Only Dead Fish

Why Do Big Companies Get Rid Of Talented People?

A strange thing happened this year. A number of highly talented people I know were made redundant from the (typically) large companies they were working for. Good people. Capable, bright, knowledgable people. People skilled in digital and who were willing to challenge the conventional ways of doing things in order to find a better way. 

This makes little sense to me. I recently worked on a fascinating piece of research on behalf of the smart folk at Econsultancy into how organisations are resourcing their digital marketing capability. One of the findings was that companies are finding it increasingly difficult to find talented people with both a depth and breadth of digital skills and knowledge. And yet some people who seemingly have all the skills and attributes that you would *think* would be highly prized by organisations (particularly those looking to adapt to the challenges brought by digital and emerging technologies) have been 'let go'.

In a recent post Rishad Tobaccowala defined strategy as 'Future Competitive Advantage', and described the two biggest challenges for firms seeking to deliver on a strategy as being to address their organisational design (processes and products that are optimised for existing customers) and their talent (attracting new skills, or up-skilling, and building out new incentives).

Despite talking a good game, many large organisations remain relatively poor at moving talent around the company. The silo culture that still characterises many businesses doesn't help. Requirements and expectations become optimised to local needs rather than those of the organisation as a whole. Strangely, the people who can really see the bigger picture and are often the ones to challenge existing assumptions are the ones that begin to not fit so easily into those silos. So companies take the easy option.

In my view, it's their loss. As Rishad says: "Strategy has a better chance of becoming reality if we keep in mind that the future does not fit in the containers or the mindsets of the past." That applies as much to talent as it does to business models. But sometimes finding the talent of the future is less about talking to headhunters and more about looking right under your nose.

Identity Is Prismatic

Chris Poole, the founder of 4Chan, About.me and Canvas, gave an interesting talk at Web 2.0 back in October about how one dimensional the existing ways in which services enable us to represent our identity are.

The portrait of identity online, he says, is often painted in black and white - who we are online is assumed to be a mirror of who we are offline, and anonymity is seen as something dark and chaotic. We all have multiple identities and there are many lenses through which people view us, yet Facebook (for example) has driven an over-simplifying, consolidating, one-size-fits-all, 'fast-food' approach to identity.

His argument is not about being disingenuous about who we really are, more about the limitations of being able to represent identity with sufficient nuance within different contexts ("It's not who you share with, it's who you share as"). Our options to do this, says Poole are eroding and this is happening to the extent that we're about to sacrifice something that is hugely valuable.

Thinking about this reminded me of the Alter Ego project by Robbie Cooper, which featured a whole series of photographs of virtual world gamers set alongside their online avatars. The project brings to life how some use their avatars to experiment with new identities, and others create ones that are extensions of their real selves, but most avatars have at least an echo of the person that created them, if not in their physical appearance then often by reflecting aspects of their creator's personality.

I am perhaps a little less pessimistic about this than Chris. The possibilities for self-expression online have never been wider, and online identity is still a relatively distributed construct. But with the ever increasing ubiquity and embedded nature of online services like Facebook, the launch of new features like timeline which are designed to lock our identity in, and with identity being such a key part of the context layer of the vertical stack, it's a really interesting question to ask.

The Best Blog Posts of 2011

Good writing and thinking should be celebrated. It's one of the main motivations behind doing Post Of The Month every month. So a good way to round off the year is with a list of my own favourite blog posts of 2011. In no particular order, here's my top ten:

1. How to Steal Like An Artist And 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me by Austin Kleon. An exceptional post by the artist behind Newspaper Blackout. He describes it as "10 simple things I wish I'd Heard When I was in college". So good it's become the basis for a book which is coming out in March.

2. How To Explain An Idea by Mark Pollard. Simple, but fantastically useful advice from Mark.

3. Building A New Agency OS from Mel Exon. Mel's provocative but intelligent polemic that she gave at the third Google Firestarters event in September. Full of good thinking.

4. The Web Is A Customer Service Medium by Paul Ford. How 'Why Wasn't I Consulted?' is the fundamental question of the web.

5. Planning For Participation by Patricia McDonald. An erudite explanation on why "then people can upload their own versions" is the new "let's do a viral", and how we can do better.

6. Do We Really Need Chief Innovation Officers in Ad Agencies? and Ten Things I've Found To Be True About CIO's in Agencies by Ben Malbon. A challenging question, worth reading not just for the posts but for the comments it stirred up.

7. Think Small, Thinking Small, Why Small Matters, Small Ideas, How To Think And Make Small by Gareth Kay. An exceptional series of posts from Gareth expounding his thinking on why small is important, and how "a continuous stream of interations and interactions" can become a "long idea". Smart and insightful.

8. 'Engagement': Fashionable Yet Bankrupt by Martin Weigel. A sharply focused piece railing against lazy thinking in marketing. Martin posted a number of well-articulated posts this year (including another favourite of mine on how we should Stop Fetishising The Insight) but sadly he seems to have stopped blogging. 

9. Check Against Delivery. My Speech to the IAAC by Ben Hammersley, about technologicial change.

10. My ICT Teacher Can't Mark My Homework from Emma MulQueeny, who runs Young Rewired State. A powerful call for change to our national curriculum in order to create more opportunity for our kids to learn how to code.

There were many that could so easily have been amongst the list including Murat's question about whether the next Angry Birds or Instagram could be born within an agency, Igor's smart piece on why W & K are not hiring Creative Technologists, and Noah's short but erudite article on the stock and flow of content strategy. But I had to stop somewhere so there you are. My thanks to all the authors for providing us with such challenging and well articulated thinking this year.

Shadow Profiles

Amen to this piece written by Bobbie Johnson on GigaOm concerning how certain sites scrape publicly available data from Facebook and Twitter to create 'profiles' of people without their permission. The focus of the article is on the site AllThis which allows people to bid for other people's time. Their creation of so-called 'shadow profiles' without permission or notification has annoyed a number of people (including the founder of Instapaper). But it also mentions another notable perpetrator: Klout.

A while back, Rohn pointed out that Klout had created a profile of me. Look, here it is. Thing is, I've never signed up to the service and have little interest in doing so. So I e-mailed them to ask them to take it down. They responded that as I hadn't registered on the site, I had to go to a link deep down on their privacy page where I would need to "provide credentials that allow us to verify you as the rightful owner of the profile in question". That turned out to be by using my Twitter or Facebook account. As the profile is not of my making, I didn't see why I should do this.

I wasn't intending to write about this, but it's an example of the wider privacy creep that seems to be taking place right now. It's a rather cavalier three-steps-forward-and-one-step-back-approach to personal data and it's an example of the worst kind of marketing. As the piece on GigaOm points out, the irony is that this uniquely anti-social practice is being conducted by companies that all claim to be 'social'.

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Google Firestarters 2012

As you'll know by now I've worked with Google this year to curate a series of events designed to facilitate different thinking and debate around some of the more challenging issues facing planners and the practice of planning. The three Firestarters events we've run have focused on some truly provocative subjects, seen some truly excelllent speakers, and had some truly brilliant feedback.

Throughout this year it's really felt like Firestarters has built some kind of momentum, and I've really enjoyed all the discussion that it has stimulated both at the events themselves, and outside of them. We decided not to do one in the run up to Christmas but the great news is that Firestarters will be back in the new year. Our first event of the year will be on 21st February, so save the date, and we'll be doing three more after that in 2012. We're lining up some awesome speakers for some more provocation for that first event (watch this space for more on that) but as usual, if there are any themes/subjects you think it would be good to focus on, please do let me know.

What Delicious Could Have Done (But Sadly Never Did)

This time last year Yahoo announced their decision to 'sunset' the Delicious social bookmarking service. At the time I bemoaned the fact that Yahoo had done nothing with the service for five years inspite of the fact that it had so much potential.

A few months later it was bought by the founders of YouTube (who had cashed out). Since then, they've invested in a few changes that seem to have taken it more in the direction of becoming a sort of social news service. Fair enough I guess, but (personal view) these changes have done little to improve the core reasons I use the site - the ability to bookmark, organise and share great content.

Seems I'm not alone. Charles Arthur has just written a piece in The Guardian about how they are moving their bookmarking service over to Pinboard. The reason? Delicious's apparent strategy to move away from being "something like the plumbing for the net". He's right. It's strength was always in the fact that it was one of the earliest Web 2.0 services that was truly built on platform thinking, with it's functionality embedded in browsers, websites and blogs alike. But whilst this core functionality provided an excellent base, it needed to develop and be augmented in order to keep pace with not only competitive services, but evolving user requirements and expectations. For me, there are 4 key areas where that needed (and still needs) to happen:  

1. Capitalise on the network. Delicious was one of the first (pre-Twitter) places where I connected up to smart people whose opinion I respected and who shared really good content. The feed from the network used to be a great source of interesting links and it still is, but it's usefulness has been surpassed by networks that offer improved levels of curation, filtering and organisation, not just aggregation.

2. Improved functionality for content - I'd like Delicious to enable offline reading (like Instapaper), and perhaps clipping, improved note-taking, mobile functionality (like Evernote), easy posting to Tumblr. I use each of these services for different reasons, but I use Delicious the most so if I could do it from one place I'd prefer to. I guess better curation of content is at least part of the thinking behind the recently launched Stacks feature, but sadly (despite being a long-time user) this functionality was never introduced or explained to me - it just appeared with the redesign.

3. Better search. It's never been any good, and yet with the amount of bookmarked content on the platform there must be a huge potential to deliver back real value to existing users, but also a great utility for potential new users.

4. Make some money. Charles Arthur's piece in The Guardian makes a clear point about Pinboard establishing a model around being a paid-for service and the relative freedom that gives them. Pinboard have no doubt been able to pull this off because (at least in part) of the ground broken by Delicious. I would pay for a premium Delicious service but I've never been asked. I've been bookmarking links on the service for five years. That's over 8,000 bookmarks. Every day, hundreds of thousands of Delicious users are busy tagging, organising and categorising a wealth of content on the web. Why has Delicious never thought to use that enormous wealth of data? Data that could have created the basis for a highly targeted advertising service. Or even better, a powerful recommendation engine that could serve up recommendations for great content based on what it knows about my preferences from five years worth of bookmarking, or even real-time recommendation based on what other Delicious users are bookmarking around the subjects I'm interested in right now. 

It's easy to say all this in hindsight I know, but I say it because I'm still willing Delicious to succeed. Partly because I have so much invested in it, and partly because I still think it's fundamentally a good service that has such a powerful base to build on. I still use it, but it needs to get better. Under Yahoo, it suffered from innovation inertia for too long. I've just joined Pinboard (which has a business model where the more users join the more new users pay) but I sincerely hope I don't get to the point where I have to use it. 

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The New Content Curators

It's great to see that Noah Brier's Percolate has secured it's first round of funding. I think it's a truly interesting service that fullfills a growing need, and the slight pivot they have just done to refocus more on offering curation services for brands rather than individuals makes a whole bunch of sense.

Brands can map their interests and goals against a wealth of content sources that Percolate scrapes daily. The Percolate algorithm then bubbles up the most interesting stories, and presents them to a 'brand editor' to curate and comment on before publishing.

As brands increasingly become content producers, and move into content hungry practices and channels, creating interesting stuff on a sustained basis is becoming a real challenge. As does mastering not just the stock, but the flow (flow being "pieces of content, produced rapidly and at a low cost"). Brands simply do not have the resource capability to accomodate this emerging requirement without utilising different forms of curation including algorithmic, social, as well as professional. As usual, it is by overlaying the best that technology can offer, with the capability of smart, talented people that works.

This begs an interesting question about the growing requirement for 'Brand Editors'. Is this a new role, or simply a new skill? As an aside, I think many media owners have been very slow at realising the opportunity that exists for them in applying their assets and skills in content creation and curation in new ways in order to generate new partnerships with brands, but that's another story.

Driving By Looking In The Rear-View Mirror

It's predictions time of year again. And like most things there's already the good and the not so good. I was rather taken with this comment from Seth Godin on a post by Fred Wilson about a talk by Forrester CEO, George Colony at last week's Le Web conference. Colony talked about the 'death of the web' and how 'social' is reaching saturation meaning the emergence of 'post-social' (le sigh).

Whilst there's some interesting points, I'm personally not keen on regarding the emergence of one thing meaning the imminent death of that which went before, and even less keen on viewing social as a 'thing'. As Jeff Jarvis commented social is not an application, it's a layer, and as another comment put it "humanity is social...social peaks when humanity does". But it was Seth's comment that made me really sit up. He said:

"The problem with just about every prediction made by industry firms like Forrester (all the way back to 1985 when these firms said that the Commodore 64 was going to change the world--until the VCR interrupted to become the next big thing) is that they are based on sophisticated analysis of what's in the rear-view mirror. A tough way to drive. The trends are legit, but we have no idea what unexpected breakthrough in human interaction is going to change everything."

It's a rather good metaphor. And it reminded me of that design-thinking thing about how undervalued the abductive thinking (imagining what could be possible) that is typically taught in design, is in comparison to the inductive (based on directly observable facts) and deductive (logic and analysis, often based on past evidence) approaches that often characterises business school teaching. Nothing wrong with the latter, but an over-reliance on framing the future through the lens of the past has missed opportunity written all over it.  

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The Digital Talent Time-Bomb

A fair bit of my recent working life has been taken up working with the smart folk at Econsultancy on a truly fascinating piece of research into how client organisations are structuring their digital marketing capability. It's been something of a massive task to navigate through the complexity of variables and surrounding factors and trends that impact how companies decide to resource this area. But the process and the results have been hugely enlightening.

One of the findings of the research focused on the fact that some of the key digital disciplines that companies identify as already being the most difficult to recruit for, also happen to be the ones that they anticipate will be the biggest areas of growth in resourcing in the near to mid-term future. Most notably disciplines including data and analytics, content marketing and social media.

This can only mean one thing: a looming talent time bomb. This is a very real issue, so I've penned a piece on the Econsultancy blog to expand on it. As I say in the article, there's reason to believe that this is not an issue that is likely to go away any time soon.

IKEA 365 Campaign

I'm rather intrigued by the concept behind this campaign (from earlier this year). To show their versatility, IKEA in Holland made a different TV ad for every day of the year. It's a wonderfully disruptive idea. But the thing I like most about it is that it's so far removed from the campaigning mindset that characterises so much of what we see - a continuous stream of communications that enables them to be far more topical, tactical and agile over an extended period of time. If you take this kind of thinking and marry it with a continuous but ever changing stream of digital communications and stories, then you've really got something. Something that is slow, fast, and spiky.