Tag: Leadership 2.0

Categories
Knowledge

The house that Tim built

It’s September 2008 and I’m on Manhattan’s West Side, standing in the foyer of the massive, aircraft hangar-like Javits Centre. The centre backs onto the Hudson River in an otherwise nondescript, rather run-down corner of the City. No matter. This ain’t no sightseeing trip. I’m one of 5,000 people attending the inaugural Web 2.0 Expo New York. There are workshops to go to and seminars to be had. There is endless coffee and cookies and even little packed lunches, served up courtesy of Microsoft.

When Tim O’Reilly’s colleague Dale Dougherty coined the term Web 2.0 back in 2004, and Tim picked it up as a useful meme to throw out to O’Reilly conference audiences, they had little idea how the concept would spread like wildfire through the digital media world.

The term ‘Web 2.0’ came at a time when there was a resurgence in optimism around the web and its capabilities, post the dotcom bust of 2000/01. The phrase isn’t allied to any specific technology, it’s more a hypernim or ‘handle’ (thanks Tom Coates) to capture the various trends that were happening at the time; these were (and still are) creating a shift in the way we use the web.

When I bump into Tim in the Javits foyer at the Web 2.0 Expo, he invites me to come with him as he heads to the hall to rehearse his keynote.

After the run-through, we get some time to sit and chat in front of the main stage. I ask Tim how the whole Web 2.0 idea came about:

“The original idea was that the web was ‘back’,” says Tim. “And we were asking, what are the new rules of business? Those new rules were network effects: you design applications that get better the more people use them, then the applications that work get the most user data. The winners are those that harvest collective intelligence: Amazon, Google…Google is actually harvesting the intelligence of all users.”

So, what does business need to do, today, to make the most of the web’s capabilities?

“Enterprise needs to learn real-time responsiveness to its users. Banks have a tremendous amount of data about their users – but they don’t share it with us. For example, look at the great things being done on Wesabe [a kind of personal finance wiki – you upload your entire bank account and credit card info, and get advice from other users on your spending habits]. Every business needs to be thinking about what data assets it owns and how it can use them.”

What’s wrong with the current business mindset?

“Firstly, that you do things in the back office. Everything should be automated [and tracked]. Companies really need to automate more services and really upgrade their IT staff.”

Tim goes onto explain that all this automation doesn’t mean there can’t be human intervention, if necessary (apparently Google had to intervene manually when its algorithmic search listing for O’Reilly caused O’Reilly Auto Parts and not O’Reilly Media to dominate the front page).

“Secondly, organisations need to be restructured around IT services, like the best Web 2.0 companies. Amazon, for example, has a whole team dedicated to the efficient functioning of the ‘buy’ button.”

“Some businesses are ahead of Web 2.0 in terms of automation. There can be too much of it. Look at what’s happening to the financial markets now. All this was predicted in Richard Bookstaber’s book, The Demon of Our Own Design.”

Who does O’Reilly really admire in business today?

“Look at the growth of Zappo’s [the online shoe store]. It recently hit revenues of $1billion. Tony Shieh, the CEO, has become a hero.

“Jeff Bezos [Amazon.com] is very strategic. He’s thought a lot about how the world is going to change. Who’d have thought that getting into cloud services would make sense, but Amazon web services (providing hosting to Flickr etc) has become a great sideline.”

Needless to say, both Shieh and Bezos are friends.

It’s likely that, in time, the group of very clever people that O’Reilly, Bezos and Shieh form a part of will come up with another very clever label to acutely describe a future zeitgeist.

A few of half-hearted souls tried to push something called ‘Web 3.0’ at the New York Expo. I’m relieved to say it didn’t take off.

Categories
Passion

Life on Mars

37 Signals CEO and founder Jason Fried has been working since he was 13.

“My parents sent me to work at a grocery store. I’ve always worked. I guess I learnt to love working.”

But after completing his college degree (in finance, since you ask), three or four months into working a big company, it dawned on Jason that corporate life just wasn’t for him.

“I decided I wasn’t fit for that sort of environment…I just can’t stand red tape and bureaucracy. There’s a tendency to add hierarchies and levels of management to projecst that don’t need it. Why start off by assuming that everything’s going to go wrong?”

He went freelance (as a designer) and after a short space of time, age 24, decided to start up a company with two friends.

It was 1999. Jason and his co-founders decided to name the company 37signals after the number of signal sources from space which remain “unidentified” at that time.

They wrote a 37 point manifesto which includes truisms such as “Choose to do one thing and do it right” (No.4), “Don’t keep them waiting or they’ll leave and never return” (No.13), “It’s better to tell a short story well than a long one poorly” (no.16), “Corporations don’t use websites, people do” (22) and “Don’t just do something because everyone else is doing it” (28).

Nearly ten years on, 37signals holds true to its beliefs. One thing the company is widely respected for is its simplistic approach to problem-solving.

A favourite maxim is “Bloat is bad”. And this reflects in the company structure: despite being a leading provider of software to the developer market, the business employs just 12 people.

Clearly, recruitment is key. How do they approach it?

“We’re quite established so there’s a big element of self selection,” says Jason. “Our culture is pretty ‘out there’, clear…transparent.”

“What was the last thing you learned?” is a favourite question to ask in interviews.

With regard to getting people to be passionate about working for the company, Jason just expects them to be themselves:

“We’ve one guy who doesn’t sware. He’s very quiet and very religious. But he’s true to himself, and he fits in brilliantly.”

In an effort to help people be themselves, 37signals gives financial support to extra-curricular activities, “whether it’s flying lessons or whittling”. Each employee also gets a corporate credit card which can be spent on personal activities.

“People ask, what will you do when you employ 50 people? You can’t give them ALL a credit card?! But I say, it works now, why worry? If we decide it’s not working in the future, we can change it. Nothing is set in stone.”

Ricardo Semler is “an idol”, as well as James Dyson.

Jason believes in trusting people as far as possible, and not filling their days with cc-ing and directives.

“The latest thing bothering me about business is that I hear about friends with work days full of meetings and emails. They can’t get anything done! People don’t have to be in the office for 8 hour days – or longer. [I believe you should] get the work done – and get out!”

And what if someone’s struggling with a project?

“If what you’re doing is too hard, cut it in half. Always scale back scope. Don’t throw more people at it. Instead, deliver half of what you expected to do.”

It’s working life, Jim, but not as we know it.

Categories
Listening

Local Hero

It’s a bright, crisp September morning and I’m walking up and down Cole Street, on the Western edge of San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district, looking in shop windows, taking photos and generally killing time before my next appointment.

On the opposite side of the street, a short, slightly portly man in a grey jacket and beret is offering treats to a short, slightly portly dachshund. The dachshund jumps up politely as each new treat is offered, tail wagging.

“There you go, Coco,” says the man.

I step over to say hello, because I recognise the man as Craig Newmark. A discussion has ensued between Craig and Coco’s owner as to whether or not the dog is overweight.

Coco looks healthy – glossy, even – and I’m sure Craig’s treats are harmless. After all, this is a man who has built his reputation (and, no doubt, some fortune) on customer-satisfaction.

An hour later, when I meet Craig Newmark again (this time for our scheduled chat at his local, The Reverie Café), he’s still worried about the neighbourhood dogs.

“I’ve run out of treats,” he laments and pats his pockets, fruitlessly.

Conversation with Craig is peppered with asides like this. His attention is easily diverted, sometimes by a real-time interruption, sometimes when a pressing thought appears to cross his mind.

You get the impression that his charming unpredictability was just one of the factors that made Craig decide early on that maybe he wasn’t right to run a global business. Conversely, Craig’s interest in others is what made Craigslist the enormous success it is today.

Craig started craigslist back in 1995 as an online listings service for the San Francisco area. By the end of 1997 the site was getting 1m page views per month. By 1999, the service was doing so well, Craig incorporated it as a business.

“I did a mediocre job [as CEO] for about a year. Then I realised Jim [Buckmaster] was much better at it than me. It was a major act of ego releasing – and a little bit scary. But we’ve figured out how to work together – it keeps changing. I’ve learnt a lot of tough lessons along the way.”

Like Ross Mayfield at Socialtext, Craig realised that for his company to reach its full potential, he needed to step aside. He retains the title of Founder, but now works solely in the area that interests him most – customer services.

Craig’s corporate philosophy is very much centred around listening to what others are saying, and keeping channels of communication open, both inside and outside the company:

“Consumers and line workers are the people who know how the business should run. The people who are good at climbing up the ladder, that’s their key skill – this is why hierarchies are dysfunctional. It’s very important to try to stay flat.”

Craigslist is unusual for a global company in that much of the work is done by volunteers (the pro-active members of the online user community): “The user community runs the site. That way it’s connected more to the people it’s serving.” In fact, the original craigslist office in San Francisco still only employs 25 people.

Craig believes that good customer service – and employee relationships – is what keeps his employees, volunteers and customers coming back:

“My advice is to do something that people can honestly believe in. That’s how it works. We realised early on that the term ‘culture of trust’ embodied what we do.”

One of the things Craig did early on was ban banner ads from the Craigslist site; he sees no need to kowtow to commercial pressures if they don’t chime with the underlying nature of the business.

“A company can be very successful by doing the right thing.”

As for Craig himself, he fact he has stepped aside as CEO now means he has more time to focus on the things that really matter to him. The success of craigslist means he’s in demand for media interviews, and regularly invited to speak at conferences worldwide.

Craig acknowledges that he has a public role to play:

“I feel like I’m having an extended 15 minutes of fame. For some reason, people listen to me, so I might as well have something useful to say. There are causes that need people to stand up for them.”

So, Craig speaks on behalf of the Iraq and Vietnam war veterans, supports Barack Obama and advocates Spinewatch, a campaign set up by journalist Jay Rosen to encourage the US media to be more critical (where necessary) of the US Government.

Despite all this, Craig remains typically self-depreciating:

“If you think I’m a celebrity, you need to get out more!”

Categories
Knowledge

Keystone Corps

It’s a bright, sunny afternoon at the Googleplex, Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.

In between the white and glass buildings that house the offices, swathes of green grass and neatly trimmed hedges offer relaxing spaces to chill out or eat lunch in. Red, blue and yellow umbrellas and seating add a Google-branded completeness to the landscape.

Every so often a Googler speeds past on a bright yellow JacMac Scooter, off to the next meeting or, possibly, one of Google’s many free talks – maybe a ‘Google University’ lecture, a “TechTalk” or an Authors@Google seminar (this week it’s Sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson).

You won’t see many cars here. But there is space for nearly 2,000 of them underground. The 26 acre Googleplex includes public trails and a 5 acre public park – a spirit of space and leisure pervades.

I’m looking out on all this from the corner cafeteria of “Building 47”, where I’m sitting with Matt Glotzbach, Product Management Director, Google Enterprise. Even indoors, it’s impossible to forget where you are. Red, green, blue and yellow prevails – cups, plates, noticeboards, chairs and, even, lava lamps.

With all the buzz around Chrome and Android, it’s hard to imagine that just a few years ago, when Matt started, Google didn’t do “apps”. Search and advertising (AdWords and AdSense) were the only products.

“Enterprise has always been in the strategy. It got delayed because of the ad side going stratospheric. Now there’s been a refocus. Enterprise is the second largest business at Google, behind the ads. And I like to say that we’re going to create the second ‘large’ business.”

Indeed, if Google Enterprise produces anything even half as successful as Adwords (which generated $16.4billion revenue in 2007), Matt and his colleagues will no doubt be very happy bunnies.

“There’s a culmination of events that make this the right time for apps,” says Matt. “Internet connectivity is almost ubiquitous, and cloud computing has hit a maturity point”

Ah yes, the cloud. Although there are disadvantages (see Bill Thompson’s piece on security), cloud computing is seen by many as the next big leap forward for the internet industry. And if the cloud is where the action is going to be for the foreseeable future, Google has an enviable share of it.

Google certainly seems to exemplify what Marco Iansiti and Roy Levien describe as the “keystone advantage” – this term is taken directly from biological ecosystems where “keystone” species are those that maintain the healthy functioning of the entire system because their own survival depends on it. Google is positioned not only to help foster the health of the system, its lynchpin role means that it benefits more than most from that system’s good health.

“Because every transaction is performed through the Google platform, the company has perfect, continuous awareness of, and access to, by-product information and is the hub of all germinal revenue streams. There’s no need for Google to do market surveys and statistical analyses to forecast trends in the ecosystem; the information is already in Google’s database.” (Iyer, Bala & Davenport, Thomas H., Reverse Engineering Google’s Innovation Machine, Harvard Business Review Article, 1 April 2008, pp.5-6)

See also Umair Haque’s recent piece on Chrome for a great analysis of the inclusive strategy of the launch behind Google’s new browser.

This full use of network effects helps make Google a definitive “web 2.0” company.

Furthermore, Google is in the enviable position of being seen as trustworthy by its users, as it doesn’t need to do anything underhand to obtain this invaluable information. Unlike other large monopolistic companies, Google is unusual in that it is generally liked and respected by its user base (“if we ever lost user confidence, we’d cease to exist in a very short time”, agrees Matt).

As for that “keystone” position, Matt nods his head: “We’ve become a big brand, a household name. We’re a mainstay, a staple, in all our users lives.”

This pole position in the ecosystem has another core advantage – Google has a continued ability to attract key talent:

“The team here are fantastic. In any company, there’s always a risk the team will get watered down but, if anything, the opposite seems to have happened here. The company has grown enormously since I arrived – we’ve gone from 2,000 to 20,000 in four years.”

Like many successful companies, Google has a notoriously drawn out hiring process. The company has to make absolutely sure that any new hires are going to be absolutely right for the fast-paced, intensively innovative environment – and help sustain Google’s competitive advantage into the future:

“It’s tempting to hire people with a long history of success but you can’t tell what the world will look like in five years time.”

Today, says Matt, Google’s sheer weight of users and its advertising income combine to enable it to watch – and follow – virtually every trend on the horizon. The business looks – at this stage – invincible.

With policies such as the “20% rule” (where developers spend 20% of their time working on their own projects – Gmail came out of this) and the famous “do no evil” mission statement, both part of the culture from day one, Google proves itself to be a textbook innovator.

“One of the things embodied at Google is empowerment,” says Matt. “A governance model and corporate structure do exist, but their impact is subtle. People want to be empowered and Google is lucky: we got to start out [offering empowerment] and then maintain it as we got bigger.”

And Matt is finding that his enterprise clients now want that sort of ‘flavour’ as part of their IT infrastructure:

“This Millennial Generation – Generation Y – grew up with openness and sharing as values. Now we’re seeing the other side of that – companies want to bring Google apps into their businesses – because their Generation Y employees are used to working with them.”

Categories
Passion

One to watch

Chanel Realegeno’s parents were both entrepreneurs, so she thinks it’s only natural she should be one too. At 19, she’s already secured US$250,000 of funding (from a VC she found on LinkedIn) and is about to launch her first company, Tyro Jobs.

Chanel is a student at California State University, Chico. Appropriately enough, she’s studying Entrepreneurship. She reads about my book online, borrows a car, and drives 200 miles down to Los Altos, where I’m staying, to talk about leadership.

“When I set up the company, I sat down with my business partner and asked, ‘What sort of bosses do we want to be? Do we want to run this company in the traditional way?’ “ says Chanel.

One thing she decided early on was that it’d be best just to let people work when they wanted to, as long as the work gets done: “I don’t think my generation wants to work a typical eight hour day.”

When she was looking for holiday work recently, Chanel was frustrated by the lack of dedicated websites: “too many of them were offering cr*p jobs, like envelope stuffing”. The idea behind Tyro Jobs is to give university and college students a trusted source of interesting and relevant work opportunities: “ideally, only quality jobs”.

Appropriately, “tyro” is Latin for novice or beginner. Sign up here for the pre-beta Tyro Jobs launch.

Categories
Listening

The wrong sort of feedback

There’s a clutch of jokes that comes around perennially in the UK when our National Rail service starts to blame any type of delay or cancellation on the weather. One year, a platform announcer accused the “wrong sort of snow” of causing trains to run late.

As the UK’s rail network fears the “wrong sort” of weather, so companies are terrified of the “wrong sort” of feedback. Praise and benign comments are all very well, but things can go haywire if a customer suggests a solution that doesn’t chime with the corporate master-plan.

Salesforce.com has built a reputation on managing customer relationships efficiently. It offers more than 800 applications – the flagship product is a web-based “sales force automation” service which provides “streamlined” CRM. It’s difficult to make automated services sound exciting, but the simple interface Salesforce offers has caused quite a stir.

The company’s headquarters are in San Francisco’s Financial District, alongside the banking and corporate offices, and just off the Embarcadero (waterfront), handy for the trendy market stalls and shops in the city’s renovated ferry terminal.

Lorna Li has a pretty cool job at Salesforce.com. She’s Web Marketing Manager (social media and social networking) – which I guess means she gets to spend most of her day surfing around on social networks, upping the profile of Salesforce.com and generally chit-chatting with as many people as possible. Salesforce.com is a ‘Web 2.0’ company, so interesting conversations must be permitted.

Lorna arranges to meet me in the wine bar in the old ferry terminal. She’s running a few minutes late but luckily the bar staff have spotted my London accent and are doing their best to make me feel at home.

When Lorna arrives, we settle down to talk social media over a couple of glasses of local Napa Valley wine and some Cowgirl Creamery cheese.

Lorna tells me abut MyStarbucksIdea and Dell’s IdeaStorm, both built on Salesforce.com’s Ideas platform.

Apparently, some users of IdeaStorm started asking for Linux on their PCs. Dell, convinced that this was only a minority concern, introduced a “vote down” button in order that other users might demote the issue; this backfired when users voted down, instead, a whole raft of other topics.

As one tech blogger commented, “what’s the point of seeking ideas and feedback if you’re going to delete ”merge” the ones you don’t like?”

Categories
Sharing

Sharing = love

In between the more classic songs (Jerusalem, etc) that we had to sing at my Church of England primary school, there was a happy clappy number which used to have my class teacher, Mrs Prentice, bopping from side to side in her purple kaftan (okay, so we quite liked it, too).

“Love is like a magic penny, hold it tight and you won’t have any, lend it, spend it and you’ll have so many, they’ll roll all over the floor.”

There is a similar sort of phenomenon at work on the web today. A culture of “I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine”.

The academic, Clay Shirky, uses the term “social capital”, which he defines in this way:

“When your neighbour walks your dog while you are ill, or the guy behind the counter trusts you to pay him next time, social capital is at work. It is the shadow of the future on a societal scale. Individuals in groups with more social capital (which is to say, more habits of cooperation) are better off on a large number of metrics, from health and happiness to earning potential, than those in groups with less social capital.” (Here Comes Everybody, p.192)

Socialtext’s Ross Mayfield puts it into a commercial context:

“Steven Weber [University California, Berkeley] points out that there is no such thing as a buy vs. build equation for deciding to share intellectual property. But we’ve a version of Socialtext that’s free for up to five users. We can afford to give that away.”

Socialtext doesn’t disclose how many of the 4,000+ companies it serves use only the free version, but Ross is clearly seeing the strategy reap rewards.

As another example, Ross points to the success of WikiHow – one of the most-used wikis on the web:

“A while ago Jack Herrick (WikiHow’s founder) decided to start using a Creative Commons licence. He can send you a graph where you can see massive growth take place at the point where he changed the licence.

“That’s Web 2.0 – how sharing control can create value. We’re seeing more transparency. We’re seeing a culture of sharing versus one of hoarding… we’re shifting from a need to know culture to a need to share culture.”

Ross points me to a recent blogpost by a member of the US State Department which sums this up nicely.

With even established US government organisations as the CIA (Intellipedia) and US State Department (Diplopedia) now using wikis, it’s surely only a matter of time before everyone starts “sharing”.

But sharing needs to be done in the right spirit to work properly.

Purple-clad “Mrs.Prentices” the world over will be watching!

Categories
Knowledge

Mixing pleasure with business

Socialtext founder Ross Mayfield works out of an unassuming office in downtown Palo Alto, a couple of blocks away from the Caltrain station (if you listen hard, you can hear the trains clanging) and a stone’s throw from the sprawling Stanford University campus.

Like just about everywhere else in Silicon Valley, Socialtext’s low-tech surroundings are a foil for the hi-tech business taking place. People talk on the phone about ‘mikis’ (mobile wikis) and ‘webinars’ (online seminars) as if these were common words in the English language. ‘Wiki Wednesday across the way’ is scrawled in faded marker pen across the reception whiteboard.

After a few minutes, Ross appears. He’s the first company chairman I’ve seen wearing shorts – ever. Admittedly it’s 28 ºC today. We go outside to sit a shady spot under a couple of Cypress trees, partly so I can make the most of the weather, partly so that Ross can have a cigarette.

Ross co-founded Socialtext, ‘the world’s first wiki company’ in 2002. What made him feel that this type of social media could work in business?

“So much interesting stuff was happening in the social space [at that time]. Adrian from Ryze was putting on loft parties and wanted to connect the people who went to them; Ben and Mena Trott from Six Apart, Evan Williams from Blogger…they all created tools to scratch an itch, to interact with friends from a community. The guy who invented Trillian [instant messaging between different networks] did it simply to connect with a girl he had met on a beach.

“It was just after the [dotcom] crash and a lot of people had been made redundant and I guess had time on their hands. The thing is, these [new] tools had better social dynamics, and they were lightweight and easy to use compared to the clunkier enterprise systems.”

Ross and his co-founders were keen to take that simplicity and apply it to business. For two and half years, they worked out of their own homes (“in a distributed fashion” says Ross, not without irony).

So, what’s the main diff between the early noughties and now?

“In 2001, it was the fear economy – the only people selling technology were the security companies, and then 9/11 happened! Now, there’s much less hype; buying behaviour and investing behaviour are verging on the rational.”

Ross cites the change in the consumer markets – the growth of wikipedia, open source etc – as a key change: “on the consumer side, the bar is raised higher”. Consumer products genuinely have to work for people, otherwise they simply won’t be used.

The growth of blogging, in particular, has helped enormously:

“We used to have a lot of push back from PR and legal departments. Not any more. Now there are thousands of blogging policies up on the web for corporate lawyers to pull down and adapt.”

In November 2007, the company entered a new phase, securing a further $9.5million of funding. This seemed a good point for Ross to hand over his CEO role to Eugene Lee, a former executive at Cisco and Adobe:

“I’m very much an early stage guy, very hands on,” says Ross. “I always knew that I’d have to step aside at some point. You start off wearing all the hats, then you’ve got to give every one away, ideally to suitable people. It was a very emotional decision when I first had to step aside [at my previous start-up].”

See Ross’ blog for more of his thoughts on ceding control.

Needless to say, the Socialtext platform, originally a wiki solely for the highly tech-literate, has grown and developed in six years. WYSIWYG editing, introduced around 2004, was a step forward. But the real tipping point came in 2006, when mass collaboration became possible.

It was around this time that more ambitious ideas, such as ‘Wikipedias’ for companies were introduced. The whole user experience became more transparent and participatory, meaning that ‘non-teccie’ types could access and use the platform with relative ease.

Ross constantly thinks about how to make the platform more genuinely useful – in internet parlance, maximising ‘network effects’ (ie, the more people using a network, the more powerful it becomes). Identifying when and how people interact with the Socialtext platform has been a key part of making it more relevant:

“Our VP of Professional Services came up with the framework of ‘in the flow’ use cases as opposed to ‘above the flow’: where [people used our platform] as an integral part of the process of a project, rather than outside of it. These [in the flow use cases] are what we specialise in.”

One context in which Ross has found social media to be particularly useful is change management – where people can “collaborate on the change”. He points to the recent merger between two large companies (7,000 employees each) as a good example:

“The wiki and social networking became a great way of getting cross-pollination to happen…in the past it would be 6 or 7 people, and $1million, just to define a structure or taxonomy. Now the approach is to let the structure emerge, let staff collaborate on building it.”

And Ross has some words of comfort for any CEO fretful of any loss of control s/he might experience:

“The person who benefits most [from good knowledge management systems] is the CEO because he can drill down and see exactly who did something and why it happened.”

There’s no doubt about it, Socialtext must be doing something right. Today, it’s a global company, with offices in California, New York and the UK, employing 50 people and serving more than 4,000 organisations.

The easy-to-use, accessible style of software that originally came from the social space has now entered the corporate world. For good.

Categories
News

Good vibes/ bad vibes

Just back from Web 2.0 Expo New York via a long weekend in Derbyshire (yes, it was lovely and didn’t rain, thank you) and looking at my pile of interviews to write up, photos to edit, facts to check and general heaps of admin to sort out. Feeling a bit swamped.

Already needing to think about interviews to line up for Web 2.0 Expo Europe. My fave on the list so far has to be Netvibes founder, Tariq Krim.

Netvibes sits on my bookmarks toolbar between iknowhow and Twitter so you can see how important it is to me. To be honest I’ve never had another RSS reader so I can’t rate Netvibes comparatively, but I’ve used it for a few years now and it’s as simple and no-fuss as they come.

As for Tariq, not only is he someone who seems to ‘get’ the potential of Web 2.0, speaking regularly on ‘creative destruction’ and other stuff, he’s also done a truly ‘leadership 2.0’ thing by ceding management of his Netvibes baby to COO, Freddy Mini, a few months back.

So, that’s the good news. Hopefully Tariq will be around for interview. If he says ‘yes’ that’ll brighten my day. And give me more time to get back to that daunting pile of other stuff that needs to be done.

Categories
Openness

Less is more

Christian Payne aka Documentally is a photographer and journalist now making a bit of a name for himself as a social media guru. When I first met Christian at the Tuttle Club a few weeks ago, everyone told me he was the one person I had to talk to.

We’ve arranged to meet at Tuttle again today…only, Christian’s dog walker can’t make it and he has to stay home to look after his Border Collie, so we’re talking long distance (London – Boondocks) over Skype.

Six years ago Christian ‘downsized’, leaving full-time employment at a newspaper London to live and work in a small village in Northamptonshire.

“The corporate world is designed to make money at the end of the day, not to make people happy. Authenticity and ethical trading doesn’t exist enough. Corporations still believe in the ‘acquisition of more’ when they should be developing the capacity to enjoy ‘less’.”

Christian urges me to read Fritz Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful to get the full take on the way he sees things. Twenty-five years on, it seems a kind of apt title for the niche-obsessed world of social media where, suddenly, the little things matter again.

So what finally drove Christian to follow his values and opt out of the London rat race?

“I spent years working within newspapers and the way we report news nowadays is really very lazy. As a photographer, I always had to go and visit the people behind the stories. Sit with them, chat to them. Find out how they were really feeling. You always get something deeper by sitting there talking to people face to face. I quickly lost faith in the newspaper industry. Journalists never go out to stories any more. They get all the information online, maybe make the odd phonecall. Everything you see in the newspaper is based around advertising. The story will be cut to fit with the ads. A fantastically touching product to begin with can be turned into pulp.”

And Christian has little praise for his old bosses:

“The leadership [in newspapers] is terrible. People sit there shouting like something out of a Spiderman movie. You’ve seen Spiderman, right? Well, the relationship Peter Parker has with his editors, who are always shouting at him – that’s a completely accurate representation. There’s no end of bullying.

“As a result you end up having no respect for either these people or the organisation that employs you. You just want to get back at them in whatever way you can. For example, when it came to expenses at the newspaper, people would calculate expenses to and from the office for every story, even though they would go direct from job to job. They could probably earn another £4K on top of their earnings annually through that. Most people did it, and the newspaper was completely unaware.

“In organisations like [the newspaper where I used to work] you simply don’t have that ‘let’s sit down and talk about this’ attitude that you should have. This is where social media has the chance to make a difference.”

Of course, not all places are bad. Christian tells me that the Open University (one of his clients) has a very progressive attitude. From the sound of it, Ian Roddis, the OU’s Head of Online Services, is more like a favourite, trendy uncle than a boss. Twitter is used as a type of intranet, while Roddis sends short video clips to his staff using Qik.

“The other day Ian sent a Tweet at lunchtime: ‘I’m working from home and having a beer, does that constitute drinking at work?’. The thing is, he’s not just talking to his employees but also to his clients and his sponsors. He’s communicable and being honest. That’s what’s so likeable.”

If an organisation uses Twitter in this way, feels Christian, it’s inevitable that workplace relationships will become more open (and that’s a good thing):

“Twitter is like a massive corporate meeting taking place 24/7 at all levels of management. But it’s a useful meeting. People can see directly what I’m doing at any point – for example, they can see if something’s my idea. That’s good, it gives me ownership. This is the kind of communication we need between people now. It’s almost too much communication. But YOU control your data. You control how much you want to share.

“You can lie, but then you have to make sure you tell the same lie everywhere. You can only really throw truth into that stream.”

Transparency, openness and – ultimately – efficiency. Who can argue with the benefits of that? And, the great thing is, it’s really difficult to SHOUT on the Internet.