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Heartfelt wishes for an excellent 2010

The end of the year and the end of this decade provide me with an excellent opportunity to offer heartfelt wishes to customers, partners, suppliers and friends along with sincere thanks for all the people who've trusted BusinessQuests over and over again this year as in all previous ones. I am particularly grateful to the people and companies who've given me opportunities to explore new spaces and to further expand my professional horizons.

  

 

Seven predictions inspired by Art

The trailer of a new documentary on Art called "Lives of Artists" published by excellent and Restless Contagious Magazine provides an inspiration to share some thoughts about the importance of art for business and also to make a few predictions for 2010 and beyond, indulging the game of futurology as it sometimes occurs. Those predictions were shaped by the excellent content shared by the people I follow on Twitter and elsewhere; so I'm grateful to all of them for what they share and teach. Of course these are my predictions and therefore I'm solely responsible for any issues of rigor and overall quality.

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"Lives of Artists" is supported by Coca-Cola and makes the case that Art should be disruptive, aggressive, intelligent, attract attention and push us out of our zone of comfort. The core message finds me in complete agreement, if only because no innovation and no evolution can happen unless we are projected into a different space from the one we are accustomed to. Being projected into the space of difference, change, imagination, dream, daydreaming, vision, possibility and openness is something that can happen either through internal forces of each one's psyche or through external factor and sometimes there are exceptional disciplines that create a link between inner and outer space. Most of the disciplines involved in Art are like that. It's an invitation to think, dream, dare, be-Start-Treky (blodly go where no one else has gone before), imagine, transcend current state, nudge yourself and others out of the comfort zone, flow, freeze, grow, disrupt... BE!

On a much more prosaic and practical level, the movie is supported by Coke and I think it shows the importance of content in capturing human attention and creating brand awareness and goodwill. It's among those signs that make me feel like indulging in the game of predictions:

1. SEO will die on its feet because it's less and less relevant as content is increasingly structured and characterized during its production and publication to be easy for search engines to find and as search engines becomes increasingly smarter providing meaning on top of mere search, a trend stated in Fred Destin's remarkable post on investment and innovation trends 
2. the pendulum will swing back and content will once again be considered important and worth paying for. No longer will we hear so much excessive language about the commoditization of content and the age of abundance, even though access to and distribution of content have indeed dramatically changed 
3. user experience whether in the form of ergonomics or experience of service or immersive events (like Cirque du Soleil) will be paramount to actually attract attention in a commercially useful way
4. advertising will disappear as a result of consumers developing resistance to mere "exposure" and "opportunity to see". Instead it will undergo a profound mutation to become a service to the desired audience...
5. ... which means that the campaign logic must go away and budgets devoted to "time bound" initiative will have to be used differently on "contiuous / uniniterrupted activities" involving communities, tribes, high quality content, permanent education, true compassion for the customer...
6. ... and that actually means that the relationship between media, advertisers, marketers, agencies and "operations enablers" (e.g. logistics companies) is going to be profoundly transformed once again in a veyr radical way that will recast completely e-commerce in the medium term
7. business organization will evolve towards networks of businesses and ecosystems for which we are absolutely not prepared in terms of leagl frameworks, contractual relationships, labor relations, work tools, practices, methods and day to day organization. Actually I think that's the angle through which much of "enterprise 2.0" is likely to emerge

That's it for predictions and vision today. It's not a round number like 5, 10 or 20, that headlines are so fond of, but, hey it's a prime number :)

reBlog from avc.com: A VC

A very interesting post on @fredwilson's blog giving an account of the recent Blackberry failure in the US. Aside from the inconvenience caused by such events, there is a lesson: Fred Wilson's article shows at a micro level how dependent we've become professionally on the (near) permanent real-time connectivity.

It also shows how interactions between theoretically distinct services increases the vulnerability of a communications system, exposes users to consequences that go beyond the failure of one system and do damage to the brand reputation of other services.

This is a good proxy for what would happen if we were to experience more or less massive disruption of the Internet itself or of a dominant provider with a strategy to embrace all aspects and layers of connectivity. Perhaps more than antitrust legislation we now need anti-single-point-of-failure legislation mandating standards of service level, trouble containment measures and adequate fallback resources for all services that are critical to the economy.

Somehow Blackberry took down mobile web access on T-Mobile, ATT, and other networks. I guess that means that Blackberry has some kind of overlay network on these carrier's data networks. I am sure that is well known to mobile phone geeks and has been true for a long while. I just never wrapped my head around it.avc.com, A VC, Dec 2009

You should read the whole article.

Bosses, leaders & builders or Gandhi's return

 In my various projects with customers of such varied industries as music distribution, microelectronics, online and interactive marketing, new media, satellite radio, timber trading and banking, I've had many opportunities to discuss issues facing those organisations that required some form of transition to a next level of maturity. Whether that was for migrating to a completely new software platform, for changing established practices in marketing teams, for reworking the business model or for (re)inventing the product roadmap, we always ended up discussing people and leadership.

These are two fields in which one can hardly do a good job without having a very clear position and mine has always been that people should be treated as responsible adults and that leadership is just not about gorilla chest thumping or "alpha" dominance as is perhaps too widely believed. To me Gandhi has been much more of a leader than a cowboy president I will not name since he's now in the closets of History. That's because "one ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching", which also means that consistency between what someone thinks, says and does becomes an ever more important element of leadership. As do concepts that have historically been considered as disjoint or even at odds with what a leader should be: mindfullness, compassion and hope. It's what Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee call Resonant Leadership. Today I came across The Builders' Manifesto (via AgileMinds), a great piece on the next level of leadership, which finds me in complete agreement. Quick quote of something I particularly liked, but you should really read the full article:

The boss depends upon authority; the leader on good will. The Builder depends on good.

The boss inspires fear; the leader inspires enthusiasm. The Builder is inspired — by changing the world.

The boss says "I"; the leader says "we". The Builder says "all" — people, communities, and society.

The boss assigns the task, the leader sets the pace. The Builder sees the outcome.

The boss says, "Get there on time;" the leader gets there ahead of time. The Builder makes sure "getting there" matters.

[...]

The boss knows how; the leader shows how. The Builder shows why.

The boss makes work a drudgery; the leader makes work a game. The Builder organizes love, not work.

The boss says, "Go;" the leader says, "Let's go." The Builder says: "come."

This is excellent stuff.

Chambers making the case for business (re)invention

You've got to love the way Chambers has been managing Cisco for the past couple of decades and also how he took the lessons of the IBM story doing a hell of a lot to permanently sharpen strategic thinking and execution. He states very clearly why a company cannot afford to miss a major market transition, which means that a company cannot possibly afford not to monitor, analyze, measure, discuss and decide on changes in its environment, something far too many companies actually do *not* do. Better watch this sequence of his interview.

reBlog from avc.com: A VC

I found this excellent quote today via Fred Wilson's blog and I thought I'd immediately try the concept. It's like thinking of new practices and behaviors at a meta-level, which is right and good if you want to see trends and anticipate business opportunities that omit "blips", focus on meaningful information (real signal) and transcend individual instances of larger waves of innovation:

 

The really cool thing - because our following models follow a lot of the same principles, we’ve been able to take advantage of a ton of native features:

• Retweeting = Reblogging
• Replying = Reblogging w/ commentary
• Favoriting = Liking
• “@david” = ”http://david.tumblr.com/”
• Conversations = Reblogs

avc.com, A VC, Dec 2009

 

You should read the whole article.

Is this the future of the magazine

When you've been watching the media space for the past few years you know the extraordinary challenges it is facing with its fundamentals, a business model that is broken, audiences that are fragmented, content that still costs a lot to produce even though its revenue generating ability has gone down the drain... Innovation is sought. Technology must be made an ally. Business will undergo massive transformation. This is definitely not about new media versus old media, but about a totally new media landscape opening opportunities to interact with audiences in novel manners and to activate multiple media formats no matter whether your initial expertise is in print, radio, television or the Internet. In that respect, Bonnier's recent roll out of a tablet that delivers the magazine to the audience is a most interesting innovation to watch. And I'm amazed with the buzz around it too.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Planet Google?

Just read a piece about where Google might be in ten years and considering the success of Gmail between 2004 and now, the author might just be right even though his forecasts may seem wild at times (e.g. Android prevailing in the mobile OS wars). That gives me an opportunity to comment and discuss a bit further Google's amazing ability to execute beautifully a bold strategy of massive innovation to deliver on an audacious vision to organize the world's information.

Types of Twitter users show diversity of purpose

In a recent post published on American Express' Open community, where you need to be registered as Amex customer to leave a comment (so much for"open"...), Guy Kawasaki identifies six types of Twitter users, which feel right if you've been on Twitter long enough and followed / unfollowed many people in an attempt to make the experience relevant to you.

Kawasaki's six types are:

1. Newbie
2. Brands
3. Smore
4. Mavens
5. Mensch

Go to his post for explanations.

To me the distinction between the Smore (the social media whore... you've got to love this new word) and the Brand is not that clear in Kawasaki's definition and I don't see two profiles that are in fact part of the Twitter ecosystem:

• Hoarders, users who use Twitter primarily to monitor, capture information to gain insight. They're are a bit like Maven's but they don't necessarily seek to be recognized as experts or to be retweeted
• Quants, non-users who have developed applications that are useful or fun to users (e.g. URL shorteners, usr grading, Tweet analytics or tags of keywords) and which can be used to gain a fine principally quantitative understanding of the Twitter landscape.

Does that make sense?

Tim Berners-Lee calls for the next leap: raw data

Through a recent post of one of my contacts, I got to view for a second time a presentation Tim Berners-Lee gave at TED for the 20 years of the web. What had not struck me the first time I saw the presentation is the claim Berners-Lee makes that everything we have today of the web resulted from the idea of hyperlink / hypertext. A big bang of sorts. 

It's almost a stereotype of the kind of claims brilliant conceptual types do, because they're so focused on discovery, innovation in its rawest form, beginnings and not necessarily finished forms... which is also one of the reasons why Tim Berners-Lee was not the many economic beneficiary of the discovery. Can you imagine the turn of events had he decided to patent the hyperlink idea and ask for a trillionth of a Euro for each hyperlink created? One of the reasons why I'm not a fan of extreme patenting and rigid copyright.

In this presentation Tim Berners-Lee calls from a new leap, which he thinks is as important as the hyperlink: open availability of raw data. Can you imagine what that means if he's right? I'm ready to bet he is and I'm ready to bet it's a matter that's far more important than data: it's a matter of civilization and a defining factor for civil liberties. 

His presentation  mentions several examples and he mentions the excellent work of Professor Hans Rosling that I covered in December 2006 in this post (here are the notes of Rossling's talk back then).

The science of motivation

Daniel Pink makes once again a great case for non-conventional thinking on the topic of the drivers of motivation. He debunks a number of assumptions that most of us take for granted just because we grew up in a world driven by the fallacy of rationality of economic agents, "carrot and stick" or "reward - punishment" paradigm. Pink shows how reward schemes actually force people to narrow their thinking down to obvious paths and therefore are mostly counter productive when it comes to really challenging situations, which is where rewards would be completely justified...

Perhaps an additional proof, if there was need for one, that money does not buy motivation, talent and ability to apply knowledge. There has to be something else. Something the builders of cathedrals in Europe knew centuries back when they were not only looking for capable craftsmen, but also looking for craftsmen that had a personal win in the success of the project to build a cathedral. And in a way Pink rediscovers and refines that by identifying three key aspects to motivation:

1. autonomy
2. mastery
3. purpose

Those who've been involved in neurolinguistic programming might say that these are key values and beliefs for reaching excellence of impeccability because they define aspects of the transpersonal level in Bateson's logical levels and they drive acquisition of skills (strategies), ways of doing (skills + behaviors) and ways of being (attitude, intention). There are some excellent examples here amongst which why Encarta lost to Wikipedia.

Furthermore Pink's points are highly compatible with the attributes of Resonant Leadership as discussed by Boyatzis & McKee.

Just watch a fascinating presentation:

Real-time search pointing towards Google acquiring Twitter?

Just saw Google's video on real-time search and there was a comment saying something like "As usual with Google: just a useless BS video , and not a tiny bit of information about how you are actually supposed to use this". 

I must disagree with that because the video provides a fairly immersive experience and a good feel for what they mean by real-time search. My comment would be that there is so much Twitter in the video that one gets to wonder when will Google acquire Twitter... 

Of Google Wave, bots and complex adaptive systems

The launch of Google Wave has generated various reviews and left many with a feeling of perplexity or outright rejection because what they saw seemed so little compared to what had been promised (a lesson for every marketer out there IMO). In fact people who've accessed the platform reported several important issues summarized here.

However GoogleWave is indeed completely revolutionary and could well transform the way we deal with information, interactions, collaboration and value creation... perhaps even transactions some day.

This wiki (kindly provided on Wave by my friend David Dossot) is proof of  the revolutionary aspect of Wave as it deals with bots, each of which has a special function within the Wave ecosystem allowing it to connect and interact with other formats, platforms, logical spaces, communities and online properties. What's still very much unclear in what I've read so far (not nearly enough)  is the security model and the degree to which bots can be configured with standard behaviors but if secure and with extensive ability to configure and string together (with some of these objects providing flexibility analogous to Yahoo Pipes), then Wave could well be the equivalent of the "one ring to rule them all" and probably also "an offer we can't refuse" as the Godfather would say. 

On the even more interesting side of things, once adopted Wave becomes a real Complex Adaptive System with a greater potential for structure emergence than the open web because of the existence of rules and constraints that are neither too many (as in collaborative systems like blueKiwi or SharePoint) nor too few (as in the open web). The concept of wave being so open and so flexible provides for an ideal combination of rules and flexibility, which is necessary for CAS dynamics to really operate.

Now this is a first impression and I have not tested this stuff a lot, but if it is what I understand it to be and if it becomes what I imagine it can become, then this thing is not simply big, it's huge.