Tag: Leadership 2.0

Categories
Listening

The new digital world order

Tariq Krim is interesting not just because he’s the guy who set up Netvibes, the fully-customisable content aggregator respected by geeks and loved by users, he’s also passionate about politics, which, as we’re frequently being told, isn’t that common with the under 35s.

Okay, so Tariq was 36 last weekend, but let’s not split hairs.

Earlier this year, Tariq was nominated a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and invited to Davos to join discussions around the ‘2030 Initiative’ – the creation of an action plan for how to reach the vision of what the world could be like in 2030.

When we meet up at the Web 2.0 Expo Europe, Tariq tells me it was the discussion on hypercommunication at Davos that he found most fascinating. Sadly we didn’t have much time and I didn’t have a chance to press him on the exact meaning of this (but I’ll get back to you).

Strangely enough for a futurist, Tariq says he often finds himself looking to the US elections for inspiration.

“When I want to see the next shift in marketing I always look at the US election. Politics is always ten years in advance of everything else. Because, simply, you have to beat your opponent.”

So, what’s he been seeing in the current presidential election campaign?

“Barack Obama has built this social network and I’m interested in how he’ll use that after the election. If he gets in it’ll mark a major change in politics. Obama’s money comes from millions of small donations – he will have shown that these people can just as powerful as big corporations.”

For Tariq, the rise to power of Barack Obama, bourne in on the back of three million internet donations, couldn’t come at a more appropriate time.

“The world is going to go digital and all those who don’t play by the new rules are going to get destroyed. There’s going to be an adjustment and it’ll be painful. In 2000 people said this [the internet] is a joke – now it’s a reality check.”

Categories
Knowledge

Another way…

At the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, JP Rangaswami focuses on the history of workplace communication for his keynote, “Web 2.0 versus the Water Cooler”. In typical JP style, the area he covers is broad, comparative and entertaining – and includes everything from ancient manuscripts to train timetables to the Olympic games.

JP is a familiar face to this crowd, as well as a great speaker, and it seems everyone wants a piece of him after the talk. We’re due to meet right after he’s finished, but it’s 45 minutes before JP finally wends his way down to the community lounge for our interview. He’s still in reflective mode:

“In low attrition, low job-mobility environments, there was a genuine covenant. It made sense to have a consensual style of management. You learnt to take a bullet for the team. And your team would remember. Over time, everything evened out. It was thick ice that you skated over. Consensus was built over long-term relationships.”

This ‘covenant’ did not only affect teamwork, it also impacted on performance reviews and appraisals. “There was institutional memory”, as JP puts it. And this memory was responsible for deciding whether or not it the time was right for a pay rise, or if a minor misdemeanor might be overlooked.

“Nowadays you get moved around. How do you get that information to be valuable? How do you deal with this new world? The silo structures of the past didn’t allow us to access information. Maybe you need to have a wiki-like construct, where knowledge becomes a cloud asset?”

In 2001, JP Rangaswami was working as Chief Information Officer at Dresdner Kleinwort, the investment bank, when he decided there had to be a different way of doing things:

“I realised that email was appalling – there were so many ‘broken trust’ implications in it – bcc was evil: ‘I’m going to have a conversation with your boss watching’; cc was ‘cover your arse’ – so I started looking at the problems I had and ways to find solutions to them.”

“Also, I realised, this way of records being attached to messages was the wrong way round. We want messages to be attached to the records. Those were the sort of characteristics I began to look for.”

As Global CIO, JP was responsible for a communications network of 6,000 employees across 35 countries. The way he saw it, the problems at Dresdner Klienwort were caused by four key things:

1. Attrition (the high rate of staff turnover)
2. The high mobility of staff between roles within the firm
3. Cultural differences – the same word meaning different things
4. Linguistic differences – the meaning of words being lost in translation

So, JP started a blog internally, and started championing wikis as a way forward.

“If you capture things using social software…there is a record of how things happened. Now a newcomer has the chance to catch up and understand what’s taken place.”

As a long-time advocate of disruptive technologies, and with a 40 per cent cut to his budget to consider, JP also began to introduce open source products to the company. By 2003, 43 percent of Dresdner Kleinwort’s Unix users were on Linux.

In 2003, JP was named CIO of the Year by Waters Magazine and in 2004 he was named CIO Innovator of the Year by the European Technology Forum. In 2007, Silicon.com chose him as one of technology’s 50 most influential individuals, describing Dresdner Kleinwort as “an aggressive leading-edge adopter of innovative and disruptive technologies”.

Now, JP is a managing director at BT Design, heading up strategy and innovation. If his influence there is anywhere near as successful as his impact at Dresdner Kleinwort, we have some delightful surprises in store.

Categories
Openness

The Grateful Read

Stowe Boyd is something of a celebrity in social media circles. He describes his role as “Front Man for The /Messengers” and, with his confident smile, trademark beret and goatee beard, you could be forgiven for mistaking him for an ageing rock star. Stowe clearly loves the ambiguous play on all this.

“The /Messengers is not a band, although it sounds like one,” he writes on his website. “It’s just is the name I dreamed up for my consulting business back in 2007…I am often asked to bring in other consultants or organizations, which I do gladly and eagerly…I consider myself the front man of a constantly shifting collaborative network, a band of doers and thinkers, designers and developers. Sometimes it’s a solo act, sometimes a duo, and when needed a combo.”

Stowe is, first and foremost, a writer and his blog /Message has around 100,000 RSS subscribers. /Message is Stowe’s fourth blog. His previous blogs were hosted by Blogger, Corante and (the now defunct) Convey. He launched his first back in 1999, before the word ‘blog’ was even familiar to most people.

Sadly, all the content this original blog, Message From Edge City, was lost forever when the host company unexpectedly closed. But another piece of Stowe’s writing from 1999 lives on.

While putting together a newsletter item on a piece of chat software, Stowe unknowingly hit on a phrase that described what would grow to become a whole new class of app: that phrase, “social tools” is now common parlance in the online world.

“It [Abuzz Beehive, subsequently acquired by the New York Times] was a great product,” remembers Stowe. “A Twitter-style chat app using email – way before its time. It was a business tool, but it wasn’t about efficiency or number-crunching. It was about allowing a culture to emerge around sharing. That’s why I coined the term – to describe this new type of approach.”

We’re sitting in the Community Lounge at the Web 2.0 Expo Europe. All around us, MacBooks are humming and bloggers are tapping away. To the right, Frogpond aka Martin Koser is chatting on Jaiku and Twitter; to the left, information architect Johannes Kleske holds court (offline and no doubt on as well) with likeminded geeks.

Take a glimpse at any screen and you can see a whole range of social tools being used – Tweetdeck, Delicious, Dopplr and Xing are just some of the applications on display.

Thinking on this, I ask Stowe about Workstreamr, the start-up he recently founded with two other partners:

“It’s all about the notion of taking ideas of lifestreaming [broadcasting your life 24 hours a day – via either video or real-time updates of blogging, posting, tagging and any other online activity] and putting them into a work context.”

“Snackr, Twhirl, FriendFeed, Flickr, FeedMeme, Digg – this is why I say I need a 30” monitor, to watch all these different streams.”

I get this image of Stowe standing, like Tom Cruise out of Minority Report, in front of a giant screen of activity, furiously touching the surface to locate and pull down items as he needs them.

The sharp economic downturn has halted angel funding but Stowe hopes that the Workstreamr venture will be up and running again soon. Either way, he has plenty of other projects to keep himself occupied. One new piece of work is /ground – a new blog looking at how the web can solve global problems.

“At Reboot in June [where Stowe expressed concern about unfettered economic growth, rising populations and impending ecological catastrophe] I felt like Cassandra. My argument was that we can’t look to the people who’ve led us to the brink to get us out of this. The only tools we have are on the web. We have to look to web culture.”

I push him on what exactly he means by this – what are the implications are for business?

“I believe a new world order is coming. Businesses need to be more open, more porous, more transparent. They need to operate in a way that’s inspired by the web. Businesses need to be more deeply involved with the communities in which they find themselves. That’s a new imperative.

“The other side of this is that consumers will start voting with their feet. It [social media marketing] is so new that people don’t really know what to think of it. Are our business and political leaders really as ‘transparent’ as they make out? For example, the General Motors blog [GM FastLane – where GM executives write about GM products and services] doesn’t talk about real issues at all.

“Another example is John Edwards [the US presidential candidate who came third to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the recent democratic nominations]. He used Twitter, but when his campaign was over, and he’d lost, he didn’t even say ‘goodbye’ to his hundreds of followers.

“People like this are just using these active communities of people as a way to broadcast their message. It’s insincere at best and at worst, totally cynical and exploitative.”

Stowe firmly believes that, ultimately, people will realise that working together for the common good is way more satisfying than individual gain. In fact, he has come up with a name for this phenomenon – Boyd’s Law:

“People are decreasing their involvement in personal productivity. If people give up personal gain for just one moment – even just a minute of their personal time – the network as a whole is more productive. Look at the network effect of one person having a willingness to help.”

I presume by this Stowe means the increased value of a Flickr photo someone has tagged and is then found and used by a high school student, or of a Wikipedia article read and corrected by an expert, to give just two examples.

“We’re moving away from a money-driven, hard capital mindset to a gift-driven, social capital mindset,” says Stowe, and he nods his head in the direction of the geeks and bloggers around us, typing away at their keyboards.

“The people here will always trade personal productivity for network connectivity. Above all, they want to remain connected with the people who are important to them.”

With that, it’s time to get going to the bar – where networking will indeed trump personal productivity and the wily Stowe Boyd will, yet again, be proven right.

Categories
Knowledge

Inverting the Pyramid


I’m in Berlin at the Web 2.0 Expo Europe. A disproportionate amount of my time seems to be spent with people who work at IBM. ‘Big Blue’ is a sponsor here so maybe it’s no surprise that key members of its social media team are popping up all over the place.

I bump into Delphine Remy-Boutang, World-Wide Social Media Marketing Manager, over lunch, and then there’s Stuart J.McRae and the nine other ‘BlueIQ ambassadors’ who’ve been invited along as a reward for spreading the social media gospel around the company’s 500,000 employees.

Meanwhile, corporate email refusenik and blogger extraordinaire, Luis Suarez, is doing a keynote and VP Social Software Programs & Enablement, Gina Poole, is running a session on web 2.0 at work.

It’s standing room only in Gina’s session and I’m a few minutes late so I only get to perch on the steps behind a pillar and listen to her voice – quite a nice voice, as it happens. Gina is telling the story of Jeannette Browning, an IBM employee who was singled out and praised for adapting social software (Lotus Connection Activities/Lotus Notes) to help her sales team, and then was so chuffed by the recognition/ acknowledgement of her efforts that she started creating lots of ‘enablement’ materials to help other IBMers do similar stuff.

As Gina reflects in the Community Lounge afterwards, it’s clear that this kind of ‘social pyramid selling’ is something she loves to be architect of. In her time with the company (and there’s been 25 years of it – she started out as a programmer in 1984), Gina has set up various social media programmes (BlueIQ, promoting social software use internally, is the latest); and launched a start up, (the developerWorks community).

A common factor behind Gina’s projects has been the use of volunteers in driving things forward. This is how she builds momentum and consensus when introducing something new:

“Run a pilot programme. Get a few dedicated people on board – some early adopters and enthusiasts. Make them the ‘poster children’ of your campaign. Make them the rock stars. Don’t just evangelise the project, say ‘look at what it did for this individual’. Success breeds success.”

Charming, softly spoken and clearly a lover of people, Gina appears to be the Craig Newmark of IBM. So, how would she describe her leadership style?

“More pure leadership than command and control. It’s more carrot than stick. I want to make sure I’m hiring the best people and then create an environment for them to succeed.

“In the old management era, knowledge was power. Now in the social era you want to unleash the knowledge. The powerful person is the one who can lead by influence. You don’t need a big budget and lots of direct reports. You’re managing more of a matrix. Listening is very important.”

And why has social media become so important to her?

“People like to share – that’s one of the most powerful things. This sharing creates ‘weak ties’ you can build on. I’m interested in helping people get outside of their inboxes [echoing the IBM mantra kicked off by Luis Suarez]. People start mixing and matching things in ways that management would never dream of.

“The end result of bringing projects together, that serendipitous stumbling across things is very powerful. Like connecting the dots. It’s a great way to break down silos: ‘oh, you’re doing that, so am I. Let’s work together’…things tend to go in directions you’d never expect.”

Things were very different when Gina started at IBM back in the 1980s:

“When I joined IBM it was very hierarchical and things moved very slowly. It was tough for good ideas to bubble up. We went through a near-death experience. Then Lou Gerstner came in. That [near-death experience] was a great catalyst for a change in focus.

“Management became much more participatory. We turned the management pyramid on its side and then on its head. Now we’re really harnessing creative capital and social capital.”

Categories
Knowledge

And the next big thing is…

It’s only 9am but already Tom Coates is having a stressful day. He relocated to San Francisco from the UK six months ago and this weekend his entire family are coming to visit. Last night, his parents flew in from London. In a few hours, he has to pick up his younger brother from the airport. In between he has a few hours to tidy the apartment. And then he has to find the time to speak to me.

I only know all of this because I’ve been reading Tom’s Twitter updates. During our Skype chat, Tom’s politeness personified, and there’s no mention of all this other stuff. Maybe because he’s already vented his stress via Twitter. Still it’s quite weird, seeing a 360 degree picture of someone you’ve never met.

Tom’s not only busy at home; he’s also incredibly busy at Yahoo, where for the last 18 months he’s been developing start-up projects as part of the Brickhouse – Yahoo’s “skunkworks”. He’s currently head of product on Fire Eagle.

Needless to say, he still finds time to blog, and to think about “being progressive and doing something new”, which is his remit at the Brickhouse.

I thought you might like to know that, right now, Tom is particularly interested in three things:

1. Social software – communication and collaboration
2. Decentralisation (my paraphrase – sorry, I need to read the transcript)
3. The web of data

“There are larger trends at work in this industry but you can get confused by the froth at the top,” says Tom. “The social software big shift, intellectually is, I think, kind of exhausted. We’re seeing it everywhere – at scale in Facebook, creeping into business…

“The web of data is newer, more exciting. [But] all of these things predated Web 2.0. Tim [O’Reilly] used Web 2.0 to describe trends he was already seeing. You give things labels so you can handle them.

“Four or five years ago, what was really exciting was the things we saw as personal being taken public. These things become big entities in themselves. Look at Flickr – it’s now a repository of 2.9 billion photos.”

Exactly. We never know where these things are going to lead, do we? And that’s what makes it all so *exciting*.

Categories
Listening

David Weinberger on Obama


It’s early October and I’m speaking to David Weinberger over Skype between London and Boston. With just a month to go between one of the more exciting US presidential elections in living memory, I’m interested to know what David thinks of Barack Obama’s leadership style and, in particular, Obama’s use of the web.

“If Obama wins, we’ll be looking back on this as the ‘Internet election’,” says David. “There’s a very good chance he will win because of the new voter registration and the ground organisation that he’s done to get people out to vote…if he does win, this will be the election that the Internet won.

“Obama is a really interesting case study…it’s this mix of top down and rigorous control of the message. On one hand, very traditional. The same press secretaries, the same small set of people who are allowed to speak on behalf of the candidate. Still driven from the top.

“And you still have a leader who speaks in elevated rhetoric. In my view, he speaks magnificently and not in the folksy, common way of the Internet. In that respect, Sarah Palin speaks much more like a regular human being…but many people are happily deferring to Obama’s rhetoric.

“At the same time you have a campaign that is setting up social networks for its users and engaging in the existing social networks.”

Yes, the online network is interesting. I remember reading an article in Time a few months ago which mentioned Obama’s fund-raising. It seems he’s essentially used long-tail economics to raise funds. A sidebar to the Time article noted that Obama raised over 1m in small (eg $10) donations, matching and eventually over-taking the amount raised by Clinton from her much smalller pool of wealthy funders. This, according to the article, was why he won the democratic nomination.

I mention this to David and he points out an additional strategy developed by the Obama campaign – involving the setting up of matching funds:

“The Obama campaign lets anyone set up a matching fund, so you can offer 100 dollars and the campaign will find two or more people to match it. So these people get to feel that they’re doubling their money.

“This is unique in itself, but the neater thing about it is that you can choose to publish an email address and a message to the people who are matching your money, and then you end up in conversation with other supporters – you’re donating, they’re donating – you thank each other . It’s a very direct connection. It’s very Cluetrain-like and I think it’s actually sort of thrilling.”

The Internet Election, eh? We’ll keep our fingers crossed!

Categories
Listening

It’s all about we not me

A few years ago Barry Libert co-authored a book, We Are Smarter Than Me, which he now uses as a base for his seminars.

Barry is Chairman of Mzinga, a corporate software company. We Are Smarter Than Me is about ‘old style’ versus ‘new style’ management. The central tenet is that traditional CEOs only think of themselves, whereas modern (post-modern?) mangers include the whole team in decision-making and other processes.

I meet Barry at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York where he’s giving his talk. Barry gives many anecdotes but the one I like best is his reasoning as to why Hilary Clinton lost the Democratic nomination: did you notice that Hillary ‘follows’ 0 people on Twitter while Barack ‘follows’ more than are following him?

Of course, we all know Barack doesn’t spend his entire day tracking the minutiae of 95,323 people online. Clearly he has better things to do. But it’s the principle of the thing, and what a simple ‘one click’ way to reinforce your support base (I was dead excited when a message entitled “Barack Obama is now following you on Twitter” dropped into my inbox – my loyalty upped on the spot).

This is just one great example of ‘we’ not ‘me’ thinking.

But, chatting to Barry a few days later on Skype, I find he’s not sure that businesses are ready for a new type of leadership – or certainly that’s not what they think they’re looking for: “If you want to be like Salesforce or SAP you fundamentally have to change the way the world works…but it’s bite-sized steps.”

Mzinga’s VP Social Media, Aaron Strout, who’s also in on the chat, agrees:

“We have to take that [leadership] concept and boil it down…managers tend to love the speech Barry does, but they want the practical crowd-sourcing stuff.”

Barry sees Mzinga’s approach as more “tactical” than revolutionary. For a start, he says, this management approach that us social media types may be evangelistic about (networked leadership, distributed leadership etc), doesn’t even have a proper name:

“I’m worried about all these words because they all come with prior definitions, prior explanations. You might argue that for example America is a democracy but it’s a whole other version of command and control…if it isn’t command and control to call our president the commander in chief then I don’t know what is…I think that these old words, distributed and democratic mean other things to most people.

“What you’re meaning is that leadership really does get distributed to the crowd, that people really do participate…I think ‘democratic’ or ‘distributed’ are dangerous words. With distributed and democratic, people think, ‘oh well, I’ve already got one of those companies, I’ve already got one of those leaders.”

So what term would Barry and Aaron like to use?

“The closest we’ve come to is ‘facilitated’ leadership,” says Aaron.

“I quite like ‘followership’,” says Barry. “As in how do you ‘follow’ other people to make them feel good…but no, I don’t think we’ve really come up with an answer to that one yet.”

But Barry himself come up with a nice description a couple of minutes later. It seems Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs might be as good a place as any to grab an apt adjective:

“I’m sort of a Maslovian…when you become self-actualised, you spend all your time giving back. You help people become self-actualised by supporting them.”

Categories
Knowledge

Close to the tipping point?

It’s a Friday afternoon and there’s this big web conference, Remix UK, going down in Brighton. Sadly, I’m stuck at my desk in London, battling a backlog. But I get to watch the conference back-chat on Twitter: half the people I follow seem to have defected to the seaside for the day.

Around 5pm a tweet from James Governor comes in, saying he’s just had a nice glass of wine with a great guy called Stewart Mader. Now if James recommends someone or something, they (it?) is probably worth looking into. So I click on the link James gives and find Stewart’s website. Looks interesting, so I message him.

And that’s how Stewart and I come to be here, chatting on Skype, a couple of Fridays later.

It turns out consulting is Stewart’s second career. He once was a chemist, but got sidetracked:

“I was lecturing at the University of Hartford; we put our curriculum on the web and told people about it. They sent so many suggestions and changes, the [web]site became a bottleneck. I started looking around for some way to open it up and I stumbled upon wikis. I put one up as an experiment. Within a few months the html site was gone and everything was on the wiki.”

That was back in 2002, now Stewart runs a company called “Grow Your Wiki” which helps clients (the majority of them Fortune 500 companies) navigate their ways through the potentially murky waters of corporate social media.

The issues Stewart comes across are “social, cultural and generational”. He defines his key concerns as follows:

    1. For people who’ve worked in organisations for a decade or more, they think ‘oh there’s this army of [younger] tech savvy people coming in’ and, for that older generation, they find they don’t pick up the tools so easily so you get a fair amount of fear and frustration. One of the things I like to do is champion mutual mentoring. So you get the older person with the wealth of experience about the organisation, and the younger person with the technical knowhow, and they help each other.

    2. Employees hear all the popular cultural obsessions around Wikipedia and become concerned about all wikis being a free-wheeling anarchic mess. I have a very complex opinion of Wikipedia – it’s created a massive misconception around what a wiki can be. Wikipedia is totally open, with no security around it. People look at Wikipedia and think they don’t want that within their organisation. But wiki use inside an organisation and Wikipedia are two completely separate worlds. Giving concrete examples of wikis that work inside organisations makes a lot of difference.

    3. Rank and file employees are often afraid that if they put all their knowledge into a wiki, they won’t be needed any more but the opposite is true. If you hold onto your knowledge, all you are is an overpaid security guard. Once you start sharing your knowledge and collaborating with other people you become more valuable to your company. You’re more likely to have your job outsourced when you’re not contributing knowledge.

    4. Senior management is largely changing right now. At Enterprise 2.0 in Boston there were a number of senior execs (Wachovia, CIA, IBM, SAP, Chevron, University of Helsinki) talking of the promotion of web 2.0 throughout their companies. The embracing of tools is there. The question is not should we use these but how can we optimise these? Two years ago it was different. I think we’re close to a tipping point.

    5. Cultural change is necessary. The ideal is to run a pilot with a group of employees and pass on lessons from that. Successful wiki adoption happens at the lunch table. If you chat to a guy you have lunch with every day and he talks about using the wiki and says ‘meetings are shorter, we’re getting more done’, that creates real change.

Categories
News

Social Media Maven

I’m gutted to say that I’d never heard of JP Rangaswami before July, but then there was Euan Semple up on stage interviewing him at 2gether08 so he clearly must be someone pretty special.

Funnily enough, I’d never heard of The Cluetrain Manifesto either until June (and me going to business school and everything), so seeing JP up on stage being asked about the Cluetrain Manifesto was a kind of double whammy. Needless to say, I took copious notes, which I then managed to delete. I did keep hold of the snaps though.

JP is Managing Director, Service Design for BT Design at BT. I agree, that title is a little scary and not immediately descriptive. Probably the three most important things you need to know about JP is that (1) Silicon.com named him one of the world’s top ten CIOs in 2007, that (2) he loves to blog and that (3) he had nouse enough to get out of investment banking (he was CIO, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein) at a Very Good Time.

JP’s blog has been running for two and a half years and just this week features topics as diverse as sleeping out with the homeless for a night in London and the progress of a 26 year old Colombian, Camilo Villegas, in international golf.

I’m hoping to catch JP speak again in a couple of weeks, this time at the Web 2.0 Expo Europe (I’ll be sure to use autosave). His theme is Web 2.0 versus the Watercooler and he’ll be looking at how the ways in which we communicate at work are changing.

The strand is strategy and business models, so I imagine JP will focus more on cultural and managerial approaches than allow himself to get too bogged down in specific (BT branded) technologies. Let’s hope so. I’ll be there on the sidelines cheering him on.

Categories
Openness

Blogs, wikis and automobiles

It’s lunchtime on the last day of the Web 2.0 Expo New York and I’m feeling a little deflated.

My fellow Brits aka the Digital Mission have vanished, leaving just some dog-eared Union Jack fliers and a few crumbs of shortbread.

All interview requests have either been fulfilled, ignored or postponed til everyone’s back in the real world (ie, on Skype) next week. The Microsoft lunch is the same grim fare as previous days, though today lacking the surprise factor.

Luckily, I have the lovely Johanna Cherry to keep me company, otherwise I would probably forego the afternoon sessions altogether and head back home on the ‘L’ to Greenpoint.

We’re reminising about our week and speculating what might have happened after we bailed out of Gary Vaynerchuk’s Wine 2.0 party the previous night, when Shannon Paul comes up out of nowhere, sits down and says hello.

Shannon works in PR in Detroit, which, as it happens, turns out to be very interesting. Detroit, of course, is the home of the US motor industry, one of the developed world’s oldest and most traditional surviving industries. This sector was the cradle of Fordism and a propagator for Taylorism. How is it adapting to the challenges it’s facing now?

Shannon is the only person at her PR firm to specialise in social media and works hard with clients to get them up to speed. But new technologies and approaches can only be introduced in subtle ways. It’s a tough, steep learning curve.

She recommended I look at the blog written by Rick Wagoner, CEO of General Motors, and also speak to Scott Monty, head of Social Media at Ford. I tweeted Scott Monty today. Hopefully he’ll get back to me.

Thanks for the leads Shannon!