by Rob Paterson
August 11, 2011 at 11:41 am · Filed under
Adoption
In my most recent post I showed how the community and the police are on a rapid learning curve to use social media to help them cope with the rioters – who also use the same tools.
It is ironic that we in the west now are considering shutting down parts of social media as a response to the UK riots – while we encourage its use by people in the Middle East.
Authorities grappling with violent unrest should avoid heavy-handed clampdowns on social media and instead try to enlist the help of the public against the rioters, said John Bassett, a former senior official at British signals intelligence agency GCHQ and now a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.
“The use of social media in the unrest looks like a game-changer. But any attempt to exert state control over social media looks likely to fail,” he told Reuters.
“A much better approach would be to encourage and support individuals and community groups in identifying alarming developments on social media and even speaking out on the internet against extremists and criminals, and ensuring that the police have the skills and technical support to get pre-emptive and operational intelligence from social media when necessary.” Link
Surely the lesson here is to help the community and the police get ever better at using these tools themselves. To shut them down makes the community and the police blind too! Social Media did not cause the riots – it only makes the rioter more powerful. It can also make the community more powerful too.
Update: Here is how the Police are using Twitter as a Perp Walk:
Lifting a page from the hacker’s handbook, the Greater Manchester Police are naming and shaming rioters on their Twitter feed.
“We promised we’d name all those convicted for their roles in the disorder — here we go …” the police announced, as they began listing the names, dates of birth and partial addresses of individuals tried in connection with the disorder, which flared across Britain.
“Eoin Flanagan (born 01/01/1983), of Carson Road, Burnage, jailed for eight months for stealing clothes,” read one post.
“Jason Ullett (born 15/10/72) of Woodward Court, Ancoats, sentenced to 10 weeks in prison for swearing at police officers,” read another.
And another: “Stefan Hoyle (born 27/01/1992) of St. Stephen Street, Salford, jailed for four months for theft after found with a stolen violin.”
Think of it as a new kind of perp walk, but very much in the tradition of hackers who are fond of outing their rivals online.
The police department’s efforts received both praise and criticism, along with a few questions. The department explained that it released dates of birth so as to avoid confusion with individuals with the same name.
by Rob Paterson
August 10, 2011 at 8:01 am · Filed under
Adoption
Joe mentioned this week that the use of Social Media still have not taken off in small business.
But we also learned this week that the use of social media and texting is at the core of how the riots in the UK are being organized. The best rioter’s tool – The Blackberry which is encrypted.
Since then, the BBMs regarding Duggan’s death and the ensuring riots have gone viral. The Guardian was shown one message by a recipient which read, “Everyone in Edmonton, Enfield, Wood Green, everyone in north London, link up at Enfield train station at 4pm.” It detailed what items to being–including hammers–for the demonstrations.
The advantage users have with BBM is that the news continues to circulate, but is covert enough that it is difficult to trace. BBMs are encrypted and hacking this network would be incredibly difficult, so protestors are able to stay a step ahead of authorities.
RIM UK has stated that it will help Scotland Yard in any way it can, so the BBM may only have so long to live as a tool for rioters. But most of them are of the young, mobile-minded, tech-savvy generation, and there are a variety of tools at their disposal.
The Police and the community are learning also in real time how to help each other – by also using social media. Citizens are using Twitter and Facebook to help the police have better intelligence and the police are learning this week how best to respond and to monitor.
Here is a Google map that is being run to track incidents
The Police are setting up a Flickr site to help citizens help the police identify rioters
The Guardian has a map that shows incidents all over the UK
The only chance that citizens and the police have to get ahead of this to to get ahead of it – they have to use the same tools better and faster.
I make no ethical comments – this is what it is and there is no going back
This is the reality of our world today – it is rushing to a network state. So if you don’t know how to use this well – you are at extreme risk. You just don’t know what is going on and the pace of your interaction with the world will be too slow. It does not matter how small you are – you will be too slow to know.
by Rob Paterson
July 31, 2011 at 6:31 am · Filed under
Adoption
Joe wrote this week about how Iceland is using the web to Open up its democracy and then asks the big question – what about corporate life? Will corporations follow?
Geoffrey West’s research suggests that they had better – because it shows that the ultra controlled approach that is the Command and Control Normal now – kills corporations early. They are dying sooner and sooner.
Are corporations more like animals or more like cities? They want to be like cities, with ever increasing productivity as they grow and potentially unbounded lifespans. Unfortunately, West et al.’s research on 22,000 companies shows that as they increase in size from 100 to 1,000,000 employees, their net income and assets (and 23 other metrics) per person increase only at a 4/5 ratio. Like animals and cities they do grow more efficient with size, but unlike cities, their innovation cannot keep pace as their systems gradually decay, requiring ever more costly repair until a fluctuation sinks them. Like animals, companies are sublinear and doomed to die.
The issue is that using a machine model – is that friction builds as well as cost as the corporation scales. The costs rise with revenue. So in the mature part of the cycle, you cannot innovate – you can only manage the numbers/ratios. For example, 10 years ago, Shell set up Shell Renewables. Shell was going to become a leader in non oil energy. Makes sense right? The top people know about Peak Oil better than most and wanted to find a place in the next energy sector. What ruined this experiment was its success. Being a very large organization, Shell did new projects at scale. With two of the largest new Wind Farms online – the CFO and the CEO saw the trap – saw why they had to retreat back into OIL ONLY. Shell had to make the numbers even if by doing so meant that Shell could not position itself to be a leader in New Energy.
Wind farms that do well have an ROI of about 8% they are a utility – like owning a bond. But the Oil business has embedded costs that are linked to the returns on OIL that are much higher than wind. So if Shell did a lot more of these mega wind projects, the ROI of Shell would be reduced and Shell would have an earnings problem. The more wind farms they installed, the more their earnings would drop but their costs could not. They were trapped!
This dooms Shell and all mature companies. We saw that is Big Steel when smaller local mini mills ate into the lower ROI parts of the business until there was nothing left? We see this now with media.
The costs of a press or a studio – are so great that all the majors can do is to defend their existing platform. The New York Times can only hide behind the paywall for a period of time. The studios can only hold off web distribution of video for so long. But their battle to keep the status quo is not stupid – they are stuck with the costs. It is the model of how we do business that is the problem. For in the mature phase, the CEO has to make the ratios and the costs are embedded. In the final phase all the CEO can do is to milk the system.
For all true innovation HAS to start with a modest revenue line. So if you have a large enterprise with high revenues you have also high costs. So a web based news alternative CANNOT earn the revenue that you need to run the Times. So you cannot go there. But of course a new competitor – Huffington? Can and will and in the end will take enough revenue off your top line to kill you.
So are corporations doomed? Well with a sample of 22,000 West makes a good case that the current model does doom you, if you are traditionally organized. So what then is the way out?
West makes the case that Cities live much much much longer. The core of why is the core idea for corporations to study and apply.
“It’s hard to kill a city,” West began, “but easy to kill a company.” The mean life of companies is 10 years. Cities routinely survive even nuclear bombs. And “cities are the crucible of civilization.” They are the major source of innovation and wealth creation. Currently they are growing exponentially. “Every week from now until 2050, one million new people are being added to our cities.”
Cities are much more open as systems and networks. They are much closer to being alive than corporations that rely too much on command and control.
As I write this I am thinking of how Wordpress works. At the core of Wordpress is a for profit organization – but also one of the tasks of Automattic is to ensure the health of an ecosystem that is the larger Wordpress ecology in which thousands of independent developers who do not work for Automattic make a living. I think of Wikipedia. At the core of Wikipedia is a set of rules about how Wikpedia has to work and how people in Wikipedia have to behave. Surrounding this core is a cadre of “White Blood Cells” AKA editors – that ensure that this DNA is kept healthy. I see no way now that Wikipedia will not be here in 50 years.
Why my confidence?
If you look at Wordpress and Wikipedia you will see the key. In a network that really is a network – like Wordpress and Wikipedia – the costs go up in a shallow linear curve while the outcomes rise exponentially. The margin grows so that any bump in revenue along the way – which is of course natural for nothing in Nature runs on any form of straight line – does not take down the organization. But in a traditional organization, the costs rise in direct concert with the revenue and outcomes. This means that once the business approaches maturity, the leadership have to force the numbers, meaning that in the mature phase, the only real focus are the numbers themselves. Not the underlying purpose of the business. The focus becomes defence and self referential. The organization is now doomed. Doomed to suffer a bump in the market or to a new competitor. Look at the case of RIM. Can RIM come back?
This site has been a place where many of us have tried to see the future for business. We could all agree that more Command and Control would not help. We could all agree that more Social Media used to open up the organization would help. But what we are seeing now is that for an enterprise to thrive over time – it must become alive! Only a true network can enable this to take place. The few true networks that we can see now, give us a working model of the new enterprise.
Stuart Baker and I are working on what this might be and in the fall we will be posting our ideas.
Our proposition is this. In the 1800’s most business was small, local and unique. The great shift in the 20th century was to consolidate into the enterprise as we know it. This was how to create wealth then. All who stayed back in the small, local and unique died. The efficient machine had to be the model you used. Now we enter a new phase. For the limits of the efficient machine have been reached. The new winners will be those that can adopt the model of the real network.
We all know about how to organize the machine. How to organize the network is all new and mainly unknown. That then is the challenge and the opportunity. Good luck to all of us.
by Rob Paterson
July 21, 2011 at 3:25 pm · Filed under
Adoption
Tesco
Now is this not “thinking”? Tesco bring the store to you – knowing that you have no time or energy left.
I am impressed – now we are seeing Social Media and Mobile in ever more pragmatic ways.
Text Books the bane of all students – now your son can rent them from Kindle
Both these stories show how we can use social media and online to help people deal with real issues.
They are very mainstream – so what is your opportunity? How can you make a real problem go away?
by Rob Paterson
July 14, 2011 at 10:07 am · Filed under
2.0 Business Model, Adoption
Don’t you feel something big in the air? The Wirearchy amplified events in the Arab world this spring and many regimes have fallen. Do you think the rest of the rulers feel safer now or more vulnerable?
In the last 2 weeks, the establishment in the UK has been rocked. Again the amplification and openness of the Wirearchy has prevented the old system from being able to contain the firestorm. It is also early days, but it is not just the Murdochs who have been shaken but the entire establishment. Do you think that this will blow over and all in the UK will go back to normal?
In the US our political system is log-jammed at a time when it has to cope with all sorts of real problems – do you think that we will avoid a crisis here at home?
Are you ready as a individual or a CEO to cope with what is unfolding?
This global meltdown and systemic failure of our system is I think the real context for social media and its tools and your adoption of them. The Wirearchy is the only way to survive. The Hierarchy is the sure way to die.
Many have thought that they could adjust slowly to the Wirearchy.
It was great to see how they are slowly being adopted in the enterprise. It is now common knowledge that we have to be more human in our work and how our work must do something that offers real value to all not just to a few owners.
Many know that we should go here. But maybe not just yet – so much risk in changing right?
Bu now all the risk is in not being there. The system has tipped and total turbulence is here.
Chaos is our new normal. Will the Euro continue and what will happen if there is a default? How will America get though its own financial and fiscal crisis? What will this mean to the election. What new weather event will affect us and the global system? Will the millions of underemployed, unemployed sit quiet?
And in this context a new kind of competitor that has been forced into being by the evolutionary pressures of this time.
An entirely new economy, based on the small tribal networks, will emerge very quickly out of the desperation of the people who have no alternative. They need no capital. They don’t need what you needed. They can get the best people. They can go from an idea on napkin to your doom in 5 years.
All organizations who rely on concentration will be too slow to keep up as the pace of change accelerates.
If you as a person cannot find your way through this and if you the CEO of a large organization cannot be agile enough, these waves will take you down.
So it is now “Change or Die”.
