Being Indian, and having lived there for half my life, I’m used to people chatting for a while before getting down to business, as it were.

Relationships first. Then conversations as a result of relationships. And finally, only where necessary, transactions.

Cluetrain. Markets are conversations. (Doc has a Nigerian pastor story that shows how universal this structure is. I will link to it when I have something more than a BlackBerry to use as my internet connection.)

A few hours ago, I read that Facebook now has more “transactions” per day than eBay does. Given that eBay has 8 times the number of participants, this is a fascinating trend.

Normally I would expect conversations to be a multiple of relationships, and transactions to be a subset of conversations.

And that would suggest that the community with more members will have more transactions, especially if they were a birds of a feather community.

Why is this not the case with facebook? Is it driven by the relative youth of the community and their perceived free time? Is it because the marketplace is open and free? Is it because of the high graphic content as a result of the sheer number of photographs? Is it because you don’t need a credit card or a paypal account? Is it because it is easier to use? Cooler? More fun?

Worth thinking about. More later.

I was sad to hear about the death of Alfred Chandler, the professor whose works were instrumental in giving me an understanding of what suits did.

He was described as a business historian, and to an extent it was the title alone that led to my researching his works. I found his writings fascinating, more as a counterpoint to Drucker than anything else. I loved what Drucker wrote, so it made sense for me to spend time understanding other viewpoints. We can so easily become dogmatic, even heretical in our views.

Chandler stood for structure, for process, for “professional management”, for many aspects of organisation I am not particularly
fond of. I have written before about Chandler’s Law, something that anyone involved in strategic change should read and understand.

He will be remembered more for his Pulitzer winning book “the visible hand” than anything else, since it was the first serious management book to push back against the Adam Smith Invisible Hand doctrine in a formal and structured way.

While I disagreed with many things he wrote about, I was very taken by the detailed, objective and dispassionate way he dealt with the subjects at hand, a true and talented “business historian”. Probably the first of his kind.

It was strange to read Sean’s post bemoaning the pushback against market forces (I think the context was weather and Australia) soon after hearing about Chandler’s death.

What Alfred Chandler did was to help me understand the motives of professional management cadres, even if I didn’t agree with them. Thank you Alfred.

Paul Downey pointed me towards this article:

http://www.healthbolt.net/2007/02/14/26-reasons-what-you-think-is-right-is-wrong/

The graphics, comments and general editorial whatchamacallit make it sufficiently different from the wikipedia entry so as to make your journey worthwhile.

Liz Strauss, commenting on a recent post of mine, muses about the separation of the information web from the relationship web, one data driven, one social.
You can see her post here:

blogherald.com/2007/05/29/are-you-ready-for-a-whole-new-blog

I’m currently in the midst of moving house and will be without access to thè web for a while, except via blackberry. So my comments are of necessity short.

I think the answer’s simple. We need to keep on ensuring that we build the web in a customer centric way, a la cluetrain. First relationships. Then conversation. Then transaction. Then the distinction between the two webs will disappear.

It is up to us. More later.

I was reading Stephen Smoliar’s latest post on The Google Paradigm and its Discontents, and something he said struck me harder than it ever did before, even if he’s said it a million times. Now most regular readers know Stephen by now, he’s one of the most prolific commenters here.  I agree with Stephen about many things; I disagree with Stephen about many things; and then there’s a large group of things I don’t even claim to understand as yet, and that doesn’t stop me reading what he writes.

I quote from that post:

As I suggested in the opensourcing discussion, we cannot talk about processes in any productive way unless we are as “epistemologically comfortable” with verbs and verb phrases as we are with nouns and noun phrases.

Something about what he said there made me think about the glazed look people used to give me when I first spoke about any aspect of software as a service. To many people, software is a noun and inanimate as well; to many people, service remains a “doing” word and closer to a verb despite being a noun. And this separation of service from software seems to create a whole series of problems in people’s minds.

The three biggest problems it seems to create are in the following areas:

Creativity: People seem to believe that software can be “clever” while service can’t; as a result, they seem to think that software is patentable, leading to all kinds of blind alleys. Which is why we now see terms like software-and-a-service, suggesting that there has to be a difference, and (at least in my mind) basing that difference on intellectual property lines.

Substitutability: For many years it has astounded me just how often oe particular class of projects fail, those based on replacing human labour with software. It doesn’t seem to matter just how mind-numbing the activity being displaced is, somehow the substitution never happens. This behaviour is at least part of the reason why many aspects of process re-engineering did not work, since processes were tied to people and doing, while the re-engineered components were tied to software. It didn’t matter what we did with the software, the people stayed on. Sometimes even grew in numbers. A variant of this happened in the offshore world. How else could you explain the focus on offshoring standardised repeatable cookie cutter tasks rather than those requiring human brainpower? Surely tasks that were standardised, repeatable and cookie-cutter would be excellent candidates for automation rather than offshoring? But what do I know?

Service innovation (which I guess is an amalgam of the two prior points). For some reason, whenever I’ve tried to drive a discussion similar to that on the opensourcing of process, I start hitting this noun-verb argument. In many people’s eyes, process as a concept seems very tied to people, in a way that software isn’t. Perhaps it’s a function of just how long the concepts have existed. This is the reason why we spend so much time carefully paving the cowpaths; in fact we’ve been doing it for so long that nowadays, when we find bits of road, we dig it up and pave them differently so that they continue to look like the cowpaths they never were.

Just musing.