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.
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.
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?
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):
About 8 months ago, in April, I posted an article on my blog titled “A Map of the World 2.0 Canon” that tried to visualize how the emerging popular literature on the impact of 2.0 could be organized. The post went mildly viral. Here’s the visualization I came up with, and links to reviews to most of the books I included back then. Read the full piece if the logic of the diagram doesn’t leap out at you. Probably time to drop/add some books, so any suggestions? For those of you who’ve been lazy about keeping up, this might make for some good Cliff Notes level material to help you fake it.
The Reviews and One-Line Abstracts
I am linking to my reviews where I have them, and to Amazon where I don’t. For a book without a review (the starred ones), if you think you have a good one, send me a link.
Before you worry about 2.0 technology for your company, ask yourself: does the business you are in even make sense for the 2.0 world? Enterprise 2.0 as an abstraction will obviously happen; it is only a matter of time. Whether your industry actually survives to benefit is not so certain. On this site, we often discuss Enterprise 2.0 principles in the abstract, usually with a hypothetical widget manufacturing company as our implied mental model. We then ask how social media and 2.0 principles affect various functions like sales, PR or engineering. What happens when you go from widgets to specific product or service industries, like baby food, cars, finance, farming or fast food? Will YourEnterprise 2.0 make sense in 2009, the year of dual disruption from 2.0 on one end and a recession on the other?
Several opinion-makers trying to influence President-Elect Obama’s technology policies thorough blogs. Part of the intent, no doubt, is to simply use a historic election and a public focal point to aid mass communication. But it does seem like these bloggers seem to be nurturing long-shot hopes that they’ll actually be heard. Here are three examples:
Over the last two weeks, I read two books on how marketing, like every other enterprise function, is changing under the onslaught of 2.0 technologies. One, Spanning Silos: the new CMO imperative, by David Aaker was a serious surprise. It underpromised and overdelivered. I felt educated. Though written in a classical, non-2.0 idiom, it is extraordinarily smart and analyzes its topic solidly. You can read my review/summary at the link above. But the other — and there is no other way to say this — just made me very very sad. It is Seth Godin’s Tribes (free audio book here).
Juan Enriquez has a great talk on the economic crisis, as part of a thought leadership series by Pop!Tech on the crisis. The video is available here. He is an excellent speaker, and this is one of the first takes on the crisis that I have found both comprehensible and believable. A great quote: “A tax cut is not a tax cut unless you and I pay less and our kids owe less.” Unlike many other commentators, he does not believe this is merely an unusually bad aftershock of a bad subprime market on an overall good economy. He makes a compelling case that that the there are systemic problems.
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Mar 10th, 2009 |
