Evolving Web

Don't Get Busy After a Poor Post

Wow, my last post was not well constructed.  Then I went on a business trip and had no time to follow up.  The comments beat me silly.

So ... I didn't really mean that in Twitter everyone should follow everyone else.

My personal rules if someone follows me are:

1. Check them out

2. Make sure they aren't a Twittermouth.  More than, say, 30 tweets a day gets very close scrutiny.

3. How much is that person in conversations and how much are they just spouting

4. Do they look thoughtful?

I am more willing to give people the benefit of the doubt because I can just unfollow them later.

The main point of that post was, the goal isn't to run around getting people to follow you - it's to have conversations with other people.

So, please stop hitting me!

Technorati Tags: tags, twitter, following, conversation, pain pain pain

Joining the Conversoverse

I was just reading Scoble's bit of insight about Twitter: that it's not about how many people who follow you, it's about how many people you follow.

I can see the logic behind this and agree with it.  When you consume information you learn, when you converse with people you engage, but when you just want people to listen to you - you're an egomaniac.

I'll take what Robert said:

But what does following a lot of people say?

1. You’re trying to learn more.
2. You’re trying to meet more people.
3. You’re trying to be a better listener.
4. You’re communicating to the world that you’d like to be listened to (golden rule: treat people how you’d like to be treated).
5. You’re trying to find out about more stuff. More events. More stories

and add a sixth - you can participate in more conversations and spread the memes of others.

In other words, you understand your place in the network better. 

The great network of life.  The conversoverse.  (Spell check doesn't seem to think Conversoverse is a word.)

Technorati Tags: twitter, conversation ecosystem, conversations, robert scoble

LinkedIn is Utilitarian

Okay, I get it now.

LinkedIn will never do anything innovative, but they will incrementally add obviously useful features methodically.

Today, LinkedIn launched Corporate Pages.

According to Techcrunch, they use some internal and some third party information, as well as bots, to populate pages.

They say:

LinkedIn uses this knowledge to display recent hires, related companies, recent promotions, top locations for employees, and so-called “headliners” (people who get lots of profile views and mentions in the press). The data has also been used for company comparison purposes. You can see which companies employees usually come from and leave for, as well as which companies the current employees are most connected to.

Incredibly useful? Yes - when combined with the other LinkedIn features.  People group or tribal coherence is greatly enhanced by having pages of professional focus. 

The innovator in me sees this as a boring and obvious move.  I've criticized LinkedIn in the past for not innovating.  What I am seeing now is that LinkedIn has little interest in innovating - but does have a desire to constantly improve.

So, I'm respecting LinkedIn's conservative business model today.

Technorati Tags: linkedin, innovation, social networking, business cooperation

Emotions and Data - Look Twice, Leap One

When we are nervous, our perceptions change. 

Comfort levels, red flags, cool zones all change.

Today, we are all nervous about the impending economic collapse of the United States.  Part of this is watching for what we perceive as signs of that collapse.

So today Comscore noted that Google's searches were down 6% in February.  It took a few hours for people to really clue in on the fact that there were fewer days in Feb than Jan.

Is this a sign of economic collapse?

Larry Dignan and Mashable did a good job of calming this little tempest.

Larry said:

It’s a shortened month folks. It’s damn lucky that there was an extra day in February or we’d have to put Google on death watch. Simply put, there’s a lot of handwringing going on over a company that saw its core search share increase to 59.2 percent, up from 58.5 percent in January.

This particular piece of news isn't as interesting as the tendency behind it.  When creating metrics for performance measures with clients, they tend to gravitate toward the emotional issue that for them is a proxy for their greatest fears.  Sometimes this is measuring a symptom, but other times it's measuring an object of transference, which is even more dangerous.

In psychology, there are many manifestations and definitions of what is commonly called transference.  They all center around the redirection of emotions from a source of pain to something or someone else.  In an organization, this can be on the individual, team or organizational level.

When a baseball team dumps a season, they tend to fire the coach.  Why?  "Because you can't fire the team."  Yeah, sure, but the coach ends up being an object of transference.  In the end, the coach, personally, likely wasn't responsible, but firing the coach is an act in which the team diffuses the pain by exorcising an object of transference.

In Seattle we can see this in the fact that we were all convinced that Bob Melvin was not manager material when the Mariners went from top to bottom in the league after he showed up.  Well, Bob Melvin went to the Diamondbacks and is doing just fine as a manager.  Bob's ouster was therapeutic for the Mariners organization (including public perception), but it really wasn't a statement about Bob himself.

The problem is that everyone here still thinks it was Bob.  If I were to have gone in to the Mariners org at that time, their performance measures would have paid undue attention to Coach Performance.  It was where their perception of pain laid.

This means that these items become very necessary to measure.  It is tempting to dismiss these data needs.  "This is a symptom and not a problem" we might say.  Or "We think the real problem is over here."

Here's where things get tricky.  Symptoms Exist.  So you can not argue with someone that they are not in pain.  They are in pain and they are focusing on the object of transference.  And they can prove that object is a real source of pain.

So don't fight that.  Rather, measure it, with other things, and over time show the transference relationship with numbers.

If you are on the other end, working with consultants to improve your company or watching the economic outlook of the US, always keep in mind that you may be nervous.  You may be looking for signs to prove your fears.  I can guarantee you will find them. 

It is always less work to find things that justify your fears.  When data comes your way, check your emotions, if things are scary or make you angry - that's a sign to dig deeper.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: mashable, mariners, bob melvin, transference, management, performance measures, larry dignan

Customer Service - a Tale of Three Cities

Goodville, Badville and Uglyville.  Three very different experiences of three companies.  One gets it, one regrets it and the other forgets it.

Goodville - Zappos Gets It

I ordered a pair of shoes, New Balance N755 cross trainers, from Zappos.  My experience went like this:

9:30 PM Monday night, order shoes with one week ship date.

6:00 AM Tuesday wake up and find a note saying, "Hey, we decided to fill your order immediately and ship them overnight instead, so your shoes will be there .. today."

6:01 AM Jim says "Holy crap! That's nice."

3:00 PM Despite the fact that UPS says they delivered my shoes, they are nowhere to be found.

3:20 PM Call Zappos and say, "Um, UPS lost my shoes."  Woman as Zappos says, "That's awful, I'm shipping you new shoes immediately, they will be there tomorrow.  And I'm giving you $30 off on your next purchase.

3:30 PM Jim is still talking to Zappos saying, "This is UPS' problem, not yours." Zappos says, "Our job is to get you your shoes first and worry about shipping problems second."

Whaaaa! No excuses. No complaints. No escalation. Just getting me shoes fast.  The next day the shoes arrive.

While I think this may have been above and beyond, it demonstrates a culture that is truly dedicated to customer service and the acknowledgement of the value of the customer.   And this above-and-beyondness certainly did impress me and earn a repeat visit.

Badville - ESRI Regrets it

ESRI is the Microsoft of Geographic Information Systems (GIS).  They have a very very firm grip on the overall GIS market. 

They make some incredibly powerful software.  They were also my business partner for several years.  Or, more accurately, I gave them money to be called a business partner.

During those years my company created some innovative tools based on their platforms.  Over the years, despite our desire to work with ESRI software, they became increasingly irrelevant for a number of reasons.  I voiced these concerns, but they were my concerns and not ESRI's.

So, in our recent projects, we found other GIS platforms to work on.  Ones that would allow productization of tools with a mapping interface and GIS functionality and not be priced astronomically.

I received my annual request for renewal of my ESRI-friend fee (note that none of my other business partners required a fee).  I asked my colleagues, "Is ESRI was even relevant any more?"  No one thought it was.

So I ignored it.

I received a few other emails with the bill, but no one calling to find out how we were doing, why we might not want to renew, or things you would expect from someone or something with the label "partner".

Instead I received this e-mail:

Hi Jim,

Gray Hill Solutions was removed from the ESRI Business Partner Program on 1/23 for lack of interest.  As part of the letter, the following advises of the requirements of a termination:

As our current business relationship comes to an end, ESRI requests that Gray Hill Solutions please return to ESRI all materials or documents furnished by ESRI containing confidential and/or proprietary information together with all copies thereof made by Gray Hill Solutions.  The items, include, but are not limited to, any development and marketing copies of ESRI software, various developer CDs, price lists, and any confidential documents of ESRI.  Materials and/or documents can be returned to:

(removed)

As an option, Gray Hill Solutions can send certification of destruction for any such items.

Additionally, Gray Hill Solutions shall cease using the trademarks, service marks, trade dress, and trade names of ESRI, and shall remove any such trademarks, service marks, trade dress, and trade names from its advertising materials, signs, labels, Web sites, and other documentation or property.  Gray Hill Solutions shall represent in writing to ESRI that these steps have been taken within 30 days of termination of the agreement.

I noticed today that your Partner section of your Web site still says that you are an authorized BP and the ESRI is still on display.  This is a violation of the trademark and copyright laws and requires attention.  I am asking that it be removed by the 29^th.

Thank you in advance for your cooperation.

ESRI BPP Ops Manager

Rather than a goodbye phone call or any type of personal contact, I receive the equivalent of a cease and desist order.  Mind you, I was an ESRI evangelist for several years - getting my clients to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on ESRI software. 

So I replied:

Hi <BPP Ops Manager>,
We have no materials like you mention.  So we're okay there.
I'm asking Ken to now (Hello Ken) to remove the ESRI business partner mention from the web site.
We didn't have any other ESRI Business Partner logos or anything on our marketing brochures. 
I will note that we were a business partner for six years.  We have not received any formal "goodbye" from ESRI except for this overly legalistic email. 
Particularly this sentence:

This is a violation of the trademark and copyright laws and requires attention.

Is unnecessarily aggressive and no way to cap off a long and very good relationship.  I have traveled around the world co-marketing with ESRI staff. 
No exit interview and being treated like a violator of copyright law, does not reflect well on the ESRI business partner program or the company as a whole.  All in all, it leaves me with a monstrously bad taste in my mouth.
Are you, as ESRI BPP Ops Manager, not even the least bit interested as to why a long-term business partner who created ground breaking applications using your products has elected to no longer maintain that relationship?
With a heavy heart,
Jim Benson

Of course, like any jilted lover, I cc'ed this across the organization and received sincere apologies for receiving the unfriendly email from many people in ESRI. 

But ... no one asked me why we left.  As people, they are perfectly nice.  My email said, "Hey, as a person, this hurts!" And they said, "Hey Jim, we're sorry about that."  And that's great.

But as an organization there simply are no mechanisms to take feedback from users and supply it back into the product development process.  

For customer service, they regret it, but they still don't get it.

Uglyville - Littermaid Forgets It

Littermaid makes self-cleaning litterboxes.  I bought my first one in 1997 and it lasted a decade.  A decade!

I loved the thing because I travel a lot and my wife hates the litter box and merely tolerates the cat.

So after 10 years of being a litterbox, the Littermaid needed replacing.  I went out and bought a new one (they'd doubled in price).  But for 10 years, hey it's still worth it.

Six months later the new one was dead as Elvis.  Of course, I didn't save all the receipts and was in a lurch.  So I went to the Littermaid web site and found a contact form.

I wrote them a nice note saying I really loved their product and my last one lasted a decade.  This one didn't and I was unhappy.  Not mad or anything, just unhappy - as anyone would be if you paid $200 for something and it broke quickly and you apparently had no recourse.

I received nothing in reply whatsoever. 

"All fields are required" - for what?

So after a few weeks I wrote them again, noting I'd written before and reiterating my situation.

Over a month later, still no reply.

Applica Incorporated, the company that makes Littermaids, apparently has no one actually reading (or at least responding to) the communications coming from this contact form.  They simply forgot to close the loop.  Let you comment, but no response.

A repeat customer, a satisfied customer, with an issue and this issue goes ignored.  No better justification for a failing grade than that.

The Moral of Customer Service

It is important to note that these all happened pretty much at the same time.  Today's customers are very active and are interacting with companies every day.  In the past, with little contact, Applica's silence or ESRI's disinterest may have been acceptable.  Now, with company's like Zappos raising the bar, tolerance for lax or bad customer relations is rapidly disappearing.

Customers make choices not only on the value of your product, but on the relationships you make with them.  You can poison an excellent product line with a few careless exchanges.

This means that relationships and community need to be a central ethic in your corporate culture.  Zappos demonstrated this beautifully.

Technorati Tags: zappos, customer service, customer relations, applica, applica incorporated, littermaid, ESRI, respect, GIS, geographic information systems

How to Birth a Culture - An Obituary for E. Gary Gygax

Gary Gygax has passed away.

It must be a good 23 years since I played Dungeons and Dragons last, in John's gameroom in Grand Island, Nebraska.

Regardless of what one might wish to say about D&D geeks, they are a culture - and a very long standing one by modern measure.  Practitioners of social media and social networking who aim to create on-line cultures and communities need look no further than Dungeons and Dragons to find all the elements necessary for strong community.

It is brilliant work.  Complex, subtle, and utterly open ended.

We used to play D&D not only for hours, but for days.  It was an incredible focal point for bored teens eager for both competition and intellectual challenge.

I can firmly see a huge table with the map and game objects, the players (Chad, Kurt, John, Chris, myself, and the cycling guests), the piles of food, the bean bag to let people crash when they couldn't go on.  Marathon sessions that didn't cause carpel tunnel.  That required face to face interaction.

All because E. Gary Gygax sat down and created some books.

It was the vital ingredients in D&D that allows it to be a sustainable community, not the game itself.  The game is merely a game.  It's construction and Gygax's forethought is what makes it sustainable. 

Why is D&D so special in particular?  What do we have to learn from it?  Well, it has all the key ingredients to culture, here's just five of them:

1. Cooperation is Vital to Survival

In a D&D world, you can be a super powerful character that can run around kicking butt and taking names - for a while.  But, unless you have a dungeon master that's scared of you, something more powerful will come and get you.

In a well balanced culture, people rely on each other for success.  Every so often we may need a character like Willem Dafoe's Elias Grodin in Platoon, but they don't make a healthy culture overall.  In fact, their uniqueness is what makes them valuable to the group.

Usually, you need to build a team of varying skill sets in order to succeed.  You need visionaries, detail people, and workers.  You need producers and consumers (see my previous post about LiveJournal).   You need balance.  You need cooperation.

When you need cooperation, you build virtuous cycles to success.  Each person not only adding their strengths, but also relying on others to do the same.  Surprisingly, people actually like to be relied upon.  They don't like being forced to do things, but they love the freedom to do good.

Cooperation is a key ingredient of culture.

2. Positive Feedback and Reinforcement

Do good, get experience points.  Get experience points, become more skilled.  Become more skilled, do even more good!

Seem simple?  Well, it is. 

Surprising, there are so many VCs out there giving money to Social Networking sites that simply don't get it.  They don't see why it's important.

And why should they?  Only recently has business begun to even accept that basing performance on strengths and not weaknesses is a good idea.  As a society, we're just beginning to grasp that positive reinforcement might be beneficial.

Gygax figured that out decades ago.

He made a game out of not getting your pudding before you eat your meat.  He figured out that we want to do the work if the reward is right and that the reward not only makes us feel good, but it makes us appreciate the reward giver even more.  In short, it earns loyalty.

Reinforcement is a key ingredient of culture.

Loyalty is a key ingredient of culture. (Bonus ingredient!)

3. Freedom of Choice

And Devo sang:

We're victims of sedition on an open sea
No one ever said that life was free
Sink, swim, go down with the ship
Just use your freedom of choice

In life we have a lot of choices and some of them are a real pain in the ass. No choices, however, is the very definition of tedium.

Creating an open ended environment where players were limited only by their imaginations - but still bound to a set of conventions - is truly masterful work.  The conventions need to be firm enough to create a coherent environment, but open enough to allow the users to build whatever environment they choose.

This freedom isn't just important because people's minds like to wander, it's important because culture is not a fixed concept.  Culture meanders through time.  It morphs, reinvents itself, but still maintains an identity - if it is allowed to.  If not, it simply dies and is replaced with something else.

Let's copy and paste that sentence a few times. If not, it simply dies and is replaced with something else.If not, it simply dies and is replaced with something else.If not, it simply dies and is replaced with something else.

Stupid VCs who want to fund something quick take note, the world of culture building is not quick and building on-line communities to flip will fail in the long run.  Certainly you can build a bubble and steal make some money, but the tools will fail.

Gygax created a very detailed environment that let people go where they wanted and do what they wanted - within a given boundary.  A good dungeon master, in the end, was someone who knew exactly when and how to apply rules.  To keep the game interesting and fun, while being neither ungoverned nor oppressive.

Freedom is a key ingredient of culture.

4. Role Definition

We all wear many hats.  But, damn, we love hats.  When we don't have a hat, we're confused about what our roles are.

This is closely coupled with two other things: Fit and Style.

Don't give me a Cowboy hat.

The roles we choose need to fit our personality and our aesthetic.  In business, people often wear all sorts of ill-fitting hats.  Excellent producers who get promoted to managers, but hate managing people.  Team members who get a role because it's needed, but doesn't fit their strengths.  People fighting for a position for which they are ill-suited because society doesn't value what they do well.

Fit requires matching with your skill set, which requires definition. Your role must come with an explanation of what society thinks that role does.  You will augment that within bounds based on your style, but the role itself needs some boundaries in order to recognizable as a role.

(You will see many posts by me for management theory, discussing why process changes at some companies fail because people are reassigned to roles that aren't adequately explained or incorporated into the culture.)

Style is how that role integrates with you.  How are you going to be a good cost accountant or an elf mage?  Do you want to be one at all?  Does your style lead to success or failure?  You can mold the position to fit your style, but you can't completely obliterate the rules for that role.  You can't be a cost accountant that only bakes cookies, for example.

Gygax's D&D universe has a set of classes and subclasses of roles that are compelling enough to attract a wide variety of personality types and skill sets.

Roles are a key ingredient of culture.

5. Maturation Process

Can your community mature?  In D&D you mature by the leveling up of your character, but after time this becomes the mechanical part of the game.  Predictable, almost.

What starts as your primary motivation for playing the game, becomes merely a byproduct of it.  After a while, maturation takes on some familiar roles.

Mentoring, specialization, and governance are primary indicators of a mature community.  As characters and players mature, they lead other players forward and teach them the ropes (mentoring).  They become more and more skilled and subtle in their areas of knowledge (specialization).  And they tend to watch for malfeasance and, from their position of authority which comes from being a long-time member of the culture, deal with it (governance).

Again, we can see this in yesterday's LiveJournal article.  Players of World of Warcraft will recognize these elements immediately.  This process is a major factor in the success of Wikipedia.

This type of maturation reinforces culture by providing a healthy continuum of member growth and internal policing.

Cultural maturation is a key ingredient of culture.

Emotional Goodbye to Gary

You know, at the time of an experience you never know what lessons you will take away.  It's certain that at 13 years of age I wasn't really all that concerned with the cultural maturation processes of D&D.  I don't even know that Gygax was too concerned.

I do know that more than few funds were pooled to go to the Conestoga Mall in Grand Island and pick up yet another D&D book.

What I see now, as I work with clients to help build communities and collaborative management processes, is that Gygax understood tactics on a deeper level than any of us ever gave him credit for.

His company TSR (Tactical Studies Rules), which produced D&D, is keyed on tactics. We always thought it was battle tactics. It's pretty clear now that he understood social tactics as well.

Consider this: D&D was sold primarily from word of mouth in a pre-Internet era.  (The lack of advertising scared parents who felt it was a pawn of the devil.)  In other words, it was a highly successful viral marketing campaign in an era where there was tremendous friction for word of mouth.

Gygax, in the end, was a person who seemed ultimately interested in the game and the community around the game.  He said in 2004:

Games give you a chance to excel, and if you're playing in good company you don't even mind if you lose because you had the enjoyment of the company during the course of the game.

In this one, compact sentence, is about half the essay above.  Every person interested in creating community, whether a social media creator, an urban planner or whatever, should have this quote on their wall.

Gygax's game did more than keep me off the streets, it reinforced deep community values and contributed to many of my current management and social theories.

So, thank you for that Gary.  I genuinely appreciate your thoughtful creations.

I would like the world to remember me as the guy who really enjoyed playing games and sharing his knowledge and his fun pastimes with everybody else. - Gary Gygax

Technorati Tags: Gary Gygax, E. Gary Gygax, Dungeons and Dragons, D&D, obituary, obituaries, community indicators, community, online communities, sociology, grand island, TSR, devil worship

LiveJournal and Dead Salmon

When you go up into the forests in the fall, you see dead salmon.  They look sort of like this.  To the untrained eye, these dead salmon are a problem. 

Maybe you think they should have been caught in Alaska and made a nice meal of.  Maybe you think they should still be swimming happily. 

What they actually happened is, in the wonderful cycle of life, they swam upstream, deposited a jillion eggs, and died.

Maybe not the way you want to go, but it works for the salmon.

This week LiveJournal, the most active web community no one ever talks about, announced that they were changing their rules of engagement.  Those rules were previously the foundation of an ecosystem where a very few paying people subsidized the actions of a lot of "free" people.

Because LiveJournal is a community, they had a self-organized board to represent the users of LiveJournal with management.  This board includes both Brad and Danah.  Influential voices who understand the way social media works and generally not people you'd care to alienate.

What LiveJournal has done is mess with the spawning grounds for new paid users.  From now on, free users will be subjected to advertisements - which they previously were not.  

Danah especially believes that this will create a less hospitable environment to new users.  She says:

Systems like LJ are an ecology and individual-driven monetization approaches fail miserably. People have different levels of participation, engagement, and tolerance. What they want from the system differs as does the way that they relate to others. It's a networked system and pissing off users affects more than just the user-company relationship - it affects the whole network. I totally understand that it's not possible to provide a service (and engineers and support and ...) for free, as much as we would all like that to be the case. But... I'm not convinced this is the right move to balance the financial scales.

We see a few things in Danah's response. 

(1) The community as a whole was not respected in the decision.

(2) Specific community members with a vested interest in the community were not respected in the decision.

(3) The decision made has philosophical impacts on the community.

It's important to note here that Brad, Danah and most of the people objecting to this decision were paying users.  Theoretically, they shouldn't care about changing new free accounts because they aren't directly impacted.  So their objections are not based in a personal financial hit.

The issues here lie solely in the LiveJournal community's self-concept.  The LJ community, judging by the comments to the announcement, as well as to Danah's post, strongly feel that free users feed the community with needed content. 

Where the LJ staff saw Dead Fish in the free users, the paying users saw healthy spawning salmon.  The paying users, in other words, were willingly subsidizing free users because of the benefit they received from the free user-generated content.

Wow.  Most social networks would kill for such an ecosystem.

There is a second slap in the face.  The disrespect of the community.

Regardless of intent on the part of Six Apart, the community felt slighted by the way this was rolled out.  The LiveJournal Advisory Board was not intimately involved in a change that they felt deeply impacted the community.  Due to their faith and support of the Board, many LiveJournal users feel slighted.

Respect is Key

Trust gets a lot of airtime in the world of social networking and social media.  We don't talk about respect quite enough.  This is a situation, sure, where SixApart violated the trust of their users - but it's the respect issue that we feel from the posts of Brad and Danah.

Their core concerns are: You didn't respect the free users and you're not respecting the Board.  The Board gave preliminary "thumbs down" for the change.  As Danah says:

Needless to say, Brad's pissed. I'm pissed. Not only because we both vehemently disagree with this change, but because they made such a change without consulting us. Or rather, we were both at a lunch a while back where they asked us what we thought and we both told them that this was the worst idea ever, although for different reasons. I had thought it had been tabled until I learned of this. After it had been posted.

Trust is the engine powering social media.  But respect is the fuel. (I know, I'm mixing metaphors again).

Thanks to Andrew B. for bringing this to my attention.

Technorati Tags: livejournal, six apart, community, community indicators, danah boyd, brad fitzpatrick, respect, trust

Business Needs Social Networking

Social Networking is an integral part of 21st century business.  How your company interacts internally, professionally and with your clients is the key to reducing waste and increasing value.  Social Networking tools appear throughout the value chain of a business from advertising to training to development and product release.

In an information society, information becomes the primary commodity - whether it is expressed through customer service or your products themselves.  Social networking provides a powerful toolkit for removing impediments to information flow.

This is a very high level description of the areas in which social networking can help business.  We will be expanding on these themes and providing other resources in the near future.

Knowledge Management

Businesses are collections of know-how and expertise.  No matter how many knowledge management systems you may deploy, the knowledge of an organization rests with its people. 

Reports, wikis, CRMs, dashboards ... artifacts of knowledge can rarely substitute from actually talking to other people.  Social networking connect the people that embody a firm's expertise. 

 Resource Management

Your organization is a teaming mass of needy people.  People who need skilled assistance, people who need to be trained, people looking for something to do. 

Social networking tools can quickly identify who has slack, who is in need of skills, and who needs training in a certain area.  Daylighting these and increasing communication can decrease waste and save money.

Small Team Interaction

Small teams within an organization benefit from increased communication, the abilities to assemble and track progress.  In this context, you want to know who can be on your team, do they have the skills necessary, what do we need to do, when is it to be done and how far along are we? 

Interpersonal connectivity and communication again drive efficiency and satisfaction.  Previously, people either did not know the answer to these questions or had to wait for inefficient staff meetings to painstakingly go over every metric.  With browser-based applications tracking progress and availability, staff and management gain comfort by knowing status instantly.  Tasks are more easily shared, changes are quickly dealt with.

Professional Development

You and your staff are more than one person, you come with networks and associations that have incredible value.  Business should understand and honor staff associations and memberships.  Their networks give them personal worth as well as professional worth.  In turn, these networks give your company training and contacts.

This is the more traditional part of social networking that uses tools like BNI or LinkedIn. 

Client Relations

Clients, users, customers - they all boil down to one thing - they give you the money you need to keep going.  They also want to do business with you.  ... As long as you give them value.

How can you ensure you keep giving them value?  Involve them as much as they want.  Let them help with design, testing, lead generation, and product extension.

Obviously you can't have every customer being intimately involved with your staff.  There (hopefully) are too many of them.  And many don't want to be involved. 

Usually enough do and they are worth their weight in gold.  Providing them with the ability to interact with each other and with your staff increases their loyalty and exposes you to their intelligence.  They get a better product, you get better product.  Everyone wins.

Brand Enhancement

Businesses are becoming increasingly social.  Staff blogs, they participate in things like Facebook or have book reviews on Amazon.  In subtle ways, your brand works its way into the outside world through the actions of your staff.

The brand also does some walking on its own. Brands have their own Facebook and MySpace pages, for example. 

Social Networking and Business

Throughout the value chain, social networking removes barriers to communication and highlights relationships between people.  Needs, capabilities, and information are apparent and actionable.  Social networking tools allow your company to make the most of your human resources.

Technorati Tags: social networking, social media, management, business theory, business cooperation

Freedom's Just Another Word For Your Choice of Societal Responsibility in a Way that Rewards You and Contributes in a Positive Wayyyyyyy

A few days ago I wrote a piece about the need for leaders during a time of transition - especially when that transition was going to result in greater freedom.

I had a nice exchange afterward with Bill Anderson.  But I didn't fully answer his questions.  So I thought I'd do that in another post.

Here's the Exchange.

Jim, another wonderful and generative post.

My associations from this include:

(0) leadership needs followership: we need to learn practices for both.

(1) responsibility and uncertainty: this seems right. Uncertainty is unnerving. Personally I have learned just how unnerving it can be. Part of my anxiety is fear of failure and I think it's easy to miss how much we all hate failure (and I do mean "hate").

(2) agile workplaces - coming, good, freedom, necessary: sounds like the Borg - resistance is futile. But resistance is not futile. I can resist learning for a lifetime, and in some areas of my life I'm sure I do just that. Your rah-rah tone here misses the serious nature of the transition. You do acknowledge that it's a process. But real personal effort is needed. And what is "freedom" anyway? I'm really want to know what that means to you here.

-Bill

Posted by: Bill Anderson | 05 March 2008 at 09:42

Hi Bill,

I replied to this before and it appears to have been eaten by the ether.

Re #2, I was talking about this more in a social / cultural evolution sense. Culture has been steadily evolving from centralized forms of decision making to decentralized one. From Popes and Kings to Parliaments and Senates. From fear-based management to more open management.

So it wasn't "Agile will eat you", but that Agile management types are part of an overall historic trend towards the flattening of control.

Posted by: Jim Benson | 07 March 2008 at 08:16

Bill also asked about Freedom.  What does Freedom mean to me in this context.

Freedom here means the ability choose your individual contribution to the organization.  Obviously there are always going to be boundaries here.  My contribution to Modus Cooperandi can't (always) be snorkeling in the Maldives.

Freedom here is derived from loosening unnecessary policies and points of control. 

Unnecessary Policies

Policies and control most often are responding to a "problem" - real or perceived.  These "problems" usually don't happen every day or even often.  But they were scary when they happened, so people want to make sure they don't happen again.

A natural, prudent, and understandable response.

The outcome, over years of scary anomalies, is an organization slowed and weighed down by policies that are governing to the exceptions and not the preferred outcomes.

Also, these policies are enacted in the service of an emotional event.  People are therefore unwilling to take on the political load of fighting them.  Because it was an emotional event and the policy usually comes right on the heels of the event, the policies often overreach and are poorly constructed.

In other words, they don't scale.

Over time, these policies slow the corporation, cost money by adding friction to communication, undermine individual contribution and demoralize the staff.

These impacts are freedom killers.  We start to act, work and think in service of or at least bounded by the policies.

Policies can also come from a power position working to shore up more power...

Unnecessary Control

Control at one point was the key to efficiency.  If you could keep everyone dancing in perfect time, you had the great operation.  One that a Bugs Bunny cartoon could put to music.

But the problem with that model was, and is, that you reduce people to the role of machines.  Do this task, this way, at this time, with these rules, and do not deviate.  Deviation = Broken.

Therefore, innovation was stifled and organizations did not grow.  Deviation is a vital component of innovation.  "Ya got to remain to be yourself," the Adrian Belew song says.

You've got to remain to bein' yourself...you cannot be
nobody else, it ain't no use tryin' bein' no whirlwind
an' uh, jumpin' here an' an' playin' checkers with
your own life, that ain't gonna work, baby...

Control stops communication, innovation and satisfaction.

Freedom

At heart people want to do a good job. Organizational policies and control mechanisms undermine this basic human need.  The need to be valuable.

Freedom here therefore is the freedom to be valuable.  To be able to add to the organization, to innovate, and to play your part not only in the work, but also the management.

Freedom within an organization is still within an organization therefore it is still organized.  Goals need to be met, business still needs to happen.

Freedom is scary because it requires a higher level of participation.  That's the responsibility I was talking about in the previous post.  Freedom abhors a slacker.

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Please Feed the Bloggers

I am a hypocrite. I have three personal rules about being a reader of blogs that I've noticed I'm not following all the time.  I was having a longish conversation about a meme running through the blogosphere and realized that I was verbally quoting blog posts I enjoyed, but didn't reward them properly.

Do you know what bloggers get paid in cash?

Zilch (usually).

What they do get paid in is attention and conversation.

The primary elements of this currency are comments, quotes, follow-ons, and link-passing.

If you read a post you like, you should (every time) do one of the following:

1. Comment - click the comments link and leave a comment.  You can say what you liked, or even disliked, about the post.  You can prompt for more information.  You can do anything you want, but just let the blogger know you were there and that you cared.  Why? Because it helps the blogger continue down that line of thought. 

Many times (many many) I have met up with people weeks after I posted something and they would be talking about the post.  But the post received no comments.  Therefore, I didn't write any more on the subject.

If you're shy or scared or something, you can send e-mail to the author as well.

2. Quotes - if you have a blog, quote parts of the entry (with a link, of course) in related articles you write.  Give credit, but also move the meme along.

3. Follow-ons - This is similar to quotes but involves specifically extending the thoughts of someone else. If they start a conversation, specifically credit the conversation to them and then extend it.

4. Link-passing - Give the blogger some added juice by passing the link along to people you think may benefit from it.  Mailing lists, del.icio.us, digg, twitter are all great ways to get the word out about a particular post.

The rules are simple and certainly not revolutionary.  But they are important and nearly universally forgotten.

Feed your bloggers, so they keep producing for you!

Technorati Tags: blogging, bloggers, linklove, comments, conversation ecosystem

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