Archive for Control
by Rob Paterson
August 25, 2010 at 12:22 pm · Filed under
2.0 Business Model, Adoption, Barriers, Business Model, Collaboration, Community, Connected Enterprise, Control, Culture, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Enterprise Software, Freedom, Information Management, Interviews, Media, Organizational Design, Relationships, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Socialprise, User Revolution, Workplace
Email usage has dropped 28% in the last 12 months! (Matt Forcey)
A recent study by Nielsen that focused on how Americans spend their time online, unexpectedly found that email usage has dropped by 28% over the last year. Since we’re certainly not communicating any less, what are people doing as an alternative? Not surprisingly, the data show that social networking use increased by 43% over the same time period. A separate analysis determined that Mobile Internet use has also increased dramatically.
When I used to have a real job, one of the things I hated about being on vacation was the dread of what woud face me in my email inbox. As it became easier to access email remotely, I began to check in every day just to keep the load and the surprises down. Today when accessing email remotely is commonplace nearly all my pals in the conventional workplace tell me that they do the same. (The full report is here)
The young, under 30, hardly use it at all – they don’t even use the phone.
But what about the rest of us who still work for and with organizations that make email the centre of the communications system? Can you push back and get more productive? Here are two well known people who have confronted this question and have won the battle.
My old pal Luis Suarez at IBM is best known for his war against email and the misuse of it that crushes productivity.
I have been consistently getting less and less email by the week, and, even more exciting, way below the 20 emails per week mark!, which surely is making a good progress from when I started 2.5 years ago. Remember, at the beginning, before starting this experiment, I used to receive 30 to 40 emails per day! And now, 2.5 years later, it’s just 17 emails per week! Yes, indeed, you are reading it right! I’m now averaging 17 emails received per week, while the majority of my online interactions are now happening through social software tools.
So, to me, it is not just a drop of 28% in the past 12 months, but way over 90% of the email I used to get! And, not sure what you would think, but that’s *huge!* Yes! Being able to state how email is no longer the only game in town for me, quite the opposite!, actually, is a good thing. It proves it can be done! It proves I am not the only one who can make it happen. And this is when it gets really exciting! When you see other folks increasingly paying more and more attention as to how they interact with their email Inboxes and how they effectively start looking for ways of reducing such email clutter.
Very exciting, indeed! Even more when you notice it’s folks around you who are starting to ask you how you can help them eliminate most of their incoming emails and instead progress towards a much more receptive adoption of social software tools for business. That’s why I’m pretty jazzed up about seeing a whole bunch of fellow co-workers who are continuing to make efforts to reduce their email workload. To the point where entire teams are figuring out strategies to make it work for them and over the last couple of weeks I have been working with a couple of them where there is plenty of promise ahead! Yay!
But it gets better! Because over the last few weeks as well I’m starting to notice how even customers want to figure out ways on how they themselves can get rid of, or reduce substantially, their incoming email. And they seem to keep finding me out there as they search how it can be done (Double yay for #lawwe), which is really good news, because I have been invited a couple of times already to go and present to them how they themselves could live “A World Without Email“.
Why and how did Luis do this? Here is a link to an excellent interview with Luis conducted by the Doyenne of the Social Media world in Canada, Nora Young at Spark (CBC Radio). The interview was almost exactly a year ago and as with this post was timed to appear as we all struggled back to work and a full email inbox.
Luis’ main issue with email is that it makes it too easy for someone else not to care or know if you are busy and to impose work upon you or to engage you in their politics at no real cost to themselves. For instance – if I was to send you a large document as an attachment – there are many steps that you must take to read it – and then it all gets even worse if you wish my comments etc. Far easier to share a document. For instance, how many times have you got a “Cover my ass” CC or BCC? When what was really needed was a real debate? How many tomes have you been really busy and have a colleague impose a deadline on their stuff on you? This is the kind of behavior that Luis objects to.
Or what about all those newsletters that you don’t have time to read? Or those missives from on high from senior management that tell you how great they are or how we all have to ull up our socks?
Luis is not the only person pushing back. Jason Fried CEO of 37 Signals has an impassioned plea about how the workplace itself crushes productivity.
Yeah, my feeling is that the modern workplace is structured completely wrong. It’s really optimized for interruptions. And interruptions are the enemy of work. They are the enemy of productivity, they are the enemy of creativity, they are the enemy of everything. But that’s what the modern workplace is all about, it’s interruptions. Everyone’s calling meetings all the time, everyone’s screaming people’s names across the thing, there’s phones ringing all the time. People are walking around. It’s all about interruptions. And people go to work today, and then they end up doing most of their real work after work, or on the weekends. So, people are working longer hours, people are tired – I’m working 50-60 hours this week. It’s not that there’s 50 or 60 hours worth of work to do, it’s because you don’t work at work anymore. You go to work to get interrupted.
What happens is, is that you show up at work and you sit down and you don’t just immediately begin working, like you have to roll into work. You have to sort of get into a zone, just like you don’t just go to sleep, like you lay down and you go to sleep. You go to work too. But then you know, 45 minutes in, there’s a meeting. And so, now you don’t have a work day anymore, you have like this work moment that was only 45 minutes. And it’s not really 45 minutes, it’s more like 20 minutes, because it takes some time to get into it and then you’ve got to get out of it and you’ve got to go to a meeting.
Then when the meeting’s over, you’re probably pissed off anyway because it was a waste of time and then the meeting’s over and you don’t just go right back to work again, you got to kind of slowly get back into work. And then there’s a conference call, and then someone calls your name, “Hey, come a check this out. Come over here.” And like before you know it, it’s 4:00 and you’ve got nothing done today. And this is what’s happening all over corporate America right now. Everybody I know, I don’t care what business they’re in. Like when I talk to them about this, it’s like “Yeah, that’s my life.” Like, that is my life, and it’s wrong.
And so I think that has to change. If people want to get things done, they’ve got to get rid of interruptions.
Email is just part of this uncritical work culture that forces many to do their work after hours at home!
So what do Luis and Jason offer up as an alternative?
Luis still thinks that email has a place – in calendar management and in private one on one matters such as salary etc. But he has found that he can push back and negotiate a better way for nearly every category of work. Want me to work on your document – then share it with me! Have an issue to solve – open a conversation in public! Want to avoid being put upon by others – work in public so that people can see when you are busy – so if you use shared documents – people can see you are editing or drafting.
The whole point is to learn how to protect your time.
Jason has the same advice.
So, this isn’t really a plug, but we use our product called Campfire, which is a real time chat tool. That is our office. Campfire is our office, and that’s a web based chat tool where there’s a persistent chat room open all the time. Anyone who has a question for anyone else in the company posts it there and in real time, everyone else can see it if they’re looking at it. But if they’re busy, they just don’t pay attention. And then if non one responds, then that means someone is busy. Not like, I’m going to keep calling their name until they turn around. That’s what it’s like in most offices. Or you ring someone and they’re not there and so you call their name, and they’re not there, so you go to their office and you bang on their door. If someone doesn’t respond in Campfire, it means they’re busy. And unless it’s a true emergency, where you really need an answer right now, then you just let them be and they’ll get back to you in three hours. And the truth of the matter is, there are almost no true emergencies in business. Everything can wait a few hours. Everything can wait a day. It’s not a big deal if you get back to me later in the day for me to know right now.
And the other thing about interruptions and calling people’s names, and ringing them on the phone and stuff, it’s actually really an arrogant sort of move because you’re saying that whatever I have to ask you is more important than what you’re doing. Because I’m going to stop you from doing what you are doing for me to ask you this questions that probably doesn’t matter anyway. So, we’re very cognizant of this, and we make sure that we only ping people, that’s what we call it, digitally and in ways that will not really get in their way if they’re really busy.
He uses his own tool but of course there are many tools that we can use – the tool is not the key it is the idea of working in public that is.
How do you get others to play? Well if you are Jason – it’s easy you are the CEO! But Luis is not the CEO. He publicly told the world that this was his intent. He pushes back and negotiated with his own team and colleagues – and the value of this spread out.
Here is a mind map from Luis that shows you his process and his results
by Rob Paterson
March 9, 2010 at 7:25 am · Filed under
Connected Enterprise, Control, Culture
5 reasons why your company should be distributed
I’ve noticed a new trend in Silicon Valley. More and more startups are beginning life as distributed companies, and investors and partners are starting to accept it as normal. Our company Automattic is distributed, and I’m ready to sing the praises of running a business in this way. BTW, I thinkdistributed (“evenly spread throughout an area”) is a better description than the more commonly used virtual (“nearly real or simulated to be real”) for a company that has people working from all over the place instead of a centralized office. In Automattic’s case, we currently have over 50 employees spread across 12 US states and 10 countries.
Here are my top 5 reasons why you should consider the distributed model for your company:
via toni.org
I think that this is indeed the future – the full text follows here
As with all good network designs – most of the direct and indirect costs of the organization go away.
The capital costs are shed and are taken up by the nodes. People work from their place. With their gear. Huge expenses off the table. Huge potential to have the best gear for the staff.
Most of those interruptions go away – who can get any work done at the office these days?
Most of those silly meetings go away.
With NO Commute – so they get hours of time back a day. Let’s say 2 hours a day. 10 hours a week. 40 hours a month. (That’s a working week). 12 weeks a year! That is a lot of dentist visits, plumber visits, time with kids and spouse, time to nap, time to do whatever. And all this time was pulled out of the air as a result of not commuting.
Then of course there are the direct costs of commuting – the car, the transport. It costs $9,000 a year to run a car fully costed. How about coffee and lunch? What do you spend today? $5.0 – $20 a day. That is $1,000 – $4,000 a year for coffee and lunch! How about clothes? I used to buy 2 suits a year as a man. Women can’t get away with that. How much does going to work cost you in clothes? $2,000 – $5,000.
Daycare – well you might still want to send your kid off to daycare but now you might be able to do this locally and walk there. You will not have that pressure at the end of the day to juggle that project and getting to daycare on time. If your child is sick, you have options. And with all the money you have saved on the other things, you can afford a good one.
They live where they want. Huge choice given back. Not only can you choose what part of town, but what town or even country.
Then firm can also hire from a market of 6 billion versus from the local pool – the full talent pool of the planet is open to you.
The costs of travel to meet and hang out now and then are tiny compared to what is spent on a conventional organization.
The communication tools that connect you all now are all but free as well. The Skype offices have big screens that are ON all the time – so you can look up and call out to a colleague in another city as if she was in the next room – for free!
So why not your office? Well if your organization is all about control, then this will never happen. if your organization is all about process and not results, this will never happen. If your organization hires people who don’t have the skills to deliver, this will never happen. If your organization is like this – why are you still there?
Posted via web from Rob’s posterous
by Jon Husband
December 11, 2009 at 3:31 am · Filed under
3.0, Change, Collaboration, Connected Enterprise, Control, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Management Theory, Organizational Design, Social Computing, Social Networking, Trust
Ed Lawler is a reknowned management thinker I have studied for years.
He was just interviewed (by Karl Moore, a management professor at McGill University) for the Toronto Globe and Mail on the need for new management models in the Interconnected Era.
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New World Needs New Management Model
Karl Moore: This is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, talking management for The Globe and Mail. Today, I am delighted to speak with Ed Lawler, who is a professor at the Marshall School [of Business] at USC [University of Southern California] and the director of the Center for Effective Organizations. Good morning, Ed.
Ed Lawler: Good morning.
KM: Ed, you told me earlier that you are thinking about a book on Management 3.0. What do you mean by Management 3.0?
EL: Fundamentally, we need to think of a whole new approach to managing complex, large organizations. We certainly have the “command and control” era, which started way back with scientific management, and progressed over decades, really, to greater and greater levels of sophistication and expertise in how to make it run. That seemed to fit a certain kind of production-driven economy.
Clearly, starting in the 1950s, we began to say it has its limits, we have to use our workers differently, our employees differently, and I think that generated Management 2.0, which was around employee involvement, participation and moving more knowledge and information and power downward in the organization so people could add more value. And I think generally, it did impact the way most corporations operate.
The problem, of course, is that I think we are yet in another era. The economy has changed radically since then, the work force has changed radically since the sixties and seventies, and of course the economy has changed … globally, and everybody knows all those points.
So it’s kind of surprising, in many ways, that Management 1.0: command and control, or Management 2.0: high involvement or high performance, and various names for it, were [still considered] suitable.
I think we do need a Management 3.0, which recognizes the impact of information technology, different work forces, diversity in the workplace, and so forth.
So what I have been trying to do in a new book is say what that looks like, and yes, I have incorporated certainly some of the things that we did in Management 1.0 and Management 2.0. I think it really has to have a different philosophy and a different orientation with respect to both organizational design, how we treat the work force, how we think about the work force and basically how we lead in this kind of economy and in this kind of competitive environment.
KM: Ed, that is very interesting, but I need to know more about 3.0. What is it? Tell us about it so that we can begin thinking about it as managers.
EL: In many ways, to zero in on it, you can pick particular areas on how you would do that differently, or how you would manage, or general philosophy. Let me just pick one and carry it out: leadership, for example.
With the movement away from command and control management to high involvement management, we became fascinated with leaders and ascribed a lot of the effectiveness of organizations to the behaviour of leaders and so forth, and I think that has gone way too far.
We have lost a lot of the managerial blocking and tackling that people in supervisory positions have to do in order to make organizations effective. It seems to me that, if you are going to have a valid, viable 3.0, it has to include the right blend of leadership behaviours. Yes, where you inspire people by a sense of mission, sustainability, accountability – but also have a valid management approach which deals with fundamentals like goal setting and work specifications and product evaluation produced by employees. So we do not want to lose some of the key managerial skills as we have, I think, in searching for these magical leaders who are going to inspire and direct people.
KM: It is kind of a balance between leadership and management in these people: You have to be a leader but also, if you are not a manager at the same time, I think it’s Henry Mintzberg who talks about it, it’s dispiriting.
EL: Yes, I think that is exactly right, it is the balance. We have spent a lot of time training people on leadership, which some people learn and some people don’t, to be frank, and we have lost a lot of the fundamental manager skills or [they] were never developed. We still see managers doing terrible basic management – like performance reviews are done just awfully and the answer seems to be, “Well, let’s just eliminate them.” Well, to me, that is just insane. How are you going to direct and control behaviour if you do not have some kind of accountability and some sort of reviews that look at people and give them feedback and give them a sense of direction?
Just knowing that we are going to [have] sustainability as a major thrust of the company does not translate into day-to-day behaviour very easily. You need to be able to make that translation from the sense of vision and mission and so forth, to actual behaviours, and that is the managerial part of being an effective manager and leader.
KM: How about how we design organizations? How would that be different under 3.0?
EL: I think it depends substantially on what business you are in, how sophisticated the business is, and how complex it is, but I see much more self organizing, much more use of information technology, social networks, and perhaps even internal markets to create the forum and allocate financial resources within organizations, and that’s an area where there would be enormous differences.
In a book that Chris Worley and I did called Built to Change , we emphasized very strongly structures that would give people external interface with the market so that nobody is more than 2 or 3 degrees separate from the external market. I think that’s the right emphasis and we need to build on that kind of thinking because touching the market, being interfaced with the market, helps direct peoples’ behaviour internally and gives them a sense of how the business is doing and certainly motivates them to perform well.
So, I think that piece of the design is critical. What I don’t think we did enough with, in the Build to Change book, is to emphasize how organizations can be built out [using] social networks and how money can be allocated to innovations and start-up operations and how they can be converted from ideas to actual operating businesses.
KM: Is that something like the Wikipedia-tion, the LinkedIn, the Facebook-ization, if you would, of the world?
EL: Yes, I think it is, and that certainly relates to why I think it’s viable now and has not been in the past, and it has to do with a lot of people coming into organizations, partly the younger group, of course, but also more senior people are now much more familiar with those technologies and it is much more viable to use those technologies to organize.
So you are starting to see large companies, like the Ciscos and the IBMs, trying to take that technology which they have sold to consumers and say “How do we use it internally to create a more adaptable and flexible organization?” The one thing we clearly know is that Management 3.0 has to leave room for very adaptable and flexible organizations so that yesterday’s competitive advantage is ready to be today’s, yesterday’s business model is going to have to be pretty radically changed quickly, in order to keep up with the rate of change that exists today in the environment.
If there is a new normal coming out of the recession, I think it is one of change and one of innovation that companies have to be able to do that. Particularly if they are in knowledge work or situations where intellectual property and technology is the key to their business.
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Read the rest of the interview here …
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by Rob Paterson
August 11, 2008 at 9:12 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Barriers, Blogging, Business Model, CPB, Community, Control, Culture, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Enterprise Software, Interaction, KETC, Measurement, Mortage Crisis, Network Effect, Public Media, Public Radio, Public TV, Relationships, Social Media, Social Networking
What is the secret of a 2.0 organization? Is it merely the mastery of the tools?
If your organization is all about control and top down – it is unlikely that having a Wordpress site will take you to the new world of networks. To make a 2.0 world work for those you serve means that you have to have such a world working inside your organization.
So what do you do to get this? It is clear to me that we have made this shift at KETC in St Louis.
The context of this story is a project that KETC is working on to find ways of activating the community in St Louis to help reduce the pain of the mortgage crisis.
In so doing we are testing the big idea that Public Media can do more than bring Jane Austen to your TV screen. The CPB is testing this idea in St Louis and if we have enough progress – will expand the test to many other cities and stations.
So an important task that we have to fulfill will be to help the system replicate what we have done.
The easy part of this task will be the “Whats”. The Content we created, what we did on air, on the web, in meetings with the community etc. But I don’t think that only talking of the “what” will be very helpful. I think that it will be the “how” that is the real secret. The “how” will be about the new culture – the new set of work and social norms that are behind becoming a convener.
We surely have to become a Convener inside the station before we can have much a of a chance of being the Trusted Convener outside. That is the really hard work. I know that KETC has pulled this off. But how can I tell you about the how. How do you tell another about a new way of being?
This weekend while watching the Olympics I had an aha about the “How” that I would like to try here with you.
Here is a picture of the Canadian men’s 8 at the Olympics yesterday.
When all the 8 in the boat and the cox are aligned – something magic happens. All the effort is applied to the work. When this happens, you feel it. It is almost a spiritual feeling. It’s a form of magic. The boat just flies. You dissolve into a field that is the boat, the 8 and the cox. You are ONE. All friction and resistance is gone.
With a big race and your reputation on the line – the pressure to get aligned is huge – you can feel if one person is not there with you.
This is what it feels like in our KETC project meetings now. It feels like the boat is flying – it feels so good to be with the other members of the boat.
The pressure is there. As the guinea pig for Public Media we feel the eyes of thousands upon us. Upping the pressure to perform seems to help with transformation. Like heat applied to water creates steam or heat applied to iron with other things creates steel.
So creating pressure about results, time and scale is a first step. You don’t go gradually into this – you have to go full tilt.
We had no time. the project is only 3 months long. So there was no time to be incompetent. In the early days we had to re-arrange the boat a bit to get the team that could do the work and do it with the others. We could not tolerate anyone in the boat who could not pull their weight. We acted immediately when it was clear that the mission was being threatened. This is not the pub media way but it is the real community way. Real communities see everything and expect a lot. Real communities are not soft.
But after this initial shift – we know we have the right team. With the right team we build energy and confidence over time. There is a trust and a confidence in each other that has been developed by publicly and transparently experiencing the abilities of the others.
To get this transparency – we have a process that is built around all involved making public commitments.
It has developed by a simple part of the Project Management process – the day starts with asking each other for help. Every day we meet for 30 minutes to talk about what is going on and all the cards are face up on the table. We have learned to be explicit. Not rude but very clear. A very different norm from the past or most organizations. Accountability is fully visible.
This does not seem like the typical meeting that many of us have. It is very operational – what has to get done today and this week. But it is also very social. As trust has built there is also a lot of laughter and banter. The walls of the silos are coming down. We are finding that people who we did not know or trust much can be very helpful and that they can work miracles. Especially when the chips are down.
We have set major milestones and we have surpassed them all. Everyone has been tested in public. By being open – by being demanding in public – we are closer. Nothing is not unsaid anymore. You don’t have to whinge in the washroom. This is more than transparency – this is “clarity”.
So how does this happen? Well we are set up as I now see like an 8. The engine room is of course the department heads – they do the rowing. But it is the project management structure and discipline that makes the 8 go so well. So let’s look at this because all can replicate this.
First of all we have “Cox”. Not the project sponsor, not the President but the Cox (The Project Manager). In an 8, it is the cox – usually a very small person (Our PM is new and is very young but is an old soul) – who not only steers but who encourages and who works with the crew to respond to threats and opportunities as they happen on the water in the race. He is always pulling us back to the task. He is always asking the awkward question – he is always asking for more clarity. He uses humor and self-deprecation to get his way. But behind him is the power of the coach and the President. He can always use disappointment as power – “Do we really have to go to Jack about this?” usually settles most issues without escalation.
So the PM/Cox not only sets the process tone but also shows us how to use power as a convener. He uses personal power and almost never has to escalate because all the conversations are in the open – bad behavior – is obvious to all – social pressure ensures good behavior.
There is no doubt in my mind that Project Management is a key skill in the operation of a high performing organization. What it does is it keeps focus – it forces accountability – it manages the white space between the silos – for this is where the cooperation is demanded. For a while it all feels forced for this is new. But after 9 weeks it is our new normal.
Of course what is really happening is that the PM is “Convening”. He is holding the kind of open and trusted space that enables groups to work well with each other. The central process at KETC has become Convening.
We are also seeing that the project never ends. There is always complex work that is measured by outcomes to do. That raises another issue. Outcomes and measurement: in the old norm, we were soft on both. Now everything that we do has to have an objective and hence has to have a measure. This again was awkward at first but now is a new normal.
Which brings us to the “Coach”. The Coach in an 8 is not the cox. The coach’s work is all about ensuring that the goals are set and the capability is ready. We have such a role being played at KETC – the project Sponsor.
There is a lot of discipline in the role. The coach is not one of the guys. The coach pushes all the time. the coach has expectations.The coach sees the needs of the whole race/project. She sees how this race/project connects to others. She sees the development needs and she has an eagle eye on personnel. If someone is not working out, she has to deal with this.
Part of her power comes from her appointment. She has been selected by the “Club President”. She can escalate and does over personnel and budget issues. But she settles organizational issues from her position. But not all her power is delegated from the President. She has her own power based on her own achievements. For the coach is also rooted in their own talent. She has deep skills in a key area – Community Engagement. She has a track record of her own in getting tough jobs done well.
Finally we have the club president. He is responsible for the financial envelope – which provides the boat etc. This is a separate role to that of the Coach or the Cox. But in most organizations this person does all of this.
This is what I mean by Top Down organizations being political. They tend to be like medieval courts, where factions compete for influence and power. All the work happens in the corridors or in secret. Little is really visible. All in the end is decided by the King.
What is happening at KETC is that all the key work is now taking place in a process that is fully transparent. The President can look at the boat in the water and see all the workings. Accountability is clear.
- Each rower has his or her part and they have to be visibly working with the rest of the 8.
- The cox’s ability to get the boat running optimally in each race is clear to all – especially in the boat itself.
- The results of the boat belong to the coach – her role is clear.
- The resources for the club are the President’s role – and he is delivering and he also sets the tone.
The President in our case, asked the team for it all. He wants Gold in an Olympic setting and he asks for nothing less. In asking for all, he is getting it.
So that’s my metaphor. If you run your organization like a rowing team, if you set up the key roles as you find in a rowing team, you can make the shift inside from 1.0 to 2.0.
The irony is that the 2.0 world is more disciplined than the 1.0 world. But as you can see much of the discipline happens because of visibility and clarity. It’s like being in a small town. What you say and what you do can never be a secret. So your word and your actions define you. In a small town you also have to help each other.
In the 1.0 world of the huge city – there is little social pressure. All is anonimity. So there have to be rules and policemen and gaming the system.
Installing the kind of Project Management Process that we are using at KETC gives you a good shot at making this shift.
by Rob Paterson
July 30, 2008 at 12:06 pm · Filed under
AP, Control, Culture, Michael Rosenblum, Network Effect, Twitter
I was talking with a client the other day and I scared and depressed her – she is already working at more than full stretch. I told here that she would have to find a way to get more for less. I did not know that this is corporate code for more layoffs and the survivors doing more.
What I meant was this.
Many papers and news outlets pay for AP membership. But as these stats from Twitter show – if you want to cover breaking news – Twitter can do it faster. They also do it better in that as a station builds its Twitter gang – as the BPP did – it builds a fanatic membership. Members who do not pay money and get a Coffee Cup – but are true members of the Station Tribe. They work for you but not for money – they work for you because they belong
Imagine your entire state covered in every area – imagine every state connected to every part of the world – now you have a news service. What does it cost? A lot less than AP.
Of course what I am talking about is The Network Effect. This is what I mean by more for less.
I think that this idea can work in every part of a station’s world. Look at me or Mike Rosenblum. Few papers or stations could afford to have Mike or me full time. I can’t speak for mike but I would never be able to restrict myself to one employer anyway – I would learn to little.
But stations can Time Share people like me. This is not transactional consulting. I want to be involved – even when I am not being paid. I worked for NPR for a full year after my contract ended and visited them on my own dime. I still am very attached. There are people with all sorts of skills who want to be attached to you. They want to do more than send a check. They want to be able to say “I work for Public radio and TV” and mean it. These people have tons of skills in all fields.
I am thinking “Tribe” more and more. In your tribe will be people who merely Twitter – they are your news wire and immediate feedback loop. There are regulars who make local content for you – video, audio, call in whtever. There are regulars who find content for you. There are regulars who help with development.
There are experts in required fields such as media, accounting, legal, and maybe local politics.
I know all of this to be true. So what is in the way?
I think it is organization and culture – oh that again!
I see w new job in media – the Tribal Connector – do you have anyone who hosts the space for the larger Tribe – who looks out and after them? I bet you don’t. In fact many in full time parts of the organization fear the outsider who may know more than them and feel shown up.
In my ancient past I was SVP Marketing for the Investment Bank at CIBC, then the 10th largest bank in North America. What did I know about marketing? Squat. So I did not build an empire and run it from my pinnacle of ignorance. Instead I hired a person who knew everyone in the field in Toronto. She and our secretary were the only full time people. We attracted and kept a wonderful tribe of the best people in the business. We could turn around anything in any time. All the infrastructure was outsourced but the key members of the tribe were very close. All our budget went on the deliverables.
This worked because we acknowledged that the best people in a creative field would never work full time for a bank. Our job was to get the brief right and to connect to the best people. We did this by creating trust with the inner circle.
No one knows it all. Even less can you know it all when all you do is one thing in one place.
So the way forward I think is to accept that the best people will not work for you full time but that you can get a bit of the best people – if you are nice and if you are straight.
I think that stations can get much more for much less if they were to explore this. Why not try a Twitter Breaking News Tribe First? No risk and you learn how to do this
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