Ed Batista

Chris Anderson on "Free" at Global Business Network

I heard Chris Anderson speak tonight at the offices of the Global Business Network in San Francisco. He's promoting Free: The Future of a Radical Price and is tight with GBN co-founder and Chairman Peter Schwartz, who introduced Anderson and led the Q&A session, so this was presumably a friendly stopover on his media tour.

Anderson opened with the story of how Jell-O was launched in the early 20th century: they went door-to-door and gave away richly illustrated Jell-O cookbooks, creating demand for the new product among consumers, who then flocked to grocery stores seeking it.  (It's similar to the story of King Gillette subsidizing the cost of razors to sell blades, which Anderson used to open his original Wired article on the topic in early 2008.)

Anderson discussed the work of 19th century French economist Joseph Bertrand, who argued that in a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost.  (A brief exploration of the Bertrand competition model suggests that Anderson is oversimplifying to make a point, but let's not quibble.)

In Anderson's words, "The Internet is the first truly competitive market the world has ever seen," and in this environment we experience "the law of gravity online: If marginal cost is zero, and competition is unlimited, price will fall to zero."  Anderson's quick to note that he's not saying the price should be zero or things should be free; he's merely observing the dynamics at work in the market for any products or services that can be converted to bits.

He also noted that it's not simply "free" vs. "paid" products and services, but rather free versions supported by advertising and "freemium" versions in which consumers and users pay to get something extra.  What will people pay for?  In Anderson's words...

• People will pay to save time.
• People will pay to lower risk.
• People will pay for things they love.
• People will pay for status.
• People will pay if you make them (once they're hooked.)

The key opportunity created by offering your products and services for free is that "free allows you to fully explore your customer space... How do we use free to increase our audience [for Wired] and convert some of them to a higher price?"  He noted that you can read Wired for free online, you can purchase single copies at newsstands for one price, and you can purchase a print subscription for yet another price.  But why be limited to just three prices?  "We need more prices... What is the $100 version of Wired?"  Referring to the recent uproar over the Washington Post's plans to host a "salon" for health care lobbyists at $25,000 a head, Anderson noted, "That wasn't the right answer, but it's a really interesting question: What is the $25,000 version of the Washington Post?"

Appropriately, Anderson is offering "Free" at a range of prices: The hardcover book was $26.99 tonight (and it's $16.19 on Amazon as I write this.)  Almost all digital versions of the book are free, but most come a with a variety of limits on how long you can access the materials.  The unabridged version (6 hours) is free, but the abridged version (3 hours) is $9.99.  (Now you know how Hyperion prices 3 hours of your time.)

And Anderson strongly believes in the future of books.  Printed materials will survive to the extent that they add value to the online version of the same content.  Anderson expects books, which are convenient for long-form content and "look nice on a shelf," to make it.  He expects newspapers to die (or at least to be radically reinvented.)  And magazines?  They'll eventually be replaced by Apple's version of the Kindle, but the rich graphic experience they offer will keep many of them safe for now.

Anderson was asked about Malcolm Gladwell's dismissive review of "Free" in The New Yorker, in particular Gladwell's skewering of YouTube as a paragon of this new economic model.  From Gladwell's review:

To recap: YouTube is a great example of Free, except that Free technology ends up not being Free because of the way consumers respond to Free, fatally compromising YouTube's ability to make money around Free, and forcing it to retreat from the "abundance thinking" that lies at the heart of Free. Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars this year. If it were a bank, it would be eligible for TARP funds.

Anderson's not-quite-compelling response was that Gladwell underestimates the power of Google's economies of scale, his figures are off by a factor of 10, and "advertising always lags the audience" (i.e. they'll figure it out eventually.)  To Anderson's credit, he deftly acknowledged and defused the issue of his apparently inadvertant plagiarism from Wikipedia in "Free" by telling his questioner, who had apologized for asking such a tough question, that there were much tougher questions he could have asked, which prompted a chuckle from the audience.  A colleague said the Anderson-Gladwell dustup was "the nerd version of Biggie vs. Tupac."  Outstanding.  (I'll let him remain anonymous, unless he asks for attribution.)

I was reminded of my "attention economy" experience with AttentionTrust and others by Anderson's comment that the 'net and its attendant armies of bloggers, videographers and garage bands has yielded an overabundance of content, and today our attention is the truly scarce commodity.  And just as many attention-focused projects touched on the related issues of reputation and identity, Anderson sees links there as well.  He believes that "Facebook and Twitter are establishing the first quantifiable reputation markets," although I'd argue that groups like Rapleaf, Opinity and Trufina tried to do just that a few years ago, leveraging data from credit reports to eBay seller status.

Finally, one of Anderson's most interesting comments tonight was his assertion that "the key talent of the 21st century is self-promotion and creating celebrity...[and] the goal is to create celebrity, or reputation...and convert that into something that pays the rent." (On a cautionary note, he added, "And that business can be just as dirty as it sounds.")

Although one example of this is Paris Hilton and the "fame-for-being-famous" that she embodies, the openness of the Internet means that today anyone can at least get their ideas into the marketplace.  That's no guarantee of success, of course--you'll still need some luck, even with good ideas and a talent for self-promotion.  But as Anderson notes, we're now able to tap into "the long tail of talent... The Internet has lowered the transaction costs of finding talent...[and] talent will find a way."

This fascinates me as an executive coach, both on my own behalf and on behalf of my clients and students at Stanford Business School, because what Anderson is saying is that the rules are changing.  We used to rely solely on personal networks and resume credentials to locate and identify talent (and to be located and identified by others as talent.)  But in a more open marketplace of ideas, those filters are less and less useful as they screen out more "false negatives" (i.e. talented people unknown to us who lack traditional credentials) and allow through more "false positives" (i.e. people within our networks who possess traditional credentials but who aren't really all that talented.)

From a personal perspective, my writing on this site on coaching, leadership, change and related issues over the past few years has given me a reputation as someone with something of interest to say on these topics--a reputation that can be quantified in data such as my feed subscribers (932 today), my site visitors (192 so far today), even my Twitter followers (302 at the moment, enjoying all 105 of my tweets to date.)  These aren't big numbers in any absolute sense, but they're big enough (particularly given how infrequently I post) to give me a sense that what I'm saying is being heard, a sense of presence.

Calling this reputation "celebrity" would be a serious stretch, but that's a matter of degree.  And if you're interested in a topic such as "double-loop learning" or "ground rules for meetings" or the "definition of organizational effectiveness," you'll find me in Google's top 10 results for those terms (at least as of today), and that's certainly celebrity in a strange, narrow way.  (Hell, if you're just interested in "ed batista" I'm #1!)

What's the connection with "Free"?  Well, even though I don't post that often, the hours invested in my writing here over the past few years would add up to a substantial amount of unpaid time.  And I publish everything here under a Creative Commons license that gives anyone the right to share and remix my materials as long as they attribute it to me with a link and make any resulting work freely available under the same license.

So free work and free content have been the essential elements in developing a verifiable reputation and an identity as a trusted subject matter expert in my field, and I don't know how I could have done it any other way.  And seeing my own experience in this new light makes me wonder if I should be encouraging my clients and students to do more of the same.

Thanks to Chris Anderson for a thought-provoking and entertaining talk, and many thanks to Andrew Blau, Nancy Murphy and their colleagues at GBN for being such gracious hosts.

Social Network Tools (From AlertThingy to Zemanta)

One year after my last review of some social media tools and networks, here's the 2009 version.  Included are:

- UPDATES on the services I reviewed last year and how I've integrated them into my work (or not) as an executive coach and consultant: Tumblr, Twitter, Utterli and (on the lighter side) Don't Break the Chain.  (In this section I also reference a number of Twitter clients, but I don't discuss them in depth--more on that front later.)

- Reviews of a few NEW TOOLS I didn't discuss last year or am currently trying out: Tumblelog Facebook Application, FriendFeed, Tumblr Post Firefox Add-on, and Shareaholic Firefox Add-on.

- QUICK LOOKS at some tools I'm considering trying or have ruled out for various reasons.  This includes a number of "social network integrators" -- AlertThingy, HelloTxt, Ping.fm, Posty, and TarPipe -- as well as some assorted blog-related social tools: Blogrollr, BlogScrobbler, Lijit, Disqus, IntenseDebate, Psolenoid and Zemanta.

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UPDATES

Tumblr has become my tool of choice for sharing interesting links.  A "linkblog" like this occupies a perfect niche between my Delicious bookmarks and my blog posts here.  My bookmarks are publicly searchable, but they're intended primarily to help me keep track of resources I might otherwise forget about, and they're often related to topics that are unlikely to be of interest to others.  My posts here are original essays, and although I hope a personal voice comes through in my writing, I typically focus on topics related to executive coaching and change management consulting.  In contrast, the links I post to Tumblr are (hopefully) of interest to a wider audience, and they touch on a wide range of subjects, including a number that I'm unlikely to write about here, although they're still more tightly focused than my bookmarks.

I publish content from my linkblog in several different places.  First, I've configured Tumblr to send my posts to Twitter and to FriendFeed as updates--more on both of those services below.  I'm using script provided by Tumblr in yesterday's Interesting Links post as well as in the left-hand sidebar here (at least for now).  And I've added the Tumblelog Facebook Application, which creates a new "Tumblr" tab on my FB profile.

Two features on Tumblr I haven't yet done much with are the option to follow other people's Tumblr blogs, and the ability to customize your own blog's look-and-feel.  Tumblr generates an RSS feed for each blog, but I haven't yet bothered to find other blogs I want to keep up with, subscribe to their feeds, and integrate them into my regular reading--that seems like way too much work right now.  Tumblr allows you to aggregate blogs you're following on your Tumblr "dashboard," but I'm not inclined to work yet another web page into my routine.  And because I'm publishing my Tumblr links in so many other places, as noted above, I don't expect many people to actually visit my Tumblr page, so as long as it doesn't look too awful, I don't really care about it.

All in all, Tumblr's a great resource, and I expect to use it even more intensively in the future.  (I wouldn't mind having all my Tumblr posts tagged on Delicious as well to make it easier for me to access them in the future, but I haven't bothered to take that extra step.)

I'm sorry to say that I haven't yet come across any other executive coaches or change management consultants who are using Tumblr consistently (which isn't to say they're not out there--I haven't been looking all that hard.)  Mark McGuinness clued me in to Tumblr in the first place, but he hasn't posted there since June '08--given that he's the most web-savvy coach I know, I assume he's just channeling his energy elsewhere.

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Twitter didn't seem that compelling to me a year ago, but it's come to serve several useful purposes.  As noted above, I send any interesting links I post to Tumblr to my Twitter account.  My assumption is that if you're following me on Twitter, you're likely to be interested in links that I find interesting, and integrating with Tumblr in this way allows me to share them as easily as possible.  But I've also begun to make more use of Twitter as a social network.  I initially synched Twitter with Gmail, which allowed me to begin following nearly 200 people, but I've whittled that number down to about 50 (with the help of MyTweeple, because Twitter's admin features are pretty minimal), with an emphasis on people I know personally and/or people who share my focus on coaching and consulting.

Although you can lock your Twitter account, preventing people from following you without your approval, I allow anyone to follow me because Twitter's not reciprocal--unlike Facebook.  (One of the downsides of Facebook, particularly in the "new" FB, is the huge amount of stuff the system sends me that I'm not interested in, simply because I'm connected to people who haven't taken the time to "weed their feeds."  As a result, I'm much less likely to accept friend request on FB now and will probably begin culling that network as well.  But with Twitter, this isn't a problem because the system allows one-way relationships, so I can follow people who aren't necessarily interested in my tweets, and vice versa.  Fred Wilson recently described how he downsized his Facebook network while continuing to use Twitter and Tumblr to broadcast to a larger audience.)

I could conceivably send my Twitter updates to my Tumblr blog, but I've decided to make that a one-way channel.  The links I post to Tumblr are all (conceivably) of interest to anyone following me on Twitter, but tweets are likely to be more personal and ephemeral, and I don't really see the need to "archive" them on a linkblog.

All this said, I know I'm not using Twitter to its full potential.  We seem to be at an interesting juncture in Twitter's evolution--perhaps a classic chasm moment--when the true innovators (the Twitterati?) have become intensive users, and the early majority are just hearing about it for the first time.  Early adopters like me (who know just enough to get ourselves in trouble) are still figuring out precisely how it adds value to our lives.  I do realize I could make much more extensive use of Twitter if I found better interfaces--on the web and via my cell.

I've looked at a few web clients--TweetDeck and TweetGrid seem popular among the people I follow--but choosing one over another and getting up the learning curve hasn't been a priority.  I'm probably at a point where I need to just pick one and get on with things.

On my cell, I just realized that I can use Twitter's mobile site--the browser on my Treo 680 isn't great, but it works reasonably well (and the mobile site looks pretty good on a laptop, too.)  And I'm testing MoTwit, a Palm OS application that provides a slightly better interface to enter updates (it fills the screen, rather than limiting you to a tiny text box), as well as links to your primary Twitter pages (accessible via your mobile browser.)  If I was motivated to change my cellphone plan, I could text or SMS updates to Twitter, but they currently cost me a nickel each, which is just enough to hold down my usage.

Unfortunately, the best mobile channel for me is email--that's the main reason I've stuck with a Treo for so long--but Twitter doesn't currently allow updates via email.  There's an interesting work-around (involving a dummy Blogger account, TwitterFeed and OpenID--uh, no thanks) and some third-party apps like TwitterMail, EmailTwitter, and MessageDance (which offers more extensive social network integration as well), but I haven't tried any of them yet.  (Although my next post on the subject will probably be a review of all these options.)

There are few coaches and consultants I follow on Twitter who seem to have sorted it out, and Pam Fox Rollin is first among them--she seems to have a perfect feel for this new medium.  Eric Pennington, Kristen Beireis, and Mark McGuinness (that's where he's been!) are also well worth following.

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Utterli (formerly Utterz) is, among other things, an easy way to 1) record a conversation using your phone and generate an audio file on the web, 2) add a photo or other contextual data, and 3) share it as a podcast.  It works well for this purpose, but the admin and network controls leave something to be desired--for example, I'd like to have more control over who can view certain files.

But Utterli is more than just an auto-podcasting service--it's really a "social network integrator" (much more on those below) or even a "rich media cross-posting platform," if you like.  You can configure it to post photos, audio and video not only to different social networks but also to multiple private blogs.  I do think it's a useful service, but I've realized that I'm a writer, not a podcaster.  And while it's nice to know it's there if I need to record an interview, I'm not going to rely on it regularly until the admin controls are improved.

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Don't Break the Chain isn't really like any of the other tools I discuss here, but it's worth noting because it's probably had the biggest impact on my life over the past year.  You simply tick off days in a calendar to create a colorful "chain" that shows how many consecutive days "you've been getting things done."  In my case I use it to track my exercise, and it's been an incredibly powerful motivator.  I've configured Firefox to open up the site as a new tab each time it launches, and I can't help but want to extend the chain every day.

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NEW TOOLS

As noted above, the Tumblelog Facebook Application allows me to add a "Tumblr" tab to my FB profile.  Pretty simple, but what's not yet clear is how best to integrate it with FriendFeed (see below), which is currently also publishing my Tumblr links to FB.  I'm not sure what advantages, if any, the FB app offers over FriendFeed.

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FriendFeed is the first "social network integrator" I encountered (although I didn't call it that then).  I started using it just over a year ago, although for some reason I didn't think to include in the first version of this post I wrote at that time.  I'm currently using FF to integrate content from this blog's RSS feed and feeds from Last.fm, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook.  In theory, the content from all these feeds is aggregated on my FriendFeed page (although no content from Last.fm or LinkedIn is appearing, and I'm not sure why.)  In turn, I use the FriendFeed Facebook Application to publish some of this content to FB.  As noted above, I have some redundant links on my FB profile, and I have to take a look at which apps are posting what content to whittle it down.  (I used to have FriendFeed configured to integrate my Delicious bookmarks and publish them on FB, but that was way too much unnecessary content.)

As you might expect, FriendFeed also allows you to subscribe to your...wait for it...friends' feeds.  But I really have no idea how my current network of friends on the service became established, and I just unsubscribed from most of their feeds, leaving only a handful to experiment with.

FriendFeed's been useful as a FB publishing app, operating in the background, but I'm certainly not using it to its full potential.  I'm getting enough content from my various networks via FB and Twitter at the moment, so I don't really want more--but given how much useless stuff I have to wade through on both of those networks, FriendFeed may offer some way to increase the signal-to-noise ratio.

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The Tumblr Post Firefox Add-on is a great way to post interesting links to my Tumblr linkblog.  The official Tumblr bookmarklet relies on the URL that's in your navigation bar at that moment, so if you're scrolling through a blog and see a post you'd like to share on Tumblr, you have to find that post's unique link and click through to it before you can use the bookmarklet.  But with the Tumblr Post add-on, you can drag-and-drop any link on the page to a small icon at the bottom right corner of your browser window.  I've configured it to allow me to add text and tags as well before posting to Tumblr, but even with that additional step it's faster than the official bookmarklet, and I prefer the default formatting (although the bookmarklet does give you some more flexibility in determining what text will be displayed.)

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And the Shareaholic Firefox Add-on is another way to post to Tumblr, but it's also a more full-featured social network integrator that allows you to post to nearly 30 other services as well, from bit.ly to Y Combinator.  In my case I'm testing it with bit.ly, Delicious, FriendFeed, Tumblr, and Twitter.  I love the Firefox integration--a nice drop-down menu added in the navigation bar, as well as a listing in your right-click menu--BUT apparently Shareaholic relies on the basic Tumblr bookmarklet function, so you get the same (slow) pop-up and (worse) you still have to click through to the actual page you want to post, so that the URL is displayed in your navigation bar.  It's nice to be able to post to a range of services simultanously, but Shareaholic isn't nearly as helpful as the Tumblr Post add-on.  (There's also some unintrusive but unwanted integration with Bzzster, which apparently developed this add-on.)

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QUICK LOOKS

Below are some tools I've taken a quick look at but have either rejected or haven't yet tested.

First up is a list of social network integrators that allow you to post to to multiple networks and services (Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Plaxo, etc.) simultaneously.  I'm only active on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and I'm connected with different people in those networks so I'm inclined to use them for different purposes (although I'm still in the process of discovering just how they differ and just what those purposes are), and--as noted above--I'm still exploring FriendFeed's capabilities, so I don't feel an urgent need to test these integrators.  That said, it's been interesting learning more about my alternatives:

AlertThingy allows you to post updates as well as to receive content from the services you select.  It also serves as an RSS reader, which is appealing.  However, it runs as a separate application, which make it a non-starter for me--I want as few apps open as possible.

HelloTxt allows you to post to over 40 services via your phone, email, IM and their Facebook app. 

Ping.fm allows you to post to over 30 services from another network, your phone, IM, or email.

Posty but it's unclear to me whether it's strictly web-based or provides access to your networks via other channels as well.

Tarpipe is another social network integrator, but with a very cool user interface (although it seems aimed at a user who's a bit more technical than I am.)

Finally, here are some assorted tools and services that I've taken a look at recently:

Blogrollr is a new service launched in the last few weeks as a result of Fred Wilson's wish for a better blogroll.  This tool supposedly* allows you to install a widget that tracks the blogs you visit and compiles a rolling list of the most popular sites and the most recent posts.  Thanks to an astounding response from Fred's commenters, Blogrollr launched just two days later.  Interestingly, this would have been a perfect application for the AttentionTrust recorder--and it's not surprising to see Stan James involved--see below.  *Unfortunately, the site crashed before I could even install the widget, so I haven't been able to try it out and don't know much other than that it looks good on Fred's site--currently just below his sidebar ads.  I'll keep trying. Their site's back up, and I was able to install their Firefox extension and set up a widget on another site. It's pretty slick and seems to be just what it's billed as: a Last.fm for blogs.

BlogScrobbler is another application developed on the fly in response to Fred's initial post--and this was created by Stan James, who developed the AttentionTrust recorder.  (The name derives from AudioScrobbler, the application that underlies Last.fm, because what Fred wanted to replace his static blogroll was "a Last.fm for blogs"--in other words, a dynamically generated "playlist" of the posts and sites he visited most often.)  BlogScrobbler is a Firefox extension that tracks your blog reading habits within certain parameters (recording a site only after you've been there for 15 seconds, for example), and then sends a list of "scrobbled" posts to a Twitter account.  You have to create a display of your scrobbled post data using one of the many Twitter widgets out there.  Very interesting stuff, and it was nice to learn a little about what Stan's been up to as a result, but it involves a bit more "bolting together" than I feel like dealing with at the moment.  (Which is why I'm an early adopter, not an innovator.)

Lijit is a social network search service that allows you to create a customized search box for your users that includes content from your site, your social networks, and any other sites you designate (such as your blogroll) in the results.  Lijit was founded several years ago by...Stan James!  (It's hard to believe that I haven't been in touch with him since my AttentionTrust days and then ran across his name on three projects in a single post.)  I created an account at that time but never actually set up a Lijit search box--I'm currently trying it out on a test site to see if it's worth including alongside my site's standard Google search box.

Disqus and IntenseDebate are blog comment services that offer a variety of features that improve upon the (very) basic functionality offered by, in my case, TypePad.  Both services improve the user experience for the commenters, but they also allow your commenters to interact as members of a social network, in a sense, and it seems to me that the service that succeeds in encouraging a critical mass of commenters to register will win.  This isn't a high priority for me right now, and I'm not ready to ask my commenters to choose one over the other--I'd rather follow the market on this one--but if TypePad doesn't make some improvements in this area, I'll take a closer look at implementing one of them.

Psolenoid allows you to reciprocally connect your blog posts to related posts by other bloggers.  I appreciate the potential value of a network of people writing on related topics, established through a series of direct connections between specific blog posts, but at this point it doesn't seem worth testing to me.  Both you and the other person need to have Psolenoid accounts activated on your site, you have to manually establish the connection between any two posts, and it looks like it'll add some clutter to the bottom of the post.

Zemanta is a browser extension (for Firefox, IE and others) that suggests "tags, links, photos and related articles" when you're composing a blog post and when you're using a web-based email service.  Their demo is fascinating, and I appreciate not only the potential time-savings but also (if true) the range of purported benefits, such as their claim that their suggested tags will improve your SEO.  That said, I haven't tried it out yet--it looks like it adds some clutter to your blog posts, and (at least at this point) I actually like taking the time to "hand-roll" my posts, without content that's automagically created for me.

Interesting Links

I post interesting links that I come across on a very simple linkblog using Tumblr.  The 10 latest links are below (and the list will stay updated), but you can search for others at edbatista.tumblr.com.  To keep up with the list you can bookmark this post, subscribe to my Tumblr RSS feed, or just follow me on Twitter.  (All my Tumblr links get tweeted, but not all my tweets get tumbld.  Got it?)

Technology Is An Interpersonal Skill

I'm struck by the parallel between A) the work I do as a coach and organizational development consultant to improve interpersonal skills and B) the role of technology in a networked world.  Interpersonal skills, by definition, can't be mastered in isolation.  We need other people to become better communicators; if a message isn't received, it wasn't delivered effectively.  And as technology becomes an ever more important way to socialize and connect with others, the same becomes true of our technical skills.  You can't be a tech-savvy user in isolation; your effectiveness is determined by the perception of others.

In an organization or a social network, interpersonal skills help you build relationships, speed information-sharing and gain influence with others, allowing you to be more effective--which is exactly what technology allows you to do today.

One implication of this is that leaders need not be "techies," in the conventional "IT" sense of the term, but their effectiveness in an organization or a network is increasingly dependent on the extent to which they can employ technology as an interpersonal skill.  Charisma can--and must--translate online.  (Obama: 1, McCain: 0)

Technology is Soft

Given the topics I've discussed here over the last few years--leadership and management, personal and organizational development, and the effective use of technology--if you're reading this, it's a safe bet that you're someone with an interest in making change happen and that you see opportunities to help your organization or your community find better ways of doing things, particularly when technology is a factor.

So here's a mental model to help make the process of leading change easier: Technology is soft.

Let me make a brief detour in order to explain what I mean by that.  In the late 1970s Tom Peters, Bob Waterman, Richard Pascale and Anthony Athos developed a framework for analyzing organizations known as the "7s Model" which looks at different aspects of an organization and which I still find highly useful.  (The graphic at left is from BuildingBrands.)  The 7s Model is often interpreted as dividing organizations into "hard" and "soft" elements--the former category includes the three concepts in red at the top of the graphic:

• Strategy
Your high-level goals and how you plan to achieve them.

• Structure
An organization's "blueprints": how people and resources are allocated, how work and responsibilities are distributed.

• Systems
All the ropes, pulleys and gears, so to speak, that get things done in an organization.

These elements of the model are seen as "hard" because they're more easily reduced to tangible artifacts--plans and documents and infrastructure--but that designation also reflects a value judgment in our language.  "Hard" stuff can be complex and difficult, but it's also serious and important.  "Soft" stuff, in contrast, is ambiguous, unreliable, secondary.  (I hope it's apparent that I think this is bias needs to be challenged, and Tom Peters agrees.)

We've traditionally located technology among the "hard" elements of an organization, and that's what usually comes to mind when we think about "Information Technology."  We have IT plans, IT departments (or people whose responsibilities include IT), and, of course, IT systems.  Thinking about technology from this perspective may seem logical, but I believe the implications are profound, unhelpful and increasingly outdated.

Some aspects of technology will always be classic "IT": hardware, storage, connectivity.  But these are commodities.  You get the best price you can for them, and you don't expect them to add strategic value to the organization.

I believe the strategic aspects of technology that have the greatest potential to actually make a difference in an organization fit into on the other side of the 7s Model, the "soft" side:

• Staff
Not the org chart--that's part of the Structure--but the real, flesh-and-blood people, and all their strengths, weaknesses, hopes and aspirations.

• Style
Management style, or organizational culture: The tacit norms that govern how work gets done and how people interact.

• Skills
The full range of competencies possessed by an organization, including interpersonal skills, learning.

Thinking about technology as "soft," as an aspect of an organization's staff, style and skills, may seem counterintuitive, but increasingly this is where it truly resides (and it's where you'll have the greatest leverage when driving technology-related change.)

Let me illustrate this approach with an story from my work at Stanford's Graduate School of Business:  As a Leadership Coach at the Center for Leadership Development and Research, I'm a member of a team with many interdependent sub-teams that often collaborate virtually on long-term projects involving multiple sets of stakeholders.  When I started at the beginning of 2007, the tools available to support these collaborations were 1) email and 2) shared network drives.  These tools met our most basic needs, but they were hardly optimal, and we found ourselves frustrated with their limitations.

It was the perfect opportunity to introduce a wiki, and as the unofficial techie on our staff of executive coaches and organizational development consultants, I was in a position to make that change happen.  But in retrospect I can see that I focused on the "hard" elements of the 7s Model.  I developed a strategic IT plan that included a wiki, I explored in great detail how the wiki would be used and how it would fit into our existing organizational structure, and I spent a good bit of time exploring various wiki platforms to find the best system to meet our needs.

I was able to get it up and running, but adoption by my non-technical colleagues was hit-or-miss.  Some people loved it, but others found it confusing or didn't really understand how  it was an improvement over email.  I think part of the problem was the language I used to introduce it.  I'd say, "I have a new system that'll help us collaborate more effectively."   Well, when you say "new," people hear "change," and they realize that means "more work," at least in the short run.  And when you say "system," people  hear "IT," and they know that means, "someone else's responsibility."  So when you say "new system," what people really hear is "more work that shouldn't be my responsibility in the first place."   Not exactly an appealing message.

So as we were about to begin a new academic year last Fall, I took a new approach.  I stopped worrying about the strategic IT plan--I didn't even update it.  I stopped thinking about how the wiki fit into our organizational structure.  And with the system already in place, I didn't have any technical work to do at all.

Instead, I starting thinking about the "soft" side of the organization.  I thought about my colleagues as individuals.  What were they like?  What were their needs?  How did they work?

I thought about our organizational culture.  Although Stanford has a certain culture, and the business school has yet another culture all its own, the Center where I work is a small, informal, entrepreneurial place where we can't do things by the book because it hasn't been written yet.

I thought about our collective skills--not just (or even primarily) technical skills, but our interpersonal skills.  How do we connect with each other?  How do we collaborate?

So rather than asking my colleagues to conform to a "hard" plan, I began asking how "soft" technology like a wiki could conform to them.  And rather than trying to "train" them on this new system, I began having a series of short conversations--sometimes just 5 minutes--about how they were working and what they were doing.  I took advantage of every small opportunity to help people think about the wiki as an integrated element in our organizational culture, and as an extension of their collaborative skills.

Today, just a few months later, we're the most intensive wiki users in the business school, and we're probably among the most intensive non-technical wiki users in the entire university.  I had to lay the "hard" groundwork to initiate the project, but my sustained focus on the strategic plan, the structure, and the system actually delayed our progress, and the wiki's ultimate success is directly related to its integration with the organization's "soft" side.

The 7th circle at the center of the 7s Model represents Shared Values, the commonly-held aspirations that give an organization a collective spirit, a sense of mission.  And if you value the effective use of technology, and you want your organization to adopt and embody that value, I encourage you to remember this the next time you're seeking to promote change: Technology is soft.

Photo by fotologic.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

7s Model graphic by BuildingBrands.

This post was adapted from remarks I made on May 12, 2008, to the second graduating class of ZeroDivide Fellows.  Congratulations and good luck to all the past and current Fellows, and thanks to ZeroDivide for having me.

Organizational Effectiveness

What makes organizations effective?  For that matter, what do we even mean by effectiveness?  I've been giving these questions some thought recently and the following graphs are the result.  (Here's the whole 9-slide PowerPoint file, 75 KB.)

I love the Peters/Waterman/McKinsey "7s" Model, but we can extend it in two directions.  First, looking within an organization, if we reduce the model further and boil it down to its most essential core elements, I think we're left with People (or Staff, in 7s-speak) and Culture (an amalgam of Style, Skills and Shared Values.)  Second, if we look beyond the organization--if we ask why it exists and whether its fulfilling its purpose--we begin to assess its Impact, which includes not only profitability and financial sustainability but also the value created for any stakeholders, from a business's employees to a nonprofit's clients.

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My focus on these three elements is also due to their tightly interrelated nature--they all affect the other two in fundamental ways.

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I think one of the least-understood dynamics is the relationship that exists between an organization's people and its culture.  Sometimes it's difficult to even know where to draw a boundary between the two: Where do I stop and where do my contributions to the culture around me begin?  This may be why so many organizations operate without a clear understanding of their culture.  (And to be clear, every organization has a culture: "When you've decided you don't have a culture, you've got one...")

But what's most important to recognize is the dialectical nature of this relationship.  An organization's founders create the initial culture, which then exerts its influence on them in turn.  Future colleagues are attracted to the pre-existing culture because in some way it meets their needs, and so they reinforce it.

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I've also focused on People and Culture because I see these elements as most closely connected to an organization's Impact.  This isn't to say that other elements don't matter--but ultimately people implement an organization's plans, and the culture in which they operate helps them or hinders them.  Talented people can overcome misguided strategies and suboptimal systems, but they can't outrun a dysfunctional culture (not for long, anyway.)

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And an organization's Impact--its ability to achieve its goals, fulfill its purpose and create value for stakeholders--directly affects its ability to attract and retain effective people and to build and sustain a high-performance culture.

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OK, having mapped out the relationships that exist among these three elements, what do they actually look like?  How do we define People, Culture and Impact in effective organizations?

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Here's my definition of effectiveness as it pertains to People.  I emphasize connections with Culture and Impact; interpersonal skills and accountability; self-development and growth.

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Here's my definition of an effective Culture.  I emphasize distributed leadership, continuous learning, openness, and decentralization.  The final quote from Tom Peters deserves further explanation: The 7s Model is sometimes divided into "Hard" elements (Strategy, Structure and Systems) and "Soft" elements (Skills, Staff, Style and Shared Values).  Our business culture tends to value the former and dismiss the latter, and Peters thinks this is entirely ass-backwards.  The "hard" stuff, from strategic plans to complex financial structures, is actually pretty fuzzy and surprisingly easy to fake.  The "soft" stuff--relationships, leadership, interpersonal skills (in short, culture)--is actually pretty resilient and surprisingly difficult to get right.  Hard is soft, soft is hard.

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I don't believe there's a universal definition of Impact--organizations define value-creation in different ways, and they're answerable to different sets of stakeholders.  But I do believe that effective organizations share the characteristics listed above, which enable them to understand, measure and communicate their impact, and to use that information to drive decision-making (cf. Bob Sutton and Jeff Pfeffer's Hard Facts.)  At the same time, they reality-check regularly and don't let data dictate decisions.

Effective organizations also know when to give up and move on.  They take a pragmatic approach and never let sunk costs fuel persistence--instead, they've mastered the art of strategic quitting.

Finally, effective organizations have a vision of victory that they're driving toward.  What would it look like to win?  For some organizations (including many nonprofits), ultimate victory means putting themselves out of business because they've succeeded in fully and permanently meeting the need that they were created to fulfill.

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Again, if you're interested, here's the whole 9-slide PowerPoint file (75 KB).  As with the other models I post here, I consider this a work-in-progress that helps me make sense of the world, and I welcome any feedback to improve it or make it clearer.

Three Questions with Mark McGuinness

Mark McGuinness is an executive coach based in London who specializes in working with artists and creative professionals and who writes regularly at Wishful Thinking.  He's also the most tech-savvy coach I know, and he's found a number of innovative ways to integrate technology with his interpersonal work.  As another fan of technology who happened to spend two years in art school as an undergrad, I was thrilled when Mark agreed to do a Three Questions interview with me--thanks, Mark!

1) You describe yourself as "a poet and a business coach," but which came first? Were you writing when you saw an unmet need for coaching among artists and creative professionals, or did you begin to write as a form of personal expression to complement your coaching practice?

Poetry came first. And it will last longest. I never planned on being a coach, I just wanted to write poetry. I got interested in hypnosis as a way of tapping into creativity, and as I like to do things properly I trained as a hypnotherapist. I found myself being consulted by writers who were stuck on their latest novel and actors with stage nerves - they were great fun to work with, and of all the clients I worked with they seemed to get the most out of the sessions. So I started looking for ways of working with more artists and creatives, and developing it as a niche. Most of them weren't really looking for therapy, just a way of kick-starting their creativity, so I started offering professional coaching instead of therapy.

After a few years another coach invited me to do some work with him at Vodafone, which introduced me to the world of coaching in business. One assignment led to another and I ended up doing a lot of work with various organisations, mostly helping managers to become better coaches for their teams. After a few years of that, I decided to put the creative and business coaching together and focus on companies in the creative industries - advertisting, marketing, TV, computer games, web development etc.

I felt reasonably confident of my coaching skills, having been doing it for around 10 years, but I wanted to get more of a sense of the big picture of the industry sector. So I took the MA in Creative and Media Enterprises at the Unversity of Warwick, which was a fantastic course - we studied the usual core business topics like strategy, marketing and organisation theory, alongside intellectual property law, theories of creativity and theories of the creative economy. A great mixture of inspiration and business knowledge, that made me look at my business and my poetry in a different light.

2) Your recent e-book on Creative Management for Creative Teams does a great job of explaining coaching, but I'm also curious about how working with your particular clientele affects your approach. What do you think you might do differently as a coach because of your focus on creative people?

Well two things I might do differently are not to wear a suit and not to call myself a coach! It's probably no surprise that creative types don't feel comfortable with suits, but I discovered through my work and via my MA research dissertation that a lot of people in creative businesses really don't like the word 'coaching'. They associate it with corporate management-speak, so the image doesn't work for them at all. But when we get down to work, the label doesn't matter, we're too absorbed in looking at the situation and finding new options.

Image aside, a lot of what I do with my creative industries clients is no different to what I would do with any other client. People are people after all. There are a lot of issues around communication, collaboration, teamwork, management and generally dealing with other people that are the same, whatever industry you're working in.

The obvious area that is different is working on the creative process, which we can approach from several different angles. Sometimes we focus on fine-tuning creative thinking strategies. Sometimes people have difficulty getting into the right state of mind for creative flow, so with my background in hypnotherapy I can help them find the right triggers for a particular emotional state. Time management doesn't sound like a particularly creative topic, but I show people that if you don't manage your workload it can play havoc with your creativity. Other times we might focus on the craft element - using your critical faculty to appraise and revise your work. And for me the creative process doesn't end until you've reached an audience with your work, so sometimes we're focused on presenting it to others (boss, client, public) in an engaging way.

Another nice thing about working with creatives is sharing what I've learned from my own practice as a poet. I find that a lot of clients are quite intrigued by poetry, so it can be very fruitful to look for the common ground between poetry and graphic design or singing opera or writing a film script or whatever it happens to be. Clients seem to find that helpful and it's fascinating for me - I get a window on all these creative worlds that I can never enter properly, but I can have a look inside as a visitor and see some of the amazing things people are doing.

3) One of the reasons I've enjoyed your work is your effective use of technology--photos from Flickr, a Facebook group, a Tumblr link blog, prominent links to your feed, etc.  I wish more people in the field did the same, but I know that many coaches and consultants are daunted by the prospect.  How do you decide which new tools are worth using, and how do you implement and support them?

I discovered blogging by reading Seth Godin's e-book Who's There? (PDF, 2MB) and it was such an exciting idea there wasn't a decision to make - I was going to do this and I was prepared to learn all the techy stuff I needed to get it up and running. So I immersed myself in the blogging world out of sheer enthusiasm, reading sites like ProBlogger and CopyBlogger and devouring what they were teaching.

A lot of the other tools came about by seeing cool things on other people's blogs and thinking 'How do they do that?' and investigating from there. These days time is a big factor for me. E.g. I wanted to do a links blog for a while but looked around for something that wouldn't add to my workload. I was already bookmarking pages on Delicious, so I wanted a Firefox extension that would allow me to simultaneously post to Delicious, my Tumblr links blog and StumbleUpon - I found the Mahalo share extension [for Firefox] which does a great job. It means I'm creating a whole new blog without any extra work - result!  [On a related note, see Mark's e-book on Time Management for Creative People.]

If you're thinking of taking the plunge with blogging and social media, the key thing to remember is that it's not about technology, it's about people. That's why they call it social media - the tools are designed to connect people and they do a great job, I've met loads of great people since I started blogging, and the tools are getting more user-friendly as they develop.

Bonus Personal Question: Your first New Year's Resolution for 2008 was maintaining a daily meditation practice.  How's it going?

So far so good! I've settled into a rhythm of meditating first thing in the morning for 15-20 minutes and now it feels like the normal thing to do. I'll admit there have been a few days I really didn't feel like sitting, but I found myself thinking 'Well, you promised your readers you would do it - what are you going to tell them?'. And sat down. So there you have it - the power of blogging!

Cool Tools

I've been able to spend a little time recently digging into some social media tools to understand how they work as well as their potential value for someone like me, i.e. an executive coach and change management consultant with an abiding interest in technology.  So here's a quick rundown:

Utterz is an extremely user-friendly service that allows you to capture and publish audio, video, pictures and text.  The site essentially creates a link between your phone, your camera or your webcam and the web at large.  You can call Utterz and use your phone to record an interview, snap a picture while you're at it, and publish the audio and the video not only to your Utterz page but also to just about any other site you designate on the fly--the audio's captured immediately, and you simply text the photo to Utterz.  You can do the same with video, but if you're like me, A) your phone's OK for stills but terrible for video, and B) uploading video via your carrier sucks up too much time and bandwidth.  No problem--just use your laptop's webcam and send the stream directly to Utterz, or upload a previously recorded video file.  (You can also opt to send all your Utterz videos to your YouTube account simultaneously.)  I see Utterz as a way to turn any conversation into an interview you can share with colleagues AND as a personal podcast for friends and family (depending on where I choose to send the files.) Very cool and stone cold simple.  Many thanks to my old--well, let's say former--colleague Holly Ross for the inspiration.

Tumblr is sort of like Utterz but a bit more lightweight, which makes it both easier to use and slightly less useful--or, rather, useful in a different way.  It's another service that allows you to capture and publish links, text, and photos, and although it doesn't have built-in support for audio and video, it's really easy (especially via their Firefox bookmark button) to publish to your Tumblr page and to anyplace you can insert a little code.  I see it as a great way to share and promote links to articles, posts and photos that don't merit a full-on blog post but merit something more prominent than a del.icio.us tag.  Many thanks to Mark McGuinness for the (continued) inspiration--he's THE most tech-savvy executive coach I've met since I stopped working in technology to launch my coaching practice, and I learn something every time I stop by his site.

And now for something completely different: Don't Break the Chain is a fun site supposedly inspired by the motivational wisdom of Jerry Seinfeld, according to Brad Isaac:

[Seinfeld] told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. "After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain."

"Don't break the chain," he said again for emphasis.

True?  Who cares.  It's a great story that translates brilliantly into a free web service.  Your "Chain" account serves as the online equivalent of Seinfeld's big wall calendar, and you use it to "X" out days on which you accomplish your given task.  (The image above indicates that I've gone running three straight days--no mean feat this past year.)  You can create multiple calendars to track different goals, you can customize the display a bit, and if you want the world to help hold you accountable, you can copy-and-paste a little code to publish your calendar anywhere you'd like.

Twitter is a service that's clearly useful for many people..but not me--at least not right now.  If Utterz makes it easier to blog audio and video, and if Tumblr allows you to turn your tags into a mini-blog, then Twitter is a sort of micro-blog, allowing you to send out even more ephemeral messages (up to 140 characters) via your phone or the web to your personal Twitter network.  The How? isn't an issue here--if you've used IM or sent a text message, you know how to use Twitter, but the Why? (or Why not?, in my case) is more complex.  I signed up for a Twitter account months ago, but it's never seemed useful to me.  This is primarily because my work as an executive coach involves a lot of face-to-face interactions that can't be interrupted, and my time online (or text-accessible) is limited as a result.  But I'm also aware that I need a certain amount of distance between the world and myself in order to think, to focus, to stay grounded.  I understand the appeal of feeling more connected with the people in my network via a steady stream of Twitter updates, and I could see myself using Twitter if others on my team did as well, because although most of our work with clients and students is face-to-face, we often work from separate locations--but until that happens, I'm content to opt out.  (See Common Craft's typically well-done Twitter in Plain English if you'd like to learn more.)  UPDATE: One day later, John Unger posts a Twitter manifesto, describing how he uses it--and he notes that his initial response was "Why the hell would I want to do that?"  It didn't change my mind about Twitter's utility to me at the moment, but it did open my eyes to the creative ways people are adapting the service to meet their needs.  UPDATE 2: OK, I give--with Mark McGuinness weighing in as well, I'll see if Twitter can add value despite my unusual schedule.

Finally, even though the services rendered by Creative Commons are nothing like those described above (and even though I've been a CC user for years), my work on this post led me to realize that my CC license was out-of-date, and this seems like a good opportunity to point anyone unfamiliar with them in a helpful direction.  CC provides an alternative to copyright that allows people like me to share our writing, our photos, and any other type of content with the world under the restrictions of our choice.  For example, everything I post on this site is published under CC's "Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States" license, which means that you're free to copy, distribute and/or remix my work as long as you also 1) attribute it to me by linking to this site and 2) further distribute any remixed works under a similar license.  Almost all of the photos I use in my posts (including the one above) have been published under the same CC license as mine, and I'm both grateful for the right to access such highly creative work and hopeful that my contributions are as useful to someone else.

Photo by Paul Schultz.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Swivel

Swivel is a content-sharing application for data and graphs.  It's sort of like YouTube meets Wikipedia for people who love spreadsheets.  As with YouTube, you can create a user account, upload your content (in Swivel's case, raw data or a spreadsheet file rather than a video), format and tag it, and set it free for others to view, comment upon, embed or otherwise use as they see fit.  As with Wikipedia, accuracy is in the eye of the beholder, so read the citations and take the figures with a grain of salt.

The most-viewed graph on Swivel today is Growth of Creative Commons Photos on Flickr, by Brian Mulloy, Swivel's CEO and co-founder:

There's tight integration with several Google apps, including the ability to make Swivel graphs from Google spreadsheets and a feed from Google Blogsearch showing people posting Swivel graphs, which just this minute led me to my friend Beth Kanter, who posted today on this very same topic, using the very same graph above.  Small world!

A Little Housecleaning: Feedback Requested

Just in case you haven't noticed, I've been cleaning things up around here over the past few days.  (Note to Explorer users: I know the boxes in the left-hand sidebar are running wide--I'm trying to determine the cause of the problem.  Thanks for bearing with me...and have you ever considered using Firefox?  Um, just a thought.  Note to feed readers: Feel free to skip this post.)  Here's a quick orientation--and any feedback would be greatly appreciated:

• The "Stay in Touch" menu at the top of the left-hand sidebar includes links to subscribe to my feed, get updates by email, use my contact form, and my email and IM/Skype addresses.

• The "About Me" menu at the top of the right-hand sidebar includes links to my About page, as well as my Recent Transitions and Local Meeting Spots posts.  (I'll keep the latter two up for a while, but I'll probably update and/or replace them shortly.)  And on my About page, I've consolidated my reputation/profile links under the "For More Info..." menu, which currently includes LinkedIn, Opinity, Trufina and RapLeaf.  I'm uncertain as to how useful these services are--if you've found them helpful (or not), I'd love to know.

• I've moved the "Search This Site" links to the left-hand sidebar, at the top of the content navigation menus (Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories and Archives).  You can still choose between Google and Technorati, but I've added logos and simplified the interface.

• I cut out a few menus from the sidebars that didn't really seem useful--like my Del.icio.us tagroll, which you can still find as a link under the "Tools I Like" menu on the left.  And I'm about to do a major culling of the sites in my blogroll--they're all worthwhile reads, but I'm currently oversubscribed to technology sites and undersubscribed to management sites, and I need to adjust my feed reading to fit my current interests.

• I may not be done--I'm thinking about a new, less cryptic banner [Update: I've added a new banner and tweaked the color scheme] and a swanky top menu (if I have the guts to tackle it), and I'll definitely be adding a page on my professional services soon--but I'm reasonably happy with how things have turned out to date.  Thanks to TypePad for continuing to exceed expectations and to John Unger at TypePad Hacks for some great ideas.