Author Archive: Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao works at the Xerox Innovation Group, where he leads technology projects that aim to invent the future of documents and information work. Before he came to Xerox, he spent 2.5 years as a postdoc at Cornell, in Raff D’Andrea’s robotics research group. His work at Cornell was on Air Force comman-and-control models for future battlefields. Between 1997-2003, he was at the University of Michigan, working on his PhD, which was on aircraft and spacecraft formation dynamics, with Pierre Kabamba. His home discipline is systems and control theory, but he tends to draw from all the decision sciences, including OR and AI, for inspiration and ideas.
He also writes a blog on innovation, www.ribbonfarm.com.
Posts:
Apr 1st, 2009 | Venkatesh Rao
One theme persistently comes up whenever I talk social media, either inside my workplace or outside. This is “culture change.” When talking about catalyzing adoption of social media within the enterprise, at some point, someone will predictably say something like, “the most important thing is to get the culture to change.” Framing social media adoption in these terms is basically a show-stopper, because it means you’ve trotted out a reassuring phrase that allows you to view yourself as a visionary, others as obdurate idiots, and gives you something abstract to blame when (not if) your initiative fails. I don’t have an alternate framing, a phrase to replace “culture change” because there isn’t one. “Culture change” is merely a zeroth-order framing that screams “some hard, context-specific thinking needs to be done here.” When you hear the phrase, you are hearing lazy thinking. The key is to start thinking, not to substitute a different lazy-thinking phrase. Here is how you can unclog the mental plumbing.
Drip some ink on a piece of fabric and watch what happens. Depending on the type of fabric, the blot spreads at different speeds along the warp and woof. The pattern that appears reveals as much about the fabric as it does about the ink. What does this have to do with social media? Here is a picture of a chain email diffusing through the social fabric, created by Cornell researcher Jon Kleinberg (picture taken from a Cornell University news article).
As I write, a Presidential news conference is going on, a broadcast event that I, like many of you, would have treated as ‘unmissable’ 10 years ago. Yet, today, I am happy to keep twhirl in my peripheral vision, trusting that if anything truly important is said, tweets or emails will come my way. I have let a vast, trusted crowdsourced filter descend over my eyes. My changed behavior is just one symptom of the waning of broadcasting and the waxing of diffusecasting (I hereby claim credit for the term) as the central process in mass communications. Virality and word-of-mouth are just surface characteristics. Here is a deeper X-Ray view. Mass persuaders, read this if you value your future in your profession. Continue Reading »
So, I am in San Francisco for a few days, and met up with Steve Wylie and Paige Finkelman. That’s the “Us” in the title.
We had a great conversation, where we figured out world hunger and other such small issues, inspired by some great coffee from the Blue Bottle Cafe in the SoMA part of downtown.
- “No, we aren’t in the picture”
And we touched upon a few Enterprise 2.0 related questions that even our combined brilliance couldn’t seriously illuminate. Care to weigh in? Here they are:
I had a big insight today: the word “social” in the term “social media” represents the ultimate in misleading advertising, and is responsible for many failures and a lot of disenchantment, especially within the enterprise. The adjective attracts exactly the sort of people most likely to fail at doing anything valuable with the technology. The sort of extroverted, harmony-seeking, consensus-driven collectivists who think it is all about the group, cutting big-ego prima donnas down to size, and building Brave New Egalitarian Communities that enshrine social justice values. It also explains why thoroughly introverted, unsociable, egoistic and ornery individualists (I am one; among my nicknames in college was “hermit”) take to the medium like ducks to water. This conflation of social with sociable, collectivist and communitarian is extraordinarily tempting. Yes, the medium fosters communication and collaboration, but remember, wolf packs communicate and collaborate rather better than sheep. And they compete viciously for the carcass right after. The true nature of social media, the “message” of this medium, is one of radical, uncompromising individualism, within a brutally competitive, bubblegum-flavored Darwinian virtual environment. The “social” adjective is about something else entirely, not collectivist utopia. Allow me to elaborate. The implications are extraordinarily counter-intuitive, and if you don’t learn to appreciate them, you will be eaten by the wolves.
Recently, a colleague attended a cloud-computing workshop and mentioned a bit of trivia. One of the experts at the event didn’t like the word ‘cloud’ and insisted on using the term “Infrastructure as a Service.” What’s in a name? Everything or nothing, depending on your point-of-view. You could argue that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but you could also argue that the right name, with the right connotations, is what takes trends past a tipping point. So let me offer you impartial thumbnail ‘name analysis’ of the common candidates, and you decide which you like.
Today is short notes day, here are three interesting bits and pieces for you to ponder. First, there’s a quick look at the GTD Global Summit, an opportunity to drink the Kool-Aid of productivity, 2.0 style (I am a panelist and have 3 golden tickets — 50% off registrations — to offer, read on to find out how to get one). Second, a thumbnail review of what might be the first “2.0″ business parable, Where in the World is my Team? And finally, a pointer to a rather unique dashboard, since we’ve been on that topic, thanks to Irwin Lazar.
Since my ongoing series on a social media capability maturity model looks like it is going to be quite a trek, I thought I’d throw in some variety. Don Tapscott (@dtapscott, he of Wikinomics fame) has a nearly-new book out called Grown Up Digital (McGraw Hill, October 2008). It is sort of a sequel to one of his earlier books, Growing Up Digital, (June 1999). In a sense, the new book bookends a decade-long longitudinal study of Millenial digital natives (the term Millenial seems to be the most common, followed by Gen Y, and Tapscott’s own neologism, “Net Generation”). So what happened in the decade during which Tapscott’s own Millenial kids, Nikki and Alex (they feature prominently on the anecdote track), grew up, and why should you, Enterprise 2.0 enthusiast, care?
Let’s recap. In Part I we introduced the idea of a capability maturity model (CMM), and noted that creating a CMM for social media is difficult because the entity that is “acquiring” the capability, the twentieth-century firm, might not even represent the right way to organize your economic activities. Anything from a nonprofit to a self-organizing crowd with no legal status might be the right organizational form for your sector, not just “enterprise 2.0.” This is the sort of change Chris Anderson is talking about in Free: Why $0.00 is the future of business, and what Kevin Kelly is talking about in his recent essay “Better than owning.” This is not gentle evolutionary “keep-up” pressure. It is a mega-speciation event of new organization forms. So a CMM for social media must go well beyond telling you how and when to adopt social media and what “stage” you are at. It must also tell you what sort of species you ought to morph into. So, in Part II, let’s now zoom down to the extremely detailed level. I’ll show you how you can get a sense of where you are now. Get out your favorite spreadsheet program and your organization chart. Identify the functional organization of your enterprise (roughly, the major clusters of the lowest level of your org chart), and create a matrix with each function listed along both the rows and columns, like so (try to get adjacent functions on the org chart, which traditionally interact a lot, next to each other in the matrix; so sales ought to be next to marketing):
Figure 1: Basic matrix, functional
I promised in December that I would share a social media capability maturity model that I’ve been sketching out, so here goes. Capability maturity models (CMMs) are a standard part of our conceptual vocabulary when talking about organizational change, but applying the idea to social media presents some special problems which I need to discuss first. It is not a simple matter of drawing a little evolution curve and labeling some arbitrarily chosen levels of competence. In other words, if you are thinking in terms of a diagram like this (with indicators like “Level 1.2: some employees blog; Level 1.8: many employees blog, most people twitter”), STOP!
Two quotes immediately flashed across my mind as I started reading Listening to the Future by Dan Rasmus, a key soothsayer at Microsoft, and Rob Salkowitz, a free ranger in the Microsoft ecosystem who occasionally wanders further afield. The first is a Kant quote: we see not what is, but who we are. The second is due to Alan Kay, a big name in the hoary past of my employer, Xerox: the easiest way to predict the future is to invent it. Looking out and ahead at the future is as much a synthetic and introspective act as it is a predictive act, even if you don’t explicitly set out to introspect or synthesize. Microsoft’s visions of the future merit some belief simply because the vast energies of that 600 lb gorilla, channeled by those visions, might be sufficient to bring them about. Goliaths win more often than we suspect, because Goliath beating David doesn’t make the news. For you and me, this book is vastly more interesting for what it reveals about the strategic culture at Microsoft than for what it reveals about the future (which is interesting enough in its own right though). If Rasmus’ views are representative, and I believe they are, here’s the radar with which Microsoft is operating (this is a rough copy of a figure in the book):
