The plural of personal is social

There was a time in my life when everything I would consider “business” was also personal.

As many of you may know, I was born in Calcutta nigh on fifty-five years ago. I stayed there till 1980. There were no supermarkets in Calcutta in those days. For most things you walked down to your local provisions store, where you knew everyone and everyone knew you. By name. They didn’t just know you, they knew your family, where you lived, when you moved there, what you did. They knew when and if to offer help, advice, credit, whatever. Not everything was available at that friendly neighbourhood provisions store; so sometimes the Mountain came to Mahomet. Milk and newspapers were delivered home; new cooking vessels were bartered for old newspapers and saris, or at least that’s what I remember, in some variant of rag-and-bone-man. And occasionally we went to New Market to buy something more exotic, unavailable in the normal shops.

We always appeared to do business with people we knew well, and who knew us well. As a family we were probably satisficers rather than maximisers (to use Barry Schwartz’s parlance in The Paradox of Choice); we didn’t shop around, we looked for an exchange of value within a stable relationship. So my haircuts were at A.N. John on Park St, when we were well off, and 003b Short St, when we weren’t. Sports equipment was always bought at Castlewood, next to A.N.John. Books at Oxford Book Emporium on the other side of the street. Second-hand books and comics and magazines came via Mr Mallick of Free School Street, round the corner. When times were good, meals were at Firpo’s and Sky Room and tea at Flury’s. Indian food was at Amber. Shoes were bought round the corner from Amber, usually from the same shop. Clothes used to be tailored to fit at K.C.Jakkimull’s, next to Sky Room.

It wasn’t just that we went to the same shops. Or that the shops were so close to each other you could have covered them under a large blanket. Those things were important.

What was far more important was that they knew us by name, knew everything about us, knew what we wanted and knew what we needed. And we knew them, knew them by name, knew what they were good at and what they weren’t good at.

It was personal.

It was a relationship.

The relationship tended to be sustained over time and over generations. I can’t remember the number of times someone has told me that my father had sat in that very seat and been provided a shave/a meal/ a suit/whatever. Sometimes it went beyond that, and my grandfather was brought into the conversation.

Relationships. Where both sides invested. Where, after a while, you couldn’t see that there used to be two sides. No haggling over price or bargaining, that was reserved for the forays into the exotica of Hogg’s New Market.

And then, in 1980, after my father died, I came to the UK.

It took me years before I went into a supermarket, they scared me. I wanted personal. So I went for personal: the corner shop, the local newsagent, the local pub, places I could walk to, people who knew my name and whose names I knew. People I saw regularly. During those days you went to your bank branch to get many things done, and the staff there knew you. Your bank manager knew you. When you got a letter from someone you did business with, often enclosing a bill, you recognised the signature.

You knew the person who sent that letter. And they knew you.

You had a relationship. It was something in your DNA. A part of what proclaimed you to belong to the human race.

Then, as the Eighties progressed, we began to lose something of our humanity in how we did business with each other. Bigger became bigger and better than Better.

And during the 17-year sleigh-ride bull market that followed, a part of our humanity was lost in how we did business. The foundation for that loss was set in the broadcast age, in how firms communicated with people, how people couldn’t communicate back, aided and abetted by the one-directional technology that was television, occasionally exacerbated by those in the advertising business.

That’s what Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, Rick Levine and David Weinberger rebelled against in the Cluetrain Manifesto. How business had become not-personal. How companies had built walls between them and their customers, how much damage was being done by those walls, why that situation could not be sustained and how the internet and the Web was going to change all that. That’s what evoked Chris’s memorable words:

We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings—and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it.

Those very emotions were what drove Doc to work on Vendor Relationship Management and then to write The Intention Economy. Those very emotions were what drove Chris to write Gonzo Marketing; you can see them at work when you read David’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Everything is Miscellaneous and Too Big To Know, as he looks through the lens of Cluetrain on how information is organised, accessed, labelled, enriched, made into useful knowledge and imparted as wisdom.

Those very emotions were probably responsible for making Rick into a great chocolatier.

[Disclosure: I have the privilege of being able to call the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto my friends. To have broken bread with them in different continents over the years, to have broken sweat with them in different escapades. We know each other by name. We know a bit of what makes each of us tick, the little bit we can know. I had the honour of writing a chapter in the tenth anniversary edition of that book, something that thrilled me and humbled me.]

Business is personal. It’s about relationships. It has always been so. Until we tried to forget it and concentrated on making money, not shoes. [As Peter Drucker said, people make shoes, not money]. Then, for a short while, business became not-personal.

As the Cluetrain guys signalled way back in 1999, the web was changing all that. Business was becoming personal again.

It comes as no surprise to me that salesforce.com was born during those heady times, as business started becoming personal again. It comes as no surprise to me that Marc Benioff understood that the plural of personal is social, and that it’s in the DNA of the company that he and Parker Harris founded. That’s why I went to work for them.

“Social” is not a layer. “Social” is not a feature. “Social” isn’t a product.

Social is about bringing being human back into business. About how we conduct business. About why we conduct business.

Social is something in people’s hearts, in people’s beings, in their DNA.

Man is born social.

Many companies were not.

And the companies that weren’t, they can’t just become social by buying layers or features or even products. Porcine unguents, nothing more.

You need to be reborn social.

You need to start thinking of the customer as someone to have a relationship with, to get to know, to invest in, to trust, to respect.

And you need to get everyone in the company to think that way, to act that way, in everything they do.

And you need to do this everywhere, not just with your customers. Not just with your supply web or your trading partners. Not just with your staff and your consultants.

Everyone. Everywhere.

The plural of personal is social.

Comments? [I hope to follow this up with a second post looking at how companies are doing this today, to be written sometime tomorrow].

 

 

 

Adapted from, based on and inspired by…..

I’m a very lucky man. As I approach middle age, I have come to know and appreciate the incredible blessings and privileges I have. I was born into a warm and wonderful family: my parents and grandparents, my brother and sisters, my aunts, uncles and cousins, my extended family. I spent time at some fabulous educational institutions (Miss P.Hartley’s, St Xavier’s Collegiate School, St Xavier’s College). I’ve worked for some fantastic companies, and I’m now in my dream job, at Salesforce.com. I’m part of a lively and courageous church, Kings Church International. And all through those years, I’ve had the joy of making many fast friends, great friends, rare friends.

I’m a very lucky man. My wife of 28 years, an incredible woman, has put up with me and stayed with me through thick and thin, and has brought up three warm and beautiful children, occasionally with my help, often without, sometimes despite. I don’t know what I’d do without them.

I’m nearly 55. There have been a few glitches along the way: I was picked up at Red Square without a visa in 1982, and faced the consequences; I was beaten and kicked into a coma when I was 25, by a large bunch of skinheads; drowned in Greece a few years later, only to be rescued by passing fishermen as I floated serenely; was paralysed briefly in 1999 after an accident; turned white briefly in 2004, as I passed kidney stones the hard way; went very briefly into ventricular fibrillation in 2006, became bionic; and a few months ago, was found to have a walnut-sized growth in my colon, which has since parted company with me, to mutual satisfaction.

A few glitches along the way.

Yes, I’m a very lucky man. I know something about God’s grace in my life, and I’m grateful. I know a lot about the warmth and support of my family and friends, and I’m grateful. Incredibly grateful.

Besides my family and my friends and my teachers, there have been a number of people, places and things that have influenced me heavily. They number in their hundreds, if not in their thousands. Authors, playwrights and poets; cartoonists, illustrators and artists; singers and songwriters and musicians; comedians; thinkers and doers. Foods. Poems. Books. Films.

They’ve all bent me, shaped me, helped make me what I am.

I can’t share all of them: life doesn’t work that way. I can’t digitise and scale out my family or my friends: for one thing, not all of them are alive. Besides, it isn’t possible for me to replicate them, to clone them, to share them with you. [Yes, I realise I can share my memories, my learnings, my recordable past with you, but somehow I’m not ready for that right now. Maybe another time. Anyway, you get glimpses of those through this blog].

Some of the influences are shareable. Some of them have written things, performed things, participated in things, things that have been published at least in analog form, often in digital form. Influences that you can read, listen to, watch. Some influences that can even be eaten.

Influences that made me me, alongside my family and friends and education and experience.

Influences that I’d like to acknowledge publicly, because at least in some part the things I think about and share are adapted from, based on and inspired by the people on the list below. It’s not an exhaustive list — my intention is to publish them in what I expect are three sections, so here are the first 171.

I hope you find the list useful, I guess it’s a variant of what used to be called a blogroll.

 

It’s not an exhaustive list. And as I said it will be added to over time. I hope you enjoy finding out why every one of the 171 are on my list of influences. Let me know what you think.

Continuing to muse lazily about sharing at work

I spend a lot of time thinking about sharing, and sharing what I’m thinking. Why? I don’t quite know. Maybe it comes from having been born in Calcutta. Or maybe because I was (and still am) part of a large family. Or even maybe it’s because my father was a journalist as was his father, while my other grandfather was a professor.

Around eight months ago I wrote a post headlined Lazily Musing About Sharing. In it, I made the following assertions:

  • For anything to be social, it must be shared
  • Sharing, the act of making social, happens because people are made social
  • Sharing is encouraged by good design
  • When you share physical things like food, sharing reduces waste
  • When you share non-physical things like ideas, sharing increases value

Since I wrote that post, I’ve been spending time observing how people share: my colleagues at salesforce.com, our customers, our partners, my personal and professional networks.

And coming to a number of hypotheses which I intend to share with you over the next few months….. depending, of course, on the kind of feedback I get on this post.

Here’s the first hypothesis:

When the shared purpose at work is itself to do with sharing, collaboration becomes part of the DNA

Why do I say this? For a number of reasons:

When I joined Salesforce.com one of the first things I noticed was that there was a culture of sharing, above and beyond the architecture of sharing that services like Chatter provide. People felt comfortable sharing things, it seemed to be in their very spirit. Was it because of something about the way we hired people? Was it because senior management set an example in leadership? Was it because we were still a relatively young company? Was it something in the air?

It seemed to be something deep-seated, something systemic. So I kept looking.

It may have been all of the reasons I stated earlier. I don’t know the precise reason, I’m still learning. But more and more I’m coming to the conclusion that it has to do with the principles the company was founded on, the principles we’ve adhered to since, which involve a new business model (subscriptions), a new technology model (the cloud)…..

….. and a new philanthropy model. 1+1+1.

I’d read about the Salesforce Foundation before I joined the company. I’d seen how people set aside time and effort and money to support the Foundation. I’d been very impressed by how central a role Foundation activities played in corporate life, not just at corporate events. I’d been pleasantly surprised by the level of enthusiasm shown by staff, customers and partners alike when it came to participating in Foundation events and activities.

More recently, I’d been overwhelmed by the support given to an initiative very close to my heart, Byte Night. 20 of my colleagues sleeping out with me. Over 300 individual donors supporting our team. Colleagues, customers, partners, the lot. All underpinned by the advice, guidance, support — and generous matching funds — from the Foundation.

And when I was awake, cold, dripping wet, that night, accompanied by my colleagues, I realised how deep the bonds were between those colleagues. How deep the bonds were between all of us as sleepers that night, regardless of where we worked.

Those shared experiences of altruism, of philanthropy, of giving, matter. They are analogous to the social objects that Jyri Engestrom conceived of, that Hugh MacLeod popularised.

The relationship between the level of collaboration at work and a collaborative worldview is by itself not new:  Howard Rheingold has written about this many times; in his latest book he speaks of what Mimi Ito called “genres of participation”, some interest-driven, some friendship-driven. When people work together on philanthropic activities, I think these two genres come together, dramatically increasing the level of energy in the activity. Amy Jo Kim, in Community Building On The Web, emphasises the importance of giving people tools to build and operate their own subcommunities, to embed rituals in what they do, to have cyclic events. Christopher Locke spoke of the importance of shared pursuits like “organic gardening” in Gonzo Marketing. John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison talk about the importance of shared purpose in The Power of Pull, particularly when it comes to designing “creation spaces” in order to get the increasing-returns value from the “collaboration curve”.

What I didn’t realise deeply enough was this: when the shared purpose is itself about sharing, then collaboration becomes part of the DNA.

Life is never smooth; that holds true at work as much as anywhere else. Historically, reinforced by hierarchical structures, information has been seen as power, and as a consequence collaborative attitudes have been weakened. Often this has been exacerbated by individual rather than team-based incentive systems, opaque performance management systems and, sadly, not infrequently, rampant briefing-blame cultures.

As the saying goes, character is not about the problems you face, but about the responses you make to those problems. The time when problems occur at work is probably the most important time for people to collaborate. But it isn’t easy to do.

Of course it helps if leaders set an example.

Of course it helps if, as Tim O’Reilly stated, there is an “architecture of participation“.

Of course it helps if performance management and reward mechanisms are tuned to recognise and reward collaborative activity.

My gut feel, however, is that these are all necessary-but-insufficient conditions for true collaboration at work.

The economic climate, the pace at which markets move, the consequences of the Big Shift on barriers to entry, competition and margins,  the nature and complexity of the problems we face today as humans, as a society, as humanity — all these militate towards a greater need for collaboration.

But then we have to go beyond the necessary-but-insufficient conditions, towards the kind of model Marc Benioff talks about, where philanthropy becomes a shared value at the heart of the company.

Then and only then will true collaboration take place within and beyond the firm.

That’s what I think. Let me know whether you agree, what needs changing, what I’ve got wrong.

[A coda: Just saw friend Don Thorson of Swipp share a John Maxwell quote that I thought was relevant to this post: People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.]

Room With A View

A few weeks ago, Luke MacGregor of Reuters captured a series of fabulous photographs of Tower Bridge, seen from the South Bank of the Thames, with a full moon behind it. My personal favourite is shown below; you can see the whole set here.

 

 

Can you imagine looking through your hotel window and seeing that? An amazing view, one of my all-time London favourites. You would expect a view like that to come with a price tag.

In a month’s time, on 5th October 2012, I shall be staying in a hotel for the night, on the south bank of the Thames, with that precise view. It won’t quite be a full moon, though — that particular event would have taken place five days earlier, on 30th September.

The hotel I’ll be staying at is somewhat unusual. The bedrooms don’t have any minibars or TVs. No attached baths or showers either. No beds. No walls. An unusual hotel indeed.

The hotel does have some attractive features, nevertheless. Ceilings that look amazingly like the sky at night. Very realistic. Because they are the sky at night.

It’s a hotel where the homeless stay. In the open air. On the banks of the Thames. With no mattress in sight. And traditional English weather. In October.

I’ve been going to this hotel once a year for some years now, with a bunch of good friends. We spend one night every year underneath the stars, whatever the weather, to raise funds for Action For Children, and more particularly in their drive to help homeless youth. It’s easy for us, because we only do it for one night. And we all know we have warm beds to go to later, hot food, running water and the company of family and friends.

We’re trying to make it a little bit easier for those kids who leave home, often without choice, and suddenly have to fend for themselves in an alien and usually hostile environment.

 

The event is called Byte Night, and it’s been happening for fifteen years or so now. I’ve had the privilege of meeting some of the people who’ve been helped by the charity over the years, and each one of them had an incredible story to tell.

As a whole we in the IT community have done well out of being part of the community, and events like this give us the opportunity to give something back.

So if you’re reading this, and you feel the urge to help, we’ve made it very simple.

Just follow this link. And donate whatever you can. Give, and give generously. Please.

Since it began, Byte Night has raised over £4.3m, and it is our collective goal to hit the £5m mark this year. You know what the economic environment has been like these past years, and you know the likely impact on youth homeless.

So give. Give as much as you can. Please.

Thank you.

 

On S-O Simon and related things

Music has its mondegreens, something I wrote about here and here. Now radio jingles may not be universally accepted as music, and for good reason. Nevertheless, they too can be misheard, misunderstood, mangled.

We never had a television set at home. I left India in 1980, around the time that TV was beginning to enter the household; my formative years were therefore spent listening to the radio, and to the gramophone.

Until about 1970, the only radios I’d seen and heard were valve radios. Main-operated, unlike the portable “transistor” radios that were just beginning to make an impact.

So the first sensation I associate with radio is the ceiling fan, signalling the presence of mains electricity, something that I could not take for granted as a child. “Load-shedding” was rampant.

If we had power, then we could switch these things on, and bring about the second sensation of radio: the orange-red filaments of the valves. That was soon followed by sensation number three, that of smell. It was a wonderful aroma, the heating up of the valves.

We were usually incredibly eager to switch the radio on, usually for something like Musical Band Box (on Sundays) or Lunchtime Variety (on all other days). Sometimes the station was just coming on stream then, so the first thing we would hear was the All India Radio Signature tune.

Seems like such a long time ago. But I digress.

Jingle Mondegreens. They do exist.

For example, every child in our family grew up believing that “S-O Simon means happy motoring”, and we would sing it at the top of our voice. We never cared what it meant. Standard Oil, on the other hand, were trying to tell us this.

 

That was fifty years ago, and I have no difficulty figuring out why we thought the song went S-O Simon. Easily done.

Some ad or the other appeared to use the old Scouting song “It isn’t any trouble just to S-M-I-L-E”. How that became S-L-Om-Buddy I have no idea. But it did.

Sometimes the jingles had other unintended consequences. For example, throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s Beiersdorf used to advertise in Indian cinema with a clip that started “Winter’s here”; it then went on to show you the ravages that your skin would face in the cold, and how all that could be avoided “thanks to Nivea creme”. Most of us just cut the middle bits out, and every time it felt cold, we would say “Winter’s here….. thanks to Nivea Creme”.

Did you have radio jingle mondegreens in your childhood? What were they?