Only Dead Fish

Britain's Got Talent

 

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“In the knowledge economy all staff are volunteers, but our managers are trained to manage conscripts” Peter Drucker

I've been thinking about this quote ever since I read it over at Johnnie's place. I did a webinar the other day about social technologies, and there were a number of HR professionals on the call. The discussion turned to how employers might best attract and retain talent in the connected world. The point was made about the need for companies to resist the temptation to impose too many controls on employees in their use of such tools, and how many bright young things have a level of expectation about the use of such technologies in everything they do (including their work).

But it felt like there was a big point that was in danger of being missed - that corporates have already become far more transparent to everyone, prospective employees included, whether they like it or not. A networked world creates choice and leverage for individuals. It's easier than ever to find inspiration, start something interesting. The barriers to entry have never been so low. My sense is that talented young people coming onto the job market for the first time have a very real sense of their connectedness and the possibilities that that enables.

So the question should not be about which organisations 'allow' the use of such technologies, but rather which are the ones where the employees are visibly empowered by them. The awful state of the current job market allows organisations the luxury of choice, but for how long? As Hugh MacLeod rightly said the market for something to believe in is infinite. And this, to quote Seth, is "where the real truth lies, where growth occurs regardless of the state of the economy". My hunch is that when we come out the other side the future will belong to those companies that are visibly driven not only by a strong sense of purpose and a culture of transparency, but empowered and connected employees.

Lessons

One year on from the event which triggered the worst banking crisis for decades (some say ever) and the policy makers have done very little to tackle the underlying causes of the deepest recession for 80 years. Meanwhile the Institute for Public Policy Research release a report warning that bankers are returning to old practices and increasing the chances of the same happening again. Meanwhile whilst corporate profits have dived 30%, top executives pay has increased 10%, more than three times the average increase for ordinary workers in the private sector. Meanwhile taxpayer support for European and US banks has surged to $15 trillion, equivalent to more than $2,000 for every person on the planet or about a quarter of everything the world produces in a year. If we don't learn the lessons we will make the same mistakes. It's time for something different. Just sayin.

Consumers Are People (2)

Looks like I struck a bit of a chord with my protestations around some of the language we use in our industry. There were some great comments and some good discussion around my post (thanks), some good follow up posts, and plenty of action on twitter. John even put together a natty widget aggregating the tweets containing the #StopUsingConsumer hashtag he's championed.

Several comments on the post made the point that it is behavioural change that is required, and I agree. The point for me I guess, is that language perpetuates behaviour. These kinds of descriptions are embedded in the practice of our industry. If we're really serious about changing behaviour then thinking more carefully about the language we use is no bad thing.

Consumers Are People

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I'm banning the word 'consumer' from this blog. Not that it crops up that often here - I've been making a conscious effort to avoid using it ever since Adam launched his 'Stop Calling Me a Consumer' Facebook group (and even wrote a piece of Firefox script that automatically replaced the word 'consumer' with 'people') almost two years ago. No, it's more that I still see and hear it used so often as a lazy, default, catch-all marketing phrase and as I've said before, I believe that the language we use in this industry compounds viewpoints and behaviours that we need to move on from. Consumers are people and people do more than consume.

There are reasons why I think it's timely to raise this:

Because marketing and communications, now more than ever, are about being human. There is real, tangible value in this. In his IPA President's inaugral speech, Rory Sutherland talked about how at its heart, our industry is about creating ideas that turn human understanding into value, and how it will be through improved human understanding that we will improve the breadth and value of those ideas, and how we need to demonstrate social value as well as commercial value, and how customers and employees can no longer be treated as what Muahmmad Yunus calls "one dimensional beings". And changing the language is a good place to start.

And because this recession has changed things for good. Because there's never been a better time to hit reset, do business differently. Call it constructive capitalism. Call it post-consumerism. Call it Generation M. Changing the language is a good place to start.

Self-Generated Opportunity

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When I wrote about tweetable career advice, Andy left a comment suggesting one: "Don't look for the job you want. Create it." Sage advice. Because in spite of all the doom and gloom around I still believe that there is amazing potential for self-generated opportunity out there.

I've been reading The Element by Sir Ken Robinson (who recently delivered one of the best talks I've ever seen), which speaks of how important it is for the sake of individuals and for society for us to connect with our true talent, fulfill our creative potential, find the meeting point between our natural aptitude and personal passion. Being in your element combines these two features (aptitude and passion) with two conditions (attitude and opportunity): "The sequence goes something like this: I get it; I love it; I want it; Where is it?"

The new world of work happily aligns circumstance, environment and tools to make self-generated opportunity easier than ever before. The ease, for example, in being able to connect with other likeminded people who share the same passions and have a common sense of purpose. The attractiveness and accessibility of collaborating with others, setting up your own company, making products and services that the world really wants.

In this new world, and particularly in technology, the advantages of speed and agility are beginning to trump the advantages of size. It's never been easier for David to beat Goliath, especially when David doesn't play by the rules. When he changes the rhythm.

If you believe Chris Anderson, this crisis is not just cyclical but the end of an era, an era which has been witness more recently to the "growing diseconomies of scale", and in which the next new economy will favour the small.

Increasingly, I can't help but think that big organisations will be defined by how they respond not only to this challenge, but to the very real (and often overlooked) challenge of attracting the best people. To quote Paul Graham:

"An ambitious kid graduating from college now doesn't want to work for a big company. They want to work for the hot startup that's rapidly growing into one. If they're really ambitious, they want to start it."

For those organisations, the thing to appreciate is that this is not only an operational challenge, it's a cultural one too.

Pomposity And Innovation

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Like Euan, I seem to get told on a daily basis that the problem with social media is that you can't make money out of it and that twitter is little more than people telling other people what they had for lunch. I can understand a little scepticism, particularly from those who are not actively engaged in it (like many of the journalists who seem to write about it), but Euan goes on to make a great point about this:

"Every time someone is faced with a pompous response to a suggestion or idea they take one step back and become much less likely to ever offer their heartfelt thoughts again. Imagine the impact this has on the creativity and innovation that organisations depend on."

It's one thing accepting a degree of cynicism, but quite another accepting the not insignificant cost to business that can result from it. I agree with this TIME piece:- that the value being created by the communities that support, build on, and use such social tools continues to be inspirational:

"We are living through the worst economic crisis in generations, with apocalyptic headlines threatening the end of capitalism as we know it, and yet in the middle of this chaos, the engineers at Twitter headquarters are scrambling to keep the servers up, application developers are releasing their latest builds, and ordinary users are figuring out all the ingenious ways to put these tools to use"

Blunt

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Email is such a blunt tool.

According to Microsoft, 97% of all emails sent over the net are unwanted. Postini (a division of Google) puts it at 94%. Blunt.

Value creation between people comes from conversing. Email is rubbish at conversation. Blunt.

Value creation in business is increasingly about collaboration. Email is rubbish at collaboration. Blunt.

In a connected world value comes from the seamless flow of ideas. Email is far from seamless. Blunt.

With a surfeit of information, it is search and aggregation that add value. Difficult, if not impossible on email. Blunt.

Email does not do community well. Blunt.

At it's worst email hampers productivity, effective time management, prioritisation. When Russell wrote about how distraction is not always a bad thing, he pointed at a great piece in The Guardian which quotes Dr Tom Stafford from the University of Sheffield: "Both slot machines and email follow something called a 'variable interval reinforcement schedule' which has been established as the way to train in the strongest habits." Rather than reward an action every time, the theory goes, rewarding it only sometimes, and not in a predictable way, makes it disturbingly addictive. A study by Dr Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University found that people tend to respond to email as it arrives, taking an average of only one minute and 44 seconds to act upon a new email notification. 70% of emails got a reaction within six seconds. Email is a distraction, but rarely of a good kind.

In the same Guardian article Roo Reynolds says: "I use other tools, where people are more comfortable hanging out". Comfortable. It's a good word. One of the advantages that Twitter has over Facebook is that it allows for a less simplified form of relationship symmetry. Relationships take many forms. Services which are opt-in, that give more flexibility to choose who can contact you, that better reflect the context of our connections, will win.

Email. Blunt. That is all.

The Optimist Conspectus

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I don't know whether it's because the sun has been shining lately or whether it's a reaction to the almost celebratory zeal with which certain sections of the news media seem to be covering the current economic malaise, but I'm feeling the need to remind myself that whilst things are bad, in amongst it all there remains a very human, and very steady, supply of optimism.

Seems like I'm not the only one. Ian has an interesting little project on the go called 'The Optimist Conspectus' which he describes as 'a survey of contemporary optimism'.  Put simply, he's collecting feedback to the question 'What is it that you are optimistic about?', with a view to creating a series of data visualisations around keywords on a geographic and temporal grid. 

Good for you Ian. For what it's worth, here (in no particular order or relation) are ten things I'm optimistic about right now:

I am optimistic (but a little scared) about being able to run a marathon in April.

I am optimistic that the power of the web to organise without organisation is fundamentally a good thing

I am optimistic that the coming generation of media and advertising graduates will take less notice of the way things have always been done and more notice of their own individual ability to create change and do great work

I am optimistic that the vegetable patch in my garden will be the best ever this year

I am optimistic about being able to lead, be a part of, and inspire positive change in the place where I work

I am optimistic about getting better at rockclimbing (even though I'm still a bit rubbish)

I am optimistic that one of the outcomes of this recession will be momentum towards greater business transparency and a more constructive form of capitalism

I am optimistic about being able to get tickets to see an upcoming Stone Roses reunion gig

I am optimistic about the curiousity and enthusiasm I see in people and it's power to make things happen

I am optimistic about marketing and advertising's ability to be inspiring, useful, and relevant.

You can submit your own contribution here.

Fish Story

"There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, 'What the hell is water?'...

...if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things...the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it...

...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about...The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness - awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: 'This is water, this is water.'"

David Foster Wallace

Come On BBC

I'm sorry, but the decision by the BBC not to broadcast the appeal by the Disasters Emergency Committee to help relieve the growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza is unbelievable. After an 18 month blockade and three weeks of heavy shelling, 1.1 million people are now dependent upon aid to survive, around 500,000 people are without running water, and 75% of the area is without electricity (upon which the water and sewage systems survive).

BBC Chief Operating Officer Caroline Thomson said: "If we lose the trust of the audience by appearing...to support one side rather than another, then we will have lost it for the charities themselves as well as everyone else."

When I heard her on the radio, she seemed to be suggesting that there might be some confusion amongst the BBC's audience between what was reported on the news and a charity appeal. In my mind, whatever your politics, the most important thing is the relief of immense human suffering. And I believe that the British public can distinguish between a simple appeal for humanitarian aid and perceived partiality in a conflict.

You can hear Caroline Thomson defending the decision on the Today programme and Tony Benn rightly being very stubborn in response here. If you'd like to donate to the DEC Gaza appeal, you can do so here.