Today’s Odd Bits are kind of a hodgepodge, but in the twisty corridors of my mind they do fit together.
First the potatoes.
Do you believe all the experts, academicians, pundits and just-plain-people who keep talking about how the so-called Great Recession is permanently changing America’s stuff fixation? I don’t, I just think people will find a way to do the same thing covertly—call it inconspicuous consumption.
On the other side, have high-end retailers really changed their attitude towards customer service? An exec from Saks Fifth Avenue said, “Every customer is valuable and they’re even more valuable today because there are fewer of them.” Does that mean they will revert to form when there are more of them? Another little gem buried in this article shows that consumers haven’t changed all that much, after all, who really needs an $18 bottle of nail polish?
Microsoft, the company people love or hate. Since I’m in the latter camp I was delighted to see that they lost on appeal and the $290 million judgment for violating a patent stands. Their reaction is typical of today’s worst corporate MAP, since “…new versions [of Word], with the computer code in question removed, would be ready for sale when the injunction begins Jan. 11.” They stole, but that’s OK because getting caught won’t interfere with business and apparently the money is no big deal. Still more intriguing is an article at CNN wondering if Steve Ballmer will be out in 2010, “Ballmer has shepherded Microsoft to vanishing mobile market share (now just 7.9 percent of the market), a hesitant tiptoe into software as a service, and a general sense of retreat in emerging markets.” (Be sure to check the two links at the end of the story.)
And then there is Facebook, which is one of the top two time-wasters since time began (the other is Twitter). Besides providing you with a whole new set of virus to worry about, it’s obsessive (in case you hadn’t noticed) and the best defense seems to be defriending.
Enough with the potatoes, you need meat to balance your last meal here. And for that kind of substance you can’t beat Harvard.
Specifically, you can’t beat Michael C. Jensen, the Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus’ fascinating paper on integrity.
“Integrity in our model is honoring your word. As such integrity is a purely positive phenomenon. It has nothing to do with good vs. bad, right vs. wrong behavior.”
Therefore the worst villain has the same integrity as your favorite saint. Interesting premise, well worth reading.
Social media; stories about it are everywhere, but I find the most interesting are about what companies are doing and how its being used.
Let’s start with Twitter. Everybody has heard of Twitter, even people who have no idea what it is talk about it—like my friend’s great-granny. But it’s their smarts in innovation that is most impressive—they outsource it.
Twitter’s smart enough, or lucky enough, to say, ‘Gee, let’s not try to compete with our users in designing this stuff, let’s outsource design to them.’ –Eric von Hippel, head of the innovation and entrepreneurship group at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T.
If you run a business these days you’re probably using Facebook or thinking about it—I know I am. So I found this article in the NY Times of great interest, especially since it’s written for folks, not pros.
You need to be where your customers are and your prospective customers are, and with 300 million people on Facebook, and still growing, that’s increasingly where your audience is for a lot of products and services. –Clara Shih, author of “The Facebook Era” (Pearson Education, 2009).
Do you know the key ingredient that helps police nab the bad guys? Stupidity—theirs. It used to be that they flashed their loot around and bragged to their friends, not they flash their loot and brag on Facebook.
Maxi Sopo thought he had made an excellent decision when he ran away to Cancun to escape a Seattle fraud prosecution. He also thought it would be a great idea to add a former Justice Department official as a friend and gush about his exploits on Facebook.
I love it when stupid gets stupider.
Last is an item that falls in the smart or stupid category—you decide. It asks the question; at what point does a CEO’s Facebook sharing cross the boundary to TMI (too much information)?
Recently Chip Conley, CEO of Joie de Vivre, a $230 million company with more than 3,000 employees, got enmeshed in a bit of a 2009 corporate culture snafu. Conley’s not your average Harvard MBA pinstriped buttoned-down corporate chieftan. He’s an entrepreneur. He writes his own rules. So to him, it wasn’t so strange to post some pictures of himself at the Burning Man whatever-it-is in the dessert on his Facebook fan page. Or to tweet on Twitter about the demise of his 8 year long relationship.
When his employees got upset he wrote about it on BNET. Read both articles and share your thoughts in comments.
Entrepreneurs, you got to love ‘em—at least most of the time.
Two great interviews today; just two because one if fairly long.
First is Dany Levy, founder and editorial director of DailyCandy in an interview conducted by Anthony (Tony) Tjan, CEO, Managing Partner and Founder of Cue Ball, a venture and early growth equity firm.
Daily Candy is “a daily email newsletter that provides readers with an essential nugget of hip, insider advice about “what to do today,” began in New York and soon spread to a dozen other U.S. cities and London.” Levy took in one majority investor 2003 and the company was recently acquired by Comcast for $125 million.
There is both a written interview and a video, but Harvard doesn’t provide embeddable code, so you’ll have to go there.
Next, Henry Blodget interviews 25-year-old Mark Zuckerberg who “started Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004. Five years later, it has 300 million users and $500 million in revenue, and it’s worth something north of $6 billion.”
Many wonder what someone that age know about running a company that size, but Zuckerberg makes the case for not only hiring those smarter than you, something every has heard, but also listening to them.
Below is the full interview, the short version is here, if you prefer, but the full interview is well worth watching.
I don’t understand the current obsession with other people’s lives, in fact, I find it very weird.
Whether it is a public figure or not, the desire (need?) to know every little detail, what they are doing every minute of their lives, the products they use, their ups and downs to be almost obsessional.
This kind of interest used to be reserved for the intimacy of real friendship or close family relations—and even then there were boundaries—but now anyone is fair game.
Apparently I’m not as out of it as I thought; many people are shutting down their Facebook pages for a variety of reasons, not the least of which are the effects they notice on their own MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).
Others are leaving because they don’t like the commercialization, which I find amusing. Any mass human congregating, past, present or future, will attract those who want to sell their product. Why anyone would think it would be different because the location is in the cyber-world is beyond me.
Other than malicious intent, two things happen on social media.
Not thinking, which causes people to post stuff to venues in which it doesn’t belong and giving access to “friends”—who may not be next week.
Not focusing, which leads to pilot error though the ease and simplicity of clicking the wrong button.
Consider this post, sent to me by a friend, as a great example of the dangers of multitasking while updating Facebook.
Can you imagine the reaction of hiring managers, potential mates or future kids? Even if it had been posted privately there is nothing to stop a “friend” who is angry from reposting it.
Once it’s out there it’s out there forever—definitely the wrong kind of immortality.
I’ve said many times, both here and at MAPping Company Success that social media never dies and people need to think about that.
You, my readers, my friends and whatever enemies I have all use social media (well, almost all), I don’t. No Twitter, no texting (no cell phone:), no Facebook, no MySpace—OK, I do business blog,
But I do read a lot about it; follow the trends and tragedies, as when Twitter went down. So I thought I’d share some of the more interesting articles I’ve come across recently.
First is a clear, concise description of three tactics to get your company up and using social media. Not strategy (as several commenter pointed out) but solid action items.
The Wall Street Journal offers (more) advice—why and how—on the importance of learning texting lingo—that’s one no one will ever sell me on, but you should if you plan to function in the cyber-world.
From Psychology Today, 5 Smartphone Rules To Live By that teach you how to own your smartphone instead of it owning you.
But not everybody believes that everything you do should be chronicled for public consumption. Protocols NYC, a salon created by five Manhattan news media types and those they invite, has banned texting, cell phones, pictures, etc. They call it off the record and just talk to each other—it’s called conversation for those of you too young to have experienced that kind of focus.
Two final offerings for kids and adults who think it’s cool put their life online. They should serve as a warning to anyone with kids and the second for anyone who holds or plans to hold a job at anytime in their lives. The first tells us that “one in 10 teens admitted posting a nude or seminude shot of themselves or others online.” Combine that with the second, “35percent of the 2,667 managers and human resource workers decided not to offer a job to a candidate based on the content uncovered on a social networking site,” and you have a recipe for disaster. Privacy settings aren’t the whole answer, since inappropriate pictures sent and information shared with friends may appear on their pages (and who knows where else)—and they never go away.
I had an interesting experience today—actually, I found it amusing, but ridiculous.
I used to live in Silicon Valley, the land of early adopters and the technically obsessed, and am still involved with several groups there.
Here’s the short version of what happened.
Around noon one of the project members sent an email to all of us saying he urgently needed certain information and asked if ‘Joe’ had it;
Joe replied around 1 that he didn’t have it, but maybe a Jean did;
Jean replied around 1:45 that only Mary had access to it.
I saw the thread around 2:15 when I got back to my office, called Mary and told her that she urgently needed to respond to the thread.
She did and the situation was dealt with immediately.
What was so ridiculous is that the entire group knows that
1) Mary is the only person with access to this info;
2) That she is ‘technologically challenged’; and that
3) she doesn’t read email as it arrives; she checks it on and off when she has the time.
That means that email wasn’t the best choice to contact her and everybody knew—if they had stopped to think about it instead of running on autopilot.
There are many ways to contact people these days, email, instant messaging, Twitter, but only if you don’t care that the world can see it, Facebook, ditto, etc.
The problem lies in focus; your choice should depend not on your preference, but on the preference of the person you are trying to reach.
So remember, communicating is like playing golf. The trick isn’t to play the whole course with one club, but to know which club to use for which shot.
It’s one of those odds and ends day, no unifying theme, but some good stuff.
Phil Gerbyshak sent me a link to an interesting post by his friend Roy Atkinson. Roy talks about speedership—the need to act quickly in today’s world. Roy sees it as a requirement for a positional leader, which it is, but I see it as an attitude that everybody needs these days.
Click over to the slideshow at Business Week and learn what experts are saying about how leadership has changed.
Next, in case you hadn’t heard, one of the newest social media trends are Facebook suicides, as in killing your profile. Click the link and see why people are choosing to kill their profile.
Finally, something for you to think about. What happens when doctors start treating medicine as a business? What does it mean for the future of medicine, not healthcare, in this country?
Together, these five disparate thoughts pack enough wisdom to live from youth to old age and never go wrong
“Friendship is an undervalued resource. The consistent message of these studies is that friends make your life better.” –Karen A. Roberto, director of the center for gerontology at Virginia Tech (I wonder if all those friends at Facebook and Twitter count?)
“Never let your ego get so close to your positions that when your position goes, your ego goes with it.” –Admiral H. G. Rickover (I call it ego merge and it’s a definite no-no.)
“That’s what keeps life moving forward, focusing on what we can do, rather than getting caught up in what we can’t.” –Trisha Meili, The Central Park Jogger (Words of wisdom from a woman who knows.)
“Small Minds Talk About Others, Mediocre Minds Talk About Themselves, Great Minds Talk About Ideas.” –Eleanor Roosevelt (Which do you have?)
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” –John Milton, Paradise Lost (True when Milton wrote it and just as true now.)
Serena isn’t a hot growth company, but a profitable 25-year-old company building mainframe software and Burton isn’t a kick-ass Millennial, but rather a 40-year-old veteran of Oracle and Veritas, who says “We’ve got to be relevant to the future. So we instituted Facebook Friday,” and dared his people to participate and learn about each other—to date all 800 of Serena’s 900 employees have accounts. But the real message was “Guys – the world is a different place and if we’re going to stay relevant we’re going to have to wake up.”
He’s also using it to evangelize the software-as-a-service business model he believes is necessary for the company to thrive in the future.
Burton says, “I think we gain rather than lose productivity this way. We have a theme, but I leave it up to them to choose what to do.”
Millennials and many Web 2.0 proponents believe that the most important thing is to incorporate the technology because it’s there, but, as Burton shows, it works better to bring it in with a specific goal in mind. He understands that people worry about, and often fear, change, so wrapping change in a palatable way works faster.
The great lesson to take away from this isn’t about Facebook; it’s a reminder that “a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.”
Do you think that sugar-coating change is good or bad?
Whether I’m socially disabled or just plain antisocial I’m the last person you want to ask about social media tools and whether/how to use them—but I keep getting asked. So when I accidentally fell into a dialog with Stephen Collins, Founder and Chief Troublemaker at acidlabs, during a thread on LinkedInBloggers (a yahoo e group) I asked him if he’d be willing to share some of his knowledge and he said yes.
According to Stephen, ‘he’s a frequently self-appointed tricky problem solver driven by a need to help people and organisations effect change in their capacity to retain, distribute and share knowledge.’
Without more ado, here’s Stephen.
Why you should be using social tools in your organisation
Just the other day, I read this comment from an accountant on a newspaper article about social networking in business:
‘Interesting info about Twitter – yes I was in that group that thought it would never catch on! Maybe I could send riveting reminders about when [sales tax] is due :)’
The writer’s offhand comment is actually not too far off the mark. This type of use is actually appropriate for a tool like Twitter and matches fairly closely with other emerging business use of Twitter where smart, social network aware organisations are using it as a channel to keep their community abreast of current happenings.
With a growing number of major businesses such as IBM, SAP, Janssen- Cilag and Morgan Stanley using social tools inside and across the wall to manage collaboration efforts, networking and communications, any organisation that simply discounts social tools as an effective medium is doing themselves a disservice. The cries of ‘time wasting’ and ‘not for business’ are ever more clearly wrong and often made by those who are dismissing social tools without looking to understand.
Now, let it be very clearly said that open slather is not the way to go for most businesses. Letting people muck about all day, grooming their Facebook profile is, frankly, less an issue of time wasting and more a matter of good people management.
Appropriate use policies that are very clear on what is and isn’t allowed and careful steps towards use and understanding are the way to go. As an independent consultant this is advice I give to my clients as I speak to them about the opportunity social tools offer them in terms of staff attraction, engagement and retention, for knowledge and information management and for collaboration. A little research is all that’s needed to find a wealth of information to support this position.
My business uses social tools as a core part of the way I deal with clients and peers around the world. Using these tools has afforded me opportunities to become engaged in communities and work that might otherwise never have crossed my radar. In the last year, I’ve presented at a conference in the USA (I live in Australia) and met in real life in excess of 100 new and interesting people I might otherwise never have crossed paths with. Every one of those opportunities was as a direct result of the networking and information and knowledge sharing opportunities opened to me by using social networking tools.
I am a regular user of Twitter (probably one of the most prolific Aussies, actually), I use Facebook to track what my professional communities (and friends) are up to and are talking about, I use LinkedIn for strictly business networking and to ask and answer relevant questions, I use Upcoming to track and note my attendance at various events and I use several other social networks for their specific purposes – Flickr for photos, delicious and Magnolia for bookmarking, TripIt and Dopplr for travel and meeting coordination and BrightKite (a new network) for tracking location and arranging serendipitous connections with colleagues, peers and friends. I also blog and use tools like Google Calendar, BaseCamp and Google Docs to keep track and store information that is important to me and my clients.
There’s no reason your organization couldn’t be doing the same. If it’s good enough for Downing Street, who are officially blogging, using Twitter, YouTube and Flickr and significantly opening up the British government to constituent participation, it’s probably good enough for your organisation. As an Australian, I only hope that our Prime Minister sees what’s happening in Britain and does something similar.
I would be more than happy to have a conversation with you or anyone else reading this post about how social tools can help you build brand and community for you and your organisation. My contact details are very public – you can find them at http://www.acidlabs.org/
Social media; stories about it are everywhere, but I find the most interesting are about what companies are doing and how its being used.
Entrepreneurs, you got to love ‘em—at least most of the time.
But I do read a lot about it; follow the trends and tragedies, as when Twitter went down. So I thought I’d share some of the more interesting articles I’ve come across recently.
There are many ways to contact people these days, email, instant messaging, Twitter, but only if you don’t care that the world can see it, Facebook, ditto, etc.
“Friendship is an undervalued resource. The consistent message of these studies is that friends make your life better.” –Karen A. Roberto, director of the center for gerontology at Virginia Tech (I wonder if all those friends at Facebook and Twitter count?)
In April David Kirkpatrick, a Fortune senior editor, wrote about 
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