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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.

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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