Change or Die?

If you had to choose between changing your life and dying, what are the odds that you'd change? If you are typical, your odds are 9 to 1. That is, you are much more likely to die than change. That's the shocking argument of this article from Fast Company - Change or Die - spotted by Rob Paterson.

It's a good read, taking the example of patients with heart disease, who seem unable to make essential lifestyle changes to improve their health. With obvious implications for why it's difficult to change organisations. It suggests that fear is a less powerful motivator than joy; that you can't successfully scare heart patients into change, you need to show them that their lives will be significantly more satisfying, soon, if they change.

It also concludes that our minds are more plastic than we think, and it the right circumstances, all manner of change is possible. That's something I believe to be true. To be able to do that, we need to get more efficient at letting go of some of the stories we tell ourselves about how the world is. Including (paradoxically) the idea that the odds are against change...

DIY corporate press release

Christoper Carfi offers an all purpose corporate press release.

[Company name], a [noted | leading | large] provider of [insert industry name here] solutions is [happy | pleased | thrilled] to announce [a new customer | a new product].

[Paragraph with lame details here]

[Paragraph with glowing quote from executive here, that was written by someone else]

[Paragraph with contrived quote from a customer here, that was written by someone else]

[Paragraph from a "Noted Industry Analyst"® here, that took three weeks to get approved through the analyst's business prevention department]

[Pollyanna penultimate paragraph painting priceless predictions for the future of the industry]

[About Company X, a rehash of the lame stuff in the first sentence of the first paragraph]

Separate feeds for branding and facilitation

I've created two new RSS feeds for those who'd like a less rambling stream from this blog. One gives you just material relating to facilitation, the other branding.

Here's the Facilitation RSS
And this is the Branding RSS.

Normal service continues on the other feeds.

New York state of mind

Well I now have a New York telephone number.

This is courtesy of Skype. Anyone dialling 1 646 808 0415 will be connected to me via Skype, wherever I happen to be logged on in the world. Any stateside readers are very welcome to give it a try.

And all it costs me is 30 Euros a year. Awesome.

Vodka selling by word-of-mouth

Jackie Huba found this article: A cut above from the Sydney Morning Herald. To launch its new Vodka brand in Australia, Absolut have ditched conventional advertising in favour of word-of-mouth.

Absolut has taken out a short lease on two pubs - one in Sydney's Surry Hills, the other in Melbourne's St Kilda - hired bands, DJs and put on a photographic exhibition on life in five state capitals. Visitors to the Absolut Cut bar will get a free bottle of Cut and eventually the public will be given a chance to contribute their photos, generating what Absolut hopes will be a viral element to the campaign.

The word-of-mouth approach is one that Carlton United Beverages is also adopting, having learned that big bold advertising does not always work when launching a brand to a younger discerning audience. In 2003, a large TV ad campaign announced the arrival of a new beer, Empire, aimed at much the same drinker as Cut is targeting - 18 to 29-year-olds. The beer flopped.

Viral doesn't have to be net-based.

The limits of wrath

Interesting post by Alan Singer: The Other Side of the Campaigning Coin.

Alan's been blogging consistently on the case of Shapelle Corby, an Australian charged with drug smuggling in Indonesia. This has raised enormous hackles in Australia, and a few of them surfaced when I blogged the story a few weeks ago. That post also contains an irate comment from an Indonesian. I checked her blog and realised that this story is experienced very differently in Indonesia. Alan's new post explores the potential downsides of wrath-laden Australian threats on the issue and reminds readers of some ground rules he chose for the debate - it's a well-considered piece.

For me, there are important lessons about the value of respect in dialogue and the pitfalls of attempting to coerce rather then explore. Ranting and raging have their place - and it's good to consider the merits of softer approaches. (Recognising the value of enquiry as well as advocacy is a theme to which I shall return)

Fake Gurus

Lisa Haneberg observes Fake Business Gurus are Chinese Bestsellers. Maybe they should start character blogs?

Seeming awake in meetings

Well here's a new approach to the challenge. (Hat tip: Ian McKenzie via Bruce Lewin)

Costs and quality

From the new (and rather good) Four Groups Blog: Costs and Quality. Bruce Lewin spotted this on the mailing list of UK-HRD.

Nothing personal - this happens every couple of days - someone puts up a posting asking for an instrument, exercise, whatever, which will presumably have some kind of effect on people’s careers and life chances and then adds the coda that it should preferably be free or low-cost.

I’m reminded of John Glenn, the astronaut, who when asked about his feelings on being punted into outer space said that he couldn’t help but think that all the millions of components were purchased from the lowest bidder.

Nice comment. Although I am rather in favour of using free, open source processes, and quite wary of well-packaged, often complicated, ones. (See Process, Schmocess for more of my prejudices on this.)

Apple is not that great

I'm strongly inclined to agree with David Weinberger: Tell Steve Jobs he's a vain, petty tyrant.

Kryptonite responds

Jake (the Community Guy) and I had an interesting chat on Skype yesterday about his email interview with Kryptonite, which he posted a couple of days ago. (Kryptonite is a bike lock company that was hit by rampant negative PR when a blogger discovered you could undo their locks with part of a bic pen). We both had the same feeling: that the responses had a stilted and defensive quality. A standard issue corporate voice, not a really human one.

Jake's been inspired to have a go at rewriting it for them. It's an improvement. And I'd like it go further than it does, which is no comment on Jake. I need to hear something from someone at Kryptonite in their own words... it's really difficult to do authentic for someone else. And I'd like it to include a really explicit acknowledgement that they screwed up; that they shouldn't have needed a blogger to reveal the flaw in their design. Oh, and how about some recognition of the alarm caused to their customers. I also think the word "sorry" would go a long way.

It would be easy to forgive Kryptonite if they could drop the defensiveness. I guess that they are a good company of well-intentioned people. But they're stuck in a standard PR groove that belongs to the last century. The corporate drone just increases distrust.

Of course (as Jake implies) if they kept a blog they'd learn how to do this a lot quicker.

Glitch

I've just upgraded to MovableType 3.16 and I'm having a problem with some of the individual archives (the pages you use for adding comments and trackbacks). Apologies if you can't get them working, I'm working on it. Any feedback from MT geniuses who happen to be passing would be welcome. I'm turning off trackbacks on this post as they seem to be triggering the problem.

For the cognoscenti, my fullest RSS feed which shows all comments and trackback still seems ok.

UPDATE: Looks like I've solved this myself, I had to remove a couple of old plugins that were conflicting. And now back to your normal programming..

Dirty linen in public?

The debate on the Micrsoft Anti-Discrimination policy continues with some very interesting comments emerging.

There are quite a few strands to the debate now, but I want to focus on the "dirty linen in public" argument. (Some of these links are courtesy of Robert Scoble's linkblog).

Some folks are wondering if this stuff should be done out loud. For instance, Rick Segal says:

First, decide up front what the plan is with communications in/out of the company. And not some 80 page legal document either. No, something simple like, before you decide to 'go public' how about giving the family a chance to solve or get to the agree to disagree point, then off you go. Simple and all team like."

Adam Herscher is on the same lines:

Over the last couple of days, I’ve thought long and hard about both the issue itself, and about whether or not I should write my own opinions in my blog. I decided not to do so. Call me old fashioned, but I still think it’s usually a bad idea to challenge your employer (or in this case, future employer) publicly. I still believe that if you have a problem with the way your company is doing something, you work from within to change it. You challenge authority — internally.

DonS.CF thinks seeing this going on will scare a lot corporates off the whole idea of blogging:

I ask that all of those fortunate enough to be in a desirable corporate blogging situation to take a moment of pause whenever you post on sensitive subjects regarding your company. Please remember that you not only demonstrate the success of this communications vehicle, but also potential pitfalls.

And there are others saying, hey, why don't you get on with making some decent software instead of indulging in all this conflict? Tony Goodson might belong to this camp.

Could we do without Microsoft in our lives? Would the world be a worse place without Microsoft?

Many of these commenters nonetheless admire the courage with which this debate is being carried on - as do I. I also agree that sometimes it's better to express dissent directly and privately... and sometimes it's good to be out there.

Overall, I'm feeling optimistic! I think the envelope of what's possible has been stretched a little. I don't think this is going to scare corporates off blogging, unless they're already too frightened to do it.

Some are concerned about the tone of the comments made to Steve Ballmer (while others like it). Well, people can always soften the tone - and actually that's often what happens as more air is allowed into an argument. That's what's good about having arguments in public; as per this manifesto, the best response to abuses of openness is more openness.

The linen isn't dirty, just multicoloured. Conflict can be good, even if it hurts a little sometimes. I disagree with Dave Winer's idea that companies shouldn't "do" politics; how can they NOT do politics? They only get to choose HOW they do politics and Microsoft here seem to be choosing to do it in the open. I like that.

I quite like Adam's further thought.

Maybe I’ve taken this to the extreme. Maybe we’re entering some new era where companies aren’t harmonious entities that strive for a succinct message and public image. Maybe companies are becoming more like governments, and employees more like citizens, each with their own opinions and with a blog as their mouthpiece.

That's probably way too radical for some but I think it's an interesting direction to travel.

Oh and harmony is made up of multiple different voices; what many companies end up with is monotony.

Between monotony and harmony, you may experience some turbulence. Fasten your seat belt.

Cultural insensitivity

Chris Corrigan has a good post criticising the logo of the 2010 Winter Olympics. The powers-that-be have chosen an Inuit design for games staged the other side of the continent from the Inuits.

Using an Inukshuk to signify winter games in Vancouver is like using the Egyptian pyramids for selling the London bid for the summer games. The two have nothing to do with one another and Vancouver and Iqaluit are separated by about the same amount of distance as London and Cairo.

Schapelle Corby

Alan Singer continues to agitate for the release of Schapelle Corby, an Australian women charged with drug trafficking under highly questionable grounds in Indonesia. He has pretty much given over his blog to the cause in recent weeks and has now launched a campaign site: www.schapellecorby.org

This certainly seems a case of someone being found guilty until proven innocent, and it seems there's an increasing tide of anger in Australia over the case.

Snapcast on Scoble

Snapcast is a name invented by Jake for a short, quick podcast. I was on Skype this morning and hooked up with Tony Goodson in Australia and Rob Paterson in Canada. Alan Singer (also in Oz) jumped in as our sound engineer. We wanted to discuss Robert Scoble's recent challenge to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer over the company's attitude to some anti-discrimination legislation.

We kick around what we think about the way this debate is being played out in public and reflect on what it might mean. Rob and I think it may represent a step change in corporate blogging, whilst Tony is more sceptical and thinks shareholder interests may stifle the debate - and thinks the mainstream media may strongly shape how it plays.

Here's the cast, a 12m31s MP3.

(By the way, it's pretty cool that a few guys with computers can create a discussion like this across three continents at the drop of a hat)

Related links

Scoble's orginal post
Adam Barr (another Microsoft blogger) comments
Vic Gundotra - Scoble's boss - joins in
Tony Goodson adds some more thoughts after the 'cast.
More links from The Newest Industry

Scoble pushes the envelope

Whoa. Robert Scoble is once again pushing the envelope for how far he can take blogging inside business. This is Scoble addressing Steve Ballmer:

The fact that Microsoft is even in this position makes me want to leave and join a different company that won't be pushed around by religious folks. Is that the message you want to send?...Steve, I'm sad. Very sad. This is leadership? What if we were a company in Germany in the 1930s? Would we have taken the same position you just did?

I wonder how many people in an organisation would say this - in full public view - to the big mozzarella? I wonder how many organisations would accept it?

If you read the comments, you can see that he's opened a big can of worms with some supporting him and others outraged. What he's talking about involves religion, politics and sexuality - an incendiary mixture that a lot of folks would prefer not to touch.

I think the ability to accept, indeed embrace, dissent and controversy can be a measure of an organisation's strength. Yet there's a common view that this just isn't the done thing. Some of the comments seem to suggest that companies shouldn't have opinions; well companies may not but the people who work for them do, and I think it's healthy for that to be acknowledged.

I'm surprised by how far Scoble has gone this time. And I think this could be a telling moment. My own feeling is that by accepting this degree of open dissent, Microsoft becomes stronger not weaker - and raises the bar for the rest of the corporate world.

If he carries on like this, we'll have to call him Robert Sco-balls. Mind you, that could be interpreted in more than one way.

iRiver

So I have finally succumbed to the urge to get an MP3 player and got myself an iRiverH320. I realise I've been a bit behind the curve here but wow, what a great toy! One of the reviews summarised it as a great MP3 player for people who've chosen the PC over the Mac: lacking in design finesse and with instructions and controls that are far from intuitive, but packed with power and features. That's about right, I'd say. Monster hard drive, high quality voice recording (useful to me for possible future podcasting efforts) and generally lots of whizzy things to tweak. Oh and the music sounds great too.

Of course, it has immediately given me my first frustrating brush with the DRM nazis fraternity. It won't play WMA files ripped from CD. It appears the EU version is especially obstinate on this point. So I poked around in google, downloaded a piece of Freeware called FreeRIP to create .ogg files instead. I hadn't heard of ogg files yesterday, and today they're installed and working a treat. Not a solution to downloaded music, I gather, but hey it works for me.

So I was foot-tapping my way round Marks & Spencer this afternoon to a wildly shuffling collection of hits. Not a pretty sight I'm sure, but it sounded great on the inside.

Improv in New York

The Applied Improv Network is hosting a free gathering in New York on May 21st. If you're interested in improv, this is a great opportunity to learn more and have some fun with kindred spirits.

Baseball blogs

Steve Rubel writes about the decision of Major League Baseball to get fans blogging at $50 a year.

Kryptonite follow-up

Jake has got an interesting conversation started with Kryptonite.

Diversity and problem-solving

Piers Young reports on research that shows diversity is a key to effective group problem-solving. But, he says, our tendency to mix with kindred spirits may be in the way.

In short, to optimise our group problem-solving we need to make sure our groups are diverse, but nature, or rather our natures, shoot us in our feet.

When faciliating, it's easy to think you're doing a great job when everyone seems to be agreeing - this can be a mistake. It's good to embrace conflict and difference to help create some diversity.

My own experience of groups is that, when I pay attention, there is a lot of diversity but it can easily be supressed. So the challenge is more about bringing out the diversity from behind the surface appearance of agreement.

One simple example: it's easy for the quiet types to be excluded from discussions. There are lots of ways of dealing with this - one of the simplest is to break up large groups from time to time into twos and threes to make it easier for the more reticent to get some air time. Sometimes, just making a neutral observation that some people are talking more than ofthers can shift the group dynamic in a way that gets more to speak.

On a broader canvas, using Improv exercises nearly always brings out subtle (and not-so-subtle) differences in the way people think and operate. For some, the most exciting learning is not in the exercises, but in the debrief where they discover how many different lessons people have drawn from it.

So as well as getting clearly diverse folks into your group, it's important to look for the great diversity that's already there, but less obvious.

Adobe translated

John Gruber offers a witty translation of corporate drone from Adobe. Here's a snippet.

Why is Adobe acquiring Macromedia?

Adobe’s mission has always been to help people and businesses communicate better. Macromedia’s mission has been to provide a rich media experience. Together, we share a vision for the future and with the combination of the two companies — our products, technologies and people — we will enable the creation and delivery of compelling content and experiences across multiple operating systems, devices and media.

Dude, we just bought the only significant competitor to several of our flagship applications. We didn’t buy Macromedia, we bought the market.

Why are the companies joining now?

Both companies are experiencing great success and momentum and have great opportunities ahead of them, and believe that together, they will be better able to achieve their combined vision with greater synergy. We also believe the joining of two healthy companies will lead to a more successful combined company.

We’re joining now because Macromedia said yes to our offer.

Hat tips: Christopher Carfi and Good Morning Silicon Valley

The plot thickins (sorry)

The Graeme Thickins article I blogged yesterday continues to get picked up in the blogosphere. It really doesn't deserve the attention but it's irritiating me so I'll just make a couple more points and then stop.

Thickins reels off a series of claims about why business doesn't like blogs.

For the sake of argument, let's allow Graeme his mythical business creature, and let's allow this mythical creature to pretend it doesn't feel angry about all these emotional bloggers. So? The bloggers are going to carry on regardless and if responses to this article are anything to go by they will be provoked further by the silence of the beast.

Graeme thinks business gets a choice about whether to blog. I say, it's going to be blogged anyway. Whether it likes it or not is quite irrelevant. (Which I suppose Graeme's "business" might approve of as an very unsentimental position.)

But arguing with Graeme is hard work. One moment, he talks about a few cases of bloggers being fired to show us that business doesn't like blogs. The next, he tells us that business is "yawning" at the thought of blogging.

And as for evidence, I think the feebleness of his efforts is contained in this, his 10th argument.

The corporate communications and public relations profession is remarkably quiet in all the rah-rah hype of blogging. Here’s but one example of their lack of buy-in: the League of American Communications Professionals recently published a newsletter on the topic of “Converting a Corporate Cause to a Grassroots Campaign via the Web.” The b-word never even appeared.

Oh well, I'm glad that Graeme won't be lonely there with his head in the sand.

Blogs and business "oil and water"

Tom Ascacker points to Enough with Blogging Already from Darwin Magazine. The author Graeme Thickins pooh poohs blogging, big time.

Among Thickin's reasons... Business doesn't do passion; business doesn't like gossip; business doesn't like doing public experiments; business doesn't bare its soul; business writing style and blogger style don’t even come close.

Each of these arguments falls at the first word; the fanciful notion of a single, monolithic thing called "business". Well, this imaginary creature may not like passion, or gossip, or public experiments... but people do, and that's probably why the numbers of bloggers keep growing.

Garden of Zopa

The folks at Zopa (see my Brandshift post on a podcast with them) emailed me with their new viral: garden of zopa, "an interactive garden that reflects Zopa’s community values".

I like the Zopa idea, really disruptive thinking and the kind of marketing innovation I get excited by.

Not so keen on the viral though. The idea is to plant a seed in a mythical garden which gets watered the more people you introduce to the viral. The trouble is, you don't get to play at all without registering, which I think is a big barrier to participation. And not much happens until you feed it three friends' addresses too. It feels too blatantly like a list building exercise.

I love to use metaphor and story, but in this case it feels like the metaphor is getting in the way of what is a compelling hard news story.

But that's just my two cents - I wonder what others think?

Fascinating clients

Howard Mann asks, Are You Fascinated by Your Clients?

Q: What if you approached (and targeted) each prospect because you were truly interested and fascinated by their business and/or the type of people they are?

How would that change your entire sales and marketing approach?

SpamLookUp

For the technically minded:

I've installed Brad Choate's SpamLookup plug in for Movable Type. I'm running it alongside MTBlacklist to try to keep comment and trackback spam at bay. I've just tweaked Blacklist as per this forum comment to get them to behave properly together. Thanks to all these clever people for their efforts.

It looks like SpamLookup is keeping a lot of spam trackbacks away which is great.

While I've been fiddling, you may have had some problems tracking back here. It looks at though SpamLookup filters out legit HaloScan trackbacks but I'm not sure. Sorry about that.

For the non-technically-minded:

Here's a cute picture of a kitten (hat tip:w3bdevil)

Left-Right

Tom Guarriello explores left brain vs right brain thinking, and reminisces about his reading as a philosophy student trying to make sense of Heidegger.

Heidegger makes a distinction between calculative and meditative thinking. The former is our typical "right brain" oriented approach, in which we view the world as objects to be analyzed and manipulated.

Meditative thinking is a more difficult and cryptic enterprise. It requires patience (not "waiting for" exactly, since that puts us into a mindset that is anticipatively anxious and very close to calculative), and a lingering persistence; the courage to "dwell" in the presence of the world. Heidegger called this releasement towards things and openness to the mystery. It is "focused" on the transcendent; a way of getting to the invisible side of the visible.

It is usually right around here that modern readers find themselves getting very queasy.

This reminds me of what Chris Corrigan writes about holding Open Space; a willingness to be present to chaos, with confidence in a resolution without forcing one.

(By the way, Wittgenstein was the one who did my head in as a student.)

Outside-in

One of the things I like about working with James is that he writes really clear articles for people trying to figure out what some of us blogging types are so excited about when it comes to new ways of marketing. His latest is a good example.

Not so much a nutshell, James, more like a nice box of chocolate brazils.

Backing the bid (the French one!)

Simon, who commented on my post I'm not backing the bid, emailed me. He points to a website for those - like me - who are fed up with ads in London instructing us to support the 2012 Olympic bid. The official website asks for votes of support but provides no place for dissent.

Well, someone has responded with nolondon2012 where you can now NOT back the bid. It also points to a French site where you can back the Paris bid. Which I did.

Vote spoiling

Interesting post by David Wilcox: Participation facilitator says spoil your vote

The great popetease...

I don't subscribe to an organised religion. So please forgive me for commenting on the recent happenings in Rome as a piece of entertainment. I realise there is more at stake, but hey I'm only one blogger and there are plenty more out there if you don't like it.

I have to hand it to the Catholic church: their conclave has been made great television.

Overall, I've found TV coverage of the death of the last pope and surrounding rituals over-the-top and at times mawkish.

TV news, so fixated with novelty, really struggles when something important but not fast moving is going on. There's only so much credibility in breaking news which for two whole days is "The Pope isn't dead" and then for a week is "The Pope is Dead". The funeral was... well like many Catholic rituals it was very long.

On the face of it, the conclave offered the prospect of days more of such coverage. What seemed the near certainty that we would have no information whatever about what was going on inside really put the news boys on the spot. The only "news" to get excited about was a discussion of what colour the smoke was.

And you know what, I actually found it a fabulous spectacle. What a great striptease the Catholic church invented with the conclave. In our era of super-connectedness and (hopefully) greater transparency, what fun to be kept in the dark so meticulously and for the revelation to be played out as such a meticulous seqence of small excitements.

As someone who watched it live, I absolutely loved the slow, sometimes tentative unfolding. The smoke starts dark but turns whiteish. What could that mean? Even after it had turned pretty white, the bells don't ring straight away, allowing us all to speculate wildly whether they've just forgotten to add the black chemicals.

Then we hear bells... but they turn out to be 5 o'clock chimes, so not THE bells. Then the real bells start to move, which really gets the crowd going... but it's a few more tantalising seconds before they gather sufficient momentum to actually chime - creating another burst of cheers. So now we know there is a pope, but still don't know who. And so on through the rituals, the opening of curtains, the bustling of servants, the latin announcment by Redhat Cardinal MC. Then we knew who it is but can't see him. More delays, more figures behind windows, more bustling servants, arrangement of banners etc etc before a giant cross emerges and finally we get to see some serious Pope action.

(Here in the UK, Sky News got terribly worked up about the smoke. Oh, they lamented after all had been revealed, how terrbily confusing it was not being sure what colour the final puff of smoke had been. Oh, how come the bells didn't ring straight away? I think they missed the point. And in the montages after the event they took out all the tantalising bits and failed completely to capture the experience)

As it turns out, they've chosen someone widely seen as an arch-conservative. It's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out. And in the after-event coverage, I got a sense that now most of the ritual is over, some very real and significant arguments are going to carried on in public - ones that will probably be more heated and robust now that the charisma of John Paul II is not a factor.

UPDATE: For a serious comment on the new Pope, check out Jeff Jarvis: It is relative. Good analysis. For irreverance, try Chris Locke.

Conference

Tim Ambler, a student at the London Business School is organising a conference Brands in The Boardroom next month.

He kindly invited me but it's not my thing I'm afraid. As I emailed Tim, "I've become really reluctant to go to conferences. I am more and more drawn to more Open Space formats which put all participants on a level. I have become frustrated with "expert" formats which treat a small number of people as if they know more than people in the audience, so that the audience is basically there to listen and gratefully absorb wisdom. With the chance to ask a question if they behave really well."

But some folks seem to enjoy these kinds of things, so I'm passing on the details anway!

Great blogging

Patti Digh posts infrequently at 37 Days but what she writes is always deeply thought provoking. Today's - Love Unlovable People is no exception.

The Parky of Podcasting...

... is the job Tony Goodson is after. (Parky=Michael Parkinson, celebrated UK talk-show host).

He's decided to based his podcasts around interviews with interesting people but to begin with he had to make do with me. He also had to make do with a rather poor connection largely because of teething problems I had with my USB headset, since resolved.

Anyway, he has now posted the result. Listen at your peril.

Improv in Washington DC

If you're interested in working with Improv (Improvisational Theatre) techniques in business, and are within reach of Washington DC, here's a date for your diary.

On Friday May 13th, 10 to 2, there's a meeting of kindred spirits in Washington and there will be some great people there. My friend Alain Rostain is one of the hosts, and he has been a real pioneer of using improv work to get results in business.

What's more it's free. Full details.

Glitch

For some reason, the last 3 entries here vanished. Very strange. I'm trying to figure out what happened; apologies for any inconvenience.

If anyone has come across a similar problem with Movable Type I'd be interested to know.

UPDATE: There was a server problem, nothing wrong with MT. I've rebuilt the missing entries and (hopefully) comments. Thanks to Adrian Trenholm for help in spotting this and helping me sort it out.

Racing to the bottom

Great post by Seth Godin: Race for the top, race to the bottom. He contrasts businesses that focus on cutting costs and service, with ones that aim high.

So, I think I understand what happens when you win the race to the top. You end up with a healthy, motivated workforce that's focused on adding art and joy to your products. You end up with profits and market share and a community that's glad you're there.

What happens, though, when you win the race to the bottom?

Making money out of cheap tools?

I had a great lunch with Adrian Trenholm today and got home to read his lastest post about two agencies which are showing good signs of switching on to conversational marketing. (JWT are saying some good things about customers being in charge and Carat are offering clients blog starter kits).

Adrian examines reactions to this, in partcular Mark Pinkerton and the guys at Redmonk. Adrian says

Mark's advice: forget the "blog starter kit," just get a TypePad subscription. Redmonk offers "quick and dirty consultation on how RSS can put [conversational] strategy on steroids."

There, I think, is the problem for the big agencies: conversational marketing tools are light and cheap, they are "quick and dirty."

The challenge for JWT and Carat et al is going to be making sufficient money out of an approach to marketing which does not, at first sight, fit the big agency mould. Do the big agencies have to rely on the "no-one ever got fired for buying IBM" factor? And will their clients pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for what I created in five minutes with WordPress?

Good question. I don't think there's an either/or here. I don't know how JWT or Carat are charging clients; perhaps they'll be tempted to try to make these simple technologies sound complicated to make the service worth more.

On the other hand, I know a lot of bloggers in what may be a self-imposed poverty trap. Because they think because this stuff is easy (for them) they shouldn't charge much for their advice - and nor should anyone else. I wouldn't agree. The point is blogging is potentially hugely valuable to corporates and if they're willing to pay someone to make it easy for them, then good luck to whoever is smart enough to get the gig. I hope sometimes it will be me.

Moore a whore - shock claim

Cam or Mick (they all sound alike these Aussies) accuses me of being a "blog book whore" in this otherwise highly reasonable podcast interview with Todd Sattersten on the More Space project.

Giving and receiving

David Wilcox reports on a Gurteen Knowledge Cafe session on networking,

we all milled about with labels showing two things we wanted to Get and two things we wanted to Give

David references Lloyd Davis's reflection

I guess the insight for me was that I rarely go into that sort of situation expecting to give AND to receive - I either call someone for help, and am entirely focused on my need, not expecting to have to give something in return, or else I call someone to offer help but am not open to how they might be able to help me out.

Interesting stuff and a great reminder that conversations are a two-way street and we forget it. A lof of the time, we probably don't even think about what is it we're trying to give and receive.

People

Chrisopher Carfi finds that top execs choose suppliers not - primarily - on price, technology or process. But on people.

Foxy marketing?

John Froda responds to the podcast James and I did with Neville and Shel and talks about Volkwagen's launch of its new car with Project Fox, in Copenhagen.

The campaign is taking place all over Copenhagen these days: Volkswagen's Project FOX claims to be a gift to the new urban generation. They aim at bringing "together young artists, designers, cooks, hotel industry professionals and managers to develop and implement their own ideas"

John reports mixed responses: some think its a good example of working with customers, others see it as phoney.

In the podcast, I used the metaphor of a swimming pool. At the deep end are things like Linux, where the product itself is co-created with customers. At the shallow-end are examples where companies invite customer participation in some aspect of promotion. Well, in terms of the Fox Car, this towards the shallow end: the target audience get to participate in designing a hotel, not the car. But in terms of creating the Fox Hotel, it's somewhat deeper.

It'll be interesting to see where VW take this next...

Toast

Jeff Jarvis says push advertising is toast. (The massive growth of the do-not-call list in the states has forced marketers to switch from telesales to customer service. Result: better sales)

He's also done a great summary of Rupert Murdoch suggesting a toast-like future for many newspapers.

Word of mouth

John Moore (the Texan one) has kindly posted links to pdfs of the presentations to the recent Word of Mouth Marketing conference.

Some of these are pretty interesting. Especially this one: Consumer Empowerment and Word of Mouth, from Pete Blackshaw (Intelliseek) & Jim Nail (Forrester Research). It's built around a great story of the authors' contrasting experience of hybrid cars and how the two brands supported - or undermined - word-of-mouth for their products.

Side observation: The thing about live powerpoint style presentations is that big wordy slides with lots of content tend to undermine the speaker and lower engagement. Presentations with simple visuals that let the speaker tell the story are usually more fun. BUT this all changes when the presentation circulates to people who weren't there. I bet Jackie Huba's presentation was a lot of fun on the day (and of course there's plenty of good stuff on her blog).

New vs old reporting

Earl Mardle makes an interesting observation - Andrea Dworkin, Dead or Alive? - about how wikipedia effectively scooped mainstream media.

This is brilliant, not just for the fact that the story of Dworkin's death was published on Wikipedia 24 hours before it hit any other news site, but for the open way in which the story is verified. For now Wikipedia people still defer to the corporate media for confirmation but as citizen journalism gains confidence and resources, that will fade.

His next post - Little Brother watches - and outnumbers - Big Brother is an optimistic interpretation of an issue that's more often seen negatively. Interesting stuff.

"We're all doomed!"

Private Fraser was a character in Dad's Army, a long running TV show in the UK. He was a pessimist, frequently observing in any crisis that "we're all doomed", in a high-pitched voice. (It's in Abe Simpson's repertoire too)

This came to mind reading Alan Moore's summary of Bob Garfield's article in the print edition of Advertising Age. It all strikes me as an over-reaction - but perhaps an indication of how troubled the business is by recent trends.

Boiled down, his theory goes something like this: The marketing industry is currently whistling past the graveyard and largely ignoring signs of massive, fundamental changes in how the business of mass marketing will be conducted in the near future.

The broadcast TV model is working less well each year and will eventually cave in on itself as it reaches ever-fewer viewers with a fare of low-quality programming and mind-numbing clutter. Marketers will increasingly abandon it. But despite their glitzy promise, the aggregate of new digital technologies -- from Web sites and e-mail to cell phone content and video on demand -- lack the infrastructure or scale to support the minimum amount of mainstream marketing required to smoothly sustain the U.S. economy. The result, as the old systems are abandoned and the insufficient new systems struggle to carry an impossible advertising load, is what Garfield calls "The Chaos Scenario" -- a period of serious disruption moving like a tsunami through the marketing business as well as the economy and the broader society itself.

Alan's a bit sceptical about Bob's views but he notes that some big comms groups are thinking of buying mobile companies in response to this sort of anxiety. Sounds a bit like they're flailing around here.

I think there are way more serious threats to the peace of mankind than technology which gives people more freedom to create the conversations and ideas that excite them. When people are addicted to the illusion of control, the idea of losing it makes them panic. Personally, I have much more faith in people's ability to organise their own lives - and in our natural human desire to collaborate and to belong. We don't need big media to keep us all together.

Yes, for conventional ad agencies, it's clear that the conventional business model is not going to work too well in future. But Bob seems to be projecting his own fears for one narrow interest group - admen - onto the whole of western civilisation. Which I think is a bit much.

The decline of traditional media

Chris Anderson's Long Tail Blog shows big falls in sales and participation for (paid for, recorded)music, TV, Radio, Newspapers, Magazines and Books. What's going up? Movies, games and the web.

Open Sauce on podcast

Yesterday, James Cherkoff and I were interviewed by Neville and Shel of the Hobson and Holtz Report.

We kicked around some of the thoughts behind our Open Sauce workshops. There's a good discussion about some of the ways marketing needs to adapt to collaborate with customers instead of just pushing messages at them.

I'm not sure how articulate I was, but it was fun to get a chance to discuss some of the issues with Nev and Shel. And I managed to say the word Improv a few times which is good.

These guys work fast! The finished podcast is alreadly up this morning with some quite thorough shownotes. This sort of professionalism really threatens to rattle the foundations of traditional media.

Take a listen (mp3 file 14.6 MB)

(James and I are going to offer the workshops to agencies and brands over the next weeks. At the moment we're not planning another all-comers version)

Facilitation for suprise

I've made a few changes to the pages on this site about what I do. This gives more emphasis to the idea of Faciliation for Surprise. Quoting myself...

What characterises good facilitation is that people get surprised – by themselves and by their colleagues. Surprised by what they learn and by what they find they can create together.

I've combined what were two separate teleseminars into one. There are still some free places left on April 21st.

The grey area

Curt Rosengren tells the story - First, learn to ask the questions - of this guy Gary Erikson and how he turns round a business. Here's the nub of it (Gary's words in italics, the rest is Curt):

He found that a culture of questioning had a tremendous impact.

Getting comfortable with uncertainty and learning how to ask questions boosted company morale. Employees began to face challenges with excitement instead of dread.

I love that simple, yet incredibly powerful, insight. It's just as valuable and relevant in our own journeys as it is for an organization. Create a culture of questioning. Get comfortable with uncertainty. The answers we need are there if we can let go of our need for white-knuckle certainty and explore.

Gary continues...

Anxiety and fear decrease when we become comfortable living in the gray area. The whole mood of a group or company can change when people are not expected to have all the answers.

Again, it's exactly the same for each of our individual journeys. Life is not black and white, and we can either bang our heads against that fact, or we can learn to roll with it, discovering as we go.

I feel that getting more comfortable with uncertainty is often a key to faciliating anything. Sitting amid the chaos long enough to allow things to emerge without forcing.

Grrrr

My relative silence recently is partly due to having had no broadband access for more than a week. This is all courtesy of BT who seem each day to deny there is a problem, then sheepishly admit there is, then say they've fixed it, then deny there's a problem, in some long running feedback loop. I've tried to be nice about it but I do feel like Basil Fawlty in the classic sketch. Anyway, I'm struggling along with dialup at the moment and it's really slowing me down. (Incidentally, did you know they actually made a collectible model of this scene?)

UPDATE: Check out Alex Schleifer's brilliant visual riff on this theme:

FURTHER UPDATE: This morning broadband is back. Joy!

Improv articles

I've just posted a couple of interesting articles at the Applied Improv Blog. The first, by Izzy Gezell, looks at how Improv is used to support teamwork. The second, by Prof Mary Crossan, explores the range of ways Improv skills are central to supporting innovation in organisations.

Following the leader

Adrian Trenholm retells this story at 173drurylane.

The Sainsbury's CEO employs an executive coach. The coach tells the CEO that his every move is closely watched by colleagues and that they take their lead from CEO, whether the CEO realises it or not.

To prove it, the coach proposes an experiment. He hands a copy of The Grocer to the CEO. The rules of the experiment are that the CEO is simply to keep the magazine visible whenever he is in the company of a Sainsbury's employee, but he is not to talk about it and he is to deflect questions if anyone asks him about it.

For two weeks, the CEO carries round a copy of The Grocer magazine.

At the next meeting, the coach asks the CEO how the experiment has gone. The CEO says: No-one commented on it, no-one questioned it, no-one even appeared to notice it. They listen to what I say, but you are wrong: they don't watch my every move.

The coach then drops a bombshell: Sainsbury's employees had taken out 400 new subscriptions to the Grocer during the previous two weeks.

Podcast: interview with the founders of Zopa

Last Friday, I interviewed two of the the founders of Zopa, a new organisation that is a kind of "eBay for Money". Zopa is a British company that creates a new market for individuals to lend and borrow money, bypassing the banks altogether. Zopa makes a 1% charge for matching up borrowers and lenders and provides essential infrastructure to support the lending process.

I think it is well worth listening.

You'll find full shownotes in the continuation of this entry.

Download the Podcast - 32.32 - MP3

Podcast RSS feed for iPodder etc.

Shownotes

0.00 Introductions by Johnnie Moore

0.20 Dave Nicholson explains Zopa is a lending-borrowing exchange, aiming to give borrowers and lenders more control over their finances. "We're not a bank... we're a way for people to lend and borrow money between themselves"

1.03 James Alexander emphasises that Zopa is an idea that is likely to adapt. They are at the beginning of a journey.

2.50 James: the core idea is about people trusting people with money

3.40 James: "99% of people are good and 1% of people are bad. Here is an industry that's set itself up to serve the 99 but through lens of the 1% that's bad. And what we'd much rather do is... create a sort of perimeter fence to keep the 1% out and then let the people within (be in) a much better position to work out how they exchange and what the appropriate rates are and what the appropriate products are... work that out for themselves...

...The central planning, product management role of the world shouldn't exist... why does someone sitting in a head office somewhere who's a product manager design products for everybody when people are better able to do that for themselves..."

4.40 Johnnie talks about fear and greed as the main levers used in traditional financial marketing and explores how Zopa breaks this pattern. James talks about how Zopa research showed how people wanted more control over how they transact. He says Zopa uses new technology to support an old idea: people lending people money; and talks about how people might be able to lend to specific communities or for specific causes.

7.40 Johnnie contrasts the exploratory style of Zopa with conventional marketing. Dave and James talk about the importance of customer feedback in shaping Zopa's approach. There's a discussion of the role of bloggers in this process. James says he is "stunned by the speed of response from blogs" and the "depth and quality of the input" If this had been paid for like traditional consulting advice, it would have cost "thousands if not hundreds of thousands of pounds."

10.20 How does Zopa contrast with egg, where Dave and James worked before? How did the idea start? They talk about how the idea of "eBay for Money" came into being, meeting the needs of consumers who want more control, and looking at why companies get better financial deals than invididuals.

14.25 Where might this evolve to? James reveals that they don't think of themselves as a financial services company. Their first move might be into social lending, moving on from setting loans only by term and risk category. What if you wanted to support, eg, social housing in Liverpool? The customers themselves could decide what markets to work with. There's a plan to expand into the US, where there is already a team at work for Zopa.

17.20 Johnnie talks about the possibility of using Zopa to help people currently trapped by money lenders with high interest rates. That this might offer him more incentive than just a better interest rate. James comments that Zopa hasn't so far emphasised the idea of customers becoming bankers themselves, but they could allow this idea to evolve. The opportunity for Zopa might not be in the prime market.

19.52 The theme of co-creation, where customers help to define the product. Dave gives one example of the sort of customer interaction they want to help build. James elaborates on the theme of co-creation and how, for instance, they are hoping to reinvent the way risk rating is done, getting away from credit-scoring... a system that denied their own CEO a mobile phone account! He talks about how eBay's system for assessing trust offers pointers to a quite different approach. Zopa wants to develop more human ways to help borrowers and lenders evaluate risk. "Zopa is a trust entity, that's all it is" Zopa shares credit ratings with customers, a different attitude from the banks.

25:50 James talks about the challenge of offering freedom of information while keeping a simple user experience.

26:25 The subject of "freeformers" is discussed. This term describes a growing group of consumers who distrust institutions and emphasise creating new ways to live lives that accord more with their values. James talks at some length about what Zopa understands about the needs of this group, based partly on ethnographic research in finding out what customers really want (in contrast to conventional market research). He believes these freeformers have needs that simply aren't satisfied by conventional banking.

31.30 James talks about how Zopa's own people are freeformers, often working more as consutlants rather than employees. Johnnie relates this to the attitudes of many bloggers.

32.30 End

Not going to Bali

Alan Singer's highlights the plight of an Australian tourist facing the firing squad in Indonesia where the legal process appears to operate on the basis of "guilty until proved innocent".

I don't see why anyone would want to visit Bali after reading this. To say the very least.

Who is behind the Office Max blog?

I just got linked from the Office-Max blog. It seems to be some kind of corporate blog but there is no "about" page or any clue as to its author. There are frequent gratuitous references to visiting Office-Max which would suggest the dead hand of a marketing professional is at work here... on the other hand, it also points to articles about Office Max accounting difficulties. The first post covers the resignation of its CEO over this issue.

So I'm left puzzled: who is behind this curious blog?

Is it a corporate stunt and thus a contender for a Hughtrain Beyond Lame award? An example of a corporate on a learning curve? A rogue employee who loves stationery but doesn't like management?

Am I being naive?

Any thoughts?

Manure madness update

The Manure Madness contest at FightTheBull draws to a close. Votes are invited to separate the two finalists, McKesson and Lockheed. For me, McKesson edges it for managing a slight lower ratio of real meaning to words used, but Lockheed is a worth adversary. At the moment, McKesson is also fractionally ahead with the voters. Be sure to have your say soon.

Small interventions, big changes

Adrian Trenholm has really got his teeth into blogging at 173 Drury Lane. I particularly enjoyed his story, The Fabulous Baker Boy. It may start off like a standard customer service complaint but this one has a great ending - one that illustrates something I'm excited by: how apparently deeply habitual behaviour can be transformed by a simple intervention.

It reminds of me of presentation I saw twice recently (part of an event where the show was run twice). The presenter was telling a story about the building he was in and how it came into being.

The first time, he stood at his laptop, facing the screen with the audience either side. The presentation was fine but nothing remarkable.

The second time, he stood at the screen, faced the audience and cued a friend to change the slides. After cueing him verbally for a bit, hoe got bored and instead snapped his fingers. The more he got into finger snapping, the more his body swayed into his talk and the brighter and more engaging he became. His talk went from interesting to captivating, and everything was different: his posture, his movement, his eye contact, his breathing, the variety in pitch and tone of his voice. This guy was almost dancing and storytelling at the same time.

And all that happened was he decided to stand somewhere different. Everything else grew from that.

You probably know the apocryphal story of Michelangelo being asked how he created the fabulous statue of David. He said "Oh it was easy, I just chipped away all the stone what wasn't David".

In the same way, I like to think we all have some genius inside, waiting to be revealed. And sometimes it doesnt' need weeks of chipping away to find it.

The presenter could have gone on a series of courses to improve his voice, his breathing his posture, his eye contact, his storytelling skills etc etc. But in fact, all he needed to do was stand somewhere else.

I'm not saying breakthroughs are easy... but sometimes they are closer and easier than we think.

Facilitation for Surprise

I just googled the phrase "faciliation for surprise" and drew a gratifying blank.

Good. Because it's a snappy little phrase I'm planning to use to describe what I do.

And big thanks to Freddie Daniells for suggesting it in the course of an excellent conversation over coffee last week.