I bet that many organizations are also having the same internal conversations and being as frustrated as he is.

Looking at where the death threats are is a more productive area of discussion.

For public media Death lurks here – We have to have a much wider based and much larger public that thinks that we are not merely important but VITAL to them. If we don’t we wont make it.

“Wider based” means that we have to break out of our current demographic – of on TV being over 50, mainly white middle class and well educated – on radio of being over 40 and the same.

The challenge of doing this has been the restrictions of our “Air”. We have only 24 hours and one place on the dial.

So to change programming enough to bring in a very different demographic is to piss off the existing foundation with no real chance of adding the new. Example, the CBC have quite good show on the Native Canadian world – my bet is that most of the traditional audience switch off immediately and that First Nation’s people are not going to be tempted to become enthusiastic listeners of the CBC based on one program. This type of programming is lose lose. For NPR it was a new hip morning show called Bryant Park. What station in its right mind will drop Morning Edition for a new entrant aimed away from its main audience?

So long as Public Radio and TV have a secure foundation on their Air – they cannot expand their audience.

Also loyalty and more important financial and voting support merely based on liking content is no longer enough. When I came to Canada in 1972, I was used to the BBC and became a fanatic PBS watcher. There was no other source of good content then. Now there is tons of great content elsewhere. The old tie to content is much weaker.

So how then can Public Media avoid DEATH? How can it expand its reach to a much wider and diverse public? How can it deepen the connection beyond the relatively weak one of content?

An answer is appearing in the work of 70 plus stations working in the 32 worst hit markets in the US where the Economy is destroying the middle and lower classes. In this project – called Facing the Mortgage Crisis – stations are working with each other to pull together/convene groups of community support into a platform that can help people cope with this the greatest crisis to hit most Americans since the 30’s.

This is where the DEATH threat can be answered and this is where Social Media and the whole 2.0 perspective is invaluable.

Here stations are helping people who do not and will NEVER watch our mainstream Air. BUT they do interact with our specialty Web Sites that are focused on this issue and hence on them. More we do a lot face to face. Sometime at the station and many times in libraries and other places of trust such as churches. More, we give the community partners a face and a voice too.

It is the 2.0 web that is at the heart of this ability to offer something meaningful to people who will not connect to our traditional content on our traditional air. Ironically, as the crisis affects all, many of the white middle class are now in the same boat. They too use our 2.0 world as a new resource. In time a common crisis, as in war, brings all together. All people share a common fear and grief. All wonder what to do and how to keep going? All worry about their kids.

I predict that something great can emerge from our web – but it is not about getting more people to watch Nova or listen to All Things Considered.

So what then was my CIO’s Death fear?

I offered up this to chew on. They are in the mutual fund business. Their funds are sold by brokers who do not work for them.

Trust in Brokers, in the market and even in the idea of getting rich by punting in the markets has been weakened. Fund managers still tout their ability to realize performance that can only be achieved by taking huge risk.

What would happen to their business if we had a 1933? After the crash in 1929, the market recovered as it is today. But like today, the market came back independent of how people lived and how the economy at the human level existed. It was a second bubble. The market crashed again and the great depression hit full force. Employment did no rebound until 1941. Stock prices and activity in the market did not return until 1954.

What if we have another 1933 in 2010? Would such a collapse end all faith in the current financial system? What is the risk of that happening – 10% – 30 % – 50% – 60%  – whatever the risk is substantive and worth planning for.

My idea of his DEATH threat was that if they did not do something to show that they could be trusted, that if we had a 1933, they would disappear as did most people like them in 1933.

So how could they become legitimately trusted? How could they hold onto to a public that had lost trust in the system? My advice was this.

Most people are fiscally illiterate. Most know nothing about household economics in the Greek sense of the basics of the human financial life cycle. People know nothing about how to save and why, borrowing, cash flow, how mortgages work, compound interest. Most know nothing about the value of and how risk works. Why you can take risks early but not late in life etc. If they did most would not be in the trouble that they are in now. Most think that it is normal and to be expected that they can get Maddof returns year after year not seeing that such returns imply impossible risk.

The entire fund business is like the food business – we have been trained to seek something that is not sustainable – double digit returns for ever and cheap food forever. Can we train people to be more real? I think not but people can train each other.

Most people now are waking up to the fact that they don’t know enough about money and how it affects their life. They are hungry to learn more. To take control over their financial lives, just as many today are using the web to take control over their health.

What if this firm was to set up a foundation to act as the Trusted Place on the web where people could teach each other all these things?

Here is where all the rules of 2.0 would come into play. The web, interactivity, social groups, partners – the whole gamut of 2.0 is here. By learning how to do this here, the old firm will also then see with new eyes what else they can do back in the mainstream.

I asked in closing what would this mean in terms of the brand and the industry if they were to do this? What if they did a really authentic job of providing the trusted space where people could help each other take back their financial power?

He could see in a heart beat that this would change the relationship – just as I am seeing signs that FTMC is changing the relationship with Public radio and TV.  At first the two worlds of the “Academy” and their traditional business would be separate. But over time there would be some kind of convergence. For who of us knows as much as we should and who of us does not have something to offer?

In time the very nature of the business would change too as will in the end mainstream TV and Radio – but this way the change would be shaped by the active participation of millions of people formerly known and “audience” or “Clients” who right now don’t even have a name.

For what is the label for a person who is part of the ecology that is the new wider enterprise?

So what do you think? Can you radically change your foundation offering without killing the golden goose? Think GM or the Newspapers – all their cash flow came from the old – but DEATH was waiting for sure. How could they have found another part of life where they could have added real value and so attached a much bigger group of people to them?

I am sure that there is an answer. Do you have one?

… on what he calls “the most exciting day in his professional life“, as the Dachis Group announces that it will work with Headshift to grow its capabilities in bringing social business design and implementation to the business world.

Here and elsewhere I’ve often written about the growing evidence that social computing will become the core foundation of knowledge work … the major vendors are all focused on social-media centred enterprise collaboration and productivity platforms as a major line of business, and there is a growing realization that the participative dynamics of the pervasive hyperlinked web environment are here to stay.  Today’s work needs to be, and will be designed in and for social networks

The Dachis Group has re-visited the whole-systems thinking / cybernetics arena of 25 – 30 years ago and updated it to present a holistic value proposition for today’s interlinked and participative era, and are calling it “social business”.

I think I’d argue that business has always been a social undertaking, but that we passed through a period of management philosophy cum reductionism (through the prism of “management science”) whereby enormous gains were obtained over more than a half a century through a relentless focus on efficiency and redundancy.

Now we are in (back to, some would say) an era where information is passed around and shaped into knowledge through interaction with others, it just happens faster by many orders of magnitude.  And so, it ups the ante for understanding how to operate effectively in the fast-flowing communications networks that characterize the environment.

I suspect that soon all or most of the major consulting firms will be headlining their social media consulting practices (now that working with all these tools and web services has become too important to be left to amateurs

Amongst all the offerings we are sure to see, clearly the Dachis Group is bringing a systems perspective to their three-pillared vision (business partner optimization, workforce collaboration and customer participation).  In presenting the model, they state that the way(s) work and business are done are in the midst of massive transformational change.

Interconnected ecosystems of interest, efficiency and purpose are clearly central to today’s and tomorrow’s organizational effectiveness.  Focusing on the right levers has always been the essential value in and by strategic consulting, and these are bright and experienced people.  I am sure they will add an useful perspective to understanding how “social” and “business” will co-exist as we all learn how to operate in tomorrow’s postindustrial societies.

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We are growing: Dachis Group expands with Headshift

We believe that organizations across the globe will begin to view “social media” as social business and when this happens, integration, scale and adoption will become complex issues which will only be solved through a purposeful act of coordinated activities built upon a solid strategic foundation. Enter social business design as a systematic comprehensive approach that orchestrates social business across three core areas: business partner optimization, workforce collaboration and customer participation.

These three areas of business possess ripe opportunities for the emergence of improved outcomes ranging from cost savings to new product/service innovations and increased revenue streams.

These are outcomes which happen when organizations connect and expand their ecosystems, evolve toward a more open culture and empower employees, business partners and customers to actively participate in their business.

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I’ve been listening to this piece over and over again — each time additional depth is gained (including evaluating Martin’s style as to ‘how’ he tells the stories to his audience, and where he chooses to focus). It’s a topic he’d written about previously for Business Week, but his talk makes it a lot more meaningful and significant. He illustrates the significance of the tension by differentiating them:

Reliability

• Consistent, Repeatable, Predictable
• Certainteed Outcomes
• Validated on Past Data
• Measurable, Avoids Bias
• Limited Variables

Validity

• Diverse Variables (possibilities)
• Embraces Bias
• Validated by Future Events
• Outcomes Vary by Context
• Relies on Heuristics and Analogies

The challenge is that they’re inverse concepts. Moving toward one, requires minimizing the other. Does it mean that there’s not a middle? Not at all — indeed that’s the real goal. While Roger (probably for great ‘making a point’ purposes) puts business on one side and designers on another, I fundamentally believe that optimal design is actually in the middle (middle, not being a spacial thing, but somewhere other than one of the ends). Design is simply asking business to shift away from the thing that it’s intent on driving toward: science. But reality suggests that there is no ‘ideal’: there are too many extenuating circumstances (context). Therefore, the only way to optimize is to add a good dose of art. Design is what happens when you successfully find the optimal blend between science (the observable facts) from the art (celebrating the ‘unseen’).

Martin notes in his Business Week piece:

If a corporation wants to enjoy the benefits of design in its products, services, processes, or business models, it must go considerably beyond simply hiring designers or declaring itself design-oriented. The CEO must take responsibility for safeguarding validity. If the CEO doesn’t, the corporation’s natural inclination toward reliability will win out.

…certain corporate divisions — including powerful ones like finance — are more insulated from direct market pressures and can more easily slide into deep reliability.

Every CEO needs…to understand that he can’t let finance or any other division run roughshod over validity, or he’ll unknowingly drive design thinking completely out of his corporation. That’s why an additional task for the CEO is to act as the CVO — chief validity officer — in order to protect and nurture a design culture.

P&G’s CEO A.G. Lafley in a discussion with Roger Martin in 2008 is a living testament of this vigilence. He shares the tremendous effort it took to shift their business to a design culture. Between the many insightful examples of ‘how’ P&G shifted their business, by Claudia Kotchka, you can hear her repeatedly give credit to Lafley for being responsible for initiating and supporting the shift to design thinking at P&G.

Enterprise 2.0 is a shift to validity over reliability — not to replace one over the other, but to move toward a balance — bringing the yin to balance the yang, while celebrating the significance of both. Trying to implement a shift to validity while trying to hang onto the ways of reliability (without changing them radically) will lead to continued failure. As well, abandoning reliability will also fail.

Enterprise 2.0 is specifically set up to fail faster — make the future turn into the past sooner, but do so with smaller risk, smaller investments, smaller bits of focus. Or to use another 2.0 term — it’s the mashup between the two, making it fundamentally different than either one.

Circling back to the opening statement, I truly do belived that one means by which to bridge this gap is to bring the reliability artifacts of validity to the table — create the corresponding collection that was described as design research or customer insight, in the former piece.

While I’ve always purported changing everything we know about software development, I was thrilled to see an old name appear again recently suggesting the same. Reflecting on the influence Tom DeMarco had on me via his book Peopleware (first published in 1987), I recalled that he’s likely the first author to focus on issues beyond the technology itself (esp. culture and context). His opening chapter stated (bear in mind these words were first written over 20 years ago):

“Since the days when computers first came into common use, there must have been tens of thousands of accounts receivables programs written. There are probably a dozen or more accounts receivables projects underway as you read these words. And somewhere today one of them is failing.”

“Suppose that at the end of one of these debacles, you were called upon to perform an autopsy. (It would never happen, of course; there is an inviolable industry standard that prohibits examining our failures.)…One thing you would not find is that the technology had sunk the project.”

In a more recent piece “Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?“, DeMarco reflects back on an even earlier book of his from 1982:

“In my reflective mood, I’m wondering, was its advice correct at the time, is it still relevant, and do I still believe that metrics are a must for any successful software development effort? My answers are no, no, and no. The book for me is a curious combination of generally true things written on every page but combined into an overall message that’s wrong.”

“I still believe it makes excellent sense to engineer software. But that isn’t exactly what software engineering has come to mean. The term encompasses a specific set of disciplines including defined process, inspections and walkthroughs, requirements engineering, traceability matrices, metrics, precise quality control, rigorous planning and tracking, and coding and documentation standards. All these strive for consistency of practice and predictability.

Consistency and predictability are still desirable, but they haven’t ever been the most important things. For the past 40 years, for example, we’ve tortured ourselves over our inability to finish a software project on time and on budget. But as I hinted earlier, this never should have been the supreme goal. The more important goal is transformation, creating software that changes the world or that transforms a company or how it does business.”

Most tools labeled Enterprise 2.0 just scratch the surface of enabling people to change the way they work, but not necessarily change the work itself. Indeed as John Tropea (@johnt) suggests the greatest natural adoption of these tools is using them to work around existing business processes. Creating Enterprise 2.0-class software that can fundamentally change business models and operations is a whole different beast.

I don’t think I truly appreciated or was willing to embrace all of what Sameer Patel (@SameerPatel) purported in a couple of pieces, perhaps for concern that it would muddy the already murky waters. In his piece “Don’t Confuse Enterprise 2.0 With Social Computing Concepts“, it took me a while to recognize that he was suggesting in his first diagram that the list did not EQUAL Enterprise 2.0 (as is the tendency for most to suggest), but was indeed part of it.

Sameer also begins to suggest the tackling of major portions of enterprise operations — I believe I got hung up while looking at his original list because of their Web2.0 implications (many of them have both Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 perspectives and focuses). His recent coverage of a more specific example (supply chain), adds significant depth to his earlier points. I also believe there are broader implications for functional-area-focuses like supply chain. Without any intent for the term to be adopted, it simply makes a point, that these are in themselves industries of practice that transcend the enterprise. The term Industry 2.0 helped me then differentiate what the larger potential of a shift in productivity tools would look like if we could speedily replace the ERPs of today.

For me, it was the Tom DeMarco reminders that helped add clarity to it all. And in the end, I have to confess that ALL of this (exposure to the recent DeMarco piece, continued dialog with great practitioners like John Tropea and Sameer Patel) is only possible because of the enabling channel of exchange Twitter provides.

It seems to me that there is an issue greater than adoption at play here: hesitation to recognize the breadth and depth of adaptation that needs to occur across the entire enterprise and every aspect of the business model.

I do know one thing: we’re not going back.

I focused ‘between the lines’ and ‘outside the box’ — the larger experience of what makes Zappos, well, Zappos. I’ve watched a lot of videos about the place, follow Tony on Twitter, and even did a brief piece on them before, but as with other 2.0 experiences, immersion makes all the difference.

The ‘get to the chase’ version:

• The Zappos environment is a full-blown corporate anomaly: full of things that most corporations would dismiss as being “unproductive”, “chaotic”, “unmanageable” and “unprofitable”.

Between the Lines: Note on video…the flags on poles…critical artifacts of the culture.

• People LOVE to work here (earning a spot on Fortune’s coveted”100 Best Companies to Work For” 2008 list). Why not? They get to follow their passions (even if they want to invite Ellen to come to Zappos) and evolve their own path of doing ‘work’, all while having LOTS of fun.
• The results: 2008 sales = over $1BIL
• Bottom Line: This crazy stuff works and they’ll even tell you how to do the same.

The ‘insights’ version:

• The Zappos experience begins way before the on-site tour. Even vendors coming on sales calls are picked up in Zappos-branded vehicles (3 SUVs and a bus in the fleet) at the airport or their hotel.
• My driver, Zack, was the Shuttle Manager. He was eager to talk about just how much he loves the company and its culture (even as a New York transplant). He worked his way into his job because he just likes to drive, which he sees a lot of: 4-5 drivers make 150-200 runs a week!
• During major conventions shuttle runs get a bit hectic, but Zack was proud that they were able to ramp up and cover 300 runs during the February 2009 CES convention (having a work culture that allows them to tap into volunteers throughout the company, makes a huge difference).
• Walking through the doors is not like entering any other company: people in motion and endless visual stimulus. Everything has been thought of, including checking in your luggage, complete with a ticket, and getting you a drink.
• Tours at Zappos are like a parade — tour guides carry a flag/banner, which alerts employees to greet guests. My guide, Jerry, while retired from Nordstrom (a company also founded on great shoe sales and service) had infectous energy that belies his ’silver’ exterior. The tour itself cannot adequately be described in words — the videos are a must watch.

Between the Lines: Our tour was cut short as CEO Tony Hsieh was available, so we headed straight for the ‘jungle’ (the location of his office) to catch Tony for his interview where he reminded me again of their ‘other’ brand 6PM.com.

• Not to downplay my chat with Tony (he gets so much press already), I was anxious to talk briefly with Alfred Lin (@Zappos_Alfred) because he holds both the COO and CFO roles, which I asked him about. His answers were insightful and his presence clearly belies his kid-like avatar on Twitter.

• I was a bit surprised to find out just how far they take their Core Value “Do More With Less”. Clearly operating as a 2.0 company, internally they leverage only very basic technology (email, wiki, blog, newsletter, word-of-mouth), in very simplistic ways — allowing for natural collaboration and connections of a tight culture to carry the rest.
• To dip yourself into the Zappos culture on an ongoing basis, be sure to check out employee voices via their many blogs.
• Oh, and did I mention, they sell shoes, accessories and clothing?

The last half of the Tour is shared in two parts.

• On average, 4-8 tours come through every day — more during the annual shoe conventions. While Jerry and Donavon are the primary tour guides, any employee can take the tour guide course and serve as a fill-in. This wasn’t staged — this is the ‘norm’ in their culture.
• The entire environment is a testament to their culture, of constant motion, immersion and learning. There are 4 bookcases at the entrance with multiple copies of ‘current reads’ for employees to grab and enlighten themselves — including Tribal Leadership (Zappos sponsors a downloadable audiobook version).
• Learning is for EVERYONE, on both sides of the coin — giving and receiving. Classes are ‘live’ and taught by employees. If you’re moving ‘up’ to a role, you’ll be taught by people currently ‘in’ the role. Likewise, you’ll teach those coming in behind you.
• Inspired by some of the things gleaned from Tribal Leadership, a more structured “Pipeline” path was created for classes. Training Supervisor, Loren Becker, readily shared the outline of the Pipeline program (which she merely had to print from the Zappos Wiki and had in my hands within minutes). Simplistic, there are:
  • Core-Level Classes (in 6-month segments)
    For the first 18 months of employment, a total of 213 required hours — the majority of which is “Customer Loyalty Training”, plus books to be read.
  • Management-Level Classes
    Includes 37 required hours (with department-specific specialization added in) and 6 recommended books
  • Leadership-Level Classes
    Includes 32 required hours (including hours to ‘teach’ classes, as noted previously).
• “Introduction to Coaching” is taught by their own full-time coach for employees, Dr. Vik — who sold his Northern California Chiropractic practice to join the team (in the Part 2 video, just before we arrive at Dr. Vik’s office, someone asks Jerry to have Dr. Vik ‘come down’ when he has a moment — there are a lot of word-of-mouth activities going on all the time). Not only did I get my own Zappos Vision planner, I also got a copy of Dr. Vik’s DVD “Taking It to the Next Level” (explained briefly here).

Special thanks to Elizabeth Gregersen who handled all of my arrangements and who was patient with my questions after the fact (here’s Liz and Jerry just having fun — its encouraged to do so). My apologies that it took so long to get this posted (it’s been a steep learning curve to edit/load the videos). If there is any information in the videos that is out of date, please let me know.

For a ‘more professional’ version, check out the ABC Nightline segment.

The Dominos “YouTube Adventure” last week  – when a couple made a disgusting video of what they did in making a Dominos Sub – is I think a “Rubicon” moment.  Not just for Dominos, who had already put their toe into the river of Social Media but for every enterprise. (Excellent revue here  by Frederic Lardinois from Read Write Web on what happened + Stats + Dominos response + an analysis)

All your customers, voters, members, suppliers – the public are now linked. Newsworthy events that are good and bad will spread like wildfire. Look at the “Good” event of Susan Boyle – as of this date 20 million views in less than a week!

The Rubicon is that – whether you like it or not – the public are now linked so well, that anything said about you will now spread everywhere and very quickly. This linkage, and hence the speed and immediacy of the spread, can only get wider and faster. Maybe, in a few months, events that affect you will spread instantly to everyone. What will spread the fastest of course will be the bad things.

So the new reality is that it is what others say that will matter not what you say. So your reputation – your brand – the trust you have – is now not longer easily or directly controlled by you.

You have to be swimming in this river to have any chance of protecting your name.

As with Dominos – using the new social media tools is not enough. You will have to understand and become a master of how to live and do well in thus new world.

Compared to many today, Dominos were somewhat ready. But even then – I think because they had only installed the tools but not the culture – they were awkward. They were late in catching their problem. Late in a their response. Stilted in their response – they did not understand that a scripted response is not going to help much.

They were still operating the new tools with the old culture.

They gave their CEO a script. He read from the prompter and did not make emotional contact with the audience. But Dominos still did well compared maybe to you! For do you even have the tools?

But of course it is not just about the tools. The issue is that you can no longer control. So their new plan is of course the old plan – “let’s control the store”. Their key response is to ban video cameras from their stores! This means a ban on cell phones really and how practical can that be?

The only effective response will be to get into the river with everyone else and get really good at how to behave in this new river. It will be to become so engaged that the conversation can be affected or shaped. You have to be a trusted part of the conversation to do this. You cannot just barge in.

Dominos and you will have to unlearn and put away all of what made old PR work. For all of PR up to now has used “Message” – a tightly controlled and scripted response where the text is key. Now you have to use “Presence” – an emotional message where the authenticity of the humanity of the “speaker” carries the point. Volts versus Amps.

This River will soon operate at the speed of light. To protect your name, you have to be a major presence in the river now. You have to merge with the river so that your nervous system is acutely attuned to the slightest hint of trouble. The leverage is Trust. Only a trusted player in the river will have any chance of settling down the ripples.

To have the Trust, you need to be known. To be known, you have to be a person and not an institution.The people that represent you in this river have to be free people who can be trusted. They have to have won the trust of the river. If trouble occurs, they have to respond immediately without a script. They have to be empathic and not controlled.

This role is foreign to institutions who are all about control. The answer are not the tools but the culture.

The error is to see your participation in Social Media as having the right Tools. “We use Twitter!” is a meaningless statement. Hey you can give me all the tools I would need to fix a car and I still will not be able to fix a car. Worse you can give me an airplane to fly and I will crash every time. The people who work for you in this field have to be the real deal. You would not hire a CFO who did not know her stuff?

Why simply tell your existing PR folks who know nothing about this – in fact who hate it – to take over? All of how PR, Research and Marketing has been done until now will have to be unlearned. Traditional PR, Research and Marketing folks will feel very uncomfortable and will do what all prior paradigm leaders do when confronted with the real future. They will undermine and fight it. They have to. For this is their nemesis.

The context for this decision is that the old world is dying. Here is how Coke is responding:

ATLANTA: Coca-Cola has created a new office of digital communications and social media within its public affairs and communications department. Clyde Tuggle, SVP of corporate affairs and productivity at Coke, noted “mass media is declining in importance,” when introducing the new department in a memo to staff, which the beverage manufacturer shared with PRWeek.

“Our future success depends on our continued ability to connect people to our brands and our Company all around the world, one person at a time,” Tuggle wrote. “Our new office of digital communications and social media will help us become even more comfortable and effective in these new spaces.”

The new unit will work in collaboration with global interactive marketing, IT, and consumer affairs, as well as legal and strategic security.

Adam Brown, digital communications director, and Anne Carelli, digital communications manager, will have oversight of corporate digital and social media communications efforts. Both Brown and Carelli will continue ongoing training programs, such as “Training Byte” online videos, in addition to “more robust” programs through its new PAC Institute.

The ideas in the new world that will have to be learned anew include these:

• Listen before you Speak – The New Tools allow you to hear the slightest tremor. Last week I Tweeted that I had done my taxes and that I had used QuickTax. Within minutes QuickTax had responded with a thank you. A week earlier I Tweeted that I had had a problem with accessing Ning. Within minutes a customer service person from Ning contacted me and worked over the weekend to solve my problem. If you cannot do this – you are not in the game. In future, most of your research will operate in real time without you having to ask any questions. Your new job will be to listen minute by minute and to have tools and people that can make sense of the stream. Not only to make sense of what you hear but also to shape the stream. QuickTax is responding to every mention good or bad. An early and a personal response, can settle a problem that could become a crisis. Such a strategy dramatically reduces your costs in research and brand management. Such a strategy dramatically increases your effectiveness and reduces your risks. More for less.

• Participate not Pontificate – To be heard, you have to participate. To speak, you have to lose your corporate voice. You have to lose the official tone of voice. You have to regain a human voice. This can only be done if you allow your social media staff to be themselves. They cannot be the highly controlled drones that are the standard in the corporate or bureaucratic world – many people in your organization will not be able to lose this voice. They even use it at home. Simply training old staff will not be enough. For how can you have trained people in the Shetl to be Americans?  You have to live in the New World to become a citizen. To have the new voice is to be a native of the new culture that is the very opposite of the norms of the old country. As with immigrants, it will be the kids who will get it first and they will train the others. But the Bubbies will never get it. This aspect of having the new strategy work or not is the most challenging part of all of this. In the end it means, that the old culture has to die too. Maybe in the interim, you set your unit up apart from the rest and have it report to the CEO for protection. Clayton Christenson has a lot to say about this problem. For to respond to this new reality demands that you disrupt your culture. The most difficult of all acts for a leader.

• Importance – Life or Death: This is not an add on or a side show as Newspapers found – This is all about whether you are going to live or die – As the Coke folks say but more gently than I – Mass Media is dying. So then is the entire Mass Media approach to PR and Broadcast – the God-like Voice and Moses with the Text of God from on high does not work. So how important is your reputation? How important is your business or enterprise? Adopting this new way is one of the most important decisions you will make. So also having the RIGHT PEOPLE to do this for you is the second decision you will make after deciding to cross the River. Ideally you have to have them report to the CEO. Ideally the CEO needs to become immersed as well. If I can do this, aged 59 and having spent most of my working life in institutions. Then so can you. The only issue is will. Do you have the will as a CEO to move into the future?

Caesar made the call by crossing the Rubicon to end the Republic and to begin the Empire. He had the will to stake it all. There was then no going back.

Actually it is society that has crossed the Rubicon. The new interactive and participative world is now here.

Will you cross too? This is a life or death decision for you. It’s also a winning choice. Many will not be able to make this choice. Their own culture will be too powerful. If you can, you have the advantage. The earlier you move, the better you will get at this.

In November of 2008, Stowe Boyd and I were invited to speak at the soft launch of blueKiwi 2009, an innovative collaboration platform which is one of the leading European providers of Enterprise 2.0 social computing business software.  Stowe began the evening’s presentation with an overview of the high-level impacts of the web on human activities, I brought that down somewhat closer to the ground by providing a perspective on the impacts of interconnection and networks on organizational and management dynamics, and Carlos Diaz, the President and CEO of blueKiwi, gave the audience an excellent overview of blueKiwi’s value proposition and the design and new features offered by the 2009 version.

blueKiwi has now revamped its web site to signal the launch of the bK 2009 version and value proposition, and is “coming out” with bK 2009 at this week’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

Last week I caught up with Carlos and co-founder Christophe Routhieau, CTO and software architect, in order to go into deeper detail as to why blueKiwi promises both innovation and pragmatic value as a social business collaboration platform.

We started off by covering a bit of history about blueKiwi’s roots and how the platform came into being just as the Web began to have major impact on the knowledge-based workplace.  Carlos and Christophe were already successful web entrepreneurs in France.  Carlos and his brother Manuel co-founded the web agency groupeReflect and Christophe joined the agency in 2000, and the team managed it successfully through several business cycles, eventually selling it to Emakina, an interactive marketing agency.   Carlos and Christophe said it was useful and important to the early success of blueKiwi that they are coming to the issues of collaboration and social computing from the web rather than from a starting point in the pre-web information technology world (the traditional software world).

The initial version of blueKiwi was conceived and built prior to the advent of the domain known as Enterprise 2.0 in response to client organizations that wanted to use Web 2.0 capabilities inside their organizations to communicate more spontaneously and efficiently. So they and their early clients understood that people were growing into using the Web, and wanted to use that knowledge and understanding to inform the core design principles, functionality and usability of the first version of blueKiwi, which was built and implemented at one of their key clients, Dassault Systems.

Given that all the serious Enterprise 2.0 platforms claim to focus on the sociality now seen as central to effective responsiveness and organizational agility and effectiveness, I asked them what differentiates bK2009 from some of the other leading Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platforms.  For me, this is where things start to get really interesting and what I find exciting about what blueKiwi has to offer.  Starting from the vantage point of the Web 2.0-savvy user, they have designed and built blueKiwi to be user-centric whilst responding to the business issues that require the building, distributing and  and deploying of business-focused knowledge … the essence of social business computing, in my opinion.

bK2009 is centered on the building, nourishing and sustaining of business-focused relationships – building useful knowledge and getting things done.  Carlos and Christophe pointed out that they had learned something important during the 2nd wave of blueKiwi’s adoption by clients … most collaboration systems start from the point of view of technical capabilities and do not make it easy, or overlook, the building and growing of relationships.  In the past, users of collaborative platforms had to go about building their business relationships, both internally and externally, outside of the collaboration system / platform.  bK2009 is first and foremost a means of building valuable and value-added relationships in the course of doing one’s work … it can enable, contain and manage all the activity in a business ecosystem.

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Digging a bit deeper, I asked them what they thought was unique about blueKiwi.  Carlos and Christophe believe that not only is their product design different from competitors, but they are very enthused about breaking new ground with the “economic model” offered by blueKiwi.  The feel that with bK 2009 they are breaking new ground in two ways.

First … all collaboration platforms offer spaces where people can connect, gather, share and exchange information.  Thus far, the mainstream approach has been to offer spaces where people can connect and gather, and then share content … information about issues, problems, and areas of interest, and as people exchange and collaborate, useful knowledge is built.  bK2009 turns this upside down, or around (you choose).  It is designed on the principle that the collaborative space is there for content and its distribution, and the individual user then chooses which groups she or he wishes to engage with.  Thus, any individual user can be a member of the groups they have chosen to interact with.  And of course it has a Twitter clone as one of its features.

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What eventuates is a network of interaction around pertinent content, and thus over time an ecosystem around issues in which engagement is de facto defined by the users’ interest and willingness to engage.  This then leads to the ability to watch and quantify the volume of interactions and obtain a better, and visible , understanding of the value that is being created (responsiveness, innovation, deepening understanding and so on).

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There are three key effects stemming from this approach:

1. there is an inherent, and ongoing, flexibility in creating and participating in (”on the fly”, said Carlos) any given group (reminiscent of Clay Shirky’s “ridiculously easy group-forming ) – the individual is always in a sense at the centre of an information ecosystem in which she or he is by definition an integral part,

2. thus, an organization’s productive social networks are developed out of the interactions between individuals (I call this the “natural sociology of knowledge work”), which in effect reproduces the dynamics of blogging or using LinkedIn or Facebook, and

3. bK 2009’s profiles reveal an individual’s contributions in a dynamic and interactive way … an user creates his or her profile, but others can add to it (a la reputation systems) and finally, the bK 2009 platform offers up various analytics on the types and foci of any user’s inter-activities.

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Second … as blueKiwi has evolved through its second wave of client installations, what it learned was the practical logic of Metcalfe’s Law of Networks, whereby the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected members of the network (debate continues, as you will note in the links and citations at the bottom of the Wikipedia entry).  To date, the standard model of pricing for social computing / social business platforms involves fees based on the number of seats or users.  The more users, the larger the fee, and the fewer the users, the less the fee.  So, many organizations begin with pilots, or make decisions about enhancing collaborative capability that involve decisions about the difficulty and costs of customization of their installation of Sharepoint or IBM Lotus Connections.

Back to Metcalfe’s Law …  blueKiwi believes that organizations should realize that collaboration in connected networks is the way work will be done all the time in the near future, and so organizations should seek to enroll and engage the entire organization in the use of the collaborative platform.  Thus, the fees to use bK2009 are based on the levels of user activity each month.  As activity increases the value to the organization increases, and accordingly blueKiwi’s revenues from that client increase.  Conversely, if there is no activity, there is no revenue to blueKiwi.

This is essentially like pricing a utility, like paying for electricity or water … so, if eventually all or almost all knowledge work is going to happen on a collaborative platform, it makes sense that the platform and its capabilities be seen as one of the organization’s necessary utilities. As activity increases and the value to the organization increases, so should the price paid for the capabilities that help create the value.  Technology is thus not a cost per se, rather the activity the technology enables reflects the price and value of the utility, and the users determine the ROI.

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Regarding its positioning in the Enterprise 2.0 market space, Carlos stated that bK 2009 is coming from the position of having “nothing to defend”.  What does he mean ?  He means that, for example, Sharepoint or IBM Lotus have fundamental technology assumptions and massive installations to defend, whereas blueKiwi is a new player, one that is coming from origins in / on the web as opposed to previous, pre-web IT design principles and  architecture.  They (blueKiwi) watched consumer behaviour on the web, Dassault Systems asked them to help build a system for more spontaneous, efficient and effective exchanges of information and knowledge, and the result after several years of intense design, development and deployment is a collaborative platform that in my opinion more closely mirrors the natural sociology of knowledge work than any other platform about which I know.  The fundamental design principle stems not from the “technology” that supported existing work processes, whereby the design and architecture of the technology drives the way(s) users operate it (or try to do so), but from how people exchange and use information and knowledge.

bK 2009 is a “social technology” .. a couple of other capabilities reinforce this position.  bK 2009 enables users to plug in and use a range of widgets so that they can take advantage of a wide range of pertinent socially-generated information and knowledge (this is closely aligned with some of my previous mutterings about mass customization / mass personalization of knowledge work).  As both Carlos and Christophe stated, the ultimate goal is have organizations recognize that bK 2009 is effectively a layer over the organization’s existing IT architecture, and that it can and should operate as a strategic complementarity to existing databases, enterprise search engines, security functions and so on.  It’s a social technology, and blueKiwi wants existing and future client organizations to see its design and capabilities as offering a “Social Hub” that complements an organization’s existing industrial-strength information technology architecture and investments.

Over and above the offering for large enterprises considering Enterprise 2.0 possibilities, blueKiwi is also now offering bK2009 Pro Edition for small and medium-sized organizations, for a flat (and affordable) fee.   An interesting wrinkle … it allows such organizations to invite external members of its value web to join and interact.  So, effectively it is providing these organizations with what they would today seek to accomplish by setting up a Facebook group (effectively side-stepping any potential hassles with Facebook privacy or Facebook owning all the member data).  Neat !

I was impressed by this company and its people when I spent time with them, and I remain impressed.  Can you tell ?

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UPDATE: If you want to know more about bK2009 or can’t see the detail on the screen shots well enough to understand as well as you’d like to, here are three short, well-produced video clips that help explain how bK2009 helps Foster Conversations, Build Efficient Networks and Bring People Together.

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To put it all in context he compares two perspectives — Old School vs. Productivity 2.0 — across the following dimensions:

Crank It Out vs Deep Focus
Lots of Planning vs Just Start
Tons of Paperwork vs Automate
Multi-Tasking is Productive vs Multi-Project and Single-Task
Produce More vs Produce Less
Be Organized vs Tag, Archive and Search
Hierarchy vs Independence, Freedom and Collaboration
Work Longer Hours vs Work Fewer Hours

This all reinforces fundamental 2.0 thinking.
Way to go, Leo.

As you read the story of the Flop and how the establishment reacted, think about organizations today and how they push back at a 2.0 culture. My hope is that, as with the Flop, as the kids come up who only know the “Flop” or 2.0, then the establishment will have to cave.

You would have thought that all would have followed him. But they didn’t. All the elite athletes and the elite coaches were too invested in the straddle. They could not undo the years of repetition and muscle memory if they were an athlete. If they were an elite coach, what did they know of the new?

So of course all the establishment had to attack the Flop:

Here is how Dick Fosbury saw the challenge.

Dr Horrible may be showing us one way.

This amazing film was launched this week for free in the 3 installments on the web. Come next week it will no longer be available – at least for free.

In the few days it has been available, it has caused a firestorm. First of all – it is very well done indeed. So there is the essential quality.

The makers are using all the rules of the 2.0 world.

• The have not negotiated with the 1.0 world for distribution
• They are using Hulu to show the web version
• They will be using iTunes to distribute the paid version
• And marketing? Of course they are using me and you – the early adopters who have some influence – I had to see this because of Laura at BPP – you might see it because of me – a friend of your might see it because of you and so on.
• They have used another form of scarcity – a very limited time of “free”
• They have used another form of scarcity – 3 installments built expectations and hope for the resolution.

And how does it end – Does Dr Horrible get the Girl? Does he deal with his Nemisis, Captain Hammer? Is he accepted into the A List of Evil Doers? Does it end happily? – Well you will have to watch it to find out.

Is it well made? Yes – very tight, great cast, great plotting and ideas, the music is exceptional – it kept me rapt all along and the end….. brilliant.

Will Dr Horrible do well? What do you think? Is this a model – yes