Author: JP

I’ve been doing some thinking. [It’s OK, Malc, I am still taking the tablets :-) ]

I was thinking about Doc’s piece on Markets Without Marketing, Hugh’s response and Tara’s response.

I was thinking about Nick Lemann’s piece on Amateur Hour in the New York Times, Mitch Ratcliffe’s response and Jay Rosen’s response, as also Steven Johnson’s related piece and Doc’s follow-up comments. [Thanks for the links and pointers, Doc.]

And I was also thinking about something Dylan Tweney said/asked a little while ago: Who’s wagging the long tail? In his piece Dylan also refers to John Cassidy’s review of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail. Here’s a quote from Dylan’s post:

The “long tail” implies that the Internet is ushering in an age when micro-niches will dominate, at the expense of mass-culture monoliths. Sure, the Net makes it easier for us all to find the bizarre fetishes and tiny cliques that we are longing for. But one thing has always bugged me about this theory: How do you make a business out of that, unless you’re a big aggregator?

I read that, and somewhere in my head a bulb fused. Or maybe it lit up. Pretty much every serious argument we’re having, every conversation we need to continue, is about some form of Big versus some form of Small. Blefuscu versus Lilliput. And we use concepts like expertise and authenticity and reliability and affordability and freedom and choice to try and win the arguments. And the concepts we use land up polarising the debates. Which made me think….
…..It’s all about trust.

The Cluetrain markets-are-conversations-are-relationships is about trust.

Hugh’s microbrands are about trust.

Tara’s It’s-Not-An-Us-Versus-Them is about trust.

The journalist-versus-blogger debates are all about trust.

Trust used to be something that bound small groups together. Over time we tried to scale trust. It didn’t scale. And what happened instead was Big Everything. In an Assembly-Line meets Broadcast world.
Big Everything broke trust. Big Media lied. Big Content Producer reduced our choices. Big Pipe and Big Device reduced it further. Big Firm wrongsized away. And Big Government did what it liked.

Trust broke.

Now, with the web and with communities and with social software and with the inheritance of Moore and Metcalfe, we’ve had a chance to rebuild trust.

And we’re rebuilding trust. Slowly. Putting the shattered pieces together. Disaggregation, to be followed by reaggregation over time. The new groupings are different, because the trust relationships are working across geographies and timezones and belief systems and cultures and ages and genders.
Yes, some forms of new Big will emerge. But only those forms who can grow while retaining their newly acquired trust.

Trust that personal freedom and choice is being preserved, trust that mistakes when made are honest mistakes, trust that such mistakes get corrected soon after they occur, trust that commonly held values are adhered to. Trust.

Trust that elections are fair and decisions to go to war or peace are just; trust that public appointments are objectively made and business models are transparent. Trust that laws are for all. Trust.
If you (re)build it they will come.

Think about Google. They are probably the first company I can think of who grew up on a New Trust basis. And then think about the times they have faced significant pressure from the public at large. Every time, it has been a situation where someone says “I thought you guys said Do No Evil? What gives?”

It’s all about trust. (And no, I don’t mean confidence, I mean trust).

A coda. This is a very provisional post. Taking a leaf out of Dan Gillmor’s book, my readers know more than I do. The people I read know more than I do as well. The blogosphere gives me a chance to learn more about these things I don’t know about. And posts like these are where I put something forward to see if it makes sense.

Flame away.

I read it when it started, but I dismissed it. Thought there was no way whoever-it-was could keep it up, didn’t even bother to add it to my Netvibes.

How wrong I was. If you haven’t read it yet, then do so now. The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, Aged 51 1/2.

Take a tiny bit of RageBoy, as if you’re putting saffron in a paella. Add a healthy dose of Dilbert, shake well and blend the mixture in a Scobleizer, until it goes Boing Boing. Serve chilled, add condiments to taste. And there you have it.

I’m not sure I ever want to know who’s writing it. Better that way :-)

It looks like I’ve been found out.

I’d been interested in blogging ever since I discovered the emergent blogosphere many years ago, egged on by RageBoy, Halley, Doc, Dan, Kevin et al. And sometime in 2003 I started toying with the process, after a dinner organised by Doc and Halley in New York that May.

Sometime after that, I started blogging in earnest, but only “internally”, keeping my blog within the firm’s boundaries. We were (and still are) a regulated institution, and we had to make sure we understood what it meant for us to blog externally, and this took time. And by late last year, we had a few external bloggers, principal amongst them Sean at Park Paradigm and Malc at Accidental Light.

Then, Julie Meyer asked me to contribute a piece for her company’s 5th Anniversary with a theme of Building Society for the 21st Century. Which I duly did. And her reaction when she read it was to convince me to blog. So I did. Thanks, Julie.
I decided to concentrate on the subject of information and its enabling technologies, paying particular attention to the enterprise context.

All that was a long time ago. And Confused Of Calcutta was born.
It looks like a few more people I know and like and trust have now discovered that piece, and blogged about it; Gordon and Doc are recent examples; thanks for your encouragement, guys.
So here it is, in full, for those of you who haven’t seen it elsewhere. (comments welcome):

Building Society for the 21st Century

Economic models that succeed tend to take advantage of the abundances as well as the shortages that characterise a particular economic era. Traditionally, the primary factors of production used to be land, labour and capital; much of this was in “institutional” rather than individual hands, and as a result, attempts to create efficiencies in the use of these factors tended to create institutional models as a basis for reducing transaction costs.
Land ownership has changed; while governments, churches and firms still own land, there is far more individual ownership of land than ever before. Labour is no longer bonded, and the ability to migrate between firms and even countries has never been greater. Capital is also more mobile, with deregulated markets and dematerialised securities and electronic cash; when many individuals have better credit ratings than the institutions they bank with, the definition of what a bank does changes.
The nature of asset creation has also changed, with intangibles forming a growing proportion of GDP worldwide; we now impute monetary value on talent and skill and knowledge and network and brand and reputation.
The Agricultural Revolution transformed our ability to produce food cheaply; the Industrial Revolution helped us reduce plant and equipment production costs, as well as those of core infrastructure providing heating, lighting and transportation. There were also major demographic and societal changes: barriers based on race and sex began to erode, infant mortality was lowered and people began to live longer.
The Information Age heralded the dawn of a true Services Revolution as human capital grew in importance and communications costs reduced sharply. Technological advances a la Moore, Metcalfe and Gilder continued their relentless march, as price-performance improved, network effects were realised and everybody started getting connected.
Despite major technological advances over the past fifty years or so, one thing has not changed as appreciably: man’s longevity. And, since assets were increasingly based on intangibles, this created, and continues to create, a war for talent. Institutions have found it increasingly difficult to attract, retain and develop talent.
Every institution had to take steps to value and protect human time. Simplicity and convenience became important, “dial-tone” services became important, design and usability mattered. Technology adoption curves became inverted: historically, adoption was driven by those with the largest R&D budgets – defence, aerospace, high-end manufacturing and automobiles, sophisticated capital markets. Products trialled in these sectors slowly drifted towards mainstream commerce and much later towards consumers.
What inverted? The age of the early adopter changed, which moved startlingly from 35-40 years old towards 12-21 years old. When you look at mobile phones, texting, instant messaging, downloads, Skype, the iPod and iTunes phenomena, multifunction devices, the standards for these are all set by youth. And this trend is now moving towards changing the functionality of “established” web firms such as Google and Amazon, eBay and Yahoo.
It was this shift, when youth became the early adopters, which signalled a real change from institutional to individual capitalism; not having been exposed to how organisations worked and not caring about how governments operated, youth began to set the agenda.
Peer respect became more important than the power of hierarchical authority; relationships and trust returned to prominence after a long time in the wilderness; there were no longer any taboos about asking why things were the way they were, and challenging the status quo.
Today is their Sixties. And, in a vicarious way, ours too; The Age of the Individual.
Empowered and free from hierarchy, jealous about personal time, keen on relationships and trust, inquisitive about values and ethics, with the power of the web to change their perceptions of time and distance and organisations and government.
What does this mean for firms and governments? Another inversion. Now, as such institutions fight to hold on to their piece of the talent pool, they realise that historical carrots and sticks have no meaning to the new generation. People migrate to institutions that reflect the values they hold and make it possible for individuals to make a difference. “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” has subtly shifted. Do ask what your country/company will allow you to do for them, before choosing.
This is not as shocking as it sounds. We already have odd critical masses developed over the years, such as shipping registration in Panama or company incorporation in Delaware or high-net-worth individuals domiciled in tax havens. It has been suggested that European IPOs grew as a result of Sarbanes-Oxley, as new entrants railed against increased regulation.
Human beings can now withhold their talent, their time, and their taxes, in ways that could not have been imagined before. Flash mobbing and IM and texting and blogs and wikis and video allow people to communicate in ways we could not have foreseen. The assembly-line approach that characterised our schools, hospitals, companies and governments is failing, as people choose to be different. Any colour you like, so long as it’s black, does not rule any more.
Assembly line approaches focus on consolidating volume and ensuring homogeneity, low standard deviation and uniformity. All citizens the same. All students the same. All the same.
The web is about diversity, individuality, personal-ness. People want to be connected, not channelled, to choose their experiences and to co-create them with peers they respect and trust.
As innovation democratises, and open-source ideas get shared and enriched and mutated, people behave differently. Diversity is no longer suppressed but celebrated.
We used to hate looking at someone else’s holiday movies and snapshots, but now we love Flickr. Why? Because we choose the time and place. Connected, not channelled.
Alumnus gatherings didn’t always work and were often lifeless, now they’re Friends Reunited. Why? Because we have transparency of information, simpler ways to discover the who and the where, and choice as to the relationships we grow. Connected, not channelled.
We choose the schools we go to, the courses we take at university, the firms we work for, the countries where we live, what we do with our time.  When we work and when we sleep. We choose our relationships and who we spend time with. Connected, not channelled.
As the Cluetrain guys said, markets are conversations. They do not happen hierarchically. Even our Assembly Line software applications have disaggregated. All we have left is subscriptions to syndicated content, heuristically enhanced non-deterministic search, support for fulfilment and a framework to enable trust and collaboration.
Governments and firms are left feeling helpless, as central control diminishes and the power of the individual rises, and they need to recognise that bell curves now have very long tails.
As these changes come about, with individual capitalism and the subversion of institutions, we need new business models. What should these models do? One, make a clear stance on values and ethics. Two, allow relationships and collaboration to take place, rather than control the relationships. Three, intermediate to enable trust and fulfilment rather than channel towards lock-in. Four, recognise that the customer wants to create and co-create value rather than just receive.
Use what you stand for to attract the customer. Use what you do to retain the customer’s trust. Ensure that the customer is always free to leave, and paradoxically he or she will stay. Who is this customer? Your family. Your friend. Your employee. Your business partner. Your client. Your citizen.
In a world of empowered individuals, everyone’s a customer.
There are barriers in the way, and serious ones at that. There is a need to overhaul everything to do with Intellectual Property Rights, be they patents or trademarks or copyright or DRM or whatever. There is a need to avoid over-regulation, the creation of bad law driven by institutional values.  This is particularly true for every form of communication, affecting big media, telcos, “content producers”, and the publishing industry in general.
This is going to be difficult, and often humorous, since these are tremendous changes. Witness what happened to Sony’s DRM or Hollywood’s attempts to send copies of Munich to the BAFTA judges. Witness what happened to Skype.
Connected, not channelled.

Malcolm was talking to me about an article he’d read in the Times; since then he’s blogged about it. And something about it made me feel uneasy. And it wasn’t what he said or thought, just something I could’t pin down.

Then today I was doing my usual trawl around the blogs of people I like reading. While I have my netvibes set up the way I want, and I love it, I still like an old-fashioned wander every now and then. RSS aggregators are great at showing “latest” and “today” and “now” and “unread” and all that jazz, but sometimes I want the apparent serendipity of walking across to someone’s blog and just wandering around. Following links almost randomly.

Today it was Steven Johnson’s turn. And through his blog, in a roundabout way, I went to Rebel Sell, with a small diversion to SquareSpace and to Nollind Whachell then back.

And reading reviews of Rebel Sell, my unease returned. I began to understand why I felt the way I did when I read the Times article referred to by Malcolm.

It’s simple.

I think we make a big mistake when we use terms like counterculture and rebel and deviant loosely. They’ve had it as terms. Defunct. Finito. Past their sell-by-date.

Because every time we do that, we paint a big red X across the backs of the people we so describe and put the firm’s immune system on full alert. And the rebels are toast.

Which is often a shame. Because they weren’t rebels. Or deviants. Or counterculture whatevers.

They were doing their job. Trying to find a better way of doing things. [In a strange way, I think that Malcolm’s feeling for consultants is related. When a “consultant” finds a better way of doing things firms roll out the green carpet, papered with spondulicks; when someone in the organisation quietly does the same thing,  he’s a deviant…]

• When I was 15, we had a new maths teacher. He walked into class and stated first off that he would personally award the Nobel Prize to anyone in his class who managed to fail GCE O Level Mathematics-With-Additional-Mathematics. Then proceeded to ask us “What is the maximum number of electrons in the nth orbit of an atom?”. Hands went up, the answer was provided. He then gave the answerer a piece of chalk and said “Prove it”. The proof, based on permutations and combinations and induction, was provided.
• He then looked at all of us and said “You think I’m impressed? Not one bit. You want to impress me, don’t give me the right answer. Ask the right question. From today you will be judged not by the answers you give, but by the questions you ask.”
  

Asking questions is important. Asking the right questions is even more important. And sometimes, asking the right questions requires some investigation, some experimentation.

And we let everyone down when we start labelling people adept at doing this as rebels and deviants. Or by labelling that class of activity as counterculture. Because the terms have been hollowed out and trashed.

Call it emergence. Call it democratised innovation. Call it something. Probably not even opensource any more, because the six-degrees-of-meaning approach has already connected opensource with pinko and lefty and rebel and deviant and counterculture.

Just don’t call it deviant.

Generation M is not innately rebellious or deviant or even countercultural. They have new tools they understand better than we do. They don’t have some of the shackles and frames and anchors and tunnel vision we have. And they are asking why? in a number of ways and in a number of places. And they need to be encouraged.

The act of downloading music off the Net is in no way rebellious or deviant. Just a better way of accessing and acquiring music. Buying books, ordering groceries, looking for cheap flights and hotels, watching homemade videos, these are not intrinsically deviant or rebellious activities. Combining things and seeing (or hearing) what happens is not fundamentally rebellious.

We have to be careful. Words have power. Let us use them wisely.

I’ve never driven a car in my life. I need to learn how to. I will, soon.

In India, when I was growing up, if you were rich enough to have a car, you were rich enough to have a driver. So I didn’t drive. My father never drove, neither did my grandfather.

But my daughter does. My wife does. My other children will, when they come of age. And I will. Soon.

Even though I didn’t drive, I spent hours fascinated by Indian car mechanics. Many of them didn’t speak English that well, I was used to hearing words and phrases like “radiowater” and “jugger-bugger” and wondering what they meant. It took me a while (well, I was eight at the time) to figure out they meant “radiator” and “shock absorber”.

They made cars work. Without manuals or directions or even spare parts. They cannibalised and adapted and fashioned from scrap and made from scratch. Amazing stuff. So, although eight cars in ten in Calcutta in the 1960s were Hindustan Ambassadors (modelled on the Austin Ambassador of a decade earlier) I grew up with the following: