Category: Four pillars

I never really knew my father’s father. Not surprising, really, since he died on 12 March 1959, when I was all of sixteen months old.

I have nothing that belonged to him. A few photographs of him, yes. Some memories, possibly false, heavily influenced by what I’ve been told about him since, primarily by his wife, my grandmother, who outlived him by nearly 50 years. She died in April 2006, a real survivor. I remember being sad when told she was going to die of a tumour….. in 1966.

I never really knew my father’s father.

And so, for the last few years, I’ve been running an experiment. “Forensically” reconstructing him. Using the web. And only the web. Primarily book and magazine extracts that make their weary way on to the web. Trying to see what I learn as a result, not just about him, but about the web as well.

It all started nearly four years ago with My Grandfather’s Teeth, a passage I found in a book I came across online. Here’s the extract.

I now have a copy of the book. The incident of coming across the passage gave me the idea that I would, on a regular basis, trawl the web for evidence of my grandfather’s life, and, based on what I found, reconstruct a profile of the man. [In turn, I hope the exercise would inform me about my father, whom I knew well and yet in some ways didn’t know at all: he died when I was 22, sadly and suddenly. And as I learnt about my father, I hope to learn more about myself.]

So here are some of the things I’ve learned so far:

So now I know that he died of coronary thrombosis, in Calcutta, on March 12, aged 65. I can assume 1959, given the date of the publication. So I also know that he must have been born in 1894 or so. I now know that he was Managing Editor of Indian Finance [yes of course I knew that already, it was the family business, he founded it, and I was its last Editor and Publisher. But the point is to reconstruct the profile using the web and the web alone]. I also know that some people thought he would be missed, and that he was a picturesque and patriarchal figure in the world of Indian….

What else? My father starts making an appearance soon after that, not in chronological terms, but in the sequence in which I came across the web spoor. Here’s an extract from the introduction to the Silver Jubilee issue of something, in 1953. Although the cover is illegible, I can surmise that it is a commemorative volume to do with Indian Finance, the family-owned journal started by my grandfather in 1928.

So now someone else thought that people did not sufficiently recognise the greatness of the founder of Indian Finance, this someone’s old friend and colleague, my grandfather.  The writer goes on to say: I do not know of any greater exponent of current economic and financial problems than Mr CS Rangaswami, whose place is now gradually being taken by his brilliant son Raju. [That’s my father, he would have been 24 at the time].

By finding the excerpt below, I can get an idea that my grandfather was considered a quotable expert on aspects of finance. Here he appears in a review of the silver market by the United States Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, in 1932:

I then learnt that when he arrived in Calcutta, he had just a couple of rupees in his pocket. That he stepped into a dazzling world of maharajas and magnates. And that he was picked by the late Maharaja of Darbhanga as his Secretary, as shown below:

This view, of his having very little money when he arrived, is endorsed by the snippet below, calling him a self-made financial expert. And I get further endorsement that he started the magazine himself.

I begin to form a picture of the man. And then I find out he is listed amongst those in the press who struggled for India’s freedom, as shown below:

I learnt that he spent time teaching people, and explaining things to them:

I learnt that his opinion was sought by government committees and appeared in research journals:

I learnt he was befriended by many people also held in high regard, and that they wrote for the journal:

I learnt that he was a man of some humour, some scathing wit, someone who liked playing with language. An unprovoked compliment. I do like that turn of phrase!

The idea that he had something to do with the freedom movement is reinforced in the snippet below, evinced in his friendship with the Asaf Alis, with Maulana Azad and with Pothan Joseph. Something else I was told, that he’d harboured and protected Muslims in his palatial home during the Partition riots, that statement assumes more significance when I see the Azad and Asaf Ali names here. But I shall wait to “discover” that properly. [I was named after one of his friends, Jayaprakash Narayan, JP to his friends. Apparently he was my godfather; there’s a photograph somewhere of me in his arms. But I have no memory of him, and what I know is what I learnt living in India between 1957 and 1980.]

So what do we have? Let’s see. Born around 1894. Arrived in Calcutta penniless. Worked for the Maharaja of Darbhanga as Secretary. A self-made man, founder of a respected magazine, living in a palatial home, his opinion and advice sought on many matters by governments and politicians, hobnobbing with maharajas and magnates. Was part of the freedom struggle. Assisted by a brilliant son. Died of coronary thrombosis in 1959.

Everything hunky-dory? Not quite. What about this, found in the National Archives here in the UK?

A player. As I look further into the archives, I find out about letters sent from Grosvenor House here in London, and from the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay. Letters asking various cabinet and board members to support Osborne Smith, to push back against Griggs. Here’s where it gets meatier:

So now my grandfather’s up to some intrigue or the other, appearing in classified documents, and there are copies of documents sent by him, but in the handwriting of the person he’s attacking. All this in letters from the head of the Police Office to the Director of the Intelligence Bureau. Hmmm.

And then Special Branch gets involved. [A bit cheeky of me, I haven’t yet proven to you in this post that PR Srinivas is my grandfather’s partner, but there is web proof of this].

And suddenly the Viceroy’s involved, with letters intercepted and returned….

That’s it for now. A lazy Saturday post, showing you how one can construct a profile of someone just using the web. Genealogy with a twist. Let me know what you think.

Addendum: Found evidence that he spent two months in the UK, ostensibly in November and December 1938. He wrote this in Singapore on his “way back from the UK”.

 

 

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi: Toyotomi Hideyoshi returning to the scene of his army’s victory

It’s that time of year when I get asked to make predictions for the year ahead, particularly in the context of enterprise software. It’s that time of year when I tend not to do anything as a result.

But this year’s different. This year I think we’re on the verge of something sufficiently different to warrant my writing about it. Something that’s been spoken about for over a decade. Something that’s been bubbling under for much of that time. Something that’s happening now; something that will dominate the year to come, perhaps the decade to come.

Max de Pree, one of my favourite writers on leadership, once said:

In some South Pacific cultures, a speaker holds a conch shell as a symbol of temporary position of authority. Leaders must understand who holds the conch—that is, who should be listened to and when.

In 2012, the customer holds the conch. And for years to come, the customer’s going to keep that conch. It’s not just about broken guitars. Or retracted debit card fees. Or shelved plans to break up services. Or even, for that matter, Occupy movements or Arab Springs. 

It’s about all of them. So, with that as context, here are my predictions for the world of enterprise software in 2012.

 

Prediction 1: The customer will insist on being listened to

Hank Ketcham, the creator of Dennis The Menace, once said, I think via Dennis: Just because I didn’t do what you told me, doesn’t mean I wasn’t listening to you. That’s what companies have been doing, not listening. They’ve spent a long time often pretending to listen to the customer, then doing what they intended to anyway. Listening is going to become more important than ever before. And if you want to listen to the customer, then you’re going to have to go to where the customer is. In the social networks. The hierarchical broadcast model of advertising will get replaced by a networked distributed listening model, something that has already begun to happen. More and more, the use of focus groups and sample surveys will recede, as companies learn that listening at scale is more accurate than the randomness of sampling. The skills required to structure the surveys will still be needed, but the surveys will operate across the customer base rather than concentrate on a select few. Customers are sharing where they are, what they did, what they’re doing and what they’d like to do. They’re sharing who they were with, who they are with and who they’d like to be with. They’re sharing what they liked, what they like and what they would like. Customers are sharing their personal and individual preferences, plans and intentions, and they expect to be listened to. Personalisation and customisation will stop being buzzwords and become business as usual.

 

Prediction 2: Customers will insist on being listened to

Listening to the customer is not going to be enough. Companies are going to have to learn to listen to customers in groups as well as as individuals, severally as well as jointly. Obfuscation of price and discount and service availability and service quality is going to become more and more difficult, as connected customers learn how to use their power to obtain and sustain transparency; the perfect market that companies have dreamed about will start becoming reality….. for customers. Trust between customers and companies will increasingly come to depend on this transparency. Think Groupon meets Priceline, but on steroids. As a result, companies will have to be able to design services at speed, to listen at speed and to adapt their offerings at speed, responding to customer sentiment, learning by doing. Feedback loops will become more and more important. Customers will also increase the way they listen to each other, as they recognise the value of their social networks not just as recommenders but as filterers.

Prediction 3: Customers will insist on true freedom of choice

Historically, there have been many markets where customer choice has been restricted by companies focused on vertical integration; the ability to mix and match components or ingredients was denied on the basis that vertically integrated end-to-end solutions were cheaper to acquire and easier to use. Over time, this became part of the customer psyche, perhaps akin to Stockholm Syndrome. As customers learn about their power as individuals and as a collective, they will insist on true choice, and continuing choice. Products will be seen as belonging to families and ecosystems, with increasing choice between components of the ecosystem and between ecosystems. Interoperability will become more important.

Prediction 4: The enterprise software landscape will be transformed as a result

Companies will need tools to help them listen to their customers, individually and collectively; to understand what they’re saying; to build, alter and refine their offerings based on customer feedback; to work with other companies in an open and federated manner; to make their products and services work with competitive products and services; to give their customers choice, and to expect their customers to exercise that choice.

Driven by this freedom of choice, the end-to-end control historically enjoyed by many companies will disappear. Process automation will look different, as companies spend more and more time dealing with exceptions rather than norms; a plethora of small, lightweight processes will emerge, to replace the traditional high volume highly repeatable form.

Service transparency will become a mandatory requirement across systems, 24×7, accessible across the web. Customers will choose to shift time and shift place at will. They will expect services to be delivered independent of device or location or operating system; they will expect services to be migrated between device and location and operating system.

The cost of change will finally begin to matter, as companies realise that monolithic vertically-integrated systems appear to provide lower operating costs, but only in a steady-state world. The outsourcing industry will come under immense pressure as a result, as their customers realise the importance of open flexible frameworks with low cost of change by design rather than accident.

 Prediction 5: People will realise that all these predictions could have come true years ago, and start asking what took them so long

None of this is particularly new. I could have written these predictions five years ago, ten years ago. There’s nothing I’ve said that wasn’t already in the Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999. Yet a dozen years have passed. What’s changed? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps I’m all wrong, and the tipping point hasn’t arrived yet. Perhaps Arab Spring will be reversed; perhaps Occupy will come to nothing; perhaps the customer, having tasted true power, will meekly hand it back to the incumbents who’ve shaped the last five decades between them.

Perhaps.

Or perhaps the time has come, and the changes we’re seeing are irreversible. After all, as Hugh Macleod pointed out in the “Hughtrain”:

So that’s it. I’m done with predictions for next year, even if it is that time of year.

Incidentally. It is that time of year. If you read this far, perhaps you’re a fan of this blog. In which case please consider voting for the blog here. And if you’re in voting mood, try this.

 Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory

In my late teens, living in Calcutta, I used to play a lot of duplicate bridge. Or at the very least, contract bridge, if eight players could not be found. This was in the mid 1970s, when sophisticated artificial bidding systems were all the rage. [For those who are interested, I used to play a modified Precision Club system with a strong club, four card majors, weak no-trump, Stayman asking for majors, a “splinter 2 diamonds“, weak pre-emptive 3s and Blackwood asking for aces.]

The particular system I was using is not relevant. What is relevant is that it was a complex way of collecting and signalling data: the bidding process in bridge, the conventions used, these are but tools to tell your playing partner something about the cards you hold.

There was this one time when my playing partner and I were playing against my brother and his playing partner. At the time they weren’t particularly serious about the game. Novices. So we did our Precision mumbo-jumbo rocket-science bidding. And they used an Acol-based “natural” bidding system, no frills. And they beat us. And kept beating us.

This was not good.

After all, we had the superior bidding system, the maturity, the experience, the everything. They shouldn’t be beating us.

And they weren’t just beating us. They seemed to know everything about the deal.

Because they did.

Having thrashed us comprehensively, amidst hoots of laughter, they told us what they’d been doing. Which was simple.

While we were knotted-browed in concentration using the most esoteric signalling systems to describe the cards we held, they were using a somewhat more effective one: they were showing each other their cards. Not within the rules, but done to teach us a lesson.

And the lesson was this: remember why you’re doing something, don’t get lost in the what and how.

In bridge, the purpose of bidding is to let your partner know what cards you have. The systems and conventions are meant to help you do that. But the purpose is to signal the cards you hold.

When I talk about engaging with customers, I try and draw on this analogy. Focus groups and surveys are not an end in themselves. They are way, inefficient ways, to find out what the customer wants to do, ways to discover customer preferences and intent. Today, the customer tells you what she wants, what she intends.

And so it is within the enterprise.

Which is the nub of this post: how the capacity for organisational memory has increased dramatically over the past decade or so (through tools like Chatter) and why it matters. [Disclosure: I work for Salesforce.com, the company behind Chatter].

There was a time when it was normal for a person to spend her whole life at one firm. The contract between employee and employer was trust-based. meaningful and long-term, there was security of tenure, and staff turnover was low. Teamwork was high.

There was a reason why teamwork was high. The institution had memory.

Teamwork involves sacrifice. Sacrifice requires humility. Teams work because people allow themselves to be vulnerable in front of each other.

This sacrifice, this willingness to be humble, this acceptance of vulnerability, all this is underpinned by trust, and in turn creates trust.

Huge dollops of trust. Trust enabled by the characteristics mentioned earlier: meaningful contracts between employer and employee,  the security that comes from tenure, the familiarity that comes from low turnover. The feeling of being amongst family.

In such an environment, teamwork excels at least in part because of organisational memory. When you “took a bullet” for the team, your colleagues and your boss remembered that. When you agreed to hold on to your misgivings and go with what some of the other team members wanted to do, you did so in the knowledge that your “sacrifice” would be noted. Now this was not in some manipulative calculated fashion, it was more of the everyday give-and-take that characterises interactions between people in relationship.

The organisation remembered. Because the organisation was stable, attrition was low.

As job mobility increased, and with it attrition, the memory of the organisation began to suffer. And at least one of the incentives to collaborate, to share, weakened as a result.

As the incentives weakened, so did the reality. People worked less as teams, people worked less in teams. The willingness to sacrifice receded, as did the willingness to make oneself vulnerable. If you took a bullet for the team, but the team wasn’t going to be there to remember that taking-of-bullet, what was the point?

An I-Told-You-So culture was born, a precursor to the full-fledged Blame Culture.

Some people noticed that institutional memory was failing, and sought to prevent it by instilling the practice of recording what was discussed at meetings, what was agreed, who was meant to do what. The process of taking minutes grew as a result, but no longer to provide a record of what happened. More often than not, it became a negotiated set of statements, truths, half-truths and sometimes outright lies, as the participants in the meeting sought to reflect their disparate positions “on the record”.

Minute-taking became an art form; in many enterprises, she who takes the minutes rules the crown. Because the minutes defined reality. An alternate reality, sometimes a false reality, but nevertheless what was perceived as reality.

And the Blame Culture was in full swing.

Dark days.

Days we can leave behind. Because of the power of streams of information at work. Now, it is possible for the “record” to show everything that was discussed, not just one person’s summary of a set of negotiations as to what to put down on the record.

Activity streams capture the flow, the conversations, the commentaries and the comments around the digital social objects in the enterprise: proposals, orders, bills, complaints, whatever: presentations and documents and tables of one form or other.

Collaboration is not what happens in the presentation, document or spreadsheet; it is what happens around these objects.

Collaboration does not happen because of a presentation, document or spreadsheet; it is what happens despite these objects.

Collaboration is not in what is captured in static documents, but in the flow of conversation around those documents. A flow that is dynamic, live and continuing.

This flow, represented by the conversations and comments, in conjunction with the “enterprise social objects”, is what is persisted in activity streams by services like Chatter.

And it is in this flow that the organisation recovers its ability to remember.

And it is in this ability to remember that the organisation recovers its ability to trust; it is in this trust that teamwork proliferates. The work of teams characterised by a vulnerability, an openness, a humility, a willingness to sacrifice for the good of the collective.

There are many other aspects of knowledge management that are made possible by enterprise activity streams, as we learn to move from past-tense analysis to present- and future-tense approaches. Aspects to do with discovery, with Rumsfeldian (or more correctly Polanyi-like) unknown unknowns, with the capacity of the organisation to record, replay and learn from the replays. Aspects to do with serendipity and with providing avenues to soak up the Shirkyist cognitive surplus inherent in knowledge work. Aspects to do with understanding the actors and their roles within the organisation, in Gladwellian salesmen/connector/maven ways. Aspects to do with nonlinear work and asynchronous work. Aspects to do with induction and training and coaching and mentoring.

I’ve written about all these before, and I will write about all of them again.

Because we live in exciting times.

The organisation can find its memory again.

So.

When you build and implement systems of collaboration, ask yourself whether you’re investing enough in persisting and understanding the flow. The documents and spreadsheets and presentations are necessary but not sufficient.

 

Here’s another smattering of open tabs, stuff I’m looking into, stuff I’m thinking about. Incidentally, I considered moving the Smorgasbord tab sweep series on to tumblr, then decided to keep it here for now. What do you think?

1. Jim Rokos Design: A truly bizarre set of design projects, some mesmerising, some not-safe-for-drinking-coffee-while-reading (in case you do yourself an injury). I came across Jim’s work as part of my research into sharing by design. Here’s a classic example of his work, wineglasses where two people have to cooperate in order for either to be able to drink. Check his site out. I’m particularly bemused by Leaping Rabbit.

 

2. xkcd. No real introduction needed for Randall Munroe’s brilliance. Even if you’re a hardened and blase fan, he still has the capacity to delight. We live in Occupy times. So his recent poster on money is apposite and a stupendous piece of work. Please go to his site and take a look, it’s worth it.

3. Streaming news: Not a good time to be selling pepper spray. Witness the reviewer comments on this product.

4. Calcutta 1945: The University of Pennsylvania’s wonderful collection of Clyde Waddell photographs of Calcutta around the end of World War II. Here’s a sample, showing what open outcry really meant at the Calcutta Stock Exchange. Intriguingly, everyone wore white.

The first album I can remember holding in my hands was a Beatles album: A Hard Day’s Night. Until then, my musical upbringing was largely Western classical, jazz through the ages, fifties musicals and crooners. Not surprising, given that I was born in 1957 and lived in India.

It was a good upbringing to have, as far as Western music was concerned: Perry Como and Pat Boone, My Fair Lady and South Pacific, all interspersed amongst the Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Lionel Hampton, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and accentuated by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Mussorgsky and Ravel. It wasn’t a question of choosing either: we listened to what our parents listened to, and that was that. It didn’t occur to us that some people thought musical taste was an individual thing; music, like food, like reading, like life itself, was a social thing, enjoyed best in the company of others.

I must have been around 10 when we bought ourselves a new gramophone player for the house, and shortly after that a few albums emerged that were different from the others. Peter, Paul and Mary’s seminal In The Wind. The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Time Out. And of all things, Edmundo Ros’s Bongos From The South.

And the Beatles, with A Hard Day’s Night. The start of a wonderful trip through the music of the age.

Over the next ten years, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of albums flowed through the house. No sense of ownership. We bought some; traded some; some were parked there by friends, loaned indefinitely; some just turned up, forgotten leavings.

We were eclectic in our listening; if there was a bias, it was towards singer-songwriter folk rock, but it went a lot further than that, starting with the Beatles (together and solo) and Peter, Paul and Mary. Dylan. Simon and Garfunkel. The Grateful Dead. Traffic. Cream. John Mayall. Jethro Tull. Joan Baez. Dave Mason. Crosby Stills Nash and Young, together and separate. Buffalo Springfield. The Who. Emerson Lake and Palmer. Yes. Neil Diamond. America. Janis Joplin. Kris Kristofferson. Joe Cocker. Creedence Clearwater Revival. Santana. Donovan. Don McLean. Clapton. Hendrix. Jim Croce. Cat Stevens. Leonard Cohen. Allman Brothers. Elton John. Lindisfarne. Led Zeppelin. The Rolling Stones. The Doobie Brothers. Joni Mitchell. James Taylor. Carole King. The Band. Jose Feliciano. Melanie. Seals and Croft. Loggins and Messina. The Doors. The Eagles. Steely Dan. Poco. New Riders of the Purple Sage. Ten Years After. Deep Purple. The Kings. Herman’s Hermits. Iron Butterfly. King Crimson. Pentangle. Queen. Police. Elvis. Stevie Wonder. The Temptations. The Jackson Five. The Moody Blues. Pink Floyd. John Martyn. Gordon Lightfoot. Chicago. Blood Sweat and Tears. Van Morrison. Harry Nilsson.

You get my drift. One paragraph. My pantheon from 1967-1980. Not that much into heavy metal. Not that much into pure pop. Deeply into rock, but mostly based around a folk-rock foundation. Usually singer-songwriter, usually able to play an instrument or two, usually in harmony.

I just loved the music. Really really loved it. At the time I felt like there were a couple of hundred albums that were all I ever needed to listen to, with songs that were full of life and stories and joy and sadness and melody and poetry. And memories.

That’s how I used to think, in my teens and early twenties. I felt rich in the music I knew and loved, and felt no real reason to step out beyond that area.

Guess what? It’s largely stayed that way. Thirty, forty years on, that’s pretty much all I listen to. And I’ve been very privileged, able to watch many of my childhood idols live since then. In fact, tonight, I’m off to see Bob Dylan at the Hammersmith Apollo, and already holding tickets for Jethro Tull next April. I was always sure I’d spend most of my life listening to Sixties and Seventies music. I hadn’t quite considered that it would mean going to concerts where the musicians were in their sixties and seventies!

To all of them, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude, for filling so much of my life with pleasure, with joy, with delight.

Thank you Sixties and Seventies musicians. Particularly those who believe that music is a performance art, not something to can once and exploit forever.