Portals and KM

Stand Out Social Marketing: A Review

I was pleased to receive a review copy of Stand Out Social Marketing by Mike Lewis. The full title is: Stand Out Social Marketing: How to Rise Above the Noise, Differentiate Your Brand, and Build an Outstanding Online Presence. It provides “tactics for standing out and drawing positive attention in the already overcrowded social web.” The book provides case studies and interviews of social media leaders on ways that the most powerful brands have succeeded in this area.

Mike is the Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Awareness, a company I have covered a number of times (see for example, Awareness Provides Social Marketing Automation and Awareness Report on Understanding and Leveraging Social Capital). The book covers several aspects of standing out in the social media world: paying attention, stimulating and engaging in interactions, creating content, developing a distinctive presence, managing the process, creating an audit, and measuring ROI.

As anyone who looks at the Web knows the social media space has gained legitimacy and investments in social media marketing continue to rise every year. That is the good news. The difficulty that this book addresses is how to stand out in a crowded field. We are generating more content every year or two that ever before and much of this is through social media.

While you can buy Twitter followers, and Facebook likes, as well as use other tricks and short cuts for some measures of impact, the meaningful measures cannot be faked but are based on creating good content and promoting it well. You need both sides of that equation and this book is a good primer to be successful at both.

You need to be seen as unique. Then if you are successful, expect to be copied so you need to unique again. You need to be in a constant state of innovation. Mike offers the Levis Friends Facebook Store as an example. Once you enter this online store you get a personalized shopping experience based on the likes and recommendations of friends. They placed a Like button next to the SKU for each item in the store to encourage participation. It is a good idea and I can see how this would work for Facebook addicts. I can imagine that many of the people who flock to Facebook would want to know what jeans their friends like.  Personally, I tend to look for bargains but then I also do not spend much time in Facebook. But then 350 million suffer from "Facebook addiction." 

Time Magazine named “you” as the person of the year in 2007 put a mirror on the cover. These types of tactics will appeal to those interested in the social mirror. I have to admit that while clothes may not be where I focus, I am intrigued by what people do think in areas of interest to me such as social media or even art.

Each chapter has specific guidelines. For example, there is a detailed set of steps and processes for paying attention to the right things that impact your brand. First, you need to identify where the relevant conversations are happening. Then you need to refine these conversations to see might ones have impact through what Mike calls an “attention matrix.” Third, you need to measure your efforts. Each chapter ends with useful actions and takeaways.

I recommend the book for anyone interested in social media marketing. I would recommend using social media marketing for anyone serious about gaining visibility for their brand, so that casts a wide net for this book.  

The Rise of the Networked Gig Economy

Rob Paterson offers us a very useful book, You Don't Need a Job (The Rise of the Network). Of course, he does not mean you don’t need an income but there are others ways to earn an income that as a salaried job with an employer.  Instead he is talking about what I have been doing since 2004 and an increasing number of others are doing. You can work for yourself as a contractor on multiple projects, initiatives, assignments, or other gigs. Some people started this way to earn a living because they lost their job, others, like Rob, started it because they wanted a change.

One thing that enables this means of earning a living is the rise of networks. Now networks have always been about, it is just that they have been extended through the Web. I worked with Rob for several years writing on the FastForward blog before we met at a conference sponsored by the blog. Then we worked together on another effort without meeting in person during its duration. In this case Rob was serving as a contractor and he made use of software from my company, Darwin Ecosystem, as he served the St. Louis PBS affiliate as they explored ways to integrate social media with traditional broadcast TV. We were both still doing the FastForward work, along several other assignments at the time.

Rob has an interesting chart that shows that in the early 1800s over 80% of people earned their living as free agents. After the industrial revolution took hold, the number dropped well below 20%. Now it is back over 40% as free agency is growing once again in the networked world. The focus has shifted from top-down command and control hierarchies to networks of skilled participants. This change is even happening within companies and those that adopt it will be the leaders of the next economy. Rob’s book provides some very useful historical context so we can see how we got to where we are now and how we can progress beyond it.

I recently re-watched an excellent video produced by the BBC in 1997, Intellectual capital: The New Wealth of Nations. The film portrayed the industrial revolution as a plague on people where workers were treated as mere extensions of machines. Charles Handy makes the same point as Rob, when the workers own the means of production they will be in control. But unlike Karl Marx, Handy was talking about the machines but the intellectual assets within people’s minds that provides them flexibility to move from company to company or become free agents.

Corresponding to this change is the rise of the percentage of enterprise wealth driven from intangible assets. Now the percentage of tangible assets in the corporations in the S&P 500 has shifted from 66% in 1982 to 16% in 1999 and likely continues to fall (see Juergen Daum, Intangible Assets and Value Creation). In its place is the rise of intangible assets as the creators of wealth (over 84% in 1999). These are mostly the ideas in people’s minds. Yet many organizations are still managing people as though the wealth was created by tangible assets, machines, and people are just servants of these machines. It is the network within and outside the enterprise that releases this potential for wealth. Now, as Rob, argues, the network increasingly allows you to do not need an enterprise to create a living.  It is increasingly possible to escape the yoke of top down authority by simply working as a free agent.

Moving form historical context, Rob offers a lot if practical advise on how to survive and prosper in the new networked world. You can join a community of free agents to share possibilities and collaborate on work. There are Web sites that support this networking. You can turn a hobby into a living. You can learn something new. He offers a number of useful sources to further your ability to thrive in this new world. I highly recommend the book, whether you are inside or outside an organization. It contains survival skills for all of us. 

Jet Vignettes: A Recommended Book for Every Airline Passenger

Here is a book for everyone who flies, on a frequent or occasional basis. Jet Vignettes by Catherine Caldwell gives you an inside look at the life and work of flight attendants, written by a veteran flight attendant with 23 year in the business. It will make my travel more meaningful knowing a lot more about the people who greet and look after me in skies. It also makes me both understand and respect all that goes on to make our travel pleasant and secure, often behind the scenes unknown to the passengers.

The fast paced book bounces back and forth between the benefits of layovers in fabulous locations and the practical aspects of being a flight attendant, between the joys of spending time with close friends in beautiful locations while getting paid for it and the occasional fears when potential threats occur. It is one job that when you leave the “office” you can leave your work behind and go have fun in amazing locations. It is a romantic picture of a job that takes you to exotic places, offers vacations almost anywhere in the world but the book comes without a sugar coating. In this sense it is also recommended reading for anyone planning a career, for however long, as a flight attendant. Many start with only a few years in mind and stay on for decades. That was the case with the author.

There is much about shopping and eating overseas complete with good travel tips. As a flight attendant you can plan a dinner party at home with the best ingredients purchased the night before in Paris. Some of her popular items include Pastis, LeBrilou liquer, Poliane bread, Fleur De Sel Camargue (French sea salt) Mer de Noirmoutier butter, Savora mustard, Amora 4 sauce Tradionale for beef bourguignon, Amore Mayonnaise Dijon, and much more. Each city has its own special shops and flight attendants either discover these places themselves or hear about them from colleagues.  Good news travels fast.

There are the joys of taking your eight year old step daughter to Paris for the weekend for her birthday and taking your mother back to her ancestral home in Scotland for the first time since she came to the US.

At the same time there are the difficult passengers which are thankfully a minority, but no less tiresome. After 9/11 a new fear crept in and some flight attendants retired. Others are more watchful which is reassuring for the rest of us.

The two strongest messages that come through are the need to think quickly on your feet, as well as the teamwork and camaraderie that can make these decisions easier to carry out. It can vary from having to stretch 30 meals to cover 45 people to dealing with more dangerous situations like the guy who brought a gun and bullets on board by accident and wondered what to do with it.

This is the ideal airplane book. I went through it on a trip from Boston to Athens with a stop over in London. I could not put it down except to sleep and then I let the flight attendants pass it around. In the morning they vouched for its authenticity.  You can order a copy at the Jet Vignettes site. 

 

Has the Industrial Age Has Finally Run Out of Gas?

Yesterday, I reviewed Rawn Shah’s book, Social Networking for Business.  Today I am going to comment on his interview With Don Tapscott: The Industrial Age Has Finally Run Out of Gas.  I reminded of the TV commercial where everything runs on gas, even the dentist drill. It asked what if everything ran cleanly on the grid?  Don is quoted as saying, “Throughout the 20th century, we created wealth through vertically integrated corporations. Now, we create wealth through networks. We are at a turning point in human history, where the industrial age has finally run out of gas.”

I hope he is right. But then a lot of the gird is powered by old style coal that is not so clean. Don position is that people are now participating in mass collaborations within or across the boundaries of the organization. This collective now powers enterprises. While this is should be the wave of the future, examples like the BP oil spill in the Gulf demonstrate that the networks of collective intelligence are not always running cleanly.

I am sure that Don would argue that it is successful organizations that are now connected and those that are not will also run out of steam.  This I would certainly agree. I just hope this concept spreads faster.

To make the connected enterprise run smoothly you need leaders who “guide and influence others, rather than to give orders and instruction. Simply said, they are not managers any longer but influencers and this takes new skills and a different mindset.” I agree but still see old school management occurring in many places. He gave an interesting example of the Chinese motorcycle industry where hundreds of little companies all work together. They meet to coordinate on the Internet in tea houses and provide 40% of global motorcycle production. Of course operate with very command and control political infrastructure and likely benefit from its macro economic policies.

Don is working with a number of cities using a variety of means to gain greater citizen engagement and reap their collective intelligence. Methods include: digital brainstorms, electronic town halls, citizen reporting, predictive markets, and policy wikis.

Tracy Hackshaw, the Chief Solution Architect for iGov for the government of Trinidad and Tobago, leading a similar effort. His government is using social business for more effective e-government efforts. There are 1.3 million people in Trinidad and Tobago. A main goal is to increase the engagement of these people with their government and have them more satisfied with what the government is doing. Within the country there is a high percentage of access to mobile phones so this was one channel they focused on. One popular example was maps with the location of government offices and transit information on to reach them. Another was the reporting of such things as broken street lights or potholes in the roads. They have reduced the time that these issues are reported.

CEMEX, the highly profitable Mexican cement company, found the business case for social business by connecting their employees globally to gain operational efficiency. They found this efficiency. They also wanted to find radical innovations and they found these as well. They wanted to unlock the collective wisdom of their employees and this occurred, as well. I did some work with them about ten years ago and they were impressive in this regard then.

Rawn concludes his interview by noting that leaders may feel challenged when the number of stakeholders increases by magnitudes. Yet, he says that these systems have worked and they continue to work. They are our best way to make use of the collective and diverse intelligence within our organizations and our world. 

 

Rawn Shah’s Social Networking for Business: A Review

I did some catching up on my reading over the last holidays. One book at the top of the pile was Rawn Shah’s Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs. Rawn is best practices lead in the Social Software Enablement team in IBM Software Group. He was kind to give me a review copy. In this book Rawn brings together patterns and best practices based on his experience managing worldwide online communities at IBM. He makes the case that for online communities to succeed they must be guided and nurtured carefully, actively, and intelligently. I can certainly agree with this position.

Rawn begins with examples of collective intelligence including IBM’s Innovation Jams. The 2006 one drew 150,000 business partners. I wrote a bit about the 2005 Jam that drew 52,000 IBM employees. The paper, World Jam: Talk Among 50,000+ describes the event. They built a Jam Analyzer to help visualize what is happening and enable you to drill down on specific participants and conversations. IBM has invested over $100 million to develop new businesses in each of themes that emerged such as improved healthcare and work toward a smarter planet.

Rawn notes that other companies are also adopting the use of collective intelligence and supporting it through social media. He writes that the trick is to focus on specific goals and methods instead of just looking at innovation in a general way.

He next goes on to look at examples of Web sites such as last.fm and social tools such as IBM’s Quickr that enable community based work. I was a big fan of Lotus Quickplace as Quickr was called when it first came out and promoted it with a number of clients. In 2000 I worked on the implementation of a knowledge management system at Ryder that used Quickplace as an important component that was novel for the time. This implementation won a CIO 100 award for innovation in 2002. Quickplace foreshadowed some of the enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools providing a quick and easy way to set up a web-based team workplace. Here is a 2006 post on the Quickplace Story – Then and Now.

The collective experience is not one-dimensional and Rawn provides a very useful set of models. They include individual (e.g. SlideShare), social network (e.g., LinkedIn), closed workgroup (e.g., Quickr), visible workgroup (e.g., Pandora), community (e.g., SAP Developer Network), and mass collaboration (e.g., last.fm or Amazon). See Four Examples of Wikis Working within the Enterprise for more on the SAP example and similar efforts. Rawn goes on to use this set of models to discuss their value and how to support them.

Rawn next discusses effective leadership in social environments. The old command and control methods do not work. Again he offers a range of different leadership styles and discusses how each relates to collaboration. The same careful and useful detail is offered. He then goes into different models of the social tasks related to collaboration. This is followed by a discussion of the different social domains, again using the approach of defining and discussing alternatives.

Building a social culture is the next topic. He discusses how the social leadership and social tasks already covered impact culture. This discussion continues with chapters on engaging members and community management. Next Rawn tackles how to measure social environments with same degree of precision, again exploring alternatives. He concludes with a discussion of social value. I highly recommend this book as it offers very specific and clear guidelines for anyone wanting to engage in social collaboration and that should be all of us.

Rawn currently writes the Connected Business blog at Forbes. Tomorrow I will comment on a recent interview he did with Don Tapscott, The Industrial Age Has Finally Run Out of Gas, where he continues to discuss collective intelligence. 

 

Gladwell's Outliers: A Review

I picked up Malcolm Galdwell’s new book, Outliers: The Story of Success, when I recently needed an airplane read. It served the purpose well as an entertaining book that was also thought provoking. Gladwell defines Outlier as “a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience.” In this book he looks at “people who are outliers—in men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August.”

Gladwell begins the book by looking at why a disproportionate number of Canadian professional hockey players are born in January, February and March. It turns out these are the oldest in their school cohort. This makes them older than their peers. The stratification of hockey players begins at a very early age when this age difference has a big impact on ability. So these slightly older players are much more likely to get put into the elite hockey groups and get the best coaching and have the most challenging peers to play against.

A similar thing happens in other sports where the identification of early talent has a big impact on future success such as American baseball and European soccer. The only difference is when the cutoff point occurs during the year.

Gladwell goes on to get more profound and specific. He offers the 10,000 hour rule. It takes at least 10,000 of practice to get really good at something. Then he offers examples from a variety of industries. First, he notes how the Beatles got a chance to practice more than any other band through their extensive playing times in Hamburg nightclubs. It was only after they passed 10,000 hours, by Gladwell’s estimate, that they started becoming exceptional.

Next, he goes to the birth dates of some of the richest people in history. He offers a chart of the 75 richest people in human history with their wealth recalculated in today’s dollars. The chart itself is really interesting. The top three are John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Number eight is Marcus Crassus of the Roman Empire, and number nine is Basil II of the Byzantine Empire. Twenty percent of the entire list comes from American industrialists who came of age in the post-Civil War industrial boom when major new opportunities for wealth opened up.

He takes this analysis to the computer industry and shows that many of the most successful people here were born in the mid-1950s so they came of age as the computer industry underwent a major transformation. These people include: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, Eric Schmidt, and the founders of Sun: Bill Joy, Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, and Andy Bechtolsheim. Then he goes into detail to show how both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had largely unique opportunities to get their 10,000 hours with computers at an usually early age.

So Gladwell concludes that there is actually a lot of luck in terms of circumstances behind the biggest successes. It was not simply their stronger intellect and drive. Of course, these people had to take advantage of their luck but the rest of us do not have the same opportunities. He argues that we should be more conscious of these success factors as we plan how to make everyone successful.  There is much more to the book. I found it to be one of his best. 

 

Review of Kate Pugh’s Sharing Hidden Know-How

Kate Pugh, president of Align Consulting, has provided us with some useful guidelines on in her recent book: Sharing Hidden Know-How: How managers solve thorny problems with the knowledge jam. The book describes Knowledge Jam, “a facilitated collaborative method for helping organizations rediscover the fundamental discipline of knowledge transfer – the conversation.” This approach was developed by Kate and uses human interaction to capture unwritten insights, and position them to provide business value. I have known Kate for some time and am very pleased to see her methods documented in this excellent book. I did a brief review on the OutStart blog but will go into more depth here.

The book provides a step-by-step process and practical tools that will help organizations harness their untapped knowledge. As the book states it, “shows how to scope topics, foster the correct tone, conduct a knowledge capture event, and integrate found knowledge into the organization.” The Knowledge Jam method uses conversation to capture information and the all important context for this information.  

Knowledge Solutions can be a great help here as they become the carrier for the identified knowledge, a main means to harvest more, and the vehicle to identify and put it in the hands of the right people to derive business value from its use. Kate covers the related technologies to the methods she provides. She quotes Andy McAfee on the value that collaborative technology brings to the table, “Now contributions are globally visible (everyone with access to the platform can see them) and persistent (they stick around and so can be consulted and searched for). Access can be restricted…but the main goal of platform technology is to make content widely and permanently available to its members.” It is this transparency that is one of the main benefits of enterprise 2.0 and Knowledge Solution technologies.

The book further describes Knowledge Jam as a “process is built around the disciplines of facilitation, conversation, and translation. These bring into balance the coordination, expansion, and pragmatic "pull" of knowledge into its future uses around the organization. Knowledge Jam moves things along efficiently, with a shared sense of responsibility for helping last month's or last year's insights to transform into today's innovative products, functions or regional strategies.”

The book begins with a rationale for Knowledge Jams. It is designed to address three problems with knowledge work: knowledge blind spots, knowledge mismatches, and knowledge jails. The blind spots are gaps in our understanding about where resides. The mismatches are failures to get the right knowledge in a format or location that makes it usable within the organization. The jails are places where knowledge gets trapped and becomes unusable to the organization.

Next, Kate goes into the basics of a Knowledge Jam.  You select the focused topic and participants, plan the project, discover and capture useful knowledge through conversations, you use brokers to get the knowledge in the right shape to be used, and then you reuse the knowledge in ways that help the organization. A Knowledge Jam can occur over days or months.

Then Kate covers the disciplines required to make this work facilitation, conversation, and translation. She provides detailed explanations and conceptual tools that can be used for each. Armed with these explanations she then revisits the three knowledge problems introduced at first: Knowledge blind spots, mismatches, and jails. The next step is to place the three disciplines in the context of recent business practices and tools: intelligence acquisition, organizational learning, and collaboration technologies. 

Knowledge Jams are then compared to other knowledge capture techniques such as after action reviews, mentoring, traditional journalism, peer assist, communities of practice, and appreciative inquiry.  Next, Kate covers how to build a Knowledge Jam program and explores how it can lead change and leverage social media.

I think this book and method represents a significant contribution to the ways we make better use of knowledge within organizations. It is a useful complement to any implementation of Knowledge Solutions. As Larry Prusak said it is, “A fine example of the new generation of knowledge books.” It offers structure to a process that is usually carried out in intuitive means. If you want to make better use of knowledge with your organization, this is a useful book for you. 

 

Review of The Social Marketing Funnel

I recently looked at a useful new book, The Social Marketing Funnel: Driving Business Value with Social Marketing. It is sponsored by Awareness and available as a free download. The book begins with some interesting stats. Inc. reported in a 2009 study that 91% of Inc. 500 companies use social media as part of their marketing mix1. A second study found that 72% of marketers reported closing more business as a result of social media efforts and 52% reported lead generation benefits with social media.

At the same time, they note that, “measuring and tying social media efforts to true benefits and ROI continues to elude many marketers…Most marketers struggle to identify, capture, and leverage the myriad social conversations related to their brands.” The sets up the purpose of the book: to “help CMOs and social media strategists think about organizing and optimizing social marketing in the context of building a Social Funnel” and provide the steps and best practices to get the most value from social media investments. They define a Social Funnel as “a dynamic collection of consumer activity across social media channels, which sits on top of the traditional marketing and sales funnel.” To provide context to this effort, Awareness looked at close of 100 businesses of all sizes from multiple industries (some managed by the brands themselves and some by agencies). They also talked with some industry experts.

To create your Social Funnel you need to first identify and capture consumer conversation across a variety of social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.  Then you need a CRM tool that handles social media (aka SCRM) to aggregate the data and mine it for insights. This effort needs to be integrates with your traditional marketing and sales efforts and your CRM tool. This makes a lot of sense but the book notes that only 6% of companies report doing this integration.  The report predicts a growth in this integration and I would agree.

They offer five steps to building and managing your social funnel. You first manage and grow your social reach. This is defined as “the total number of social profiles a brand has collected across all social media platforms with brand presence.”  Then you monitor the relevant social conversations and manage your social content as a result of this monitoring.  You also practice good SEO as part of this management and measure and analyze the relevant social activity around your brand.  There are useful tips for each step.

In a related 2010 study Awareness asked over 300 companies about what they did with their social media monitoring. The results: 78% - Identify and respond to customer service issues, 64% - Identify individuals looking for my product or service, 38% - Identify individuals who influence sales of my product/service, and 17% - Identify behaviors associated with people who are likely to buy our product or service. However, this was mostly informal as only 18% had a formal tracking process.  Cleary there is a need for more effort here.

There is much more in the book as I have just skimmed over the headlines and I recommend it to anyone interesting in making their social media marketing more effective.  They conclude: “Remember, your Social Funnel is a strategic business investment – treat it with the same rigor, dedication, and governance you treat your other strategic investments.” This is good advice for any initiative and one that is most often ignored when the effort is around a hot new topic such as social media. 

 

Review of Business Goes Virtual

I recently received a review copy of Business Goes Virtual: Realizing the Value of Collaboration, Social and Virtual Strategies by John P. Girard, Cindy Gordon, and JoAnn L. Girard.  I have known Cindy for some time and we have done work together on several occasions, including several writing efforts so I had high expectations for this work. The book argues that after some false starts, four critical enablers have converged to make virtual business opportunities a reality: social technology, visionary leadership, an increasing recognition of the value of a collaboration culture, plus virtual worlds. They define virtual business as follows: “A virtual business provides innovative solutions to new and traditional business challenges by exploiting social technology, leadership, and collaboration in both the real and virtual words.”

The book examines four virtual business strategies that are showing promise. The “any place, any time” strategy provides high quality service 24/7 through bypassing traditional geographic challenges. The “people know best” strategy looks at crowd-sourcing the wisdom of every-day people. The “everyone has a stake” strategy allows organizations to take advantage of their stakeholders’ views. Finally, the “real in the virtual world” strategy enables real businesses to sell their wares in the virtual world.

The book provides case examples and best practices. They look at both successes and failures in this new market and make some bets on the future. They conclude that virtual business is here to stay and firms need to develop a strategy to take advantage of this new market or risk their demise.

One strong example is the transformation from printed books to e-books. I am reading a virtual version of their book now. The authors report that on Christmas Day 2009, consumers purchased more Kindle books than physical books through Amazon, a virtual store itself. Now the iPad is booming with Apple selling more tablets than PCs both in terms of volume and revenue – and the iPad is much cheaper. It takes e-reading to new heights and provides connectivity to so many other possibilities. For example, it becomes that much easier to sharing insights from what you are reading or look up related information from other sources.  Publishers who recognize this trend will be in position to ride the new wave and those that do not will be ridden over.

This new world will change many things including jobs. The authors note that many of the top jobs of 2010 did not exist in 2004. We are now faced with preparing our children for jobs that do yet exist and to solve problems that are yet unknown.  This uncertainty has always been the case to some extent but it has become a much stronger factor.  I saw from another source that in 1986 75% of the knowledge that a worker needed was stored in workers’ heads but by 2006, that number was estimated to be 9%. We need new ways of providing the remaining 81% and the virtual world opens up an opportunity for this also through social software.  

It is nice that at least some of the challenges brought forward with the virtual world can also be addressed through it and the new technologies that have enabled it. The authors provide a useful chapter on these new technologies including social networks, blogs, microblogs, and wikis. I was interested to see that Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2010 Report on American bloggers found that 81% have been blogging more than 2 years and 11% say blogging is their primary income source. I am currently one of those in the latter group.  Supporting their growth predictions is that fact that most of their usage stats for most tools have now been surpassed.

Of course it is more than technology and they cover the leadership necessary to go forward in the virtual world.  They found a variety of leadership styles to work including both transformational and transactional. They provide a series of stories written by a diverse group of successful virtual business leaders.

The book covers much more including the power of sharing, the four strategies mentioned above, and where the future may take us. I recommend it to anyone who wants to make sense of today’s business world and the opportunities and risks it provides. 

 

Review of We First: On Brands, Consumers, and Social Media

I was pleased to receive a review copy of We First: How Brands & Consumers Use Social Media to Build a Better World by Simon Mainwaring. It covers the rise in consumer power brought on by social media and how brands can best respond. He goes on the add that this rise in consumer power can be good for society and not simply the brands who recognize and act on it in the appropriate ways. The book goes beyond the topic of social media marketing to provide a new look at capitalism. While Simon is supportive of free markets, he wants to make them better with more direct consumer participation.

Simon uses the book title, We First, to discuss a new twist on capitalism – We First Capitalism rather than the Me First. He states that looking for the greater good will actually help the individual. It makes sense because healthy markets and consumers with jobs are necessary to buy the goods and services that create corporate profits and drive more jobs.

The Internet began the rise of consumer power and now smart phones and other mobile devices are accelerating it. He argues that there is a growing interest in doing business with socially responsible corporations and that now consumers have more power to push firms in this direction. I hope he is right on both counts.

Simon argues that the social technology is enabling us to be more human as we can establish greater connections to discover shared concerns. The values of We First capitalism are; sustainability, fairness of reward, fiscal responsibility, accountability, purposefulness, dialogue, and global citizenship. Sounds good to me.

He goes on to argue that a better world and market will occur when consumers and brands work together, A number of companies have recognized this and created online communities for consumer feedback, both private and public. There is also a rise in crowd sourcing. Simon writes that consumers are now in a better position through social media to help co-create a better world that more closely reflects their interests.

I recently saw a study by Communispace, a company that builds and maintains online consumer communities for brands.  It founds that the vast majority of respondent sat all levels of technology adoption saw technology as a positive force in their lives (84%) with the more advance adopters (tech fast forward) slightly ahead (87%) on this measure. In a related question: Will technology make of break us? All segments respond make 72% of the time and 85% of the fast forward said make. When asked if technology better connect or creates more distance, 72% of all segments said better connect and 80% of the tech fast forward sided with this view.   This is an overall quite positive view and one that I share. The tech fast forward group is also more optimistic about the future. Let’s hope that they and Simon are right.  We First contains a useful premise that can serve as a good grounding for social media efforts by both consumers and brands.

 

 

Knowledge Management in 2011: New APQC Book

The subtitle of The New Edge in Knowledge is How Knowledge Management is Changing the Way We do Business. Knowledge management is becoming one of the longest running shows in business and Carla O’Dell and Cindy Hubert of APQC have been there from the beginning.

The book begins with a foreword by another of the KM All-stars, Larry Prusak.  He notes a 1995 conference at UC Berkeley and offers some of the main principles of knowledge management that were articulated at the time:

“Knowledge is a fixed pool, a collection of resources that can be measured and used by standard management practices.”

“Technology is the key tool to unlock the value of this resource,. The more technology the better.”

Now before you jump all over these old school ideas that gave KM a bad name, Larry does it for you. He notes that these principles were not suitable for working with an intangible such as knowledge. He adds that despite this KM did not die and is experiencing a resurgence. I would agree on both counts.

He modifies the principle as follows:

“Knowledge is better understood as a flow. It is highly dynamic, nonlinear, and difficult to measure or even manage.”

“Although technology surely has its place, working with knowledge is primarily a human activity…”

Carla and Cindy pick up on this and note several new trends that have increased the potential for knowledge management such as enterprise 2.0 tools and the increased reach of the digital world in the work place, including mobile access.

Now there are those that use knowledge management as a whipping boy in describing the benefits of enterprise 2.0. There are also those that prefer to show how enterprise 2.0 helps achieve some of the promise of knowledge management.  Clara and Cindy are in the latter group and I belong there as well. I think it is the more constructive approach. This promise is what first attracted me to the Web 2.0 tools seven years ago.

The book provides a comprehensive version of how best to implement knowledge management in 2011. It begins with an updated framework to guide program design initiatives and goes on to cover developing a value proposition. It then offers a variety of approaches to chose from and examples of successful ones. There is a chapter devoted to the new enterprise 2.0 tools and how they impact approaches. These tools are explored further as they go into detail on social networking. Following chapters cover governance, culture, and metrics. Four in-depth case studies conclude the book.

If you want a guide to implementing knowledge management in 2011, this is a good book for you. 

 

The Many Myths of Innovation from Scott Berkun

Here is an excellent book. The Myths of Innovation, by Scott Berkun, was first published by O’Reilly in 2007. The recent 2010 version has four new chapters and revisions through out. I was pleased to receive a review copy recently. In this volume Scott Berkun takes a “careful look at the history of innovation to reveal powerful truths about how ideas become successful innovations -- truths that people can apply to their challenges today.”

The book begins with the myth of epiphany and the perspective that ideas never stand alone. It has long been held that innovation is generally a collaborative experience and that has been my observation so I am already aligned with the premise of this first chapter.  It is also the premise of crowd-sourcing. Scott notes that we often see ideas as existing independently from our selves and we have to find them. This concept is traced to the early Greeks but it does a disservice today where modern psychology sees a closer connection between the thinker and the thoughts and, at the same time, the strong impact of the social context on our thoughts.  

The seemingly moment of eureka when the final piece of the puzzle falls into place does not do service to the long process of putting together the foundation for this final effort. Scott refers to the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihaliy on creativity. I have long respected his work and did a review of it in the early 80s. Mihaly studied the thoughts of highly creative people He wrote, as Scott quotes, “Cognitive accounts of what happens during incubation assume… that some kind of information processing keeps going on when we are not aware of it, even while we are asleep.” I find this to be so true and often will take a nap to get a breakthrough idea for a presentation or an article.  The lesson is to work hard but take time for reflection. This works for group research as well. People are starting to get this.  Even Agile development builds in reflection points.

This is just the starting point. Berkun explores other myths around innovation such as: the best ideas always win, good ideas are hard to find, and people love new ideas. Just ask Copernicus, Darwin, and many of the others who had breakthrough ideas about the last one.

There are four new chapters that address what you might do after coming with an innovative idea. They include how to move forward with an idea, how to pitch an idea and how to stay motivated.  The book concludes with a useful annotated bibliography.  There are a lot of examples throughout and in many ways it is a history book and I find this approach interesting.  The author points out that most great innovators did not start out by reading a book on innovation. I think they would have liked this one.

 

 

 

National Geographic Offers Simply Beautiful Photographs

Here is one of latest in a long series of great photo books from National Geographic, Simply Beautiful Photographs by Annie Griffiths. I was pleased to receive a review copy. Annie selected images from all of the Society's core mission areas: exploration, wildlife, cultures, science, and nature. Each chapter covers a “specific aspect of what creates beauty in a photograph, whether light or color, or motion, and illuminates that quality in a splash of large-format images —most of which readers will be able to purchase as prints. Musings on visual beauty from scholars and poets enhance the experience.”  

This must have been a fun assignment given the rich depth of the National Geographic photo archives. It is certainly fun to look at what she came up with.  The chapters are: light, composition, moment, time. palette, and wonder.  Many of the photos span across two pages of the large format book. Among other things it shows the diversity of beauty with the world and the people who live in it.

I was especially drawn into the composition chapter as I am always mentally composing pictures as I walk around and this gave we some new ideas to consider. It begins appropriately with a quote from Henri Cartier-Bresson, the master of composition.  I loved the contrast of a single black muddy road through a white field of snow followed by a busy Asian marketplace. An image from Sam Abell follows with an archway of trees over a dirt drive. I have interviewed Sam before about his composition process. Later a large group of white pelicans navigate the curve in a dark river through a grassy march. A curving street in Lisbon provides a stage for a variety of people. The great images go on and on. Annie provides photo she took of a bicycle in front of a fruit stand in the rural UK.

The Moment chapter captures those fleeting instances that photography is unique in its ability to capture. Nuns play volleyball. A whale surfaces and a gorilla considers a leaf. The Time chapter shows image sin motion, often with a blur. The tango dancers surrounded by motion is a great example.

The Palette chapter shows images with a strong color sense, often in the same color, sometimes with contrasting colors. A lone red umbrella in a large green Japanese garden is a good example of this interplay. Another red umbrella is seen in a blur of snow in a largely black and white image of Chinese workers.

The Wonder chapter is true to its name with images that cause a close look such as a group of seemingly dancing humpback whales. An exploding volcano in Hawaii is followed by the northern lights in Canada.

This is a comprehensive collection of images that will not disappoint. It will draw you in for many viewing.

 

 

 

Review of The New Social Learning

 I was very pleased to receive a review copy of The New Social Learning by Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner. Tony is President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD). Marcia is a Partner at Altimeter Group, founder of the Twitter chat #lrnchat, and writes the Fast Company column “Learn at All Levels.”

Getting a chance to read this timely work excited me for several reasons. First, I began my consulting career in the learning space in the 80s and have remained convinced of its importance for accelerating business performance. I presented at several ASTD session during this period. Second, Marcia was also a colleague of mine at Pistachio Consulting where we did some projects together. I had a chance to review an earlier version of one of the chapters of this book. But most importantly, it is the first book I have seen to help organizations understand and harness the huge workplace learning potential of social media and enterprise 2.0.

Tony and Marcia began with an acknowledgement that social learning has been around for a long time. While social media tools bring new power to social learning, it is not about particular tools as they will come and go. The book is about news ways that social media can enhance social learning and thus the book title. Much of the talk about social media has focused on marketing and while, there is great potential there, the authors bring forth a powerful additional use case. They also point out that social learning is not a new form of e-learning.  I would certainly agree and much of e-learning appeared to me to be disappointing watered down adoptions of technology–based learning from the 80s.

I remember studies in the 80s where people reported that 90% of what they learned that helped with their work came from informal conversations with fellow employees. Now social media can enable those conversations on a global basis across enterprises or in a secure manner within a select group in one enterprise.  When I first saw social media in 2004 the possibilities for knowledge management re-energized my interest in KM. I have began to see the same potential for learning and this book helps to put it in perspective and offers some excellent cases examples.

The book draws on some of my academic heroes, John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Peter Berger, and Thomas Luckman to set the stage of how people most effectively learn through active participation and social interaction. They define learning as “the transformative process of taking in information that, when internalized and mixed with what we have experienced, changes what we know and builds on what we can do.’ I certainly agree and it aligns directly with how Piaget would define learning. Jocelyn Davis, head of R&D at the Forum Corporation, recently suggested that learning might be a major motivational driver on the level of David McClelland’s three main drives achievement, affiliation, and power.  Social learning can draw on a number of these motivators.

The authors list some of the major concerns about using social media in a business context and then offer excellent ways to address these concerns. The book takes a very practical approach and is clearly written with concrete examples through out.

After setting the stage, the authors provide a chapter each covering online communities, the power of stories, micro-sharing, growing the collective intelligence, and immersive environments. Each chapter begins with a detailed case example. The book concludes with some useful tips of making the most of in-person events. I let you read the book to get the useful details.

I highly recommend this book if you want to make better use of social media and enterprise 2.0, if learning is a passion, or if you want to increase the productivity of your workforce.  It is one of the better business books I have seen recently.

The Learning Layer Has Potential to Push the Envelope of Enterprise 2.0

 Here is an interesting concept that is well articulated in a new book, The Learning Layer by Steven Flinn.  Recently, I had an opportunity to speak with Steve about this marriage of aspects of Web 2.0 and artificial intelligence (aka adaptive systems) that can have useful applications within the enterprise.

Steve is the CEO of ManyWorlds, a firm that conducts R&D in the area of next generation systems and business processes and provides practical applications of this work to organizations. He was an executive at Royal Dutch Shell where he held  a variety of positions including Chief Information Officer and Vice President of Strategy and Strategic Alliances. Steve has a background in economics, mathematics and computer science.

Steve noted that use of personalized responses based on user behavior has been pervasive on the consumer Web through such things as Amazon’s recommendations.  However, this technology has been applied much less within the enterprise.  He feels that this is ironic since behavioral information available within the enterprise  can generally be much richer than out on the Web. You have a more clearly defined set of users and many more interactions to data mine, along with more related teams who collaborate and generate more behavioral data.  I would certainly agree with the difference in the quality of information on user behavior and also add that many Web 2.0 applications such as wikis work better within the trusted environment of the enterprise. This seems to be another case.

The Learning Layer approach takes this personalization several steps further. Not only are personalized recommendations provided to individual users based on their behavior and the behavior of others, but the system feeds these recommendations back to itself to continuously adapt on an automated basis. Steve said that the technology is currently available to do this, it just needs to be properly applied.

For example, a system managing content might make recommendations for related content based on a user’s profile and actions.  Using the Learning Layer approach, it would also keep track of all user behavior and feed this back into the system on a regular basis. The relationship between two sets of content may become stronger or weaker depending how it is currently being used.  The same logic can be applied to the connections between people to see the ebb and flow of connections.

The approach can be applied to work flow and here it gets even more interesting in my opinion. Just as old school knowledge management created more direct business value when aligned to business processes, I see the same thing happening here.  Let’s take the example of a property casualty insurance underwriter. After the system takes in enough actions to be able to differentiate the skill level of users, it is ready to go.

Now if an underwriter with no experience in underwriting laundry mats, for example, starts to work on one the system recognizes this. It also knows the steps that an inexperienced underwriter should take when working with laundry mats and provides these process steps. It can also recommend a person who is slightly more advanced than the user who can offer guidance. If the user has middle level experience, then the process steps can be tailored to that level. In the meanwhile the system is observing the ongoing user behavior on an aggregated basis and making adjustments in the proper process steps for everyone at all levels.

The technology is around to create this type of system. I can see the value and wish I had this capability when I designed knowledge management systems for underwriters in the early 90s.  Call centers that deal with complex topics would be another great target area. You need to have enough complexity to warrant this type of intervention and then enough users to generate useful data for the system to apply.

We also discussed the concept of learning value that Steve raises in the book. He took the concept of value of information from decision analysis and applied it to learning. In decision analysis people calculate the value of having certain information to help with decisions. The same concept can be applied to learning.  When undertaking an activity there is the direct value and the value of the learning derived from the undertaking. This often translates into the amount of uncertainty that can be eliminated by the new knowledge and its effect on actions. Steve noted that learning only has real value if it changes behavior (i.e., decisions).  If people will still do the same thing regardless then nothing is gained. That sounds simple but it is often overlooked.

I like this approach. I think it does extend the possibilities of enterprise 2.0. If we can create data rich environments through the transparent interactions within enterprise 2.0 then we have expanded the learning opportunities. Then if we can use this expanded learning to better guide individual behavior we have taken it a notch further. Now if we can turn this learning back on the system to auto-generate changes within the system itself, we have taken things another step further.  I think the data gained from the transparency of enterprise 2.0 is a large piece of the value. Here is an approach to make better use of this transparency.  

Useful Guidelines and Metrics for Speeding Up Your Organization

Here is a very timely book from several thoughtful people at The Forum Corporation, Strategic Speed (Harvard Business Press) was written by Jocelyn Davis, Henry Frechette, and Edwin Boswell and recently released.  Forum has shown great longevity. It was founded in 1971 and I competed against it in the 1980s when I was with a long since gone learning firm. 

I could not agree more with their basic orientation. It is time to engage and empower employees rather than simply fine tune processes and continue to do things to people in the outdated mode of Fred Taylor.  The authors use a nice image of the college campus with paved walkways and barren short cuts across the lawns. You can try to regulate what people do but they will go against the grain if it makes sense to them.

Enterprise 2.0 provides us with better tools to empower and engage employees and enable them to set the proper pathways that better align with actual business processes.  Technology is not the focus of this book but it offers an approach that will work very well to guide enterprise 2.0 adoptions.

The authors did extensive research in creating this book. They looked at hundreds of examples of accelerated and sluggish businesses, created 18 in-depth cases examples, and surveyed 343 senior business leaders in n both fast and slow companies. From this work they abstracted four critical leadership practices than enable strategic speed and conceived of two key metrics: reduced time to value and increased value over time.  I like the value part as too often ROI has focused on speed issues without tying them back to the bottom line.

The book begins with a useful chart of ten differences between fast and slow companies. The underlying themes for fast firms include collaboration, reflection, transparency, flexibility, coordination, innovation, and alignment. These are all issues that are better enabled through proper use of enterprise 2.0 technologies.  Consistent with these themes are three basic principals the authors found in fast firms: clarity, unity, and agility.

They note a bit later that business collaboration is the main driver of unity. In contrast, when there is a culture of internal competition projects and strategies get derailed. I have certainly seen this latter problem first hand. For example, when managers are asked to rank order their teams in performance reviews that is an invitation for counterproductive competition.  This approach can put individual goals above team and company goals.  The authors offer a number of examples where learning activities went across divisional and, even company, boundaries to create greater collaboration and unity.

They also introduce a strategic speedometer to enable you to better measure your company’s efforts on the three fronts of clarity, unity, and agility. Again, this score card can be a very useful metric in evaluating enterprise 2.0 adoption with such measures as the translation of strategy into clear and measureable goals, presence of cross- boundary collaboration, and evidence that people capture and communicate what they learn from initiatives.

I certainly recommend this book for anyone undertaking an enterprise 2.0 adoption, as well as those who simply what to effectively speed up the efforts of their company.  There are many useful examples and practices to achieve these goals. 

Hackers are the Heroes of the Computer Revolution

  I have been reading the recently released 25th Anniversary Edition Hackers —
Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy. The first version traced the exploits of the computer revolution's original hacker. These were the nerds who got their revenge by being successful and playing a major role in the computer industry from the late 1950s through the early '80s.  They took risks, bent the rules, and pushed the world in a radical new direction.

The 25th anniversary edition includes updated material from noteworthy “hackers” such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Stallman, and Steve Wozniak. I did not get involved in the computer world until the end point of the first edition.

In the early 80s I made the transition from academia to the business world by joining a firm that did training primarily for computer firms. As a consultant I led the development of Apple’s first national account sales training in the pre-Mac era, developed sales training for NCR’s first personal computer, and wrote about the creation of one Raytheon’s mid-range computers, among other projects.

The book closes with a chapter on Cambridge 1983 as the place for the last of the true hackers.  Being a Boston resident at the time, and still one, I enjoyed this homage. It closes with a quote from Lee Felsenstein, a Berkeley hacker, “…to able to defy a culture which states, ‘thou shall not touch this,’ and to defy that with one’s own creative power is…the essence.” In those days it seemed that most of this hacker power addressed positive outcomes. Now while some hackers have gone to the dark side, this need to push boundaries still does more good than harm.

It was an exciting time and this book brought back those years and set the stage for them by going even further back in time. I wish I had read it then but it is no less relevant now.  Not being technical I have always had great admiration for those who are and I share some of the other traits such an obsession for doing things more than interacting with people, I have always felt connected with hackers even though I do not possess their computer skills. I think it is a similar obsession that drives my involvement with the painting I post here on weekends. Artists and hackers are pushing envelopes from very different perspectives but I feel there is a common core.

I highly recommend this O’Reilly book which PC Magazine named the best Sci-Tech book written in the last twenty years. 

RARE: Portraits of America’s Endangered Species from Joel Sartore

 I received a review copy of Joel Sartore's new book, RARE: Portraits of America's Endangered Species, and greatly appreciated it. It is published by National Geographic. The book presents 68 iconic images representing Joel’s three-year investigation into the Endangered Species Act. It protays some of the creatures it exists to protect.  The book moves from condors to crocodiles, wolverines to woodpeckers, snails to sea turtles, plovers to pitcher plants. RARE presents each animal with the number left. This is very impactful.

As you open the book you see a Southern Mountain Yellow-legged frog breaking the surface. The contents are organized by the number of a species left on earth. Many are fewer than a thousand or unknown.  I was surprised to find there are only 46 Woodland Caribou, 195 Ocelots, around 300 Wolverines, 330 red wolves, 356 Condors, and 539 Whooping Cranes. I remember as a kid in New Orleans seeing the Whooping Crane stamp released connected to Louisiana.

Even among more animals with greater numbers, it is concerning to see only about 3500 Polar bears and 2,000 American Crocodiles. Joel’s photos really make these animals come alive. There are some plants, as well.

Joel Sartore is a winner of the 2010 North American Nature Photography Association (NANPA) “Outstanding Photographer of the Year” award, and award winner at the 2010 Pictures of the Year International (POYi) competition for images that form the foundation of this book. You can visit Joel’s web site to see a video on the book.

This is a highly recommended book on an important issue. 

Entering the Social Age: Review of The Social Factor by IBM's Maria Azua

 The old adage, knowledge is power, has been transformed in the social age to “sharing knowledge is power” according to Maria Azua, author of The Social Factor.  While I agree that the new saying has taken on increased importance within Web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0, the old saying still holds.  With the new transparency and the tools to mind this content, both obtaining useful knowledge is even easier and making decisions on when to share has become easier. 

I was pleased to receive a review copy of The Social Factor with the subtitle: innovate, ignite, and win through mass collaboration and social networking.  Maria Azua is the vice president of cloud computing enablement at IBM. The book begins with an interesting history of communication technology and innovations. I picked up some new bits. The Associated Press or AP was formed by newspaper publishers with the advent of telegraph. They recognized the profit potential of instantaneous worldwide news bulletins. I wonder why these same institutions began in such a passive way during the beginning of the Web. This newer global communication technology was first seen as a threat by many traditional communication channels and they are only just beginning to be more innovative in its use (see Mainstream Media versus Social Media? Not Really the Right Question and The Misplaced Fear of the Mainstream Media).

The telephone was able to spread more quickly because it rode the existing telegraph infrastructure. There is an interesting chart on the pace of technology adoption in the US. She compares technologies from the industrial age on how long it took to achieve 70% household penetration.  The industrial age technologies include: autos, 82 years; telephone, 55 years; color TV, 42 years; and electricity, 34 years.  The information age technologies include: computers, 24 years; VCR, 20 years; cell phone, 16 years, and internet, 14 years.  Times are approximate based on how well I read the chart. You can see the accelerating rate of adoption. 

My grandparents were around during the auto, telephone, and electricity adoption phases and they tell some interesting stories about the early stages. My grandfather wanted to return his car as it was not as smart as his horses, until he thought to teach his daughter to drive so he could sleep on the way back from his medical rounds.  Now we have GPS but the car is still not as smart as the horses, just much more effective. My great aunt was able to simulate the benefits of teleconferencing, ambient awareness, streaming audio, and expertise location when she was the first telephone operator in her small town.  Now the telephone cannot do much of this but the Web can.  I wonder what stories we might tell our grandchildren about the transformations we observed as we move from the Information Age to the Social Age.

In an excellent case example of enterprise 2.0, Maria reviews Rheinmetall. There were three primary drivers of the use of social media within the enterprise: enhanced employee recruiting in the generation that has become used to social media on the Web, leveraging this Web social media experience within the enterprise, and supporting the increased desire for collaboration in research efforts. The concept of the networked organization supplementing, and/or replacing the hierarchical organization is also covered. This is very similar to Jon Husband’s concept of wirearchy. Organizations that recognize the power of this approach and use social media to enable the new channels will be the winners.

There is much more in the book including chapters on wikis, blogs, tagging, cloud computing, and cultural implications. It is a good thought provoker for those implementing enterprise 2.0 

Monica Bhide Provides a Great Blog and Books on Indian Spices

 Monica Bhide writes the blog, A Life of Spice, and has written the cookbooks, Modern Spice: Inspired Indian Flavors for the Contemporary Kitchen - Simon & Schuster, 2009, The Everything Indian Cookbook: 300 Tantalizing Recipes--From Sizzling Tandoori Chicken to Fiery Lamb Vindaloo - Adams Media, 2004 and The Spice is Right: Easy Indian Cooking for Today - Callawind Publications, 2001.  

My friend Don Lesser recently did a guest post on her blog commenting on Modern Spice.  He wrote that it refreshed his cooking. Don started with the simple fennel-chili dry rub, a great topping for grilled steak or chicken pieces which I think is an excellent suggestion. I was especially excited by the Eggplant and Tomatoes with Cilantro, Indian Style Chili and the Tomato and Coconut Fish Curry with a side of Zucchini and Yellow Squash with Cumin. I will attempt to convince Don to make these the next time I visit.

The illustrations on Don’s post and the rest of the blog are excellent. This blog and her books make a useful introduction to Indian cooking. 

Don also has a great food blog of his own, Russelnod, “From the way we ate then to the way we eat now.”  Don does restaurant reviews for his local paper and I liked his recent post, Reviewing Restaurants without Really Reviewing.” He says he does not write reviews– “I don’t give stars and I don’t trash places, both commonplaces of the reviewing biz. I write stories about the restaurant, interview the chefs or owners after I’ve eaten there, and tell you what to expect.” I have been with him on one of these trips. He does not accept getting “comped” for the meal and takes an very objective stance. Here is my report on our Dinner at the Gypsy Apple in Shelburne Falls MA and Don’s - Gypsy Apple Bistro. 

Live, Laugh, Celebrate from National Geographic

Here is a beautiful new photography book from National Geographic I recently received to review. It is Live, Laugh, Celebrate, a visual celebration of the human spirit, by Ferdinand Protzman. The book documents a vibrant collection of celebrations from around the world that speaks kindly about our human nature. We can certainly use this perspective today.

The book notes that like love, the urge to celebrate is common to every culture.  This is a great photo opportunity as the description reads, “Whether it's a festival, a parade, a sporting event, a ceremony, public or private, large or small, formal or informal...the pageantry, excitement, action and emotion of celebrations are a riveting subject.“  This pleasing, very global, collection of photographs is accompanied by essays. It includes some never before published images and others from National Geographic's archive.  

The book begins with the premise that. “t any given moment, someone somewhere in the world is celebrating something.” This is a nice idea to consider. Chapter One covers the cycles of life. There is a warm shot of an older sister holding her brother’s face on his first birthday I remember how my uncle set up the picture of me and my first birthday cake. He placed the cake on one side of the blanket and me on the other. Then he got his camera to record what he knew would happen as I crawled toward the cake to proceed to embed my face in the cake. I did not have an older sister to deter me from this act.

There are both color pictures and black and white. In the first chapter I tend to like the B&W ones best as you focus more on the people, at least I do. However, a number of the color ones make excellent use of color as in some of the shots of food and the pink Caddy with the very long tail fins transporting a wedding couple.

Chapter Two looks around the world to show us celebrations that are more regional than life cycle oriented. I loved the carnival in Venice, an event I have always wanted to attend. The over the top nature of the carnival in Rio is well covered. A Grateful Dead concert is included, as well as Kenya’s celebration of Obama’s victory. There is a great photo of Mardi Gras in my home town, New Orleans.

Chapter Three moves on to parties. I loved Sam Abell’s photo of musicians playing at the Japanese Emperor’s garden party. I spoke with Sam a while back (see Sam Abell Talks about Photography and Life) and have written about his work before (see The Life of a Photographer – Sam Abell). This photo shows how Sam is very concerned with the framing of a shot. The last picture is a foam party in Ibiza Spain with dozens of people playing in the suds.

This book certainly shows the diversity of human celebrations and the common joy they can evoke. It will make an excellent holiday gift and is available on their site and in stores. 

Polar Obsession - Photos and Writing by Paul Nicklen – Another Great Photo Book from National Geographic

Ever since my trips to Alaska, the Yukon, and Newfoundland in the early 70s I have been interested in the Arctic.  I was very excited about receiving a review copy of the Polar Obsession book by National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen. It is another great one from National Geographic and the book exceeded my already high expectations.  First it is a very beautiful large format book. Second, Paul goes both underwater and across the ice to deliver unique, close-up documentation of wildlife in the Arctic and Antarctic. The book also presents timely insights into animal behavior, the fragile polar environment and the climate change that threatens the ice and those who live over and under it.

Paul grew up in a small Inuit community in the Canadian Arctic so he is at home with this effort.  He now lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, a town I have visited. There are 150 images from the polar reaches that include elephant seals, leopard seals, whales, walruses, narwhals and polar bears, penguins, albatrosses, petrels, arctic cod and tiny krill. The cover has dual image of a polar bear underwater and its reflection on the surface above it.

The books often have a photographer and a writer. Paul covers both roles here. He starts each chapter with an essay detailing the life conveyed in the images. The title page has a great shot of a sleeping seals riding the waves taken at water level. The next shot is a group of narwhals with their unicorn horns raised like spears. There is wonderful two-page sot of a group of walruses in Norway.  The narwhals get extensive coverage with some great group shots and close-ups of their horns.

The creatures of the Arctic and Antarctic are quite spectacular and Paul covers both ends of the earth.  There is a great contrast. For example, on two-page spread you see a lone polar bear in the distant framed against the blue ice glacier and cold cliffs off Norway. You turn the page to see another two page spread of a warm tone image of hundreds of Elephant Seals and King Penguins on a beach in South Georgia in the very South Atlantic.   Turn again and you are faced with a close up of a baby Elephant seal staring at you underwater.

There are many close-ups of Polar Bears that make you wonder how he took the shots. One shows a close head shot of a Polar bear shaking off waters as it comes up from a dive. Another has a bear shining red in the sunset as it hunts. The landscapes, both above and below the water are also well covered.  This is a book that I will return to many times. I highly recommend it. You can order the book at the National Geographic site.

 

A YouTube Guide that Goes Beyond Dummies

I have now had a chance to read, YouTube: An Insider's Guide to Climbing the Charts. Thanks to O’Reilly for the review copy. The book is very comprehensive, including great coverage of all the technical video stuff. I see the above blog post title as an endorsement, not a criticism. One thing that stands out is that YouTube success requires a lot of work. This should be no surprise as this is an artistic medium. The book focus more on YouTube as an art channel than YouTube as a news or marketing channel but the lessons apply to all uses.

Any artist will tell you that you need to pay your dues and obtain basic competence in your medium before being able to accomplish artistic depth. This applies to both visual and literary arts. I would not be surprised to see courses on YouTube in art colleges than cover video and/or the web. In these cases, this book should be on the reading list.

The book covers how to succeed in storytelling and directing, shooting, editing, and rendering, creating your very own channel, broadcasting user-generated content, re-broadcasting commercial content, handling music, cultivating a devoted audience, fitting into the YouTube community, among other things.

The book was written by YouTube veterans Alan Lastufka and Michael W. Dean and includes a lot of their personal experience. It also has interviews with YouTube stars LisaNova, Hank Green (vlogbrothers), WhatTheBuckShow, nalts, and liamkylesullivan. There are a lot of links to great YouTube clips.

There is also a nice chapter on using other social media to promote your YouTube efforts. You can use blogs for simple promotion but starting a community invites more engagement by your audience. It is interesting how people build communities around all types of interests, YouTube simply being a more recent example. I remember reviewing a documentary on BBQ competitions and the community around these events. There were always those who put in the extra effort and they were usually the winners.

Michael Dean provides a chapter on time management to help with the effort issue. He noted that he wrote that chapter while waiting in his doctor’s office. Ironically, I am writing this review at my doctor’s waiting room and can appreciate his approach.

I liked the background on Hollywood movies and how YouTube differs. It gave me a better understanding of treatments and techniques in both media. In both cases, conflict is the essence of drama. The sequence is similar to what I learned in building sales pitches in PowerPoint. Define a situation, introduce a complication, and then offer a resolution. In this case, whatever you are selling without this sequence there is no story or focus and people lose interest.

So if you want to be a YouTube star, this book is required reading. It will either excite you or test your commitment by pointing out all that needs to be done. In the end all the competence will still need an artistic vision. Skills are certainly necessary but not sufficient. Good luck and I hope to see you on YouTube. If you have some favorite clips, either yours or others, please leave them in the comments to this post. I am a sponge for these.

Reza War + Peace: A Photographer’s Journey from National Geographic

National Geographic was kind enough to send me a review copy of REZA WAR + PEACE, a large format 30-year retrospective of the work of the award-winning photojournalist and humanitarian Reza. As their site states, he has “devoted his life to bearing witness through his camera to the struggles and hopes of oppressed people around the world…this remarkable photographer chronicles his travels to places of conflict through exquisite images that pair turmoil with hope, joy with despair.” I would have to agree. The book is full of moving images from the Middle East, Africa and other places in conflict. It is certainly a page turner in the best sense of the word, except that you also want to go slowly to absorb each image.

The introduction is written by the novelist, Sebastian Junger. Sebastian writes about the experience he shared with Reza in northern Afghanistan in 2000. They were in the middle of conflict, traveling with Ahmad Massoud, an anti-Taliban leader. He writes about the depth of Reza’s connection to those he photographs and his unwillingness to back these people more abstract as a psychological self-defense. As a result his pictures achieve a greater emotional depth as well as a more profound artistic accomplishment.

The book site writes that “Reza’s journey has taken him from his native Iran, where he was jailed and tortured because of his photography, to dozens of countries gripped by turmoil — from Kurdistan to Egypt, Lebanon to Turkey, China to Israel, Somalia to South Africa. Through his lens, which captures not just conflict, but friendship, loyalty, family life and love, he takes us to such regions as northern Pakistan, where cultural shock and mutual incomprehension are deepening the gap between the American military and people in the tribal zones; Libya, a country making strides in economic and social well-being, but not in basic freedoms; Saudi Arabia, ruled by oil-rich princes whose opulent lives are in stark contrast to those of the “guest workers” who serve them; and Afghanistan, whose land and people have deeply touched Reza, helping him find his way in the labyrinth of his own nomadic life.”

There are portraits of leaders such as Yassar Arafat, Benazir Bhutto and Indira Gandhi. I was especially moved by the images of Benazir Bhutto, given her fate. The vast majority of pictures are of unnamed and unknown people who serve as representatives of their fellow country men and women, boys and girls, and even animals. The latter comes through clearly in a picture of boy and his large white horse in Turkmenistan. Here the horse captures the boys attention while the horse looks into the camera to hold ours. There are pictures of joy like two smiling girls dancing in front of what looks like a distant explosion in Turkmenistan and a boy playing with a balloon in Turkey. There are many pictures of people looking directly and intently into the camera who convey a sense of connection with the photographer that can extend through him to the reader. There are also many pictures of the tragedy that conflict brings. Reza provides the context in narratives on many of the pictures. This is a moving book that I highly recommend.

Forty Highly Rated Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 Bloggers (Part 2)

Yesterday, I listed Twenty Highly Rated Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 Bloggers. Below I provide the next twenty on the list. The inbound links reported by Google and the Technorati ratings and the number of reported blog reactions are provided and they are listed in order of Technorati blog reactions. I used Technorati inbound links for the order since Technorati ratings were not available for all of the bloggers. The Google reports of inbound links were taken today. The Technorati stats were taken a few months ago and the results for both sources are constantly changing so the relative order may have shifted if you look today.

I found these bloggers through a combination of methods. I could have easily missed some. Many are well known. I found other bloggers through Google and Technorati searching on the terms web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 and noting their stats and who links to them. Since many, like myself, cover both topics I did not attempt to divide them into those two groups (web 2.0 and E 2.0). The numbers are always changing as the web is dynamic. If you know of bloggers on these topics that rate higher than these and those that I listed yesterday, I welcome your input and would appreciate at. However, since ratings generally go up, at least in terms of Google and Technorati inbound links, the ratings for these twenty and those listed yesterday are also likely higher today.

I think the difference between numbers 22 and 24, for example, are not significant because of the dynamic nature of the data. What is important is that these blogs are well read and well respected. I look forward to hearing about other bloggers on web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 who have this level of traffic and reactions.

Nick Carr - Rough Type - Google reports 3,980 inbound links. Technorati has 8,629 blog reactions and an authority rating of 1,741.

Jeremiah Owyang - Google reports 3,690 inbound links. Technorati has 8,627 blog reactions and an authority rating of 2,101.

Lee Lefever - Google reports 2,000 inbound links. Technorati has 7,570 blog reactions and an authority rating of 2,427

Programmable Web - Google reports 1,670 inbound links. Technorati has 7,129 blog reactions and an authority rating of 749

Valeria Maltoni - Google reports 2,580 inbound links. Technorati has 5,085 blog reactions and an authority rating of 571.

Dave Weinberger - Google reports 5,380 inbound links. Technorati has 4,843 blog reactions and an authority rating of 786.

Paul Kedrosky - Google reports 4,070 inbound links. Technorati has 4,398 blog reactions and an authority rating of 936.

Erick Schonfeld. - Google reports 2,650 inbound links. Technorati has 4,276 blog reactions and an authority rating of 571.

David Silfrey - Google reports 2,500 inbound links. Technorati has 3,918 blog reactions and an authority rating of 820

Joe Wilcox - Microsoft Watch - Google reports 3,000 inbound links. Technorati has 3,643 blog reactions and an authority rating of 710.

John Jantsch - Google reports 812 inbound links. Technorati has 3,596 blog reactions and an authority rating of 2,258.

Douglas Karr - The Marketing Technology Blog - Google reports 916 inbound links. Technorati has 3,417 blog reactions and an authority rating of 845.

James Governor - Google reports 2,660 inbound links. Technorati has 3,287 blog reactions and an authority rating of 376

Euan Semple - Google reports 1,830 inbound links. Technorati has 3,244 blog reactions and an authority rating of 249.

Dave Pollard - Google reports 3,030 inbound links. Technorati has 3,243 blog reactions.

Stowe Boyd - Google reports 2,690 inbound links. Technorati has 2,800 blog reactions and an authority rating of 564.

Group authors - Fast Forward - Google reports 1,020 inbound links. Technorati has 2,732 blog reactions and an authority rating of 316.

Dion Hinchcliffe - Google reports 1,640 inbound links. Technorati has 2,711 blog reactions and an authority rating of 468.

Emily Chang - Google reports 538 inbound links. Technorati has 2,550 blog reactions.

Gavin Heaton - Google reports 2,030 inbound links - Technorati has 2,429 blog reactions and an authority rating of 434.

Suite Francaise - Irene Nemirovsky - Great Read on World War Two

I do not often write about literature but I have really enjoyed this book, Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky and was moved by it. One of my daughters recommended it after my other daughter suggested it to her. As the New York Times review, As France Burned, wrote the book, “contains two narratives, one fictional and the other a fragmentary, factual account of how the fiction came into being. "Suite Française" itself consists of two novellas portraying life in France from June 4, 1940, as German forces prepare to invade Paris, through July 1, 1941, when some of Hitler's occupying troops leave France to join the assault on the Soviet Union. At the end of the volume, a series of appendices and a biographical sketch provide, among other things, information about the author of the novellas.”

The writer focuses on several families at all social levels as they leave Paris. You go back and forth between each family and individuals as they experience the trauma of the exodus. It is a technique used more often now. Then she covers an occupied rural village as the German troops move in and the strained and strange relations with their occupiers. The story behind book is also moving. The author was sent to Auschwitz where she and her husband both died. The book was written quickly at the same time as the events. Her oldest daughter did not open the manuscript for years, thinking it was diary that would only bring back bad memories. Not until the late 1990's did she examine what her mother had written and found two complete hand written novellas. The book appeared in French in 2004 and was a best seller. Now it is available in English. As the NYT reviewer wrote, “She wrote what may be the first work of fiction about what we now call World War II. She also wrote, for all to read at last, some of the greatest, most humane and incisive fiction that conflict has produced.” I certainly agree.

Collaborate for Success: Great Resource for Physician-Hospital Collaboration

I recently had a chance to look more closely at Ken Cohn’s Collaborate for Success! Breakthrough Strategies for Engaging Physicians, Nurses, and Hospital Executives. Today’s healthcare providers are often asked to do more with less to the detriment of both them and their patients. This book enables physicians and other healthcare providers to reflect, reframe assumptions, and collaborate to achieve outcomes that they cannot accomplish when operating in silos. As an occasional patient married to a healthcare provider, I know that both sides need this type of help.

Ken is a board-certified general surgeon dividing his time providing surgical coverage in New Hampshire and Vermont and working as a consultant at Cambridge Management Group. CMG specializes in resolving physician-physician and physician-administration communication issues. He has been exploring this theme for some time. Ken’s first book, Better Communication for Better Care: Mastering Physician-Administrator Collaboration, appeared in 2005.

The first three chapters of Collaborate for Success! debunk the frequently held assumption that healthcare professionals act principally out of self-interest and thus merit suspicion and careful supervision. As Tom Davenport as argued well in Thinking for a Living, knowledge workers do not respond well when they are closely managed. They excel when they are inspired to act in the best interest of the whole. Healthcare professionals are no exception to this fact.

The next six chapters offer field-tested strategies that can boost collaboration, revenue, safety, and satisfaction to create win-win strategies for docs, nurses, hospital administrators, and the patients. The final two chapters discuss new web-based approaches that can help build virtual communities of practice among healthcare professionals who do not see each other often but nonetheless need to remain in contact.

I was pleased to be a co-author with Ken and Glen Mohr on one of these last two chapters, Building Community and Collaboration with Blogs. In this chapter we outline a case example where Glen and Ken worked with a major health care facility. Kathleen Gilroy was also involved with the project. Here a senior advisory panel of physicians faced the task of developing strategic recommendations for the next five years. They met regularly and heard presentations for all major department heads. A blog platform was created to record meeting minutes, link to key documents, provide a means to record their observations of current work processes, and allow for commentary by panel members on these meetings, documents, and observations. Access was limited to panel members, but the blog made it available on a 24/7 basis from any terminal in the hospital, office, or home.

The blog thus allowed panel members to interact outside the meetings, as new ideas surfaced and new issues appeared. The secure, password-protected site allowed members to engage in candid discussion. The blog also provided a convenient distribution point for downloading and commenting on material relevant to department presenters and their reports. The best came at the end as the blog’s search engine facilitated the creation of final report writing. A large amount of data had accumulated in eight months of meetings. Panel members could now search the archive to find recurring themes, as well as specific comments and examples that otherwise might have faded in memory or have been too time-consuming to locate in the minutes or reports buried in emails. The report was completed more efficiently and with greater use of all the data to achieve a more comprehensive, consensus-based set of recommendations. As one panel member said, “Having this organizational tool allowed me to recognize important themes that were relevant to the majority of the medical staff.” It also provides a simple and clear instance of the benefits of taking the new, more open, web tools and techniques inside the enterprise. Glen Mohr provides some more detail in his blog.

This chapter is one example of the practical advice and concrete examples that are offered through out the book. I highly recommend it to anyone struggling with the complexities of providing quality healthcare in a cost effective manner in today’s climate, in other words almost everyone involved

Web 2.0 for Business Advantage: A Personal Guide to Profiting from the New Web – Otter Group

Here is a great introduction to Web 2.0. Kathleen Gilroy of the Otter group has produced, Web 2.0 for Business Advantage: A Personal Guide to Profiting from the New Web, a forty-page guide that “explores what is driving the dramatic adoption of Web 2.0 and how you can profit from it. The guide covers key advantages that can be had from smartly deploying Web 2.0: building an online presence; personal information management and the new desktop; and the new collaboration.”

The book includes three cases where business problems were solved with Web 2.0: podcasting for learning, innovation in financial services;, and learning networks at the American Library Association. Kathleen writes this in the first person and coveys a personal journey as the central case. This makes it much more readable and useful for other small businesses like her, including myself.

In true web 2.0 manner, she has set up del.icio.us tags for further reading, opened a discussion forum, published a set of video podcasts as tutorials. You can find all this in the report and the document is also full of useful links. A good small business blog example is Nitewinds Kennels who stared a blog and has spent $300 on Google Ads directing people to the blog. It has resulted is $10,000 is sales, some new ongoing customers, and daily enquiries about her services, a nice ROI.

There is a good review of the main blogging tools, including MySpace. I knew that business had started to infiltrate MySpace but it was useful to learn more. I followed a number of Kathleen’s suggestions throughout the report, including checking out myspace restaurants on Google and found the Nu-way Restaurant in Spartanburg, SC with some good rock coming out of their web site. I may go their the next time I visit my cousins in nearby Greer. It was number one in Google for the search, one more example of the power of blogs for search results.

I could go on with examples but you should get the report yourself. At $9.95 it is a much less expense way than the O’Reilly report to learn more about the opportunities within the new web. I learned a lot myself. I frequently get asked about the difference between blogs for such tasks as project mamagement and groupware. I have a few ideas on this, primarily the transparency vs. silos issue. Kathleen offers a nice articulation of these differences but then provides the best answer - simply Google the name of a groupware tool and add the word "sucks" to see what the wisdom of crowds is currently saying.

Hollywood and Sunset: A Great Early LA Story

On the way to and from my recent rip to LA, I read a very entertaining novel, Hollywood and Sunset, by Luke Salisbury. Luke lives in Chelsea and I had gone to his book party where I got my copy. This trip seemed to be the ideal time to read it. The story is set in LA in a few days in 1916. It focuses on D. W. Griffith, whose Birth of a Nation, was a very innovative (in a cinematic sense) and controversial silent picture. The film featured racist depictions of blacks after the Civil War and the rise of the KKK as a saving grace, or as one of my older relatives used to say, the aftermath of the war of northern aggression from the prevailing perspective of some southerners.

The protagonist is Henry Harrison, an Eastern Establishment, Harvard man, who attacked Griffith for his racism in an article in the Atlantic. He is now out to interview Griffith in connection with completing a book. This quest serves as the background for the story. The foreground includes the breakup of Henry’s marriage, his despair and eventual – well now I do not want to spoil it for you. Everyone evolves during these few days. Even Griffiths character changes into someone more complex that the misguided son of a Confederate officer who produced the racism in Birth of a Nation.

There is a rich treatment of the early film industry including Lillian Gish, the virginal queen of the silent movies, and Griffith’s colleagues. There is a second rate British actor who dresses up as Jesus and drives around LA in a Model T picking up women. He acts as the tour guide and protector for Henry through part of the book. You see the building of the set of Babylon for Griffin’s monumental film, Intolerance. As Griffith remarks, in the old days people built monuments of stone and now they use light and illusion to achieve their egotistical glory. You read a bit about how early films were made and have some sense of the early development of LA in the process of following the characters.

Griffith wanted to take advantage of the unique qualities of film to speak through the media in new ways. He goes beyond reproducing theater to arrange for a monumental aerial view of thousands of Babylonians in what becomes the climax of the book.

I highly recommend the book as a fun and fast read but one with an intelligent message. The narrative moves you along and there are many surprises. It is especially good to read on the way to LA but there is no need to wait for that opportunity. Hollywood and Sunset is published by Shambling Gate Press and is available at their web site.

Thinking for a Living: Tom Davenport

Tom Davenport’s Working Knowledge was the classic knowledge management book of the 1990s. Whenever someone asked me for a good introduction to KM, I always recommended this book. I believe that his latest book, Thinking for a Living, is destined to become the classic knowledge management book of the 2000s and the one I recommend now. It covers work he has been developing for some time. The book operates at the intersection of knowledge management and process improvement, two disciplines where Tom has greatly contributed. Warren Bennis beat me to this conclusion when he said that Thinking for a Living “will soon become the classic work on knowledge management.” I think it earns this accolade because it goes beyond managing knowledge to enabling knowledge workers to become more productive. It speaks to the original promise of knowledge management, empowering workers with the ability to make better business decisions.

I heard Tom speak on the thinking for a living at KM World before I had a chance to read the complete work. The talk fueled my interest and I then read the book, itself. Tom acknowledges that knowledge workers are very difficult to manage, just as some people have said that knowledge management, itself, is an oxymoron. But the rewards are great as they make up a third of all workers and they make the largest financial impact. Going beyond the common theme of “hiring smart people and leaving them alone,” Tom argues that taking part of the knowledge creation and application process out of a “black box” and making it more apparent and structured can provide benefits. However, you need to approach it differently than traditional process improvement. First, you need to involve the knowledge workers in the creation of this structured process and you need to allow for practice, as well as process. In other words, you need to give knowledge workers to the tools to make smart decisions and not take those decisions away by scripting the work. This enlightened approach leads to integrating knowledge into the job, not merely simplifying work.

When I first became aware of knowledge management in 1993, it was through developing a system for property casualty insurance underwriters at Cigna that fits Tom’s approach. These underwriters were pleased to be involved in standardizing the decision process and steps because they were involved in creating the process. They most resisted an automated decision system and responded best to getting access to documented knowledge and contacts to experts to better enable them to practice their craft and make better decisions at each stage of this new process. This effort was documented as a Harvard Business School case.

The Cigna work occurred in the beginning days of KM and before the term had reached us. The underwriting process was essentially broken. Working with Cigna experts, we first re-designed the underwriting process. Property casualty insurance is very knowledge-intensive (e.g. risks at movie theaters are different than those for drag racers). We then re-designed the applications that supported these processes. Balanced scorecard measures where developed around these key business processes and applications were designed to support these measures. A system was set up to monitor performance on these measures across the different divisions.

In this effort we also turned the existing relationship of underwriters to IT on its head. They had traditionally viewed underwriting applications as an evil imposed by the central office to check up on them and to be avoided if possible. We went out to the field offices to ask users what they wanted. This was a novel idea to them and really energized support for the knowledge management system and the new approach. Positive emails began circulating about how the central office was now listening to their needs.

Instead of building applications around central office needs, we linked application support to the new process we co-designed with the underwriters and they applauded this change. Next, we thought it would be useful to provide connections to the documented expertise on each market niche (again, think movie theaters vs. drag racers) as well as the identified company experts on these niche markets at each step within the process application. This concept was popular and we created a series of process focused "desktops" for underwriting, claims, and sale support that linked knowledge management with process applications through a Visual Basic front end linked to DB2. Part way though the effort, the term “knowledge management” began to appear in the market press. So we said, “Hey, that’s what we're doing” and changed our descriptions from “performance support” to “knowledge management.” The fortunes of this division greatly increased and it was later sold at a profit of billions. We called this effort knowledge management, but others used the term for document repositories disconnected from the work process. It is great to see a thoughtful and practical work that takes knowledge management in the right direction.

I first heard Tom speak on the topic of personal knowledge management as a key note speaking at a KM Cluster meeting in Cambridge in January 2005, while he was still writing the book. At that time Tom listed blogs as one of the several time wasters for knowledge workers. After his talk, I pointed out the potential for personal knowledge management that blogs offered. Tom makes references to this conversation in the book and allows that blogs may be an effective means for managing one’s personal knowledge. He says that, “if this particular use (PKM) of blogs caught on broadly, it could represent a new approach to organizational knowledge management (p. 108)”. However, he still has reservations for the business value of blogs if they are simply a means for personal expression. Tom does not address the use of blogs for marketing communication but he recently began to contribute, with others, to a blog, Babson Knowledge, for his Babson Executive Education. It is great source for new thoughts on knowledge management.

I highly recommend Thinking for a Living. It should be read by everyone interested in knowledge management and knowledge workers.

ABC’s of SEO – David George

David George has written a helpful book, ABC’s of SEO – Search Engine Optimization Strategies. David started using the web as a Unix kernel developer at Seimens. He then worked at some of the large consulting firms including my former employer. He now lives in southern France which is a good thing.

The book starts with a definition of search engines, “a web page that allows keywords or phrases to be entered and returns results based on the relevance of the documents it holds in its index. (which could be the whole Web.) Relevance is determined by a set of automated routines referred to as algorithms.” There is more detail and then it defines search engine optimization, the process of designing or modifying a web site to get high ranking by the search engines. He notes that the search engine guys are always adjusting their algorithms to stay ahead of the cheaters, the black hats who try to trick them. So this is an ongoing challenge for those who play by the rules since the rules change.

The book then operationalizes its title by literally providing search optimization topics from A (Algorithms and anchor text) to Z (zero page rank) in separate chapters. It is clearly written for the non-technical person like me. The range of topics allows for it to be a good reference guide, as well as a straight read. It includes such helpful comments as the need to have the anchor text (the underlined part that has a link embedded in it) reflect the place you are linking to. My co-author, Amanda Watlington, had pointed out this useful tip to me and I try to follow it.

We cover the basics of search optimization for blogs, based on Amanda’s expertise, in Business Blogs: A Practical Guide. David’s book provides an excellent in-depth coverage of the topic in an accessible format and easy reading style.

Swarm Creativity: Next Release – Peter Gloor

Peter Gloor offers the next release of his book, Swarm Creativity, on his website. The goal of the book is to introduce the concept of Collaborative Innovation Networks, or COINs. Peter writes:

“COINs have been around for hundreds of years. Many of us have already been a part of a Collaborative Innovation Network without knowing it. What makes COINs so relevant today, though, is that the concept has reached its tipping point – thanks to the communication capabilities of the Internet and the World Wide Web. A COIN is a cyberteam of self-motivated people with a collective vision, enabled by technology to collaborate in achieving a common goal – an innovation – by sharing ideas, information, and work.”

The book provides many historical examples such as the Fugger banking empire of the German Renaissance period, Marco Polo, and the Rothschilds. Many more current examples of COINs are offered such as the SHARE (Swiss House for Advanced Research and Education) – The Swiss government’s initiative to link Swiss Entrepreneurs into the Boston Innovation Network. It is located just around the corner form my office in Cambridge and I have been to an event showcasing Swiss researchers, such as Peter, working at Boston educational institutions. Peter was the e-Commerce Practice Lead for Deloitte in Europe and had leadership roles in other firms. He draws on this experience for many of his recent examples.

The book concludes with a introduction of Temporal Communication Flow Analysis (TeCFlow), a tool that I have written about before. It allows you to make cybermovies of the patterns of communication in electronic formats such as email, web site links and blogs. This is helpful to see where the collaborative innovation networks are occurring and whether the communication patterns are functioning or dysfunctional. Peter continues to apply it to blogs in creative ways. Look at the TecFlo site to see what he is doing now.

The book is available for free down load at the Swarm Creativity site. TecFlo is available for free download at the TecFlo site.

I was pleased to see that he has also started a Swarming Blog, embedded within the Swarm Creativity site. It covers instances of swarm creativity and self-organizing networks such as the Alliances for Discovery and the Futureworld network. He also covers related writers in the field such as Charles Ehin.

Everything Bad Is Good For You – Steven Johnson

At one of the recent Berkman Thursday blog meetings, we had a short agenda. Steven Johnson, was speaking next door on "Everything Bad Is Good For You -- How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter" which is the title of his latest book. So we went there instead. We found half of the Berkman regulars already in the audience. Steven premise is:

“that popular culture on average has been steadily growing more complex and cognitively challenging over the past thirty years. The dumbing-down, instant gratification society assumption has it completely wrong. Popular entertainment is making us smarter and more engaged, not catering to our base instincts.”

He calls this trend the Sleeper Curve and feels that it “is the single most important new force altering the mental development of young people today, and I believe it is largely a force for good: enhancing our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down.”

Steven gave some interesting historical data in his talk. Hill Street Blues was the first TV show with multi-threaded story line. However, it set up most of the story lines in the opening roll call. Even then it was ahead of its time on this feature. More consisitent with other shows of the era, most stories did not require the viewing of past episodes for understanding. In contrast, he showed how most of the multithreads in the Sopranos requires viewing past shows. He also mentioned that in early TV all jokes were set up and concluded in the same show. In Seinfeld, the punch line was sometimes delivered several years later. In addition, he digrammed the social network of relationships of Dallas, one of the more complex shows of the 80s. He then compared it to the current show, 24, which he said had a social network complexity on the order of Middlemarch, but not, he was careful to point out, the same literary quality.

He said there were two main factors for this complexity. First, most of the new technology capabilites were in the area of reproduction (VCR, DVDs, TIVO, etc.) and secondly, the economics of selling the same stuff in multiple formats made it desireable to have shows that you would want to see more than once. Thus, the shows have gotten more complex as you have several viewing to make sense of ti all. The same goes for video games.

Personally, while there may be some cognitive benefits from Grand Theft Auto, as he argues, I think the more important issues as what you might use this increases acuity to do. Many of these video games do not promote the greatest goals. But Johnson does have an interesting book premise that should sell a lot of books. Even Boing Boing promotes it. His talk contained much oversimplification along with some valid points. It was interesting to see how television and games have become more complex over time, but then the same could be said for most media as people learn how to better use them. He read an admittedly over simplified critique of books as passive bits of words on a blank white page. It is precisely this space that requires and encourages imagination generated by the reader rather than having someone else’s images feed to the game player or TV watcher.

The first books were recording of the oral tradition and epic poetry. It took several thousand years to recognize and take advantage of the random access capabilities of books and include indexes in publications. It took this long to come to terms with what cannot be done with books as more active forms of learning promoted by Pestalozzi and John Dewey have argued. It will take a while to fully understand what can be done and not done with TV and games but I hope it is for greater good than some of the current uses.

Call To Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results

Do you have a business blog or web site and want to increase traffic and prolong visits? Here is a book, Call To Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results, that gives some practical advice. Written by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, it covers the roles of usability, information architecture and search engine optimization. There is a nice section on ending the single page visit. There has been a lot of attention on search optimization, but then what happens we someone comes to your site? Is it just a quick look and gone? Getting people to stay is important whether you are selling stuff and just wanting to share your thoughts.

The authors offer an interesting example from Café Press, a site that runs indepdendent shops as wellas syndicated stores. The case study shows how Café Press reduced its shopping cart abandoemnet rate. In the spirit of eBay and Amazon, Café Press manages all aspects of doing business online. Some one can open a store at no upftront cost or inventory to manage. More than a million companies of all sizes offer their wares through Café Press and they adverstise 8 million products and growing. I have often heard it mentioned as the place for selling your custom t-shirts.

One thing they did was eliminate the need for first time buyers to register by creaitng an account. I have also stopped from applying comments on a blog that requires registration. Some Blogger blogs even require you to set up a Blogger accoutn to place a comment. I did nto go further and “abandoned” my comment. While, I understand the issues with comment spam, if you ask for regiatration be prepared for fewer legitimate comments also.

Another suggestion from Café Press is to always give the customer an option to contact by phone throughout. I have been frustrated by commercial sites that do not make the phone easier to find or find at all. I have also been frustrated by blogs that do not offer the email address of the blog writer as another means to contact. Mine is in my About Page which is the first place I look in another blog. Again, this opens up possible spam but there is a trade off. The book has a lot more advice that is useful for business web sites and much of it could be extended to business blogs. Thanks to Amanda Watlington for poitning it out.

A Whole New Mind – Daniel Pink

I received an email from Gautum Ghosh that contained an excerpt from Daniel Pinks’ A Whole New Mind. I will not repeat it all but here is an excerpt of the excerpt.

"The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind – computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind – creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers. These people – artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers – will now reap society's richest rewards and share its greatest joys.”

“This book describes a seismic – though as yet undetected – shift now underway in much of the advanced world. We are moving from an economy and a society built on the logical, linear, computer-like capabilities of the Information Age to an economy and a society built on the inventive, empathic, big picture capabilities of what's rising in its place, the Conceptual Age.”

With a Nerd Score of 6 out of 100 perhaps there is hope for me. I would like to think that Pink is right. Events in the world have, in my mind, indicated that the analytical are not always right and we need people who can conceptualize.

Daniel has a nice blog on his book site. It contains posts that support the ideas in his book. I liked one about Larry Lessing’s new wiki. Larry is inviting anyone who wants to participate, help him revise his book, Code and other Laws of Cyberspace. The only problem with Pink’s blog is that you cannot find individual links for the posts. Perhaps he is too conceptual to understand how permalinks work. Either that, or like some department stores, he wants you to go through the whole thing on the way to what you want.

I found a reference to the TV show, Indian Idol, on Gautum’s blog. I followed up and here is the story from rediff.com.
“Abhijeet Sawant is the Indian Idol. After seven gruelling months and competing against hundreds of contestants, the Mumbai lad was crowned Indian Idol, at around 3 pm at the Famous Studio, Mahalaxmi, south Mumbai. The result brings to an end one of the most awaited outcomes of a talent hunt in Indian television history. Sony Entertainment Television had bagged the exclusive rights from the makers of the US serial American Idol and turned it into one of the biggest television events in India.”

Gautum’s post said that The Apprentice is the next US import for the Indian TV market. Is this what Pink means?

Making CRM Stick

My good friend Javad Maftoon has just co-published a useful book on CRM - Making CRM Stick: Readying Your Organization for Successful Customer Relationship Management by Daniel T. Murphy, Joseph B. Grady, Javad Maftoon, and Andres A. Salinas. It covers ways to make CRM implementations work based on the practical experiences of the authors. Javad works with the CRM group at IBM Consulting and has extensive prior experience in this area with a number of other consulting firms. We worked on several projects at Renaissance Strategy Group in the early 90s that dealt with enabling better customer relations and employee performance. Companies have spent a great deal on CRM and often the results have not meet expectations. I am sure the collective wisdom of these consultants will be a useful investment for anyone venturing into this area.

This is a critical issue because most CRM implementations fail to produce the desired results. The authors point to an IBM study that found only 15% of these implementations are done right. They also note a more optimistic Accenture study which only found a 60% failure rate. It gets better as the Gartner says that through 2006, only 50% of CRM implementations will be seen as failures. Room for improvement here.

The book contains a series of chapters written by different articles that cover a range of useful issues. It begins with strategy formation. Then it moves to organization alignment, managing organization change, building commitment at the top, and making the business case for change. The book then continues with architecting the future-state customer experience, training issues, and concludes with project management and governance. The last chapter, co-authored by Javad, covers “The challenge of Knowledge Transfer in the New World of Outsourcing and Offshore CRM” which is an issue I have seen first hand. In this case a knowledge management system was effective and had a greater incremental effect on the outsource staff than the regulars. The right topics are there in this book and my initial look says the content is excellent.

Blink vs. Wisdom of Crowds – Experts vs. the Multitude

Malcom Gladwell’s new book, Blink, is getting a lot of positive press and seems to be everyone's favorite review topic. In the book he argues that we sometimes rely on our quick intuition to make decisions rather than detailed analysis (duh?). And sometimes we regret these snap judgments, as Gladwell acknowledges. Not a new idea, but then he offers many interesting examples according to the reviewers. I am sure we could come up with our own good and bad ones. The New York Times reviewer (January 16), in a more balanced and thoughtful commentary than most, pointed out that, while he provides these fascinating stories, Gladwell does not offer a comprehensive theory as to why this happens or when to use quick judgments (sorry no way to provide a link). No maven here.

John Maloney pointed me to an interesting exchange in Slate between Gladwell and James Surowiecki whose Wisdom of Crowds could be taken as quite in contrast to Gladwell’s thesis. Blink could be taken to support the value of individual wisdom, even Gladwell agrees with this. Surowiecki’s book argues for the ability of large numbers of “regular” people to out-think experts in certain situations.

I think both theories have their place and each counters a standard decision model. There are times when each view make sense but each can be pushed to absurdity. For example, Gladwell asks Surowiecki if a 1000 people in a village in China would be better at collectively looking at x-rays than a single highly trained radiologist. How about the 120 million Americans who believe in creationism re-writing our science curriculum? Or two dozen Democrats trying to swiftly guide the Kerry campaign? Perhaps John read Suroweicki's Wisdom of Crowds before he picked his team. A similar critique of Blink is offered by Suroweicki as there are times when detailed analysis makes sense if time allows.

Based on reading the reviews, I find Gladwell’s work to be a one idea book and not necessarily counter-intuitive, so reading the examples becomes less valuable for gaining insights. Blink seems simply entertaining light reading, as the New York Times Reviewer suggests. I think Suroweicki’s book is more counter-intuitive so reading the book to understand the examples will provide more value to those who want to implement his ideas, especially for marketing through the web.

The Executive’s Role in Knowledge Management - Carla O'Dell

In The Executive’s Role in Knowledge Management, Carla O'Dell continues her practice of writing extremely useful practical guides for knowledge management. In this case the primary intended readers are senior managers who want their investments in knowledge management to be successful and provide real business value. Carla O’Dell has been a leader in knowledge management throughout its life cycle and I have enjoyed her previous books. This book continues the tradition. My review of her book appears in the most recent issue of KM Review and the KM Review people have added this review to my space on their site. I did an earlier review of her book on my blog which focused on its applicability to blog development.

Introduction to Knowledge Management - Todd R. Groff, Thomas P. Jones

I spoke recently with Thomas Jones who manages the Oklahoma Wine News blog. He is also the co-author of Introduction to Knowledge Management, a book that looks quite interesting, especially for those who are planning an implementation. Robert E. Klabenes, President, Oklahoma State University-Okmulgee wrote about the book:

"This systemically organized, innovative and well-written book astutely integrates content, technology and problem-solving into a learning tool that sets the standard for maximizing learning in an arena that is continuously bombarded with interventions that compete for each learner's attention."

It is designed as a textbook and there is an online Instructor's Guide with power point slides, case studies, exercises and review questions.

Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce - Dave DeLong

KM Review has kindly put a recent book review I did for them of Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce by David DeLong on my space on their site allowing free down loads.  In this book David DeLong makes an impressive case for the high cost of losing intellectual capital in his new book. He follows it with a comprehensive set of chapters on how to design, evaluate and implement an array of knowledge retention strategies.

Facilitated Transfer of Best Practices – APQC

I have been reviewing the new APQC report, Facilitated Transfer of Best Practices, released on October 14, 2004. (An earlier study, Measuring the Impact of Knowledge Management, had found that transferring best practices was the primary source of positive financial results from knowledge management and, at the same time, this opportunity was being under used. The study looked at 29 large scale organizations across a number of industries to determine best practices for transferring best practices. Participants include CEMEX (a world leader in building materials from Mexico), Ford, and Service Master (homeowner services provider)

Here is a summary of the five key steps for Transferring Best Practices from their findings.

1. Identify or create practices and processes to be transferred. Make this effort explicit and supported. Some organizations create communities to develop, evaluate, and propagate newly found best practices.

2. Document and validate the practices. It is critical to make the practices accessible and to continue to test and refine them.

3. Share and communicate the best practices. Pick the methods that work in your firm. Some organizations use workshops, replication teams, and structured “information maps.”

4. Create a clear adoption policy as to whether the best practices are voluntary or mandatory. Even if they are voluntary it is important to publicize successes to encourage others to pick them up.

5. Measure and report results. All those successful in the transfer process had a measurement and reporting system.

The study goes into useful detail and offers six detailed case studies on participant organizations. I have done work for two of them, Ford and CEMEX and was impressed with each as leaders in their markets. Ford is well known for quality. CEMEX, located in Monterey, Mexico, is the largest producer of cement in the Americas with the highest profit margins in the industry. They accomplish these results primarily through innovation and new technology.

I recommend getting a copy of Facilitated Transfer of Best Practices for anyone who wants to realize significant and sustained returns from their knowledge management and best practices transfer efforts.

Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content by Biz Stone

I went to BookSlut after reading Margo Hammond and Ellen Heltzel in Blogging for Books. Looking through the non-fiction, I found a review of Biz Stone’s book on blogging. It writes that the book, “...is broken into three main sections for beginning bloggers, experienced bloggers, and advanced bloggers. You can find a decent primer on setting up your first blog with one of the many blog services available, some tips on HTML formatting, suggestions on how to market your blog and blog for bucks, or even how to syndicate it. Stone never dives far into any subject, but has concentrated more on getting his readers started and sharing his ideas and experiences.”

Perhaps I’ll get a copy, although the review was done in November 2003.

NetCreators – Peter Gloor

Peter Gloor has created a revised version of his book on collaboration and innovation. It is now titled, Net Creators: How to Build Lasting Value Through Social Webs of Innovation. It is available through this link. I think this book, and TeCFlow, the tool he describes, represents a breakthrough in ways to look at social interactions. Here is a long quote from the opening to Chapter 15 of the book which introduces the tool and the concept behind it.

“If you are a lover of classical music, imagine listening to a sonata from Beethoven. After the music has been introduced in the exposition, it will undergo a modulation and will arrive at the end of the exposition in a different key. As the melody further develops, you will more and more be able to unravel the tune and to analyze and understand the underlying patterns of the melody. The longer you listen to the tune, the better you will know what to expect next. The TeCFlow tool allows you to do the same for the evolution of interaction patterns in social networks. TeCFlow, a Temporal Communication Flow Visualizer, is currently being developed as part of a research project on CKNs at the MIT Center for Coordination Science and the Center for Digital Strategies at Dartmouth. Our goal is to build an environment for the visual identification and analysis of the dynamics of communication in social spaces. Similarly to an orchestra playing a musical melody, our tool plays back an interactive movie depicting the interaction between members of a team based on their e-mail traffic. By comparing dynamic interaction patterns with the performance of virtual teams, we can identify typical communication patterns of different types of virtual communities.”

Peter then provides many examples of how TeCFlow can be used to look at social interaction patterns. He characterizes the ideal patterns in three stages of innovation – the initial innovation group (COIN), the resultant learning network (CLN), and the broader community of interest (CIN). Then he offers insights on how these interactions can be improved to better achieve the communities’ intended objectives, whether they are a successful merger, an innovative new product, or a productive sales campaign. There is much rich material here and the temporal visualization of social patterns makes it all very clear.

Book Reviews – Another Space for the Old Media – Blogger Debate

Thanks to Dina Mehta for pointing to an interesting discussion on Blogging for Books. Blogging book reviewers are gaining a following. BookSlut gets over 3,000 hits a day. It also seems that there are battle lines being drawn between old media and bloggers on the book review front, just as there are on the political front. (BTW – see the Sunday NY Times Magazine (Sept. 26) – for the political “bloggers on the bus” following the current US presidential campaign). Dina quotes Kevin Smokler:

"The format of the book review is 30 years out of date," he (Kevin) says, where blogging offers the opportunity to discuss not only the book, but the context and process of its creation. It also puts the book's creator out in front of his or her work, a notion that may not sit well with authors who value their privacy.”

Kevin’s thoughts are embedded in a nice discussion on the effect of blogs on book reviews and book promotion by Margo Hammond and Ellen Heltzel in Blogging for Books.

Margo refers to at least one serious literary blog by Mark Sarvas and concludes with a nice comment I am quoting in its entirety because I really agree with it:

“From a blogger's perspective, old media feel too old-fashioned, too corporate, too confined by non-literary objectives and philosophies to meet the needs of today's reader. Spreading the power is good. Challenging the powers that be is even better. But I don't think the already beleaguered audience for literature needs to be minced and diced into too many small pieces, to the point that we're all having our own separate conversations and losing sight of the larger cause, which is a commitment to the beauty and value of the written word. For all the Internet's interactivity, it seems like more people than not are on send mode. The narrowness and meanness that pervades American politics has shown us how a good idea can devolve into name-calling. I wish better for books.”

I hope that blogging book reviewers are seen as additive and not competitive with old media. I am also sure that there are those reviewers that go both ways. I have had the opportunity of reviewing a book (The Executive’s Role in Knowledge Management – Carla O’Dell) on both my blog and for a print journal, KM Review. It was interesting to reflect on the differences. Immediacy was certainly a plus in the blog column just as Margo pointed out.

The (Knowledge) Impact of an Aging Workforce – Dave DeLong

Here is a NPR interview with Dave DeLong, author of Lost Knowledge. You can download the audio to hear this “live.” He starts the interview with the fact that we lost all the knowledge that NASA gained on when it landed men on the moon so they would have to start all over again. He goes on to list a number of actions companies can do to retain the potential lost knowledge, including NASA’s use of storytelling to pass on culture.

Dave’s book was also reviewed in the New York Times Sunday Business section this past weekend. The review concludes, “Mr. DeLong says the emphasis should be on capturing the information that is most important to a company's strategic objectives. Obvious as that may seem, the natural tendency is for individual departments, like marketing, to retain information that is most important to them, regardless of whether it strengthens the company's overall competitive position.”

I have read Dave’s book and did a review of it for KM Review which will appear in the next issue. I highly recommend it.

We the Media - Dan Gillmor's book is on-line

I learned from Gunnar Landemark that the full text of Dan Gillmor's book "We the Media," about blogs and other things, is now online. Gunnar mentions that he found this out from Lawrence Lessig.

The Executive’s Role in Knowledge Management – Carla O’Dell

I just finished this excellent book, The Executive’s Role in Knowledge Management by Carla O’Dell, and am doing reviews in two media, a tradition print magazine and this blog. My review for KM Review will appear in the November issue. It will focus on the primary intended audience, senior managers who want their investments in knowledge management to be successful and provide real business value. There is another related audience to this group, those responsible for knowledge management who want to educate their senior leadership on how to support their efforts. While there are many books on knowledge management, including some excellent ones by APQC, I know of no other specifically designed for this purpose and highly recommend it. You can get it through Amazon or the APQC site and give it to your management. The pay off will be large.

For this blog post, I will address another audience, one probably not intended by the authors, but one no less important – those who want to successfully implement blogs within their corporations for business purposes. Blogs can serve many business purposes and knowledge management is one of these, but certainly not the only function. Blogs are also not the same as knowledge management, but they can supplement a knowledge management capability.

However, regardless of the intended business use for blogs in your corporation, there are certain factors, especially non-technical ones, which are essential for success. This work by Carla O’Dell covers many of the related issues. The successful use of both knowledge management and blogs involves the creative use of technology and processes to support workforce performance aligned to business goals.

For example, Carla provides a series of steps for successful implementation. These are similar to ones I have suggested for KM and portals, and ones I completely support as critical for both blogs and knowledge management.

1. establish a business need for blogs
2. create a solid business case
3. establish tangible measures of success
4. create a framework for technical support
5. cultivate a knowledge sharing culture
6. lead an internal communication strategy to support the business use of blogs

The book is organized around these steps and provides many practical examples from knowledge management efforts than largely can be extended to blog efforts. I will let you find the details in the book. It is a quick initial read that you will go back to as you move forward with an implementation.

Support Economy Ventures

The Support Economy authors are taking the principles in their book to the next step and have set up a program to raise venture capital to support initiatives in line with the positions they take in their book. I did a brief description of their excellent book before. Its position that people today are looking for opportunities for a personal voice and a chance to make a difference supplies one explanation for part of the strong interest in blogs. John Maloney pointed me to their venture site. It says:

“The Support Economy Ventures Website is an axis for regional Investment Summits concerning the principles of The Support Economy by Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin. The goal is to identify entrepreneurs and advance investment for building the deep support infrastructure. The intention of Support Economy Ventures is to shape and catalyzes a community of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, deep support professionals and others wanting to benefit from the next chapter in capitalism. We envision this community collaborating to fund and build the new enterprise logic and lifeboat ventures that will lead the way to a support economy based on distributed capitalism. We invite you to donate, sponsor, join and participate with us.”

They have several investment summits coming up. One in New York on Friday, Oct. 22, 2004. It follows our first New England KM Cluster on Oct. 15 in Boston and another on Dec. 10, 2004 in San Francisco.

Collaborative Innovation Networks: Peter Gloor

I have been reading Peter Gloor’s new book, COINS @ Tipping Point – How to Convert Organizations into Collaborative Innovation Networks. It defines COINs as “self organizing cyberteams of intrinsically motivated people who get together around revolutionary new ideas and concepts.” Peter uses the development of the internet as a prime example of a COIN in operation. The book also looks closely at the experiences of the Swiss sailing team that created and then raced the Alinghi to victory in the America’s Cup. The book explores three main questions:

• What are Collaborative Knowledge Networks
• Why are Collaborative Knowledge Networks better than conventional organizations?
• How can my organization become a Collaborative Knowledge Network?

Peter talks a good bit about the openness and trust required to participate in a COIN. Then he models this behavior by putting his complete draft book available on-line for free download and invites comments from readers. With Peter’s permission, I invite anyone interested to take a look and provide their perspective. In a way, the creation of his book becomes a COIN, itself.

He also put his previous book on-line before publication and it is still available.

Peter was the former e-business practice lead for Deloitte in Europe and draws on his many relevant experiences there, as well as prior industry experience. Examples come from companies like DaimlerChrysler, Novartis, Intel Deloitte, UBS, HP, and IBM. It makes interesting reading and I urge you to join in this COIN.

Peter is now at MIT Sloan and Dartmouth Tuck doing research and development on the open source Collaborative Knowledge Networks, a very effective SNA tool that supplies movies of connection patterns over time. I have posted on it before.

Lost Knowledge: Connecting the Generations with David DeLong

I recently had a chance to write a review for KM Review of the soon to be released, Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce by David DeLong. I will not repeat my review here as it appears in the September-October issue and I can offer a link then, but here is the conclusion - it is highly recommended for anyone involved in knowledge management. The book provides the first comprehensive framework to deal with the significant knowledge aspects of the looming retirement of today’s largest workforce segment, post-World War Two Baby Boomers. Dr. David is a research fellow at MIT’s Age Lab.