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Twitter overview at TED by Evan Williams

An interesting presentation at TED by the evangelist-founder of Twitter. I came across this one as I was doing some research on existing analyses of the phenomenon and in particular the types of use cases that were "invented" by users who made extremely creative use of the minimalism of Twitter's design. To me it's an example of chaos, flow and emergence that I think will be a necessary ingredient in any initiative of the future.

Fallacies, illusions and dogmas of social media

Having spent the best part of the past twelve years operating on the treaterous frontier of progress defined by the combination 'business + innovation + technology' the phenomenon of stubbornly odd pursuits of generally accepted truths makes me wonder sometimes. It does seem to remain valid with each wave of innovation imposing fads as reality for as long as it takes for deception to sink in thus leaving room for people who actually deal with the nuts and bolts of new practices to create forms that can be adopted. In this article we'll identify what I consider to be the top 5 fallacious propositions in today's social media environment.

What Makes a Great Salesperson?

In these challenging times several of my customers are looking at expanding their salesforce, which may seem paradoxical but in fact is not. This morning I came across a good piece by Inc on what makes a good salesperson (see link below). My top three attributes

1. great listening skills because very often the customer is actually stating needs behind questions or the expression of wants
2. ability to open doors and develop the relational capital
3. ability to profitably close deals

What Makes a Great Salesperson?

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Quote of the day

"When one puts objectivity in parenthesis, all views, all verses in the multiverse are equally valid. Understanding this, you lose the passion for changing the other. One of the results is that you look apathetic to people. Now, those who do not live with objectivity in parentheses have a passion for changing the other. So they have this passion and you do not. For example, at the university where I work, people may say, ‘Humberto is not really interested in anything,’ because I don’t have the passion in the same sense that the person that has objectivity without parentheses. And I think that this is the main difficulty. To other people you may seem too tolerant. However, if the others also put objectivity in parentheses , you discover that disagreements can only be solved by entering a domain of co-inspiration, in which things are done together because the participants want to do them. With objectivity in parentheses, it is easy to do things together because one is not denying the other in the process of doing them."

Humberto Maturana - Interview 1985.

How would you salvage the banking system?

Over the past few weeks I've been doing some research work around the financial system because I have an idea that I might pursue as an entrepreneurial venture aimed at making a difference in the following areas:

• funding for privately owned European SMB companies
• the way investors (LPs) structure their deals with fund managers
• how relationships are (not) created between LPs and companies in which a fund invests
• the degree of transparency allowed into the system for various stakeholders
• the way investment performance is measured to account for environmental, social and human cost of decisions taken by companies and by the financiers to pursue growth (and wealth)
• how companies share the benefits of their success with all stakeholders not just between shareholders
• ...

I still need to do some work, but the thing is taking a nice shape, especially after a sudden satori I had over the weekend... It now seems so obvious I am in bewildered wonder at the idea that something so evident that was right before my eyes could have escaped my attention even as I was working on stumbling blocks that it helps remove! Anyway, more in a future post. For now, I'd be grateful if you could help me by voting on a question I have: how would you go about salvaging the financial system? To answer on LinkedIn, please click here.

Inspiration of the day

Impossible is sometimes an excuse for not trying enough different ways for reaching a goal. Many thanks to Anne (Institut Ressources), Sylviane and JH (Media4) for letting me have this gift today.

Are You Going To Finish Strong? Awesome video! If you watch only one video today make sure it is this one! Nick Vujicic has no limbs but he leads an incredible life!

Tribalization of business

An interesting piece covering the "tribalization" of business, which shows that:

1. communities are about delivering significant transformational dynamics in any competitive game
2. the role of CMO needs to become more "networked" and start dealing actively with community management. Companies may need a Chief Community Officer although with my previous posts you must have guessed that I hold the CxO roles as nothing more than participants in a business and organizational network: they have no particular significance especially if they try to do the job ib a traditional deterministic way in a world that is increasingly chaotic
3. companies need new approaches to management in order to include community dynamics in the way the business is managed, which means that it's more about managing networks of talent than about tweaking the rigid hierarchical pyramid to coexist with the community. In fact there are important implications to this especially when it comes to leaderhip, measuring performance and solving conflicts

Here's the presentation, which is heavily marketing & communications oriented, but I think has implications well beyond those areas.

2008 Tribalization Of Business Study Sncr Webinar

View more presentations from Francois Gossieaux. (tags: socialnetworking social)

The future of work: towards chaordic business?

This interview on the future of work as shaped by modern infotech and social media is extremely interesting not only because of the implications for social infotech tools in business, but also because it suggests an evolution of business and the enterprise into more flexible and adaptive systems. Are we going towards a less deterministic way of running business? One combining chaos and order, considering the enterprise as a chaordic system... that would be much, much better than enterprise 2.0: should we call it enterprise x.0?

The future of enterprise: what's 2-tier business?

Earlier today I had a quick personal thinking session as to what could well define business organizations of the future in a world of constant (and radical?) change, requiring permanent morphing to adapt and adopt the most relevant form for ever more unpredictable (and improbable?) events. The thinking was prompted by a question someone asked me "what's a 2-tier business?", 2-tier referring to the concepts of Spiral Dynamics. Here's my take in 17 + 1 bonus points.

Excellent discussion on the crisis at Digital Life Design

Late January at Digital Life Design in Munich, there was an interesting panel with Nasim Taleb (always insightful and full of common sense | his site) and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman (always fascinating pioneer of psychology applied to finance and the economy | his Nobel profile ). Taleb has a realistic approach by saying that what he basically want is not to improve forecasts but rather to review the way the world is working in order to make it resistant to forecastign errors. Like Roubini he advocates the nationalization of banks. I suspect he means the "utility" part, not the "casino" part of the banking system (for a view of utility vs casino listen to the podcast at the end of this post). Kahneman shows how human psychology is a key driving force for understanding organizations, companies, the economy and markets because, as he very correctly points out, these entities do not exist in any other way than through human behavior.

Video and comments below.

To be consistent, we need (radical) change in execs' compensation

Senior executives are supposed to be dealing with strategic matters most of the time or at least supposed to be exerting major influence on a company's long term. Yet their compensations are structured to reward short term thinking and short term action. In particular bonuses and stock option schemes tend to be attributed and vest much earlier than the time horizon when the results of the execs' work become apparent. How can there be more consistency without additional legislation, regulations and authorities of control? We know none of the really works.

Keeping copyright sound

That's a worthy cause. Copyright extension is perfectly useless for people who create new stuff and only a means to securing the dominance of organizations that are increasingly made irrelevant by the radical changes in the media distribution landscape. We don't need our legislators spending time, energy and money on building perpetual streams of income for antiquated forms of content usage. Perhaps they'd be much better inspired to consider enforcing Creative Commons as the official copyright management system.

Watch this and sign the petition on the site of Sound Copyright.

Becky Hogge: Speech at Sound Copyright conference in the EU Parliament 27.01.09 from Open Rights Group on Vimeo

More pressure on marketing expected

A few short months ago there were worries about marketing budgets being cut but most professionals were sounding reassuring in saying that the bulk of marketing budgets would be transferred to online and interactive initiatives. The theory went that brands would want to keep taking initiatives and would continue the same intensity of communication by shifting their marketing dollars to more affordable channels like the Internet.

Even then this thesis did not seem to hold against careful analysis and discussions with senior decision makers even back then. Recent news seem to confirm the pain to come for agencies and marketing professionals, irrespective of the nature of their business, with an exception that is not what most people seemed to think, but makes economic sense.

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