With the explosion of social media, traditional non-web organizations have had to rethink their positioning and market message, especially as under 30s start making informed purchasing decisions, and just as importantly, look to join the workforce.

I chatted with Venkatesh Rao about Xerox’s experience in overcoming these obstacles.

PF: What steps has Xerox taken to implement social tools?

VR: Its been a true groundswell effort, with a lot of early adopters in different organizations leading the charge, trying out different things in an ad-hoc way, complemented by our IT organization developing and pursuing a strategic roadmap in a very enlightened way. Their thinking has been around sensible enterprise defaults and an open local architecture where individual organizations develop practices and tools that work for them. Ive played a role since January 2007, when I started leading a team to explore and experiment with social media, and also to evangelize and educate. The team was very successful, and we can claim part of the credit for taking Xerox from a culture of isolated social-media activities to a thriving enterprise conversation. I talked about our work at the IRI conference recently, where it was very well-received. I suspect Xerox has interesting new things to add to the broader conversation because of the unique old + new economy nature of our business.

PF: What have been the biggest challenges in the implementation process?

VR: Everybody has a different view of course, which weve been gradually evolving to a consensus view, to the extent that a consensus is needed. Personally Ive found that the biggest challenge is unpredictability. About half the things my team and I tried succeeded, and half failed. As a researcher, with an experimental mindset, I like my successes to be replicable and theoretically explainable, but thats hard because of the enormous diversity of contexts. For example, an approach to creating a successful blogging culture in one group can fail entirely with another. I am skeptical of secret sauces and general formulas. Often, 80% of the hard work is in understanding the uniqueness of specific contexts. Possibly this is because social media amplify exactly the non-formalized/ad-hoc local social practices that are outside generic one-size-fits-all process definitions. Somebody I think it was Ross Mayfield said social media is about exception handling. I think thats right. My colleague Ed Chi at PARC has very sophisticated thoughts about these questions, and he and I frequently discuss these questions. It is a very stimulating subject.

PF: How do you measure the success of Xerox’s social efforts?

VR: Again, everybody has different expectations and interests. The key is to calibrate everybodys expectations with respect to the organizations social media capability maturity at the time. Some look for business ROI, some like to see strategy narratives about how 2.0 can become a competitive advantage, others look at the cost side and information risk, while still others look for signs of employee or customer empowerment and culture change. The key is to create a dialogue that creates a collective, evolving, definition of value. Personally, I have a qualitative, metaphoric measure periodically, I ask myself, are we closer to the organic enterprise, and further away from the mechanistic one?

PF: What branding efforts does Xerox have planned that leverage social media and web 2.0 technologies?

VR: Id question the premise of your question. You cant plan 2.0 rebranding; you have to evolve and earn it. We just had a major rebranding exercise, and Ive spent some time introspecting on the lessons. I believe you cant just ask an agency of record to create a 2.0 identity for you. Youve got to earn it by raising the level of customer and employee discourses to the level where the brand and its grand narratives are being legitimately and powerfully co-created. Thats why Googles Dont be Evil is believable part of the brand weve all heard the story of how an employee wrote that on a whiteboard during a meeting. An employee creating a cute riff on your logo to use for a Facebook group is of some minor value, but if you can take that seed of creativity and grow it to the point where your brand doesnt need the 2.0 tag to be recognized as such, youre there. Google doesnt need to call itself Google 2.0. We all know it is a 2.0 brand. Google was born that way, but older companies have to earn their reconstructed 2.0 identities.

Of course, we do have our experimentation going on, like industry vertical blogs, and YouTube viral video campaigns.

PF: How does a mature company like Xerox compete with the hot younger, companies like Facebook and Google for talent?

VR: Talent management fascinates me at multiple levels. It is a personal interest that I blog about, a professional focus area that I research, and of course a practical concern for the projects I manage. We are in an era of unique demographic conditions that are creating what I call Kool-Aid talent market economics. Gen Y, which has the collaborative ethos and design instincts what Dan Pink calls “The Whole New Mind needs to work with the more experienced, left-brained and independent-minded Gen-X thats just beginning to take over leadership roles from the Boomers. I think the way for older companies to compete is to really emphasize the fantastic opportunities available in what I call “the rest of the economy. Much of the attention to-date has been around the dog-food companies. Its nice when Google figures out how to make money from social media. But to me it is even more fascinating to watch how Boeing evolves to Boeing 2.0, or how Tata Steel, the company my dad worked for, evolves to Tata Steel 2.0. Mature companies need to convey the excitement around completely rethinking complex sectors of the economy around Wikinomics, to use Don Tapscotts phrase. But the good news is that the talent management thought leaders are really stepping up to the plate here and helping us understand how to operate. Rob Salkowitzs Generation Blend and Peter Cappelis Talent On Demand, which Ill review shortly on my blog, are fantastic additions to any Enterprise 2.0 managers bookshelf, and of course, everything by Dan Pink. If you arent reading him, you cant compete for talent today.

PF: Why do you think it’s such a challenge to find qualified candidates?

VR: Specifically around Web 2.0, it is a simple matter of supply and demand. The 2.0 label misleads people into thinking it is a small, incremental revolution. 2.0 is actually much bigger than 1.0, as Tom Hayes points out in Jump Point. It is to 1.0 what Windows was to DOS. It looks small because its natural DNA is around narrow, vertical-functional applications. Farecast.com simply looks like a kitten-sized idea next to the big idea that was eBay in 1.0. But take a thousand Farecasts, and youve got a long-tailed economic mass that rivals eBay.

How does this affect talent? It is a much more complex technology set. In 1.0, any technical person off the street could take a 6-month course and become a productive programmer. I did that my background is in mechanical and aerospace engineering. But in 2.0, the technology set is seriously complex: cloud/grid computing, SaaS, SOA, Ajax, P2P architectures, agile work practices Stuff like this takes talent, training and experience to become good at. I manage developers who do this, but I honestly cant do it myself. For the limited hands-on work I still do, I stick to MATLAB and scientific computing. Take the complexity of the technology set, and add in the fact that the people with the best design instincts around it are barely out of college, and inexperienced architecturally, and throw in the condition that you need phenomenal sociology/psychology instincts to design good applications, and youve set the threshold really high. I am blown away by people like Matt Mullenweg of WordPress, my favorite piece of software the guy is 10 years younger than me, and has changed the world already! We could use 10 clones of people like him, to go after the great opportunities Xerox is positioned to pursue.

PF: You just celebrated Ribbonfarm’s first birthday. Your illustrative blogging provides readers with an interesting perspective on enterprise 2.0 tools. How did you get started blogging?

VR: Thats an easy one. I blog to write. Ive always written and drawn, even as a kid when I had no avenue to publish, and in some ways those interests are more fundamental to me than my engineering interests. I used to write articles and columns and help edit Sulekha.com back in 1998-2000, which was then a writers webzine. When they went commercial, I joined them as first employee, in 2000, at the tail-end of the first Internet boom. It is now a 200 employee+ powerhouse social media presence in the global Indian community. Thats where I learned the game of online content and community management, from the very talented founder couple, Satya Prabhakar and Sangeeta Kshettry. I developed my writing and editing skills there. But I am fundamentally not an entrepreneur, so I went back to the University of Michigan to finish my PhD, did a postdoc at Cornell, and joined Xerox. Thats when I again had breathing room to revive my writing interests in a serious way. The blog, with its fascinating new creative possibilities, was the obvious medium to pick.

I think the blog and the comic book are the next great creative media for both writers and artists. Itll take a decade or two for the blog to find its James Joyce, but I absolutely love the process of learning and sometimes helping advance the art and craft of blogging. Heres just one lesson Ive learned: I started by thinking that little cute drawings are just viral marketing gimmicks to draw attention to my more “serious long essays, which still dominate my blog. But in actually doing little cute drawings, Ive understood that they are part of the rhetoric of the new medium, to be used in seamless ways. The medium is the message, and the message is starting to sink into me. I have a draft article going called “the rhetoric of the hyperlink, where I am trying to capture some of the lessons Ive learned. Ill post it on ribbonfarm.com in the next month or so.

PF: How do you define the business of innovation?

VR: Innovation to me is creative destruction in the sense of Joseph Schumpeter. The business of innovation is the art, craft, and science of driving that process deliberately. Its served as a nice tagline to define my blog, but Ive since discovered that theres a TV show with that name and that it is also the tagline of the Battelle institute, so I am looking for a new tagline. Suggestions are welcome!

Postscript: Big thank you to Venkat for taking the time to answet my questions. Looking forward to seeing what lies ahead for Xerox, and reading his musings on Ribbonfarm.com.

Tags: Venkatesth Rao, Xerox

Trackback URI | Comments RSS