Bright ideas to grow your business
Hot off the press, just heard from Suw Charman that I’ll also be blogging from the Web 2.0 Expo Europe which takes place 21-23 October in Berlin.
Only a month later than the Web 2.0 New York, it’ll be interesting to see the differences between the conversations been had among the delegates, as well as what’s been said from the podium. Looking forward to getting the European angle on things.
Now, if only I could work out a way to get to Tokyo…?
Yay, I made it! My long-planned US trip is finally a reality. After a parched ten hour Virgin Atlantic flight it was great to see family friend Judy waiting outside San Francisco airport in her green Lexus, ready to whisk me off to sunny Los Altos.
And yes, the sun does shine here. After six weeks of cloud/rain in England, that in itself is quite a shock.
There’s even a swimming pool, which I’m ashamed to say I haven’t used yet; been busy with interviews and the like.
Day one, yesterday, paid a visit to the Socialtext offices in downtown Palo Alto. Had a lovely chat with founder, Ross Mayfield who was wearing shorts! Yes! Shorts! In September! Whatever next?! Watch this space for write-up.
Then on to San Francisco for a nice glass of Napa Valley white (it’s a tough life) and cheese from the Cowgirl Creamery with Lorna Li from Salesforce. We went to the Wine Merchant at One Ferry Building. It’s great there - lots of organic stuff, a bit like London’s Borough Market.
Both Ross and Lorna were beaming with optimism despite the general economic outlook, so good to see us UK Panglosses are not alone (and, possibly, not even Panglosses).
Today, it’s lunch with Chanel Realegeno, an entrepreneurship student at California State University, who’s kindly driving down all the way from Chico to give me her take on leadership 2.0.
Then, this afternoon, I’ve got my hard-earned ticket to the Googleplex - and an interview with Director of Products (Enterprise Division), Matthew Glotzbach, at 3.30. Chrome, mash-ups, global domination…where do I start?! What am I even doing writing this?! Should be researching, goddammit!
Monday morning I’m having a cuppa with Craig Newmark - a leader 2.0 exemplified. He’ll be talking customer satisfaction, personal values…and why he decided to hand over his Craigslist baby to someone else.
Monday afternoon it’s goodbye sunny California and hello sunny New York (you can see I’m suffering, but I checked the five day forecasts and they all look ridiculously yellow). Yes, I’ll be heading back east for the Web 2.0 Expo. Meeting Tim O’Reilly, Jeremy Maritz, Lee White and the fabulously-named Shwen Gwee, among others.
This is all great research for the book. I’m really looking forward to hearing what these people think of the future of business leadership, and the impact of Web 2.0. Promise to report back here as soon as I get the chance.
Christian Payne aka Documentally is a photographer and journalist now making a bit of a name for himself as a social media guru. When I first met Christian at the Tuttle Club a few weeks ago, everyone told me he was the one person I had to talk to.
We’ve arranged to meet at Tuttle again today…only, Christian’s dog walker can’t make it and he has to stay home to look after his Border Collie, so we’re talking long distance (London – Boondocks) over Skype.
Six years ago Christian ‘downsized’, leaving full-time employment at a newspaper London to live and work in a small village in Northamptonshire.
“The corporate world is designed to make money at the end of the day, not to make people happy. Authenticity and ethical trading doesn’t exist enough. Corporations still believe in the ‘acquisition of more’ when they should be developing the capacity to enjoy ‘less’.”
Christian urges me to read Fritz Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful to get the full take on the way he sees things. Twenty-five years on, it seems a kind of apt title for the niche-obsessed world of social media where, suddenly, the little things matter again.
So what finally drove Christian to follow his values and opt out of the London rat race?
“I spent years working within newspapers and the way we report news nowadays is really very lazy. As a photographer, I always had to go and visit the people behind the stories. Sit with them, chat to them. Find out how they were really feeling. You always get something deeper by sitting there talking to people face to face. I quickly lost faith in the newspaper industry. Journalists never go out to stories any more. They get all the information online, maybe make the odd phonecall. Everything you see in the newspaper is based around advertising. The story will be cut to fit with the ads. A fantastically touching product to begin with can be turned into pulp.”
And Christian has little praise for his old bosses:
“The leadership [in newspapers] is terrible. People sit there shouting like something out of a Spiderman movie. You’ve seen Spiderman, right? Well, the relationship Peter Parker has with his editors, who are always shouting at him – that’s a completely accurate representation. There’s no end of bullying.
“As a result you end up having no respect for either these people or the organisation that employs you. You just want to get back at them in whatever way you can. For example, when it came to expenses at the newspaper, people would calculate expenses to and from the office for every story, even though they would go direct from job to job. They could probably earn another £4K on top of their earnings annually through that. Most people did it, and the newspaper was completely unaware.
“In organisations like [the newspaper where I used to work] you simply don’t have that ‘let’s sit down and talk about this’ attitude that you should have. This is where social media has the chance to make a difference.”
Of course, not all places are bad. Christian tells me that the Open University (one of his clients) has a very progressive attitude. From the sound of it, Ian Roddis, the OU’s Head of Online Services, is more like a favourite, trendy uncle than a boss. Twitter is used as a type of intranet, while Roddis sends short video clips to his staff using Qik.
“The other day Ian sent a Tweet at lunchtime: ‘I’m working from home and having a beer, does that constitute drinking at work?’. The thing is, he’s not just talking to his employees but also to his clients and his sponsors. He’s communicable and being honest. That’s what’s so likeable.”
If an organisation uses Twitter in this way, feels Christian, it’s inevitable that workplace relationships will become more open (and that’s a good thing):
“Twitter is like a massive corporate meeting taking place 24/7 at all levels of management. But it’s a useful meeting. People can see directly what I’m doing at any point – for example, they can see if something’s my idea. That’s good, it gives me ownership. This is the kind of communication we need between people now. It’s almost too much communication. But YOU control your data. You control how much you want to share.
“You can lie, but then you have to make sure you tell the same lie everywhere. You can only really throw truth into that stream.”
Transparency, openness and – ultimately – efficiency. Who can argue with the benefits of that? And, the great thing is, it’s really difficult to SHOUT on the Internet.
A friend of a friend of mine spent years in business development for the BBC before he decided to pack it all in and become The Master Genie of The Universe. Needless to say, The Master Genie no longer has much time for mortal work, being kept busy granting wishes to anyone who chooses to ask, via his Myspace page.
A few weeks ago (when he popped in for dinner), The Master Genie alerted me to a number of websites that he felt were pointing the way to the future of leadership. I’ll list them here for the sake of completeness, if nothing else:
It’s strange, this hippy thing, because hippies can be a bit like Jehovah’s Witnesses in their constant talk about the looming Apocalypse, and the fact that their (to the majority, slightly barmy) ways are the only route to salvation.
A lot of this can, frankly, be put down to bad marketing – Whirl-y-gig founder, Fraser Clark, banging on about over-use of black bin liners in an illegible font isn’t going to impress anyone, yet a book like The Celestine Prophecy, covering similar issues (though not, specifically, black bin liners), sells over 20 million copies worldwide and spends 165 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Now that the liberal, free-spirited baby boomers are becoming grandparents, isn’t it inevitable that ‘hippy’ values become more mainstream? It seems that we’re all buying organic vegetables, wearing tie-dye and inhaling at High School (thank you, Barack).
The irony is that the recent inflation in petrol and food prices is forcing even the most cynical of us to reconsider our consumerist behaviour. Last month, the UK saw a decline in car use for the first time in years (thank you Steve Moore for pointing me to this), while in the US, sales of gas-guzzling cars have nose-dived (thanks Janet Parkinson!) and airlines saw an unprecedented drop in air travel during their usually busy Labor day weekend.
Sales of energy-saving lightbulbs are soaring. Concerns about health and carbon footprints means that people are turning to freshly-made food, local producers and farmers markets, forcing fast food giants like Macdonalds to rethink their menus and approach.
George Por, executive coach to businesses, government and NGOs, happily admits to being a bit of a hippy. There’s no doubt he has the credentials: a student of sociology, he was jailed (for 20 months) in the 1960s after leading university protests in his native Budapest; exiled from Hungary, he studied tantra in India at Puna in the ‘70s and moved to Berkeley, then Santa Cruz in the ‘80s. His website is decorated with flowers and mind maps.
“It’s clear that we’re at a transitional time in human history,” says George. “Everywhere you can see signs that old systems are dying out while the new ones are still to come.”
The thing about George is that he seems to be getting the right sort of people to listen to him. He was a senior research fellow at INSEAD and a visiting researcher at the London School of Economics, before becoming PrimaVera Research Fellow at Amsterdam Business School. He currently advises both the European Commission and the European Investment Bank.
George is keen to support what he refers to as “the transformation of organisations” and what he calls “evolutionary leadership – large scale systems thinking”.
“I like to think of myself as a community technology steward,” he says. “It’s an emerging profession – at the join between business, technology and personal development.”
(It’s interesting just how many people I’ve spoken to for the book seem to like to apply their own labels to what they do, rather than accept a conventional job title.)
George is interested in what he calls “knowledge gardening”. It’s in pursuit of this, he says, that he spends much of his days, “evaluating gadgets and platforms in terms of their potential contribution to collective intelligence; looking at the organisational requirements; finding out what technology can do for us.”
I’m quite happy to believe in the positive evolution of humankind, but would like some hard scientific facts. George points me in the direction of the following:
Okay, so I’m going to try and have a conversation with Otto – watch this space!
One of the most memorable characters in the 1970s smash BBC sitcom, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin was Perrin’s boss, CJ, whose grandiose catchphrase, brought out at every meeting, was “I didn’t get where I am today by…”.
CJ’s arrogance is highlighted when, half way through series two, his company, Sunshine Desserts is dissolved and he’s forced to apply for a job with Reginald Perrin, his former employee. He then corrects himself slightly, and starts his remarks with “I didn’t get where you are today…”.
The joke is, of course, that CJ can’t cope with his loss of power and authority, has stoically failed to move on, and continues to behave pretty much as he did when he was in the top dog position, to the despair of those around him.
It is this sort of one-dimensional leader that we are keen to get away from. The heroic leader’s potential inability to adapt to change, or listen to others, or to learn new ways of doing things is a significant factor in the failure of businesses.
But we ourselves are responsible for helping to shape these monsters. The heroic leaders’ egotism is in no small part a reaction to the adulation and sycophancy of those around him/her.
The classic heroic leader initially refuses to take on the leadership role, but is cajoled and persuaded to do so by the group. After a period of time, initial reticence is replaced by acceptance. This in turn, can be subsumed by arrogance. Especially if there are no checking mechanisms in place.
But business continues to promote the heroic leader.
Professor David Sims, Head of Management at Cass Business School, says that clients are increasingly asking for courses and seminars which are looking beyond the charismatic hero to more holistic ways of leadership.
He’s been asking himself why the heroic model of leadership has survived for so long.
“A colleague came back from a top international business school recently and said they were talking about heroic management – straight from the 1980s – but then you’ve got to realise that [those academics] are speaking to a self-selected audience that wants to be told it’s special. That’s why you get this rubbish trotted out…again and again!”
Part of this long-standing belief in heroic leadership is down to work carried out by Warren Bennis’ studies of leadership in the 1980s:
“Bennis popularised visionary leadership as the way to go. He went around interviewing leaders of the top 500 companies. They told him that they were in their position because they had vision. And he published that. But he shouldn’t have stopped there. He should have gone on and spoken to the friends of those CEOs – or their employees.
“If all you have is vision, you get locked up, because you’re mad. Things are only going to get done if you have other people around you to make sure the photocopiers are working.”
“A lot of people get to the top of organisations by surf-riding, actually avoiding leadership. Leadership has nothing to do with wearing the t-shirt that says ‘leader’ on it.”
So why does the myth perpetuate itself?
“One of the problems lies with journalists. Why do they constantly publish interviews with ‘leaders’? Well, when did you last read a good novel about a group? The thing is, we need heroes. If we don’t have them, we create them. We need them because once we’ve assigned responsibility, then we can relax. We don’t have to worry any more, because the ‘leader’ will sort it out.”
One way of dealing with this is to accept full responsibility for your position.
“There’s a great quote from Jack Welch: ‘as soon as you’re a leader, it’s not about you, it’s about them’. If you’ve got Neutron Jack saying stuff like that, you know it makes sense. Write yourself out of that hero role!”
iKnowHow® is an award-winning innovation consultancy, run by Jemima Gibbons, author of Monkeys with Typewriters: Myths & Realities of Social Media at Work (Triarchy Press, 2009). Read more...
