Business Quests in the Information Age

Thalys experiments: WiFi inside, idiot design?

Writing while in the train getting back to Brussels after a couple of days in Paris for Ad:Tech. Yes while in the train. That is really cool. What's less cool is the amount of over-engineering Thalys seems to have put in designing this service: resources like Gmail, Google documents, Network solutions webmail and Google Apps are simply not usable because some stupid piece of junkware that runs on the Thalys WiFi network considers those to be forbidden resources. Even the sites of Le Monde and CNN are not accessible. So what gives? Is Thalys developing a new concept of a hyperlocal web? Are they trying to revolutionize the web by severly limiting connectivity? Is this a censorship experiment for the Chinese government?
None of these exciting avenues I'm afraid. It only seems that somebody felt it important to implement an extremely stringent security policy, which, in the end, voids of most of its value the great promise of WiFi aboard high-speed trains. I'm sure they'll fix this someday, but what does it say about cost of opportunity in terms of revenue to the company? What untellable stories of wasted service design resources does this case convey? Is there anyone to doubt that product / service design will be a strategic competency for companies in the coming years?

In the end, it all boils down to common sense and a structured albeit flexible approach to product ownership. Something that does seem to be a common thread to methods like scrum, agile development, permanent beta, Toyota's continuous improvement through the kaizen approach or NLP... They all accept a degree of chaos that characterizes the real world. Realism, common sense, perseverance, patience, continuous and relentless improvement, continuous quest for evolution, no nonsense and a thirst for  feedback are some of the characteristics of approaches that work.

Now on the positive side of things the idiot design does not prevent Thalys travelers from accessing Wikipedia, Barack Obama's web site or the Business Quests blog :-) as you will see in the screen-shots.

Discovering Efficient Frontier at Ad:Tech

Got to Ad:Tech this morning. The usual suspects are around, but it's always interesting to keep tabs on how the market is evolving. One interesting surprise though: efficient frontier, an interesting SEM company. It's a company whose founder combined his experience with stock market systems (hence the name derived from modern financial theory) with his knowledge of how search engines work to create a platform helping advertisers optimize their marketing investments online. To them an AdWord is like a stock and the words an advertiser buys are very much like stocks in a portfolio. Thus provided one captures sufficient relevant information from search engines and can put them through an algorithmic process, it is conceivably possible to define the risk / return combination of each word and each possible combination of words, which in turn means that it is possible to define an optimal combination of words to be bought. Extremely interesting in my very humble opinion.   

Upgrading my "software"

One of the things that I most love about being a freelance professional is the freedom to choose how I go about upgrading my skills, the software that I have installed between my ears if you will. In fact, following trainings that can help me better coach and help my customers is a priority. That's one criterion for choosing and that's what led me to participate to a two-day training session organized by Xebia with Jeff Sutherland (who I find very impressive with his great combination of expertise, experience and common sense - highly recommended!) on scrum a method that he's helped invent. Scrum does seem to be the kind of methodology that truly binds agile practices of software development teams to agile product management, i.e.exactly what one needs to help customers in fast paced and high-growth business contexts. For more about Scrum this is a good link. No nonsense approach to projects, smart implementation of lessons from complex adaptive systems and action orientation are the characteristics I most appreciate in the approach. I will definitely be looking for projects and environments where to apply this stuff...

Full speed ahead for Linked In

Linked In is evolving big time with the integration of social networking functionality of a new sort and with the extension of its services to cover company profiles, something I consider awesome. A few months back I wrote a piece stating why I did not believe in Facebook for business and how a combination between carefully chosen Facebook-like functionality and Linked In functionality would deliver major value. Now more than ever, Linked In is becoming a real custodian of professional identity, pretty much like Google will increasingly be the authority to ascertain the identity of individuals (in fact they already act as a trusted third party for customer details verification in e-commerce transactions).
Anyway, here's a nice little video of the product manager doing a demo of the new feature, which will help propel Linked In to a position its look-alike competitors will have hard time catching up with. And by the way, this is the sort of stuff I would love to see more product managers do for their products.

Wisdom of crowds or herd mentality?

"Wisdom of crowds" is one of those fads especially online and I think there's a myth to dispel. Opinions, concepts, software, decisions and content may emerge and get build as a result of adding-up the individual inputs of many people, but that does not mean that where one identifies group phenomena there's necessarily intelligence, let alone wisdom. Since I think words are important, let me get back to the basics of what the word "wisdom" actually means, referring to a definition quoted from dictionary.com:

1.	the quality or state of being wise; knowledge of what is true or right coupled with just judgment as to action; sagacity, discernment, or insight.

2.	scholarly knowledge or learning: the wisdom of the schools.

3.	wise sayings or teachings; precepts.

4.	a wise act or saying.

While there are cases in which the collective intelligence of many participants to a process of creation or evaluation may yield positive results, I believe there are conditions for that phenomenon of collective emergent intelligence to actually take place and I doubt it should be called "wisdom". And I doubt it's relevant to characterize any group behavior as "wisdom of crowds" as some people tend to do. Since there are a couple of business ideas out there that rely on the assumption that collective intelligence can be exploited by merely putting together a community of users, I think there are quite a few entrepreneurs who should think this through. Sometimes crowds are just dumb and there's nothing very wise about herd mentality as shown in this excellent story of Gaston Lagaffe (click to enlarge).

Carbon emissions: facts to make a difference

Nowadays a day seldom goes by without some piece of news regarding the sorry state and dismal prospects of the Earth's environment. These are the days of inconvenient truths. Opinions are numerous, conceptual ideas abound,  more or less scientific and rigorous conclusions widely distributed and each person responds in their own way. Some will feel anxious, others don't know or pretend not to know (so they can drive an over-sized car with an engine that makes a noise that is music to their ears), others still feel a century is too long a time to worry and a few do what they can to help.
The point however is that we all seem to be like drivers or airplane pilots deprived of instruments, flying or driving blindly in the worrying knowledge that the wall we will hit is getting dangerously close. That's the key issue: we lack data about the impact of our daily micro-decisions on the environment even though there are all sorts of calculators of environmental impact out there. What we do not have is a means to measure what is going on as it's happening, which is really a pity in a world so connected. That's precisely one of the challenges OpenSpime, the self proclaimed "infrastructure company for an open internet of things", seems to be addressing with a pretty cool infrastructure that combines sensors, software, the Internet and mashups to deliver actual maps of carbon dioxide emissions. A good friend of mine is their CTO and I am impressed with what these guys are presenting in this video:

Great User Generated Content in the US Primaries

Here's a piece I think is a shining example of user generated content and a strong indication that open online platforms give real power and influence to the people. Now sure whether that validates Gladwell's tipping point, but it does show that the people can wield some influence. Now the question is whether this influence will be stronger than that of insiders of a system, in this case the US political establishment. Something interesting to watch for marketeers and communication pros.

Direct from AlwaysOn OnMedia NYC 2008

Just got to the OnMedia conference and glad to be here for a new edition meeting friendly faces from previous events. Same posh location and already a couple of very striking facts for the marketing & communication industry or at least stuff I found quite interesting and worth commenting:

• found a flyer of IBM Global Services giving their analysis of the momentous changes this industry is undergoing. My take: if IBM GS is around looking for business the changes could be even greater than we think in the field of media & marketing;
• fact from a KPMG survey of 300 CEOs,executives, VCs and insiders of the industry: 64% of them feel between 26% and 50% of media time and spending is to shift to new media;
• fact from the same survey: 91% feel advertisers have not figured out how social media fits into marketing mix;
• search engine marketing voted most effective form of online advertising by 71% of those surveyed;
• large majority see mobile marketing effort increasing within the next couple of years.

Interesting trends don't you think? Of course as a friend of mine keeps saying surveys can be twisted to convey the desired message, so they have to be taken with a pinch of salt, but nevertheless the field is ripe for some momentous changes, all of which may not necessarily be in favor of Google. For example I doubt AdWords will be successful in its current form in the long run... but that's for another post :-)

Le Web 3 - questions

Attending a couple of interesting presentations yesterday I got some pretty good food for thought, which translates in a few questions:

1. in a panel (yes that one was interesting) a guy working for Facebook said they knew for sure the online behavior of their users was similar to their offline behavior. I wonder how they actually know: can they really characterize their audience in terms of behavior?
2. a lawyer who was on the same panel claimed that owners of major sites had to choose whether to protect their users or to abide by the laws and help authorities enforce the legislation citing Yahoo in China as an example. I wonder: has he ever heard anything about civic dissent?
3. somebody mentioned the issue of proprietary corporate content being exposed on social networks and the issue of loss of corporate control over intangible assets such as business networks and networks of customers when somebody working for a company changes jobs. I wonder: how will that affect the relationship between workers and their employers? What does it mean in terms of balance of power and in terms of nature of contracts? Will that actually drive more coherence in the workplace where knowledge workers would be held accountable for their results instead of being accountable for contributing time of presence? What does it mean in terms of how intangible assets should be managed? Is this finally the time of flat and distributed organizations attracting talent through other means than compensation?
4. Evan WIlliams of Twitter gave an account of the power of "less is more" in terms of designing a product and user experience. He said they tried to think about what could be eliminated in terms of product features to create something new. I wonder: how many creators of new stuff, how many entrepreneurs, how many technologists will actually try this?
5. Philippe Stark highlighted the importance of having compelling concepts and made a passionate statement about his ultimate belief that whatever we do is worth doing only if it actually contributes to enhancing the power of love and compassion. He also claims that a product ought to be making a point, a political point, to be the material expression of a statement about the world and what drives it. Strange as it may seem, focusing simply on the concepts of love and compassion one can seriously re-thing and re-imagine probably any business activity and in particular the business of marketing and communications. I wonder: how many people will dare trying this?
6. Hans Rosling highlighted the importance of storytelling in helping the world build a finer and more accurate view of the actual state of the world. He showed how important this is in view of the environmental challenge we face and in particular how ridiculous the claim of developed nations is about the fact that China and India are among the most damaging nations in environmental terms. I wonder: what impact will individual stories and person-to-person experience sharing in the future of business? How can that help business be a force in favor of the environment?
7. how sustainable is the current paradigm of social networks and blogging? What is the real economic value and productivity of effort spent in all the stuff currently being done? Is Facebook really worth billions of dollars?

Le Web 3 - impressions

This year's edition is reasonably well organized although sometimes I felt there is room for improvement in the content delivered by speakers and panelists.

A curse of many such events is that panelists spend more time speaking about themselves than discussing the matter of focus and when they do discuss it ends up being a sort of cacophony of parallel monologues without much actual value...  I wonder whether this is a matter of

• moderation of the panel
• definition of the motivations and objectives of panelists during the selection phase
• structuring of the process itself, which may actually benefit from using tools such as De Bono's hats
• ...