Branding by accident

Telstra Clear staff in New Zealand have received a not-very-festive email from their CEO, Allan Freeth, who says the company is on a "trajectory to disaster" because they lack the "killer instinct". It continues,

We are too tame, too lame, and too timid to call ourselves a challenger... A challenger winds their opposition, kicks them down to the ground, and them makes them bleed like someone from a Quentin Tarantino movie and then finishes them off - fast.

The email says the company faces a loss of NZ$7m this year. Shareholders will be relieved to hear that Dr Freeth apparently now says the figures were a meaningless, worse-case scenario of where the company could end up. Apparently, he also thinks his email reflects "the frank style of internal communications at the company, which most staff respected."

According to stuff.co.nz,

He also warned staff that if they did not have the stomach for the fight, it was "time to move on".

He ended by thanking staff, saying they were some of the best he'd worked with.

Perhaps the most ironic part of Dr Freeth's outburst is where he suggests the organisation is "all bluster and no action".

One of the best examples of "doing a Ratner" I've seen in a long time...

Good service

I feel heartened by this post from Annette Clancy: Thank you, Iarnród Éireann

Brands and community

James reflect's on Nike's expensive attempt to build a community, Joga.

Compare this to Arseblog, a blog written by a single Irishman armed with a fan's insight into the anxieties and passions of Arsenal Football Club, a wicked turn of phrase and many pints of Guinness. Six or seven hundred comments echoing, challenging and baiting each Arseblog post is entirely normal. Alexa tells us that today Arseblog and Joga stand side-by-side in the traffic play-off. The community lives, breathes and inspires in a way that Nike and Google's combined $400bn muscle struggles to match.

(This idea also appears in James' and my ChangeThis manifesto: Co-creation Rules)

Posted by Johnnie Moore at 13:13 in Branding
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Consulting 2.0

Jevon Macdonald's been thinking about the future, in particular of consulting, as Euan's picked up. (I worked with Jevon this year - it was great fun.) I like the idea of thinking about how to do a kind of consulting 2.0, and please take that title lightly.

I wrote this in Jevon's comments and thought it bore repetition.

So, reflecting on my year, I think the theme that's coming out strongest for me is to challenge the notion of separation, in which we think of the other person as the problem, to be either dismissed as stupid or difficult, or solved/cured etc. I know Rob didn't warm to the Senge book on Presence, but I did enjoy its notion of experiencing ourselves and the other as parts of the same system, and act from that sense of connectedness. Seems to me that's a similar notion to the one you're evoking here.

It's easier said than done, as it means foregoing the slightly masturbatory pleasure of a good rant against those who, by my own lights, dont "get it". But fun to try, even as experiment.

Going forward, I think I'd like to generalise less about big organisations (including big consulting firms) not getting it. It seems to me that in doing so, I instantly turn thousands of individuals into 1) a lumpen mass and 2) a *stupid* lumpen mass. So it's easy to cheer you on the "people, not the brand" theme, and recognising the person who's hiring. Organisations can be changed by anyone within them, I find there's less magic than I hoped in the CEO's office.

(Actually, organisations are constantly changing as the individuals change. Maybe we need to think of organisations as verbs, not nouns.)

I suppose I should elaborate on the verb/noun thing. We often talk about a big company, say Shell or Coke as if it's a thing, like a table. Actually, it's a really way more fluid than a table, it's really a dance of all sorts of constantly changing people in action. If we called it an organising, would that help? (I realise that at an atomic level the table is all moving parts too, but let's not go there just now.)

This might change our perspective on how we relate to this organisation, and our sense of its capacity for change. It might make us more optimistic about how we might be able to engage with it, and suitably less pie-eyed about the ease of implementing a vast change programme.

Perspective

Rob pointed me to this remarkable site which zooms in from 10 million light years away from the Milky Way down to the quarks on an oak leaf in Florida. Watch this and you mght think, what was that thing I was worrying about just now that seemed so important?

Made me laugh

I mistyped the website address for Singapore Airlines and came across one of those link sites that occupy the slightly-mispelt web addresses of big companies. This typo site (and I'm not linking) is sinagporeaire.com. It's full of links and not much else. I had to laugh at the copy on the home page though.

We empower individuals, organizations and businesses by providing unique up-to-date information. Our dedicated team of professionals strives to gather the most relevant content for our users.

We specialize in Students Airfare , Cheap Car Rental , Business Class Airfare , Singapore Hotels , Charter Flight , and an array of other products and services.

This strikes me as something you'd find on quite a few pukka business websites. A wonderful example of dinosaur-speak, and it amuses me that this is how the fakers try to pretend to be real businesses.

Tagged

For all my love of Improv, I struggle to say Yes, And to being tagged on the blogosphere.

But as both Jeff and Rob have both marked me for this meme, here goes. The idea is to say five things most people may not know about me, and then tag five others.

Right then.

1. I used to have a Private Pilot's Licence. I loved flying but found waiting for the weather in England a bit problematic, and one year I let it lapse. If I win the lottery, I'll probably start again.

2. My great great grandfather was Lord Mayor of Manchester, laid the topping out stone of the dam across Lake Thirlmere in the Lake District and opened the Blackpool Trams. My aunt still has the official key.

3. I cringe inwardly when people ask me to try something from their plate in restaurants. Please bear this in mind if you eat with me.

4. My friends (hmm) at school called me "helicopter legs" because they flail outwards when I run. The only athletic standard I ever attained was in Walking Races. Somehow my swivelly legs were great at that.

5. Like Rob, I like sad music. My favourite way to unwind is to take a long bath listening to Elgar's Cello Concerto.

There, that wasn't so bad after all.

And I'm tagging the following. I hope they feel free to ignore this unwarranted interruption of their lives: Tony Goodson, Ton Zijlstra, Tom Guariello, Chris Corrigan and John Winsor.

Change This...

James and I have penned a new manifesto for Change This: Co-Creation Rules

Regular readers will know that I'm no fan of lists. I'm not renowned for making rules either, though you'll understand we're being deliberately ambiguous in our title.

Nevertheless, James and thought we'd try and bash out a few ideas that we sometimes use in our work trying to help organisations get their heads round marketing these days. We've focussed more on corporates and marketing in this, but the general ideas carry over into over areas too. Here are the opening paras:

We no longer live in a world where people instinctively trust authority. As much social research shows, we’d rather trust our own instincts and the information we learn from our friends. For organisations and brands, this ain’t Kansas anymore. In our social world, it’s better to be talked about by others than to try to out-shout the crowd.

If we have to choose between engagement and control, we prefer engagement. We think that organisations in the future will do well to have the same preference when it comes to dealing with their own people and their customers.

I've shamelessly reused a game I described in More Space as part of this, partly in an effort to make this a bit more experiential and less academic.

We might think of this a first draft... and we'd be interested to know how people would change this to make it more useful... You can download it here.

(Thanks to Change This, especially Sally Haldorson, for their support and to John Winsor for some very useful ideas for the content. This mistakes are all ours, of course.)

Rehearsing

Stray thought.

I quite like that motto about life not being a rehearsal... but maybe it would be easier if, in some ways, we saw everything we do as a rehearsal. An experiment. Things we try and we'll do differently next time if need be. That might allow us to reframe our mistakes less painfully... And no-one is saying you can't rehearse with all the passion and commitment you might otherwise be saving for the opening night...

What links things together...

Neil Turner blogs about a machinima (in this case a kind of pop video) on YouTube created in World of Warcraft using the song, Here Without You.

I love this. I love WoW being used for something quite different than it was orginally built for, simple cos of an ethic of letting folks play. (And how much free publicity is that worth to them, by the way?) And I love what Neil shares in his blog.

There's something holding all this stuff together and I fancy most of us could use some more of it...

Stray thoughts of Guinness

Wandering past the shops at the weekend, I suddenly found myself thinking, it's time to see Declan Elliott again, indeed a trip to Galway would surely be a lot of fun.

A few seconds later, I heard a busker on his Irish fiddle.

Coincidence? I don't think so, more like cause-and-effect. I bet that some part of my brain had picked up the Irish music first, triggering thoughts of Galway. You know, the way we sometimes incorporate noises from the real world in our dreams, shortly before waking.

I suppose I'm an averagely neurotic individual as sensitive as the next, so it makes me wonder how much our lives are shaped in this way, without us noticing. I think when we touch on the wonderful unpredictability of our own minds, it might give us pause in assuming we can organise other peoples'.

What if...

And on the heels of my last post, Chris Corrigan points to Doug wondering about micro conversations.

Micro conversations can be a counterpart to micro credit: what if we could encourage people to converse in little groups, to take charge of their lives, jointly, in little snatches, and spread these micro conversations to thousands and thousands?

Love Doug's strapline for his blog: What if conversation were how we consciously evolve?

On conversations...

Conversations have been on my mind lately.

Prompted by my friend down under, Matt Moore, I've been slowly rereading Patricia Shaw's Changing Conversations in Organizations. She's able to articulate very clearly a way of seeing change in organizations that feels more human and realistic, and that gets beyond a kind of language trap people can often get into when looking to "change culture". She writes,

Decades of a certain kind of business school education and writing; the rise of expensive management consulting focused on packaging 'best practice' and promising to provide the expertise that will 'deliver' desired future success; the professionalization of all kinds of human communication into codified behavioural notions of 'coaching', 'counselling', 'teamwork', or 'leading' - all these have given us a curiously rational, instrumental approach to ourselves...

Most of what managers, leaders, consultants and facilitiators are asked to do is 'to get ahead of the game', 'to be on top of the mess', 'to manage the process', to 'set the boundaries', 'to delve beneath the surface to change the deep structure'. It would seem that we want to think of ourselves anywhere other than where we are, in the flow of our live engagement, sustaining and transforming the patterning that simultaneously enables and constrains our movement into the future.

Among the many qualities I like in Patricia's work is the genuine modesty of her approach. Many of her examples are of projects she worked on, made what felt like progress, and then saw things fizzle out. I think she's making the point that this is what real life is like, it's full of these non-linear comings and goings. I often find myself thinking that it's our efforts to make meeting efficient that make them inefficient, because they suppress our natural gift for exploring and experimenting.

The book opens with a funny story of her being asked to 'facilitate' what sounded like an elaborately pre-planned meeting in which the participants would be led (and I'm simplifying and crudifying her language) by the nose to the right solution determined by the client in advance. In contrast, she talks about the notion of a more flowing, organic process. I often see life as a process by which we are continuously making choices in the moment about how to go on together, and Patricia seems to be asking if we wouldn't do better to engage in that in-the-moment sense of making meaning.

I think she gets to the nub of it here:

The assumption is that in the process of reflection we can learn to design with increasing self-consciousness the patterns that it will prove useful to find ourselves in next time we pause to reflect. This is largely how collective learning is understood in organizations."

I took a few moments to digest that but I think I get it. We experience a messy process by which we get to some goal or other, figure out (in hindsight) what was ineffiicient, and aim to legislate against that next time. I totally understand the appeal and naturalness of this... but the trap is that we keep creating this idealised notion of what our meetings, organizations, nay our whole lives, should be like... trying to get the mess out of our lives and not seeing that the mess is the life. She argues that

we focus mainly on the tangible products of conversation - the organizational designs, performance profiles, business models, strategic frameworks, action plans, lists and categories with which we seek to grasp the reified complexities of organizational life and render them 'manageable'. We spend much time... generalising from our lived experience and then trying to apply the abstractions as templates for shaping the future as though we uncritically believe that this is how our future comes to have shape.

So what is the alternative? That's what the rest of the book is about: the less-easily articulated notion of experiencing culture not as an object to operated upon but as something that we are doing, all the time. It's a notion that I feel increasingly influences my own work, so expect more later... Meanwhile, I hope anyone who finds this interesting will be tempted to get hold of the book and... have a conversation with me...

Costwolds or Milton Keynes?

Euan Semple's talking about how he developed social software at the BBC. It's nicely put. And I think the metaphor carries way beyond software.

When we started building this stuff at the BBC we were consciously trying to build the online equivalent of a collection of Cotswold villages with lots of footpaths between them. You know where the pub and church are, you’re comfortable in the environment and you can locate yourself. Corporate systems tend to be more like Milton Keynes. On the surface they’re efficient with lots of straight lines and signposting, but you get lost because everything looks the same.

Threshers getting busy

It looks like Threshers, the UK booze retailer, is discovering the power of viral marketing. It's not completely clear how pleased they're going to feel about it. Here's the scoop from the BBC News website:

Off-licence chain Threshers is braced for an onslaught of bargain-hunting drinkers as an online discount voucher is downloaded by millions of people.

The 40%-off wine and champagne voucher was intended for suppliers and their friends, but has been distributed widely via blogs, email and chatrooms.

One wine company has reported 800,000 downloads and the Threshers website has crashed under the strain.

"It was never intended to get this big," a company spokesperson said.

The company admits it is slightly concerned about the popularity of the offer.

Hugh, who must share some of the credit or blame for this is on a pub crawl this afternoon. I don't suppose he's getting 40% off that though.