Emerging Technologies Managers

We do know this stuff, or at least we did

Chris is deeply concerned that social media might encourage people to segment into antagonist tribes and that have-nots will be increasingly disenfranchised. Coming in from an organizational design background, both in profits and not-for-profits, I am less concerned. Polarization and marginalization are risks, but not inevitable outcomes. We know the risks; they are old questions; and they are covered in basic training of “organizational scholars” as basics are in every profession.

‘Group think’, made famous by Kennedy’s failed invasion of Cuba, is 101 material - as are the trajectory to reach the point where groupthink is possible, and the manager’s role (as opposed to team leader’s role) when the group reaches that level. The protection of journalists as the fourth estate is critical to the management of group think, etc. etc. Pol Science 101.

What is a mystery, at least to me, is the apparent collapse of public administration in the UK. Missing computer disks, 20% tax on the minimum wage, crowds of people milling around a train station trying to find out about delayed trains - all beg the question “Where do people learn to manage in the UK? What do the learn? Who do they learn it from? What are the gradations in experience that a young person might expect?”

What I find more of an unknown, and therefore compelling, is the increasing split between consumers and producers.

In the media world, consumers have become producers, and producers have retreated, by-and-large, to making platforms. This is a complex issue that has taken place in other sectors too.

The hotel example is relatively easy to draw out into rules-of-thumb. If fine dining is to be replaced by a microwave, a hotplate, preprepared meals and packaged soup, the demand for skills changes. The call for what you and I think of as real skill, diminishes. The demand for chefs bifurcates. Top chefs need to be in restaurants where it is very clear we will pay for their skills in the price of our meal. Indifferent chefs are likely to be replaced with a management system such as we find at McDonalds. Now the skills are estimating the demand for chips, contracting for potatoes with farmers, persuading a lot of young people to do work where they learn little, etc.

From hotels to knowledge

The same pattern is being seen in the knowledge economy. We simply do not have a role if our consumers can “cook” better than us.

What becomes interesting from an HR point of view are these questions?

I listened to Brad Smith of Intuit, the accounting software people, talking about the challenge of moving from providing accounting advice to a platform where consumers advise each other. As he put it, we have to move from

Note, McDonalds doesn’t go this far. You get what you get. There are some services in the States though that do all your shopping for you, and sometimes your chopping and slicing. You get to cook. This is a different space where people don’t do as they are told!

I might be carrying forward basic organization theory inappropriately and I’d be happy to know I am wrong. In current thought, we distinguish between

I’ve done a lot of assessment center work and we watch out for adequate transitions between levels 1 and 2 and 2 and 3 (and thereafter but this is a pyramid!)

When a highly skilled person is transitioning between 1 and 2, they often make 1 of 2 mistakes.

The psychologists will be looking for the ability to say this is the situation, this is my goal, this is your goal, these are your resources and authority, this is how we will coordinate. Within the context of their sector, military guys are taught this stuff and the agile can carry it over to other sectors.

Between 2 and 3, a highly trained junior manager or supervisor, has to make another transition. They need to remember that they are talking to people who will go out to manage another team (as above). Again we see some ‘cuffing it’ but more often we see micro-management where they start quizzing the subordinate about what they did or did not do.

The psychologists want to see the task positioned “at the right level”. A clever trick, for anyone interested, is to delegate to the whole team of managers on one piece of paper. What is the situation, what is your goal, what is the goal for each subordinate manager (one line each only!), what resources and authority vary from normal, and how will the team coordinate. That keeps you focused on coordinating managers and and understanding the nature of the management task, how much it varies from day-to-day, etc.

Going back to the bifurcation of skills, a run-of-the-mill chef who joins McDonalds has to learn a new swathe of management skills, beginning but not ending with some “man management”. They cannot approach the day as if they are going to do the work themselves. Other people have to figure out what they are on about, deal with their own demons, adjust to small details, etc.

If the customers persist in talking to each other, and deciding what recipes should be used, running that restaurant takes on a massively new dimension. The manager cannot do everything. Customer Mary talks to Waiter Johnny who liaises with Chef Sam who might be buying in food from Farmer Lucy. To manage this business, even as a manager at the bottom of the pecking order, we need a a capacity to anticipate and conceptualize what needs to be done, what may need to be done, etc. This level of know-how used to be the province of people who gained experience in a leisurely fashion, often spending years in jobs such as Assistant GM of a hotel.

Conceptualizing the complicated decisions made by other people is our business now. Fantasizing here, the hotel business becomes the art of allowing an owner to manage the business. You won’t manage the business directly. And you will survive if they survive and continue to buy your services and pay your bill! Franchising takes us part of the way, but not all of the way because our clients own their own businesses.

Yes we can!

I am not catastrophizing here. This is not beyond our knowledge set. Everything we need to know about managing in these situations has already been written down - quite often 50 to 100 years ago. And while some education is certainly dumbed down, in my experience, Gen Y picks up information very very fast.

But we do need experience. We do need to practice doing things at speed in real-time. My question is this: where are the universities who are systematically championing the skills we need to run the transition of social media from service to platform? Where is the process where we pass on the skills to design massive role play games such as Jane McGonigal designs?

And as I always keep my eye on the business ball, which businesses are ripe for taking over by people who understand the way things are going and the skills that are needed to run them?

So my two questions are:

July 22, 2008 | Filed Under Jo Jordan, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment 

3 steps to choosing your social media metric vendor

I found a really good blog about measuring the value or ROI of public relations and a post on selecting your metric vendor. I think it will answer many of the questions people have about metrics.

I have turned the blog around into 3 steps with some sub-steps to condense the issues.

1 How much do you want to pay?

Crass question, I know, but you can think in terms of three price points: 0, 500-1000 pounds a month, or 5000-10000 pounds a month. That’s pretty clear, isn’t it? Where do you fall?

Cost is determined by three things:

a) The span of your metrics - how many products, services, issues, communities are you watching?

If you are a giant firm like Coca-Cola, you may need to research several languages and several markets because you implicitly compete with coffee, fruit juice and water, too. Most firms have a much narrower field of interest and will be tracking fewer issues.

b) What needs to be done?

Sometimes it is enough to get some machine-counted numbers and a standardized report. You may need to spend more if you need

c) Who will do the work?

The fee for work is calculated using the following factors:

If you are a very large company, you may need to pay for all this to coordinate the work, but you may be buying what consultants call a “transactional” service - the same service that everyone is getting.

The difficulty with hiring independent consultants is that you feel unclear about how good they are. Perhaps you should put that question to them squarely. I want to see if I can hire you, but I don’t know this business well. Can you walk me through the issues? What will you do? What should I be looking for? Where must I speak up and give you information? Where do you have difficulties with clients and what can I do to make the relationship work?

So that is cost:

2 What’s the business that we are we talking about?

People who deliver social media metrics are typically trawling the web in one way or another. Some claim to cover 30 million sites; some 10 million. The real question is: do they cover sites of interest to you?

And that begs the million-dollar question, which sites interest you.

This lovely blog I found suggests you should list the top 100 sites that concern your customers, and make sure your vendor already has them in their list! You also need to check you have covered all the relevant categories: sites, blogs, newspapers, platforms, microblogs, etc.

If you cannot list the top 100 sites that interest you, then that is where you need to begin.

3 What does you vendor do?

Most vendors of social media metrics are marketers. I don’t know these firms at all because I am on the supply side - HR and people particularly. It’s useful though to scan the list and think of how vendors differ from each other.

So those are the three questions:

People who are really expert at this, I am counting on you to question, correct, clarify and elaborate. For my part, I am interested in the supply side.

Does anyone out there work on the metrics of people offering companies goods and services?

July 3, 2008 | Filed Under Jo Jordan, Uncategorized | 2 Comments 

Compulsory is not on the list

The key idea is control of me, by me, for me!

Do you prefer to drive an “automatic” or a “stickshift”?  To be honest, I have never driven an automatic.  When I drive, I like to have a relationship with the vehicle.  But if I sat in tail-backs everyday, I might change my mind.  I would change my mind.

None of us want our lives to be “dumbed-down”.  We get pretty irritable when that happens.  Think of the retired school teacher who writes wonderful letters by hand.

But she probably also types letters to bureaucrats on a computer and prints them out.   She’s a smart gal after all.

Social media needs to give us control, not take it away

Horses for courses, cars for different driving conditions, writing utensils for different purposes.  Technology makes us happy when it improves our ability to get things done.

If we start taking control away from people, they will get unhappy with us, or best work round us.

Colin Walker has a great post telling how his mother-in-law uses the internet for some tasks, and not for others.  She understand without studying psychology & computer science, what a computer will do more smoothly, and what a human does better : repetition vs discretion.

The five C’s

Colin also lists five ways social media can augment and make IT more useful to us:

Please note : compulsory is not on this list!

Zemanta Pixie
June 30, 2008 | Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment 

We are in the business of mashed inbound communication

Metrics and clear minded thinking

I am more-and-more convinced that we need to measure social media against what we would have been doing otherwise.  That is profound you know!

At Leicester, we heard the story of The Savile Row tailor who developed a successful blog and was able to move his shop to his house up north.  Without the blog, his marketing cost was a shop on Savile Row.  Well I would miss living in London.  But there you are! Business is business.  A blog vs a shop in Savile Row.  No contest in terms of costs.

In terms of the other idea I picked up at Leicester, reputation - breaking into the market - was the constraint.  Can social media be used to break in to the market - to release the constraint?  In this case, yes.  A lot of people who buy expensive suits enjoy talking about them and learning more about cloth, cut, etc.

SM costs are negligible - so we just have to look at our gains, how we would have got them the old way, and how much the old methods cost!

The business case for social media

Making the business case for SM is a different matter.  Remember every business case is actually three business cases intertwined like a DNA helix:

a) the business case for the business buying the social media

b) the business case for the customer who will spend time on the social media

c) the business case for the person supplying the social media (YOU in other words)

I  looked at Neilsen’s site again yesterday.  It looks like magic.  But lets face it.  Unless you are Obama or Coca-cola, you don’t even register on their counts.   Neilsen are selling off their excess computer capacity.  That’s their business case!

What is the business case for the company buying the social media and for you, if you were able to develop and sell a similar service?

I like data.  It is amazing what a bunch of data tells you.  Powerful stuff. Unfortunately it is usually in the realm of Emperor’s Clothes.  The big boys have staked the ranch against an ego-trip, you know they are wrong, you run the data, then you run .    .    . Emperor’s Clothes aren’t called Emperor’s Clothes for nothing.  Yes data is cool.  But it pulls down without replacing it with anything better.

The real issue is getting the Emperor to put on some clothes.  Actually, the real issue is social relations have become so distorted, a heck of a lot of people are pretending he has got clothes, and if you are the buffoon who points out his nakedness, even with wad of computer printouts as a shield, it will be “off with your head”!

I am not trying to be pessimistic here.  I just don’t want you to be drawn to professional suicide.  Data isn’t power - it is a bludgeon.  I believe, like the social scientist, Karl Weick, we must define problems in ways that we can do something about them.  That’s our task as managers, gurus, or whatever the privileged call themselves these days.  If we feel we are in a cul-de-sac, turn, leave, find a better route.

So what is our contribution to the common good?

I got this from David Terrar who was talking at NLabNetworks about his work with the Chartered Accountants.  DT and colleagues were asked to set up an online community for the Institute’s 133K members.  We would expect the 1:9:90 rule to apply.  So we would be happy with 1,3K active members. 12K listeners and occasional participants.  90% inactive or at best lurking.  In 4 months, the new “online community” achieved: 3K users, 175 posts and 400 comments.

3 comments per post (on average - probably a J curve).  3 comments per post.  This is the magic number and the insight. 3 comments per post.

For everything you say, how many replies do you get back?

We are NOT in the business of content.  We are NOT in the business of broadcast (well I seem to be most of the time!).

We are NOT even in the business of sonar radar.  When they ping, they don’t want a reply.

When we ping, we don’t want an automatic reply.  We want the ping to circulate around a person’s emotional system and come back digested, mashed, and different.  We are in the business of MASHED responses.

Going back to Emperors and their clothes

Social Media just amplifies what is already there.  We provide an easy way for people to talk to the Emperor.

The first time the Emperor appears a little scantily dressed, some people comment.  Because they trust the Emperor and the Emperor trusts them, he puts on some more clothes next time he goes out.  He even appreciates the 3 comments from the “people” saying where the best tailor shops can be found and gives them some custom.  Everyone is happy!

If the people do not deign to appraise the emperor of his lack of apparel, mmm .   .   .

a) no inward communication (how many mashed replies to each outward message?)

b) no inward communication on something that is obviously important (check the last time you updated your own beliefs about what is important!)

c) no one in the “court” wants to pass on messages that imply criticism or they miss any irony completely

These are all signs of an empire running on borrowed time.  Now empires are like cars, they run a long time without a service.  So, don’t panic.  You have time.  But don’t kid yourself that you will change the fundamentals with some social media.  If things are this bad, keep your head down, buy a copy of “What Color is my Parachute?”, and figure out what you should be doing with your life and with whom!

It’s disappointing to find yourself in the court of an Emperor with no clothes, but it happens.  It’s disappointing that’s all.  It is not a disaster unless you make it one.

Inward Communication

Now I certainly don’t have the knack of opening up a discussion.  There is a personality type “the chair” who is brilliant at that.  The flip side, is that they just don’t get anything done on their own.  But the front person is ideally a “chair/team player” - the inveterate socialite.

I’m the shaper, completer-finisher type.  You can see it in my post.  Is what we doing important and are the important things getting done?  I tell the socialites to kick me under the table if my timing is off.  I won’t necessarily get the replies, but I will read them!

We need a mixture of people in social media and I can see a course on Belbin team roles and social media coming up.  We need to get both sides of the coin: a charming environment so the replies come in, backed up by people with a more analytical disposition.

The points

If someone asks what is the ROI of social media, ask back: what do we have to get done in this business, how will we do it, give me 24 hours to sketch out how we can use SM to do it more quickly and more cheaply.

If someone asks what is SM: we use modern internet as a system of inbound communication.  We will leave automatic ping-backs to other people.  We deal with “mashed” replies - where our consumer has added an opinion or a variation that is deeply valuable to us.

If their eyes glaze over, and they don’t want to know, don’t fight it!   You have the answer to your business case!  Your next step, then, is to look at the business case of everyone - consumers, rivals to your customer, rivals to you, and position yourself accordingly!

If I am right that we are in the business of mashed inbound communication, then we want to pick our clients.  We want clients who can disrupt the current business model (like the Savile Row tailor) by using social media and who ‘get it’ - at least intuitively.

I want a session on July 5 about our clients - who are they, how do we understand their businesses, what can we do to help them.

June 25, 2008 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 11 Comments 

Did you know we have a conversation going on over here!

I didn’t!  How can we make this feed the comments through email?

June 25, 2008 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 2 Comments 

NLabNetworks 4 of 5

Workshop time - choice of 6. I am going to David Terrar’s workshop on organizing accountants. Talk later.

June 19, 2008 | Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment 

NLabNetworks 3 in 5

5 Bioteams: what can we learn from nature’s social networks? [Our swarm team]

Ken Thompson is talking about the broken model of “single leader teams” and the promise of what we can learn from biology.

1. Networked Enterprises

Helping small businesses form networks to win large contracts.

Collaborative skills for amplified enterpriees.

2. Swarmtribes

For fans to promote bands. Compliments Myspace and Twitter but less of a “broadcasting”. NESTA funding allows UK bands free funding until the end of 2008.

Organizing festivals.

Organizing around a cause.

Identify the top 50 fans and they will reach out to the rest of the community. All messages come from some one you know. If you like a message, we pass it on.

3. Mobile teams

a. Ask the network

b. When one knows all know.

c. ?

Experiment in the session

1. Text join swarmname username

2. Receive acknowledgment

3. Sent a message

Question from an audience: does twitter waste time?

1. Any group member can take the lead.

2. Short messages relevant to what we are doing makes for dynamic teams.

3. In a crowd, many people do the same thing to make a mexican wave. In a small group we all do different things to make something happen.

4. Reach many through the few.

Lifecylce

Founding stage

Ergonomic stage

Reproductive stage

Terminal stage

Humberto Maturana on Autopiesis : a living system its product is itself

Boundary

Processes

Nervous system

External Communications

Group membership - boundary

+

Build survival mass with swarm queen

Get VIP fans to recruit up to critical mass (increase engagemet from 1% to 100%)

Too fast to get details

6 Social Networking beyond the Dogma: Let’s make some money

Jim Benson from Seattle, urban planner by training, musician and evangelist is talking about how to get the most out of its social media.

SME’s have “stuff to do”. Social media is time sink.

To have a good business you need advice+customers+ . . .

Communities that create value help and you have a valuable community if you participate.

You invest social capital in and after a while you get something back.

Example twitter.

Some people tweat copiously. Small business owners don’t have time. What works for your business?

What intangibles are you seeking in this network? Not direct results. If you just take, you will no longer be welcome.

How do you pick what to participate in?

Know your limits. How much time do you invest and what will you get back?

Learn:

Your community

Your market

Your limit

Start:

now (feel around, test waters, participate)

small (start small and work your way up - social networks pull you in)

directed (fits your immediate needs, business, your personality)

Business relies on

Personality

Familiarity

Proximity (Social and Locational) Clients and Information

e.g. restaurants customers in walking distance, national wide restaurants for health regs.

Reduces:

transaction costs (lead acquisition, product improvement, opportunities, individual sales, expert information - later is important gain)

Social networks are like cities because they give you things you used to get in cities

by fostering

growth for economics, thought,innovation (spiky, low transaction costs for info exchange, vetting, advice)

coordiantion

affinity

voice

realization of the individual through groups

Question:

June 19, 2008 | Filed Under Jo Jordan, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment 

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