Yesterday I had the privilege and pleasure to interview Marty St.George, the CMO at JetBlue.

We started the conversation by focusing on what it takes to achieve one of JetBlue’s original goals – bringing humanity back to the airline industry. Many companies try to embrace humanity or talk about humanizing their brands, but very few achieve that goal the way JetBlue has. Most end up with pockets of humanity or episodic programs that makes them seem human for a little period of time. JetBlue was able to scale it to the point where it has become part of the fabric of the company.

The secret?

First, they created a culture based on embracing humanity – they did not just try to make humanity an add-on to a more traditional airline business culture. Where most other airlines consider themselves in the airline operating business, seeing their jobs as flying airplanes around, JetBlue considers itself in the customer service business, and they happen to fly airplanes as part of that. Second, and in order to scale “embracing humanity” as their company grew, they built a set of 5 core values by which they hire, train, and lead their people – Safety, Caring, Integrity, Passion, and Fun. They also realize that the company does not own the culture, nor the brand – the employees do, and every crew member is an equal owner in the culture and the brand. Subtle nuances to some traditional business thinkers, but possibly the single most important difference between a company who can truly claim to have a human face and one that is just giving it lip service.

We then talked about the importance of leadership in maintaining such a culture, and how JetBlue University is an integral part of coaching and training new leaders from within. They also have a very different concept of teaming than most traditional companies – making sure that no silos form within their organizational structure, and being very collaborative in nature. Being able to have a true collaborative culture is another byproduct of being based on a shared mission and core values.

The 2nd part of the conversation was focused primarily on JetBlue’s embrace of Social Media. For JetBlue, Social Media is the antithesis of media – it is a direct connection/two way conversation between the customer and the brand. While they started with social media as an experiment, they now have truly made it part of the fabric of their company. Like Dell, they realize that you cannot just play by putting a toe in the water – at some point you need to go all out. And when you do it right, people do not just talk with you, they talk with one another about you – providing you with the richest learning environment.

We also touched on the messy side of embracing humanity – including how to deal with people who unfairly voice their anger and frustration in public, and how to avoid being taken hostage by others who have big social media megaphones.

Other things we talked about include:

• The importance of senior leadership involvement in onboarding new employees
• How your front line employees are your brand
• The need to keep a small business feel as your company grows
• The role of passion in the workplace and the importance of communications as part of that
• The importance of praise in embracing humanity
• How to keep the balance between being hi-tech vs. hi-touch and still be able to claim that your brand embraces humanity
• How twitter scales as a customer service channel
• The importance of trials in airline marketing

You can listen to the podcast over at the FASTforward Blog.

Join us on Wednesday, May 12 Thursday, May 13th when we’ll be joined by Marty St. George, the CMO of JetBlue, one of America’s admired brands, for an hour-long discussion on how JetBlue has experimented with and embraced “social-ness.”

Tune in and you’ll hear how JetBlue has integrated 2.0 principles into its business processes and customer experiences as well as undertaken the hard work of orienting its culture towards a more open and innovative mindset. You’ll also learn about:

• How technology is anticipating and enabling a more human (and occasionally messy) culture of collaboration to drive growth
• How the rise and empowerment of the individual doesn’t have to come at the cost of the company
• How embracing transparency, resisting fear, and tolerating failure are critical in today’s dynamic marketplace
• How the design and architecture of new customer service strategies has driven success

The conversation will be hosted by Francois Gossieaux, co-author of the book “The Hyper-Social Organization” due out this summer.

Find out more and register to attend this free event.

A reminder about the next webinar in our ongoing series: “Media and the Money Trail: Connecting with the new Digital Consumer.”

Tune in for a conversation between Greg Clayman, MTV Networks’ Executive VP of Digital Distribution, and Jennifer Kavanagh, Vice President of Digital & New Media for Oxygen, in which they’ll discuss their respective companies’ efforts to develop new models and re-think the economics behind what it means to create and deliver entertainment programming.

Find out more and register here.

On September 29, the FASTforward blog hosted a stellar conversation between Beth Simone Noveck, US Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government and Andrew Rasiej, the co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum.

The discussion, which was moderated by Renee Hopkins of Strategy and Innovation, explored how the U.S. government, as well as individual states and municipalities, are employing new tools and processes, as well as addressing cultural issues, to affect change and drive adoption.

We’ve compiled highlights of their conversation into a handy little ebook, available here. You can also access the recording of the discussion here.

And lastly, the audience for this webinar was particularly engaged, tossing out lots of great questions we promised to post as an attachment to this highlights piece when it came out. As regular readers of FASTforward, you likely have responses and perspectives on some of these – feel free to take them up in the comments.

Q: Do you see the direct interaction of citizenry with government circumventing the representative process and shifting more control to the Federal government instead of the states?

Q: How do the non-technical participate in a social media government?

Q: The CIA’s Intellipedia wiki speaks to the issue of transparency within an agency.

Q: We see technology being used in government to offer services, etc. How does local government use this technology to educate its citizenry and encourage civic engagement? Any suggestions or examples?

Q: Will we be making the census data available at no cost in raw form as well?

Q: How does this conversation apply to PACER Court records, which are ideally suited to being made publicly accessible? They are organized, and have no copyright, but for administrative reasons, there are onerous fees to get these documents. There are public projects to make these available, but sadly, the bureaucracy has actually worked to slow these.

Comment: With regard to open government and transparency, it would be useful to communicate to the public (in an easy way, like a graphic) the impact of new state and federal policies, such as the proposed Renewable Electric Standard and the Cap and Trade Program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Too often, the viability or impact is not communicated or lost in a sea of text.

Q: How will the collaboration work for those parts of our country that do not have high speed internet connections in their homes? Will these people be ignored because they cannot readily interact with government?

Q: How does citizen participation solve the extreme polarization evidenced by Fox News/MSNBC? The trend of polarization is getting worse. Does Gov 2.0 make that worse or solve it?

Q: Online collaboration is deeply inviting to manipulation by ideologues. Anyone who has argued politics online knows this very well. So what will the administration’s general policies be to ensure that the processes remain fair across partisan lines?

Q: Where would you see differences in Gov 2.0 use internationally (especially USA / Germany)?

Q: How will people collaborate in specific policy issues when they actually disagree concerning the main points involved in that discussion? Does collaboration in policy-making process work only in consensual issues?

Q: With regard to public participation, I’d like to know what the next milestones are (as we’re going into 2010).

Q: It would seem that government communication and political communication are in conflict here because the elaborate use of data and openness is in opposition to the level of openness preferred by politicians to be able to implement policies. Is this true?

Q: Do you believe than an agency has to be more transparent, collaborative and participative internally in order to be so externally?

Q: Don’t these ideas require government personnel to be open to input and to change their policies and behaviors?

Q: What can an agency administrator do to begin to implement the President’s policy with regard to transparency? What support will the administration provide to such an administrator?

Q: Do you think the NYT article “Athens on the Net” got it wrong by talking of just two views of Gov 2.0: one an Athenian-style direct democracy, where “our consent is gathered every few minutes, not every few years” and the other a false illusion of equality that can be hijacked by well organized groups?

Q: Can either of the presenters speak to what we can learn from other countries on collaborative government?

Q: What are the types and sources of resistance to greater collaboration in governance?

Q: Do interactive methods of obtaining public comment result in different comments being collected? For example, do respondents comment on each other’s feedback, resulting in more synthesized and thought through comments overall?

Q: Can the States work with the federal government to assist in the culture change that Deputy CTO Noveck referred to?

Q: Do you envision a day when multi-stakeholder scenario planning will be available/created with the public to deal with on-going complex public policy issues – such as water management?

Q: What is being discussed assumes a “public” that wants to and is willing to spend time making their contributions in this collaboration. What if there is a large portion of the population who just want to live their lives and not spend time helping in a collaborative democracy? Isn’t this still just a government of the few who care enough to participate – just using social media tools?

Q: Will individual government employees be more accountable with this additional transparency? How will government employees have an appropriate expectation of privacy?

Q: What do you think of a benchmark session in New York with all Open Data Initiatives from other countries like UK, and France?

Q: There seem to be both organizational and local levels for affecting change: The plain language movement was something that seemed to be adopted across agencies, at a higher level, through legislation. We’ve also heard about smaller DIY (or DIO) initiatives like everyblock.com where citizens are taking government data and building a service around it. Do you see these smaller local initiatives as the primary path for improving interaction and service models system wide, or is it a combination?

Q: Citizens send in comments to go that may not be machine readable – is there a budget to fix that?

Q: Will the implementation of Gov 2.0 require legal reform?

Q: During the 1990’s “reinventing government” effort, the White House DID see “e-gov” as including citizens in the decision-making process. How much do the panelists really know about that effort (e.g., lessons learned)?

COMMENT: Aneesh Chopra just answered the question about whether the White House will develop their own “Open Govt. Plan”. (Basically, he said “no”).

Q: The CTO says that the soon-to-be-released “Open Government Directive” will require each federal agency to develop its own “Open Government Plan”. Will the Executive Office of the President (EOP) be EXEMPT from that requirement?

Q: Given the polarization of hot-button issues and the danger of poorly interpreted data (such as climate data) do you think that a consensus mechanism (such as what occurs in wikipedia) is viable?

Q: Data interpretation is a science/art with the potential for misinterpretation; what measures do you envision to keep misinterpretation from occurring from citizen-open-source apps?

Q: Organizing data, AKA knowledge management, is essential to good access, and currently many federal sites are very poorly organized. What types of effectiveness measures do you see implementing to increase usability?

Q: How can we be sure that the underserved, who likely have no access to a computer, are not left out of the new collaborative model?

Q: How do elected officials feel about how this more dispersed approach might diminish or conflict with old-fashioned representative government?

Q: Can the spread of technology create an externality? For instance, how, with widespread and quick-spread nformation can misinformation be corralled or contained?

Q: In regard to the point about engaging employees as we have the public in this discussion, how is whistleblower protection being weighed in post-OGD discussion and analysis? It received the greatest amount of public support (many comments from federal employees directly) in stage three of the OGD, and is fundamental to transparency in any government agency.

Q: What is “WIKI Government”?

Q: Is the CTO office looking to make data natively available on agency websites through the web using Semantic Web of Linked Open Data rather than through data warehouses?

At the bottom of this post you will see a link to the recording of today’s conversation between Beth Simone Noveck, the US Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, and Andrew Rasiej, the co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum.

The discussion, which was sponsored by Microsoft and moderated by Renee Hopkins, the editor of Strategy & Innovation, ranged far and wide in discussing how new collaborative technologies are driving a critical cultural and technological shift in the U.S. from closed to open government.

Stay tuned to the FASTforward Blog for the transcript and a highlights piece we’ll be publishing here in the next week or two. And please feel free to chime in in the comments section here with follow-up reactions, thoughts and questions.

We’ve created a highlights doc of the discussion we hosted here last week between Vivian Schiller, the CEO and president of NPR, and Scott D. Anthony, the president of Innosight and author of the forthcoming book: The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times. Recording of the conversation, entitled “Innovating through the Storm: Insights on the Disruption in the Media Industry” and sponsored by Microsoft, is available here.

Vivian, on the importance of disrupting oneself:
“It’s critical that we think about… becoming our own disruptors.”

Scott, as a follow-up:
“The time when it’s easiest to master disruption is the time when sometimes you feel like you don’t need to do it because your core business is doing pretty well.”

Scott, on value:
“When you think about business models it’s important to unpack it and say, ‘What are you doing that’s going to create value? What are you doing that will allow you to deliver value? And how are you going to make sure you capture that value?’”

Vivian, on freeing up their content:
“We want people – we want our users and listeners to look at it and create – to look into our archive, look at our content and figure out other ways to display and to distribute our material so that it reaches the most number of people.”

Scott, on search:
“A good editor is really critical in guiding me somewhere and sometimes I don’t even know what I’m searching for; I need to have some discovery. And again, these two other jobs related to search—the guiding and the discovery—are places where I think today’s solutions still don’t address those areas particularly well.

Scott, on quality:
“[Companies] really have to recognize that quality is a relative term and convenience and simplicity are oftenpen overlooked innovation levers that people can pull to grow businesses and to create new profit streams.”

Vivian, on the need to experiment:
“[You need] to accept going in that you will try something and many of your experiments will fail and that that’s okay… The “stop doing” is very tough for many traditional media organizations and if there is a “stop doing” there is sometimes a reluctance to try again.

Vivian, on audience interaction:
“Our very powerful, engaged, smart, savvy audience is a huge potential for us in terms of the kind of value they create and you will see more and more of that from us in terms of our interaction with our audience. “

Scott, on opportunity:
“There really is a lot of collective wisdom that still isn’t captured. And if you can find ways as a media organization to help facilitate or tap into that collective wisdom and bring some order to it, it’s an area that still is not completely tapped.”

To download the full doc, click here.

This morning the FASTforward Blog hosted a great discussion between Vivian Schiller, the CEO and president of NPR, and Scott Anthony, the president of Innosight and author of the forthcoming book: The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times.

Moderated by Renee Hopkins Callahan and sponsored by Microsoft, the discussion touched on topics ranging from:

• the challenges of today’s news business, NPR’s particular “business” and its need to “be its own disruptor”
• the “misalignment” of business models with real value in some of today’s media companies
• the role of technology in enhancing the user experience
• the importance of good editors and harnessing the collective intelligence of informed human beings
• framing disruption as not just a threat, but also as an opportunity
• the viability of charging for content and other forms of monetizing content
• the need to experiment *and* be willing to fail often
• the importance of innovation even, sometimes, in the absence of a clear business model

Click on the link below to access the full recording of the conversation – you can play it in place or download it as a podcast. And stay tuned to this space in the coming days for a trancript of the discussion as well as a highlights piece we’ll be publishing.

A reminder that we will be hosting another discussion in the FASTforward Insight Series – Innovating through the Storm: Insights on the Disruption in the Media Industry – this Thursday, May 14, from 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM EDT.

Expect a real treat for this conversation between Vivian Schiller, the newish president and CEO of NPR and Scott Anthony, the president of Innosight and the author of the forthcoming book “The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times” from Harvard Business Press. Moderated by Renee Hopkins Callahan, the editor of Strategy & Innovation, the hour-long webinar will explore the many challenges media companies are facing and how they’re navigating through truly disruptive times.

We’re lucky to have two people so qualified to speak to the issues at hand – Vivian was previously the SVP and general manager of NYTimes.com, and Scott spearheaded the “Newspaper Next” project with the American Press Institute, is a colleague of Clayten Christensen, the renowned innovation thinker and specialist, and is president of the innovation strategy firm Christensen founded.

Find  out more and register today.

Also, if you’re interested in downloading “The Great Disruption” a free chapter of Scott’s book, due out in a few weeks, register here.

Earlier this week, the FASTforward Blog hosted a great discussion on how leading companies are designing “social-ness” into their business processes and customer experiences. Moderated by David Rogers, the executive director of the Center on Global Brand Leadership at Columbia Business School, the conversation with several practitioners from Dell and Best Buy explored the particular programs and processes their respective companies have devised as well as shared their learnings and advice for other companies considering the same.

Our panelists:
- Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt – the founders of Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation
- Richard(atDell) Binhammer – Social Media and Corporate Reputation Management, Dell.

Click on the link below to access the full recording of the conversation – you can play it in place or download it as a podcast. (Our apologies for the audio issues during the call. You should find the sound in the recording substantially better after the good scrubbing we gave it.)

Web 2.0 — as glorified by Time Magazine when the publication named “You” as the Person of the Year — has moved from entertainment and social networking medium to strategic corporate weapon.

That’s the view of best-selling author and digital society guru Don Tapscott, who recently declared that Web 2.0 “is no longer about hooking up online or creating a gardening community of putting a video onto YouTube… The new Web, so-called Web 2.0 and service oriented architecture are really becoming a new mode of production, and changing the ways that we innovate, the ways that we make decisions, the ways that we collaborate, and the ways that companies engage with the rest of the world.”

Don is a featured speaker at the upcoming FASTForward ‘08, to be held February 18-20 in Orlando, Florida.

I recently moderated an ebizQ Webinar in which Don discussed how Web 2.0 technologies and approaches are dramatically changing the way businesses manage and analyze information. (Audio replay available here – registration required.)

Don Tapscott broke new ground in 1996 with his book, The Digital Economy: The Promise and Peril of Network Intelligence. His latest book is Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, co-authored with Anthony Williams.

In our Webcast, Don described how he sees the Web 2.0 world — with its high degree of collaboration — changing the face of business intelligence to “collaborative intelligence.” Prior to the introduction of Web 2.0 methodologies, he explained, internal data had “been accessible in various limited ways through traditional ERP reporting systems, MIS and business intelligence.”

Now, he continued, “for the first time, this is all being supplemented by massive quantities of additional data that is created through new models of collaboration, as consumers and employees use the new tools of collaboration — wikis, blogs and social networks.”

“The marriage of this new accessible data with the firm’s traditional internal data creates an unprecedented challenge, as well as an opportunity to gain insight into the behavior of the company’s most important stakeholders, and to translate that knowledge into success in the marketplace.”

The speed of Web 2.0 processes is also changing what end-users expect from BI approaches as well. “Think about if you do a Google search, you get the results back instantly. If the results took half a minute, or five minutes, or 10 minutes, you’d probably stop using Google so much. Traditional BI was kind of like that — which is part of why we didn’t use it so much Because you’re calling out to a disk, basically.”

The merging of Web 2.0 and business intelligence has become an enormous opportunity for growth, Don said. “For starters, we’re seeing the integration of business intelligence, which has historically has been about numbers, with content and knowledge management, which has been historically about words.” For example, Don foresees the rise of of 3-D visualization of BI data.

“The mother of all opportunities is people across an organization being able to collaborate more effectively around data.” He calls this collective intelligence the holy grail, in which “minds across an organization can come together around information and data that they believe and is relevant and timely and pertinent to them.”

(An audio replay of our recent Webcast is available here – registration required.)