Patrick Lambe discussing the latest meme making the rounds in knowledge management circles: Wisdom Management
Show me a disaster – Katrina, Enron, 911, Challenger, Columbia – and I will show you problems with how individuals’ knowledge fails to scale to an effective organisational response. The notion of wisdom management is a gigantic red herring based on an increasingly outdated individualism.
I found this via Jeff Jarvis, and it's good stuff: Power of Information: New taskforce and speech:
The 19th century co-operative movements had their roots in people pooling resources to make, buy or distribute physical goods. Modern online communities are the new co-operatives.
The report is about the role of the UK government (and by extension all governments) in the new information economy. The report, although long, is chock-full of insight-- you might even call it a road-map.
The full report: The Power of Information.
John Battelle has been discussing branding and has several examples that make a familiar point-- The Rise of Independent Media Brands Online:
To keep building our brands, we have to go where the audience has gone. And every month, according to Comscore, 600 million people visit conversational media sites – foreign lands when it comes to brand marketing. Or ….are they?
His posts are worth checking out. He's got some great examples to help make the case. I know I'm a bit of a broken record on this strategy of going to the communities, rather than expecting them to come to you. It's a difficult concept to grok. It's that be-the ball thing. Bottom-line, if you build it they will not come. It's no longer the internet 0f 2004.
From Engineers without fears-- the presence paradox - lite communication tools:
Most of our corporate communications (emails from the CEO, townhall meetings, intranet pages) position themselves as meaningful but are frequently meaningless. Instead they convey another set of messages around status, order & control. They are, in fact, almost purely phatic.
If you start looking for the phatic messages in emails, and who amongst us doesn't, it changes everything. And that is why you must use a variety of modalities for communication. Especially if you work in a multi-generational workplace. (And God help you if you don't).
This a great read at Harvard Business on organizational class structures and the hidden (and not so hidden) damage they do to organizational cohesiveness and effectiveness: How to Crack Companies' Class Structure.
An invisible class structure is preventing companies from making the most of their employees’ talents.
By class structure I mean there’s a function or profession that considers itself and is perceived by all others to be the one that the organization values most. Everybody else is a de facto second- class citizen or worse.
By invisible I mean that everybody just accepts the class structure as a fact of life. Leaders do not consider either the price it exacts or how they might get rid of it.
What a shame! In an age when solving increasingly complex problems requires not just the input but also the robust interactions of multiple disciplines, a class structure is a formidable competitive disadvantage.
When I read these sorts of things they just make me sad. It'd be hard to find a more class-based organizational structure anywhere than what we have in higher education. The hidden costs are huge, and it would be wonderful to see someone step-up and take this on. Fixing this would yield tremendous organizational and societal benefits far beyond the academy.
I was in a discussion a couple of weeks ago at an inworld event at Emory University: Virtual Worlds and New Realities in Commerce, Politics, and Society. A small group of us got talking about whether virtual worlds are a harder sell, to whomever we have to convince, than the World Wide Web was back in 1993. Of course, there weren't that many people in the discussion that had actually been in a position to have to sell the Web back in 1993, but that's a different matter.
I'm writing a post on this topic, but before I do, I thought I would kick off the discussion with a couple of quotes from our favorite, and very conservative, analysts on what they see coming:
In five years, business versions of online virtual worlds like Second Life will be just as important to commerce as the Web is today.
By the end of 2011, 80 percent of active Internet users (and Fortune 500 enterprises) will have a “second life”
(They are not referring to Second Life in particular, but the general concept of virtual worlds.)
There are many other predictions I could have used to forewarn what is on the horizon in regard to virtual worlds. It's suffice to say that the freight train is coming.
I'm a big believer in the first-mover advantage. If you wait until your customers/clients/constituents have already made the move to new ways of learning, communicating, and working you'll be years attempting to catch-up. If you aren't working on getting ready for this right now you're already late.
That said, from my perspective I think selling virtual worlds to decision makers is a much tougher nut today than the Web was back in 1993. I'll explain my reasoning in a subsequent post.
I found a new blog through Andrew McAfee that I am rather liking: Transparent Office. The blogger, Michael Idinopulos, works at Socialtext, and the blog is focused on the use of social software in the enterprise. One of his very first posts addressed the concept of in-the flow versus above-the-flow kind of work.
In the old world of emails and knowledge management systems, our tools and processes force a rigid distinction between "doing your job" (i.e., in-the-flow activities, usually in email) and "giving back to the organization" (above-the-flow contributions to a knowledge management system). That framing of the issue ensures that people will spend almost all their time in email and very little time contributing knowledge--hence the "culture and incentives" problem that has bedeviled Knowledge Management since the very start.
Too often we approach knowledge management tasks from a naive perspective. We approach it as a Field of Dreams type of problem, if we build it they will come... The problem is, it doesn't matter what you build (i.e. what tools you use), because it's a far more complex problem than just providing the means to manage knowledge. You have to first address the will, the incentives, the really big questions.
Reading Michael reminded me of the Dave Snowden interview that I had posted about previously: The Impact of Web 2.0 on Knowledge Work and "Knowledge Management"
One of the things I've always argued very strongly is that you shouldn't provide any incentives to knowledge work because, for example, to reward people for contributing to a knowledge management database fails to understand the basic trust implications of the knowledge interaction. If you ask me for something that I need in the context of genuine need, very few people if anybody other than the obdurant is going to refuse to give it to you... but if you ask me to share my knowledge in anticipation of possible need in the future by somebody I don't know, then you're never going to get it. It's the immediacy of the context that matters.
Here we have three people (McAfee, Idinopulos, Snowden) with expertise in enterprise knowledge management telling us it's an almost impossible task to accomplish. It's a very complex issue that defies overly simplistic attempts to try to explain away failure. What makes it more difficult is trying to find some places where it has worked in order to try to replicate success. It's almost impossible to find above-the-flow success stories beyond the large scale open example of Wikipedia.
So you want some of the peer-production hyper-productivity for your organization? I was thinking about this some this morning and came up with some guidelines:
These are mine.. Can you think of some more?
I sent Budget a request via their Web form today and this is the response I got:
Your message was sent to a Budget Customer Service representative for review. Please allow 5 business days for a reply.
I got this response within 10 minutes of sending my inquiry. When I saw the email I fully expected to open the message and have what I had requested. Yes, I had some expectations of an immediate response.
I'm wondering if I had called their customer service people if they would have said, "Thank you for your inquiry, please expect a call back from us by next Thursday."
At the Metaverse U conference a week or so ago, Byron Reeves of Stanford asked, "Do you know who the guild leaders are in your organization?" He went on to comment that IBM had just completed a survey of its management and found that they had 1000s. I've been thinking of that off-and-on ever since.
The basic idea Byron was expressing is that the current generation of business leaders are sorely prepared to deal with the modern Enterprise 2.0 world with its flatness, lack of hierarchy, transparency, burstiness, lack of presence, and new metrics for measuring performance. He mentioned that the next generation of business leaders might better be selected from those that are adept at leading online virtual teams in executing complex missions. The very skills being developed by accomplished gamers.
So it was with interest that I read this Paul Hemp piece in Harvard Business: Does Your Leadership Development Strategy Include World of Warcraft?
This echoes a theme in the interview I did with HBS professor Linda Hill that appeared in the January issue, entitled “Where Will We Find Tomorrow’s Leaders.” One of Linda’s key points is that organizations risk overlooking potential leaders because they are “invisible” – that is, lack the high-profile personal characteristics such as compelling communications skills that we associate with leadership. Ironically, these invisible leadership candidates may in fact possess characteristics – for example, modest egos that don’t get in the way of collaborative work – that are ideally suited to tomorrow’s business environment.
And therein lies the paradox. How will the current generation of business leaders, with their gregarious "people skills" find, value, and promote this next generation of leadership? The current generation of leaders are making personnel decisions, and most haven't a clue about these new tools, and new ways of working. They don't use the tools, don't understand them, and are often frightened by the very organizational culture necessary to make them work.
The next generation of leader doesn't look anything like the current, and I don't see the one truly valuing the other any time soon. We are headed for a serious disconnect. It'll be interesting to watch how this all plays out.
From Stephen Abram's keynote at the Tools of Change conference: Will publishers matter?
From David Johnson at Lost Remote commenting on the expected layoffs at Yahoo: Yahoo looks at cutting hundreds of jobs
Is it ironic that Yahoo positioned itself as the ultimate content aggregator online, co-opting newspaper publishing strategies and partnering with the newspaper industry, and now is laying off staff like newspapers are doing nationwide?
If your business is content you need to be paying close attention. Yahoo defined content production in the Web of old. This is a lesson in scale. You can't begin to throw enough people at the problem.
I was reading this article in Fortune: Will someone please start a Facebook group to save Scrabulous?, about Hasbro trying to shutdown Scrabulous for copyright violations. I didn't find the intellectual property parts of the article that interesting, but this did catch my eye:
Their site launched in 2006 and quickly signed up 600,000 registered users. Not too shabby for a year’s worth of work. So the brothers launched a Facebook application in June, 2007 and the results were stunning: 2.3 million active users as of today. For those of you keeping score, the application generated 70 million pageviews in the past month. Not a bad deal for a two-man operation.
I don't know about you, but 2.3 million users and 70 million page views seems pretty impressive. With numbers like that you'd expect them to be making some serious cash. But no...
Jayant said that he didn’t exactly understand what all the fuss was about. Its ability to generate insane numbers of pageviews notwithstanding—he said some players play as many as 170 games at a time on Facebook—the application isn’t throwing off that much money. He declined to say exactly how much, pegging revenues at “over $25,000 a month.” Hmmmmm.
That's only $300k a year for 2.3 million users and 840,000,000 pageviews?
If you're thinking that you might strike it rich on the Internet you might want to think twice before you give up your day job.
David Weinberger from Harvard Business: The Year of Scale
Management by control just can't work in a scaled world. In fact, it was only by removing control that the online world was able to scale.
I'm going to be blogging a lot more on the topic of scale this year. An inability to scale is where most good ideas fail, and it is something that few people give serious consideration. We do "things" because we can, but rarely think about might happen when the demand for those "things" increases exponentially.
Sorry, I keep going back to Umair Haque, but quite honestly I don't know of anyone who is a better thinker on what's happening right now. This is related a tad to my posts of the last few days: Data is a Commodity, or How Not to Revolutionize...
The way we're discussing media is still focused on exclusion - "it's their service, they own you." That's inaccurate. In fact, what's strategically critical aren't the costs of exclusion, but the costs of inclusion.
And a bonus quote:
Let me try and put it more simple. Data is inherently valueless in the edgeconomy, because it's infinitely replicable. Any structure seeking to limit access to data will simply be too radically inefficient for the market to bear in the medium-long run.
UPDATE: Scott Karp says he doesn't totally agree with Umair's thinking: Data And The Future Of The Web
Umair is half right — we are increasingly overrun by data, and SOME of it is a commodity. The commodity data is precisely what Google has harnessed, which makes Google so powerful — the data on the open web.
And then for the life of me, I'm hard pressed to figure how he doesn't make Umair's exact point:
The future of the web will be determined by companies that can overcome people challenges — to bring EVERYONE’S data online, and make it useful. And it won’t be about locking up people’s data, but instead helping them be smart about the free flow of their data.
It will be about networking that data, connecting it, to make a whole greater than the sum of the parts. That’s why web applications are so much more powerful than siloed desktop applications. That’s why the web itself is so powerful — it’s not just about collecting and distributing data. It’s about connecting data. And about connecting people.
And that is where I got confused, as I'm hard pressed to see any difference in that and what Umair said:
Think about it this way: the lower the cost of interaction, by definition, the more abundant data is - because every interaction creates reams of data. More data is created tomorrow than was created yesterday. And so on.
What is valuable are the things that create data: markets, networks, and communities.
I've been reading with great interest about the screen scraping incident with Robert Scoble and Facebook. Of most interest was this note from Facebook telling him that they had decided to let him back in.
Our standard process for handling cases when an account is disabled for security violations is to allow a user to appeal and remedy the situation. This is the process we have followed here. Since you contacted us and have agreed not to run the script again, we have reactivated your account. You should now be able to log in with your normal email and password. In the future, please refrain from running these types of scripts again
That's an interesting policy, as I'm thinking screen scraping could be big in the future. I spent a good bit of my holiday playing with Dapper and Yahoo Pipes scraping sites, and creating Atom feeds where the sites didn't have one. Did I ask permission before scraping the sites? Heck no! Did I violate someone's copyright? Got me, I never bothered to look at the terms of use.
I don't believe for a minute that Facebook didn't know what Robert was running against them. I also think that Facebook is smart enough to know the difference between a white-hat and black-hat bot. Facebook was sending an RIAA type of message through Robert, and that has to make you wonder about their DNA. (Not that we didn't already know.)
Personal data gathering bots are a part of our future. Technologies like Dapper and Pipes make this possible. The scripts will be shared like baseball cards, and we all will be running them. Scoble was just a little ahead of the masses, but the rest of us are not far behind. Web sites that resist people's ability to run these scripts will be going the same way as the record companies. Facebook just can't seem to get much right when it comes to respecting their users.
It was very interesting to watch the news break on television yesterday and to watch the twitter stream. Dennis Howlett at ZDNet noticed the same thing: Benazir Bhutto assassinated: Twitter’s utility
What I have seen today is the convergence of new media forms like Twitter and its add-ons, Seesmic, blogs and traditional TV media providing a powerful example of how important events are going to be reported, dissected, analyzed and ultimately acted upon from here on. Not some time in the future - but now.
Jeremiah Owyang mentioned something very similar on Twitter this morning:
It's pretty amazing how fast news breaks in twitter, this could be THE fastest form of communication around the globe.
I had a similar thought yesterday morning while I watched the news unfold:
Twitter is an amazing place this morning. I've been watching the news all morning but many of the reports I saw here first.
Seems to me that if you are in the information dissemination business you might need to be approaching things differently than assuming Twitter is dangerous. Might be time to formulate your Twitter strategy. Proactive trumps reactive every time.
I've had a few more random thoughts on Knol after reading a bit of the firestorm that has emerged. I should have known...
For example, the comments about how this is not as good as the wiki model of collaborative content development. My thoughts:
Sorry I keep going back to Umair Haque, but he is just too spot on: The First Horseman of the Macropocalypse:
Imagine if we threw money at record labels, in the hopes that they'd publish better music. What do you think would happen?
A fascinating read by venture capitalist Fred Wilson: Why Early Stage Venture Investments Fail
But, where you really see the value of being nimble is in the failures. All but one failed to transform their business and all but one were unable to do that because of the large unsustainable burn rates they had built up. Even the one business that did transform itself, it went from a low cost business model to a high cost business model and they put themselves in a pickle when the transformation didn’t pan out.
To go back to Dick’s analogy, you can go down lots of blind alleys if the cost of doing so is low. But if you are spending a million dollars on each blind alley, you’ll be out of business in no time.
So it’s pretty clear to me that most venture backed investments don’t fail because the business plan was flawed. In my experience at least 2/3 of all business plans we back are flawed.
Most venture backed investments fail because the venture capital is used to scale the business before the correct business plan is discovered. That scale/burn rate becomes the cancer that kills the business.
So the bottom-line, your business plan is almost always flawed. If you put all your eggs in that business plan, only to find out you can't pull-it-off, you have no agility to change directions and still survive.
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