Author: Jemima Gibbons

Categories
Listening

The wonderful wisdom of the table tennis ball

It’s a Thursday afternoon and I’m drinking tea with cultural theorist Michael Thompson in the RSA’s crowded coffee shop.

In between chats with Andrew Summers, RSA trustee (whose friend, it turns out, is also publishing a book on leadership) and Alison from Triarchy Press (who’s treating us to carrot cake), Mike and I discuss how the internet helps with problem-solving.

“The internet is clumsy by design!” says Mike, enthusiastically.

In Mike Thompson’s world, “clumsy” means “good”, even “best”. He is keen for us to find broad, all-embracing, “clumsy solutions” to problems. These are win-win resolutions where each party gets “more of what it wants (and less of which it does not want)” (“Organising & Disorganising“, p4) – in essence, all voices are heard, and responded to.

Cultural Theory argues that there are four ways of organising – and all too often we focus on just two: individualistic (eg:a free market economy) and hierarchical (eg: a heavily-regulated market). The other voices (fatalistic and egalitarian) are frequently neglected.

Our love of the “pendulum” model (arguing between one of two extremes) and desire for an “elegant solution” (using single definitions) leads us to favour a simplistic decision-making process where alternative voices are excluded; additional viewpoints become “uncomfortable knowledge” and are inevitably dismissed without serious consideration.

Mike has just finished giving a lunchtime lecture at the RSA, a lecture in which he proposed we start solving the current economic downturn by incorporating egalitarianism (equality with fettered competition) and fatalism (inequality with unfettered competition) more rigorously into future decision-making models.

Mike’s model is a holistic, 360° one, so maybe it’s not surprising he has drawn it on a table tennis ball which is passed around the room.

The world is now “effectively one colour” says Mike – individualistic, market-orientated: representing a “self interest ideology”. This world has been hit by what Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, calls “a once in a century credit tsunami” and it’s inevitable that something “hierarchical” is going to happen: this is what we are seeing now in the effective nationalisation of major banks.

According to Mike, we need to consider egalitarian and fatalistic approaches in order to encompass all viewpoints, move forward, and stop ourselves from simply swinging the pendulum back.

Financial institutions are just one example. Mike opens his lecture with the story of Arsenal Football Club [an individualistic player], who approached Islington [hierarchical] to build its £60,000 seat Emirates Stadium. Within days, a third actor appeared – The Highbury Community Association – and “all hell broke out”. But all three voices were heard, some under-used land was found, and a “clumsy’” solution emerged. The new stadium was built on time and on budget; all parties were happy.

Mike also cites Coca-cola in India: the soft drinks giant recently ran into trouble over its use of local water in soft drinks production – the company was accused of making a private good of something which was, essentially, a public good. If the egalitarian view (as expressed by the local villagers) had been accommodated into the planning process, such negative publicity may never have surfaced.

Another example given by Mike is that of the Brent Spa storage and tanker loading buoy which Shell wished to dispose of by sinking in the Atlantic Ocean in 1995. Shell [the individualistic player] obtained consent from the UK Government [hierarchical]. But Greenpeace heard of the plan and launched a world-wide campaign against this type of disposal. A heated debate ensued and “new paths were exposed that had been hitherto hidden”, according to Mike. Eventually, Shell agreed to to re-purpose much of the original structure.

Mike’s argument is that if we stick with the pendulum model, we’re going to be confined to just four of nine provinces in a three dimensional grid – and those four provinces are “most impoverished in terms of deliverable quality”.

I’m not saying this approach is always going to be workable – clearly it takes time for a business leader to seek out and listen to opinions, especially those that disagree with him/her, but I do like Mike’s metaphor of “clumsiness”. It ties in with the web’s propensity for democracy and its ability to throw up the “long tail” of human opinion.

You can listen to Michael Thompson’s lecture again via the RSA events page.

If you’d like to read more about Cultural Theory, RSA Chief Executive Matthew Taylor gives a nice every day example on his blog.

Categories
Metanoia Openness

Things can only get louder!

NESTA’s shiny glass and chrome offices on the edge of the City of London are rather swanky. It’s a bit like finding yourself in an uber-stylish wedding, one of Anouska Hempel’s boutique hotels or, possibly, the latest series of Battlestar Galactica.

Black Arne Jacobsen chairs are set off by white walls, white drapes and white orchids. Plush grey carpets muffle your feet (although no need as everyone’s in trainers). You can almost hear the doors swish as you step out of the lifts. The meeting rooms for break-outs have round walls and are known as ‘pods’.

Needless to say, the 160 guests who’ve just arrived seem to take to this 21st century environment like proverbial ducks to water. The auditorium is a sea of gently humming i-phones, laptops and digital cameras as people blog, tweet, message and record each other with all the earnestness of a roomful of children writing notes for Santa.

We’re here for Amplified08, the brainchild of Toby Moores and Mike Atherton. Bouyed up by the confidence around social media in London, and un-deterred (in fact, positively spurred on) all the talk of credit crunch Christmas and looming recession, Toby and Mike have decided we’re in a ‘perfect storm’ for change.

Toby estimates that around 2,000 people in London, maybe 10,000 across the UK believe that social media has the potential to create a positive difference in people’s lives. Amplified08 aims to harness that conviction by holding a series of ‘unconferences’ across the country – visiting a different UK city every three months, and culminating in a massive event in Summer 2010.

As Toby says: “If we, quarter by quarter, region by region, build it, we’re going to be able to change the way things are done.”

Most of the delegates seem to enjoy the spirit of evangelical optimism, others mumble about “hippy rubbish”. It’s possible we’ve become part of a cult, but then no-one has parted with a large amount of money or disowned their family…yet.

The way unconferences work is that it’s up to the audience to decide the agenda and put on the sessions (which works great if you’re not paying, not so well if you are). Half the fun is outside of the sessions where you’re meant to network like crazy, preferably with people you don’t know (difficult in social media settings as its always the same hard core who show up).

Amplified08 has the additional twist in that we’re urged to go to sessions we wouldn’t normally go to. I start off with #15: Dynamic practice interfaces for local government (business case), followed by #23 Young People and Social Media and #06 Bretton Woods II (okay I admit that last one excites me, but it’s getting late).

In the boardroom, @stephendale is talking about knowledge management in local government. His take on existing KM systems? “Knowledge being captured in a web repository is where knowledge goes to die”. Steve’s efforts to build a workable wiki for best practice across the UK’s 400 odd local councils are admirable. As always with these things, the real issue will be not so much the technology per se but getting people to actually interact fruitfully with the thing once it’s up and running. Calling it an ‘efficiency library’ (though I like the term) may not be the way forward.

Over in the Faraday pod, chairing the session on youth, @digitalmaverick (aka Drew Buddie) tells us he’s recently had “an epiphany” through using Twitter. Drew teaches ICT at a comprehensive in Hertfordshire and has nearly 2,000 followers on Twitter. Making contact with hundreds of people across the world, whether it’s to discuss technology or share recipes, seems to re-affirm his belief in the general good of human nature.

Inspired by Dave Eggers’ legendary TEDtalk, Drew wants to do something for children using social media that really engages them and produces positive results. All around the room, there are general gripes and moans about the way the education system (in the UK at least) doesn’t address social media properly or, indeed, seem to take it seriously.

Drew mentions that, despite the stereotype of young people revealing everything about themselves online, sometimes anonymity is preferred. He produced a collaborative play where pupils of all ages contributed lines and characters. When he offered to throw a party so all the cast could meet each other in person, the pupils refused – they liked the fact that a grade 11 was working alongside a grade 6 but completely unaware of the fact – that anonymity actually enhanced the creative process because there were no pre-conceptions about what each party was capable of.

@simonperry is concerned about children growing up online and being unaware of the “digital shadow” they leave. I’ve never heard this term before but google it and find out it was coined in an EMC report earlier this year and refers to the data you unintentionally leave about yourself as you browse, make purchases or are filmed on security cameras. The shadow makes up a part of your digital footprint – the mass of digital information there is about you, including email, social-networking, blog posts etc.

@antoniogould points out that personal information you actively leave eg in social networks can be just as damaging as unintentional information. He recalls the story told by Danah Boyd of a young black man who passed the Oxbridge entrance exams but was rejected because of the derogatory anguage he used on his MySpace profile.

@philoakley thinks it’s ridiculous that Microsoft’s hold on schools (as the main supplier of software) means that issues such as open source simply don’t get taught or discussed. Why are kids being taught to use pc-based Word and Excel, he asks, when open source and cloud computing is more important to the future of the web?

Another contributor whose name I failed to get refers to the web as “the eternal memory of our indiscretions”, which turns out to be a nice term used by academics Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross (Carnegie Mellon University) to describe the nature of social networks.

The final session on Bretton Woods is the liveliest. Taking his cue from World Bank President Robert Zoellick’s suggestion that we need “a Facebook for multilateral economic diplomacy“, @paulmassey wants to know if any of us have a new perspective on solving the global financial crisis.

Comments veer from the indignant (“Governments are pushing immense amounts of money into these very ill patients…the market is saying ‘this is dead!’) through the reflective (“The idea of a social stock exchange is interesting…”) to the blatantly optimistic (“If we had a few top notch developers and a few lawyers we could develop something great and hand it to the UN!).

No firm conclusions are reached but everyone agrees the conversation is worth continuing – the hashtag #bw2 is born.

With that, we all break for wine and olives. It feels a bit like fiddling while Rome burns.

Randomness, connectivity, serendipity…these are all themes of Amplified08. I met a lot of good people and learnt interesting things. The sharing and openness is great (although yes, that could all change once big money is involved), but for now the momentum seems positive. Roll on Amplified09!

Categories
Leadership 2.0

Eyes wide shut

As Lloyd Davis, Janet Parkinson, Maria Sipka and any number of my friends might tell you, I’ve a bit of a problem with my eyesight.

Now this isn’t down to rubbish opticians and/or glasses that should have been changed ten years ago, nor is it down to the fact I’ve downed too many double vodkas before lunch-time, it’s simply a legacy of no-one actually realising I was shortsighted until I was seven (well, why would I have said anything? I thought the world was meant to be hazy and full of sudden collisions), plus another four years or so of my being too vain to actually put the glasses on.

As a result, not only was I inevitably left until last in any kind of sports team selection at school (possibly this happened once a week but in my pained childhood memory, the process seemed to come round more frequently – life became easier once I discovered bunking off to shop in High Street Ken), I also developed a way of ignoring or not fully believing what I actually did see.

Now in adult life I frequently fail to register blindingly obvious physical entities (like balls coming at me – ask any of my previous team captains).

Anyway, this all comes to mind while I’m sitting in the Royal Thames Yacht Club Knightsbridge with Arie de Geus. We’re eating Dover Sole, polished off with some nice Viognier, and looking out over a sunny Hyde Park, where people are riding horses, sedately, along Rotten Row, and frost still sparkles on the grass.

Arie is telling me about Francisco Varela’s research into ‘cognitive objects’. Varela (1946-2001) was a Chilean biologist and neuroscientist who argued that we need to ‘recognise’ something neurologically before we can process it properly; if we have no previous experience of an object (or idea), then we don’t tend to pick it up.

Leading on from this, Arie argues that the main problems in business stem from the fact that we either (i) fail to see something because we don’t understand it or (ii) reject something we do see because the object triggers a recollection of something painful or unpleasant which we would rather forget.

These ideas tie in nicely with Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan Theory (thanks again to Benjamin Ellis for mentioning that) – we’re so busy analysing stuff that’s familiar, we fail to prepare ourselves for perceived (and unperceived) impossibilities.

Arie is keen for neurologists and management experts to work more closely together to explore the links between neuroscience and the way people behave at work. From what I understand, the Tavistock Institute and MIT have already done some research into this area, but it’s still relatively unexplored.

I hope we see this research happen. Neuroscience could go a long way to explaining why, despite years of expounding the case for enabling, enlightened leadership, we humans still tend to revert to primitive, command and control-type methods when it suits us.

Categories
Passion

Why bankers don’t do casual

Someone has left a lollipop in Gemma Price’s Canary Wharf office.

“I don’t want it – you have it,” urges Gemma.

The lollipop is one of the few bright things in the otherwise very sedate office, full of grey, black and muted tones – the kind you’d expect of a leading investment/ private bank. The lollipop seems out-of-place. As rare as a Myspace page in a set of banker’s bookmarks (it turns out).

Gemma looks after learning and development for the bank’s 25,000 back-office staff, as well as overseeing learning and development (co-ordinating, sharing best practice etc), for Europe, the Middle East and Africa – this role also covers employees in private banking, investment banking and asset management.

Gemma’s unit operates as a kind of internal consultancy, brokering deals between internal ‘clients’ and external vendors, including executive coaches, facilitators and IT training providers.

Gemma has been at the bank for nine years so when she started, the internet wasn’t much of an issue. Today however, there are tight limits on what can and can’t be viewed:

“We’re very restricted with what we can access, apart from LinkedIn and Google. We can access the BBC and news sites…LinkedIn is seen as professional tool. Most Facebook groups [for example] would not be considered professional.”

With regards to internal communications, a knowledge management team has just been set up, charged with looking at KM in its entirety across the bank. But the watchwords are effectiveness and ROI, rather than radical change:

“They’ll be looking at knowledge management in terms of efficiency. The last thing anyone wants in the market right now is innovation or risk-taking!”

The bank’s vast corporate intranet serves 45,000 people across 51 countries.

“There’s a massive staff directory, and Sharepoint, which includes a lot of shared sites where people have blogs and wikis. There’s a lot of stuff on there, a lot of videos. There’s a huge amount of e-learning.”

Gemma points to the webcam on her desktop, used for Camtasia presentations.

“We design and develop our own content, working with outside vendors. We also use Harvard Management a lot, and Intuition Plus.”

In a large, multinational company, it’s a challenge to produce e-learning videos where the message hits home. And Gemma’s team needs to catch the attention of people who are extremely busy and frequently stressed.

“The shorter, the better, the funnier we can make [the videos], the better. Actually funny is a flippant comment. Because we can’t afford to have something that’s funny in London being unfunny in Singapore.”

How would she describe the overall culture of the company?

“We’re a real mix. The dominant cultures are Swiss and American. We have some people coming in who are very innovative, but then we’re also very traditional. We have people who’ve made it up themselves through adversity but also people with double PhDs in Maths – again, that duality.”

The staff is, culturally, very diverse. The bank has just won an award for its multicultural leadership programme, and Gemma clearly works hard to promote harmony.

She admits she looks for parallels where possible:

“The Singapore and Zurich offices aren’t dissimilar; their attitude is ‘we’re here to serve’. The approach of London and New York is more, ‘we’re here to work with you, and we want to get the credit’.”

“My role is to create a great working environment. A manager has to be all things – a coach, a mentor. The predominant style of the lead manager has a huge impact on mangers below. [Our CEO] isn’t a ‘show and tell’ guy so his team aren’t out there banging the drum. That creates very much a team-based culture.”

Recent experiments in sub-prime mortgages aside, the banking industry tends to be conservative by nature, especially where leadership is concerned.

“The front office tends to be very command and control. That sort of method is seen as outdated but in practice still exists. There’s a real dichtonomy there.”

Above all, the bank’s well-heeled clients want to see respect:

“We’ve got to strike a balance. It is quite formal. You don’t say ‘Great!’, ‘How you doing?’ or ‘Wassup?!’ to personal clients, a lot of whom are billionaires. There’s no room for casual language in that way. These are high net worth individuals we’re speaking to. Luckily, there’s huge amount going on socially so we’ve got plenty of opportunity to be informal and casual.”

Maybe that’s what the person who left the lollipop thought.

Categories
Passion

Telling tales

It all comes back to stories, according to Ziv Navoth.

Ziv is sitting in his New York office (AOL’s headquarters on Broadway), chatting to me on Skype.

“Leaders see opportunity where other people see difficulties or challenges…then what you have to do as a leader is convince other people; make them think they can win. The ability to do that requires the ability to tell stories.

“Look at where Barack Obama was 21 months ago. Watching his campaign has been mind-boggling. [The US] is a country that doesn’t like change. The thought of voting for a black person is anathema to some people. But Obama can paint a picture of what the future could look like.”

Ziv works for Bebo, the world’s third biggest social network (45m registered users), which was acquired by AOL for $850m in March 2008. As Senior VP, Marketing & Partnerships, Ziv is part of “People Networks” – a business unit at AOL which includes Bebo, AIM, ICQ and Socialthing.

Ziv should know all about stories. In February 2007, the same week he started at Bebo, (as VP of marketing and business development), he published his first book, Nanotales, a collection of 83 short stories.

Inspired by the book, Bebo ran a competition encouraging users to write their own ‘nanotales’ – short stories of under 1000 words. The stories were uploaded to the web where they could be reviewed and rated by other users.

The contest was a perfect reflection of the potential ambitions of Bebo’s core 16 – 24 year old demographic, and a great way of harnessing the viral power of the internet. Shortlisted writers such as Tolu Ogunlesi, Richard Mooney and Shirley Davenport promoted the competition on their sites, asking readers to vote for them, and spread the word.

“Social media enables you to cross barriers of space and time,” says Ziv. “You can broadcast your story with zero investment and the only thing that will effect how far it spreads is the power of your story. Before there were barriers and hierarchy, now it’s just up to you.”

Whether it’s teenagers on Bebo, or CEOs of multinational companies, the internet is a great leveller. Craft your message in the right way, touch a chord, and your words will spread like wildfire.

Scott Monty, Ford’s head of social media, stresses the importance of simplistic story telling. To succeed in the digital world, he says, you need to decide your story and repeat it again and again. Polish up your story-telling talents, and you’re more likely to be on to a winner.

The Oxford academic Keith Grint praises imaginative story-telling in his book, “The Arts of Leadership”. He compares leadership to a series of artistic disciplines – and defines the effective portrayal of a strategic vision as the ‘fine art’ of leadership.

“This art is most appropriately considered as the one responsible for constructing the strategic vision of an organisation – that is, its future destination, its current direction, and its past deployment. It is, in effect, the world of the artist’s studio, for here the fine artist/leader must draw or paint or sculpt the future…the imaginative vision can be crucial in explaining the success or failure of a leader.” (p.16)

Add network effects to an appropriate imaginative vision, and you have a virtuous circle. But if you allow them to amplify a mistaken vision, you have a public relations disaster, as brands such as Virgin, Kryptonite and Cillit Bang have found to their cost.

AOL is a media giant “beginning to get its groove back”. It’ll be interesting to see which stories Ziv will weave to ensure his brand regains maximum respect in cyberspace.

Categories
Openness

The novelty has worn off, we’re now in a period of consolidation

Richard Sambrook is sitting in his office on the first floor of Bush House, television blaring. It’s 6th November, the day after the US election result has been declared and the BBC’s World News channel is going into overdrive, broadcasting minute by minute reports of President-elect Barack Obama’s every move – or so it seems.

This is the sort of character-filled room that you imagine should be featured in The Observer magazine’s My Space series. Cartoon caricatures mix with modern art on the walls. A large comfy maroon sofa sprawls at one end of the office, a relatively-contained network of high tech communications (plasma screen, laptop, TV monitor, fax) at the other.

Richard himself seems pretty relaxed, given that the last few days must have been hectic. As Director of the BBC’s Global News division, Richard is in charge of all the BBC’s international news services, across radio, television and digital media. Guiding and monitoring the US presidential election coverage in 32 different languages can’t be easy.

Before we meet, I check Richard’s blog to see how things have been going. Maybe not surprisingly, there’s been a bit of a lull – the most recent post is 29th October, over a week ago. 

Richard readily admits he’s not posting quite as frequently as he was when his first internal blog launched in 2004. Back then, he was the first senior manager at the BBC to do such a thing. 

“I’d moved into my new role and I thought it would be an interesting communications tool. The BBC can be very insular and inward-looking. It’s not just about journalism. I wanted to communicate with the new staff. After about three months I was getting 6,000 unique visitors each month. People I didn’t know would stop me and talk to me in the corridor, just because they’d read something of interest on the blog.”

“Part of it was learning about digital media and social media. Blogging is a way of getting to understand the dynamics, how it all works.”

Richard is refreshingly honest about the four things that bothered him at the outset. His editor’s head identified drawbacks from the start: 

  1. Am I going to be taken to task for something I write?
  2. Am I going to offend a specific constituency or community?
  3. Is anyone going to be interested?
  4. Can I do it?

While he found the blog relatively easy to write, he was concerned about the way his audience would react:

“Being a journalist, the actual writing wasn’t a problem. Finding a personal tone was. As well as issues like transparency, honesty and frankness. If you take all the contentious stuff out, will it be interesting?”

So far, the most awkward moment was during a dispute between the BBC and the unions:

“I said the only way through is negotation. And then found out the official BBC position is not to negotiate.”

Hmm. So would he extol the virtues of blogging to all senior managers?

“I wouldn’t say everyone should do it. It only works for some people. You need to get the right mix of informality and openness. Otherwise it won’t work. It’s good to have a very clear purpose, to see if you can open discussion and dialogue that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

“For example, last year I talked about advertising on the BBC World Service website (outside the UK). A small number of staff felt strongly about it and voiced their opinions on the blog – I wouldn’t have found out otherwise.”

When Richard went to his bosses with the idea of setting up a blog, they must have thought they were relatively safe. After all, to use an old cliché, Richard is a BBC man through and through – he joined the organisation in 1980 as a sub-editor in the radio newsroom (after training as  journalist with Thomson Regional Newspapers) and worked his way up the ranks, becoming News Editor and head of newsgathering, then Director, BBC News, before moving onto his current role. Plus, they must have hoped Richard’s editorial experience should create some kind of Pavlov’s dog-type reaction if he ever thought about writing anything too close to the edge.

“Initially their attitude [the bosses] was, ‘that’s novel’. But I think they were generally very happy for someone like me to do it.”

In 2006, two years after launching the internal blog, Richard moved his ideas into the public domain with the launch of Sacred Facts on Typepad. The site now averages around 2,000 visitors a month.

“Because I’d already done it inside and they [the bosses] had seen my blog, it was okay. They clearly thought that I, more than anyone, should know the risks.”

Richard was Director, BBC News, in May 2003 when BBC Radio 4’s Today programme ran a report claiming that the British Government had knowingly exaggerated claims over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in a dossier published in 2002. The government’s vehement rebuking of the accusations levied by the report led to a British judicial inquiry, chaired by Lord Hutton, and eventual resignations of the BBC’s Chairman and Director-General.

“Part of my experience of going through the weapons of mass destruction incident motivated me. If I’d been blogging at that time, it would have been an opportunity to say something, to speak out against the spin – although the corporate line would have been tight.”

I ask him what he thinks about the current storm raging over the BBC – the whole furore around the – some would say cheeky, others offensive – telephone calls made by Russell Brand and Johnathan Ross to actor, Andrew Sachs.

Admittedly entertainment is not Richard’s milieu, and he won’t be drawn, saying, diplomatically: “I’d only want to say something that adds value”.

Sacred Facts has clearly given Richard a great feel for social media. As all of you out there will know, BBC News has an impressive presence across digital media, and Richard is looking for the next big thing to develop.

“The novelty [of social media] has worn off; we’re now in a period of consolidation. 2006 was the year of Facebook. Now, I’m on Twitter more than anything else. But it’s not so much professional. It’s more a back-channel to a group of friends who are interested in the same stuff. Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Seesmic, Threads, 12seconds, Qik – all have a BBC presence. It’s all experimentation, all extending our journalistic reach. We don’t get a huge amount of feedback.”

So, go on – he works hard – make Richard’s day and give him a comment!

Categories
Openness

Like water finds its level

There’s no doubt Horsesmouth is going to be a success. First, it’s a great idea. Second, founder MT Rainey has run a few businesses, and won enough awards, in her time.

After studying psychology at Glasgow University, MT (short for Mary Teresa) took an MSc, then worked in advertising in the late 70s, moving to LA to work for the seminal agency Chiat/Day.

She made her mark planning the launch of the world’s first Apple Mac in 1984. And moved up the ranks before being asked to set up Chiat/Day London in 1989. She was voted UK Advertising’s Woman of The Year the following year.

In 1993, she founded her own agency, Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe, which soon secured top name clients such as Virgin Group, Land Rover and M&S. In 1999, the company was acquired by WPP and merged with Young & Rubicam. MT stayed as joint CEO of RKCR/ Y&R for four years, and then became chair.

In 2005, she left to set up her first social enterprise – Horsesmouth.

And this is where we are now. Sitting in a large, comfortably-furnished room in the Horsesmouth offices, tucked under the eaves of an eighteenth century building in Soho’s Golden Square, on a darkening, chilly November afternoon.

“I became very excited about the power of social media while everyone else was preoccupied with the dotcom boom of Web 2.0,” says MT. “I knew it had great potential…if I’ve learnt anything in life, it’s that everything communicates. There’s a frustration when communication is blocked – social media finds a way.”

The comment makes me think of water. And its ubiquitous, essential, life-bearing properties.

If there’s one thing Horsesmouth enables, it’s hearts-on-sleeves, in-your-face communication. Horsesmouth is a mentoring site – a giant, interactive agony column, helping people share knowledge about life, love, work, whatever else concerns them.

Anyone can register, everyone is anonymous, and the idea is that while you may sign up to get advice, your own life experience can enable you, in turn, to help others.

It’s a virtuous circle, and one which, in true Web 2.0 fashion, makes use of network effects – becoming more useful, more relevant, as the number of users grows.

“On Horsesmouth people bare their souls but it’s not attached to their identity,” says MT. “I can be more authentic if my identity is private. We see people coming across as very liberated on the site – because they can’t be judged.”

Launched in January 2008, the site now has 13,000 registered users and gets 100,000 unique page views a month. Each person lists three topics they can help with, so in theory 40,000 topics are possible.

Horsesmouth is growing slowly, organically by word of mouth (none of your Facebook-esque ‘invite friends’ tactics here). MT wants people to sign up because they’re motivated, not simply because an invite from someone they know has landed in their inbox.

“10,000 was a critical mass for coming up with a result on any search term – now we can do that,” she says, with pride.

The site provides an interesting mirror on society. Since September, they’ve noticed a change in the big themes: ‘Enterprise’, ‘debt’ and ‘relationship stress’ now represent the most popular key words, according to MT.

Working with visionaries such as Steve Jobs and Jay Chiat, and as an excellent strategic planner herself, MT is clearly happiest a few steps ahead of the curve. So, what’s her advice to businesses considering social media as a tool?

“Businesses think it’s happening ‘out there’, that it’s social, that it’s not meaningful. They see it as outside mainstream commerce, but it isn’t.”

“One of the challenges with so much chatter is that you have to sift through it. There’s too much information. Take Tesco Club Cards, for example. You get a negative spiral of irrelevance. Just because I bought nappies doesn’t mean I’m going to buy soup. Companies shouldn’t worry about all that. The web is universal ubiquity combined with pinpoint relevance.”

Above all, she stresses it’s important to accommodate – not ignore – the conversations taking place:

“If people make a negative comment online, then at least it’s out there and everyone can deal with it…Social media can demonise and victimise but that can be dealt with. It isn’t primarily bad or unsafe. Good leaders will be competent. They’ll deal with it.”

Categories
Sharing

From soy sauce to open source

It’s gone 1.30pm and it’s been a long morning. James Governor and I are sitting in the Hanoi Café in London’s Kingsland Road watching the owner’s two daughters run, play and generally get in the way of the ever-smiling kitchen staff as they try to prepare food.

When the Vietnamese waitress finally arrives with plates of steaming Cha Nem Chay (spring rolls), Pho Xao Dau Rau (stir fried tofu) and Dau Xao Sup Lo Xanh (Spicy Broccoli tofu), we tuck in, hungry.

James and I were due to meet earlier but he has had to wait in for a special delivery – which it turns out was DHL coming to pick up his postal vote for the US presidential election. (Anyone who follows James on Twitter will be painfully aware that he’s an American citizen and there was no way he was going to miss his chance to assist an Obama win).

So, over Cha Nem Chay, we get to discuss the merits of open source business.

RedMonk, the industry analysis firm James co-founded in 2002, publishes research papers for free and is 100 per cent funded by ‘supporters’, ‘sponsors’ and ‘patrons’ who pay subscriptions for additional service packages. This is an entirely different model to others in the sector.

“The open source model came out of our frustrations with editing each other’s work,” says James, between mouthfuls. “We just started blogging and thought, let the internet be the editor. We don’t agree with companies writing white papers for vendors. You claim you’re independent but you’re really a PR man. Blogging became a much more natural way of developing our content.

“I am sure some white papers are ok. Mostly we don’t like doing them. When I started RedMonk I used to rail against our industry’s ethics – but these days I prefer to focus on value. I think the internet model, with internet based peer-oriented production, has significant value.

“[Before RedMonk] Software developers and information architects thought they couldn’t actually talk to industry analysts. But that’s exactly where our community is. We’re neither buy side or sell side, we’re ‘make’ side.”

In 2004, James and his partner Stephen O’Grady wrote a paper on compliance-orientated archictecture and published it under a creative commons licence.

“[The IT company] EMC took our paper and built on it, and gave it out to their customers. We told people they were allowed to create derivative works. We never got paid for it. Another company got back to us and said [what you’re doing] is completely changing our business model. That was great. But again we got no money.

“Then, in 2006, Thomas Otter [now Gartner Group, then SAP] got in touch wanting to use one of our papers in a workshop. This eventually led to SAP becoming a client.

“When you’re open in this way, other people become your evangelists. You don’t need a huge sales and marketing team.”

RedMonk is a bit like marmite to the IT industry – people either love it or hate it. Oracle was apparently none too pleased when James and Stephen merged names associated with Microsoft (Redmond) and IBM (Armonk) to christen their new business. And other industry analysts no doubt watch RedMonk’s rise with trepidation.

But James, Stephen, and the new team members, Michael Coté and Tom Raftery (who heads up sustainability initiative, GreenMonk) are popular speakers on the global IT conference circuit. Meanwhile, clients include IBM, Sun, Abobe, Atlassian, BMC, Dell, Eclipse, Loglogic, Microsoft and Redhat.

For James, the recipe is simple:

“We don’t sell content – at least, not white papers – but we sell services around that research. It’s all free, but when people want to take it somewhere else, then they have to pay. We’re out in these networks, without any groupthink, and that’s increasingly valuable.”

Categories
Openness

It’s like changing tyres on a car going 60 miles an hour!

One of my favourite texts at A level was Howards End. A key theme of the book is the pastoral versus the mechanistic. In E.M Forster’s Britain, 100 years ago, the industrial age was at its peak.

By the end of the nineteeth century, an extensive rail network had been built across Britain (interestingly, the expansion of the network caused popular protest not dissimilar to that provoked by the expansion of the UK’s airport terminals today). The first flight in an aeroplane by the Wright Brothers had taken place in 1903. And the large scale manufacturing of motor cars had begun with the introduction of production lines for the Oldsmobile in 1902.

But the ability to travel at high speed was still an anathema to many. People needed to be taught how to look out of the carriages of trains. And, right up until the end of the century, cars were not even permitted on the roads in the UK unless someone walked a few feet ahead of them, waving a red flag.

The sense of unease is reflected in the feelings of Forster’s Howards End’s heroine, Margaret Schlegel, who sees cars and motoring as symbolic of all that is brash and insensitive in a new, more prosaic world. Forster uses typical irony to show Margaret’s distaste as she’s forced to travel in a car:

 “She looked at the scenery. It heaved and merged like porridge. Presently it congealed. They had arrived.” (p.199)

Fast forward 100 years and the theme of nature versus machine is increasingly pertinent – but in ways that Forster and his fellow Edwardians could hardly have imagined.

Three of the world’s biggest car companies, Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, face potential bankruptcy. Market capitalisations and profits have collapsed in the last few months as sales have hit a dramatic low.

The high price of oil, coupled with environmental concerns, has caused a sudden slump in demand for the large, ‘gas guzzling’ cars which the American ‘Big 3’ have excelled in producing. The banking crisis means credit – for companies as well as consumers – is increasingly hard to come by.

It’s 13 November 2008, and I’m reading through recent headlines; the outlook is bleak:

100 days to save the American car industry (Guardian)

Ford and Chrysler resort to new model price cuts (Financial Times)

The end of Detroit: Shape up or ship out (Economist)

US motor industry: the great breakdown (Independent)

Detroit’s big three near the brink (Time)

At Ford, Scott Monty may not be able to save the US car industry single-handedly by using social media, but he’s sure as hell trying.

A few months ago Scott was one of four at Crayon, a tiny (but reputable) digital marketing agency. Now he’s filing a newly-created role at Ford where he’s essentially responsible for the communications behaviour of over 4,000 people.

When Scott speaks to me on the phone from Detroit, he’s typically upbeat:

“The Ford way of doing things is putting our heads down and moving forward with our plans. Alan Mulally [Ford’s new CEO] spent a great deal of time pulling together a team and we’ll put together our plan with or without financial help from government. At the same time we’re also having to support existing projects, it’s like changing tyres on a car going at 60 miles an hour!”

Scott is tasked with creating a social media strategy which will then be a roadmap to help Ford become “a leader in digital communications four or five years from now”. In the meantime, he’s continuing to launch digital marketing campaigns/tools such as Mustang Stories and Ford’s new media relations site.

So, times are hard and cutbacks are inevitable, wasn’t there the slightest bit of resentment when you walked in the door?

“I was completely thrilled at how receptive people were to social media. It was like, wow, you’re finally here!”

In an email follow-up (there’s room for improvement in SkypeOut’s transatlantic connectivity), Scott agrees the current climate isn’t ideal:

“We’re fortunate that social media is not as heavy in production costs, but we’re also aware that we’re constrained by human capital. We’ll do our best to continue the efforts.”

And he suggests the sort of tools that Ford might be using:

“With the advent of many of these social sharing tools through mainstream technology such as Google Docs and wikis, I think there’s natural interest internally. And when you look at enterprise solutions like Microsoft’s Sharepoint, there are ways that more cohesive teamwork is being fostered right now.”

Back on the phone from Detroit, Scott clearly feels he has genuine support from the top of the organisation down:

“From everything I’ve witnessed Alan [Mulally] has social media in his DNA – even though he might not know what a blog is. The day he arrived at Ford, they said, ‘you’re going to need someone to deal with your email’ and he said, ‘yeah, me!’. That’s the sort of guy he is – incredibly hands on.

“There’s another example recently when Alan was sitting in a television studio with a reporter from Bloomberg who told him his mother in law was crazy about the Ford Focus. Alan was really insistent on getting the guy’s mother in law’s postal address so he could send her a handwritten note to say thank you.”

How about the rest of the board?

“[Chairman] Bill Ford’s major passion point is sustainability. He’s always enjoyed the wilderness, the outdoors, and has brought that in as a priority for Ford. You know, Henry Ford was using soya beans as part of the manufacturing process and recycling wooden crates. Our increasing environmental awareness is a return to those roots.”

Bill Ford seems a good figurehead then, at a time when Ford’s environmental responsiveness is being questioned. Such issues are tough to keep on top of in a digital world, but Scott echoes Clay ‘all businesses are media businesses’ Shirky in his approach:

“In corporate communications things move extremely fast. We think in terms of hours and minutes. We’re a news organisation, essentially.”

“In web 2.0, control is gone. Your message is no longer what you say it is. There are risks and opportunities in this. With social media, the message has to be given repeatedly, and in many places. We need an army of ambassadors. But there’s a pervasive attitude of fear – [Ford] employees can’t say what they like on blogs. But would you stay quiet at a dinner party if someone was disparaging your company and you knew them to be wrong?”

Scott is determined to help Ford turn the conversation outwards and not make the same mistakes as, for example, GM – with its essentially corporate, ‘on message’ blog.

It’s early days, but Scott already has strong ideas about the direction in which Ford needs to move. In his follow up email he speaks highly of a more collaborative approach:

“There’s been an amazing openness that’s been demonstrated in social media – the sharing of links, information and knowledge. And collectively, the social media industry is maturing because of it. In a traditional siloed business, knowledge is power; if we can demonstrate the rapid advance of the industry via these sharing platforms – not to mention the concept of Open Source – we can show how quickly such an entity can grow, adapt, and attract a strong fan base.

“It’s still early on in the evolution of the industry, but I think businesses are sincere in their desire to understand it and to communicate with customers in the way the customers want to be spoken to. Ultimately, I see social media being a more integrated part of the way a company communicates, much like email is today. It’s about more than just the tools – it’s a cultural shift in the way companies think.

“Ultimately, it’s the companies that make the leap who will succeed, for in this day and age of more products choice and a flattening of supply chains, customer service will be the differentiating factor. And social media espouses a number of customer service principles.”

As I’ve mentioned on this blog before, Ford and the other companies that dominate the US motor industry are particularly fascinating as, 100 years ago, they provided the cradle for the command-and-control type processes that wrought such change back then – but seem so outmoded today.

It’ll be what Ford does with the voices coming into its organisation that’ll be the most interesting. And from what Scott says, there is some evidence that the company is prepared to listen. Whether or not this may be too late, is another question.

Categories
Miscellaneous

A timely reminder of our universal insignificance

Overheard this on yesterday’s Thought for the Day, and quite liked it:

“From a huge distance, the earth reminded us of a Christmas tree ornament, hanging in the blackness of space. As we got further and further away it shrank to the size of a marble; the most beautiful marble you can imagine.”

From US astronaut James Irwin, 8th man on the Moon (and, strangely enough, nothing at all to do with this David Walliams character in Little Britain USA).