Author: JP

Some of you may have seen this news report already. As the BBC says “India’s Calcutta to be painted blue“.

I was born there. Lived there for 23 years unbroken. And still consider myself a Calcuttan. [Enough to have named this blog after it]. So the story mattered to me.

Yet my first instinct was to avoid this topic altogether. I left Calcutta over 31 years ago. I don’t live there any more. I’ve only been there five times in the last 20 years. So I don’t have a right to say anything. And that is that.

And then I thought about it, and felt it would be strange if I didn’t cover the event, especially given my origins and association with the city. I don’t have a vote. But I can still have an opinion. [Readers in Kolkata: you live there, your opinions count far more than mine, so please treat my comments with as much disdain as you think they deserve.].

So here goes.

My first reaction was straight out of the book of McEnroe. You cannot be serious. And then I thought about it for a while, went and read the coverage across a bunch of sites, both local as well as international. Slowly I began to feel an odd sense of familiarity with the colours.

Soon I realised why I had the sense of familiarity. When I think of Calcutta, one of the first things I think of is my school. I went to a Jesuit school and college there, spent a wonderful fifteen years with them. St Xavier’s Collegiate School. St Xavier’s College. Institutions which had flags and uniforms and colours. Here’s a photograph of the flag being carried at the ceremonies to mark the 150th anniversary of the school:

Yup, blue and white.

And here’s a photo of the women’s hockey team, wearing what I remember to be the traditional Xaverian sports team colours:

Again, blue and white.

And there was something else. You would expect someone like me to think of the school first and everything else later. But what about someone like you? What images are conjured up in your brain? My guess would be that the first thing that enters your mind when you hear “Calcutta” is … Mother Teresa. [I suspect that if I’d asked the question fifty years earlier the answer would have been something else, but that’s another matter]. When Mother Teresa came to Calcutta, one of the first things she’s meant to have done is to have given up her classic nun’s habit to wear a simple, Indianised version, part habit part sari, as shown below.

Yes. Blue and white again.

An aside. The bulwark of my 15-year existence at St Xavier’s was Fr Camille Bouche, who was the “Prefect of Discipline” throughout my time there. A wonderful man, it was a privilege to have been taught, nurtured and discipled by him. I made a point of visiting him every time I went to Calcutta until he passed away. I last saw him at St Lawrence’s shortly before he died, and it was only in speaking to him that I realised just how close he’d been to Mother Teresa: I was aware of an association, but not its closeness, as briefly described here.

So now you can understand why I felt a sense of familiarity in imagining Calcutta in blue and white.

Other emotions stirred in me as well, more positive than I expected, more positive than I intended, still underpinned by my childhood experiences. I’d been brought up to dress smartly for school, to dress particularly smartly for sports matches, and to dress as smartly as possible for the “National Cadet Corps’. Crisply ironed clothes. Starched shining whites. Blancoed belts and webbing. Brassoed bits of metal everywhere. And shoes you could use as shaving mirrors. I must have been about 14 when I was preparing for what I considered to be an inconsequential cricket match, and my shoes were not particularly clean. Fr Bouche noticed them and asked me to go get them cleaned properly before I was allowed on the field of play. Some time later, I asked him why he’d done that. And all he said was “Baba, it’s an important discipline, you will think better and play better if you dress properly”. Later I heard him say something similar to a cadet in the NCC, how important it was for soldiers in terms of morale and discipline.

Those ideas have stuck with me. Deeply. So deeply that I know I will stop watching cricket the day Test matches are played by people in coloured pajamas. They can wear what they like for the limited overs games, they can wear shorts and t-shirts if they want for the 20/20, but when it comes to Test matches, there is no alternative. Whites.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve used the power of dressing up as a panacea for many things, all designed to lift up my mood and to help me focus. Depressed? Haircut and shave. Tired, exhausted? Best suit on. A day full of challenges? Dressed up to the nines. Every time with Fr Bouche standing beside me. Think better. Play better. Work better.

When I came to England, many of these ideas were reinforced during my early days in Liverpool, in Kew and in Richmond. I’ve never driven, and so I tended to travel often on buses. Every Saturday morning, as I went about my chores as a young man, I’d marvel at how the retired and the elderly would insist on shaving and on putting on a jacket and tie, even if only to go for a walk to get the paper. As I walked around the town in the afternoon (all the shops in town used to shut at 1pm those days) I’d notice just how many people were washing and cleaning window sills and windows, polishing doorknobs, trimming hedges, mowing lawns. Keeping things spick and span.

I marvelled at the discipline that they showed, at their age, and often despite the infirmities that age brought. Today I live in a different England, some of those disciplines just aren’t there any more.

When I left Calcutta I lost the right to vote on the subject. That is the prerogative of the people who live there today. And they are the only ones with that right. Again, if you’re reading this and you’re a Calcuttan, dismiss all of this with disdain if you disagree.

Of course there are a million reasons why not. The money can be used for so many other, important, perhaps even life-saving, activities and acquisitions. Painting the town blue sounds like a superficial, wasteful engagement.

But a little part of me is listening to Fr Bouche. And thinking. Hmmm.

 

 

 

 

There was a time that musicians produced collections of music called albums. A time when every song in the collection so published was worth listening to. A time when musicians even tried to create some sort of continuity, some sense of belonging, some coherence between the songs on the  albums. Sometimes they called them concept albums, to differentiate them from the others.

Albums. A fine idea. As an example, take a look at the albums I’ve listed below. All just from one year, 1971. From when I was 14. Every one a classic of its kind. If I could have afforded it, I could have bought a new album every two weeks. [In fact, I had every one of those albums in my collection in vinyl. I now have the lot in CD form, and just over half in vinyl as well.]

 

• 4 Way Street: Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
• Abraxas: Santana
• Aqualung: Jethro Tull
• Blue: Joni Mitchell
• Bridge Over Troubled Water: Simon and Garfunkel
• Chicago III: Chicago
• Emerson, Lake and Palmer: Emerson, Lake and Palmer
• Every Good Boy Deserves Favour: The Moody Blues
• Every Picture Tells A Story: Rod Stewart
• Fireball: Deep Purple
• Imagine: John Lennon
• Led Zeppelin III: Led Zeppelin
• Meddle: Pink Floyd
• Mud Slide Slim and The Blue Horizon: James Taylor
• Pearl: Janis Joplin
• Songs Of Love And Hate: Leonard Cohen
• Stephen Stills: Stephen Stills
• Sticky Fingers: The Rolling Stones
• Sweet Baby James: James Taylor
• Tapestry: Carole King
• Tea For The Tillerman: Cat Stevens
• Teaser And The Firecat: Cat Stevens
• The Yes Album: Yes
• Tumbleweed Connection: Elton John
• What’s Going On: Marvin Gaye
• Who’s Next: The Who

Well, that was over 40 years ago. I could have chosen 1969 or 1972 or pretty much any year from that genre and come up with similar results. As Mary Hopkin would have said, those were the days. Since then, slowly, alarmingly, albums started morphing into something else: vehicles for surrounding a few decent tracks with tat. Of course there were exceptions. But they were exceptions.

Not surprisingly, album sales declined, and continue to decline.

I could say that overall music quality declined as well, but that wouldn’t be fair or reasonable. Every generation tends to think that the music quality of succeeding generations is poorer. So I won’t go down that road.

What I can say is that the quality of recording is getting worse, something that Neil Young feels strongly about, something that we need to think hard about, find ways to change. In the meantime, Neil is working on a device and an end-to-end process that could transform the way we listen to music.

And in the meantime. I am so glad that sites like discogs.com exist. They’re amazing.

They help you discover music; make it easy for you to find people you share musical tastes with; provide ways to buy music and sell music in pretty much any format; they even have facilities for you to add to, correct or otherwise improve their database. Now that is what I call a 21st century open and social music site. Thank you discogs.

Okay, okay, you got the “social” bit, but where did I come up with the “open” tag? Here’s why:

 

A simple, worthwhile platform. REST APIs. Using open standards. Allowing people access to the core data and processes. Allowing people to build incremental value on top of the platform. Keeping to social, open and cloud principles.

 

Admit it. I had you with that headline. Have I finally flipped? What could possibly connect Neil Young and David Agus to the Social Enterprise, and related topics?

I could just say “Marc Benioff”, since he personally introduced me to all three.  Soon after joining Salesforce.com, I heard Marc speak about the concept while travelling with him through Munich and Davos last year; he gave me the opportunity to meet Neil Young, a boyhood hero of mine, in Tokyo last December; and he ensured that I had a chat with David Agus, heard him speak and read his book last week in Las Vegas. [Incidentally, if you have any interest in personal health, you should read David’s book, The End of Illness. I’ve just finished it, it’s an excellent read].

Serendipitous introductions, like the ones Marc made above, can be valuable; sometimes they’re valuable enough for me to write a blog post about them. And sometimes they’re a lot more important than that.

Let’s take David Agus and his book, which I will commend you again to read. It’s more than just a book, it’s a manifesto. A call to action built around some core (and radical) principles. A whole new way of looking at the very concept of health, or at the very least a renaissance of older ways, underpinned and substantiated by advances in medical research, technology and understanding.

Early on in the book, Dr Agus quotes JBS Haldane as saying, in Cambridge in 1923:

“The recent history of medicine is as follows. Until about 1870 medicine was largely founded on physiology, or, as the Scotch called it ‘Institutes of Medicine’. Disease was looked at from the point of view of the patient, as injuries still are. Pasteur’s discovery of the nature of infectious disease transformed the whole outlook, and made it possible to abolish one group of disease. But it also diverted scientific medicine from its former path, and it is probable that, were bacteria unknown, though many more people would die of sepsis and typhoid, we should be better able to cope with kidney disease and cancer.”

For patient read customer. That’s easy. And for disease read product/service; it may be a bit harder to strip negative connotations away from the word, but the principle is important so please try.

We used to be patient-centric, then found that we could industrialise processes better if we went disease-centric. Which was fine for some patients and some diseases. But overall it was a backward step as we stopped learning about the patient in a holistic manner.

Park that thought, and let’s move on to Neil Young. When we met in Tokyo, Neil spoke passionately about the parlous state of modern music. He’s been a harsh critic of the poor quality of MP3s, and has felt particularly aggrieved by the continuing deterioration of the technical quality of recorded music. As a result, he’s been working on ways to transform the music listening experience end-to-end, how music is recorded, how it is stored and retrieved, how it is played back, the devices used, the connectivity, the whole nine yards. You can read some of his views on this here and here. I was particularly taken with the way Wired UK reported on this, quoting him as saying:

My goal is to try and rescue the art form that I’ve been practising for the past 50 years. We live in the digital age, and unfortunately it’s degrading our music, not improving [it].

You could say Neil is putting forward a manifesto, a platform for change, transforming the customer experience end-to-end. It may be about his chosen art form, but the principle transcends that.

Which brings me to the Social Enterprise.

It’s a manifesto for radical change.

It begins with a holistic view of the customer; the entire process emanates from a 360-degree customer profile that is at the core of the Social Enterprise vision.

It then continues with a radical transformation of the business, end-to-end, connecting customers with the companies they deal with, their staff, their distribution network, supply chain and even their products.

And it focuses on making sure that technology is used to enhance the customer experience, not to degrade it. [Remember region coding on DVDs? That’s the sort of thinking that comes from being product-centric. No customer’s experience was enhanced even infinitesimally by that “invention”.]

And there you have it. How Neil Young and David Agus help me understand and explain the Social Enterprise.

I know, I know, you’re very tempted to say “To a hammer everything looks like a nail”.

But step back and think about it.

We have moved from being customer-centric to product- and service-centric in many contexts, sometimes to such an extent that we forget altogether about the customer. Think about what’s happening in education, no longer about the student or about learning; about what’s happening in healthcare, no longer about the patient or about being healthy; about what’s happening in government, no longer about the citizen or about her satisfaction.

There’s a renaissance needed, to a time when it was about the student, the patient, the citizen. And about the customer.

A renaissance based on using the tools of technological advance to improve the customer experience rather than to degrade it.

Thank you David Agus. Thank you Neil Young. Now, as I listen to my vinyl collection on my Linn equipment, and as I continue to approach my personal health and well-being holistically, I will also continue to learn about how the Social Enterprise works.

Have you heard of Sugata Mitra? If you haven’t, then please watch this video. And if you have, please watch this video. And if you’ve already seen it, please watch this video.

He’s an amazing guy; his ideas on “minimally invasive education” and “child-driven education” are fabulous; what’s more important is that he’s put his ideas into practice and shared the results with us. I had the privilege of watching him at TED Global at Oxford in 2010 (thank you Chris, thank you Bruno), and one phrase he used has stayed forever in my memory.

Teachers who can be replaced by computers should be replaced by computers

I may be paraphrasing him, but that’s the gist of what he said. That sentence, along with John Seely Brown’s deceptively simple question (How long does a five-year-old take to become a six-year-old? One year), have influenced quite a lot of my recent thinking on education. But that’s not what this post is about. Or maybe it is. Sometimes I get the feeling the answer to everything is learn, learn, learn. Learning is living. The willingness to learn fuels life.

When I first came across the concept of outsourcing I was mystified. The received wisdom was that we should only outsource operations that had well-defined and mature processes, standardised and repeatable. And a part of me was asking “Why? Surely those are the very processes that are prime candidates for automation? Why would we want to apply the sledgehammer power of human brains to such mundane things?”. I remained mystified as I watched the BPO market mushroom. Paraphrasing Sugata Mitra, I felt that processes that can be replaced by computers should be replaced by computers. And I could not understand why this didn’t happen.

Those were the days, eh? Times when we had regular, standardised, repeatable processes. Times when we knew when, where and how locked-in customers would consume products and services in a predictable, stable manner. Times when listening to the customer was easy because there was nothing they could say and nowhere they could say it. And even if they did say something, it was easy not to listen.

Today it’s a whole different ball game. And for some time now I’ve been stressing the importance of “designing for loss of control” as companies spend more and more time trying to fit square pegs into round holes, as engagement with the customer migrates and mutates away from standardisable processes; companies nowadays seem to spend more time “handling exceptions” than executing the unexceptional.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

Systems can ask for permission. Only humans can ask for forgiveness.

You can come up with rules for how people should do things, and come up with tables of authorities and permissions and what-have-you. Much of the time, all you’ve done is lay out a rulebase that can be automated. And perhaps should be automated. But maybe it’s too late for that. Today, we’re seeing a shift from process to pattern, a shift from rule to principle, a shift from hierarchical to networked, a shift from centralised to edge-based. No more repeatable processes. Values-based activity. With domain experts dotted throughout the organisation, engaging with customers who expect the people they’re dealing with to be empowered to deal.

Customers know all this.

Customers know that exception handling is now the norm. And they expect everyone to know this.

People in customer service will have to learn to improvise. Be creative. We’ve all heard tales about the helpdesk from hell of the type “My computer freezes every time I touch any key” “Well don’t touch any key then!”. That’s not going to work any more.

An aside. I was looking for recipes for jhal muri, street food from Calcutta. Extra-spicy puffed rice with dollops of mustard oil and lashings of fresh green chillies. And I found this site, which I loved. In fact the stimulus for writing this post came from reading the recipe. The author makes the point that there is no such thing as a recipe for the dish; just a set of ingredients that can be varied at will to suit tastes.

And I thought to myself, that’s how customer service will look in time to come. A set of “ingredients”, the things a company can do or make or provide, loosely coupled by the values and principles the company adheres to. A “cook” who puts those ingredients together, on order, to suit what the customer wants.

Creativity in customer service? Perish the thought.

But I’m being serious. It is possible that unless customer service gets creative, it will be the company that perishes, not the thought.

Which brings me to my final point. For this creativity to exist, we should look to the masters of improvisation, in music, drama, art. Before they could improvise, they had to have real in-depth knowledge of the domain, a feel for the space, an intuitive sense of what they do. [Maybe there’s a reason for knowledge workers to be called knowledge workers? Hmmm.] Before they could improvise, they had to understand the technical capabilities and constraints of the instruments they played, the tools they used. Intuition, coupled with technical skill, underpinned by experience.

That’s hard.

Or at least it used to be hard.

Now, with enterprise social networks, it’s become a whole lot easier. If they’re designed well, you’re able to able to propagate the principles and values consistently, develop both the tacit as well as the explicit knowledge needed, share and enhance experience, make it easier for people to build their intuition and their skillbase, grow their confidence via active feedback loops. All done in an environment where you can record and look back in order to learn and improve. [Of course this can be used to apportion blame as well, but that’s not a sustainable strategy]. That’s why I joined Salesforce just over a year ago, I was fascinated by what could be done with Chatter, how enterprises would be able to transform themselves.

Look around you. See if the culture of work you’re in is about permission or forgiveness. It’s a good yardstick for figuring out whether you’ve really grasped this new world we’re all entering.

My grandfather appears to have grown up in a village in southern India, attended university in what was then Madras, worked as “private secretary” to one of India’s richest men and biggest landowners, the Maharaja of Darbhanga, all on his way to founding a weekly magazine, called Indian Finance, in Calcutta in 1928. He died when I was sixteen months old, and he was succeeded by my father. So I grew up in a home full of books, where reading and writing and publishing put food on the table and, occasionally, even paid the bill.

It was an interesting business, with some very unusual approaches to vertical integration. The family owned the printing press. Made sense. If your livelihood depending on somebody printing, publishing and distributing what you write, then you’d want to own a printing press: the internet hadn’t been built as yet. The family also appeared to have significant stakes, perhaps ownership, in a canteen. You employ a lot of people, they need subsidised food, it made sense to own what must have been a precursor to the modern office cafeteria. But it didn’t appear to be that common in small family-owned businesses in the ’60s.

And there was an ad agency stuck in there somewhere. For the life of me I could not figure out whether we owned the agency, had shares in it, had a strategic alliance, or what, but there was a relationship. So when I was growing up, it looked like we “owned” a magazine, a printing press, a canteen and an ad agency. The set-up gave me some firsthand experience of what Ronald Coase was on about, in terms of the theory of the firm, transaction costs and vertical integration. [Amazingly, Ronald Coase is still alive. I would so love to meet him and talk to him!].

Which brings me to the point of this post.

As a child I used to have the run of the place, driving people insane with my constant questions “Why?”. I couldn’t help it, I was curious. One of the things I was curious about was the fact that every now and then, a parcel would arrive from Air India. And it contained tickets. Which was very strange, because I’d never known anyone who worked for Indian Finance travel abroad. And Air India did nothing but travel abroad, domestic travel used to be the sole domain of Indian Airlines in those days. So why were we buying the tickets? For what and for whom?

Nobody there seemed to know. Which meant that I had to ask my dad. It wasn’t the asking that was difficult, it was the remembering to ask. So many questions, so little time. Yet one day I did.

It turned out that the answer was simple. We wanted Air India to advertise in the magazine. They didn’t have the budget to do it…. as long as we wanted to be paid in cash. They were short cash. And they were long airline seats. So if we were prepared to be paid in airline seats, they would advertise. And so they did.

I have no idea whether my father pitched it to them or whether they pitched it to us, but the deal was done. And we kept getting tickets. Which somehow got used up.

Years later I went to university. Studied economics. Started writing stuff about banking and finance. Tripped and fell into computing in 1980. And here I am, 32 years later.

Fast forward to the 1990s. Lots of stuff published about the internet, increasing-returns models, “holonic” organisations, incubators and ecosystems. That’s when I first met Don Tapscott and read Paradigm Shift, a fabulous book. I think the firm he was with was called something like DMR Consulting, an interesting Canadian outfit. That’s when I fell in love with what Ken Ohmae described as the Borderless World. That’s when I really got into the works of W Brian Arthur.

More influenced by Dr Arthur’s work than anything else, overlaid on my childhood and education, I began to view economies the same way I viewed companies, a network of smaller organisations trading with each other. That view led me to observing the way companies did business with each other through different lenses, applying personal, often warped, interpretations of transaction cost theory to the whole network of companies.

It was a theme that had already been influenced by my exposure to EDI and SITPRO in the early 1980s; it was a theme that continued throughout my time in capital markets; it was a theme I continued to see elsewhere, in other industry sectors, as when Covisint was formed.

The theme was simple. What causes friction between companies in a market? How can that friction be reduced or removed altogether? What can be done with the resources that are freed up by removal of the friction? It may sound boring to many of you, but I enjoyed thinking about it and talking to friends and colleagues about it. Most of the time, in a post-trade world, frictions are caused by “reference data” mismatches: names, addresses, that sort of thing. Low-volatility data are incredibly important in capital markets; vast sums of money are spent in seeking to keep them accurate and up-to-date; and yet errors related to such data continue to be immense sources of friction within that trading environment.

So when I moved to Salesforce.com, I was fascinated to hear about the existence of what would soon become data.com.

Since joining the company, I’ve had the opportunity to watch the Social Enterprise concept emerge and take form; how important it was to connect customers and distribution and supply chain and staff, how an ecosystem of companies would evolve as a result, how this was really a fractal representation of the market and the global economy.

In the past, much of my thinking about this was in a post-trade context. Since the middle of 2010, I’ve been working on a book on Designing For Loss Of Control, and for the last year or so, I’ve been thinking about all this from a pre-trade perspective. What makes it difficult for companies to agree to trade with each other? What would happen if this barrier, this friction, was removed? How would we go about removing the friction?

Probably influenced by my time in capital markets, and probably underpinned by the environment I grew up in, I started thinking of pre-contract frictions as “mismatches” of some sort of other, sophisticated versions of what Air India faced when dealing with the family business. Long one thing, short another, willing to trade only if a way could be found. Again, influenced by capital markets and trading terminology, I kept seeing all this as flows, and as barriers to flow. This whole mindset was reinforced by repeated exposure to the research of John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, in The Big Shift and, prior to that, The Only Sustainable Edge. [And even before that, I felt the same sense and imagery of flow while reading JSB and Paul Duguid on The Social Life Of Information]. How could labour productivity have doubled since 1965 while return on assets dropped precipitously? And would the stocks-to-flows shift reverse that? If so why?

Influenced by all this, I began to visualise the possibility of radical changes in how companies contracted with each other, how risk was transferred, how gains and losses were crystallised. I began to visualise API-like structures connecting firms together, with each pair of connections choosing the best “currency” to execute the trade in, something that happened to suit both sides, some sort of barter 2.0. [Yes, I know that our systems of accounting and valuing what we do are way incapable of dealing with all this; but then some would say they appear to be way incapable of dealing with “normal” business today….] If you contracted with a haulage firm, the measure of success would be in volume of goods carried over distance; with a telco, it might be new customers gained; and so on. Some way of having a shared risk and reward system, such that both parties got paid out only when successful against some commonly agreed measure or baseline.

A part of me gave up on that thought stream, thinking that it would be too complex to agree the terms….. friction in the contracting process would not be reduced unless it was simple to agree the currency and the baseline, and unless it was difficult to game or subvert.

That remained the case until I came across the work of Geoffrey West on cities. How some things experienced superlinearity in comparison to population, while others had sublinear relationships. I had the chance to talk to him at TED Global last year, and understood he was driving the research into the corporate world as well.

And that made me think. For each company-pair, if we could identify something desirable, something that had a simple superlinear relationship to something else that was easy to measure and hard to game, we could simplify the contracting process and de-risk it for both sides.

All this stems from a sense that the way firms contract with each other today is a static stocks-based view of the world. That the world of the cloud is radically different, flexible, elastic, dynamic. That as companies continue to connect with their customers and supply chain, as trust is created through transparency, as information flows faster and faster, as low-volatility data becomes more reliable, we’re going to see new forms of contracting. And new forms of currency. In a typically William-Gibsonian manner, this is happening already.

The social enterprise will accelerate all this. It’s about flow. Not just in the Hagel-Seely Brown-Davison sense. But also in the Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi sense.

Thoughts? Views? Or is this all too much for a Saturday night?