by eye of einstein
Facebook and The Future of Competition:
[Via HarvardBusiness.org]

Last week, I discussed Facebook’s relentless evil, how that was a profound strategic error, and why the costs of evil are starting to outweigh the benefits - for everyone, not just Facebook.

Now, that’s a pretty unorthodox argument, and I took a lot of heat for it: what is evil, anyways? Does it really have any relevance to the real world of backslapping, boardrooms, and bonuses?

After all, business exists in a kind of Nietzschean state beyond good and evil - it has to, because it’s only when we ditch the suffocating dictates of morality that we can think in terms of economically meaningful concepts, like utility, efficiency, and productivity.

Right? Wrong. The problem with failing to call evil, well, evil is simple: we can never really do good unless we’re able to judge what’s evil. And doing good is fast becoming a strategic - not just a moral - imperative.

There is a very interesting discussion going on over at Harvard Business online. It is about the very nature of companies, on whether they are good or evil.

While the terms are pejorative, the discussion is about what works best in the Information Age. Industrial Age approaches were all about gaining complete control and zero-sum games. Now, in a networked world, the most successful companies are those that make it easiest for their customers. Otherwise they will move to the one that is easier.

Creating walled sandboxes will not be as successful as open playing fields. At least if the leaders of this discussion are right.

But, truthfully, the importance is to have the conversation. While they may not be exactly right, the dialogs can get them to the right answer sooner. Sometimes being provocative can speed things up.

Here are a few more things he wrote:

It’s that, in fact, yesterday’s lumbering dinosaurs are actually smartening up faster than Facebook. Even textbook cases of pathological evil like Starbucks and Wal-Mart have decided to play the tiresome, zero-sum games of competitive strategy less and less.

What’s really going on here? There’s a massive tectonic shift rocking the economic landscape. All these players are discovering that the boardroom’s first and most important task is simply to try always and everywhere do less evil. In the dismal language of economics: as interaction explodes, the costs of evil are starting to outweigh the benefits.

[snip]

That’s really what Facebook’s mini case is all about: no amount of competitive strategy can help Facebook gain advantage - because advantage is built on putting good before evil.

[snip]

As Starbucks and Wal-Mart are discovering, orthodox strategy was built for an industrial world - an equilibrium world of oligopolies, soulless “product”, and zombified “consumers”. But that’s not today’s world. Playing the games of orthodox strategy in a world whose economic fabric is being rewoven isn’t just small: the opportunity cost is never discovering newer, better approaches to strategy.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

by ThunderChild the Magnificent
Square One: The Knowing Doing Gap:
[Via Creativity Central]

Let’s go back 1999. Crown Prince Abdullah becomes the ruler of Jordan on the death of his father, King Hussein. Lance Armstrong wins first Tour de France. And most importantly Family Guy airs its pilot episode.

It’s also the year that Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton wrote The Knowing-Doing Gap. Nearly a decade later a significant number of companies have amnesia. A lot of mangers read the book. A lot of managers ignored what they learned.

Their preface does a masterful job of setting up the premise. “We wrote this book because we wanted to understand why so many managers know so much about organizational performance, say so many smart things about how to achieve performance, and work so hard, yet are trapped in firms that do so many things they know will undermine performance.”

In a nutshell: There are more and more books and articles, more training programs and seminars and more knowledge that, although valid, often had little or no impact on what managers actually did.

Nothing has really changed.

[More]

In my rubric, knowledge allows decisions to be made and actions to be taken. Data interacts with humans to gain context and become information. Information interacts with human social networks to become knowledge. While knowledge allows decisions to be made, widsom permits the correct decision to be made.

Knowledge, by itself, does not guarantee that the decision will be the correct one. It does permit a decision to be made, even if the decision is to collect more data. Wisdom often requires several false starts to be taken before the right path can be found. In many settings, groups actually learn more from their mistakes than from a success.

P.S.

If you want to dig a little deeper, here are a few lines in an interview that Pheffer did with Fast Company

“If companies genuinely want to move from knowing to doing, they need to build a forgiveness framework — a tolerance for error and failure — into their culture. A company that wants you to come up with a smart idea, implement that idea quickly, and learn in the process has to be willing to cut you some slack. You need to be able to try things, even if you think that you might fail.

The absolute opposite mind-set is one that appears to be enjoying a lot of favor at the moment: the notion that we have to hold people accountable for their performance. Companies today are holding their employees accountable — not only for trying and learning new things, but also for the results of their actions. If you want to see how that mind-set affects performance, compare the ways that American Airlines and Southwest Airlines approach accountability — and then compare those two airlines’ performances.

American Airlines has decided to emphasize accountability, right down to the departmental — and even the individual — level. If a plane is late, American wants to know whose fault it is. So if a plane is late, what do American employees do? They spend all of their time making sure that they don’t get blamed for it. And while everyone is busy covering up, no one is thinking about the customer.

Southwest Airlines has a system for covering late arrivals: It’s called “team delay.” Southwest doesn’t worry too much about accountability; it isn’t interested in pinning blame. The company is interested only in getting the plane in the air and in learning how to prevent delays from happening in the future.

Now ask yourself this: If you’re going to be held accountable for every mistake that you make, how many chances are you going to take? How eager are you going to be to convert your ideas into actions?

So the final point from Square One is that a learning culture driven by creativity and innovation must allow mistakes to be made. The goal of mistakes is to learn from them, not to assign blame. People must be recognized for the attempt, not always for the solution.

One of the strong points of Web 2.0 tools is that they create much more openness and transparency. This makes it much easier to tell identify someone who pushes the envelope in order to help create knowledge that is useful to the organization. If the only way to succeed is never to fail, then the organization will eventually find itself with only followers and no leaders in creativity.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Social media, Web 2.0

by makelessnoise
Innovation Development:
[Via InnoCentive]
This site uses new tools to solve problems. It essentially acts as a broker between organizations that need problems solved and the large external community that may be able to find a solution.

The rewards can be pretty substantial if someone can become a successful solver. The site not only has problems in specific areas, but there are pavilions sponsored by single entities for directed solutions. The Rockefeller Foundation Accelerating Innovation for Development is one such organization.

So the possibility exists that external investigators could solve internal problems, and make a reasonable living at it. It will be interesting to see if this does become a form of livelihood.

Technorati Tags: Open Access, Science, Web 2.0

by Zed.Cat
A Day Without Twitter:
[Via chrisbrogan.com]

Yesterday, I took the day off from Twitter. I’ve been using it fairly solidly since the early days, and wanted to get a feel for what I was counting on Twitter to do for me. The results were interesting:

• I count on Twitter for group answers. A LOT. For instance, I needed to know who from the social media scene was in Detroit. I ended up using LinkedIn, but I know that means I missed a bunch of folks.
• I count on Twitter as a way to express quick, random thoughts, or to mention references to cultural items to which I know people will respond. (For instance, I like tweeting parts of song lyrics, because it’s fun when people pick the song up as a reply).
• I use Twitter to promote other people. While I was dark, I got no less than 14 requests to promote fundraising causes, and 12 general promotion requests.
• I use Twitter to promote myself, my blog, things I’m doing.

A day without Twitter didn’t give me more time to write. It gave me fewer distractions, but I don’t sit around and LABOR on Twitter when I write something. Often times, I can just jot something from my mobile in between meetings, or I pop the window open, reply to a few folks, and then go back to my work. Meaning, I don’t find Twitter to be a time suck to me.

I’m wondering if I should try my “a day without” on other services, like email, or my BlackBerry.

Have you tried things like this? What would you lose if you didn’t have Twitter?

‘Going without’ for a day is a nice way to see how a tool helps or how it does not help. Twitter certainly has some important uses in a general social network, particularly by keeping in touch with a wide group of people.

Many networks are made up of weak ties to a large group of people. Twitter helps maintain these weak ties, keeping the network functional. LinkedIn serves a similar function. Research has shown that the ability to activate weak ties when needed is a critical aspect of a working social network. It is also where many innovative ideas come from.

So, Twitter may have its uses. I’m just not sure I see where it would fall inside an organization. It seems like much more a personal network enhancer.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Social media, Web 2.0

by krisdecurtis
Why Twitter Matters:
[Via Business week]

It’s easy to laugh at nonsense on Twitter, the microblogging rage. “My nose is leaking,”writes someone called Zapples, “so imma go to sleep now.…” But I’ve heard lots of similar drivel (and even produced some myself) on the phone—an important technology if there ever was one.

The key question today isn’t what’s dumb on Twitter, but instead how a service with bite-size messages topping out at 140 characters can be smart, useful, maybe even necessary. Here’s why I’m looking. In the last few months, the traffic on Twitter has exploded, growing far beyond its circles of bleeding-edge tech enthusiasts and hard-core social networkers.

Businesses such as H&R Block (HRB) and Zappos are now using Twitter to respond to customer queries. Market researchers look to it to scope out minute-by-minute trends. Media groups are focusing on Twitterers as first-to-the-scene reporters. (They were on top of the May 12 China earthquake within minutes.) Loads of new applications and services are growing around the Twitter platform, leading some to suggest that the microblogging service could become a powerhouse in social media.

[More]

Lots of information in here about Twitter. I’m not sure how effective it might be in a research organization but then it was hard to see 6 years ago how a wiki might be useful.

This is definitely something to keep an eye on. One of the interesting aspects is its almost instant access to experts. Think of it as just-in-time answers. Beth Kanter discussed an interesting experiment she performed.

She wondered if Twitter or Google was faster at retrieving facts. She wanted to know the atomic number for radium. She twittered the questions and as she turned to her keyboard to Google it, she got 5 responses from her twitter friends.

So Twitter can be used to get simple answers rapidly. However, as the comments displayed, not all questions are equal and many will not get an answer. I’m more curious about finding answers to more difficult questions.

One of the really nice qualities of a  research library is that the librarians are very good at finding such answers. What if there was a Twitter group that was designed to help answers that were in immediately searchable on Google. Would that work better than trying to do it by yourself?

Have to think about it.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Web 2.0

by ThunderChild the Magnificent

Social Software: Freestanding or Layered?:
[Via A Journey In Social Media]

Had an interesting phone interview the other day, and we got into the topic above, which I found interesting.

We both agreed that we were going to see far more social software in the enterprise in the coming years.  The question was more about architecture — would these software packages be purchased and deployed as free-standing entities, or would they be thought more in terms of a “layer” over something else already in the enterprise.

And, if you’re aspiring to be a social media proficiency practitioner (as I am) — or a vendor that’s selling to people like me — the answer might matter to you.

Enterprise Buying Patterns

If you listen to software vendors who are trying to sell in the enterprise, they’ll usually make it sound like all sorts of large, important companies are buying their software.

However, if you dig down a bit, the truth is more usually that some group or another within that large organization made a purchasing decision. It wasn’t what I’d call a corporate decision.

As an example, let’s take SAP — a large, enterprise ERP platform.  No single group or department within a corporation will go out and deploy SAP — it just doesn’t make sense.  100% of their customers are probably “corporate decisions” rather than “group decisions” within a large company.

To take the opposite to an extreme, I happen to use SanDisk USB memory sticks.  Does that mean that EMC Corporation - a Fortune 500 company!! — uses SanDisk USB memory sticks?  Technically yes, but I think you get my point.

Why does this matter for social software?

Because I think there’s a big difference between some engineering group putting in a wiki for their team, and a large corporation making a strategic decision for all their employees.  Trust me, the buying criteria will be very, very different.

If I’m selling to a small group, I’d want an offering that’s focused on price, ease of installation, price, ease of management, price — and maybe price.

If I’m selling to a large enterprise, though, the list is very different.  If I’m a large enterprise, I’ve already made many, many investments in existing infrastructure software.I want my new social software to work with everything I have — not as another free-standing entity, but as a “layer”.

And I’ll pay extra for that capability.

[More]

An interesting discussion of the needs of a large company vs. a small company. The large company wants something that will act as a social layer over what it already has. It will not want to reinvest in calendaring, directories, etc.To a certain extent, this is software lock-in. The choices of the company are limited by what others have decided to add on to previously purchased software. It is certainly a way to go but will reduce the types of tools the users can access.

As an example, if a company waits until Microsoft provides a social layer over Outlook, it could be a while. Even if a third company provided this solution, its updates may not be timely, hurting the company’s competitiveness against companies that can utilize new software more rapidly. They are tied to the develop cycle of the vendor, not the technology.

Web 2.0 technologies can change very fast. Twitter was hardly anywhere 6 months ago. Now it is being used by millions. So there is a trap for large organizations, especially ones on the innovation train.

Also, the tools need to meet the needs of the users to be successful.

That is one thing not addressed in the post. People will really only take advantage of these tools if it makes their work flow easier. A group at the company may need and utilize Web 2.0 tools in a very different fashion than others in the company. How does the company deal with this?

Trying to use a tool that may be ‘best’ for the needs of HR may not mean Research is happy. The best tools may be the ones that resemble Swiss Army knives, with multiple attachments, than simply a layer over Outlook. They may need to be almost infinitely customizable.

I do agree that the user needs to have a single point of entry to the social web. But there has to be a recognition that new tools are being developed and that they may have to be implemented someday. A real worry should be that a large enterprise may not be as nimble with the successful recognition of vital new tools. This flattens the playing field with those companies that can utilize the new tools.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Social media, Web 2.0

Video: Podcasting in Plain English | Common Craft - Explanations In Plain English:
[Via Common Craft]

These videos are always worth watching and do a wonderful job explaining how many Web 2.0 tools work. The videos can be downloaded and embedded into intranet pages for employees, allowing them to better understand the technologies.

The fact that these videos use such a low tech approach to teaching about high tech tools make them very original and eye-catching.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

by aussiegall
Social networking site aims to help fight malaria:
[Via News at Nature - Most Recent]

New website gives smaller African projects a bigger profile.
[More]

An interesting approach - using social networking tools to help increase awareness of anti-malaria projects and help fundraising effort. It is a novel way to use some of these tools but I wonder if these would be more successful as a stand alone project or under the wings of larger social media entities?

Technorati Tags: Non-Profit, Science, Web 2.0

by Bitterjug
Is knowledge hoarding all about your pay cheque?:
[Via Library clips]

The other day I posted on, Participation is the currency of the knowledge economy.
The word “participation” can be interchanged for “social captial”, “conversation”, “contribution”, knowledge sharing”, but I chose “participation”, because “conversation” cannot happen without “participation.” And “participation” sounds more involved, sustained, or perpetual than “contribution” or “knowledge sharing.”

Anyway in that post I mentioned that the way companies currently operate is driven by each worker building their “intellectual captial” to get ahead, and to differentiate themselves. The more “intellectual capital” you have the more you are worth something or unique to the company. This kind of means workers compete with each other, or at least try to have unique power that will make them an asset to the firm. In this environment “knowledge sharing” would be the worst thing you could do, as you would be giving away your “edge”, giving away what makes you a unique asset to the company.

Of course we all know the “wisdom of crowds”, and an open and transparent participation model leads to ideas and conversation, which leads to discovery and collaboration. The act of sharing and finding saves others from re-inventing the wheel, saving money and project cycle-time.
A company that runs on a social captial model runs on the notion that “two minds are better than one”, so why not have a culture where these minds have open dialogue. In the end this opportunity for access to knowledge to help you with your work and to find new work brings the company closer to innnovation, and more honest client relationships.

No matter how simple the tools, and no matter even if people understand the benefits of “knowledge sharing” it just won’t happen if the company culture is about “intellectual captial” rather than “social capital.”
[More]

Organizations that depend on the creativity and innovations of their employees will not be as successful if they utilize knowledge hoarding when compared to those that have learning, collaborative communities.

The diffusion of innovations has been well studied. It is an outgrowth of human social networks. The rate at which information traverses the network will determine how rapidly a new idea gets accepted and used.

If certain people hoard information, they prevent this flow. In hierarchical companies, this hoarding can be useful to the hoarder, since they can position themselves as the node through which the information must flow. Knowledge is power.

In the highly networked world found in many companies today, however, this is more difficult. Preventing information flow along other routes becomes harder. The hoarder loses all power if someone else spreads the knowledge.

Just as the Internet routes around damage when a node goes down, so do well-connected human social networks route around knowledge hoarders, diminishing their power.

Companies that lessen the power of hoarders will have more rapid and successful diffusion of new ideas that can have huge impacts on the bottom line. Organizations that fail to deal with hoarders will not be as adaptive or as responsive to innovation. And, if the hoarder takes their information elsewhere, the organization is left with much less than it had before.

Technorati Tags: Open Access, Social media, Web 2.0

by flattop341
Tips for Delivering a Successful Online Experience:
[Via eLearn Magazine]

Standing in front of an audience is no easy task, as any talk show host or comedian would attest. Unfortunately when a seminar moves into the virtual world, capturing the attention of your audience can be even more difficult. How can you keep everyone engaged and informed? Richard Watson has several helpful techniques which constitute a major improvement over picturing the audience naked.
[More]

As increasing numbers of our collaborations take place online, these sorts of events will become even more common. These tips can be really useful, such as getting a high quality headset rather than use speaker phone. Not only will they sound better but they will be less likely to yell into the speaker with the misguided notion that others will not hear you otherwise.

Now if we could just modify the speaker spider found in many conference rooms - the one with multiple speakers for several people. They never get placed where everyone can both be heard and hear what others say from the speakers.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0