Category: Four pillars

The Ugly Question

Going by the number of people who pooh-pooh, write off or just plain criticise Facebook, and by the vehemence with which they do it, I’m surprised that they aren’t calling it the F-word.

I feel old and in the way. Seen it all before. In fact, I’ve seen it so many times that I’m tempted to start asking the ugly question:

Have you actually spent any time using it?

You’d be amazed at the responses you get.

People love to pontificate about phenomena like Facebook without ever having used it “in anger”. Reminds me of a story my Physics teacher used to tell, about the way the Greeks apparently argued about things like stones and feathers and free fall. A stone fell quickly, a feather fell slowly. If you tied a stone to a feather, would the resulting mess fall faster than the stone (because the combination was heavier) or more slowly (because the feather “slowed down” the stone). The point he was trying to make was that they kept debating the issue without ever actually trying it out. The Romans, on the other hand, just climbed up a tall building and watched what happened. Or so the story goes.

This post isn’t really about Facebook, but then again maybe it is. Maybe we can learn something from looking at the types of people who object to Facebook. Here’s my light-hearted list:

Hrrumph Steak: This is the type of person who goes red in the face when you ask him whether he’s actually used Facebook at all, and remains embarrassedly silent. Dead meat in more ways than one.

Billy Slow-Mates: This guy is actually nothing more than a shy late adopter, waiting to see what his friends do. In the meantime he hopes he keeps his street cred by claiming complete ignorance. Usually a true fanatic once converted.

IM I Said: This is the guy who’s taken this long to discover instant messaging and texting, and doesn’t feel he needs another mode of communication. Often seen buying LaserDiscs and, occasionally, Betamax tapes.

Time Lord: This person just considers Facebook to be a waste of time and that’s that. Probably because it interferes with his Word Search and Sudoku.

The Jobcentred: The sort of guy who thinks you’re slacking on the job if you talked about the cricket or the weather while waiting for the lift to arrive.

I’m sure there are many good reasons why people think Facebook is evil. I just don’t know any of them. As with anything else, moderation is called for, and there are many ways by which moderation is arrived at. Most people I know who use Facebook have fairly full lives. Remember that all this started with college students, real social animals in the main. People who imagine that Facebook users are introverted No-First-Life loners couldn’t be further from the truth. Facebook is about community and interaction.

And it’s this facet of Facebook, the community and its interactions, that I will write about next in my Facebook and the Enterprise series.

More musing about open multisided platforms

The Wall Street Journal, in today’s print edition page C8, has an article headlined Facebook’s software boon. [The link should lead to a summarised version of the article that has not yet been paywalled.]

The article discusses the purchase of Where I’ve Been (a Facebook application) by Expedia (or, more accurately, Expedia’s TripAdvisor unit) for $3m, or $1.30 per Where I’ve Been ‘customer’. Which is all very fine and dandy. But it then goes on to discuss something else. I quote:

What’s in all this for Facebook and its youthful founder Mark Zuckerberg? When a company pays a college kid in his boxers a few million to acquire his creation, no money lands in Facebook’s coffers. And when the application is rebranded it effectively becomes free advertising for which Facebook, again, gets nothing.

It’s not yet clear how Facebook will exploit this bonanza. Charging software developers some sort of advertising fee to promote their wares on the site may prove irresistible. The worry is that this might change the character of the site. One of Facebook’s attractions is that it’s more collegiate and less overtly commercial than Rupert Murdoch’s ad-filled MySpace.

One solution that would allow Facebook to capitalise on the ferment would be for the company to take equity stakes in the applications in exchange for allowing them on the site. In so doing, Facebook would have an incentive to promote them without cluttering up its interface. Now there’s an application Facebook’s own developers should be designing.

I think two of the sentences above are telling.

“What’s in all this for Facebook….?”

“It’s not yet clear how Facebook will exploit this….”

These are the wrong questions to be asking, questions that are typical of Web 1.0. Questions that show a lack of understanding of The Because Effect.

We have to move away from the mindset in the article, which represents the economics of scarcity, to one which represents the economics of abundance. We have to move, more particularly, away from models which create artificial scarcities in order to support economics-0f-scarcity structures.

Facebook will actually make money on a double Because Effect. Because Of the people who use Facebook, and Because Of the applications they use.

Because Of is the answer, not With. Any specific application is a model of scarcity in this context, and the application developers can make money With the application. The ecosystem of applications, the open multisided platform, is a model of abundance, and the ecosystem providers need to base their business on that abundance basis.

From what I’ve seen, the guys at Facebook understand all this, so I do not expect to see artificial scarcities created. Instead, I will expect to see advertising-driven revenues. I will expect to see transaction fees, but more on an all-you-can-eat basis rather than a dish-at-a-time basis. I may even see vanilla-for-free and sophisticated-at-a-premium models. Or maybe a combination of these.

Taxing the application developer is the equivalent of American Idol having entrance fees and making voting free. There are smarter ways to make money. Facebook needs the app developers. The app developers need Facebook. It’s a symbiotic relationship, a community.

Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 6: Musing about Role-driven Induction

I’m one of those people who likes the Max de Pree definition of leadership:

  • The first job of a leader is to articulate strategy and vision.
  • The second and last is to say thank you.
  • In between, a leader should be a servant and a debtor to the led.

De Pree’s definition, which forms the basis for his works on servant leadership, resonate well with my personal spiritual beliefs, leaving me with fewer conflicts in life.
I’m also one of those people who believes in “nurture” far more than “nature”; I truly believe that given the right environment, training, opportunity and motivation, anyone can do almost anything.

Given these values and beliefs, I’ve tended to prefer management styles that use mentoring and coaching methods to train and empower, rather than stentorian or authoritarian approaches, or for that matter spoon-fed prescription. I think it is important to teach people to discover their potential, to be able to live up to that potential and then to extend it.

As a result, I’m always on the lookout for tools and techniques that improve my capacity to mentor and coach people. So I thought it was time to review what something like Facebook could do in this respect, speaking from an enterprise perspective. How could Facebook help?

For many years I’ve been looking for a way to simplify role-driven induction, such that I can

  • list all the committees a person should belong to
  • list all the “meetings” a person should attend
  • list all the people a person should normally interact with, staff as well as customers
  • list all the applications a person should use
  • list all the “permissions” and authorisation levels a person needs
  • list all the intranet web sites a person should visit

Of course, I can do all this now. Yes, but not that accurately. IF I use something like Facebook, I can get so much better at doing this. Today, I have to use formal organisation charts and job descriptions to create an artificial model of what the person should do, and then try and overlay that with real-world mentoring and coaching so as to bridge the gulf between theory and practice. I guess it’s a bit like driving a car (incidentally something I don’t know how to do!). Theory is what you need to pass the test, and practice keeps you alive, even gets you from A to B traffic permitting.

With Facebook, I can capture the real-life interactions of a person in an organisation. Whom he connects with, what groups he joins, what events he goes to, whom he converses with, exchanges communications with, what applications he uses, which ones he doesn’t use, what he reads, to a certain extent even why he reads something. Over time, these real-life interactions allow me to model the role far more effectively than I can today.

Over time, I can create a template for every given role. I can try and construct a baseline structure and look at variations between people, see whether those variations improve performance or not. Learn from those variations and pass that learning to the people performing the roles. Find out, for example, who are the “professional meeting attenders” and genuinely and dispassionately work out whether they’re bane or boon. Who the lone wolfs are. Maybe even get some Gladwellian Tipping-Point classifications for the staff.

You can see how the templates could get richer and richer over time, as we add learning and extend the population and timescale.  In turn, the templates form a rich basis for role induction, both for grad hires as well as for laterals. It’s almost as if you can create an unmanned cockpit and dashboard and headphones and everything for a given role, then transfer people into it as needed. Provide a really rich context and structure for what a person actually does in a given role.

When we are able to do this, we can spend far more time on the more valuable bits of human and career development, looking at a person’s communications style, approach to teamwork, to performance evaluation, to conflict resolution, even to goal-setting and refining.

[An aside. I am not interested in reducing standard deviation in performance. I am far more interested in exploring ad exploiting the things that make a person different and distinctive, by simplifying the boring things. Assembly line thinking has no role to play in 21st century services. Or education. Or healthcare.]

When we can capture a person’s interactions patterns on an objective and unemotional basis, we are also able to form the basis for something else, something that I will cover in my next post. Let me leave you with a taster, a teaser:

Human interactions have a cost and a value, both within the enterprise as well as beyond the enterprise. If we are able to price and value interactions on an individual basis, even crudely, we are able to create far better feedback loops than we’ve ever had. As the population covered grows, we are able to bring in collaborative filtering processes, ratings and recommendations, really get engaged on a Wisdom Of Crowds and democratised innovation model.

But first we have to be able to capture the population and their interactions. Objectively. Unemotionally.

Musing about national anthems

I’m not a particularly jingoistic person. I’ve heard and seen too much damage done in the name of “national pride”. I’m not a particular lover of passports either, believing that they’ve become bureaucratic barriers over the years, rather than the leave-to-wander-unfettered that they originally represented.

Notwithstanding all that, I’ve held on to my passport and nationality of birth; I’d prefer to think of my stance as dignity rather than jingoism.

When I was growing up, I’d hear the national anthem regularly; every film I watched ended, for some reason, with the national anthem. I loved the tune and the words, probably even more so in knowing that it had been written by Tagore. I felt we’d lost something when the tradition died.

There are still some places where I hear national anthems, usually at sporting events. Too often, many in the audience don’t appear to know the words for their own national anthem, and tend to trivialise the occasions, especially when it’s the opponents’ anthem.

With all this in mind, I was strangely touched by this video, probably released to coincide with India turning 60 last week.

More than anything else, what the video did for me is to remind me that we can be dignified without being overly jingoistic. And for that I am grateful to the makers of the video, and to my sister for pointing it out to me.

If you’ve wondered about OpenID, and you’ve wanted to know more

…this video by Simon Willison is a good place to start.

Incidentally, the way I got to the video is probably the way I’m going to get to many things in the future. I was in Facebook, used Blog Friends to get to Chris Messina’s Ma.gnolia, read a very interesting article on Identitu.de by Dan York, and while reading that saw the reference to the Simon Willison screencast (something I missed because I was recuperating in hospital when it came out).

While doing all this, I also found Aswath Rao’s blog, somewhere I intend to spend a little time. Soon.

We need to get used to this process. Some place in cyberspace you go to regularly, a place that supports your reading the blogs of people you trust and like, your friends. A way of following the recommendations that your friends make, particularly about things you’re interested in. A way of selecting from those recommendations those which you intend to do something about.

Lower search and discovery costs. Persistent and shareable processes. Patterns I can study and learn from. I like what I see.