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May 20 Bobby!!!I was on tompeters! this morning making comments as is my want... This time Tom was blogging about the best book of this decade... he says it is The Black Swan.... I am not sure about that because Black Swans are common in Australia whereas they seem more exotic in the US... Anyhow he went on to mention the Cuban Missile Crisis and so I replied as follows.... Tom... The Cuban Missile Crisis is an excellent choice. I had the pleasure of taking the lead role in a couple of Post Graduate classes on decision making and organisation theory - a long time ago. These students were bright young people who already were 'making it' in their careers. I made the Crisis - especially Bobby Kennedy's glorious 3 days - the highlight of the course. Why? Because it demonstrates the value of talented people in organisations in a way that no other books or direct experience I have had can match. Bobby and key members of President JFK's Cabinet saved the world. They did it because they refused - down right refused - to submit to the system. They refused to comply with orthodoxy, they refused to roll over to past policy settings, they refused to defer to those with all the corporate memory and experience, they refused to not believe that they were capable of thinking up a different ending to their sequence of events... I lectured, unmercifully, my students on the value to the US economy of Bobby and his crew... You can talk about GM,IBM, Bank America, etc (businesses of the day) as providing great wealth for the nation as being the best of the best as having the best of the best talent BUT a bunch of lowly paid (relatively) public officials in 3 key days made the crucial decisions that saved it all from possible destruction... What value do you put on those who worked only with totally inadequate information, self-generated creative ideas, intolerance of stupidity, a fixed purpose to do good not evil, etc. What value can you put on the work of Bobby and his mob? They forever proved to me that it is the people not the system that determines the success of your organisation, your business, your government, your community, etc... Bobby was a leader who led "the system" to another place - you rarely find such people in organisations but when you do you tend also to find that most of their colleagues oppose them.. What is more common are people who lead by fitting best and most comfortably into "the system"... Both types are needed in business but I know who I would rather work with or for - the people who lead the system.... Sure it is a "hairy ride" at times but you get to some truly exciting places after the ride is done! In both cases a business needs the very best example of what I call "systems led people" or "people led systems"... For those core 3 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was Bobby who gave the world the best of the best example of a "people led system".... Thanks TOM for stirring my memory of this great leader ( I cried when JFK was shot BUT I was totally devastated when Bobby was shot in a that hotel kitchen)... He was known to everyone who loved him simply as Bobby!.... Richard. May 16 Reflex and cortex...You are wired for C20th capitalism - just like me. You are wired for competition. You are wired to price signals. You are wired to scarcity. You are wired to growth. You are wired to Nation-State economics. Your reflex and cortex are in sync. with the old economy the one we are leaving. You are in the new economy but here the rules are different and your old-fashioned wiring is dodgey to say the least. You need to be wired for C21st globalism. You need to be wired for cooperation. You need to be wired for free goods and services. You need to be wired for abundance. You need to be wired for networks. You need to be wired for global and local network economies. You have a serious problem, as do I and everyone else, because your relexes are out of sync with your environment. Your intuition has been whacked - it does not work so well. Your experience is often counter-productive for you as a decision-maker. You are adrift in a turbulent time of change without a reliable compass. You have an equally serious problem with your cortex. Your brain does not work so well in an economy where information is abundant. Where the more users you have in a network the better the quality of the product or service. Where cooperation is imperative. Where decisions are made in a nanosecond. Where information is freely available even when there is no competition. Reflex and cortex - can you rewire yourself for C21st? May 15 Quotes, slogans, tag lines, and wise sayings....When I was pretending to be an academic - a long time ago and yeah there is no sign of it now - I would tire of being told that every idea I came up with was in this book or that book. "Oh I know what you are talking about that was the key theme in Professor Kanter's book...." "NO, NO... don't tell me it is in Peter Drucker's book..." "Yeah that's right.... you read Drucker - well he is a good thinker and you have a good point there!" Well no actually if it is in any book it would be in one of De Bono's books on lateral thinking - I would nearly always be thinking to myself... The reason I think of De Bono is because he wrote about this syndromme - he understands all too well how much people need to label ideas, to tag them, to assign them to a box, and to assert that they are totally comfortable and familiar with them when they are not. The truth of the matter is that most of my ideas, like everyone else's ideas, were derivatives of some collection of ideas that I got from my various workplaces. They were based on doing not reading. They were stolen from others or more precisely they were composites of many ideas I had stolen from my colleagues. But through the weird sieve that serves as my brain I had developed a particular slant on them all. Enough of a slant to claim them as my own original ideas. Today this problem seems to have become worse than ever before or is it just me? I find that when you engage people in a serious discussion about ideas - original, new, borrowed, or used - they quickly resort to talking in quotes, slogans, tag lines, and wise sayings. They have an endless repertoire of these things. They can chatter for hours saying absolutely naught but quoting every genius who ever lived. Is it just me or is this the new substitute for really having a serious discussion about ideas, about differences, about clashes of ideologies, about values, or about social mores? I guess the thing that really upsets me about this is either they give me chapter and verse where their precious quote came from OR I am too ignorant to know the source. Would that I could now get my revenge by saying "oh yeah I remember that quote from Twain - so you agree with Mark Twain do you?" Then continue "while it is hard to argue with that this is the C21st and lot of things have change since he observed his world".... May 11 Are you stretched are stressed?Look ahead five years. What will it take for you to be just as good as you are today? What will it take for you to improve? What will it take for you to be considerably better? Look at yourself today. What is it that stresses you? Which of these stress points are associated with your need to be better the day after tomorrow? Which of these stress points are the result of yesterday's not tomorrow's problems? Which of these stress points are caused by other's failure to stretch and improve? We all have old habits, thinking, theories, and ideologies running constantly inside our heads. We need to stretch out our thinking just as we need to stretch out our muscles. We need to stretch our theories if we are to cope well with our future challenges. We need to stretch beyond the constraints of ideologies if we are to get beyond being perpetually stressed. May 09 Chattering Clusters at work .....Its simply great if and when the 'chattering clusters' are talking about YOU and ME! Thanks to Tom Altman's Wedia Conversations for this gem.... Change ArchitectMarch 11, 2008We were blabbing in a meeting the other day and we blurted out the title “Change Architect”. I really liked the concept - so I tossed it into google. I found a post over at boxes and arrows called “Change Architecture: Bringing IA to the Business Domain“
This is another result from a dude’s (Richard Lipscombe) Live Spaces page:
I like the “commonsense” part - it’s like saying we will try to do good things in the best ways we can think of. That’s pretty cool. May 07 YOU wanted me to remind YOU - REMEMBER?YOU wanted me to remind YOU about the new world of business YOU live and work in.... REMEMBER? What YOU find is scarce in YOUR flat world is: - time - privacy - security - trust - cooperation.... What YOU wanted me to remind YOU about is that YOUR consumers have new wants and needs in YOUR flat world of the internet... These new needs and wants are a direct result of what YOU find is now scarce for YOU in YOUR flat world.... REMEMBER? YOUR consumers want and need: - speed - anonymity - time for 'me' - belonging - reliability - trust. YOU can compete with stealth bombers....YOU live in a digital world... YOU work in a digital economy.... YOU are working with YOUR peers to develop a digital business - or are YOU? YOU may find it difficult to relate to your digital age... YOU like me are not wired for the age we both live in.... YOU are wired for a world of visuals not virtuals. YOU are programmed to belong to communities... YOU are taught to trust your gut feelings.... YOU are stretched by the pace of life today.... YOU are both excited and exasperated by the digital world you inhabit... YOU were programmed for a world of WWII bombers... They were visible... They were noisy.... They afforded you plenty of time to prepare to protect yourself from their explosive bombs... They even gave you a 'second chance' to run for cover as the bombs whistled and shrilled as they hurtled towards you. YOU were never programmed for a world of stealth bombers.... They are designed to be invisible... They are silent stalkers... They give you no warning of their attack and thus no time to protect yourself from their deadly arsenal... They are fast, silent, and precise delivery platforms.... YOUR digital world is full of stealth bombers... Sure you see the odd WWII bombers bumbling around but they are more a curiosity than a threat... YOUR business has to compete with the stealth bombers not the WWII bombers... YOUR business has to be agile, flexible, open, transparent, and future orientated... YOUR first task is to acknowledge YOUR consumers old fashioned needs and wants - ie belonging to a community, high levels of trust, visible benefits, and transparent decision making processes... YOUR second task is to marry those needs and wants with YOUR digital business platform... YOU will succeed if you can built a business that operates like a stealth bomber BUT looks and feels like a WWII bomber to all your customers... May 02 Switch to new age marketing....Times are tough yet companies continue to waste millions on marketing... Consumers are not watching, listening, or paying attention to you. They simply do not care what you say or do they are out of your loop. So do yourself a favour and go into work on Monday and slash, better still obliterate, your current marketing budget. Put everyone in marketing who does not deal directly with your customers on a redundancy package. Why? Because if you don't you should start looking for a new job yourself. The simple truth is your job now depends on revenue generated from nanosecond consumers who are digital warriors not mass marketing junkies. The mass market is dead. Brands are dead. Value adding is dead. Welcome to the exciting new age living in the flat world of the internet! A world where everything can be sourced from everywhere. A world where time is more important than choice. A world where value is more important than price. A world where trust is the key ingredient in a purchase - this trust comes from word of mouth or viral marketing not what you currently do to support your Brand or current Revenue Models. Go into work on Monday to either clear out your desk or to clear out your C20th marketing regime! Friends on the net....Social networks work at many different levels and yet all these levels cover off on what we loosely call 'friends'. At the entry level of any social network you gain a new set of acquaintances or friends (like pen friends in the past) who will chatter with you incessantly. In many instances you will never ever come to see them face to face. At the next level social networks give you 'friends' who you simply 'hang with', the Clan, and they maybe global or local. If they are global then chances are you will never actually meet them face to face. If they are local then you might meet irregularly for coffee at Starbucks (this type of gathering is what made the Starbucks brand so famous). Finally 'the truly, madly, deeply friendship' is probably local and so it involves regular face to face meetings. These circles of friends are often purpose-driven in they come together because they share a hobby, religion, sport, creative passion, etc. These friendship circles come with deep feelings of belonging, as within a Tribe, and thus with some sense of commitment and accountability to each other. Social networks from Clusters, to Clans, and through to the Tribes are all layers of friendship for digital age people who are bored, lonely, and switched off from their local communities, politics, and social issues. These are new social networks that form quickly on the web but still impact on lives in real time as much as other types of friendships did under any other technology regime. Intellectual property theft?The big idea at Fast Company yesterday was that "all innovation is fueled by the theft of intellectual property". Here is my response.... Interesting idea - does some one have the intellectual property rights to it or can I just steal it and have my way with it. Innovation is an ACTION! I have had and continue to have great ideas and heaps of intellectual property that I am trying to put into ACTION about health care. About a year ago I told Google about some specific ideas - today Marissa Mayer and her Google Health Team have ACTIONED those ideas, or a set of very similar ideas, into a global platform for patient records. Should I complain to someone? Did they steal my ideas and my precious Intellectual Property? Even if they did steal it does anyone care? Do I care? I care only insofar as they have made some of my ideas, or their ideas I am truly not sure which, come to fruition. I can now use my residual Intellectual Property and other innovative ideas in this arena to leverage off the Google platform. How good is that? Thanks Google for stealing my Intellectual Property, even if you
didn't, because you have given me the chance to prove my related ideas
have merit and revenue building capabilities. May 01 The more things change.....The more things change the more things stay the same - well no! Brands and marketers are geared to a spherical world but the world is now surely flat. In this flat world consumers are different because they have a very different set of wants and needs. In part that is because of the changes to what is abundant and what is scarce. So let's start this discussion right there. Abundant in a flat world is: - choice - opportunity - travel - information - sellers - supply - labour - technology..... Scarce in a flat world is: - time - privacy - security - trust - cooperation.... Thus the wants and needs of consumers in a flat world are very different to those that most businesses are set up to supply. Most businesses supply goods and services based on an obsolete list of consumers' wants and needs. Consumers' wants and needs are dictated by what is scarce not what is abundant. This means their satiated wants and needs are few even though they have an abundant supply of goods and services. In a flat world the consumers wants and needs are: - speed - anonymity - time for me - belonging - reliability - trust. The flat world of the internet has produced nanosecond consumers. They are not impressed by brands or marketing or choice or price or guarantees etc... They are guided by those they trust or the clan they belong to or the reliability of a past product/service etc... They make purchasing decision in the blink of an eye whether they are buying online or in a face to face situation. They are not listening to marketers or sales people or advertising campaigns etc... They no longer seek choice. They no longer trust brands. They seek value not just lowest price. They demand a quick sales and delivery process. They expect reliability. The more things change the more things change - actually! Could the world be cooling?The near universal acceptance of the science of global warming is a worry. I remember late last century there was an 'active debate' about whether we all faced global warming or cooling. Rising sea levels or ice caps? was the choice and neither should appeal to any of us. Actually more and deeper ice caps is probably the bigger worry. It would signal a return to Europe being under ice - in 1790 through to around 1850 Europe did experience a mild ice age. So could this weather pattern, or worse, be about to be visited on our world again. As I live down the bottom of the world I do not have to worry (yeah right) so I can look at this like a bad movie - which they made a few years ago - about huge snow and ice storms that literally freeze everything and everyone in its path. The simple fact is if this happens I will be living on an island that is being invaded by masses of people seeking food and shelter. The old movie 'On the beach' displayed us down under as the only survivors of a nuclear war - we were simply waiting for the end.(why is it always us who are the last to go?). In the ice age scenario we would be waiting for our eventual over run by the masses before we all went under. So this is all very dramatic BUT what should we expect given the facts that the earth's temperatures are actually dropping and the sun spotting or the flaring was way down on what is an expected level for February and March. Could the world be cooling? Well who the hell knows the real answer to that question? I do not that is for sure. But pushing on through all that it means that we have to do more not less to be innovative about our use of energy, water, manufacturing, food production, distribution of products/services, etc. The time is now. Food cost are rising to levels that already threaten most of the developing world - world hunger has suddenly become an acute problem because of the price of food. This is a new problem and it is not a simple one to solve. Distribution of food is bound up in the price mechanism. The more you squeeze supply the higher the prices go and so the less there is to spend on food for everyone. It is a zero sum game for everyone except those who grow their own food. This appears as an economic problem but it is also a social problem. What answers are we going to find to the problem of feeding the world - this problem was last addressed and thought to have been solved in the 1960s but it is back on our agenda. It is back on the agenda because the world's climate has changed - it does not really matter whether it is because the earth is cooling or warming for the people who are left to starve because the price of grains, rice, etc are too high. The real issue of Climate Change is the redistribution of wealth. Oil rich nations are gaining wealth. Grain and rice rich nations are gaining wealth. And so it goes. We have to change the way we live on this planet because the distribution systems we have evolved are not able to cope with a warming or a cooling planet. |
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