Brain beautiful

It's been too long since I browsed Gary Lawrence Murphy's blog, and it's been fun catching up. Here's his delightful response to an ad for brain training online: why not learn to make music instead.

Leadership

I'm pretty phobic to most of what's said after the word leadership is used in speeches or essays. But Dave Snowden's recent succinct effort strikes me as dead sensible. Snippet:

Not all great leaders are good communicators, fewer still are, or will ever be gifted story tellers. Ironically some of the worst leaders are only too good at telling stories
and excel at communication. What really matters is the degree of coherence and integrity that is evident in the lived life of the leader as perceived by their employees and colleagues. I have heard more integrity in a badly told but obviously genuine story than in a super slick presentation. Teaching executives to abandon powerpoint and communicate by listening first and then demonstrating empathy beats any number of story telling courses or coaching sessions.

A small incident suggesting a lost plot.

I popped into WH Smith to buy a paper this morning. As I pushed my pound coin across the counter, the assistant mumbled something about a pound. I couldn't make it out but picked up a vague sense I was being invited to buy something else. I probably gave a look of mixed confusion/doubt, and whatever it was, was clearly sufficient to remove what little motivation my fellow human being had for the ritual. I grabbed my change and headed for the train, as my brain put two-and-two together, noticing the big display of £1 chocolate bars.

Clearly, the folks at WH Smith are under instructions to pitch every single customer with the idea of buying chocolate. Come to think of it, last month they were pitching me some £1 bag of sweets.

This strikes me as a modestly demoralising way to do business. On the whole, we don't really need to eat more sweets (US: candy) and you don't need a degree in psychology to realise that the ritual of having to repeat this mantra for every customer, day-in, day-out, is not exactly life-enhancing for the staff. No wonder the guy pitching me was barely going through the motions.

I don't know if this is typical, but if makes me wonder if whoever is running WH Smith has lost the plot.

Death by powerpoint, simulated

Presentation Zen on how Obama would sound if accompanied by powerpoint.

"Bottom up": Arse-over-tit

Arse-over-tit, a splendid bit of British slang. And I think it's easy to go that way using the term "bottom-up" to celebrate a lot of the good stuff happening in the world these days.

Flash mobs, facebook groups, protests against higher charges etc... these are peer-to-peer things and to label them bottom-up seems to miss the point.

"Bottom up" frames these things merely as rebellions against authority, missing the positive benefits to participants of collaborating with others.

Some gestures towards interactivity are just bottom-up. So most Q and A sesssions at conferences are just "bottom-up". You, the poor peasants in the audience, may ask a question of our distinguished expert, but keep it short. Oh, and we'll lump your question with three other peasants' questions and you may or may not get an answer. So your participation is on the leadership's terms, and by complying with this set of instructions you reconfirm the leadership's authority. All that's missing really is the obligation to kiss the ring.

I don't own the language, and I'm sure lots of folks will use the bottom-up to describe things that are more peer-to-peer. But I think there's a difference.

Sorry...

Great post by Annette on the value of being sorry.

Geldof

For me, Bob Geldof was the highlight of yesterday's NESTA innovation conference.

For one thing, Bob's a natural performer. He was able to speak without notes for 40 minutes and hold the attention of the room. With 3000 people in serried ranks, that's not at all easy to do.

For another, I found him very down to earth on a subject on which it's easy to be abstract. He made an interesting point about innovation happening naturally in response to need; that Ireland's dire poverty may have been powerfully linked to its more recent economic success.

Geldof reminded me of Thunderbird 6. Here's what I said about that last year in a slightly different context:

That was a movie I enjoyed as an eight-year-old. You can see the trailer here...

Jeff Tracy and the team at International Rescue are up to their usual heroics. The subplot is Jeff demanding the hapless Brains come up with a sixth thunderbird. As the movie rolls on, a series of ingenious but daft models for the new machine are presented. Jeff disses each in turn, and we see each model swept off the table and breaking up like so much lego. In the end, one of the Tracy boys has to improvise a rescue with an old biplane which then gets jokingly referred to as T6.

So for me, the challenge of innovation is about expressing and recognising need. That requires sensitivity, vulnerability, passion and some kind of humility. (I imagine you may be wondering about Geldof and humility; I could explain but not today).

Talking about humility, another good contribution yesterday came from Tim Berners-Lee, and James has covered that nicely already.

I also appreciated the exhibition space which seemed awash with all sorts of creative projects which NESTA has supported. I would have enjoyed some of their war stories as part of the main program.

Benevolence and cockroaches

James emailed me a link to this presentation by Paul Graham at Startup School.

Some great thoughts here about the value of benevolence to business: if you're really helping people, you will be more motivated, and that will make you more confident. Reminds me of the improv principle of making your partner look good.

Since most startups will come close to death, survivability is key. I enjoyed his use of a cockroach as a metaphor for startups: "If you're really committed, and your startup is cheap to run, you become very hard to kill" And doing good for the world may turn out to be what makes you harder to kill than pursuing more selfish projects. And it'll help you attract the smartest employees.

I also loved his suggestion that lying doesn't scale well: being good is a better algorithm.

Weaning ourselves off the gin

Clay Shirky being brilliantly engaging.

Apparently, when Britain first industrialised, for a long time the way people dealt with the trauma of suddenly being in urban density was.. gin. Gin would be wheeled on trollies through the slums. It took a generation for an infrastructure to be created that actually took advantage of urban density.

Shirky argues that TV is basically the 20th Century version of gin trolleys. Desperate Housewives is a cognitive heatsink. But now we're moving beyond merely passive consumption, and something interesting is going to happen.

Hat tip: Charles Frith

Unrest

Interesting article by Naomi Klein: In the wake of catastrophe comes the whiff of unrest She wonders if natural disasters in Burma and China may shake the regimes iron-like grip over the news.

Hat tip: Jon Husband

What's Love Got to do with It?

The latest Hugh and the Rabbi podcast features Hugh, Pinny, me and guest Euan Semple.

Recorded a few weeks ago, we've only just round to posting it but I hope you enjoy it.

We went round the houses on a few things, but started off talking about love and what it might have to do with organisations.

Show notes below, you know the drill: unreliable blah blah.... timings approximate yadda yadda... rough paraphrasing etc etc... don't take literally, rhubarb rhubarb.

Download the Podcast

Podcast RSS feed (all my podcasts)

Podcast RSS feed (just Hugh and the Rabbi podcasts)

Show notes

0.00 Intros, Hugh forgets who "the Scottish guy is" and isn't sure what Euan does but settles for rock star.

1.00 Hugh sets up the idea of love, recalling a talk about this by Euan at Reboot.

1.45 Euan talks about the L word, and people's reactions to it. It's about people's basic desire to connect to each other, caring about things, getting passionate about things. So much of the business world sanitises passion out of things.

3.15 Pinny wonders about how companies show love. References Lovemarks. In relationships, if you don't go to the nth degree, everything else doesn't count. Talks about how mistakes by Facebook and Apple get pounced on by the blogosphere.

4.40 Lovemarks proves a red rag to Johnnie's bull. Love means different things to different people. Johnnie wary of the fanatical idea of love, the pursuit of perfection. It's more about being human, fallible.

5.50 Euan chimes in against fixation on the romantic idea of love. Instead favours "the passion that grows out of day-to-day stuff".

6.45 Hugh asks Euan about his World Service experience at the BBC.

7.30 Euan: Roughly 47 different language services in the same building. Lots of characters, different cultures. "If you were climbing ladders, they were all against different walls." - so less ego and tribalism than in the rest of the BBC. You had to get on quickly with people, the ability to engage and connect, and move ideas round the building was a formative experience.

9.00 Product of World Service is ideas but also the kind of intimacy you can create on radio.

9.50 Hugh talks about the purpose idea - what are we here for, why are we doing this. Trying to get a sense of purpose going.

10.30 Euan: purpose is good, so is obliqueness. Says what he likes about podcasts is that they are not like broadcasts. Meandering semi-conversations that get under skin in a different way than stuff projected at you in broadcasts. Conventional radio output sounds increasingly patronising.

12.20 Euan on how he pays each month to support Leo Laporte's podcasts, more than half he pays in the BBC licence fee. "That's me doing that to an individual because I really don't want him to stop podcasting." People will pay for stuff that's passionate and accessible.

13.00 Hugh contrasts Euan's story with a UK show, Newsnight Review and its affiliation with the Notting Hill cultural elite. New media is a threat, not so much to cash as to old media privilege.

14.30 Euan recalls David Weinberger saying conversations can only take place between equals.

15.00 Hugh on fanboys.

15.20 Hugh asks Pinny a question "as the only guy here with a real job": does this podcast affect your business.

16.10 Pinny: it's not affecting the business... what it affected is how people view him. Discusses impact on his employees with Hugh.

18.45 Hugh on podcasts as disruptors. Euan says disruption is a word with all sorts of baggage but we get involved in this stuff because it makes a difference. How can governance cope with these changes? It's going to change power dynamics and who is successful and why.

21.10 Pinny returns to the theme of love, inspired by his nephew's wedding where a Rabbi talked about what happens when you aren't in love with love, but with the other. Companies need to own up to mistakes.

23.00 Hugh: gosh, act like a human being, not a robot. Johnnie: intimacy an important word in Euan's story. There's something about "ordinary smallness", the ability to have a real conversation; how meetings that strive to be effective often fail. The need to feel each other as human beings.

24.30 Hugh on how small town, West Texas experience has affected him. How it's safe to have a guy walking round with a ten inch knife, because everyone knows who he is and what the knife is for. Euan reminisces about Glasgow and Pinny, Israel.

27.20 Euan: the danger of homogenisation of success. Quote Doc Searls about things being valuable without being important.

28.00 Johnnie on spending Sunday morning with the papers and someone else, where you don't talk but there's a feeling of companionship. You can't put that on a spreadsheet.

29.15 Johnnie on a twitter-related experience of finding work in a very accidental way. If fell out of a conversation where he wasn't trying to make something happen.

30.30 Pinny: the unplanned as the eureka moments of our lives. Getting beyond ego.

32.10 Pinny on the online course Oprah is doing with Eckhart Tolle. This is why the web was created: to spread goodwill.

33.00 Hugh: a lot of people are trying to use the web to do business the way it's usually been done, which misses the point.

34.00 Euan wonders about how these changes connect to our spirituality. Hugh recalls a Catholic priest who influenced him. God as a metaphor rather than a bearded sky fairy.

35.40 Pinny the web is teaching religion to say it's about human beings, not about God. It's teaching companies it's about what the customer wants to pull, not what the company wants to push. Strip away the disease of entitlement and learn humility. Connects to the rise of Barack Obama.

37.20 Johnnie on the difference between Clinton and Obama. Clinton's positioning as the leader, Obama's emphasis on us.

38.20 Euan: authority used to mean authority as conferred; now it means having a compelling argument or idea.

39.00 Johnnie on authority as being the authors of our own experience. You don't take authority from the BBC any more, you participate.

40.00 Hugh wraps by asking what advice we'd give corporate man in light of all this. Euan: be brave. Pinny: don't be stupid ("Be brave but have a day job") Empty your mid once a day for opportunity to happen. Hugh: be compassionate to those above you. Johnnie: you already know what to do.

44.35 Ends

"Knowledge work" or a conversation?

I know what I'd choose. So I loved this:

Here's a definition of that pesky and borderline elitist phrase, 'knowledge worker'. A knowledge worker is someone whose job entails having really interesting conversations at work.

The characteristics of conversations map to the conditions for genuine knowledge generation and sharing: they're unpredictable interactions among people speaking in their own voice about something they're interested in. The conversants implicitly acknowledge that they don't have all the answers (or else the conversation is really a lecture) and risk being wrong in front of someone else. And conversations overcome the class structure of business, suspending the organization chart at least for a little while.

If you think about the aim of Knowledge Management as enabling better conversations rather than lassoing stray knowledge doggies, you end up focusing on breaking down the physical and class barriers to conversation. And if that's not what Knowledge Management is really about, then you ought to be doing it anyway

Technology for being better at being human

Roland at NESTA highlights this great 10 min video of what happened at SiCamp

I think this gets across how SiCamp managed to get geeks and non-geeks together, and how much energy is created by people working on things with a higher purpose that they care about. It also says something about what makes me excited about the Web: not the technology, but how technology allows us to be better at being human.

Kudos to NESTA and many other good folks for sponsoring this. (Disclosure: NESTA are a client of mine)

Evil Twin visits America

I see my evil twin brother Matt is on tour in the US, as follows. If you live in these places, I heartily recommend meeting him.

Washington from May 9th to 11th.
Chicago from May 12th to 14th.
Boston from May 15th to 17th.
Toronto from May 18th to 20th.
Detroit from May 21st to 22nd.
New York from May 23rd to 27th.
Seattle from May 26th to 29th.
San Francisco from May 29th to 31st.
Los Angeles from June 1st to 2nd.

Brutality and civilisation

I saw a documentary last night on the Beeb about the middle ages. Prof Robert Bartlett talked about how power structures changed over five centuries. It was a reminder of just how brutal power was then, and how oppressed the masses were. Brutality for minor offences was commonplace.

It reminded me of the opening of the Old Bailey archives last month. They included the case of a 13 year old boy hanged for stealing a sheep - here in England, less than two centuries ago.

Blimey. As a species, we have come a very long way in a short space of evolutionary time. It's an interesting sidelight on our response to other countries that today fall short on human rights. In a sense, they're only a few generations behind us in their cultural development although that's no reason to feel anything but revulsion at torture and abuse. (And deep concern at any attempts to legitimise them in countries that ought to know better.)

What times we live in. In some ways, human life on this planet seems so endangered; and on the other hand it seems as though we've made extraordinary leaps in the way we think of and value each other as human beings.

Illusion

I'm fascinated by visual illusions. They challenge our everyday notion that the world is as we see it. Richard Dawkins has a great chapter in Unweaving the Rainbow which explores how our mind processes visual data to manage what we see. He suggests that in one sense we already live in a kind of virtual reality.

So this new blog is worth a look: Illusion Sciences

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan