Only Dead Fish

You Are Listening To...

I'm rather loving YouAreListening.to, a simple mashup by Eric Eberhardt evoking four different cities: New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Montreal. Each one features an image of the city from Flickr, a local Police Department Radio Stream via Radioreference, with an audio soundtrack from Soundcloud. So simple, and yet spookily atmospheric.

HT

When I Grow Up

I guess it's no big surprise that in a (US) survey of over 10,000 young professionals Google came out as the company that most would like to work at. And by some margin, with nearly a quarter of survey respondents selecting them, almost twice as many as picked the second place business, Apple. As well as being a huge brand, and one that is well used in a consumer context by the survey audience, they are a company that take their employer brand very seriously and are very good at externalising their progressive culture. Google were one of four tech focused businesses in the top ten and it was kind of interesting, but again unsurprising perhaps, that when respondents were given the option to write in companies that were not on the list, the top write-in was Facebook.

In the battle to attract the best talent (because it is a battle), the lessons of tech focused businesses go further than just investment in employer brand. It's about culture. In the age of the porous enterprise, organisational culture is not something that happens in isolation within a corporate firewall. It still amazes me, for example, how many organisations fail to see the benefit of a significant digital footprint, in having employees who are externally facing, out-there interacting, expressing opinion, connecting, talking about the good work they're doing. Many businesses seem to prefer to have their good people internally facing, spending their time managing upwards.

Yet if the visibility of your talent and your best work is low, how do you expect to attract people who only want to work where the best stuff is done and where the smart people that they can learn from work? The danger is not just that you will lose the game, but that you're not even on the pitch. And if you don't get the best talent, you won't win. Period. 

The best account that I've read of where Yahoo went wrong comes from Paul Graham (and he really does have unique insight). He talks about how they lost their way early on. How the wrong things became prioritised. How they began seeing themselves as a media company rather than a technology company. How they lost their start-up culture. How this meant programming was not taken seriously enough, became treated as a commodity, downgraded in influence and importance. How they lost the obsessive desire to hire the best programmers that you need in order to win. And since talent wants to work with other talent: "once the quality of programmers at your company starts to drop, you enter a death spiral from which there is no recovery".

The antithesis of this in technology companies is a strong hacker-centric culture. This post, describing how Facebook developes and releases software, is notable in articulating an engineering driven culture where everyone feels responsibility for the product. At Facebook, resourcing for projects is purely voluntary. Rather than a top-down hierarchically-driven organisation of effort, a Project Manager lobbies a group of engineers and endeavours to get them excited about their idea. The engineers decide which ideas they want to work on, and say to their manager what those things are. The Engineering Manager largely leaves these choices alone, perhaps sometimes asking that certain tasks get done first. 

This post on Quora from the CTO of Etsy on how they manage their development and operations talks about how engineers are treated as 'creative collaborators' alongside design and product, and instead of simply being handed stuff for implementation, how products are worked out and iterated on with engineers. Developers regularly interact direct with Etsy members via their community forums and a status blog, which "gives everyone a deeper sense of responsibility for the code we're writing". The founder and head of product, Rob Kalin, stays in close contact with product and engineering but the teams have a lot of autonomy in how they work, staying within a broad set of architectural principles and overall design approach.  Specs are very light, the emphasis on building working features.

The observation that Paul Graham makes is that the area covered by this kind of rule is bigger than most people realise. In answer to the question about which companies are in the software business, he suggests that it's any company that needs to have good software. I'd add a more general point. Technology companies naturally work in more agile ways, often focused around motivated, self organised teams and on outputs not input. But in today's world, show me a company that does not want to be more agile. Show me one that does not want highly motivated employees. That does not want its staff to be more entrepreneurial.

In Drive, Dan Pink talks about how everything we know about what motivates us is wrong. How the carrot-and-stick, hope-of-gain-fear-of-loss approach is outdated and ineffective in today's environment. And how in the search to produce creative solutions to problems, it is factors such as autonomy, purpose and mastery - the inherently human need to direct our own lives and efforts, to learn, to create new things, to make a difference, to make things better than they were before - that is the key to having high performing, motivated, happy employees. In the modern networked economy, as JP Rangaswami has said, it makes no sense to employ bright, talented individuals that bring new thinking into organisations and have the ability to solve complex problems, and then for management to tell them what to do.

In his excellent post about scaling start-ups, Chad Dickerson (Etsy CTO), suggests that people want to work in start-ups because they like to move fast, they want to make impactful decisions, want to DO things and BUILD things (not sit in meetings, or write reports), and take risks (he uses a great Peter Drucker quote: "People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year."). I'd argue that most talented people I know want exactly the same. They want a more grown-up way of working. 

So corporate culture is no longer hidden, it's transparent. If you have a culture that stifles this kind of grown-up, fit-for-purpose way of working, you will not attract the kind of people and thinking that companies now need not just to gain competitive advantage, but to survive. As Paul Graham says: "Hacker culture often seems kind of irresponsible…But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example."

Visual Budget

  

"How do we fix our National Budget Deficit and Debt? Help us build a website that helps America explore the answers to build our future."

I love this project on Kickstarter. Visual Budget is an extraordinary data visualisation project that is setting out to explain the complexities of the US Federal Budget, find the human element behind the numbers, and bring it to life through storytelling with data. 

This kind of stuff is important. The US and UK governments have gone to substantial lengths to open up their data and crowdsource ideas to mixed levels of success (crowdsourcing isn't easy). Many US states have a spending transparency site enabling access for citizens to detailed spending information from state agencies. Some have performance transparency portals that take this into the realm of performance information and in rare cases to information on outcomes. And interestingly, someone has already suggested to the UK government the idea of developing a national version of such spending and performance transparency sites that would enable the public to view information on how their tax pounds are being spent, and how well public service organizations are performing in delivering outcomes that improve people’s lives.

I'm not a fan of the over-burdensome, target-driven culture of government championed by some, but aside from the good work The Guardian have done in visualising the UK Budget (often in collaboration with David McCandless), there seems to be a lack of accessibility to the bigger picture of government policy and outcome, and use of tools like data visualisation to tell the real story of what's going on at a national government level.

So for me this is not just about increased accountability and transparency. The originators of Visual Budget say that their aim is to bring a new breadth of knowledge to the political discourse around the budget deficit, and beyond that to push the politicians to act, and motivate people to act, and to make a real difference.

They make the point that popular news media is really bad at explaining conceptual subjects, and topics of relative proportion, focusing instead on the newsworthy or controversial in isolation and making it difficult to see a true representation of what the bigger picture really looks like. On a personal level, I'd also welcome something that represented a counterpoint to the constant use of isolated, out-of-context statistics by politicians trying to make a point or justify an individual policy.

At time of writing Visual Budget had already beaten its funding target by 50% and still has 38 days to go. So good for them - I really hope it lives up to what it could be.

Something To Remember

When asked "What thing about humanity surprises you the most?", the Dalai Lama answered:

"Man…. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived."

HT

The Shamrock Organisation (Redux)

Charles Handy, Irish philosopher, management thinker and writer, first coined the phrase The Shamrock Organisation in the late 80's to describe an organisational structure with three distinct parts: 

• The 'core staff', likely to be experienced or highly trained professionals, essential to continuity and maintaining detailed knowledge of organisational aims, objectives and practices.
• A second 'leaf' comprising a 'contractual fringe' of specialists, perhaps including people who once worked for the organization but now supply services to it, who operate within broad guidelines but have a high degree of flexibility and discretion.
• The third leaf describes a flexible work-force of part-time, temporary or seasonal roles. Whilst they are employed on a casual basis, the value that they bring is recognised in the way in which they are managed, and they are close enough to the organization to feel some degree of commitment to it, ensuring they maintain a high standard of work.

When Handy described this concept in The Age of Unreason, he was at odds with the kind of industrial-era hierarchical approach that had long characterised management thinking. But his view has been somewhat vindicated since as organisations have sought more flexible ways of working.

The interesting thing is how we've reached a point where, powered by networked technologies and the need for businesses (in the face of rapidly changing competitive and consumer environments) to be more flexible than ever, this kind of model is about to be taken to a whole new level. We are in the eye of a perfect storm: an influx of highly talented individuals into the market; the need for organisations to  adopt structures and overheads that are more adaptable and far less rigid; the opportunity afforded by technology and ubiquitous connection to enable a totally different way of working. The rise of talent networks. 

In Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson talks about how ideas often lay dormant in the form of hunches, or half-ideas for years. And how it is the collision of these half-ideas that enable breakthroughs to happen. Agile enterprises that recognise this create spaces (physical and virtual) where ideas can mingle. In The Power Of Pull, Hagel, Seely & Brown talk about how 'flows' of knowledge have become as important as the stocks of knowledge that businesses have traditionally relied on. How it is the connected employees that bring new thinking into the organisation (thinking that is inherently non-core) allowing for innovation at the edges. McKinsey found that companies that were fully networked (intensively using social technologies to connect employees to each other and to customers, partners, suppliers) were "more likely to be market leaders or to be gaining market share but also use management practices that lead to margins higher than those of companies using the Web in more limited ways".

This makes a lot of sense. Networks are highly efficient, benefit from a vastly broad talent base, new thinking, frictionless collaboration, flexible cost structures. Charles Handy was more prescient than he could ever have known at the time. Those organisations that ignore the opportunity for more flexible ways of working, who don't actively encourage their people to network outside their organisation, who block employees from using technologies inside of work in ways that they naturally use them outside of work will lose competitive advantage. And lose it fast.

Image courtesy

All The Information In The World

How much information can the world store, communicate, and compute? from SCVideos on Vimeo.

I sometimes think that one of the most fundamental issues that content producers (of any kind) consistently fail to get their heads around is just what they are competing against in the new world.

As Kevin Kelly said all the way back in 2006, the amount of information we are generating is the fastest increasing quantity on this planet, expanding and accumulating faster than any material or artifact in this world, and anything else we create or can measure: "That means that at the very edge of change, where change changes the most, information is leading."

A study by Martin Hilbert of the University of Southern California pegs the annual growth of general purpose computing capacity at 58%, the annual growth in telecommunication capacity at 28%, and the annual increase in globally stored information at 23%. In 2007, humankind was able to store 275 Exabytes of compressed information in our technological devices, equivalent to 80 times more information per person than was in the historic Library of Alexandria. Whilst broadcasting capacity has grown at about the same rate as the world's GDP, our information storage capacity has grown four times faster, and computation capacity 9 times faster.

The point is that unless you have a grasp of the way in which ideas propagate and involve in this new environment, distributing content could well feel like you're dripping water into a raging torrent. And it's why share of voice is rapidly becoming such a defunct concept.

For a larger version of the above image take a look here. And a HT to Kevin Kelly.

Social Paintings

Courtesy of the Bad Banana blog I came across the remarkable work of Enda O’Donoghue, an Irish artist living in Berlin who's work is influenced by his background as a computer programmer and web developer. Enda scours social networks and blogs looking for "the throw-away shots which otherwise gather digital dust buried away on hard-drives, camera chips, mobile phones or are uploaded and then lost or forgotten someplace on the web".

He is meticulous about tracing the ownership and requesting permission, before dissecting and dismantling the image section by section and reconstructing it in paint, a process that is "methodical and yet filled with randomness and inviting of errors, misalignments and glitches." 

One of the comments to the post questions why he likes the throwaway shots so much when there's so many 'good' images out there. But I think that's precisely the charm of them. It brings a new and different focus to everyday things, and makes you reconsider your perception of them. And isn't that, at least in part, what good art is all about?

Google Firestarters

So, some exciting news. I'm working with Google in the UK (full disclosure: they are a client of mine) to curate a series of events to provide some stimulating thinking and discussion around some of the more interesting and challenging issues facing planners today. The first one tackles how advertisers can use existing and new data sources to be more adaptive and iterative in their planning, and more responsive to the real-time world and the rapidly changing environments in which we all have to operate.

I've written a lot about agile working practices, and my belief that the relentless digitisation of products, services, and communications has created an environment characterised by ubiquitous connection, a proliferation in data and a shift toward always-on, real-time marketing where advantage comes more from responsiveness and agility. So the objective here is not to sell Google, but rather to extend that debate out and facilitate some good discussion around a subject which I believe has the potential to genuinely change how we do what we do. 

Speaking at this first session will be long-time comms provocateur Mark Earls, who's been doing some interesting work in this area of late, and Tim and Stuart from MadeByMany who are really walking-the-walk as far as implementing and integrating smart, responsive, agile development processes into how they work as an agency.

This first event will be held at Google UK on the 31st March. Spaces are limited and invite only but I have a handful of first-come-first-served guest passes to give away to Only Dead Fish readers - if you'd like one the please e-mail me and I will notify the successful applicants (I won't be able to respond to everyone I'm afraid).

Mondo Window

Gosh. Stamen Design, all-round-awesome data visualisers (and creators of one of my favourites - the lovely MTV VMA twitter traffic visualisation) have been working away with the people at Mondo Window to create the first site designed specifically for use with in-flight internet, and one that enables you to see what you're looking at out your airplane window, as you fly above it.

Fill in your flight details and the site accesses the various APIs that track where planes are and plots a map showing you what your flying over, overlaid with content from Wikipedia and Flickr. Brilliant. Shame mobiles and planes don't mix so well - it would make for a brilliant augmented reality phone app.

The Like Log Study

The Like Log Study from Yury Lifshits on Vimeo.

Fascinating study here from Yahoo Labs that analysed 'Like' counts for 45 of the world's most popular news sites over the period of three months. It's worth taking a look at the site, but the findings showed just how well The New York Times is performing in terms of social engagement with no less than 2.3 million Likes per month (which, if you take the average Facebook friend count to be 130, gives an impressive incremental potential reach). Good to see The Guardian also performing well.

With more than 30 Billion pieces of content shared every month, Facebook is a massive content sharing ecosystem. But the other aspect of the findings that particularly interested me was seeing how sharp the decay in engagement actually is. Unsurprising perhaps, given the real-time nature of most socialised digital environments but even so, less than 20% of likes happen after the first 24 hours. Good stuff.