Before engaging on a rant about FaceTime and whether it’s great or terrible, let’s get one thing straight: what kind of bandwdith does FaceTime on iPhone consume and what kind of bandwidth is currently supported on the 3G network? The reason being that I think a lack of 3G-support is a real handicap to this whole mobile (!) application, as you can easily find out if a friend tries to Face Time call you while on the road.

A Google-search revealed that FaceTime’s actual bandwidth people are measuring is 100 Kbps to 392 Kbps and an AT&T 3G cell has 7 Mbps of total capacity (source), while T-Mobile in the Netherlands (my country) has a reported capacity of 2048/384 kbps (source), which I assume is representative of some, but not all countries in Europe. So, in theory, FaceTime should work over 3G and I can also report that watching the last keynote live over 3G on my iPhone was impeccable, which should say something.

So if FaceTime over 3G will work fine and looking at how Apple is releasing this technology incrementally, 1st to iPhone, then to Mac, then it can be assumed that we ain’t seen nothing yet and Apple will either/or release FaceTime to PCs as well, open the API to Skype et al, and mobile providers will eventually allow it to transmit over their networks.

As to the question of whether it is disruptive, I can only comment on some features that I think are pretty cool and some that are questionable.

What’s cool?! The second camera: One cool feature is the ability to use the iPhone as a demo-machine. I had a Face-to-Face call with a good friend of mine in Brazil in order to show him our product and how it is developing. We build hardware and try to be stealthy about it, so I prefer the one-to-one call, vs. something more public. So what we did was for him to call me from his Mac on my phone and for me to walk him around our workshop, essentially give a presentation, while showing our tech on the back-camera. And that was… awesome! Now, Apple did advertise FaceTime as a way to show off your babies, which is what I was doing, but I don’t know if this is really a killer-feature that is convincing for everyone. But I can imagine a reporter going to an event and getting a sound-byte from Steve Jobs as pretty cool as well.

What’s bad?! Your nostril-hair: I think that the ergonomics of the iPhone camera are not optimal. Basically, anyone with a fat chin or hairy nostrils will probably be self-conscious to the camera seemingly focussing on these parts of their anatomy. I tried holding it higher and further away from my face, but just like a touch-screen iMac would be super-tiring on the arms, so is such a posture.

What’s controversial?! Instant on: Unlike Skype on your PC or phone, FaceTime does not have to be running all the time, or if it is, you don’t notice it. So people who know my mail-address can actually call me, FaceTime will start (with some delay, I should note) and I can either accept or deny the call. If I deny it, my iPhone tells me that the recipient is not available for FaceTime, which is diplomatic enough. But still, being so used to having Skype off, if I don’t want to be disturbed, I’m not sure how I feel about FaceTime intruding into my space like that. At the same time, always being reachable is a telephone thing, which also has its plus-sides.

What’s bad?! Connectivity-issues: My call to Brazil wasn’t flawless and this is over WiFi. I especially noticed problems when I moved around, which would cost more bandwidth, I guess. This brings me to my next point.

What’s bad?! No backchannel: If a Skype-call fails, I type a message to let my contact know about it. No such thing with FaceTime, and it’s also somewhat surprising that they didn’t make a link between iChat & the FaceTime app on the Mac. A little bird did tell me that that would prevent Apple from releasing FaceTime on Windows, where it would be easier to do so as a separate app. But back to the backchannel, there are two features I would like:

1. A way to leave a voicemail if I don’t reach someone via FaceTime. This will happen a lot if the recipient is on 3G.
2. A chat-client that isn’t paid sms & works on both the Mac & the phone.

It’s early days yet, but my sense is that this a pretty cool technology meant mostly for buying more Apple-devices. Now, speculating what could be the next steps for FaceTime, there are several:

• Worst-case: it could remain as is and I think that at the very least the lack of 3G and the lack of any kind of back-channel are a problem.
• Medium-case: Apple will improve the FaceTime app & allow it to run on 3G. This would be a very big deal already.
• Best-case: Apple will open up the API to other programs. Since this is what was originally announced and VOIP is only a threat to mobile operators and not to Apple, I expect this to happen in any case.

But is it disruptive? Only if you consider mobile video-calling disruptive. It certainly is, if you watched Star Trek in the 90s like I did and consider this a next step towards teleportation & exploring other planets. I’s also pretty interesting for live-newscasting (over 3G!). It isn’t, if you or your significant other suffers from excessive nostril-hair.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Is mobile commerce disruptive or incremental?
2. Thoughts on the (iTablet) iPad – connectivity, apps, multitasking, integrating with Macs
3. Microsoft will not FOLLOW Apple in phones
4. This June: Apple will start selling software for Windows
5. Changing markets – OS opportunities in retrospect

In my post on piracy, my point was not complete. YES, historically, there has been a trend in every industry towards eliminating inefficiencies and yes, in some ways making things digital is just another step down that line, but NO, as @ksilvennoinen pointed out in the comments, digital goods do have a value greater than zero, the question is how to find a way to recuperate that value from customers.

To me value equals investment, but that is not the way pricing works. Unfortunately, I managed to misplace my pricing bible some months ago and can’t seem to recall most of the rules of pricing, but there is a strong psychological component to it. And the psychological part is what I am confused about. To get another book in here, it’s just like “Positioning: the battle for the mind,” if online goods are ‘positioned’ against a never-ending slew of free content, how do you position yourself to be priced at a value greater than zero?

On the one hand, it’s not so hard. You position yourself in such a way that a comparison does not make sense. Let’s take digital books, an area I actually don’t consider as threatened as publishers and media-outlets would like you to believe. The reason is that as soon as you download a digital book and view it on a PC, it immediately becomes an inferior product. Unlike a TV-show or movie, which I can frankly watch on a post-stamp (no matter what David Lynch says), reading and eyes work best together on either paper or e-paper (haven’t tried reading on the iPad, though I really like doing it on the iPhone). Of course the real threat to e-books in a PC environment is websites, but that’s a story for another day.

To get back to it, e-books work best in a dedicated reading environment, which immediately creates opportunities for platforms and putting walls around those. Platforms ensure that there is a network effect of content, walls ensure that there is no inter-leakage between the quality-controlled inside and the dark-waters-of-piracy outside. And that mechanism allows digital goods to be priced to recuperate investment and more. But…

Where it gets confusing again is how very open the Internet is. This openness allows you to create an app in a day, it also allows you to jailbreak an iPhone (now with US-gov. support), and it allows for me to get a movie that Chinese kid 107-xg46-*** released 5 minutes ago on the torrentZ. Amazon was built on this openness, as was OS X, as was pretty much anything that was stolen out of the Xerox labs 35 years ago. While there is a trend of eliminating barriers in general, it is even more prevalent on the Internet.

So, what I am asking myself here is the following questions:

• Is this 1969 again, where hippies roamed free, sex was consequence-less, and there is an Aids-epidemic on the horizon, which will make us go back to the 50s in terms of promiscuity?
• Are platforms doomed? I’m just talking platforms, not walls around them. Twitter is an example of an open platform.
• Are the walls around platforms doomed? So: iTunes & iOS-devices, Amazon & Kindles, Facebook & human relationships, every online retailer in the world…
• Is pricing digital goods a logical thing when taking into consideration how it is positioned against other digital goods?
• Should digital goods be free and prices be set for things that cannot be spread digitally: iOS devices, Kindles, Disk-media, other consumption-devices…
• And many more questions…

Getting back to value equals investment in my third paragraph. In any chain that leads from idea to the user, there are value points, which come from some kind of investment. In the embroidery example, a strong value point appears to be the creator. Without that person, there would be no creation. And, of course, there are plenty of examples on that. In the case of iPhone, strong value points are both the conceptualisation (R&D expenditure) and the production costs. In the case of Amazon, the website (presentation, distribution, etc.) is a strong value point. The end-product can still be digital, as it is in the case of the embroiderer’s designs, the iPhone apps, and the Kinde-ebooks, but the investment in certain parts of the chain is very much real.

And the value to consumers, which the crux of the matter, is equally real. If I compare 2010 to 1995, we live in the era of digital convenience. From e-banking, to restaurant-reviews, to TV-shows, to software, we undeniably live in a better world, but one where, ironically, we are less willing to spend as much on it. But there is another side to this as well. Let’s say, everything that exists is walled off. You’d have to pay to get access to every blog-post, to every youtube-video, to everything else that is already being charged for. I would sincerely start to question whether it was all worth it.

The Internet continues to be confusing to me, part shopping bonanza, part free-for-all utopia. Writing this has brought a little clarity, but if you have stuff to add that clears it up even more, please feel free to share it in a comment.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. The role of the internet for the retail of *physical* goods.
2. Thoughts on pricing (yourself, products, and services)
3. When analogies don't work
4. Looking towards a new naming-convention for the wave of web/software-services
5. The Poor Man’s Business Model—How Out-of-the-Box thinking can generate tremendous value for customers

The point about all of these is not about destructive replacement. It’s about improving a product in the eyes of the consumer. And what enabled this improvement? Common standards, collaboration, user-feedback, guts, ruthlessness, innovation, progress, etc. Why producers don’t like to cooperate with that? Because every technology requires an investment to make it work.

Think of the poor embroiderer, which is what inspired this post (bound to get a lot of flack). It’s a funny industry. I wasn’t aware that needlework designs are being sold over the internet and thus at the risk of piracy. I suppose I always thought an embroiderer embroids, then sells their product and ships it to consumers. Instead, they seem to go to the simplest side-product of their work, the one that becomes a foundation for potential mass-production, the “design-chart,” which is then being “shipped,” via download, to customers. Interesting! It kinds of makes sense from a distribution standpoint. Customers are not willing to pay for the shipment of needlework, instead they prefer producing locally, which really is a great idea. The only problem here is the way it is distributed.

In a B2C relationship over the internet, I think, it always comes down to eliminating as many barriers as possible. When you buy from an online shop, you really want the product in your house as quickly as possible. If I could reach my arm into the screen in front of me and pull out the product that I just ordered, that would be just perfect. It’s worse when the product is digital, because the customer knows that it’s just bits & bytes really not worth anything tangible (I’m just talking about the 1s & 0s here) and it could be in the customer’s home in a millisecond. Instead, business erect as many barriers as they possibly can, whether it’s a big ‘copyrighted’ sign across a picture, an overly complex signup/payme page, or the somewhat convoluted iTunes-model, where it really is easier to pay than to pirate.

But in the light of evolution, these barriers are bound to be broken! The same reason why gold is no longer a form of payment, because it’s really heavy and annoying to handle, the world of commerce has a way of evolving towards something easier and easier and easier, until finally I pay by waving a magic wand (eh RFID chip) across a panel.

Let’s get back to embroidery. The problem is two-fold. 1. fragmentation, because any solution that I am about to propose will not get blanket acceptance. 2. the silly notion that selling designs, which seems like the most valuable thing an embroiderer has to offer (actual IP), is something that should be done in a direct B2C relationship. In the light of consumers constantly wanting to break barriers, this offering of valuable IP seems like an industry-defeating purpose.

So what are possible solutions?

• consolidation & protection. Basically the iTunes model, where everything is placed behind a secure window that can preferably only be accessed via a specific device (my personal belief is that anything bits & bytes will eventually be free as that is not where the real value lies).
• selling designs via local shops. If the problem is distribution, why not partner with local shops that keep your designs behind bars and just print out the end-product for consumers.
• selling designs via the machines that produce needlework. No idea what they are called, but they have a strong incentive to keep their machines being used and have a direct line to consumers.

I’m sure any of the above is a solution with problems, but my point is the following:

• Piracy will continue to exist and will become worse if you make it easy for people to pirate.
• Consumer products evolve in a fashion that keeps pushing out inefficiencies and piracy is one of the quickest ways online to remove these inefficiencies.
• The only way to prevent privacy is to not distribute anything that can be distributed via bits & bytes.

Case in point: the idiot that just walked into an Apple store and jailbroke every damn iPhone 4 on display.

Last point: I am not advocating piracy. I run a company myself, I have a business degree, and I believe in getting paid for your work. But I do believe silly strategies deserve to get punished. And there are plenty, plenty, plenty of them that I have mentioned on this blog over the years.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. The Internet does not make much sense… On pricing digital goods and other illogicalities
2. Yo, ho! Lessons from Piracy for industry dynamics
3. The case against software piracy
4. When analogies don't work
5. The Poor Man’s Business Model—How Out-of-the-Box thinking can generate tremendous value for customers

• Intellectual Property Protection (IPP)
• Revenues
• and Operations

Revenues is a straightforward concept and reflects market potential, market share, and business-model. Operations can also mean business-model as that clearly affects your operations, it also concerns the team, and it very much concerns *the last mile*—a very detailed understanding of how your product comes of the “factory line” and goes into a customers hands (every step and every screw has to be planned out). And IPP, well IPP is something special.

Intellectual Property Protection refers to legal and other ways that you protect the innovation and knowledge that is built within your company and its people. It is not as straightforward as simply taking out a patent, copyright, or trademark, though those are usually the first avenues that investors will pursue when talking to you about IP. IPP can just as much come from keeping information tacit—inside the heads of your team—, developing systems that spread an innovation across many parts—e.g. the way technology companies prevent copying from factories they outsource production to, by only giving them parts to produce, but not the whole—, another systematic answer could be deep vertical integration, which ensures a higher quality of products and services than can be replicated by vertically smaller competitors (a strategy pursued by Apple and Starbucks), and last but not least: speed—in some industries it pays to just scale very quickly, rather than build a protective base around IP (a contrast between e.g. web and medicine).

But let’s get real for a second. You’re an inventor, you developed something new. The most obvious path to pursue is a patent. The first issue is cost, because taking out a patent is not cheap. Basically, by filing a patent in your country, you can protect yourself for a while because there is a period, 1-2 years, I believe, where you are filing it and it can serve as a type of legal instrument to prevent other companies from filing a similar patent. But in the end, you have to shell out maybe €5000 per country to protect your invention internationally—and those costs do not cover the legal cost or protecting a patent once it’s being breached. Let’s get real x 2: you’re a startup and while your technology may be innovative, it may not be what the market needs (which can relate to actual taste, but also to cost, to regulatory issues, etc.) and that means that your patent, if you decide to take it out, may not be worth squat. Let’s get real x 3: your invention may not be unique, at least not in its current form, and pursuing a patent in that case is not even feasible.

So practically speaking, what do you do? Just to be clear, I don’t have the final answer to this, though it is something I am constantly thinking about as a potential risk in our, a technology startup. So my interpretation and approach are entirely my own, but I am writing this to start a discussion more than to give the final answer.

The answer to me is all about strategy. IP protection has to make sense in the context of a longer term business strategy, long term meaning to me longer than 2 years and preferably longer than 5 (if you have an actual patent and it has market value as well, you have over a decade of protection). And IP, just like a business, is something that can be split up to cover different areas related to supply, to the manufacturing, to the end-product, to the service, etc. So the more broad and comprehensive your way of protecting your intellectual value is, the less it can actually be replicated by your competitors.

All IP concerns aside, it is sometimes of benefit to not protect the whole value chain. This is true in our business, which I will write about some other time, where we can split up our technology into core-components that are integrated into new solutions which act as a platform for more solutions. Locking off that whole chain is perhaps of some benefit, but in some ways we would like to have people innovate in their respective areas and for us to focus on developing better products out of that. My point is that IP protection should be seen as something that can be shifted to those areas most critical to your business and that new development in your industry is not necessarily something to be scared of. In the end, we are in the product business and if we can produce superior solutions for customers that outweighs comprehensive IP solutions.

So the conclusion is, even if you are developing a product that is not entirely novel, there are places in the value chain where you can still develop an IP solution. And if you are developing novel solution, it has advantages on both the supply and the market side, to not make your IP too restrictive and thus diminish your product potential.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Peter Rip's advice on "how to double your valuation" + Microsoft IP Ventures program = some thoughts
2. Thoughts about Tech IT Easy, inspired by my time in Paris
3. The Poor Man’s Business Model—How Out-of-the-Box thinking can generate tremendous value for customers
4. The Euro vs. Dollar double gambetto for high tech corporations
5. Dassault Systèmes soon to turn to B-to-C

Sunk costs are part of reality. Every decision you make comes at the cost of not doing another one (opportunity cost) and as soon as you make a choice and invest in it, that money / energy is sunk / gone. The thing that counts then is to evaluate both the context under which the decision was made and the outcome of that decision. While it makes sense to not include sunk costs in a financial decision-making formula, a negative outcome does require taking pause before making new investments. Perhaps this is a European attitude to things, or a risk-averse one, but much of our thinking about forecasts is based on looking at past performance.

What matters most then is the context, and this, in a startup environment, is rather a complex affair. I’m going to draw some analogies with rocket building in the early 1900s, producing art (at any point in time), and staring at goats here. Art is, I believe, a calling that is very difficult to quantify. It is very strong amongst people that seem to be bad at everything else—just based on my own experience. In this case, you have no past performance to base future performance on. And art being a fluid craft where aberrations of the status quo seem to produce some interesting results (but also at terrible odds), it is nearly impossible to predict the future of such an enterprise. Rocket building in the early history of rocket building suffered from similar dangers, in that no one had done it before and it required cracking a great number of eggs before reaching the moon.

All of these are sunk costs that may or may not lead to greatness, and what I take issue with is to then ignore sunk costs in making future decisions. At what point is it justified to ignore sunk costs and at what point isn’t it? If the “staring at goats” division in the army spent half a century, eh, staring at goats, you could argue that it’s an investment in the future, but you could also argue that it’s a foolish enterprise—just for fun, I tried staring at the back of the heads of a few people standing in front of me in a supermarket, I did make a few scratch an (imaginary) itch themselves upon my specific mental request, but I can’t say that this “sunk cost” was a reason to invest some more energy into it.

When we made a financial plan for our startup, we didn’t give much thought to making the wrong decision, though that is a very important factor to consider at this stage. It is nearly impossible not to make a wrong decision when you’re building a rocket to go to a place no one’s gone before. What we did do were two things: 1. we researched as much as we could of the environment we were heading into and the tools & reality we had to work with. 2. Every, and I mean *every* decision that had to be made that involved a financial or time investment was scrutinised as much as possible beforehand. But… both research and execution can be flawed in that not all information may be clear—especially regulatory stuff can be a maze to travel through, as can understanding a science or technology—and execution depends on both good information and good people to execute. And the fact is, I believe with any startup, that we have incurred certain costs that can be considered sunk and gone. When we make the plan for the next stage, we will have to ignore those investments, as painful as they have been.

I’m a great believer in the lean startup. This comes from my father, whose whole life philosophy is based on a Ghandhiesque lifestyle that involves discipline, routines, and a leanness when it comes to living and working. I can’t say that this is exactly the way I want to live my life, but I do believe that the opposite, coming from an abundant lifestyle and trying to make good decisions, is more than often a formula for failure. Entrepreneurs and their startups should to a certain degree remain hungry so that the decisions they make are made with the desire to improve life. If you see the amount of hurdles that are presented to startups everywhere, you know that this attitude of keeping startups hungry is shared by many people.

A part of this leanness in decision-making is what I discussed before: scrutiny, scrutiny, scrutiny, among many a step of the way. But I have to frankly admit that this scrutiny can lead to a near bureaucratic way of doing business, which, to me, seems quite incompatible with creating great innovations that require some significant dreams. Dreams are your mind processing information in funny and interesting ways, and if there was an accountant sitting in the back of your head telling you to not dream this and that because it costs too much, it wouldn’t be much of a dream.

That brings me back to the role of sunk costs in decision making. One must be allowed to make mistakes when engaging on an enterprise. It’s quicker to learn from a mistake than to try to constantly prevent it. I’ve also been thinking quite a bit on the role of subsidies in early stage startups and the chance they present to make these mistakes. That, however, should be the topic for a future post.

My conclusion thus is that while entrepreneurship is a serious business, there can be little great ideas without some (in many cases considerable) room for experimentation. How you quantify this, I think, remains subjective. It can’t be Google’s 80-20 rule, where 20% of an employee’s time is spent on his own ideas. When you start, it should more likely be 50-50, with 50% being aimed at making good decisions and the other 50% at pursuing the dream that make those decisions have meaning.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. CIOs/Consultants: An insight into making better software/hardware/IS/networks investment decisions
2. An e’Diary part 1 – on the decision of becoming an entrepreneur
3. Why do startups fail?
4. Minutes of the IE-Club lecture at Microsoft France on European Rising Stars of the Internet
5. Dassault Systèmes CEO Bernard Charlès @ Capital IT

He entered. The last ever retail-clerk left on earth. A wide smile on his face, from years of practice, a swing in his step from his regular work-outs. All part of the routine.

The camera-system, also the lighting system of the place, followed his every step—one tiny camera in every tiny light-bulb, giving combined resolutions beyond that of any screens in use today and filming whatever was in the store with more dimensions than the holographic output to date would require. As he reached the music-rack, the one closest to the door, the one most geared towards impulse buying, he passed the security threshold and the system was forced to react—was he an intruder or an insider? Always a fun game to play with this flaky system… He passed the test and personalised systems started turning on all around him.

It started with the music-rack, a 50 metre (150 feet) long pathway surrounded by holograms of artists’ heads performing—sometimes in group-form, if it was a band—and tiny beams triggering the sub-dermal speakers behind his ears to play a song, just right for his mood and of course just out in the charts that week. He sometimes felt he was his best customer, because he rarely left that isle without purchasing at least one song. Another credit down from his, well , limitless credits that he could spend on these things. One thing caught his eye, the Beatles hologram was slightly off-colour, the yellows not quite as yellow as they should be. He knew banging the holographic projector would only make it worse, so he made a mental note to call the mechanic, who could probably calibrate it from his home office.

Next up, the movie isle. He loved how movies had evolved over the years to become a hybrid of a blockbuster movie with great effects, a great story-line that was essentially limitless and could be changed by the viewer as he or she consumed the movie. The movie isle was a mini-experience of such a thing, also targeting his past taste, his current mood, as well as plenty of other variables of course. The result was that as he moved onto the platform, he saw Disney-bunnies playing in the grass around him, and walked along a couple of prehistoric hunters in their furry outfits with, in the distance, their attractive female mates waving at them and cheering as they got closer. He could smell the food as he drew closer, another marketing gimmick, and he was happy that after this came the food isle.

At this point, it should be said the last retail store in the world (also the name of the store) was in fact a great big mall. The difference to other stores that came before? It was run by a single man and everything else was automated or remote-controlled. A consumer would enter and would first be entertained through music and movies, and could then choose to fulfil his primal needs: food, hygiene, etc. The second-smallest section in this store that had everything was the electronics section. People basically had electronics implanted into their bodies or they ran everything off a terminal. There was no hardware differentiation, everything had already been invented, and every software could run on the hardware that people owned from the day they became an adult or when their parents gave them permission. The smallest section of this store was the payment area, in that there was none. Why pay when every credit you need is stored on your person and you can just swipe the product you want and get it?

The clerk had said his goodbyes to the women in his personal film and started down the food isle. Again, a moving platform, on which he could sit this time, with choices flicking across the tables next to him, sushi-style, until he identified his favourite, grabbed it, and munched it down. The platform, measuring his progress and seeing that there were no impatient customers trying to get by, basically came to a standstill, allowing him to eat and enjoy.

This was a typical start of the day and arguably he had the best job in the world. The rest of the time would be spent on support, on dealing with customers that “didn’t get it,” take care of the technical issues that arose even in his technology heaven, and, even, doing some sales, though that was highly unlikely with the kind of data computers already had on consumers, making every product suggestion the perfect one.

The clerk didn’t care where his customers came from or where they went, but he suspected that they lived very much like he did, in an overcrowded apartment block with a big postal area designed specifically to receive all the UPS shipments people ordered online or in his store (mail and those inferior small postal boxes were out-innovated years ago).

The first customer came in and he smiled in anticipation of having to do absolutely nothing, while the customer spent at least 20% of his disposable income that month. Typically, people only came in once a month, if ever, just to get that personal, immersive touch that systems at home and elsewhere would never be able to replicate.

Welcome to the last retail store on earth.

This story was inspired by a recent Macworld article on comic stores vs. iTunes, my blogging on food and retail, and thinking about the future of the physical retail store. Pictures courtesy of the movies “Clerks” and “Thomas in Love.”

Prefer to have me blog in fantasy format? Let me know and I’ll continue to do so!

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. CeBit 2010: On 3D technology and its commercial potential
2. When analogies don't work
3. The Poor Man’s Business Model—How Out-of-the-Box thinking can generate tremendous value for customers
4. iPhone's app strategy and its implications for other smart phones
5. The role of the internet for the retail of *physical* goods.

Here’s a list of signals a startup might want to send out (I will discuss these further below):

1. The quality of your idea/prototype/product (the whole range of what your startup is centred around)
2. The quality of the team
3. The quality of your associations
4. Your legal status as a company
5. Your financial situation
6. The satisfaction-quotient of your customers
7. The speed of growth, which is really a component of ‘quality’
8. Your location & office

I kind of threw a few in there, as you can perhaps tell, because for instance some signals can be bundled together into tangible vs. intangible signals, as well as technology, people, financial, legal, etc. You can of course also split op signals into external—to the outside world—and internal—to your co-workers or board.

Why does any of this matter? On a basic level, because we all care about showing signs of being good at something (and starting a business is a highly personal thing in which individuals determine the direction such a venture takes), and more practically, because startups are about bringing ideas to the world that do not exist yet.

Signals are about increasing your worth in the eyes of someone else. To go back to the list, the first one, product, should be obvious: either create a kick-ass product or find a kick-ass customer that really needs your product (the latter is more realistic).

No. 2, the team, is trickier, though still crucial. It’s about getting the right mix of people in a company; people that have different educational backgrounds, possibly different genders, different ages, different networks, etc. It’s tricky because any relationship risks becoming a liability if people don’t match (that’s a big IF). And because getting quality people doesn’t always come easy, either because you can’t afford them or because the type of quality you need cannot be measured on paper or elsewhere.

Three, associations are pretty straightforward. If I have a board-member that has a good reputation, that opens doors. If I have partners in a market that is my target market, that kicks ass. If I can stamp logos of companies on my product that already have a name, that’s great marketing. It’s not rocket-science and the only thing that is required is to make these kinds of connections happen, usually through the quality of your pitch, your product, and your team-members, each of which comes with their own network.

Four, legal status, is not so straightforward. For many companies, having LTD written next to their name is a sign that they reached a certain stage. But in of itself it means nothing, only if it actually makes sense from an accounting point of view. So this is actually something that I don’t think should be up to the entrepreneur, but to an accountant and tax-lawyer. Having LTD or equivalent next to your name is still sweet of course (though not if it costs you 1000s of dollars/euros to set up and you haven’t written your business-plan yet…). Another legal status symbol is having a patent or a trademark. Both are valuable only in certain situations and require a serious strategic analysis beforehand, not least because it is so expensive to maintain (between 6000 – 100,000s for a patent & that doesn’t include the legal cost of going to court over a dispute), but because if you haven’t done your homework, you could be spending money on protection that isn’t worth a damn. Legal signals always require the help of experts, which is why lawyers will, for better or worse, always be around.

Five, the finances, has consequences on so many things that it’s impossible to summarise it well. What kind of company do you have if you can’t pay your employees, if the effort you put into it isn’t generating any cash-flow, etc.? The answer is simply a bad one. Other positive signals here are having a high profile investor on board or, preferred by most companies, a high paying customer or 100.

Six, your customer, should really be number one. Again, what kind of company do you have if you don’t have happy customers? It’s not impossible that this is the case at the start, but there should always be room for making customers happy—interesting story about how Zappos decided to sell to Amazon because its stakeholders thought Zappos was investing too much time/money in increasing customer satisfaction. There will always be conflicts in regards to customer satisfaction vs. financial satisfaction. Another often underestimated problem is that one happy customer doesn’t translate to another. This is the topic of a little book called ‘Crossing the Chasm,’ which is about going from early adopters to the mainstream, different types of customers with very different values and expectations!

Seven, speed, is one that I don’t like, but became aware of through my studies of entrepreneurship. It’s crazy how much media-attention fast growing companies get, as well as how much government-attention. If you can grow to 20+ employees in 2-3 years, it wouldn’t surprise me if politician X gives you a call to thank you for the good you’re doing the economy. If you grow to 1000, the queen/president will probably shake your hand. On the other hand, there are plenty of situations, the internet boom & bust comes to mind, where speed is actually a detriment and it would’ve been better for the entrepreneur(s) to take better care of the foundations of the company (you know, building a profitable business), rather than focussing on the status of having a ginormous team. A debatable point, I know…

Finally, location, well who doesn’t want an office looking out at Manhattan or, in my case, some tropical beach somewhere (I don’t really need the office…)? Who doesn’t want to be able to invite clients and show them your shiny office, with plants, fountains, and beautiful people everywhere? As I hopefully made clear, sending out signals is fine and good, but it should always be weighed against what you give up and if you actually need it. Kind of the same thinking that should be employed when deciding whether to get a new Apple product or Aston Martin—will those shiny objects really make you more desirable to the opposite sex? Well, maybe a little

That was a little braindump. Hope you enjoyed it.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. My biggest nightmare if I ran a startup, and what I would probably do about it
2. An e’diary part 2: what are the responsibilities of an entrepreneur
3. 37 Signals : Digital Natives Leadership in action
4. "The knowledge-creating company" — does it work in practice?
5. 10 reasons you should start a startup before turning 25

I think in very a short time humanity will have to make a choice regarding the path that computer interfaces take: allow them to enslave us a la Terminator (or financial algorithms) or to enhance our innate capabilities. This video [embedded below] makes my new Macbook Pro feel like outdated technology.

Like

Unlike

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. My computing context and what I think about the iPad
2. "The Art of Computer Programming": Donald E. Knuth on computer science and its maturity
3. The iPhone's hardware and software capabilities are misaligned
4. MacSaber, a killer app
5. Apple releases MacBook pro powered with Intel Core Duo 2

Many thanks to @flapinta for pointing this one to me (french link). What a revelation !

Isaac Getz is is a professor of Idea, Involvement, and Innovation Management at ESCP Europe. He has been Visiting Professor at Cornell University, Stanford University and at the University of Massachusetts. He graduated in Computer Science, then obtained a M.Sc. in Management Science, a Doctorate in Psychology and a post-doctoral degree (HDR) in Management.

I usually don’t spend too much time providing information on the business thinkers I quote, but considering the content, I just wanted to make sure Isaac Getz is not mistaken with some kind of hippie smoking ganja on a beach in Goa.

With Liberating Leadership : How the initiative-Freeing Radical Organization Form Has Been Successfully Adopted (pdf) Isaac Getz received the accolade of French Management Union of engineers (SYNTEC) with the Academic Prize of Management (french link again).

This 26 pages essay provides us with further evidence that methods of management that arose in the 50s (Chris Argyris and Douglas McGregor), have been successfully applied by dozens of world class companies and market leaders in their area (Toyota, Southwest Airlines, USAA, Avis, WLGore, QuadGraphics, FAVI in France etc …) to foster employees engagement. The amazing thing is how they align with the management principles that are consubstantial to Enterprise 2.0.

In a time where leadership has never been so critical for businesses, some lessons to remember from this essay :

The key to F-Form organisations

Chris Argyris and Douglas McGregor researches converge in the 50s to the conclusion that traditional organization forms (organisation silos, command and control type of management) lead to failure.

In the 90s many companies such as Southwest Airlines or Toyota illustrated successfully Argyris and McGregor preferred organisation type : what Getz calls the F-form. In F-form organisations, employees have complete freedom and responsibility to take actions that they (not their bosses) decide is best.

Getz decided to study these companies to answer this obvious question : how come this type of organisation, yielding impressive economic results, have not been more generally adopted throughout the business world ?

What he found out : there is a common factor in all the companies where F-form of organisation prevail : liberating leadership. Enterprise without this type of leadership just can’t adopt this type of organisation.

All studied leaders understand the defining function of the organizational form they were building, to allow complete freedom and responsibility of employee’s action.

Nourishing people three universal needs

McGregor redefined the How to motivate people ? conundrum into a “How to build an environment where people self motivate themselves“.

Edward L. Deci and Richard Ryan studied organisations and proposed a self-determination (wikipedia) and work motivation (pdf) theory. This identifies a framework of non controlling environmental factors required for self-motivation : relatedness, competence and autonomy.

Beyond these environmental factors, they identified three universal needs that, once fulfilled, lead to self motivation :

1. need of being treated intrinsically equal,
2. need of growth
3. need of self-direction.

Creating an environment for intrinsic equality

Robert Townsend (CEO of Avis) published the Up the organisation best seller in 1967. Motto : once you’re in charge, remove everything you didn’t like as a subordinate and implement what you missed.

Robert was an admirer of Management Theory Y by Douglas McGregor. Alike other liberating leaders, he proceeds in what could seem to be an empirical fashion, adopting work practices that help treating people intrinsically equals and removing the ones that does not.

Principle thoroughly adopted for instance by Cristobal Conde, CEO of SunGard :

How do people get recognized? How do you establish a meritocracy in a highly dispersed environment? The answer is to allow employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart

It’s all about listening

This is a very strong and common trait of liberating leaders : stop controlling and start listening. There are some telling examples in Isaac Getz essay but the most impressive I know of probably is Paul Chambers CEO of Cisco (though not in the essay) :

I had to move from a command-and-control leader to a collaborative one.” Collaborative leadership means “letting go” by involving others in decision making, listening to ideas.

The are good reasons behind the listening key. Jeff Westphal CEO of Vertex provides the Wisdom of Crowds one in Getz’s essay. But the main one is that when people genuinely are listened to, they feel intrinsically equal.

Creating an environment for people to grow and self direct

With all the studied companies and organisations, Getz’s team has witnessed a strong focus on making sure the company encourage self-direction. Among other examples, the essay explains how USAA (insurance company) does not measure the performance of the call center on the number of calls handled per hours but on the number of customer problems solved during the first call.

What really is interesting here is that the company provides the guidance (take care of the customers by fixing its problem in one call) rather than the control (count the number of calls addressed by employee). This did not prevent USAA to top Business Week 2007 and 2008 (2nd in 2009) customer service ranking US wide.

Fostering culture-keepers

Another common principle with liberating leaders : they are the culture keepers. There is a strong will to foster this. We live the culture (Terri Kelly CEO of WLGore – link to her video).

And there is a will just as strong to make sure nothing can damage it. Getz gives the example of FAVI, an amazing french company building brass gear forks auto parts. This company has experienced a 3 decade long double digit free cash flow and solid margins, moving from 0 to 50% of market share in an industry where its European competitors are, at best, at a loss, and in most cases has disappeared.

In the 25 years of the company, Jean François Zolbrist (great french blog post by @pmeance including a video of JFZ explaining FAVI principles) didn’t dismiss people whose job became useless. But he did promptly fire 3 people for malfeasance as they were not treating people intrinsically equals.

This brings us back to how Brad Bird protects innovation in Pixar by getting rid of passive-agressive people.

Main values

All the leaders of the studies company share the same values :

1. Freedom and responsibility values. As Bil Gore said : “Freedom is is the great motivating power of individual human beings”.
2. Creativity : A survey from IBM’s Institute for Business Value shows that CEOs value one leadership competency above all other : creativity. One of the observed main feature of their creativity, is the ability to rephrase problems to find solutions more easily.
3. Wisdom : The ability to contextualise and the reluctance to fundamentally attribute errors to individuals

Be nice

Last remarkable trait of Liberating leaders, they make sure their F-Form organisation are considerate not only with their employees but also with their suppliers, customers and partners.

This brings us back (again !) to E. Goldratt definition of any company goals : be profitable, take care of the customers and take care of the employees.

By doing so, the F-Form companies develop trustful long term relationships.

A remarkable essay which sheds a great light on the “mysteries” of many successful and exemplary companies. It perfectly complements Gary Hamel best seller The Future of Management.

Now the questions : have you witnessed such type of leadership ? Have you experienced it ? How to implement such type of leadership in an organisation ? (My hint : it starts with E and finishes with 2.0). Let us know.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Enterprise 2.0 : less control and more leadership
2. 37 Signals : Digital Natives Leadership in action
3. The management toolkit for an interconnected world
4. Beta equals Innovation, or another reason why I like the Business of Software
5. How to tell when Enterprise 2.0 is not appropriate for your organisation

As Enterprise 2.0 activists, we keep on trying to sell Enterprise 2.0 as the ideal solution for your organisation.

But to be completely honest, depending on your company objectives, values and culture it may just not work.

10 principles your company may have adopted that will make Enterprise 2.0 implementation counter productive …

1. Your company is not comfortable with innovation

It’s not a matter of being conservative, it just that your company culture loves it when nothing change.

Managers and employees alike have been doing the same routine job for the last ten years, they don’t want any innovation to emerge and disrupt the nice and quiet day-to-day work in real life business.

2. It is business critical to foster politics

Politics happens in any social organisations. So if you master politics, you master the organisation.

Your company loves it when people in the hierarchy feels they are powerful. This is the raison d’être of your enterprise. They have dedicated parking spaces, business card for travels, dedicated secretary, guaranteed pay rise and many other advantages.

Each department rates its own importance with the number of people they have and the cash flow they burn : that’s the way it is in real life business.

3. Strong managers are pivotal in the organisation

In your company managers have to be tough men, there’s no wimp in here. They have to be able to kick the butt of people lacking motivation to reach the company objectives.

They make it clear who is the boss during the very long meetings whose agenda is decided on the fly by the manager.

In addition, managers make sure any bottom-up or top down information go through them so they can filter and make sure they stay in control. A proof of how important they are : they spend 20% of their time fighting with their email box.

Taylor and Ford made it clear that’s the way you have to run your lazy resources to get the job done in real life business.

4. Employees are engaged or else …

The Company needs the engagement from employees. So either they engaged, either our managers kick their butt (refer to point 3).

Employees have to behave. They’ve been hired to produce and apply the methods, processes and strategy coming from above.

They are not here to ask silly questions that would disrupt the regular process.

It is OK for strong managers to take ownership of any of their employee successful contribution : this is what we call team spirit in the real life business.

5. The IT department defines the organisation

Nowadays you have to be VERY careful with IT security issues. As a result, IT has naturally emerged as the most important department in your organisation.

It is very handy for the IT department that all different department (Marketing, Sales, Professional Services, R&D, Product definition, IT) has its own hermetic silo : then we can ensure that all communication go through the Strong manager : this help preventing any security issue in real life business.

6. Collaboration is dangerous

In a similar fashion, collaboration is DANGEROUS. One could exchange information with somebody from another department without going through the manager. The latter would then be terribly upset and upsetting managers goes against your company core values.

Besides, it could happen that employees share information that is not 100% VALIDATED & CORRECT. Can you envision the disaster ? Your company can. Better be safe in real life business.

7. Employees need to know where to find stuff

In every company, people are losing an amazing amount of time searching for information. Not in yours, because employees HAVE to know where things are.

The IT department have structured what there is to know in directories in different network drives and in Real Time Database Management Systems. All your employees have to know is the name and location of every bit of information they are supposed to work with.

Who needs knowledge management system in real life business with disciplined and closely monitored employees ?

8.High Fear / Low Trust

In such a dangerous world as ours you don’t want to nurture a trust culture. You need your employees to be wary of any person they have not been working with for at least 5 years.

Besides, you make sure that any mistake is severely punished and ridiculed so that people don’t lose other people time with any idea/document they are not 200% sure of in real life business.

9. By IT workers for PC users

Your company is developing software. To be run on computer. Nowadays every man and his dog can use a computer.

So why should your teams ask any question to the customers and question the way they use your product ? Asking questions to your users is the best way to make them think you are clueless and lose market share.

To communicate with the customer, a couple of annual official corporate statements and ad campaigns are the way we do in real life business.

10. Business Methodologies are just a way for consultants to make big bucks

What’s the whole story with this Getting Thing Done fad ? How about these Agile projects ? Hey did they use Scrum to build the Pyramids or the Ford T ? Let’s be serious for a minute. Your company has been in the business for 30 years and it has been doing things the same way ever since.

Why should it change ? As if the world has seen any dramatic change since then. Hexadecimal numbers still go from 0 to F : there’s nothing new under the sun.

And don’t even mention business schools studies or academics : none has been interested in your organisation lately. A proof of how little they know about real life business.

Conclusion

If any of the above is true for your company, then Implementing Enterprise 2.0 is very risky.

It encourages collaboration and knowledge sharing for employees to be more efficient.

It fosters weak links, networking, questioning and associating : there could be the risk of some people discussing the same problem from different perspectives and come with some ideas or even an innovation.

It fosters employees engagement and helps leveraging flow of information to create value.

How scary. Better be safe : in that case make sure you stay out of Enterprise 2.0.

Can you think of any other principles that would make Enterprise 2.0 a no-go for an organisation (in real life business) ?

Like

Unlike

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Enterprise 2.0 : less control and more leadership
2. Five Elevator pitches for Enterprise 2.0 adoption
3. Toward Enterprise 2.0 with Cécile Demailly
4. Enterprise 2.0 : the end of office politics ?
5. Enterprise 2.0 Forum – the 10 keys of successful projects

Bertrand Duperrin makes an interesting analogy in his post Will Adam Smith drive business in the future ? His take :

(…) Opposing a top-down and directive model an emerging relying on the existence of an “ invisible hand” that, in the same way as Adam’s Smith theory in economics, would make people personal actions and choices contribute to a collective purpose without the need of organizing anything.

I guess the difference between the enterprise and the market is that within the former, people (ideally) are working with the clear goal of collectively creating value and making the company richer. While in the latter the goal is to individually create value to make oneself richer.

Bertrand then sets a table comparing Enterprise 1.0 (strict), 2.0 (anarchy) and Rationalized 2.0 (ideal organisation).

My take : Bertrand’s Rationalized 2.0 is Enterprise 2.0 with a strong and clear leadership. The invisible hand in Adam Smith Enterprise is the leadership.

Leadership is doing the right thing while management is doing the things right (Peter Drucker).

Usual suspects 2.0

Offering more organisational freedom to employees is suicidal if it’ not carried out under a strong leadership. Looking at the usual suspects in terms of bottom up organisations these companies have strong principles.

Whole Foods Market have strong purposes and causes that are underlined by Gary Hamel essay The Future of Management.

Cisco‘s CEO John Chambers has completely revamped Cisco to build the whole organisation around collaboration as main core value. This transformation has been carried out based on five pillars, first of which being change of leadership style.

WL Gore Terri Kelly CEO on her company organisation :

WL Gore has guiding principles : freedom, fairness, commitment and waterline. this creates engagement, empowers team et voila : business results. People are leaders in our company only if there are people to follow them. (…) Leaders at WL Gore are not bosses. They earn their leadership, they have followers, they live the culture, and they explain rationale behind their decision.

37Signals is another great example of an amazingly successful company with strong principles. No-nonsense, get things done, technology alignment on objectives, think small, do less but do better, financial independence, etc … Strong principles are so pervasive in the company culture that they even infuse the web development framework (RubyOnRails) they have created : Convention over Configuration is the motto being the whole framework.

Agree on what to do

These guiding principles act as clear boundaries and define the frame within which employees are given freedom to organise their activity. They provide visibility and guidance.

Since the foundations of the collaboration the enterprise and the employees agreed on upfront are principles on what to do rather than processes on how to do, they naturally give more freedom to employees and are a bedrock for trust.

Organise and Control Vs Lead and Engage

Thinking about it, this is probably what scares the most leaders out of enterprise 2.0. It is not possible to hide : they need to show a strong and clear leadership to frame the collaborative work. There is no workaround if they want to fully benefit from bottom-up organisation that empowers employees.

Leadership is not granted. As Terri Kelly reminds us : it is earned. Organising control is dead easy. Leading to engage people is not.

This brings us to the first questions an organisation should ask itself on its way to 2.0 : do we have a strong and clear leadership ? What are the principles and purposes on top of which we want to build our whole collaborative environment ? Are these clear and strong enough for our employees to take ownership ?

Like

Unlike

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Liberating Leadership, intrinsic equality and world-class businesses
2. How to tell when Enterprise 2.0 is not appropriate for your organisation
3. 37 Signals : Digital Natives Leadership in action
4. Five Elevator pitches for Enterprise 2.0 adoption
5. How Enterprise 2.0 nurtures employees engagement

I think a value should always be weighed against the value of not having it, particularly when it’s hard to put a numerical value on something. This something is clearly Facebook and even more clearly Twitter, which still doesn’t compute for 100%. Why I love Twitter would be like saying why I love my dog or my Bengalese tiger, it’s hard to place a value on love. Not to say that I love Twitter, but there are few things that bother me about it. I tolerate it and it has nestled in a comfortable (but small) place in my life.

There are again ramblings against the status quo, or rather the status pecunia—the status of wealth. A few years ago, it was Twitter which seemed to show the Fail Whale more often then the “what are you doing now?” page. It lead to Friendfeed and various other me-too services that were dropped as soon as Twitter got its act together. There are again ramblings about evicting Facebook from people’s lives, though I’m here to tell you that if you want to have any kind of social life online, you’re probably better of keeping that account, though perhaps with less naked pictures or whatever you are worried about losing.

The value of Facebook is that it allows for richer connections between people that do not see each other every day. I care for my high-school friends that live in the UK, France, or Brazil, but since I can’t see them everyday, it adds value to my life to know that they are getting a kid or getting married. It does not add value to my life if people choose to leave Facebook, like some of my friends did at first when they were overwhelmed by all this publicity (something blogging prepares you for). And I’m really glad Facebook doesn’t delete accounts permanently as when people change their mind (they usually do), their friends are again there waiting for them (life is too exhausting to be-/de-/re-friend friends like most of the internet forces you to do).

The value of Twitter is like that morning coffee that adds a little (but not everything) to the quality of the moment you’re experiencing. No, NO, let’s not equate the value like that. The biggest value of Twitter to me is actually pretty much the same one as Facebook’s. I met up with a friend in Denmark a few weeks ago, who is also on Twitter, and I was able to finish his sentences because I read about his experiences ON Twitter. To me Twitter is more like a Second Life than Secondlife(tm) is. It allows for quick streams about people you care about or you “follow” because you respect them. If I had intelligent displays running Twitter on my sunglasses, I would wear them all the time while walking through life, that is how second life Twitter has become to (some of) my relationships. My business partner is going to China this week and I would love for him to update his Twitter-account while there to keep me informed of the cool stuff he’s researching for us (mobile operators better start catching up to this dynamic).

So, what, WHAT, could possibly be the value of Neither? Such a leading way to pose that question, as I’m clearly not on that side of the fence. I’m sorry that many of my friends decide against Twitter accounts because they don’t see the value of it. Those are usually the people that I see once every 6 months and our conversations are less deep because, well, we still have to get through the superficiality of “how was your day? What are you up to?” Questions that Twitter & Facebook both ask. And I’m sorry if my friends decide not to use Facebook as it not only allows them to post their thoughts, but pictures of their Bengalese tigers or their latest trip to hell, and even status updates about Farmville, which I previously stated, was an imperfect way of showing of your virtual garden to your friends.

The value of Neither is a type of emptiness that may be good for meditation, but it is no longer how the world works. It’s like seeing my parents struggle with emails or internet banking when no one sends snailmail or goes to a physical bank anymore. The world without Facebook or Twitter no longer exists. I don’t care about privacy issue 1 or 0, because it’s really your business what you put on the internet and what you don’t and you should never put stuff on there that you don’t want people to know about. I care about connections and about the empowerment that they bring to interpersonal relationships.

I have met 80 people on Facebook that I never expected to see again after graduating from high school, from university, or from leaving the coolest job I had as a tween. I am so grateful to the site for that that if Zuck were here, I could kiss him. Facebook isn’t perfect, and we should protest against these imperfections until they are fixed. Whether we should leave social networks and abandon all the possibilities they have brought us, that is like starving yourself in protest against war: Nobody cares!

This post was brought to you by TigersInPoolsHellYES. Donate via the paypal button on the right.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. On making Global Package Delivery a little better [Weekend Ramblings]
2. Why Facebook will eventually fail
3. The Future of Television, Facebook it isn’t.
4. A (Sci-Fi inspired) vision of Facebook's (or equivalent) future
5. My favourite Facebook-app

OK, there’s nothing to do about software updates and I already give up.

Global package delivery, on the other hand… UPS was founded in 1907. That’s right, gentlemen & ladies, it is over ONE ZERO ZERO (purposefully emphasised) years old! That means that people have been carrying UPS parcels around on horses, then on Fords, on ships, on aeroplanes, and will most likely carry them to space also. Unlike regular mail, the Package Industry is here to stay as well, ladies and gentlemen, all thanks to you for ordering from places like Amazon every single day.

Now, I don’t mean to pick on UPS. I actually have a problem with FEDEX (founded 1973) this week and with DHL (a German company, founded 1969), both of which like telling me things on their website that aren’t true, or are true, but so incredibly late to publish that truth that it’s just a false truth.

Dear companies that I just mentioned: we are in the age of real-time. When my best friends go to the bathroom, I know about it 5 min. before they even think about it, that’s how quick Twitter is. Sadly, that doesn’t bring a hot new gadget into my life, like your great service does. I appreciate your service, it allows me to be lazy and order to Visa’s delight. But it’s meant to be a service of convenience, and I don’t consider having to drool over my doorbell-phone by any kind of definition, “a convenience.”

Here’s what happened with DHL: Package shipped on the 6th out of Germany. On the 7th, at 4:30 a.m., package left Germany heading for the Netherlands. I sent them a mail asking whether if it doesn’t arrive today, they ship on the weekends. No reply! At 20:00, I found out, that package has arrived for sorting at a sorting centre at 17:42. I decide to call the next day to ask whether they ship on the weekends. The kind person at DHL the Netherlands informs me that a. he has no idea where my package is and b. they do not ship on the weekends. 2 hours later, the doorbell rings. It’s the mailman, who works for TNT (the Dutch equivalent to DHL) with the package from DHL. Status on the website on the 8th: “7th of May, package has arrived for sorting at a sorting centre at 17:42.”

Here’s what happened with FEDEX: Package shipped on the 5th from the US. Paris then somewhere in the Netherlands on the 6th. Estimated delivery: on the 7th at 6 p,m. I’m home at 3:30 p.m. At 20:00 I get a message that FEDEX passed by my house at 14:55 p.m. and no one was home. Status: sadly FEDEX does not receive phone-calls on the weekend.

We need a change, we need that thing you do with the tracing, not to be restricted to when it arrives in parcel sorting centre 42. We need it to have an RFID chip in the parcel, which is connected to a GPS device in the truck, which at all times tells a satellite to send me a tweet of where exactly you are at what given time. And when I’m not home, I can tweet back to said truck to give notice, to save fuel, to save the planet, and/or to change the address to my work-address. Saves your time and mine and the planet’s.

This is not rocket-science. GPS exists (globally since 2000), RFID exists (required by Wal-Mart since 2005), real-time web exists (Twitter since 2006). Yet for some reason, in 2010, I still have to wait 10 hours for an update about something REAL & RELEVANT that happened 10 hours ago. Sigh.

OK, all ranted out now. Now go fix.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. The value of Twitter vs. the value of Facebook vs. the value of having Neither [weekend ramblings]
2. The Poor Man’s Business Model—How Out-of-the-Box thinking can generate tremendous value for customers
3. What would an Always-On Device look like? Do we even want it?
4. Please welcome Anand Kishore Raju, a new blogger on Tech IT Easy !!!
5. Thoughts about Tech IT Easy, inspired by my time in Paris

Every startup starts great, I think. You (and your team, if applicable) feels a sense of elevation, of engaging onto a route that brings rewards, wealth, and joy to future customers (of course the entrepreneur is usually the 1st customer). This hazy phase is necessary to get the necessary adrenaline for the rest of the trajectory. It’s like a warming up, the important difference being that the more you structure your plans during that phase, the more strategically you can dedicate energy to different steps & actions.

Continuing with the analogy of a run, we have reached the marathon phase. We’re running on the limits of our “bodies,” which contain what energy we have pumped in before, what survival strategies we researched, and what supplies we managed to take with us. Both in a marathon and in a startup the vision of the destinations should be strong. It starts with much socialising with other runners, perhaps with some personal trainers during the preparation stage. But eventually, we realise two things: there are lonely routes to run during that marathon. And eventually, it’s a race too and only a selected few can win.

So what am I learning during this marathon?
I may have mentioned this before, but I envisioned my role in the company as different then it is now. I drafted a contract for myself with a set of deliverables that relate a vision outlined in our business plan. One deliverable is keeping that business-plan updated as I know that these plans hold little value as static documents. But essentially, it’s about getting our product to a certain stage and our company to a certain stage, and that’s how I phrased it in my business-plan.

As a CEO, an important part is learning to let go of the definition of a “job” (singular). A CEO must be a generalist and be able to do a number of “jobs” (plural). Not to a great depth, but enough to get each member of the team to do their job well. That means that, in my company, I have to understand how our products are built and help build them. I have to understand design and help my designers. I have to understand marketing and help my team there. In the end, there’s three things to realise about being a CEO: a good percentage of your time is spent on people management and you have to learn to delegate a lot of things. And last but not least: the final responsibility is always yours! You can fire an employee for doing a bad job, but you are always to blame for the outcome. So there’s no excuse, ever!

A runner’s most important asset is his brain. In regular intervals, he has to observe his body and his environment and make a decision about what the best actions are at that moment. Going downhill = move faster. A long road to the next water-source = conserve your supplies. A runner close to you = know his and your strengths and weaknesses and decide whether to run faster, slower, or at normal speed.

The startup’s most important asset is leadership, which fulfils the same role as the brain during a marathon: evaluate internal resources and the environment and decide what step is best to take when.

I hope to have a few more general blog posts on entrepreneurship left in me. But for now, the sun is shining and the future looks bright. But we also need to conserve our supplies to the next water source, and run at sufficient speed to meet both our milestones and reach the finish.

All my entrepreneurship diary posts can be followed under the tag ‘Vincent’s eDiary.’ I don’t write about what we do as a company on purpose, but you can always ask in the comments or via the email address on the right.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. E’Ship Diary Part 4: what to pay attention to when starting a business
2. E’ship diary part 7: Gut Instinct vs. Calculation, or On Managing Uncertainty
3. E’ship diary part 5: project management and vision development in the face of ambiguity, technology and market risks
4. E’ship diary part 6: on the important matter of product design
5. An e’diary part 2: what are the responsibilities of an entrepreneur

Ever since the first time Andrew McAfee coined the term, the definition of Enterprise 2.0 has constantly evolved.

Arguably, the most appropriate has been : “The use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.”

Regardless of how good these definitions have been, none of them has given enough credit to a) the tight relationship between Enterprise 2.0 and Management and b) the reason why we need to adopt these social platforms.

Management

Management here is considered here in its most generic sense, i.e. applied to people, managers, knowledge, innovation, business, customer relationship, IT, communication or human resources.

This is a critical dimension since while importing social platforms from the Internet into the workplace, we also import an underlying electronic culture that profoundly impact the workplace organization.

Interconnected

We are passing from an era in which things were assumed to be controllable, able to be deconstructed and then assembled into a clear, linear, always replicable and thus static form, to an era characterized by a continuous flow of information.

(Jon Husband – Will Enterprise 2.0 drive management innovation)

In The Future Of Management, Gary Hamel (the most influential business thinker according to The Wall Street Journal) asks how relevant it is in the 21st century to use the same management techniques as the ones we used a century ago.

How appropriate these techniques are in a world where changes have never been so fast nor happening to such large a scale, where barriers of entry have never been so low, where strategy cycles are shrinking, and, last but not least, where customers and employees have never been so informed and interconnected.

In the conclusion of this book, Gary Hamel states that a) to survive in such an interconnected economy, companies have to be extremely adaptable and b) adaptable eco-systems are not reduced to mere vertical top bottom flow of information and processes but are peer-to-peer democratized flat systems.

Toolkit

Gary Hamel conclusion : Internet is the best metaphor for 21st century management.

The Internet happens to be the foundation of our interconnected world and Social Platforms have naturally emerged as the best way to connect people and get things done on the web.

This is the very reason why we HAVE to import these tools behind the firewall.

It is not because they are new, trendy or because our competitors have implemented it. It is because they have proved on the web to be the most appropriate tools to leverage a continuous flow of information in order to create value.

Definition

Hence the proposed Enterprise 2.0 definition : the management toolkit for organizations in an interconnected world.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Management Innovation : problems, facts and 10 lessons for the future
2. Liberating Leadership, intrinsic equality and world-class businesses
3. How Enterprise 2.0 fosters Knowledge Capture
4. Enterprise 2.0 : fostering knowledge management, innovation and productivity
5. 7 good software project management videocasts

God bless Jon Husband : he pointed me via a Twitter conversation to his telling blog post (Will Enterprise 2.0 drive management innovation) on Fast Forward blog, where he quotes Gary Hamel FAN-TAS-TIC book : The Future of Management.

To start with, Gary Hamel is not an obscure blogger or some kind of geek preparing the internet revolution. He has been ranked the most influential business thinker by the Wall Street Journal ahead of personalities such as Thomas Friedman or Bill Gates. Therefore, it won’t be as easy for corporate afficionados to dismiss his theories as it may be to dismiss Cluetrain Manifesto’s chapters by Chris Locke ou David Weinberger (regardless of how brilliant these are).

This is fascinating essay. Lucid, smart, driven by a relentless desire to find the truth and to help the reader find the one of his company.

Problems

Funnily enough, Gary Hamel asks the same question as Chris Locke : how relevant it is in the 21st century to use same management techniques defined by Taylor or Weber in a world where :

1. Change has never been so fast or happening to such a scale. Nowadays not only advantages erode rapidly but whole industries are crashing (airlines, music …)
2. Barriers of entry have never been so low because of deregulation and technologies. Therefore, companies are now facing ultra low cost competitors.
3. Internet offers a light speed disintermediation between producers and consumers
4. Strategy life cycle is shrinking. New Business is faster than ever
5. Customers (and employees !) have never been so well informed thanks to the internet and the amount of information available to them

Facts

Looking into these management issues, Gary Hamel analyses how management works today and how innovation prone it is. Well, not much since :

1. All companies gets obsessional about innovation and yet don’t apply any at management level
2. Right now, your company has 21st-century Internet-enabled business processes, mid-20th-century management processes, all built atop 19th-century management principles.
3. 19th century management will just not work to manage knowledge workers in a world-changing at such breathtaking space.
4. Management is extremely conservative because it is based on unchallenged beliefs and politics of people willing to keep their status, power and benefits
5. The only solution to survive and succeed in an ever-changing business environment is to be adaptable
6. You can not be adaptable if the whole company is controlled by a heavy and fossilized hierarchical chain of command. Adaptable eco-systems (life, markets, cities) are not reduced to mere vertical top bottom flow of information and processes but on peer-to-peer democratized flat systems

Use cases

The Future Of Management goes through different real life use cases and tell the remarkable stories of enterprise very famous world-wide for their amazing innovation ability.

WL Gore

Bill Gore left DuPont in 1958 to create a company (WL Gore) based on Douglas McGregor book The Human Side of Enterprise. Motto : make money and have fun. Which reads in terms of organisation :

• Small operating units
• No bosses but leaders that get things done and are excelling in team building
• Team free to fire its boss
• High Trust / Low fear environment
• Willing commitment instead of assignment
• 20% time to personal project.

In terms of quality of workplace :

For the 13th consecutive year, W. L. Gore & Associates has earned a spot on FORTUNE magazine’s list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For.” Only a dozen other workplaces have appeared in every edition of the rankings. The company, known for everything from waterproof, breathable GORE-TEX fabric to life-saving medical devices, is No. 13 on this year’s list, now posted at fortune.com/bestcompanies. (fibre2fashion)

Whole Food Market

WFM is the most profitable food retailer chain in the US according to their profit / sq foot ratio. 3000% increase in revenue between 1992 et 2007. Rules :

• Small units (up to 8 people)
• associates are empowered and accountable
• Trust and equity : executive can not earn more than 19 times of the lowest salary
• Strong purpose and common cause : quality and healthy food, local producers

Google

Again extremely innovative and rather successful company.

• Network of lateral communication
• Small work units (3 to 4)
• Position and hierarchy don’t win an argument.
• Grueling recruiting process
• Collaborative tools (MOM, MiscList)

10 Lessons

Out of the real life stories above, Gary’s extracts the following lessons for management innovation :

1. Management innovation is critical. Because systemic management brings advantages that are tough to replicate.
2. Principles matter. Whole Food Market is quite representative in this respect : love, community, trust transparency, mission are the principles the whole company has based its success on
3. The main obstacle to management innovation is the belief that there is no other way to manage an organisation. Ask : who benefits from the status quo ?
4. Management innovation redistributes power. When people are empowered (responsibilities, accountability) their job makes more sense and they are more likely to get more engaged and passionate about. And engaged and passionate people are happier and more productive
5. Costs of management innovation are more obvious than benefits. For instance, WL Gore cluster of factory plants sounds ridiculous in terms of costs savings for business orthodoxy. But in practice, it offers cross business learning to the people in the company. How to measure such intangible assets as adjacency, autonomy, agility, commitment ?
6. Management innovation that humanized work is irresistible : the three main case studies (Whole Food Market, WL Gore, Google) this book is based on are exhilarating examples on how empowering people fosters a grand slam in organisation success : innovation, profits, and employee engagement. This is leveraging Gary’s pyramid of human capabilities.
7. Experience managers are not the best in terms of innovation and MBA is an obstacle to management innovation. In all 3 real cases above, CEOs are graduated in computer science, philosophy and chemistry. As Gary Hamel puts it, not doing MBA, they are not been told what NOT to do. Which echoes the David Heinemeier Hansson presentation : Unlearn your MBA.
8. Small is the new big. All these companies have chosen to have small operating units
9. Manager is more a producer of the show rather than being the lead to quote Cristobal Conde.
10. Internet is the best metaphor of for 21st Century Management. This is where we go back to Jon’s insightful blog post :

Whether we like it or not, we are passing from an era in which things were assumed to be controllable, able to be deconstructed and then assembled into a clear, linear, always replicable and thus static form to an era characterized by a continuous flow of information. Because it feeds the conduct of organizations large and small, it is a flow that necessarily demands to be interpreted and shaped into useful inputs and outputs.

What’s next

If you have any interest in management, do yourself a real treat and read this book. It contains many questions that will help you rate your organization in terms of management innovation : very useful.

Surprisingly enough, this book concludes on the Internet as a metaphor for management. This is the perfect introduction to another Harvard Business Press release : Enterprise 2.0 new collaborative tools for your organization toughest challenges book by Andrew McAfee.

We are now faced with this chicken and egg question type of question : who was the first in the 2.0 landscape : Management 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 ? This has to be the subject of another blog post …

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. The management toolkit for an interconnected world
2. Enterprise 2.0 : fostering knowledge management, innovation and productivity
3. Enterprise 2.0 Vs Diffusion of Innovation
4. Enterprise 2.0 : less control and more leadership
5. Beta equals Innovation, or another reason why I like the Business of Software

Marketing aside, it’s hard to write about something that continues to evolve. What is a permanent truth is that you get presented with a lot of information, challenging problems, and Choices (with a capital C) all the time, and I wouldn’t exchange this period for anything (except for a bit more sleep).

The Uncertainties
Today’s post will be about managing uncertainty, which is really at the core of my job description. I wrote about technology, market, people, and other risk before, which is a way to abstract what is happening.

What really is happening is that you have multiple people in a company, each has their own job, not each does it in the same (predictable/independent/insert apt term here) way. These people have to build or build upon often multiple technologies that may or may not exist yet. All of that needs to happen before the project runs out of money. You need to involve external parties who have to like what you’re doing, enough for them to give us stuff for free, invest in our stuff, and/or buy our stuff. Risks from all angles but oddly enough it feels fine.

Lilypads allround
In a draft I wrote a few days ago and don’t want to bore you with, I compared it to the following:

Entrepreneurship is different. You may love doing a certain activity more than others, but doing so may very well come at the price of success. If I were to try to describe the feeling, I would say it feels like jumping from one lilypad to the next and keeping them all floating in the same general direction. I can spend more time on one lilypad because it houses a nice frog I like or because the sun’s shining on it just right. But eventually, the pressure would push the leaf into the water and I would drown. Or something to that (slightly nightmarish) effect.

This isn’t that bad, of course, or rather if you think it’s bad, believe me: you’ll get used to it! I wasn’t prepared for this, but I knew it would be hard and now it’s just an everyday thing.

The best way to deal with all these lilypads is to learn to be efficient and to spread the love around equally.

Gut instinct vs. calculated risks
During the early days of my master in entrepreneurship which was supposed to teach me all this stuff, we tried to analyse “the entrepreneur” from the psychological, sociological, and economical perspective. The most frustrating part about it was the psychological side because every academic paper and article seemed to compare the entrepreneur to a superman. It probably didn’t help much that plenty of those articles were written during the .Com days where we all worshipped entrepreneurs many of which later turned out to sell very good smelling air.

One thing that struck me, however, was the concept of “calculated risk.” Entrepreneurship isn’t a risky venture, it is an exercise in calculated risk. I didn’t get what that meant until very recently.

As mentioned, our company is composed of several people, all of whom are different and work differently. I have people that need structure, people that hate structure, and people that seem to jump from one lilypad from the next, with me, the “boss,” chasing after them. In one way I hate it, in another way I really want people to find the best way FOR THEM to work, though of course respecting the general reality of our situation.

I am taking a risk there, but the crucial part is that I do so in a calculated manner. And that is more literal than you think. For example:

We have a very clear vision of where we want to be in several months time, but there are alternative paths to get there. One would be to build upon existing technology, which would involve a slight adaptation but at a very high financial cost. The advantage is that we have a ready to go product, the disadvantage is that we have to calculate the higher cost down to our customers. That’s ok, if it wasn’t for path no. 2.

No. 2 would require building something from the ground up that would interface with an existing technology, except that it allows us to create something much more impressive (and innovative!), as well as build a series of cheaper prototypes until we reach the mature prototype phase. Cost of production would be the same in the end, except that we can produce 10 versions of our product for the same price. The advantage is a superior product for the consumer, the disadvantage from a developmental stance is that instead of a minor adaption such as in path 1, we spend more time on this part, time we could allocate to other areas.

These are pretty much once-a-week decisions that I have to make, and a large part can already be decided by instinct. It is better to build 10 cheap prototypes than 1 expensive prototype. But how much better it is can also be calculated out in time and material cost in a simple excel sheet.

How I choose to interpret “calculated risk” is that it is actually calculated. Risk is simply uncertainty and uncertainty means that there are alternative paths to a destination and we don’t 100% know which is the right one.

You can apply this to plenty of other things, such as how to design products for different business models and how to design companies for different investors. It is amazing what clarity it brings to quickly crunch the numbers when a new idea is introduced that appears to derail the whole project. After calculating the cost of that choice (the “risk”) it may in fact bring the project to a whole new level!

I still consider myself a visual thinker where ideas are concerned, but I am becoming more and more convinced of the power of “the numbers” in turning ideas into commercial innovations. There is a risk to spending too much time in them, of course. Who hasn’t heard of forecastoritis, also known as the hockey-stick financial forecast. Life doesn’t work that way and while any forecast over a longer period of time ends up looking like starting with a large minus that turns into a larger plus, the best forecasts actually reduce the minuses to a minimum. I see a large R&D budget as the equivalent of a welfare state that just sponsors those types of people that don’t really ever want to make money: the scientists. They just want to build things and love an endless R&D budget. What they don’t realise is that when a company actually makes money, part of that money will be used for R&D anyway, which actually becomes an endless development budget! But only after you have a viable cash cow that makes it happen and only if development continues to generate continuous revenue opportunities. Ok, that last paragraph was a bit of a rant…

All my entrepreneurship diary posts can be followed under the tag ‘Vincent’s eDiary.’ I don’t write about what we do as a company on purpose, but you can always ask in the comments or via the email address on the right. Pictures are courtesy of the great M.C. Escher and nature.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. E’ship diary part 5: project management and vision development in the face of ambiguity, technology and market risks
2. E’ship diary part 3: Why I don’t like the term ‘entrepreneurship’
3. E’Ship Diary Part 8 – On the Marathon of Starting a Business
4. E’ship diary part 6: on the important matter of product design
5. An e’diary part 2: what are the responsibilities of an entrepreneur

Towers Perrin has published the results of a Global Workforce Survey they made about employees engagement. The survey has involved about 90,000 people over 18 countries. The objective was to rate the level of engagement of the people in their work.

People are split into 4 groups depending on their level of engagement :

Engaged: Those giving full discretionary effort, with high scores on all three dimensions.

Enrolled: The partly engaged, with higher scores on the rational and motivational dimensions, but less connected emotionally.

Disenchanted: The partly disengaged, with lower scores on all three components of engagement, especially the emotional connection.

Disengaged: Those who have disconnected rationally, emotionally and motivationally.

What Towers Perrin found out does not give much credit to management : only a fifth (21%) of the workforce is engaged, twice as much (41%) feels enrolled, a third (30%) feels disenchanted and almost a tenth (8%) feels disengaged.

Costs of lost engagement

This excellent study also shows the cost of lack of engagement. On a three-year study, companies with high employees engagement show a positive evolution of operating margin (+3.74%) while companies with low employee engagement show a 2% reduction of their operating margin.

In addition, it shows that this engagement strongly affects the belief people have regarding the impact they can have on the company innovation, productivity, costs, growth and customer satisfaction.

Three conclusions from this report :

1. The global workforce is not engaged — at least not to the extent that employers need their employees to be in order to drive results.
2. Engaged employees are not born, but made
3. Employees worldwide want to give more, but they also want to see a clear and measurable return for their effort.

Now : let’s see how and where Enterprise 2.0 can help in nurturing engagement …

How to close the engagement gap ?

Tower Perrins provide three axis along which management can make a difference in creating a more engaged workforce.

1 – Engaged Leadership

2 – Shape the work environment.

3 – Puts employees under the microscope

In addition, the report provides the Top 10 engagement factors for employees. Based on real life Enterprise 2.0 stories, we’ll see how these collaborative platforms answer all these employees requirements along the 3 axis identified above.

1. Senior management sincerely interested in employee well-being.

Enterprise 2.0 platform helps leaders to communicate with the workforce. With blogs, leader can engage in a conversation with employee. And conversational communication is key for leadership.

Paul Otelinni from Intel or, more recently, Ben Verwaayen of Alcatel Lucent are examples of leaders who has fostered Enterprise 2.0 platforms to exchange directly with their employees (blog for Otelinni, Ask Ben for Verwaayen) and show leadership engagement (management axis #1).

2. Ability to improve skills and capabilities

Coming from an open source background, I can guarantee that there is no better place in the world than inter connected network between people with similar area of knowledge to learn, locate experts and support and develop new skills.

I am still surprised this does not happen behind the firewall apart from those companies that have implemented Enterprise 2.0. One has to be very persuasive to convince me this is not necessary for knowledge workers productivity.

These collaborative platforms are genuine tools to shape the work environment (management axis #2).

3. Organization’s reputation for social responsibility

By providing a mean for customers, communities and citizens to openly discuss with brands and corporations, Enterprise 2.0 Social Tools allows for more transparent and visible policy regarding the social responsibility.

The Nestle Vs Greenpeace story in social media shows how harmful it is in the 21st century for company to neglect their social responsibility.

4. Employees’ input into decision-making

Gary Hamel essay Future Of Management describes how Enterprise 2.0 Prediction Markets have made wonder in Best Buy, thanks to a manager fascinated by the theory of James Surowiecki book Wisdom of Crowds.

It has been quite a tough one for the bunch of internal experts/analysts from the company. But at the end of the day, people felt more engaged as their input was taken into account and the company made more profits.

5. Quick resolution of customer concerns

Again, in Future of Management Gary Hamel explains how adding organisational layers between the workers and the final customers made knowledge workers losing sense and responsibility about their contribution.

By reducing the feedback loop and offering the space of conversation between employees and customers, Enterprise 2.0 provides the framework for quick resolution of customer’s concerns while helping knowledge workers to make more sense out of their contribution.

6. Setting of high personal standards

In his book, The 22 Non-Negotiable Laws of Wellness, author Greg Anderson wrote, “When we change our perception we gain control. The stress becomes a challenge, not a threat. When we commit to action, to actually doing something rather than feeling trapped by events, the stress in our life becomes manageable.” (Setting High Personal Standards – ezine articles)

In the excellent series about Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at Booz Allen, Bill Ives reports that thanks to professional profiles in the implemented solution :

There is also a greater sense of individual responsibility as people are better empowered to manage their identity in the firm and their career development. The Hello tools provide both greater control and increased transparency. So the firm is now more global, and at the same time, more of a collection of empowered individuals rather than a collection of partially siloed teams

7. Excellent career advancement opportunities

Again, with the People Profile feature in Hello platform Booz Allen, Bill Ives notes that

A person is more likely to get staffed on a project that reflects the interests and experience noted in their profile. They are also more likely to find the right contacts and intellectual capital to allow them to succeed in their areas of interest contributing to their preference to stay with the firm.

This goes back to my definition of enterprise 2.0 : the empowerment of knowledge workers. Providing professional profiles to employees allow them to have a greater control on their career.

Last but not least, these professional profiles and open contributions to conversation provide the company with an opportunity to put the employees under the microscope (management axis #3).

8. Challenging work assignments that broaden skills

Enterprise 2.0 offers more comprehensive understanding of the company and the business as a whole via conversations. Besides it also provides networking possibility with weak-links people the employees wouldn’t hve been in contact with otherwise.

And these weak-links are instrumental in getting new opportunities : studies show most career opportunities occurs via weak links.

9. Good relationships with supervisors

As Susan Scrupski puts it, trust is the currency of anything social.

Enterprise 2.0 open and easy platforms are a bedrock for transparency and trust, hence a better relationships with supervisors.

10. Organization encourages innovative thinking

Professors from Harvard Business School, Insead and Brigham Young University have completed a six-year study of more than 3,000 executives and 500 innovative entrepreneurs, that included interviews with high-profile entrepreneurs. They have identified five keys that drive innovation : Associating, Questioning, Observing, Experimenting, Networking.

Enterprise 2.0 collaborative platforms are the obvious management toolkit for knowledge workers to

• Associate with people from different background,
• Observe internal processes and user experiences, `
• social Network,
• Question experts and whoever involved in the project,
• Experiment and get an instant feedback from all expert on the domain on the business value of their proposal.

Refer to my Enterprise 2.0 presentation (How Collaborative platforms fosters knowledge, productivity and innovation) for a more detailed description on this subject.

Actions

Now that you know how make your employees happier, more engaged, more productive and more innovative, you just need to refer to the 10 keys of successful projects to see how to implement Enterprise 2.0 in your company and increase your operating profit by 6%.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. How to tell when Enterprise 2.0 is not appropriate for your organisation
2. Five Elevator pitches for Enterprise 2.0 adoption
3. How Enterprise 2.0 fosters Knowledge Capture
4. The management toolkit for an interconnected world
5. Positioning with other IT systems: the liquid nature of Enterprise 2.0

This is a question I love to ask in the Enterprise 2.0 interviews :

Broadly speaking, one can say that there are 2 types of Enterprise 2.0 activists. The revolutionaries and evolutionaries. The formers believe that collaborative platforms are disruptive technology that will deeply change the organisations. The latter think this is an incremental evolution that will just fill up some communication holes that are not covered in organisation 1.0. Where would you stand ?

Andrew McAfee talks about new way of doing business in his Enterprise 2.0 book, of disruptive technologies in his PARC talk but still reckons that this is not such a big deal. We can see here that evangelists position is not very comfortable.

On one hand going towards the revolution paradigm risks scaring executives out of it. On the other, minimizing the disruptive nature on Enterprise 2.0 may slow knwoledge workers buy-in and adoption as it may curb their enthusiasm.

First approach is more of an Executive show-stopper while the second is more of a knowledge worker tue-l’amour (desire killer) and adoption obstacle. What’s best ?

Funnily enough, two of the main Enterprise 2.0 figures posted completely opposed post on the topic this week : Oscar Berg on one end and Bertrand Duperrin on the opposite. The former regrets Our Tendency to think and talk in terms of efficiency while the latter is pleased with the end of social washing in his Enterprise 2.0 Forum wrap up.

The Revolutionaries

Oscar’s post is quite telling. It starts from Susan Scrupski blog post Enterprise 2.0: The Next Narrative and the themes to be addressed in the cases study the 2.0 Adoption Council is currently working on.

Together with Denis Howlett (the official Enterprise 2.0 referee) Oscar regrets that most of these themes are only efficiency driven and bring nothing new to the enterprise plate.

Oscar quotes the quite brilliant Maslow’s Hierarchy of Enterprise 2.0 ROI by Hutch Carpenter and insists on the need of expanding the scale of benefits beyond mere ROI when evangelizing Enterprise 2.0.

The conclusion says it all :

I think that all us in the Enterprise 2.0 space need to realize that we are all – like it or not – under heavy influence of Taylor, Deming etc, and the dominating management paradigm that focuses almost entirely on efficiency. We need to listen to Dennis Howlett when he blows the whistle, and do our best at trying to adjust the balance so that we don’t get stuck in the efficiency corner with Enterprise 2.0. I personally believe that the greatest potential business benefits from Enterprise 2.0 lies in doing things that weren’t possible to do before social software.

The Evolutionaries

Bertrand’s post lie at the completely opposite end.

I’m fed up with the usual 40 min “show flat” presentations which conclusion is “it’s really awesome but I can’t do this in my company” and where we have the vague impression that instead of getting answers to our problems we’re being sold a little piece of dream that comes with a big piece of software. In brief, attendees leave with shining stars in they eyes but realize, when the time to wake up comes, that it does not help them to achieve anything.

I tend to agree with Bertrand in the sense that we need to get the job done. In the Enterprise 2.0 Forum Workshop that happened on the Wednesday afternoon, the day before the use case keynotes, Bertrand insisted on the specific french cultural issue with Enterprise 2.0. In all fairness, he didn’t really need to insist, I’m convinced.

Anyway, in such a rational and individualist culture as french one, it is just scoring an own goal to mention things like social, dreams, utopian values when trying to sell Enterprise 2.0 solution. Bertrand knows, he’s been in the business for many years and he does know how it works here.

From this perspective, he admitted that being an Enterprise 2.0 consultant in France is far more touchy and complicated that it may be in such cultures as US or UK. As a result, as a pragmatist, he is a strong advocate of incremental evolution.

(Still, I was very pleased to notice that the only book that has been mentioned during the discussions after the keynotes has been The Cluetrain Manifesto, a quite revolutionary one).

Heavy Mentalery

I think the reason why we’re focussing on Taylor or Demings values when trying to sell Enterprise 2.0, is to smooth the disruptive nature of E20 not to scare executives out of it.

The unique nature of collaborative platforms and what you can achieve with them is quite challenging to envision if you’re not familiar with it.

It will naturally emerged as the tools/approach is deployed. The culture will naturally evolves as a result of it.

But if you want executive support to start such a project in the company I guess that the best way is to talk about current problems, how E20 can solve them and the business value it will bring to the company.

Starting with cultural issues, disruptive technologies, transformation of the enterprise may work with some but not with the vast majority of executives. And will most likely not work in France, alleged home of the revolution, funnily enough – hence Bertrand’s position.

I leave the conclusion to Clay Shirky :

“A revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new tools, it happens when society adopts new behaviors”

So how about you ? Are you a revolutionary or an evolutionary ?

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Enterprise 2.0 Forum : the Jive side of Swiss Re project
2. The management toolkit for an interconnected world
3. Enterprise 2.0 : the end of office politics ?
4. Enterprise 2.0 Forum – the 10 keys of successful projects
5. Social Networks : the third level of immersion

If you’re interested in what’s in the pipeline technology-wise in the coming decades be sure to read this report. As previously mentioned, this report is a compilation of articles written by the PhD students of Aalto University (previously Helsinki School of Economics, Helsinki University of Technology and University of Art and Design Helsinki).

The topics include

• Future of IT and hardware
• Future of Telecommunication and Networks
• Printed electronics and nanotechnology
• Future of Media
• Future of Living
• Future of Globalization
• Robotics and artificial intelligence

Also, in the appendix is a small diary of our meetings in Silicon Valley.

Normally these kind of reports would cost thousand of euros, but thanks to the Finnish educational system you can get the report right here for free (PDF; 2MB).

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. A Study Trip to California, full of Finns this time
2. A (Sci-Fi inspired) vision of Facebook's (or equivalent) future
3. 2 resolutions for 2007: visit a cluster of innovation every year & brush up my programming skills
4. Yet another trip to Silicon Valley?
5. Poll: Decide the future of Tech IT Easy (my part in it, at least)

Big up to Kongress Media (Thomas Koch, Bjoern Negelmann) for organising such a superb event in Paris. Both ON (the conference) and OFF (parties in the evening) were fun and it was so nice to hang out with Enterprise 2.0 people (@bduperrin @flapinta @cflanagan @an_elm @tlg @ceciledemailly @tdebaillon @gculpin @aponcier) in real life.

Local Consulting firm NextModernity (Bertrand Duperrin, Richard Collin) acted as moderator and contributed to make the whole thing casual yet focussed.

Great organisation, great speakers but most of all : great real life projects feedback. Featuring : Claire Flanagan (CSC – multi-awarded project), Anu Elmer (SwissRe), Jérôme Poujardieu (Dassault Systems), Fabrice Poireaud Lambert (Lyonnaise des Eaux), Nicolas Rolland (Danone), Julien Le Nestour (Schlumberger), Jean-Paul Chapon (Alcatel Lucent) et Jane McConnell (NetStrategy).

A high number of common best practices have naturally emerged. Here are 10 of them :

1) Manage risks from the early stages of the project

Fabrice Poireaud-Lambert showed a very interesting 4 axis graphs (Organization and HR / Competencies / Methods and Tools / Culture and Behaviors) that LdE used to evaluate the change factor of such a project on the enterprise scale. They reached a 12/16 value which is pretty high.

In addition, these are cross-functional projects with a high cultural impact. Therefore, it is critical to address subsequent risks as of the very early stages of the project.

This comes with an advantage, though. When such risky and game-changing projects succeed, they benefit from large recognition : both CSC and Lyonnaise des Eaux projects are running for most innovative project of the year in their respective organisation.

2) Seek Executive supports

Both Claire Flanagan and Anu Elmer insisted on how critical it was to have unconditional Executives support for project involving change of such magnitude. Big changes project need legitimation. The reason : without strong leadership and executive support, the project is a lost cause against managers who have day to day budget and objectives.

So first thing first : use the elevator pitch and then Enterprise 2.0 presentation to show your executives how collaboration platforms can foster knowledge, innovation and productivity in the organisation.

3) Know your business needs and address them

Danone really wanted some tools to perpetuate their strong networking culture born at the beginning of the century and put the people right in the center of the solution.

Dassault needed to share sales best practices amongst their distributors (the Value Added Resellers) of their software solutions.

Schlumberger desired to save time to their workforce in critical environment (example : deep water drilling) when few minutes saving can turn into million of dollars.

Alcatel Lucent new management made it a strategic goal to have a greater transparency throughout the company.

The objectives can be marketing, HR’s, operational, leadership ones. The solution may be internal (i.e only amongst employees) or external as for Dassault between employees and partners. In any case, for any successful project, the objectives are clear so is the expected business value.

4) Knowledge sharing in complex and fast paced changing environment for distributed workforce is a common motive

Regardless of the business needs, the type of industry or activity, all companies have this same problem they wanted to tackle.

SwissRe is a reassuring Insurance company. They have experts on climate changes, terrorism threats, global economy etc … Hugely complex topics. They have office in many different cities.

CSC is a global IT services company : new technology, cloud computing, open source, software architecture, virtualization, enterprise system integration, project management, you name it : knowledge sharing make their professionals more reactive, efficient and team oriented.

If your organisation context includes these constraints, Enterprise 2.0 surely will make more sense and witness better adoption.

5) ROI may be complicated to evaluate but some benefits are unassailable

Talking about ROI in a project whose bottom line is a cultural one may be quite challenging.

Apart from Cisco who shows impressive figures, most companies and consulting firms struggle to puts ROI figures.

However difficult to monetize, some benefits may still be extremely valuable for the company. The most important one being engagement. CSC employees feedback is quite spectacular : the distances disappear and their solution has helped fostering a one team one company culture.

Jane McConnell in her survey on Intranet adoption reported that 30% of surveyed managers/executives answered either Quite a lot or Absolutely when asked if collaborative tools had improved employee engagement. This ratio grows to 50% when including people answering A few.

This is not anecdotical : Tower Perrin showed in their Global Workforce Survey that, on a three-year study, companies with high employees engagement show an average positive evolution of operating margin (+3.74%) while companies with low employee engagement show an average 2% reduction of their operating margin.

6) Usability is key for quick adoption

A key to Enterprise 2.0 project is the adoption. There actually are metrics to rate the success of adoption. How many people opt-in ? How many clicks ? How many people add content ? Commented ?

Now, if your tool is complex, not user-friendly etc … people won’t waste their time trying to contribute.

Open and easy are two of the key characteristics of Enterprise 2.0 solutions as per Andrew McAfee. Lyonnaise des Eaux and Dassault went for the Blue Kiwi solution. SwissRe and CSC went for the Jive SBS one. All choose a solution of a vendor specialized on the topic and went against the standard vendor selection IT policy of their respective companies.

The tool is so intuitive no-one get blocked during a 20,000 seats pilot (C. Flanagan).

Specialised vendor, no usage issue reported thanks to user-friendlyness, massive adoption rate, tens of thousand seats project successfully achieved within a year : would that be a coincidence ?

7) Cross functional participation is critical

Since Enterprise 2.0 project is a cultural one, and not simply a technological one, it requires cross functional competencies. HR, Marketing but also IT : all have to be involved in the project.

8. IT support is critical but IT Governance is crippling

This is probably one of the most challenging issue : have IT involvement without suffering the constraints of IT Governance. IT has been key in helping companies deploying enterprise solutions to support business processes (ERP, CRM, etc …). Security, stability, operability, overall IT architecture coherence, these are the main criteria they took in consideration. Usability ? Never. Here is the main problem : refer to point 6.

In order to circumvent this issue, both SwissRe and CSC prepared beforehand the list of criteria along which all different solutions would be benchmarked. One of the main use case for Claire Flanagan was the ability to administer the solution herself with her limited IT Admin knowledge. It was easy with Jive SBS and not with the other vendor being the IT preferred solution. CTO accepted that and all agree to play the game and chose the solution that satisfied the most the predefined use cases.

9) Don’t use the S word

Our company is a well respected 150 years old company. We are doing very serious stuff. In order to make sure we have executives support, I made sure no one ever pronounced the S word, following the very good advice from Andrew McAfee. (Anu Elmer)

Claire Flanagan, Fabrice Poireaud-Lambert, Nicolas Rolland, all reported the same lexical cautious approach. They never mentioned Social Media or so but kept on referring to business problems and how they could solve them with collaborative tools when selling the project to executives.

10) Top-Grassroot-Down is the new Bottom-up

All these projects started with a clear lead from project team. But as the project implementation started they all needed support from advocates disseminated in different teams to evangelize the new tool and make it viral. (Again if the tool is not usable, forget about viral regardless of how enthusiastic your evangelists are …).

So successful projects are both Top Down and grassroot efforts, more one or the other depending on the stage of the project.

Conclusion

I leave it to Richard Collin and his comment after Claire Flanagan keynote :

“CSC project massive success is a great example. These are knowledge workers generating business value through services, the typical 21st Century company. The fact that Enterprise 2.0 succeeds with such company is a proof of how relevant this approach is today and will be tomorrow.”

See you all next year. Be there or be 1.0.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Enterprise 2.0 Forum : the Jive side of Swiss Re project
2. How to tell when Enterprise 2.0 is not appropriate for your organisation
3. Five Elevator pitches for Enterprise 2.0 adoption
4. How Enterprise 2.0 nurtures employees engagement
5. Toward Enterprise 2.0 with Cécile Demailly

But startups don’t work this way and the entire reason for working in a team is that you share the work and hopefully create synergetic effects (1+1=3!) in the process.

And the truth is that even as for non-technologist like myself (I am a geek though) designing products is not so hard.

I had a discussion with an industrial designer (my all time fav. people to hang around with) concerning the term ‘a perfect product.’ Her field understands the term as a product that functions perfectly, I choose to add “for the customer” to that definition.

The start of product design is always to ask: “so is this cool for people?“, meaning will they like it, do they need it, will they pay for it? I don’t think all question can be answered from the start, except the one of “is this cool?”

A very big part of entrepreneurship is sales, and as they say: you have to believe in what you sell. Easier when you already have a product, I’d love to sell Apple computers for a living, but when the product doesn’t exist, you have one of two choices: one, you design the product yourself, starting with “is it cool?”; two, you trust that your CTO can design something cool.

That’s not a problem, except for one thing: is cool something we decide or the market decides? It is of course the latter and one bullet point in an entrepreneur’s job description missing from that of the CTO’s is keeping a close eye on the market.

Therefore, product design is absolutely something entrepreneurs cannot delegate! And on that short note, I’ll leave it.

All my entrepreneurship diary posts can be followed under the tag ‘Vincent’s eDiary.’ I don’t write about what we do as a company on purpose, but you can always ask in the comments or via the email address on the right. Picture courtesy of The Esoteric Church (of all places!).

Like

Unlike

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. E’ship diary part 7: Gut Instinct vs. Calculation, or On Managing Uncertainty
2. E’ship diary part 5: project management and vision development in the face of ambiguity, technology and market risks
3. E’ship diary part 3: Why I don’t like the term ‘entrepreneurship’
4. E’Ship Diary Part 8 – On the Marathon of Starting a Business
5. An e’diary part 2: what are the responsibilities of an entrepreneur

Good ideas also reside in intersections between different modes of thinking. I don’t know who made up the idea of the ‘execution multiplier for ideas‘ (Derek Sivers posted it on his blog once), but an idea is worth little without someone carrying it out. Similarly, in Neil Fiore’s book “The Now Habit” (the ONLY self-help book I would ever recommend to people) he writes about the source of good ideas, which often come when you least expect it: on your breaks, your holidays, anywhere which is not work-related.

While productivity is a great thing and crucial to executing ideas, idea-generation itself is actually not very compatible with the productive mind. But it’s not impossible to combine the two either.

Let’s look at a sample workflow from problem to idea generation to product (product meaning the outcome of idea generation, which has to lead somewhere):

1. You have a problem (duh… no really, don’t come up with an idea if it doesn’t solve a problem!)
2. You discuss it with people to try to figure out it’s parameters —what is the true gist of the problem?

This is a good time to get stuck. Where do you go from here? Do you go the left-brained route — the super-rational approach that would e.g. benefit from some number crunching in Excel? Or do you take a right-brained approach — the artistic approach of drawing out the problem further on a white board or an outliner?

It of course depends on the complexity of the problem, but it isn’t time yet to go super-rational all of a sudden. It breaks you out of creative solution mode and gets you into execution mode, which is really brain-dead “getting things done” mode. Before you get things done, you have to define “things” much further.

The next step in my process would be:
3. draw out several solutions, preferably in a group, and discuss them and the logic behind it. Is it an elegant solution to the problem? Does it solve it or does it complicate it? What scenarios are there and what are its parameters?

As soon as you come to scenarios, we come into process mode. And this is where a more left-brained approach of calculating resource-allocation (people, time, money) absolutely makes sense. In my last post, I was hoping that someone would have a good way of making this more compatible with step 3, I am still waiting for someone to come up with a good solution, however.

4. calculate it out. What are the costs associated with each solution, what are the benefits of each solution?

Costs vs. benefits could also be called expenses vs. income on a financial projection for a startup. Solid resource allocation is ultimately the lifeblood of a company, however in an early stage it is also the language to use when looking for funding for your company.

I don’t want to be too rigid about this; I’ve struggled with the process of “problem -> idea generation -> execution -> product” in the past and think that it’s an area that benefits from several approaches and also leads to more-than-several pseudo-suggestions on how to approach this.

Rather, I thought to expand a little on yesterday’s post and clarify why I really do want a more visual Excel (for lack of a better term). If you want to combine right- and left-brained perspectives, a white board alone won’t do it and Excel alone won’t do it. I want software that does both.

Like

Unlike

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. The Right Mix between Idea and Execution
2. A very old economy business to new economy business action plan
3. CartoRéso: a turnkey project for an entrepreneur without an idea (software or network engineer preferred)
4. Rebooting entrepreneurial brainstorming sessions: what elements should they contain?
5. Where do Good Ideas come from?

In a way I view Google Buzz as a reference platform, like Google Wave Preview, instead of a finished product. Of course, because Buzz is right there in Gmail’s interface, it’s Buzz deserves to get all the critical comments about its launch it got. It could be argued that without exposing it to the larger public at start, it would have been impossible to get all those great ideas to make it better. One interesting thing to note is that most requested features for Buzz are UI-related. However, I’m more interested in what makes Buzz work behind the scenes, because if Google can get the critical mass behind this, things are going to be great.

It was again a sad example of the sorry state of technology blogging when Buzz first hit the web. In that little world that’s so enamored with Twitter, Facebook and status updates, it never occurred to anyone that Google was aiming much higher. One of the worst offenders was the serial-troll Lyons. He was followed with lots of others who came up with as lame puns in their headlines without actually figuring out what they were looking at. Instead we got petty lists of “fails” in Buzz. Yeah, on the surface that these Techmeme all-stars barely skim, Buzz might resemble Twitter, but the differences are pretty obvious from the start.

The attention spans are so incredibly short that that they have completely forgotten that even in this age of agile Web 2.0 iterative processes, things take time. This was probably best illustrated by this post, where the author totally oblivious to the lineage of Buzz claimed that

As always, time will tell whether this is a game-changer or just another Jaiku, the Twitter competitor that Google bought but never found a way to leverage.

In their defense, even Ars Technica got it wrong.

The only reason I can come up with why people associated Buzz instantly with Twitter was the simple user interface. Much more interesting comparisons would have been with Friendfeed (which kind of tried to do this in simple way), Yahoo Updates (which kind of tried to do this in a difficult way) or it’s genetical ancestor Jaiku (which kind of did this LBS twitter thing in a pretty nice package a good three years ago).

While I agree that Buzz is a rather odd combination of product/platform/project, I do find it exciting that Google has the resources to just try things. We are so early to this social web thing that if someone pretends that they know what exactly works, they’ll be proven wrong in a fortnight. Sure, I do agree that Google might be forgetting that what people want are applications and not technology (a mistake Nokia keeps on repeating, and one reason why they are so incredibly lost in the technology woods. Or like Yahoo, which just pumps out nice web tech with no apparent apps or revenue streams). Google has the money to experiment and the mindset to test things on a large scale. That takes balls. That’s what the whole world wide web was about in the first place, experimentation. You have to be pretty clueless if you take anything on the internet right now as granted.

Seriously, take a long view here. Even on the internet, you need some time to lay out the groundwork even when you’re working in the application layer. If you think about the 2,5 year timeline between Jaiku’s acquisition and Buzz, there were little hints along the way in many of Google’s products. To be able to have something like Buzz, Google had to first come up with a friend/follow system and a location system. You know like following other people on Google Reader and Google Latitude? The ADD-riddled tech bloggers were pretty hyped about Google Latitude and how it was going to kill Brightkite, Foursquare and other LBS services, but somehow Google Buzz failed to generate a single comparison to these services?

But all this is just technology. What about the revolution that I hope Google can pull with Buzz? What’s the beauty in Google Buzz? You only need to check Google’s API page for Google Buzz and you’ll soon realize that all the stuff behind what makes Google Buzz work are open standards, which enable pretty ground-breaking integrations that could just solve the mess discussion on the internet is right now.

As a sidenote, when tech bloggers complain how they can’t add this and that twitter stream to their Google Buzz timeline or how the tweets are not in real-time and all that, they would only need to look at that API and realize that because Google looking at the whole thing at much higher level, it’s actually the publisher who needs to find a way to enable a thing awkwardly called PubSubHubbub, and in that instant all the content is pretty much real-time. Of course, I have no idea if it is at all feasible to use PubSubHubbub in the scale of Twitter, but the point is that Google is not planning to have custom pipelines to Buzz, but to play with common, open protocols and APIs. Another point is that once your content works with Buzz, it works with any aggregator/social app that has decided to have that same common, open infrastructure.

So, instead of trying to centralize every user, every piece of content to their site, like Facebook and Twitter, Google has had the guts to try and harness all the discussion on the web to their service. It’s going to be a happy day when this post right here and all the discussion and the comment this might generate are all happily syndicated in Buzz.

The open nature of Buzz is not all news to some creatures on the web. On Twitter and Facebook you can follow and be followed by inanimate products and abstract brands and they can have pages and whatnot, but right now, to be able to take part in Buzz you need to have a Google Account and that means that you have to be a natural, real person and you shouldn’t have more than one account. This is pretty bad news to all the “SEOs” and other “internet marketing experts”. It is also excellent news and pretty amazing on this forcing-marketing-down-your-throat in this “social” happy place we call the web 2.0. Simply, that means real people and real feeds that try to integrate the real discussion on the web. All those @’s and #’s? What about real discussion with real threading and real topics? What about a renaissance of long-form personal publishing? (If you didn’t follow any of the previous links, please read this. I’m totally with DeWitt Clinton here).

The trick to make all this work and where Friendfeed and Plaxo failed is critical mass. I’m pretty sure that the guys at Facebook are really looking at Friendfeed again and rethinking what parts they should chop off it instead, because if Google can truly pull this off and make this pipe-dream of semantic and social aggregation nirvana that plumbs everything out of what it can get it social graph on work, Facebook has no other option than to open up and that’s pretty much the end game for them right there.

The technical challenge is really complex and it’s going to take some time until all the pieces are in place. Google has put their thing out in the open and it is now the publishers’ turn to do some back-end changes so that this discussion utopia can get its legs. I’m not expecting the social web to turn on its head in a day, but this is some serious stuff for the long term. The reason why I think Google can pull this off is that Google just needs to show ads on the web to make this worthwhile, Facebook et al. need to monetize every inch of their userbase. Google can, and it is in their advantage, to utilize open systems and not lock people in. And, hey, maybe things don’t pan out. Google has the cash to try something else.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Facebook’s power grab of the social web
2. URL as a metric for social object’s value (Weekend rambling)
3. Looking towards a new naming-convention for the wave of web/software-services
4. Is 2008 the year of instant communication nirvana?
5. The Annual Kari Silvennoinen is out!

Firefox, in its latest version (3.6), introduced a nifty feature for a better tab user-experience, which I hope they expand a little more. Basically, when you click on the little icon on the top right (see screenshot), you get a nice overview, called “Showcase,” of all the tabs loaded in your browser at the time.

A similar implementation is of course Safari’s and Chrome’s start-window, which shows you an overview of your most viewed sites, making it a visual replacement for your bookmarks and/or history managers.

For some time now, you’ve also had the feature of restoring tabs after closing your browser, either voluntary, which makes sense as tabs consume an insane amount of ram and CPU (especially for Flash sites, but for plenty of other things also), and as a safety feature, when your browser crashes. Saft for Safari (Mac only) introduced a tab-recovery user-interface (see picture), where you see a list of tabs previously loaded and where you can tick or untick sites that you want to start up with. I believe Firefox has a similar interface for tab-recovery after a crash.

But it’s all still a hassle and I really haven’t come across a perfect implementation of dealing with several dozens of tabs. I wouldn’t mind having the option of starting Firefox tab-free, with option of restoring whatever tab I used previously, in its original state, via something like the Firefox Showcase interface. There are some Firefox extensions that do just that, but I’ve so far not come across something that is intuitively usable.

There is the other problem, which is that sometimes you want to open a browser for a single purpose, such as Google Maps, Gmail, or the weather, and it’s annoying to have to open a browser with 50+ tabs in it. Some sites have become applications rather than sources of information and just like it doesn’t make sense to open the full Office suite when opening Microsoft Word, it doesn’t make sense to open several tabs to go to one site.

Since last night, I’m experimenting with Fluid on the Mac, one of a few, I’m sure, applications that turn websites into applications that launch from your application folder. So I now have a Google Calendar app, a Google Docs app, etc. For Gmail, I really like Mailplane, which also uses Webkit, Safari’s open source sibling, as a basis for creating a service dedicated to one site, or in Mailplane’s case, multiple Gmail accounts.

So far that is the best user-experience for me if I want to go to a site that is also an application. Tabs, I’m sure, have a purpose, but they just invite information overload and the guilt for not being able to deal with it all. If you, the readers, have similar experience, feel free to share them, and if you found solutions, please let us know as well!

Addendum: talk about measuring the real cost of tabs… In the last weeks, I received 12 identical letters from the Dutch government regarding an access code I requested once. Turns out that it was one of my 50 saved tabs in Firefox that, every time I restarted the browser, requested a new code when the page loaded.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. How to make the Browser a more Efficient OS
2. Choosy [Mac app] does what I want, when I want it
3. One reason I don’t like Google Chrome on the Mac
4. Google Chrome and when vertical integration rocks
5. Favourite Web Tools to start 2009 with