs, wikis, social networks etc.  CEO’s response:  Human Resources is full of backwards people who are always behind the curve.  Don’t waste your (read “my”) time.  This is not an exaggerated paraphrasing.

While Human Resources is still trying to grasp the “what” and “why” of social technologies, they are missing an enormous opportunity to lead on “how” these tools are successfully employed in the enterprise. It is high time that they lead.

Why?

Ask anyone engaged in bringing social technologies into the workplace and you will hear the same thing;  “it’s the people stupid.” (what I call “The Harder Stuff”)   The primary resistance to the new operating principles at work in social technologies lies with the mindset, culture and leadership of today’s workplace.    So if Human Resources’ expertise is people, change and transformation (after all this is where our leadership, training, communications and change management groups are housed) why aren’t they leading the charge?   The market is quickly moving beyond the “what” (what are social technologies?) and the “why” (why are they important to my business strategy?) and engaging the deeper question of “how” (How do I employ them in my business?  How do they threaten business-as-usual?  How do I manage the transition?).

Simple test:

• Would your organization hire someone today in marketing that didn’t understand how social networks change marketing outreach and customer insight?
• Would your organization hire someone today in R&D that didn’t understand the role of online communities and customer led innovation?
• Would your organization hire anyone in Human Resources that had no understanding of how social networks are being used for talent management and employee retention?

The answer is likely no.  Yet the employees that most organizations have working for them today do not possess the skills the organization needs for tomorrow.

Human Resources is uniquely positioned to lead the inevitable move to incorporate social technologies into the enterprise in the form of:

• Skills training: organizing workshops to help employees grasp the operating instructions (what, why, how) for using social technologies.
• Policy support: helping define appropriate terms of use within their companies (one of the largest killers of any project is the lack of understanding between a business unit employing these tools and the legal department’s existing terms of use).
• Leadership development: helping leaders understand how social technologies prompt a new type of leadership
• Talent Management: how social networks can be used in recruiting and retention strategies.

Who better to address this than HR?  As lower skill responsibilities such as payroll get outsourced I am hoping that HR takes a strategic leadership position in the organization.  Anyone reading this that knows someone in HR – please forward this post.  Anyone in HR reading this – please add to the comments or contact me.  Let’s get HR into the game.

As a rule the traditional organization has very few people dedicated to listening (Customer research) and a whole lot of people dedicated to talking (Marketing, Advertisting, PR, the communications dept., Events etc.).  What’s worse, the feedback loop from listening to taking action is glacial (consider that a typical customer research cycle takes three to six months to complete). This was supportable in an age where customers had very little means to connect with companies and, more specifically, with each other.   No longer.    The Internet (shorthand for the Internetwork) has reconfigured power relations by empowering everyone(sic) with their own broadcast tower.
In this new reality organizations need to adapt to the laws of the network.

Why?  Because our information economy is being subsumed into the network economy; because we now live in the network.
1.  Send is Receive
In the network each node is a sensor capable of receiving and processing information in real time.   If every business unit in your company isn’t listening (to each other – to the outside world) it isn’t learning at the same rate as its competition. (see Listening beats Talking).
2. Small is Big
In the network all things begin small (the individual, the faint signal, the single message) and roll up through collective action (the viral pass along, the “Digg“) into a swarm of biblical proportion (Obama’s donor list of 13 million).   If you don’t understand this Network Law — you are in trouble.  And, If you can’t build reach into this world – you will soon be in a world of hurt.
3. Hard is Soft
In the network “soft” power is the power that persuades.  It is a power of influence and attraction, and a call to leadership to the swarm.  If you are still issuing decrees from on-high you are going to find yourself increasingly ineffective in the as a business leader.
4. Vertical is Horizontal
The network is rhizomatic in it’s growth and structure; flat and situational.  Hierarchy and information flow is still important – it’s just that it now flows in all directions.  Each business unit  needs to be more rhizomatic, and promiscuous in its connectivity with other units (see also, Moments of Truth: We Are All Marketers Now).
5. The Center is the Edge
“No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else” — Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems
Where in the old world, the center of power and influence, of productivity and expertise emanated from within the walls of the organization,  in the world of networked relationships these properties  are in more abundance at the edge.  (see Open beats Closed).  Companies that work the edge win.

FDR was our radio president, JFK was our TV president and Barack Obama will be our Internet President.

Quietly at noon yesterday, as the world was fixated on the televised inauguration of Barack Obama, some obscure IT managers flipped a switch (metaphorically) and transferred Change.gov to Whitehouse.gov…  While the inauguration spectacle was awe inspiring and the speech lived up to its promise, Whitehouse.gov is the herald of bigger changes.

Team Obama has shown a native fluency with the web – high engagement (personal video emails from David Plough), bottom-up organizing (empowering a thousand micro-campaigns to flourish via their social network), great use of data as a competitive advantage (they release voter lists to be called upon, scrubbed and returned to them by their members) and harnessing collective intelligence (during the get out the vote campaign they were feeding real time results of calls back into the system making it smarter with each succeeding call).

Thirteen million citizens joined MyBarackObama.com.  They gave money and time.  They occasionally rose up in protest of their man’s policies (see FISA).  MyBarackObama.com fulfilled the deeper, more democratic promise of social networking;  that people can organize around meaningful issues and coordinate action with near-zero barriers to entry. Change.gov was launched immediately upon Obama’s winning the presidency and we saw the same result – massive engagement and some surprises (the biggest topic members want answered is how Obama will deal with the issue of prosecuting torture).   And now  Change.gov has become Whitehouse.gov.

I applaud this use of technology to engage citizens in better government.   I also carry a healthy bit of skepticism (every citizen should).  To quote Barack Obama, “Power Does Not Concede” – It did not before the Obama  and it will not after the Obama administration comes to power.   But the responsibility for how this gets shaped over the coming years is ours.   An Internet president presides (if anyone can) over a loose network of citizens capable of mobilizing and flexing their power (money, petitions) in near real-time. But, like any network – the power is with the massive swarm of citizens staying informed and participating in the social technologies that now take democracy from an annual ritual to a daily activity.

Last week I took a walk with Tim O’Reilly (my boss) and cameraman Kirk Walter (who has perfected the art of walking backwards with a 15 pound camera on his shoulder!).  We spoke about a wide range of topics that will be released over the coming weeks.   This is the first in that series,  “Work on Stuff that Matters,”  a subject that Tim spoke about throughout 2008.   It seems even more relevant in 2009.   The original Radar post that I did is here.

Tim’s passion and focus is with the entrepreneurs who are working in garages and small businesses around the world on big, audacious projects.   This discussion really got me thinking about my own role in working on stuff that matters.  How do I as a consultant ensure that my work is done in service to stuff that matters and congruent with my values?   That post is coming up soon.
These videos are a companion piece to Tim’s recent blog post, of the same name.  A great read, especially for the comments that support the original post.

We will be releasing the other segments over the next few weeks. They will also live on at www.thefutureatwork.com (where the video series has a home).  There you can also download the files for offline viewing.

Part One:

Part Two:

Part

The average age of the C-Suite in the U.S. is 53.  These leaders first encountered the Internet in their 40s, well along their career path. 85% are male. Their medium was television – childhood diversion might have been pinball.

It is fair to assume these leaders were apprenticed in the time-honored mandates of the enterprise:  control the flow of information, manage the formal hierarchy (roles and responsibilities) to control business results.    Social technologies (blogs, wikis, virtual worlds, social networks etc.) invert these rules and rely on an “in command and out of control” philosophy where leaders exert influence but allow input and information to flow more freely (across roles, across disciplines, across company borders).  Essentially social technologies invert the logic that has dominated the enterprise since the days of the railroad.

This inversion leads to our paradox (warning – broad generalization dead ahead).  The higher you go, the less you know; people leading (at the top of) our companies have only a beginners awareness of, understanding about and facility with the tools and technologies of the social web; which are defining how new forms of value are created. Even more debilitating to top performance is that the leadership belief systems concerning the nature of work in this network economy  is rapidly becoming antiquated in some critical arenas (I will soon be posting on these “seven deadly sins”).