I had the great honor to work with Irving Wladawsky-Berger while I was at IBM about 12 years ago. He is one of the clearest thinkers I have had the good fortune to know. Thus, no surprise, he was at the heart of many strategic initiatives, arguably projects which saved IBM from near-ruin back in the ’80s and ’90s. To name two: the RISC chip; the Internet Division.
He does not, however, have an eponymous entry on Wikipedia, and I love him for that.
He wrote recently about power and responsibility in the wake of the credit crisis which drove the current economic downturn: “How Can ‘The Best and Brightest’ Get it So Wrong?“ It is a compelling reminder of the cyclical cultural phenomena which occur around the accumulation of success, wealth and influence.
Soon, pride rears its ugly head, and arrogance taints clear vision and decision making.
Power clusters tend toward homogeneity — the human desire to prefer “like” people, ideas and things to “unlike” people, ideas and things. The concrete begins to harden. The alert, flexible and agile entity that initiated the cycle can no longer respond to changes in the surrounding environment. A new cycle must begin again.
Irving references how arrogance led to an indefensible policy in Vietnam in the early 60’s. The big ideas from Harvard overpowered the career State and Defense Department thinkers.
I lived through the arrogance of the Internet era, when an infinitesimally small coterie of venture capitalists infused small technology companies with massive amounts of cash in order to create vast but artificial valuations for initial public stock offerings. I’ll never forget the photo of a dot com chairman and CEO, wearing sombreros and mounted on horses, addressing employees on the beach at a resort in Cabo San Lucas. Not a bad place for a company meeting. The company was called “Agillion,” an amount only slightly higher than what was spent on the off-site extravaganza.
And now it’s the banking and finance sector, the creation of highly complex derivative financial products, sub-prime… you get the picture.
Bloom off the Web 2.0 Rose?
We are seeing another power-arrogance-collapse in the magical land of Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0?): the new communication environment created at the intersection of the worldwide web and some innovative “social” technology: blog tools, online video services like YouTube, social networks like Facebook and Flickr, and Twitter.
Starship Enterprise
In the world of news media, communication, and culture, the rate of change is incredibly high. I’m reminded of Scotty from Start Trek, the Scots chief engineer, warning James T. Kirk as he presses the spaceship’s engines harder and faster: “She’s breaking up, Captain.” Somehow Kirk, the symbol of leadership and responsibility, guides the Enterprise through the threat to a new state of greater intergalactic safety and security in the end.
Newspapers are losing readers and suspending print operations, going entirely online. Advertising agencies have had to completely reinvent themselves in order to continue to deliver value to customers: there’s no “15% of the media buy” left to pad the bottom line. Public relations firms have to help companies find influencers not within a community of hundreds of print publications, but amongst millions of self-publishers (bloggers). It makes your hair hurt. And it is creating panic as brand stewards try to figure out what decisions to take under high stress.
This is due to the growing amount of that fixed-asset, time, individuals are shifting from old media, like print publications, radio and broadcast or cable television to new online communities and media: blogs, podcasts, streaming videos.
A million blog posts are published every day. News stories are spreading instantaneously not through free online news sights like Yahoo! News, but through individuals posting micro-messages on Twitter. 200,000 new videos are posted to YouTube daily. Microsoft, once the symbol of personal productivity, is now investing nearly $2 billion annually to brand its “Bing” “decision engine,” the company’s nth effort to respond to Google’s remarkable success in the extraction of cash from web search.
What have we lost, in finding what we’ve found?
What the old media world provided, whether we want to admit it or not, was a structure for the flow of information. The media community had a hierarchy. Leaders had names like “The New York Times” and “The Wall Street Journal,” Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. There were giants with enormous power, and smaller niche players with less influence, but a role to play.
In the new media world, we have no such structure. There are no barriers to entry. Anyone can become a publisher, a director / producer / leading actor, a self-styled pundit.
But that doesn’t mean to new media world isn’t subject to exactly the same cutural, cyclical patterns which have shaped the human experience for centuries.
IM#1, not N1H1, is the new threat.
I have observed over the past couple of years that an important cultural side-effect of the zero-barrier-to-entry new media world is the rise of an alarming number of super-egos.
Cable news started the process with the creation of on-camera experts — that cast of characters who don’t actually have a vocation in, say, politics, they just serve as on-camera expert on politics for the cable news discussion of a real news event in the political realm. I don’t think they own trousers or skirts to match their suitcoats and jackets either. But I digress.
The blogosphere is clogosphered with similar experts. And what concerns me is not that a new generation of “Rock Stars” has been created — it is the basis upon which they have been created and the durability of that foundation.
The basis of relevance in the new media world is, quite simply, the numbers. How many subscribers and visitors to your blog? How many followers on Twitter? How many views of your YouTube video? Old school publishers like bloggers with lots of online readers. Looking for a soundbite from an expert? Take the one with the most awareness. Nothing new here.
But what we need to ensure, to protect the richness and texture of our culture, is quality. We need to be able to discriminate the original from the knock-off, the sage from the lunatic.
There are thousands of technology tricks that can be put to use in order to inflate your on-line metrics. Sign up for Twitter if you haven’t already and you will receive a thousand suggestions a day within a few weeks.
Search engine specialists are extracting thousands of dollars per month from unwitting business people in order to drive web site traffic which is numerous but completely irrelevant. There are tools which will grow your Twitter followers by tens of thousands.
And all of this “relevance” is bogus. With it, however, we do get the unattractive aspects of arrogance and greed. Web 2.0 snake oil available from thousands of spammers who have made on-line millions. “The Four-Hour Work Week.” And worst: bloggers who from behind the avatar’s shield, and who, bearing absolutely no responsibility for the outcome, cast their judgment on others mostly for the purpose of attracting attention to themselves.
I wrote recently about the Susan Boyle phenomenon. Don’t remember? That’s because she didn’t win the “Britain’s Got Talent” show, her audition for which generated 70,000,000 views of her performance of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables. I didn’t track the show closely, but it was clear from the snippets I heard that Ms. Boyle’s 15 minutes of fame occurred during that audition. She just never rose to the same level of performance again. She may have gotten the YouTube views, but she didn’t get the votes.
On a local media note
WTKK talk show host Jay Severin built an enormous ego for himself on the basis of success in the ratings book. He also managed to wangle a contract believed to be in seven figures annually.
Then one day the ratings methodology changed. Instead of a listener maintained written log, ratings were based on an electronic system which records listener activity electronically — no opportunity for human intervention between the listening and the logging. Severin’s ratings dropped like a stone, and suddenly advertiser and management tolerance for his outrageous statements tanked as well. After a particularly strong statement with racially unsavory overtones, he was suspended for a month — and presumably a contract renegotiation.
What do we do in the meantime?
How will we sort out the junk from the quality in such a media environment? We will figure it out — and I’m certain there will be further innovation in technology that helps us apply the uniquely human constructs of judgement and hierarchy to this “flat world” and open communication platform that is the worldwide web.
The smart companies, however, will stick to their values as we sort things out — and avoid the temptation of pride and arrogance which success and power often brings.
An old friend shared this link with me last week — an incredibly ambitious undertaking, extremely well executed: a parody of Don Maclean’s “American Pie,” recast to survey the demise of the old media at the hands of the internet and Google.
The piece is cute. It tests your sensibilities lyrically from time to time, but a tip of the hat to “lmcduff” for writing and producing in a single day!
Now let’s stop crying about the end of print journalism, the end of the big agency team, the end of all the perks (my favorite: tickets to see Bobby Short at The Carlyle). It’s like lamenting the end of the horseless carriage for God’s sake. Last time I checked we still had horses and ponies around and people spending plenty of money to watch them play polo, and take left turns around grass and dirt tracks for big prize money.
The media have changed. How do we protect the message? How do we answer my brother David’s question: “Who’s going to staff a bureau in the dark corners of the world so that we can get reliable news when things start blowing up in the Pashtun provinces?”
We do so by creating value, and choosing to bring that value to markets willing to spend to support it. The mistake failing media outlets are making is this: they believe that their key asset is their readership. Wrong again, Watson! Their key asset is their staff, their writers, and their ability to find and produce the right story at the right time with the right insight. Readers will find the media source with the best writers… and the eyeballs will turn over — and over. Readers will be loyal to you if you are loyal to your bureau chiefs, your editors, your stringers. Find your niche and protect it!
I do a lot of writing. I write white papers, brochures, presentation texts, speeches. You name it. Working on a contract basis for the past couple of years, I have had the pleasure and challenge of writing in many different voices for many different audiences. It is a great mental exercise.
Today, I had an experience which turned out to be an exercse which I recommend to any of you who write — for fun or for a living.
Take a walk with someone who does not speak your language. Friend of a friend, colleague of a colleague — it shouldn’t take too long to find someone who has at best rudimentary skill in your language.
I did this with a dear friend just this afternoon. She is trying to learn French. I work with French-speaking companies and have been fluent (or nearly so — I’ll let others decide that) for most of my life. I learned while a student at a school where the rules were strict: only the target language is spoken in the classroom. This rigorous discipline enabled me to become fluent in French and conversational in Russian, German, and, yes Latin.
We took a walk through a local nature preserve — the Moncrieff Cochran Bird Sanctuary — and I decided to conduct the walk entirely in the target language. It was fascinating as a mental exercise for me as a writer.
My student had a very small vocabulary, but nature provided plenty of examples to begin to expand that: leaf; bird; grass; rock; sky; green; blue; grey. I learned quickly that I had to cut away complexity and embellishment: only use the present tense; avoid language that exposes the “exceptions.” Keep it extremely simple.
How refreshing. How obvious. What a powerful exercise. And how pleased was the student who, immersed in the language for a couple of hours, felt so much more confident with her new language.
I haven’t posted in quite a while; which is always a sign that lots is going on of the kind that offsets future tuition obligations, which for the next few years of my life is a good thing.
So what awoke me from my social publishing slumber? As is often the case, it was a visceral reaction to a seemingly small thing… in this case a tweet from a friend and industry colleague — but the content of which furrowed my brow.
This friend is a great writer, speaker, affable fellow, and has been a great advisor to me personally as I gave up suckling at the corporate teet about two years ago. He has a big following. When he speaks or blogs or tweets, lots of people listen, read or retweet. He’s a new media guru.
He has been a thought leader as fellow marketing functionaries sought to understand how new communication tools (blogs, in particular) and the power of web search engines turned the traditional media context upside down.
He uses his first-mover advantage to spread what was once riot-inciting marketing rhetoric, and is now common sense about social media, social networks, social publishing:
Listen ten times more than you speak
Give ten times more than you expect to receive
It’s all about the virus: try to create ideas that will spread to squillions over the web
He uses his platform to challenge brands to wake up to the ways of this new world, and always acknowledges them when they respond.
He blogged recently about what one of the very large manufacturing entities bailed out by the government could do to fix its marketing. Excellent suggestions and, as usual, steeped in the perspective of the new media.
The next day, he went out on Twitter, essentially saying:
“Knock Knock. Hello? Hey is anyone home? Care to comment on my post?? It’s been 24 hours..”
I dashed off a reply (via Facebook, where I first saw the tweet), which said:
“Yo: Those guys have just been told to take orders from a 31-year old who’s never held a job with products or revenue on the line in his life. Perhaps they’ll get back to the social media moguls a little later on. ”
It was meant in light seriousness… but it got me thinking. The new media are so powerful. And yet the temptations are so great. Here was a case where a good guy and a bright industry light used his platform to essentially say, “Hey — I’m talking over here. Are you listening to me?” To me, it read like a violation of the Gospel according to the New Media Gurus. Off to confession!
Thankfully, about an hour or so later he tweeted again:
“OK, this company has more important things than my blog to do this week.”
I was relieved. But there’s a lesson here: with barriers to communication to vast audiences so low, people need to keep in mind that social media aren’t always at the center of everyone’s universe.
We are stewards of our online persona(e) — a very very big responsibility indeed.
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The Strain that will cause The Next Web Pandemic: IM#1
by Tim Dempsey on July 1, 2009
The Arrogance of Power
I had the great honor to work with Irving Wladawsky-Berger while I was at IBM about 12 years ago. He is one of the clearest thinkers I have had the good fortune to know. Thus, no surprise, he was at the heart of many strategic initiatives, arguably projects which saved IBM from near-ruin back in the ’80s and ’90s. To name two: the RISC chip; the Internet Division.
He does not, however, have an eponymous entry on Wikipedia, and I love him for that.
He wrote recently about power and responsibility in the wake of the credit crisis which drove the current economic downturn: “How Can ‘The Best and Brightest’ Get it So Wrong?“ It is a compelling reminder of the cyclical cultural phenomena which occur around the accumulation of success, wealth and influence.
Soon, pride rears its ugly head, and arrogance taints clear vision and decision making.
Power clusters tend toward homogeneity — the human desire to prefer “like” people, ideas and things to “unlike” people, ideas and things. The concrete begins to harden. The alert, flexible and agile entity that initiated the cycle can no longer respond to changes in the surrounding environment. A new cycle must begin again.
Irving references how arrogance led to an indefensible policy in Vietnam in the early 60’s. The big ideas from Harvard overpowered the career State and Defense Department thinkers.
I lived through the arrogance of the Internet era, when an infinitesimally small coterie of venture capitalists infused small technology companies with massive amounts of cash in order to create vast but artificial valuations for initial public stock offerings. I’ll never forget the photo of a dot com chairman and CEO, wearing sombreros and mounted on horses, addressing employees on the beach at a resort in Cabo San Lucas. Not a bad place for a company meeting. The company was called “Agillion,” an amount only slightly higher than what was spent on the off-site extravaganza.
And now it’s the banking and finance sector, the creation of highly complex derivative financial products, sub-prime… you get the picture.
Bloom off the Web 2.0 Rose?
We are seeing another power-arrogance-collapse in the magical land of Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0?): the new communication environment created at the intersection of the worldwide web and some innovative “social” technology: blog tools, online video services like YouTube, social networks like Facebook and Flickr, and Twitter.
Starship Enterprise
In the world of news media, communication, and culture, the rate of change is incredibly high. I’m reminded of Scotty from Start Trek, the Scots chief engineer, warning James T. Kirk as he presses the spaceship’s engines harder and faster: “She’s breaking up, Captain.” Somehow Kirk, the symbol of leadership and responsibility, guides the Enterprise through the threat to a new state of greater intergalactic safety and security in the end.
Newspapers are losing readers and suspending print operations, going entirely online. Advertising agencies have had to completely reinvent themselves in order to continue to deliver value to customers: there’s no “15% of the media buy” left to pad the bottom line. Public relations firms have to help companies find influencers not within a community of hundreds of print publications, but amongst millions of self-publishers (bloggers). It makes your hair hurt. And it is creating panic as brand stewards try to figure out what decisions to take under high stress.
This is due to the growing amount of that fixed-asset, time, individuals are shifting from old media, like print publications, radio and broadcast or cable television to new online communities and media: blogs, podcasts, streaming videos.
A million blog posts are published every day. News stories are spreading instantaneously not through free online news sights like Yahoo! News, but through individuals posting micro-messages on Twitter. 200,000 new videos are posted to YouTube daily. Microsoft, once the symbol of personal productivity, is now investing nearly $2 billion annually to brand its “Bing” “decision engine,” the company’s nth effort to respond to Google’s remarkable success in the extraction of cash from web search.
What have we lost, in finding what we’ve found?
What the old media world provided, whether we want to admit it or not, was a structure for the flow of information. The media community had a hierarchy. Leaders had names like “The New York Times” and “The Wall Street Journal,” Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. There were giants with enormous power, and smaller niche players with less influence, but a role to play.
In the new media world, we have no such structure. There are no barriers to entry. Anyone can become a publisher, a director / producer / leading actor, a self-styled pundit.
But that doesn’t mean to new media world isn’t subject to exactly the same cutural, cyclical patterns which have shaped the human experience for centuries.
IM#1, not N1H1, is the new threat.
I have observed over the past couple of years that an important cultural side-effect of the zero-barrier-to-entry new media world is the rise of an alarming number of super-egos.
Cable news started the process with the creation of on-camera experts — that cast of characters who don’t actually have a vocation in, say, politics, they just serve as on-camera expert on politics for the cable news discussion of a real news event in the political realm. I don’t think they own trousers or skirts to match their suitcoats and jackets either. But I digress.
The blogosphere is clogosphered with similar experts. And what concerns me is not that a new generation of “Rock Stars” has been created — it is the basis upon which they have been created and the durability of that foundation.
The basis of relevance in the new media world is, quite simply, the numbers. How many subscribers and visitors to your blog? How many followers on Twitter? How many views of your YouTube video? Old school publishers like bloggers with lots of online readers. Looking for a soundbite from an expert? Take the one with the most awareness. Nothing new here.
But what we need to ensure, to protect the richness and texture of our culture, is quality. We need to be able to discriminate the original from the knock-off, the sage from the lunatic.
There are thousands of technology tricks that can be put to use in order to inflate your on-line metrics. Sign up for Twitter if you haven’t already and you will receive a thousand suggestions a day within a few weeks.
Search engine specialists are extracting thousands of dollars per month from unwitting business people in order to drive web site traffic which is numerous but completely irrelevant. There are tools which will grow your Twitter followers by tens of thousands.
And all of this “relevance” is bogus. With it, however, we do get the unattractive aspects of arrogance and greed. Web 2.0 snake oil available from thousands of spammers who have made on-line millions. “The Four-Hour Work Week.” And worst: bloggers who from behind the avatar’s shield, and who, bearing absolutely no responsibility for the outcome, cast their judgment on others mostly for the purpose of attracting attention to themselves.
I wrote recently about the Susan Boyle phenomenon. Don’t remember? That’s because she didn’t win the “Britain’s Got Talent” show, her audition for which generated 70,000,000 views of her performance of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables. I didn’t track the show closely, but it was clear from the snippets I heard that Ms. Boyle’s 15 minutes of fame occurred during that audition. She just never rose to the same level of performance again. She may have gotten the YouTube views, but she didn’t get the votes.
On a local media note
WTKK talk show host Jay Severin built an enormous ego for himself on the basis of success in the ratings book. He also managed to wangle a contract believed to be in seven figures annually.
Then one day the ratings methodology changed. Instead of a listener maintained written log, ratings were based on an electronic system which records listener activity electronically — no opportunity for human intervention between the listening and the logging. Severin’s ratings dropped like a stone, and suddenly advertiser and management tolerance for his outrageous statements tanked as well. After a particularly strong statement with racially unsavory overtones, he was suspended for a month — and presumably a contract renegotiation.
What do we do in the meantime?
How will we sort out the junk from the quality in such a media environment? We will figure it out — and I’m certain there will be further innovation in technology that helps us apply the uniquely human constructs of judgement and hierarchy to this “flat world” and open communication platform that is the worldwide web.
The smart companies, however, will stick to their values as we sort things out — and avoid the temptation of pride and arrogance which success and power often brings.
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