Ozmota

Listening to good entrepreneurs make their pitch is great fun. How well, or poorly, they align their passion and persuasiveness to the product details reveals a lot. Are they pushing an idea or telling a story? Is it all about their own charisma or is the innovative idea the real hero? Are we having a conversation or am I being sold? How will they get me to "get it"?

All these entrepreneurial issues resurfaced during the recent Fortune technology conference in Aspen. There was no shortage of either articulate entrepreneurs or provocative ideas. So as Osman Rashid, who co-founded Chegg.com, described his new digital textbook startup Kno during a coffee break, I peppered him with questions. His idea was undeniably clever, but aspects of his business model weren't clear to me. He had his elevator pitch answers down pat, but I wanted to learn more.

Unprompted by me, Osman whipped out his smartphone and handed it over. I was watching a decent video clip illustrating his product's features and functionality. I could tap to hear testimonials. I could tap to play with a simulation of the software. In a matter of moments, the device had transformed Osman from an entrepreneur I was having a conversation with to a guide and narrator of an interactive experience. My focus and attention alternated between what he said and what appeared onscreen. Sometimes he'd take, touch, and hand back the device; other times, I'd point to something onscreen and ask another question.

The object — and our interaction with it — became an intimate part of our conversation. We couldn't have discussed either Kno or his answers to my questions the same way without it. An idle part of me wondered how cool it would be if our conversation (and my questions) could be recorded and time-stamped along with what was appearing onscreen. Osman refused to allow his smartphone to decay into a sales tool or product pitch — although those elements were baked into the material — and instead used the device as a medium to both reinforce his conversation points and invite new questions and comments from me.

I can say without hesitation that this felt technically and interpersonally different from "laptop-on-the-table" presentations I'd experienced 1,000 times. We were standing up, drinking coffee, chatting, and taking turns holding, viewing, and manipulating this device. The kinesthetics, eye contact, questions, and interruptions revolved as much around the device as us. We would have been worse off without it.

Not ten days later, I was at a Venture Cafe gathering by my MIT office. It's a place where entrepreneurs and VCs alike come to socialize and impress each other. I struck up a casual conversation with an aspiring biotech entrepreneur. Not two minutes into our talk, he took out his iPhone to animate a technical point about his company's planned product. He handed it over to me. I thought it fascinating and asked if he might forward that animation to my email. He could and did.

Again, the nature of the questions and our conversation made his iPhone a focal point of our interaction. I wouldn't have learned nearly as much about his company, or him, if we had just been talking. The "hand-it-over" nature of the iPhone made it feel more like a value-added conversation rather than a scaled-down presentation.

I looked around. No one else was interacting this way.

Elevator pitches are important. The ability to boil down the essence of your innovation into a tasty forty-second sound-bite remains essential. Only now, the pervasiveness, ubiquity, and visuality of mobile devices quantitatively and qualitatively changes the ecology of interpersonal interaction. It's no longer about what you say and how you say it; it's increasingly about what you hand over.

What do you hand over that transforms the conversation? What do you hand over that visually and interactively adds value to your spoken words? What do you hand over that complements and supplements your pitch? What do you hand over that invites and inspires the curiosity you want? What do you hand over that makes you more persuasive? These are the questions that will increasingly shape tomorrow's rhetoric of innovation. The design challenge here is fantastic: how do we use mobile devices not to better connect us to digital networks but to better connect us with customers, clients, and prospects.

Of course, the technical beauty of these media is that — unlike the words one speaks — the imagery one sees onscreen can be emailed, Facebooked, forwarded, or LinkedIn as desired. "Hand-it-over" innovation pitches can be seamlessly slipped wherever your prospects desire. Indeed, an excellent measure of "hand-it-over" effectiveness is whether the person who you "hand-it-over" to actually asks you to send what they've been seeing and interacting with.

My professional bet is that "hand-it-over" innovation pitches will double smartphone and mobile device sales worldwide. Entrepreneurs, salespeople and innovators alike will socialize with at least two devices in the backpacks and breast pockets — one for their personal/professional use and the other to "hand over" for interpersonal play.

"Hand-it-over" conversations seem destined to create new genres of salesmanship and interaction. It will become an innovation best practice. In fact, people will be surprised, and disappointed, if you don't have anything to hand over.

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Someone in India recently asked me what I thought about an innovation strategy featuring a heavy dose of "imitation." My response was, "Innovation isn't Olympic diving."

What did I mean? An individual diver's scores for an event are a factor of two things: how well they execute their dive, and the "degree of difficulty" of their selected dive. The more twists and turns you have, the more points you can earn.

You don't get points for degree of difficulty for innovation. You get points for producing profits. Sometimes you do have to take higher risk, more uncertain approaches to produce those profits. But the goal isn't making things any more difficult than they need to be. The goal is to find the quickest, cheapest path to profits. If that involves imitation, then so be it.

My diving quip was an homage to Michael Lewis's book on baseball, Moneyball. It describes how the Oakland Athletics exploited market inefficiencies to compete against baseball teams with more financial resources. Early in the book there was a discussion between A's general manager Billy Beane and his team of scouts. They were discussing a prospect, a University of Alabama catcher named Jeremy Brown. The scouts didn't like Brown, pointing to his "soft body" and "low energy." Beane's analytical team loved Brown, citing some of his performance statistics. A debate ensued. Beane shut discussion down with a succinct phrase that summarized his organizational philosophy: "We're not selling jeans here." Brown became the 35th overall selection in the amateur draft.

Beane's point was that he didn't care about a player's physical attributes; he cared about whether the player would perform. And his philosophy was that statistics provided a better way to identify high performers than a player's physique or mental makeup. In this case, the scouts might have had a point — Brown ended up with a grand total of 11 major league plate appearances (where he did bang out two doubles and a single). Nonetheless, Beane's admonition is a useful reminder that innovation leaders should make sure they are asking the right questions and focusing on the right variables.

I generally ask five questions to determine whether an innovator has the seeds of a transformational idea:

1. Is there an important problem that customers can't address because existing solutions are expensive or inconvenient? In Innosight's parlance, is there a high-potential "job to be done"?
2. Is there a disruptive way to solve the problem in a simpler, more convenient, or more affordable way?
3. Is there a plausible hypothesis about an economically attractive, scalable business model? I don't need a detailed financial model (because I know it's wrong anyway), but I need a sensible story that's at least conceivable — and a plan to turn that plan into reality.
4. Does the team have the "right stuff" to course correct based on in-market learning? Remember, the odds are high that the first idea isn't quite right. A team that is dogmatic and keeps trying to prove it is right is the wrong team for many innovation efforts.
5. Can early profitability be a choice? Ultimate success requires a profitable model. The sooner there is a line of site to profits, the better. You might make a strategic decision to be unprofitable by investing in marketing, sales capability, and so on, but at least you know the core part of the model works.

Have you heard any good innovation one liners lately?

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Your animated interaction in response to my post The Miracle of Making Mistakes delved deep into the subject, broadened the interpretation of a mistake, and even coined a delightful new term: Risktakes. Thank you Notmd, Dawna, Brett, and all the others, who provided terrific insights over the past four weeks.

A mistake is as an error in action or calculation caused by poor reasoning, carelessness, or insufficient knowledge. Risk is the exposure to the chance of injury or loss, the chance that the actual return might be different than the one expected. Thus, a risktake is an error — but not one caused by carelessness or insufficient knowledge. Its possibility has been foreseen, calculated, and accepted.

A simple test will help you differentiate a risktake from a mistake. Ask yourself: Did I account for the possibility of failure before it happened — or did the mistake catch me by surprise? We are not promoting carelessness, but genuine, well-intended mistakes, as Dawna pointed out.

Every new company and new product launch, every new service and new discovery has the potential of being a risktake. In fact, every strategic decision has the potential of proving to be just that. We usually take them with the joy experimentation brings, enhanced by the courage to fail and stand up again. Doing everything "perfectly" breeds stagnation and laziness, argued Brett.

I am all for taking risks as long as the process is supported by conviction, persistence, and discipline, and it is based on knowledge. During the recent worldwide recession, the decision by HCL to acquire Axon — the biggest overseas acquisition by an Indian IT company — had the potential of becoming a risktake. There were many critics of the deal, but so far, the takeover hasn't given them the occasion to say: I told you so. Would I do it again? Sure, as long as the possibility of short-term losses is less than the potential of long-term gains.

Lemuel Morrison shared a potential best practice with us: Maintain a mea culpa list and update it regularly with new risktakes along with what, if anything, was learned. My new book, Employees First, Customers Second, provides an account of several risktakes at HCL. For instance, we made a risktake while measuring the success of a new "Smart Service Desk" set up to address employee problems. There was a need to get employees to believe in the process and to induce those on the desk to respond quickly. We therefore started out by measuring the number of tickets that the latter closed, signifying the resolution of employee problems, as an indicator of success. That was a risktake because it skewed the picture: The larger the number of complaints, the larger was the possibility of success! We eventually amended the metric so the service desk today aims for zero tickets.

Understandably, executives fear the unknown and crave the security of the comfort zone even though that's a prescription for predictable and controlled performance. Moreover, today's environmental volatility won't allow the comfort zone to stay comfortable for long. That's why I would suggest that we should create discomfort with the present situation. Then draw the path, which will be littered with risktakes, to where we would like to be in the future. Keep your sights focused far ahead and stay undeterred.

Mark Twain once wrote, "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. "

Are you ready to sail away on the winds of your risktakes?

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In the past months I have been systematically scoping out social media businesses, startups, services, agencies, and more. It’s what us “freelancers” do &emdash; especially now that the industry has matured. I have a filemaker database of more than 650 companies worth tracking. Along with notes, and various other sundry details.

If I were to rush my way through the database, read company descriptions provided by founders, reviews gleaned from techcrunch, killerstartups.com, etc, I would come away with the impression that these were almost all technology companies. That’s the common narrative arc, the identity by so many efforts in this space. And the professional culture that unites so many of us located in and around the Silicon Valley.

And yet so many of these companies are not technology companies. Not from the perspective of what they promise to better and improve. Not from the perspective of the business opportunity they seek to create or extend. Not, certainly, from the perspective of individual users, clusters of friends, groups, or communities.

If this were the age of the television, perusing local company profiles might read like a directory of television manufacturers, broadcasters, transmitters and relay providers, cable guys and dish installers. A Detroit of post-industrial industry, risen out of the early and pioneering PC and software years to mature through database, operating system, hardware, software and finally internet business eras. One epoch after another of technological innovation and business value creation.

And yet from the user’s perspective, very little of this matters. Sure, it may matter (a lot, even) to local pundits and industry experts &emdash; because this is our narrative. But the audience and marketplace of people expected to adopt and embrace this stuff couldn’t care less about funding rounds, acquisitions, and other milestones on the roadmap of entrepreneurial success.

Technology’s manufacture is transparent to the user. It neither gets in the way nor attracts attention to itself. We’ve always designed to that principle: the user experience should not have to attend to interactions with the technology itself.

Which allows me to return to my initial impressions, having sampled a large number of startup and social media profiles and reviews: where is the social? Or to back up, where is the appreciation for utility and value, as well as for interaction and social relations? Where are the descriptions and insights into what users want; how users behave; how user experiences are improved; how social outcomes are shaped and designed?

We are, after all, in the entertainment industry now. (And it is no accident that much of the Silicon Valley’s growth now takes place in New York and Los Angeles, where the content and advertising people are). Social media are an extension of the mass media &emdash; are just another medium. Granted, a medium in which content is contributed; distribution is free and occurs by means of communication; and interactivity creates worlds of possibilities.

Those of us here in Bay Area startups and social companies are creating content &emdash; content of experience. We’re creating entertainment &emdash; pleasure of experience. We’re creating routines and habits and reshaping relationships &emdash; surfacing and enabling what used to be tacit and invisible. We’re bundling information together with actionables to change consumer habits &emdash; granting power to consumers and forcing transparencies upon brands and their advertising.

All these things we do, and yet we self-identify as technology. This is not technology. These are not technical problems, solved by means of technical solutions. We make the infrastructure of experiences. We don’t make guns &emdash; we make the pain and strategy and the fear and the hope and the charge and the sniping. We don’t make engines, wheels, dashboards, and back seats &emdash; we make the driving, the getting there, the waiting in traffic and the weaving and rear-ending and making out at the town’s last drive in.

So where are the descriptions of value, of utility, experience, of individual, group, social, and public habits of use and practice? Do we not have the language for it? Is this just how we identify with what we are doing? Is it too difficult to see that we’re not making TV’s but creating shows? Do we lack confidence in what our “technologies” are for? What if we suspect that only a small number of us will ever take to this stuff &emdash; is that why we prefer to describe what our stuff does rather than what people do with our stuff?

Once in a while, I come across a great company description. I get a sense for what the company’s trying to do, with, through, and for its people (users). Most of the time I read about features, about faster, bigger, wider, broader, narrower, more targeted &emdash; in short I read about the increments on a measure who’s metric isn’t ever defined. Incremental improvements towards what end? Addressing what individual or social problem or need? Enhancing what essential experience of relation, communication, information sharing, or, what?

If I can’t see it, and I’ve been in this since the beginning, and I’m no fool, it’s not there. Perhaps it could be there &emdash; but hasn’t yet been identified and named. Most of the time it’s just not there. It is easier to name an incremental improvement to an existing technical practice than to capture the social benefits resulting from its use.

None of this need be a problem, if it weren’t for the fact that we all tend to the nerdy end of the spectrum, personality wise. We are heavy users of our own product (never a good idea &emdash; but in our case, less self-harming). We make what we want in order to compete against those very similar to us. We increment based on feedback that we obtain from people who use our products &emdash; aware, or not, that the feedback can only possibly tell us about what we built, and not what we could have built.

We eagerly engage in what is an ever-unfolding process of co-evolution undertaken by a great milieu of companies building up component parts to a shared set of experiences &emdash; of media, information, relationships, time, action, and so much more. And yet I have to say that it is entirely possible that behind all of these individual startup efforts is but a myth that this is good, smart, better, and more useful. And that these technical or design attributes naturally go hand in hand with social and cultural practices &emdash; relationships, friendships, being together, relating to and through and with, having an identity, communicating and sharing it….

It is in fact it is cultural and social change that leads technology. Technologies succeed or fail to the degree to which they capture implicit, latent, and ready individual and social needs. Where are these insights? Who has them? Why are they not self evident? I have over 600 companies right here in front of me, and a set of descriptions that reads, altogether, like technical documentation authored by a marketer.

But I just spent two months off social media and out in the world of “normals” in order to re-calibrate my perspectives and reset and re-test my notions. A necessary break, in hindsight, if only for the reason that we are an over-amplified bunch whose work is the very medium in which we conduct our work.

So I’m not seeing it &emdash; not for many of the companies in this database. I see potential, I see direction, and I see increments. But for the full measure of things, I use a bigger metric. And by its measure, we’re thinking too small.

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Editor's note: For an opposing viewpoint on this topic, see Robert E. Litan's and Hal J. Singer's entry "Why Business Should Oppose Net Neutrality."

In business school, where I teach, students are often predisposed to see legal concepts as impenetrable and foreign. I watch the lightbulbs go on as they see that Microsoft's antitrust woes, RIM's $600 million patent infringement settlement, and Galleon's downfall due to insider trading say as much about strategic judgment and application of analytical tools as the cases that they study in marketing, management or accounting. The most successful businesses understand the non-market environment in which they operate.

Network neutrality is another good example. Business executives should recognize that the contours of broadband Internet access will affect them, both as customers and as providers. And for all the apparent complexity, the major issues are straightforward. Those reading recent headlines might be surprised to learn just how much agreement there is today on two fundamental points: the Internet fosters innovation and investment in new business opportunities because it's an open platform, and the network operators who build onramps to the Internet thrive when they maximize the returns on their invested capital.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), when proposing network neutrality rules last year, emphasized both dimensions. It offered a pragmatic framework that would put the United States in line with Great Britain, Canada, Japan, and other countries that have considered the issue. It proposed a set of basic principles — no blocking or degradation of traffic or devices, no discriminatory favoritism of affiliated services, and transparency — enforced through a case-by-case process that took into account the need for reasonable network management and the legitimacy of private "managed services" alongside the public Internet.

It's not hard to see why business should favor such a regime. Venture capitalists seeking the next YouTube or Twitter want assurance that a broadband access provider won't throttle the new application to advantage its own affiliates, and those broadband providers want certainty that they can use good engineering practices to manage their networks. The FCC's proposals were designed to foster clarity on both sides.

So, where is the controversy? The problem lies with those who see a religious conflict about whether the Internet will be "discriminatory" or "regulated." The simple truth is that it will be a little of both. We regulate the financial system, health care, electricity, and every other essential infrastructure for a modern economy. Pharmaceutical companies don't put drugs into the marketplace without FDA review of clinical trials, and startups don't launch IPOs without SEC registration. The success of those regimes is a big reason for America's global economic strength.

The FCC and other regulators can do a better or a worse job. It's certainly fair to talk about how to optimize the regulatory process. And it's appropriate to call for regulators like FCC Chairman Genachowski, a former venture capitalist and e-commerce executive, who appreciate the dangers of government over-reach.

It's not appropriate to disregard what the FCC actually said. Robert Litan and Hal Singer, for example, should feel reassured by the FCC's language on the concern they raise about "enhanced services" with special traffic handling: "We recognize that these managed or specialized services may differ from broadband Internet access services in ways that recommend a different policy approach, and it may be inappropriate to apply the rules proposed here to managed or specialized services." (Open Internet NPRM, paragraph 149).

This leaves plenty of important details to address. Can Sony's packets be prioritized without degrading the Internet experience for everyone else? Would Zynga have pioneered a multi-billion dollar social gaming market if it had to pay for priority delivery from day 1 to compete with Sony? What if Sony's agreement blocks Microsoft from receiving priority delivery for its competing online gaming portal? Should AT&T's prioritization of its own online gaming portal be viewed differently? Should the same rules apply to wireless broadband? How would enforcement work?

These are not new issues. There has been continuous debate at the FCC about network neutrality for six years. The absence of a comprehensive legal framework exerts a drag on the market. And with no enforceable rules, companies from Facebook to Foursquare have no confidence that discriminatory practices won't undermine their investments. Fortunately, over time, even as the rhetoric has ratcheted up, advocates on both sides have narrowed their differences substantially.

Verizon and Google have now issued a proposal that offers compromise solutions to the major disputed elements of a network neutrality regime. It's a flawed proposal, but it's a step in the right direction if it helps to break the logjam in Washington. Businesses can help achieve that result by supporting a solution that is workable in practice for the long run. For example, if the current wireless broadband market is too immature and different for the same rules to apply, what are the triggers for that to change?

The most valuable area where business can contribute is to support giving the FCC and other agencies the flexibility they need. A recent appeals court ruling called into question the FCC's legal authority over broadband access, opening the door to more years of lawsuits and Congressional lobbying. Such prolonged uncertainty benefits no one.

The FCC was established in 1934 because in complex, fast-changing industries, a body with expertise and open, transparent decision-making processes is the best forum to resolve contentious issues. That's still true. Chairman Genachowski has already proposed to "forbear" preemptively from FCC regulation of Internet content or business practices, outside the limited open Internet rules needed to promote competition and innovation.

The FCC should have the tools to do its job, now and as the marketplace evolves. Network neutrality is just one aspect of a vibrant environment of open, interconnected networks. One would hope that the 2008 financial crisis put to rest the spurious notion that business functions best when regulation functions least.

An open Internet is one in which investment is rewarded and the best innovations win. What could be more pro-business than that?

Kevin Werbach is an Associate Professor of Legal Studies at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and organizer of the Supernova technology conference. He served until recently as a consultant to both the Federal Communications Commission and National Telecommunications and Information Administration.

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The curious case of social commerce is upon us. And it raises interesting questions for the social interaction designer. I will here allow some of these to beg and grovel.

If you have been a reader of mine in the past, you will know that I believe that in social media, interactions take place among and between users. That the software serving as a mediating architecture is just that. It may constrain and enable interactions, but does so by means only of structuring interactions and content onscreen(s) and over time.

In order to get at the gist of social commerce, we need to look past the screen, the brand names, the offers, coupons, and discounts, to the social.

What’s social about commerce? When is the social commercial? Where and when, in the acts of shopping, purchasing, owning, and using a thing, do social factors come into play. To some degree, in each.

But for social commerce to result in social engagement and participation, individual commercial relations (from wanting to choosing to preferring to owning to showing to feeling) must communicate and signify.

Some aspect of social shopping must communicate, by means of an act, gesture, representation, selection, or something else. And some aspect must accrue social significance — that is, must have a social value and interest distinct from the commercial item and value. Social worth and relevance have to be created, and the social shopping experience must accrue value produced by user actions and related to things of commerce.

We can see then that there may be two ways of approaching the socialization of commerce. One, by identifying and extending the actions taken during acts of social shopping. Another, but adding meta social activities and meanings (as Foursquare is game-like without being a game) to standard shopping practices.

The latter may seem more interesting, but at the risk of distorting original values and relations. Because things involved in these meta games become tokens used in the game. Their “intrinsic” value is replaced by their value within the game.

If use of artificial game mechanics is one way to supply social relevance (through players, play, rules, and elements), then another is to use social relations. Here we might choose among real and invented relations. Or among serious and non-serious. We might organize social commerce activity capture and representation to distort views of individual acts and to fashion desired social outcomes.

We might mix in persons, elements, brands, events, and other types of content from mediated social worlds: tv, movies, books, music. It doesn’t really matter, since the aspects being used are those that signify — it’s not reality, but meaning, that works here as incentive and motivation.

The type of relation we leverage in social commerce will inform not only the value captured by the system (whether as ratings, checkins, purchases or what have you). Relations will also inform the social practices we build around acts of social commerce. And by extension, the durability, identity, and habituality of social commercial activities. These can be one-off experiences, or lead to lasting loyalties and mutually-reinforcing relationships.

I’m really only scratching the surface here, but I have a pile of material to touch on in the weeks and months ahead as I return to a baseline routine of blogging.

If you are in the business of social commerce, have a site or service, or would like to extend an application or campaign in social shopping space, I can be of help. I have concrete ideas and practical applications that will remain off the blog, for the purpose of private commercial consumption .

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One of our most read posts is Beirut’s “Why Do People REALLY Tweet? The Psychology Behind Tweeting!” and it tends to illicit a varying range of reactions to it. Dr. Shawn was one of those people who stumbled on it and couldn’t help but call it a “load of donkey dung” but it was written in such a way that made us interested in contacting Shawn and getting him to re-post some of his articles over at our blog because he’s a man with a perspective.

It was interesting to read his blog and get an insight into how medical professionals use social media and how it’s impacting their business, communication, and how they tame s0cial media to meet their needs rather than follow the crowd when it comes to its usage. In this post he shares with us how he utilizes Twitter, and what he wants to achieve with his usage of the service.

==> Link to the original article.

* Note: If you have a Twitter, Facebook or social media related post that you think is worth republishing on Thoughtpick, just drop us an email.

As published on Dr. Shawn’s Blog:

Wake up in the morning feeling like P Diddy…

Grab my glasses,

I’m out the door, I’m gonna hit this city

Before I leave, I check my Tweet

For some follows back

Cause if they don’t, Then I feel

Like a total jag…

Today I noticed that, due to all those incessant follow back hash tags, a D-List porno “actor” has more followers than I by about 20,000 people. My first response was, Oh COME ON…What?” Then I had to laugh at myself, take stock of why I even cared…Do I care? Why am I on Twitter? Is it to get followers, attention, or is it for me as an outlet? If I care, why do I care? Am I really envious of a porno actors following? So I did some self assessment.

A Twitter Raison d’être

Why are you tweeting?

The first thing I decided was why I am on Twitter. I had been thinking over blogging for a while. I wanted to and had things I wanted to discuss and keep record of and share with others. I beat around the bush for some time with it. Deciding to co-author our book really gave me the push forward I needed. I spent some time researching blogs as to how people were doing them. A recurring theme while checking blogs was Twitter Twitter Twitter. So I joined Twitter to see what the fuss is about. My boys have Twittered for awhile, but joining social networking sites has never been my cup of tea as time is valuable to me and my friends and family are around me daily so the need for constant communication wasn’t important. What I didn’t expect was to see how many informative link sharing there is. Many colleagues in my profession are on Twitter sharing thoughts, medical research, informative commentary and current trends and topics. I was hooked.

I took a lot of flack at first for finally succumbing to a social networking site, but then I was inundated with the “coolness” of it all. I decided to pave my own way on my Twitter journey and began Googling topics and people I would have a direct interest in. I would add them on Twitter and one find would lead to a few more and so on and so forth. Within a week, I was fully functioning on Twitter with Tweetdeck and Twitlonger etc. I knew how to add, remove, make lists, join lists, block and recognize spam. What I missed initially was how many people follow you JUST to get a follow back or to extract your followers list as their own. So I began being more practical and observant of who I added, as to why I add them and who follows me and why. It’s very noticeable that many people on Twitter add, follow, follow back etc without ever caring who, what or why. THAT is the part of social networking I have absolutely no interest in. I only want people on my list to follow if they bring something to the table that intrigues my interest or makes my brain happy. That being the case, I will never have 15,000 people I follow because truly, that is just plain insanity. Who has time to read that? If you don’t have time to read it, why is it there? Of what significance is it to you? Those you do have an interest in get lost amongst the drivel.

The Follow-me-follow-you Game

Follow Me

When I add someone, I want them to feel appreciated; I want them knowing I read their information. If I didn’t they would not be there. So that is a fine balance for me. My life is about manageability and balance. I believe in all areas of our lives we should know our boundaries. Then we are less likely to make those in our lives, or in this case on our Twitter Favs, feel undervalued. I believe the salt of a man is his ability to provide security, love and respect to all he touches on a daily basis. That includes people you add into your life even if via Twitter. No person has to be seen to be heard. The internet taught us that a long long time ago. So in this instance, I haven’t changed or manipulated my values at all.

Would I like 150,000 followers following me hanging on my every word? Maybe, that would be kind of exciting, but I would feel guilty as it would be impossible to follow them all back. What I would like is a good number of people following me that think I have worth in my ideas, actions, and communication. Those people would be people I follow back because then we have a symbiotic Twitter relationship that only leads to positive value for all concerned. It keeps you grounded in reality, boundaries, self worth and of value/importance to others.

Adding with respect

Don't you deep inside feel that way?

I ALWAYS answer DM’s, “mentions” etc. I think that is as important as a common hello. It lets those who hear you, see you, include you in their Twitter lives know they have worth. In conclusion, I know if I wanted to disrobe and flash my junk on the internet in a movie, avatar or live cam, I would have a gazillion followers, but I chose not to thank you very much…lol I’ll chug along and add and follow and be followed respectfully forwhat is in my mind, not my pants. That ladies and gentleman is a choice I am very happy to live with.

And now, the dudes are lining up

cause they hear we got swagger

But we kick ‘em to the curb

unless they Tweet like Mick Jagger

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It's been a while since we posted here because of all the craziness surrounding the launch of our book, The Power of Pull, but we are happy to announce that we're going to be resuming a regular schedule of postings to build on the themes in our book. We thought we would kick off our new postings by summarizing some of the ideas from Pull that resonated the most in our many conversations from the last few months. from The Power of Pull.

The Red Queen was optimistic. Nearly everybody in management is familiar with the Red Queen effect, taken from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass: this is the notion that "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."

It turns out the Red Queen represents an optimistic view of the world. Despite long-term increases in labor productivity, the average return on assets (ROA) of US companies has steadily fallen to almost one quarter of what it was in 1965. We're running faster, but still losing ground. There is no sign of this long-term erosion flattening out, much less turning around.

The conclusion is inescapable: our management practices and corporate institutions are fundamentally broken. The good news, if you can call it that, is that this isn't sustainable for much longer: the trend line on ROA approaches zero in 2020. If you believe that markets spur innovation, however, it does bring up a conundrum: Why haven't companies yet figured out how to compete more successfully? One reason is because...

Value ain't where it used to be. Competition is not only intensifying (pdf), it's changing the source of value creation from stocks to flows of knowledge, and the means for value creation from push to pull. These changes require such fundamental shifts in mindset and approach that most executives are unable to make the leap from their current ways of seeing and doing. Thus their companies remain mired on the downward slope of performance.

Asia is the new global center of innovation. But some companies and executives are figuring it out. The bad news for the US is that these leading-edge companies and executives tend to be in China and India. Westerners generally have a narrow view of innovation, limiting it to breakthrough technology and product innovations. We need to expand beyond product, process, and even the management innovation called for by Gary Hamel to a broader notion of institutional innovation, which redefines roles and relationships across large numbers of institutions.

Where is institutional innovation most advanced? In China's open production and design models and in India's open distribution models. We've written about both of them before. Unfortunately, the concept of institutional innovation — as yet anyway — is all but invisible to most Western executives.

The collaboration curve supplants the experience curve. We may, for the first time, have an opportunity to turn diminishing returns performance improvement into increasing returns.

The BCG experience curve is one of the most enduring ideas in business. Unfortunately, it's characterized by diminishing returns: The more experience accumulated in a specific industry, the longer it takes to get the next increment of performance improvement. As competitive intensity rises, these diminishing returns are a serious obstacle to performance.

As it becomes increasingly possible to scale the number of connections and interactions between participants in a given environment, however, a new kind of performance curve is emerging: the collaboration curve. This is characterized by increasing returns: the more participants — and interactions between those participants — you add to a carefully designed and nurtured environment, the more the rate of performance improvement accelerates.

The collaboration curve helps explain the rise of network-centric efforts ranging from open source software development to "crowdsourcing" to "creation spaces." In nearly all of these group efforts, rapid leaps in performance improvement arise as participants get better faster by working with others. The evidence for the collaboration curve is still admittedly fragmentary, but one place to look for it is in the online game World of Warcraft.

The "Dilbert Paradox" holds the key. Companies will not be able to fully harness the potential of collaboration curves until they resolve the Dilbert Paradox.
Here's the paradox. Ask CEOs about their top priorities and inevitably they will cite talent as one of their top priorities. If this is the case, how do we explain the enormous popularity of Dilbert and The Office, which so eloquently describe the stultifying effect of our work environments on talent?

In part, the paradox arises because executives tend to focus on talent acquisition and retention, but do not invest much time on talent development throughout the firm. When they think about talent development, they spend time designing training programs rather than re-thinking the work environment to accelerate talent development. If they took on-the-job talent development seriously, they would reassess all aspects of the firm - strategy, operations, organization and information technology platforms - to find ways to foster even more rapid talent development.

Passion is everything. Management can only do so much. All of us are responsible at a personal level, too — for reintegrating our passion into our profession. What is passion? More than simple satisfaction, passion is when people discover the work that motivates them to achieve their potential by seeking extreme performance improvement. Their job becomes more than a mode of income.

Yet our survey in the 2009 Shift Index showed that passion levels are low across all US industries. In most of them there are fewer than 20 percent of employees that say they are passionate about their work--and no industries have more than 25% that say so. Furthermore, passion levels are inversely related to the size of the employer: the larger the company, the lower the passion levels.

Why is passion so important? Because it drives a questing disposition that is essential to employee performance as they react to the inevitable unexpected challenges today's work environment presents. It also drives more connection. Our Shift Index found that passionate workers participate much more actively in knowledge flows that are the new key to value creation. If you can help make your employees more passionate, you can create value in today's economy.

Book writing has many purposes, but surely among the most important is to spark conversation, and maybe even controversy. What did we get right? More importantly, where did we go wrong? What can we do to sharpen and refine these propositions?

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For the past ten years, my colleague, Chris Trimble, and I have studied one critical question: What are the best practices for executing an innovation initiative?

Execution is the poor stepchild of the innovation challenge. People love to engage in the hunt for the big ideas, but, let's face it, without execution capability, an idea on paper is....just an idea on paper.

Having conducted research in more than 25 of the Fortune 500 companies, including Deere, Hasbro, Thomson Reuters, GE, IBM, and Corning, we have found that when they want to bring an innovation alive, companies typically commit one of two cardinal sins. Either they ask the core business to do the innovation, or they create skunkworks. Both approaches are fatally flawed. Asking the core business to do innovation won't work because the core is built for efficiency — to make every task repeatable and predictable. Innovation requires actions that are incompatible with what core business can do, actions that are non-routine and unpredictable. On the other hand, isolating innovation in skunkworks far away from the core business is not a good solution either, since innovation must leverage some assets from the core. Otherwise the skunkworks has no advantage over a Silicon Valley start up.

Businesses need a distinct-but-linked organizational model: a dedicated team for the innovation initiative that partners rather than fights with the core business.

Once it has that partnership in place, a company must keep it on track. We have observed five danger signs that signals that the partnership has gone awry:

1. The members of the dedicated team frequently use words like "rebellion" and "conspiracy."
2. The dedicated team members act as though they are the company's saviors.
3. Those assigned to the dedicated team feel like winners and those that aren't feel like losers, or vice versa.
4. Core-business employees are obsessed with the dedicated team's special treatment, such as performance standards or compensation formulas that depart from the company's norms.
5. Core business leaders go out of their way to argue that the innovation initiative is failing by highlighting its shortfalls against the company's typical performance expectations.

How frequently have you observed one or more of these de-railers? How have you overcome them?

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At the Techonomy conference in California last week, there was a stack of galleys (pre-publication review copies, for those who don't speak bookese) of Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants on a table just outside the main meeting room.

What technology wants, I thought at the time, is for publishers to provide e-book galleys so I don't have to haul stacks of paper across the country (we've actually started doing that at the Harvard Business Review Press, I discovered midway through writing this post). So I left Kelly's book on the table, and on the flight back to Boston instead read David Mitchell's beguiling The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet on my Kindle. Where I encountered pretty much the same question, posed by a Japanese scholar to a Dutch doctor in late-18th-century Nagasaki:

"If science is sentient, what are its desires? Or, to phrase the question another way, when the doctor's imagined sleeper awakens in the year 1899, shall the world most closely resemble paradise or an inferno?"

... Marinus is pleased by the question. He rocks gently to and fro. "I shan't know until I see it, Mr. Yoshida."

No we shan't know. But we sure do talk about it a lot. The most striking such discussion I witnessed at the Techonomy conference had to do with spewing sulfate particles into the upper atmosphere to cool the climate. This technological possibility was the focus of the most controversial chapter of the book Superfreakonomics, which caught flak mainly because authors Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt were so blithely dismissive of any preventative approach to combating global warming. At Techonomy (here's another take on the conference, from Andrew McAfee) climate scientist and entrepreneur David Keith wasn't blithe about anything. We can definitely cool the climate by making like a volcano and pumping sulfur high into the sky, he said. We can do this at relatively low cost (a couple billion dollars), and without much risk of unleashing a global environmental disaster. But as Keith kept pointing out, this wouldn't magically restore us to the climate of, say, 1993. It would cool the earth on average, but result in major and mostly unpredictable climate changes on a regional level.

That, in the end, is what technology really seems to want: Change. Unpredictable change. Disruptive change. And while over time these technology-induced changes in how we make our money and live our lives have tended to raise living standards, there is (a) no money-back guarantee that this will always be the case and (b) lots of pain along the way.

All sorts of explanations have been offered up for the financial debacle of 2008 and subsequent Great Recession: too little regulation, too much regulation, too high taxes, too much inequality, too much money in circulation, too much Fannie and Freddie. Some of these things surely did play a role. But I wonder if it's entirely a coincidence that we've fallen into this economic morass a decade or two into a period of rapid and disruptive technological change — much, but far from all of it, focused around the Internet. A decade ago lots of people were all excited about the wondrous new economy that all this technological transformation would deliver. We may still be headed to that new economy; it's just that getting there isn't easy. It never is.

The Great Depression of the 1930s, after all, happened a decade or two into a transformation of the global economy wrought by electrification and the rise of the international combustion engine. The long depression of the 1870s came a decade or two after railroads and the telegraph began to transform economic life. There's a school of macroeconomics, very fashionable back in the 1980s but not so much now, that posits that the ups and downs of the business cycle are mostly the product of "technology shocks." It's hard to square this theory with the actual history of run-of-the-mill recessions and recoveries over the past century. But maybe when we get to the really big downturns there is something to it.

This is what I was getting at in my post last week about business and uncertainty. There are bigger forces causing confusion and uncertainty at the moment than the policy choices of the Obama administration and Congress. That confusion and uncertainty may be the most important explanation for our current economic troubles. In which case the only way out of those troubles may be to forge ahead in the face of it.

Fully rebounding from the Great Depression in the U.S. took a government-led effort to gear up for World War II. I don't know as much about the 1870s, but I assume that recovery was more organic and business-led. What will it take this time around? Let's just say I'm uncertain about it.

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