Category: Four pillars

It had to happen. Second Life meets S.O.A.P. Check this out.

Looks like machinima is the next word for my vocabulary after minihompy. Not neologisms, just new to me. I live and learn.
This week, Second Life has already had Suzanne Vega and Howard Rheingold, they’re due to have Kurt Vonnegut Jr tonight, and (for those somewhat younger than me) Duran Duran have recently bought a virtual island to perform on. See this schedule if you want to get an idea of what’s happening.
It’s funny how people keep asking “Where are the aggregators?” I wonder what they think a Google or eBay or Amazon or Youtube or Wikipedia or Technorati or Second Life are.

Some parts of the Second Life model are fascinating. I particularly like the way the medium (can I call it that? I’m not used to saying metaverse, but I guess I’ll learn) allows both scarcity and abundance to coexist for the same product. It’s not far different from getting, say, Reuters prices at a premium instantly, or free-to-air with a fifteen minute delay. This can be done in isolation in Second Life. By the time you factor in other universes, so to say, we’re going to see some interesting shifts in what abundances and shortages can mean.

I’ve wrestled with this issue for a few decades now, through the Strassmann and Carr arguments and a whole slew in between. And sometimes it feels a bit like The Emperor’s New Clothes. It’s just not done (in polite circles) to point out the guy’s not wearing any.
When I look back over the years, I find that my arguments came down to this:

1. Costs are easy-ish to measure, benefits aren’t.

2. Even if costs are easy-ish to measure, allocating them is often a major headache.

3. And if allocating costs is hard, try “allocating” benefits. Just try it.
4. Quite often the decision is already made, by people with the authority to make the decision, so where’s the value in post-facto bureaucracy?

5. The process of trying to define, measure and crystallise benefits is itself so amorphous that it lends itself to arbitrage; more projects “fail” as a result of benefit-arbitrage politics than is commonly known or accepted. It’s along the lines of “When you can’t deliver the benefits, get your defence in first. Attack the project.”
So I spent time looking at Andrew Abbott’s The System Of Professions and the Searls/Brand Because Of Rather than With, spent time looking at democratised innovation and its implications, trying to figure out how best to deal with the issue.

I never questioned the need to have a real and communicable plan, a routemap, an expected cost and an expected timescale. I never questioned the need to ensure that the decision-maker(s) were empowered to make the decision(s). I never questioned the need to have good feedback loops and monitoring processes. What I questioned was the process by which the benefits were “created” and then used as an opportunity for arbitraging the rest of the project, and how much time and money was spent arguing about them prior to project initiation in comparison with post-implementation-benefits-analysis.

So it was with considerable interest that I read Andrew McAfee’s recent post on The Case Against The Business Case. I was particularly intrigued to see the comments made by Bob Kaplan on the topic; I will now go and read Strategy Maps, I’d bought the book and not got around to reading it.

Thanks, Andrew! Much food for thought.

I came across this post by Guy Kawasaki, commenting on Seth Godin’s latest book, due out sometime this nonth.

Do read it, what they speak of is very much in tune with what I was saying in my previous post, even though there are a number of things I disagree with.

Here’s what Guy quotes from the book:
For an idea to be spread, it needs to be sent and received.

No one sends an idea unless:

1. They understand it.
2. They want it to spread.
3. They believe that spreading it will enhance their power (reputation, income, friendships) or their peace of mind.
4. The effort to send the idea is less than the benefits.

No one “gets” an idea unless:

1. The first impression demands further investigation.
2. They already understand the foundation ideas necessary to get the new idea.
3. They trust or respect the sender enough to invest the time.

A number of things occur to me as I read this:

(a) Seth talks about enhancing “power” or peace of mind. I could, if I wanted to, cite the Nohria and Lawrence Four Driver model and connect this to the Drives to Acquire, Learn, Bond and Defend. But I am intrigued by just how often people refuse to accept any form of altruism as a motive to do something. In fact I’m more than intrigued. The reason so many people fail to understand the opensource movement or democratised innovation is precisely this, a failure to understand or accept altruism as a motive for anything. Yes there is peer respect and peer feedback loops and learning and peace of mind. But not at the expense of altruism. If you don’t get that, you won’t get opensource.

(b) I also think people need to accept provisionality is part of the new way of doing things; as Doc says, blogs are provisional. So it may well be that the “sender” of the idea doesn’t understand everything about the idea, but ploughs on regardless. Again, this is a fundamental shift from the past. [Actually it’s not that big a shift, it’s more an Emperor’s-New-Clothes shift. In the past people pretended they understood everything and that everything was accurate and perfect and and and. Now they know different and, at least in the blogosphere, we’ve started dropping the pretence :-) ]

(c) The two lists can actually be made into one list. The difference between sender and receiver is less distinct than has even been the case before. You could even take the last “receiver” point and say “If you don’t trust or respect yourself, then you will find it hard to blog your ideas.”

Let me summarise. Last time around I spoke about trust, and the Guy post/Seth book do that better than I could. However.

There are at least three concepts that, unless understood, will make it hard for people to grasp what is happening:

• Altruism
• Provisionality
• Sender-receiver concept convergence

People can be altruistic, not everyone wants to find ways of “monetising” and “securitising” everything they do. People can be comfortable with being “provisional” rather than false-certain about things. In the blogosphere, the distinction between sender and recipient is blurred.

Deal with it.

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 :-)