Category: Four pillars

Whenever I get the chance, I talk to people about just how they use Facebook as part of their day-to-day business. Today it was my sister Jayapriya’s turn. She runs a literary agency out of India and China and Singapore and a few other places, and was in town for the book far.

She described how she meets publishers, converses with them, forwards manuscripts where relevant and completes contractual negotiations, all on Facebook.

And something about the way she said all this made me realise something for the first time. It’s pretty obvious. It’s very obvious. But I missed it. Completely.

And that is this:

When people converse on Facebook, they connect with each other. Not with intermediaries. No PAs or EAs or ESs or whatever.

Up till now, enterprise mail has always been all about mailing lists and distribution lists and blind copies and carbon copies. As it matured, enterprise mail became all about Office attachments, particularly spreadsheets and presentations and documents. 

And I hated it. So not fit for purpose. [Or, to put it another way: Fit for a purpose I wanted no part of: Fit mainly for office politics and intrigue].

A few weeks ago, I mused about the lack of a Forward button on Facebook, and how refreshing that was. The implications of not having a cc button or bc button  or Office attachments. The implications of having Record Video and Share Link and Add Music/Video.

But I missed this key difference. The disintermediation of the enterprise protective barrier. I need to think about it some more, try and see just how people work differently as a result.

What I see so far is intriguing. I see that Facebook mail is all about between-enterprises rather than within-the-enterprise. Between-enterprise mail is largely about business and rarely about politics. Within-enterprise mail is often about politics. 

I wonder. Comments anyone. Stowe, your input will be appreciated, given your unrequited and yearning love for e-mail.

A couple of days ago I read a headline in the Financial Times (strange, the things I get up to on vacation!):

Airlines and their regulator too “collaborative” says watchdog

You can find the article here. [For some reason, the headline in the print copy is not the headline in the linked article, but the change of headline is not germane to this post.]

The juxtaposition of the airline, regulator and watchdog took me on one of my traditional flights of fancy, and I thought I’d share it with you, and learn from your comments and links.

Many years ago, I worked at Silwood Park, an Imperial College research campus near Ascot, Berkshire. I used to travel in on the White Bus from Windsor (where I still live), serenely passing through the Great Park against the grain of the traffic before getting off the bus approaching Sunninghill.

Most of the passengers were regulars, as was Alan, the pipe-smoking genial driver. [I still see Alan in WIndsor every now and then, though he’s retired now]. Most of the passengers were forty years older than me, going about their morning errands and chores, shaven, shorn and dressed for the day; theirs was a generation of immense discipline and courage, and it showed in their retirement.

There was only one other passenger anywhere near my age, long-haired, bejeaned and Jesus-bearded. I cannot recall his name (this was over 20 years ago) but I do recall what he said he did.

And what he did was this: Using formal research methods, he sought to identify the parasite and the pest that went with a particular plant. Apparently, as human migration continued through the ages, we took our plants with us. And, usually accidentally, we took the related pest or parasite as well.

But rarely both. Since we didn’t know what we were doing, we tended to take plant+pest or plant+parasite, all by happenstance, and as a result the plant turned out to be unstable in the ecosystem it was transplanted into.

So this guy, and his colleagues, spent all their time trying to locate the precise pest or parasite that had been “disembarked”, with a view to repairing the ecosystem imbalance.

I found all this fascinating, and have spent time reading up on the different forms of symbiosis as a result, seeking to understand the difference between pests and parasites and their relationships and interactions with the “host”.

Maybe it’s the heat, maybe it’s because I’m on vacation, but the first thing that occurred to me when I saw the “…regulator too collaborative…” headline was: plant: parasite: pest.

We have much we can learn from biology, but until now I did not consider regulatory models to be part of that set. Now, having considered this for a few days, I am intrigued.

Can we come up with a market model where participants are “hosts”, regulators are “parasites” and watchdogs are “pests”? Can we learn to model these things objectively, without reacting to negative connotations of the terms themselves?

Well, aqualung, (since you tweeted the question) that’s what I’ve been thinking about. How to create a better model for market regulation, one that creates a balanced ecosystem. How to learn from nature in doing this, in conceptualising it.

I won’t bore you guys with the rest, I’ve been working on quite an elaborate model: what I will say is that there is scope to build out many related concepts: the obligate relationship between the host and the parasite, the lack of an obligate relationship between the host and the pest; how the pest keeps parasite numbers down; how the parasite protects the plant from the pest.

Just the kind of stuff I like thinking about on vacation.

Comments welcome.

I guess most of you have seen this by now, it’s been doing the rounds these past few days. (My apologies, I can’t actually remember where I first saw it and saved the diagram. When I remember I will make sure I give credit appropriately.):

 

It reminded me of the Indexed blog, where Jessica Hagy has been entertaining us with wonderful charts for some time now. Here’s an example:

By the way, her book’s pretty good as well. She has a searing wit about her, she touches many diverse subjects, and she does a great job showing how charts can be used to actually convey information. Strongly recommended. 

We have so much to learn about visualisation.

Most of you are aware of my consuming interest in how Facebook creates value for the enterprise. Over the past eighteen months or so, I’ve written a large number of posts on the subject, and am currently in the process of converting them into a book. [Before you ask, the book will be a free download.]

The interest is not just academic; where I work, we have well over 10,000 people on Facebook, learning by watching and doing, and we continue to fashion and build tools that embrace and extend that learning.

Those who know me well would also be aware of the high regard in which I hold John Seely Brown and John Hagel, ever since I read  The Social Life of Information (written by JSB in conjunction with Paul Duguid). The Only Sustainable Edge (written by the two Johns) is a book I delve into frequently, and I’ve had the privilege of knowing both the authors personally for some time now. In fact I was with John Hagel earlier this week.

Whenever I used the word “Facebook” in the same sentence as “enterprise”, I used to get quizzical looks. Sometimes those looks went beyond quizzical, marauding into the territory of “he’s old, he’s past it, let’s just humour him”.

Which is why I have this sense of being “legitimised” when I read this article in BusinessWeek, by the two Johns, on what executives can learn from Facebook. 

An aside. How did I know about the article? Because it showed up on my Facebook news feed as a post by JSB. Seems fitting, somehow.

They make a number of points really well, points that I have written about before, but without the crispness and coherence they bring to the table:

• Innovation happens at edges
• Youth shouldn’t be discounted, their demographic group has edges as well, edges where innovation takes place
• We need to build platforms that sustain many open edges in order to foster innovation
• When building the platforms, we need to ensure that the time/money costs of edge innovation are kept low

The “lessons” piece at the end, while succinct, is really worthwhile. Don’t dismiss it lightly just because you may have come across variants before:

• Create more edges
• Provide better ways to connect at the edge
• Demographic edges are fertile grounds for business innovation
• Experiment and iterate rapidly
• Social, technologic[al] and economic are inextricably intertwined

And, of course, the paragraph at the end.

“Social interaction often precedes economic activity.”

Otherwise known as cluetrain. Markets are conversations. Relationship before conversation before transaction.

More later.

 

I’m not a traditional company investor. Since 1987, the only stakes I’ve held have been in the companies I worked for, and they’ve been acquired while I worked for them. That’s been a Rule for me.

Rules, however, are proven by exception. And I’ve made an exception.

School of Everything.

Regular readers will know that I have a passion for education, in many forms and shapes. One of my goals in life has always been to set up a school, from scratch.

Those who have worked with me over the years will also know that I have a similar passion for start-ups, for “fresh blood” innovation. 

And, if you’ve been following this blog over the last year or so, you will have found it hard not to notice that I spend a lot of time looking at social networks and how they work.

So.

It seems appropriate that the first exception I make to the Rule brings these strands together: a start-up, focused on education-with-a-difference, innovative in its style and outlook, discovered as a result of Facebook.

I met the founders many months ago, and they have a passion about them, an excitement about them, an excitement that bodes well for the future. They stand for many things I identify with, and I’m delighted to be able to be a small part of what they are doing. I wish them well, and hope that I can help be of some help to them.

You can read more about it here on TechCrunch, or here on the School of Everything blog.