The view from Glion -- photo credit, flickr.com/photos/glion

I have been stressed out lately.  And I feel guilty about it.  This increases my stress.

Life has been tougher in the last 24 months than in the five years prior.  I made the decision to go out on my own as an independent consultant — which has been a fantastic experience — but not without its ups and downs.  At times I have been busier than I want to be, at others not quite busy enough.  After 20 years in the corporate environment of companies like Lotus and IBM, that is a big change.

Within large enterprises there is this vast safety net made of high-tech polymers that smooths out the swings and narrows.

Then I realize just how fortunate I really am.  When I take the time and prioritize the activities which give me a higher-altitude perspective (like getting exercise and proper rest, balancing the energy put in the never-ending list of to-dos with a reserve aimed at other personal hobbies and interests), I realize I’m sitting at a place like the Hotel Victoria in Glion (pictured above), looking down upon a beautiful city built into steep, pre-Alpine hills (Montreux), the freakishly deep blue water of Lac Léman, and a “beautiful river in the valley ahead” (who can name that tune?).

Down below is the foundation — the city in which dwell the people whose skills and efforts drive the engine of the local economic community.

When I work with companies I find a significant portion of the engagement must be spent ensuring that the skills on staff are the skills required to meet their three-year objectives.

Off across the lake is a valley which leads up to the “White Teeth” (les Dents Blanches) and to Mont Blanc.  That destination is off in the future — and their are several paths which lead there.

I also spend a great deal of time working with companies to understand their strategic goals.  I challenge the executive team to define very clearly that target.  I challenge path choices between the here and now and that goal: Why choose to expand into that territory, why not partner?  Is there an opportunity for you to position your product adjacently to a growth category or trend?  Why not disrupt the status quo and the incumbents with a radically new vision?

When I am feeling stress, it is usually during these working phases.  Will the executive team accept my input and challenges?  Will they make the moves that are required in staffing and skills?  Will the clouds lift over that three-year destination — and will all agree to the path which leads there?

Then, if all goes well, I look up as I did yesterday and see a view like the picture at the top of this post.  The pieces of the puzzle fall into place, and suddenly the stress is lifted — the team is aligned — and focus shifts from discussion and debate about the goal, to execution.

Then I feel really lucky.

A quiet weekend of solitude is a very rare occurrence for me.  I can’t remember when I last had the luxury.  As I faced the prospect of this time away from home I was anxiously planning activities out of fear I would lose my mind from the cabin fever.

Wrong again, Batman.

I am in Geneva, Switzerland — which is a lovely city of pleasant, human scale.  The Genevois have a certain style: confident and cool.  The people are progressive in many ways (green, public services) and centuries-old traditional in others (private banking, watchmaking).  I’m here often, and have nearly burned through the sensor on my DSLR wandering the streets.

Strolling about the village of Carouge during the weekly Farmer’s Market, I passed this repair shop for bicycles (cycles) and motorcycles (motos).  I’ve passed the place many times, struck as I was (and not sure why) by the weathered and ancient building, the bright and new graffiti, the contrast of chaos and confusion with elegance and simplicity.

What does this have to do with the transformation the web and new media are putting businesses through today?

Bear with me.

1. Durable innovations recapitulate ancient human instincts and behaviors.  I totally agree with and admire how Chris Brogan has begun to evolve his focus.  A true leader among the social networking set, he just published a new book along with co-author Julien Smith: Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust.  Chris seems to me (not a long-term watcher, mind you) to be refining his focus and interest — moving as we all have from (IMHO) a long period of hot romance with the new tools and new channels of social networking — to a focus on what is genuinely human about the new media world.  He astutely observes that social technologies are recreating, online, human interaction models that have been crucial to western civilization for a long, long time.  Word of mouth, spreading so freely at the Farmer’s Market among neighbors yesterday in Carouge, spreads via Facebook or Twitter today.  Special interest groups are today’s guilds, they merely convene online and asynchronously thanks to new technologies.
2. In any market disruption, there will be chaos and confusion. Gartner’s notion of the “hype cycle” provides solace in this atmosphere of hyperchange in the media.  It reminds us that although the proliferation of tools and utilities, applications, devices and wizards, and the squillions of tips and guides out there continues unabated, market forces will eventually come to bear.  Crowded categories will thin, understandable segmentation will set in.  Some graffiti becomes accepted as art, the rest gets painted over.  And if tenet #1 is true, standards of conduct (call it “netiquette” if you must) will take hold, and drive out the fringe behaviors by consensus of the community at large.  I’m among those who believe that the level of civility within a community will have a higher impact on the long term success of that community than sheer numbers (Twitter, Facebook included).
3. Durable innovations conform to Einstein’s definition of elegance: they must be “as simple as possible, and no simpler.”  Already, the problem of online identity portability is being addressed.  Many web sites and services today allow you to “connect via Facebook,” using those credentials to establish your identity and authenticity with additional web sites.  Soon I’ll be able to digitally shred the encrypted office file I keep with the dozens of user IDs and passwords I once needed to navigate the web.  On the other hand, it will take longer for us to answer the broader questions relating to online identity: how do I manage the very natural separation I want between personal and professional spheres?
4. Market disruptions will accelerate the retirement of one generation of leaders, making room for a new one. Just as the novice cyclist glides across the frame in the image at the top of this post, so too will the generation behind us live and learn in a technology and interaction ethos only subconsciously aware of the pain and confusion which today’s transformation is causing.  The next generation’s leaders will not simply pass “through the frame,” however.  They will stop to study and learn from the past, and exploit that insight to fuel innovation based on those experiences, not in blissful ignorance of them.  I work with organizations every day that are caught between these two worlds.  Men and women of good will and trust want to understand the new communication media and channels — but aren’t quite sure how they need to drive behavioral change in their wake.  Organization response: the eternal challenge of the business leader, isn’t it?

As always, please leave any reactions or comments.  Thanks for reading.

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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.

Unilever: 400 brands!

I’m sure the twitterati and digerati and otherati will be all over this speech:  : from Unilever CMO Simon Clift.

The denial: “Social media is not a strategy.”

How right he is!  Of course you knew that already, since you read this blog.  :-0

The new media are just media; buyers have taken control of information about sellers; vendors need to learn first how to listen… I think I like this guy!

Thanks to Mark Mullen for the tip on the speech!

Holland-Mark, Boston

Demonstrations of leadership and courage are rare in times of economic crisis, and basically invisible at present.  Thus one is tempted to suspect a challenge to the digerati-twitterati and the marketing profession as a whole as just so much more hype in a period of zeal and desire for revolution unlike any I’ve observed in my twenty years in the marketing trade.

Read Chris Colbert’s recent post from his new blog.  Marketing is the only profession with no real accreditation.  Marketers are challenging congresspeople and lawyers on the approval ratings front.  And this more extensive quotation:

As example, the last few years have brought the declaration that traditional media no longer works and that the online milieu does, or works better.  The flaw with that platitude is that no one ever knew whether traditional media worked(s).  So what are we comparing online media too?  And even in the online realm there are a dearth of quantitative cases to show how it delivers tangibly better performance and/or performance that is scalable.  The entire topic and our industry’s ability to declare anything “for sure” about it is thwarted by a gaping lack of analytical and intellectual rigor, made worse by a gaping hole of data.

Kudos, Colbert.  I encourage all to subscribe to Chris’ new and fresh feed.

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Thanks to Ron Miller for the link to the performance by Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, yesterday.

The video clip is so evocative I had to stop work on another project to reflect.

We are at a genuinely interesting point of transition in the United States, and therefore in the world.  My genuine hope, and I use that word advisedly these days, is that Obama-imbued optimism will prove a tonic for our pandemic hypertension.  We need a “collective yoga class” in this country.  Perhaps the debut of our 44th President will have us all breathing deep into the far recesses of our lungs, stretching further and making more supple our cable-taught hamstrings.

Perhaps thus relaxed, even temporarily, we can once again envision a future characterized by economic growth, by the belief that we can coexist with earth, air and water while generating less fire, by a vibrant, tolerant, and free culture we can be proud to pass on to our children, and theirs.

If you haven’t heard this piece — I encourage you to do so.  Commentary continues below.

I am no Pete Seeger expert, but I have enjoyed his music since my childhood, thanks to my Mom.  I have seen great biographical programs, particularly the PBS show, “Pete Seeger: The Power of Song.”  He was among a group of artists and intellectuals who were grotesquely treated at another point of transition in this country — the debut of the Cold War.  He survived and ultimately thrived, on his own terms.

I could not help thinking I was seeing Pete Seeger perform live for the last time.  He is aging.  Gracefully, but aging.  His voice and timing are not what they once were.  But there he stood, before the Reflecting Pool, part of a political event which must have had him full to bursting with pride.  My throat tightened and the tears did in fact well up.

Toward the end of the clip, the producers “pot up” Springsteen’s mic, and his distinctive, almost twangy, harmony strengthens in the piece.  As you may know, Springsteen produced a CD / album and a fairly extensive tour behind his recordings of Pete Seeger greats: “We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions.”  His admiration for Seeger is well documented.

Think about that metaphoric transition: from Seeger the American Communist Party member, the political protestant, who lived a modest material existence but dedicated his life to human rights causes and a world of man living in harmony with nature and the earth; to Springsteen, sprung from working class roots near the cosmetically uninspring Jersey Shore, seering advocate of labor in industrial America, critic of immigration and domestic issues like privacy protection in an environment of wire-tapping and other surveillance, multi-millionaire leader of the E Street Band which regularly tops the music industry in concert tour receipts.

 I find the difference in “cultural authenticity index” between the two poignant.  Today we think of U2′s Bono and Springsteen as media beacons with enlightened political consciousness.  Their presence at certain types of political events has become predictable.  Whatever your view of Seeger, Springsteen, Obama — there can be no doubt that among them (at least judging to the date of this writing), Seeger is the only among them who truly lived “an examined life.”  He is a man whose vision for humanity can be seen in all aspects of his life.  His political and social views; his choices about lifestyle and consumption; his application of his God-given artistic talent to his dream for mankind.

I am a huge fan of “The Boss,” and while I found U2′s concert a let-down, I would not deny them a spot in the pantheon of modern rock bands.  But neither is up to the standard for authenticity set by Seeger.  Not even close.  And believe me, my judgment is not based on the merits of their political views, as many who know me can attest.  It is based on the depth and breadth of their conviction; of the completeness with which they pursue life in all its aspects.

The question becomes, who among us is?

Thanks to industry colleague and friend Lance Shaw for this post to his Facebook profile: “Gartner cancels 2 upcoming ‘flagship’ conferences.”

I wrote back at the time of the Gartner Symposium in Orlando – their surviving ‘flagship’ conference — pleading with their junior anal-ysts in particular to take a couple of affect lessons and consider how their basic and stereotypical interaction model just might need to change in the face of economic hard times.

As a perennial vendor representative, and often small and upstart vendor representative at that, I have been on the receiving end of “helpful advice” for years.  So I admit it: guilty as charged of schadenfreude!

But on a more serious note… this is yet another reminder of what is required of leaders in these trying times — humility, honesty, and refreshed and recalibrated vision.