Guiding Principles are the First Necessity – #TEDatIBM
Posted by cheuer in Insytes, Leadership, Social Business, The Noble Pursuit on September 28th, 2015
Can you imagine a world where we could have such great trust in society that you no longer cared about your privacy? While some may already feel that way today, most of us could never imagine such a world, especially given what we have experienced over the past decade. At last year’s TED at IBM event, Marie Wallace addressed the challenge we face today in a brilliant speech with a very practical, evidence based solution in her talk, “Privacy by Design”. Her talk is where my belief that we should abandon hope of any true privacy was replaced by hope that there was a vital, and indeed better way.
In light of this year’s theme for TED at IBM being “Necessity and Invention”, I thought it important to revisit her talk and illuminate this topic from a fresh perspective. When it comes to the matter of privacy, Marie’s talk grounded me in the realization that our guiding principles are the first necessity. The theme, according to the conference web site reflects our common wisdom on the subject:
“Necessity is the mother of invention—or so we have been led to believe. We cannot help but suspect that our needs to create and to shape the world around us run much deeper than simple pragmatism.”
It’s true, it’s not pragmatism that is at the root of our inspiration to invent in my view, it is our ability to be imaginative, our ability to overcome challenges we face, our desire to not only survive, but to thrive. It is something innate in our very being. It is the unique combination of a bias towards action, a sense of greater purpose and a belief in our personal ability against all risks that drives many of us to invent. To create. To struggle against ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune […] and by opposing end them’.
Unfortunately, as we have seen, particularly in the last century, absent a sense of true social responsibility, systems are designed and goods are brought to market out of a necessity that benefits a few at the expense of the many. All too often, it seems that data is being used to manipulate society broadly, and you specifically, instead of empowering us all.
Marie starts her talk with what I believe is one of the most powerful and important concepts of our modern era. It is also apparently from the Pope’s remarks last week during his US tour, a zeitgeist moment where many others are coming to this same realization. The idea that we can create a world by our own design, intentionally, not by inheritance or accident. As with the many lessons on life itself we have learned, we can choose to let it happen as it unfolds or we can direct it. So why not take an active role in shaping the world we’d like to see, and manifest it through thoughtful design. Today more than ever, this power is in our hands, not merely in the hands of a powerful few. But we must exercise it, not abdicate our rights out of a sense of helplessness. It’s a matter of intention and attention – do we want to create systems that are intentionally good for all, or to allow others to create systems that are used to manipulate us. Do we want to give attention and support to organizations and systems that are using their resources to manipulate us? I think not.
It is Marie Wallace’s central premise, that “How we approach privacy, will have the single greatest impact on [our future society].” It not only establishes the expectations of every human relative to their role in the market, but also their role in the work force. Will it continue to be based on suspicion and absent any meaningful degree of trust? Or could it instead be more trustworthy as a result? She and I agree in this case, it could be the latter, but it will take time and greater attention from us all in shaping this better future. As she said in her talk, “The reality is it doesn’t have to be like this. And I don’t think we want to live in a world where it will be like this.”
The alternative, is potentially pretty scary, to even the least educated of us on this subject, and perhaps even to the apathetic if they were to see how their data might be used to manipulate them instead of empower them. One of the examples she mentioned was relative to an organization learning from their data analytics that you had a problem with body image and this was used to sell you diet pills. Countering that approach, what if the system was open and transparent with you, and showed you the insights it generated and gave you options, not just taking advantage of your emotional state. It suggested healthier recipes, encouraged you to take a walk or to uplift your spirit and confidence. These are all possible with data analytics, but only if the controllers of the data and the insights are emboldened with positive intentions for you and society, instead of being motivated to sell you the most expensive diet pills on which they would make a profit.
Marie pointed out that even if you control your data with do not track and other mechanisms, there are still data leaks from one system to another that can provide companies with data you do not want them to have. Recently I was given a demo of a new product that did a deep personality profile on me based on my public social media presence. It developed a profile of my emotional state, and also my psychographic drivers. For many this is the holy grail of marketing, being able to tailor ads based on psychoanalysis to understand what motivates me and hit my ‘hot buttons’.
Indeed, there were a few things it suggested about my personality that were troubling, and many of which were flat our wrong because of how I have been managing my public image on Twitter proactively, and because of some recent #tweetfight I had. This is all data in the public domain, so I don’t necessarily have a problem with it, but I am concerned, as Marie is, about how others with less scrupulous intentions may use it. As a marketer, I am concerned about how a snapshot like the one it produced does not represent the whole of the person, and how even such advanced data analytics can still get it fundamentally wrong by basing such insights on a snapshot instead of the whole me and the deeper insights that would come from having a REAL Relationship with me.
Many will tell you that we need to accept all of this data is already out there and this is simply beyond our control. So the solution is to turn it off, to take ownership of our own data and to block advertising through our devices, as Apple recently enabled with the latest iOS update. But this is not a complete picture of the reality we face. As Marie points out, the current state is really a ‘privacy spaghetti’, or perhaps a ‘spaghetti monster’. We need to go to the root of the challenge and rethink our approach to this important topic from the ground up.
Which is exactly what she did in the IBM case study she shared on how they applied analytics to their vast trove of data generated from one of the oldest Enterprise Social Networks in existence. Instead of thinking of management and the employees as separate interests, she took the perspective of providing maximum value to all participants, not just the management. In taking the Privacy by Design approach, they built the foundation of their data analytics program rooted in privacy as a guiding principle that would rule all decisions and actions that followed, before writing a line of code.
In undertaking the project to better understand their employees, the IBM team embraced three core guiding principles. In my view, the pre-requisite before the invention.
- A commitment to transparency and openness.
- Embrace simplicity and ease of use.
- Focus on personal empowerment.
By making these guidelines simple to understand and visible to all, they gave trust to gain trust. By giving employees actionable insights that would help them improve themselves as a principle benefit, and enabling them to choose whether or not to share those insights with others, it changed the dynamic of the relationship for the better in more ways then one. Still, management was given access to the aggregated analysis to understand the important trends, challenges and opportunities, but did not unnecessarily reveal the private details of a uniquely identifiable individual.
This resulted in a significant upside, the sort of upside that many of us have long been trying to prove to those who would choose to exploit the data instead of protecting and empowering individuals. According to Marie, “Demonstrating openness and transparency builds trust and it allows our users to engage more openly and freely with us and share more data. And more data means more value for them and for us. It’s a virtuous circle.” In short, their approach to Privacy by Design deepened their relationships with their employees. Instead of merely providing the other stakeholders with analytics, these deeper relationships provided increased engagement with interested employees that enabled the accomplishment of even more valuable outcomes.
To my original question – Can you imagine a world where we could have such great trust in society that you no longer cared about your privacy? I’d like to believe we could, by facilitating such transparency that we all knew what was available and where we had control over how it was being used. I’d like to intentionally design such a world, perhaps with you through my new community movement “We Are the Solution“. But in order to abandon my hope or interest in defending privacy, I first need greater confidence that unscrupulous people and companies who value profit above people are not able to use my data, or any data, in a manipulative way.
As you are probably keenly aware, this is not the world in which we live today. But it is a world we could design and build together if we choose to do so. As Scott Swhwaitzberg posits in “Trust me… there’s an app for that” the combination of technology and transparency can make this world a reality. But first, we need to ensure that no corporate desire trumps the guiding principles of our shared values across society. This is why the first necessity is to embrace a common set of guiding principles. This is why we must support organizations who share and operate under such values with our hands, hearts and wallets, and deny such support to those who don’t.
Watch Marie Wallace’s talk, “Privacy by Design” on YouTube, and visit the TED at IBM web site to learn more about the upcoming event.
DISCLOSURE:
Like many of you, I love the inspiration and big thinking that comes out of TED. It’s why I helped to produce BIL back in 2008 and why I spoke at BIL again in 2014. It’s a part of who I am, which is why I attend TEDx whenever I can (and hope to speak at a few next year) and why I was so grateful to be invited to TED at IBM last year and will be attending again on October 15, 2015 as their guest. This post, while not required of me in exchange for my invitation, was written as a part of the IBM New Way to Engage futurist program of which I am a part and is being promoted by IBM through that program. While they are paying to promote it in social media, the words above are completely my own, except as otherwise quoted, and do not reflect the position of IBM.
It’s Time for a Forward Thinking Conversation. It’s time for a #ReOrg
Posted by cheuer in economy, Future of Work, Leadership, Social Business, Social Media Club, SocialMedia, Unconferences on November 21st, 2014
We live in an amazing time. A time where we are able to not only stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before us, but also where we can be lifted by our peers and give them a boost too.
When we started to broaden the conversation around social media back in 2006, we engaged in a dialog around the principles and practices which we hoped a more social future might bring us over many months. We debated what the proper language should be. We stood our ground. We compromised. We read the writing on the wall and acquiesced when it was clear that something other then our position was winning the day.
The majority of the people who participated in the early social revolution joined not for their egos or their popularity, they joined to make a difference out of a deep seated set of beliefs. They engaged with each other because they believed the power to create change was in our hands. That the difference making we needed in the world was within each of us, and that it was our responsibility to do something with it. We did unconferences, BarCamps, Social Media Camps and Social Media Breakfasts. We joined clubs, we recast societal beliefs about what was possible and we shared too much information about ourselves!
We learned the power of the tools to organize ourselves in support of our causes by building relationships and sharing. We learned that it wasn’t about the number of people who showed up, we learned it was about who showed up and the fact that we cared about similar things, we cared about making the future better, we cared about fixing what was broken with marketing and we cared about advancing similar values. We learned that our words mattered, and that those words transformed by a # could become something, a hashtag, that enabled us to connect with our tribes and our interests.
As I look back now, we had so much right in those early days. It really was about the distribution of power. Which is why I am disappointed that our original intention of fixing our broken systems and transforming the world through social technology has only sprouted as a small seedling of true change inside organizations instead of becoming a fast growing oak. Though surprising, it makes sense that many of the early social media evangelists have moved to other fields and areas of focus, some completely eschewing any professional relationship to social media. I am certainly not alone in abandoning a previously deep association with social media in search of a new fire to light the revolution. That list is too long to mention, though perhaps you might want to chime in here yourself in the comments to share why you have or haven’t.
What I can tell you from our more recent history is that many of us who saw social as a catalyst for a fundamental transformation to the market and the pillars of society moved into social business. Many are still fighting that fight today, and despite my belief that Social Business is Dead, I applaud these modern Don Quixote’s for continuing the fight, for not giving up and for continuing to create positive change every day. They are indeed the true believers, and while some of them may be unhappy with me for dampening the embers of the smoldering fire instead of pouring on more fuel, I am grateful for their persistence and their valor.
As I said then and as I believe more than ever today, the principles aren’t wrong or misdirected. However, in the war of words that is central to the battle for the soul of our organizations, fighting under the banner of social business is a losing proposition – the modern equivalent to knowledge management. It’s just not winning the hearts, minds and slices of the budgetary pie necessary for our shared vision to become reality as quickly as we need the change to be the reality.
Unfortunately I have come to feel the same way about the “Future of Work” discussion and movement, despite the fact that it is the direction where my social business cohorts have headed. It’s hard to talk about the future of something when you haven’t created a shared vision upon the present that is emerging and what distinctions must be embraced and elevated.
What can we do about it?
So when I look back on how we won the broader debate that launched the social media movement and the wider industry at large, I am now asking you to join me once again in a collective effort for mutual benefit. I am asking for you to take what we have learned, to cash in our social capital and to invest our reputations, our hearts, and our minds into a conversation about what is next. A conversation about what needs to change, about what matters most, about what we want it to be and about how we describe it to others. A conversation about where we are at and where we are going. Perhaps more importantly, I ask you to join me in a conversation about how we prove the value in a measurable and tangible way beyond the ‘duh’ that supported the social media sales pitch.
It’s time for us all to come together and invest ourselves into reimagining and reorganizing our resources and structural models for managing organizations and creating value. It’s time for us to work together to orchestrate a resurgence of visionary innovation that inspires both change agents and this great millennial generation into standing up and speaking out for a better way. To stand against the folly and ignorance inherent in many organizational hierarchies. To join a conversation that will illuminate the dark corners of our work worlds into which our leaders do not currently see, a conversation that will highlight what works and what doesn’t. To stand with the courage of your beliefs again and speak truth to power.
Our institutions are failing us. Education is too expensive, making access to knowledge harder and turning wisdom into a scare resource. Government is stagnant and putrid, using fear to destroy the common interests that bind us and dividing us in a way that surely signals a Jeffersonian ‘fall’. Our corporations appeal less and less to just about everyone – including their customers, their employees and even their leaders. Many who have achieved some station in life are resting in that space and opting out of the fight, tired of the perennial struggle between doing what’s right and what’s politically expedient. While a wider swath of humanity is self actualizing and realizing their ability to live a life on purpose and not accepting less than what they truly deserve, the system is still working against them on many levels.
Why? Now that’s a better question – because we know better, but too many of us accept it as “just the way things are”. I don’t think we can afford that way of thinking any longer. I’ve spent my life tilting at the windmills, as I know many of you have. If we can’t knock down the broken windmill with our lances of inspiration, I say it’s time for us to build our trojan horse. It’s time for us to come together once again and develop a collective vision for our future and a common language that will define and support that vision. It’s time for a bigger conversation.
There is room for each of us to have a unique take and a unique contribution for which we deserve to earn respect, recognition and incomes. But without working together towards our common vision and connecting the dots in a way that simplifies the inherent complexity of our shared vision for organizational leaders, the institutions themselves may just fail completely before we ever get a chance to save it.
While failure is often a prerequisite of exponential breakthroughs, we need not accept this as a fait accompli. We already recognize many of the challenges and the looming failures, so why not begin to work towards saving us all from the unnecessary pains and waste seems to be an inevitability. We already have a vision of the future of work. We have a vision for what a social business looks like. We have an understanding of how we need to reimagine our organizations to create shared value. We know what is necessary to unleash the fullest potential of the human spirit. So let’s set about doing that now, and doing that together in conversation that advances our field and inspires others to think differently and act differently.
So what are the words that will serve as our campfire around which we will gather for camaraderie and warmth? What is the language of the movement that encapsulates the multiple distinctions and insights that collectively are driving us towards a future free of today’s most commonly accepted defects? I don’t think it’s social business, I don’t think its future of work. I’m open to other suggestions, but for now I’d like to start this conversation focused on what I have consistently heard as the most fundamental change we must realize – a change in organizational structure and governance. A re-imagination of what an organization looks like and a rethinking of what we mean by work.
While we may not yet have adequate language for what we envision, I submit for your consideration that we are talking about a widespread #ReOrg. The reorganization of our mindsets, methods and measures about the organization, about our relationships to them as humans and about the fundamental practice of management as the underlying operating system that governs its behaviors. It’s time to create a more holistic view of how we create value, and especially with a focus on how we can optimize our ability to create shared value that benefits society as a whole instead of just those who have won the war for control.
Yes, it’s time for a #ReOrg. Are you ready? Let’s talk about it.
Join the conversation and add your voice. But don’t just add your voice, engage with others. For every post or insight shared, comment on or engage several others around their point of view. Keep your minds and hearts open. There is no single answer, but I do believe that we have collectively learned enough about what works and what doesn’t for us to discover the shared vision we have that is underlying our individual efforts. So let’s bring that into the light of day and collectively nurture our #ReOrg.
My Photo in Opening Sequence of Intruders on BBC
Posted by cheuer in Personal, PicO'daDay on August 22nd, 2014
In the ain’t it cool department, this ranks up there for me. As many of you know, I love photos, and occasionally take some pretty good ones – portraits, landscape, abstract, weddings, sunsets, conferences and more. Occasionally, I shoot photos from planes of the earth below. So this one time while we were circling SEA-TAC on my way to help launch Social Media Club Seattle in December of 2006, the sky was just too brilliant to pass up, so I whipped out my Canon Rebel and grabbed this amazing shot of Seattle and Mt. Rainier (that has been viewed a whopping 282 times)
Looks like it will be viewed a few millions times over the weeks ahead with the season premiere of new BBC “paranormal thriller” series called Intruders tomorrow night – debuting right after Doctor Who’s season premiere with the new Dr! Check out the series opener for Intruders below and you can see my photo at the 19 second mark.
So to answer your question, they found it through Creative Commons but I am expecting a small licensing fee from communications with the production company. Regardless, I am just ecstatic to have something I shot used in a television series being aired by one of my favorite media companies, the BBC where so many of my friends have worked over the years. Given the ‘special relationship’ I have with the UK (me personally), it’s all the more special. Given that this premiers right after Dr. Who, well, that means I get to share a moment with a bunch of friends when we watch this together at my house tomorrow night. You are coming right?
Building Our Future: A Blueprint for Leading in a Connected Society
Posted by cheuer in Alynd, Conversation, Future of Media, Future of Work, Leadership, The Noble Pursuit on February 27th, 2014
Note: This post outlines our plan for a video project / documentary we are producing while in Austin next week.
Many of you, like myself, have spent the past several years, or decades perhaps, focused on inventing and building our future. Through our own personal experiences, challenges and insights we’ve made decisions about where we wanted to invest our time and energy and what outcomes we wanted to produce. For some, it has been a movement. For others, a family. For others, building a business to solve both small and large problems. For others, its been about manifesting a vision of something never before imagined possible. And for others still, it’s simply been about getting by in an increasingly fast paced, overly complicated and increasingly connected world.
While we are on one hand still fighting poverty, injustice and inequality, we are truly standing at the dawn of an even more incredible future then we might have even imagined just a few years ago. In fact, my Alynd Co-Founder Rawn Shah made the point during our Work Hackers Salon the other night that the Renaissance could be considered a failure due to the limited participation it produced in the upside of the prosperity and knowledge it generated. His point was, can you imagine what we are capable of within our connected society today, where we have access to each other and so many enabling technologies? Indeed, a new age of enlightenment is already underway, but the era ahead of us can be even more spectacular then we can even imagine.
This is why I want to bring people together in painting a picture of what we want our tomorrow to look like and sharing our blueprints for how to build it. The real challenge is, how do we look past how things are and begin to make them how they should be? Can we transform large slow moving conservative organizations or are they beyond hope? With a sense of unease coming from a perception that both corporations and governments are failing humanity, and a market that is seemingly unfair and out of balance, how can we break free from what we have always known to create a better tomorrow? What are the most important things for us to understand? Where should we invest our most precious and limited resource, our time?
So next week in Austin, we will connect and have conversations with the many great people who are leading us towards this future. We will seek to discover more about their own noble pursuits and see if we can determine how we can each find the courage that it takes to lead others into this future with us. While George Bernard Shaw famously said “all progress depends on the unreasonable man”, Building Our Future is not a solitary act, but the collective actions of millions spread around the globe. In the connected society of today, perhaps he would have said “all progress depends on the connected man’s ability to gather others for collective action.”
This is post is an introduction into the idea behind “Building Our Future”, to bring together leading futurists, entrepreneurs, executives, influencers and those who are on the front lines, leading us into a better tomorrow within our deeply connected society. There are of course, many worthy areas for discussion, but we’ve identified a few key topics that we believe to be the macro-trends around which our collective future is being built.
- The Future of Media and Brands (request VIP Access to this Round Table here)
- The Future of Work and Careers (request VIP Access to this Round Table here)
- The Future Economy
- The Open Web That Connects Us
So next week in Austin, from Friday March 7 through Monday March 10, 2014, we are gathering the leaders and the tribes who are already in town for that big interactive conference. We will be hosting round tables on each of these topics (links to come shortly) and interviewing leaders with visions of the future and stories of transformations to share. You can request an interview time slot using this form – be sure to explain what topic you want to address and a little more on your story. For the round tables, we will be using the same format we did for the Social Media Clubhouse in Austin in 2010 – in short, a handful of featured speakers/guests and other subject matter experts in the audience to lob in questions and participate on a more limited basis.
We are still seeking sponsors/investors in this project. Our goal is to collect as much footage as possible while in Austin from conversations with the people who are building our future, so that we might be able to create a long form video/documentary that we can release in a few months. We have different sponsorship levels available from $2,500 to $25,000. Only $10,000 gets you a co-producer credit, a small one hour meet up on Saturday or Sunday and a room at the Echo Studio, which is being held at a beautiful bed and breakfast just off of South Congress about a mile from the convention center.
More info to come on the bigger story behind this idea shortly, but if you have any questions, please feel free to email [email protected]
Many thanks to Sponsors Echo, Ancestry, Alynd and many other in-kind sponsors for their support of this effort. [disclosures: long time friends with Echo, for who I am producing this event; my wife works at Ancestry.com and Alynd is my new startup we are previewing next Sunday, so it is still just a family affair, though that will change shortly with your help]
Social Business Isn’t Dead, It’s ____________
Posted by cheuer in AdHocnium, Future of Work, Insytes, Leadership, Social Business, SocialMedia, The Noble Pursuit on January 29th, 2014
Here at IBM Connect 2014 in Orlando this week I’ve had a epiphany. Or perhaps, I should say that I have actually come to face the facts I have long known to be true, yet tried to forget. Or rather, I tried to ignore the facts by imbuing my support for the bigger idea that is Social Business, with a greater aspect of my soul, and my aspiration for improving humanity. Yes, I still have aspirations for a smarter planet, a smarter workforce, a smarter city and a smarter, more informed citizenry (h/t to our friends at NPR as well as IBM there). But Social Business was barely ever alive, so it isn’t dead, it’s just a marketing slogan.
No, this does not mean that I am disavowing my claims from my earlier post, “Social Business is Dead, Long Live What’s Next”. So, if you are one of the zealots hoping I have had a change of heart, you will be disappointed by what’s written here, yet I will encourage you to read on despite our disagreement. I suspect we agree more then you may even know, yet are still clinging hopefully to the symbols of these two words and the higher meaning it portends.
What I have come to realize by listening to sessions here, talking to consultants, asking analysts and speaking to real world users of the suite of technologies IBM calls Social Business is what many have known all along, and what few evangelists are willing to accept: Social Business isn’t a solution to a company’s problem; it is an aspiration. Hence, the need for such energetic and strong willed evangelism. As I came to realize long ago, great products aren’t sold, they are bought. Which is why advertising is the tax companies pay for incomplete or poorly designed products. (let’s leave aside solution selling from this discussion for now please, as that is different)
When I recommended to my colleagues at Deloitte Consulting, at the start of my job in early 2011, that we pursue Social Business as our focus, instead of Social Media, it was based on an assumption I had made and an understanding that social media was the realm of creative and communications agencies more then consultants. It was an assumption that I now realize was only partially correct, which was based on an incomplete understanding of the facts I used as the basis to make that recommendation. Yes, I made that decision in large part because of the marketing muscle and might that IBM was putting behind Social Business as much as their prior success touting eBusiness, but it’s also based on what I learned from advocating and educating people about Social Media.
At the time, I argued that we needed to call it SOCIAL media and not new media, and not, as my friend and respected colleague Steve Rubel argued, to just call it media. My reason was that we needed to accentuate and call attention to what was different about it: it was social, involving people sharing, and participating in conversations in public spaces. It has taken about seven years since those arguments in my opinion to reach the point that we can actually mostly just call it media now (though I am not opposed to calling it social media), but surely that realization has been evident for many months if not longer to many of you.
Perhaps with Social Business, the cycle has accelerated and we have reached the point where extra differentiation or attention on the social aspect isn’t needed even faster then before. The one thing I keep hearing in the keynotes, in the hallways and in my discussions with leading analysts is that most of what we are talking about is just BUSINESS. It was always intended to be about the new way we should be doing business. It was abut leaving behind the exploitative ways of old to embrace more efficient, more effective and more human aspects underlying the engine of our economy.
To this end, we do need a label, a symbol or a banner to rally behind; hence, we do need to call it something. That was really the point behind my Social Business is Dead post, to seek out and perhaps discover a better phrase. But none have materialized, and no appropriate alternatives that encompass the ideals has been suggested yet, though several exist which are at least partially true. This is why I don’t mind if we keep calling it Social Business. Or, that you might call it the Postdigital Enterprise. Or, if we talk about operating in the collaborative economy.
There are probably few things I wouldn’t want it to be called, but my mind is mostly open. It’s a big transformation for the world, and that requires a big tent where thinkers and pundits and leaders can connect the proverbial dots and go about letting people see it as they do from their perspective, calling it whatever makes the most sense to them.
Leaders, particularly in large, conservative, publicly traded companies are not ones to buy something because they’ve been told it will make them feel better, they want solutions to their problems and clear proven advantages that will help them grow profitability and market share. But still, some very smart people I have met and have known still think a social business is one that participates in social media spaces effectively with their customers, responding to tweets that might otherwise tarnish their reputation if they aren’t there fast enough. Truth is, as it has been designed, social business is much more then that – it is, as several speakers yesterday said proudly, “not something you do, but a way you are”.
As I talked with colleagues here this week after I realized Social Business isn’t dead, it’s a marketing slogan, there was some head nodding and some very light resistance – but not much. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, and while it may be off-putting to some, it is actually just a label applied to a view of how the world should operate for the benefit of everyone, where organizations work to create shared value for our society. One society, under god, with liberty, justice and equal opportunity for all.
And in that spirit of freedom, I won’t mind if my colleagues and friends keep calling it Social Business, as even I do from time to time. But I will be on the lookout for a better symbol and phrase for the foreseeable future. Because as those speakers has been saying, and as I have been hoping, its more then a set of tools, its a way of being that is different than most managers in the old world can even comprehend.
That is worthy of our efforts, and worthy of marketing dollars to help shift that change, but its also worthy of us going way beyond the marketing, the messaging and the dogfooding, to find ways to help more leaders wake up to the new world order. It requires us to convene conversations that really matter like the one I had with Rudy Karsan in the press conference after Monday’s opening general session. (will share audio shortly)
What it takes is more conversations like the one we will be hosting at our next Work Hackers Salon later in February with Charlene Li at Altimeter Group’s Hangar. If you are in the Bay Area, I hope you can make it to talk to us about the fight of our lives, the fight for defining the future of work and ensuring it has a bigger soul that will drive an even bigger wallet.
CES 2014 – Technology Solutions, Not Gadgets
I’ve been trying to synthesize everything I have been seeing at this year’s CES into some trends and insights on a macro level, but the pattern wasn’t clear to me till just now. I have a lot more of the show floor to see today, but I’ve talked to a lot of press, analysts, startups (IndieGogo and Kickstarter companies are everywhere) and industry leaders, so I have a fair impression at this point which started forming after my meeting with my friends at Seagate, my tour of Eureka Park and my limited time in the Lenovo Lounge (where I am co-hosting their Social Media party tonight).
From what I have seen, it feels that there is a lot more harmony between technology and our daily lives in the solutions being offered, and there are truly more solutions for life instead of technology for technologies sake. Makers, engineers, developers, designers and business folks are thinking more holistically and more focused on real world needs and applications of technical insight. No where was that more visible then in the number of solutions around controlling lighting, or creating ambiance through it as Bonsai Light does. But Bonsai isn’t as yellow as they are green, with their unique energy harvesting technology.
CES started for me on Monday when I kicked off the week by visiting with my dear friend and former Palm colleague, Rick Wootten over at the Seagate lounge in the Vdara. I personally have a Seagate Wireless Plus that I take everywhere with all my media and a backup of my key files off my laptop (for the just in case situations), but have been struggling to love it because of the mediocre media browser app they offered with it. I am happy to report that the new app they are bringing out shortly (in the next month I believe) will finally solve my challenge with this. I am unhappy to report that I love the new Seagate Slim models so much, I think I need to buy one. The other major software improvement they made is a new mobile device synchronization backup service that lets you move files from your mobile tablet or phone to your storage device with one click of a button, wirelessly.
Seeing everything that Seagate is doing (they now own LaCie btw) is what got me into a solution state of mind actually. They are no longer just a hard drive company. Seagate Central (I also own this for my home storage cloud) and their other drives now connect and synchronize with each other, making it easier then ever to have a simple to use file backup, media server and even social media backup configuration at home. I don’t think I will be getting the new LaCie Chirstofle designed Sphere myself, but it’s an absolutely gorgeous storage device as you can see from the photo of it with myself and Rick reflected in its shiny silver plated surface.
One thing I saw that I am going to buy right away, is the Seagate Rescue and Replace data protection plan (I’m still in the window to add this to my prior purchase). I suspect everyone who has been around tech for a while will also buy this with every new drive they purchase. In short, for $30, you insure your hard drive so that if anything happens to it. Whether it just fails, gets dropped into a toilet, run over by a car or chucked up against a wall in frustration at a spinning beach ball, you can get your data back and drive replaced. Apparently the team there has a 90+% recovery rate, one of the best out there, if not the best. Better still, after you send in the damaged drive, they send you back a new drive with all your data on it and do a very secure shred of the drive and destroy all copies of the data. The one time I had to recover a drive during my first startup in the 90’s it cost me $1,400 to attempt recovery of something like 10GB.
One other thing that has me impressed and thinking about the harmony between technology and life is the Lenovo Yoga Tablet, which I am going to be buying shortly if I can’t manage to get a product loaner for a while. But I need to get out to the show floor, so I will need to tell you why my long time friends and occasional client Lenovo has me thinking about something other then an iPad…
Wonder – a poem
And you often wonder why,
And you sometimes wonder how,
But you never quite find out.
Even when you reason with the mind,
Even when you feel with the heart,
Nought to you is ever revealed.
Though your quest began in earnest,
Though your path is paved with good deeds,
Never for a moment are you certain.
Yet you strive for even greater things,
Yet you fight the battle every day,
Because you have faith in spite of not knowing.
Neither natural disaster nor man-made mistake,
Neither purposeful malice nor accidental action,
Withdraws the whispering white wind from your sails.
Either you’ve developed uncommon resolve,
Through patience, compassion and hard work,
Or you already know the answers you seek.
– Written in late1995
All I want for Christmas is a Rockstar Developer
Posted by cheuer in Alynd, Future of Work, Personal, Social Business, SocialMedia, The Noble Pursuit on December 24th, 2013
I still want peace on earth too, but in order for me to contribute to that lofty goal, what I really want, well, what I really need, is to find a lead engineer to join Alynd as a cofounder who can code in their sleep and solve complex problems with elegant poetry. As long as I am asking Santa, I might as well ask for the stars and the moon, right? It is after all, the only thing I really want this Christmas, though I will take it as a New Year’s present too of course! Or even Valentines day if I must, but it would break my heart if we haven’t found true love by Valentines day.
Here’s the kicker, and the present that I can offer the universe to even out this very selfish, business related Christmas Wish. Up until now, my company has really been focused on finding and locating our team mates in the bay area, but the war for talent, even at the startup level, is so fierce, Bill Sanders, Rawn Shah and I have decided that we are going to build a next generation organization ourselves. So instead of centralizing everyone in the Bay Area, we will work as a virtual, distributed company. As such, I am seeking a rockstar developer / lead engineer who will be able to work from home, somewhere outside the valley from across the USA and even up in Canada.
After speaking to my friend Chris Kenton of SocialRep.com and learning how he operates his distributed development team, I was fascinated. When I read Scott Berkun’s The Year Without Pants, I was becoming a believer. When even my friends and ‘family’ asked me to fill this particular role and complete our MVP before they would invest in Alynd, I realized it was time to rethink our approach to recruiting for this position. You see, other startup friends, recruiters, venture capitalists and even our advisors have not been able to help us find someone – in fact, many are in the same situation themselves. With bay area developers asking for and getting $200k each, even those with barely any real world experience, it just makes establishing a headquarters for operation here nearly impossible. It is truly the big leagues, a near equivalent of professional sports. So unless you are the code developer equivalents of Lames, Wade and Bosh, or participating in one of the incubators, its really tough.
So we decided to look at things differently. We realized we should be ‘dogfooding’, not only with our own Alynd Software as a Service, but with the networked organizational and operational structure we see as the future of business. So recently we began to explore what that organization would look like, and it seems like the smart choice is to find team mates to join us who had a balanced, happy life already, who could contribute value to our company from wherever they were happiest. Then, as Chris Kenton does with his SocialRep team, we could get together every 4-6 weeks in person somewhere for a sort of ‘sprint’ in agile terminology.
Recently, Bill and I traveled to Tucson to do the first of what we are calling our regular “Alynements” with Rawn, working for 4 days together focused on how we were going to operate our private alpha release and early sales cycle. We talked product road map, debated the merits of different facets of our ‘big story’ and bonded a bit more too. I can’t wait to actually use our software for the next one we will be doing in February.
Hopefully, if I get my Christmas Wish (perhaps with your help if you forward this to a friend) we will be able to make someone else’s Christmas a little brighter too. So who are we looking for, besides someone awesome who lives outside the Bay Area?
Ideally the right person will have had some bad experiences working inside companies that struggled to build a positive culture and had difficulty collaborating across boundaries inside their traditional silos. They will be frustrated with the state of the current tools we have been given for collaborating and communicating as part of work, and they even realize that social technologies aren’t quite doing it right yet. Having some experience building social software, for individuals, small teams and large enterprises would be a huge plus though. Prior experience working in a startup would be a must, as is crazy proficiency with virtual team situations, as well as having a very dynamic, questing disposition. More details and a link to apply can be found over here on Social Media Jobs.com.
Given that Alynd hasn’t yet raised any money, though we are on Angels List and hoping to do so in early 2014, the right person would ideally be working the next several months largely for equity with a minimal salary to start, moving up quickly as we grow.
One thing that is essential to understand is that we really need someone who can not only manage themselves, but someone who can see problems and opportunities before they arise, and move towards them without needing us to tell them – a true self starter. In this sense, there are two ways we could go with this position, a rockstar full stack developer who can spit out code as easily as rhymes; or an engineering team leader who can build out a team while still actively contributing to the codebase. Ultimately we need both…
So it’s Christmas eve day, and while I am here with my wife’s family enjoying some rest and time together, I am still of a singly focused mind – how do we bring the vision we have for Alynd into the world? What can I do to make us successful? How can I give this great gift to the world?
Simple. I need one thing that you, my friends, colleagues and family can give me. All I want for Christmas is a Rock Star Developer. There has to be someone living in the US, who is the perfect fit. Please share this and help me find them.
And then enjoy the rest of your Christmas with your family and friends, like I am going to do for the next 36 hours. See you on Facebook in the meantime with everyone else…
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NOTE: I want to make a special request to encourage female engineers to submit their resume’s for consideration. We believe that the success of our software will ultimately require a truly diverse team, from different genders, religions, cultures and backgrounds. Why will become apparent should we interview you.
Obituary for Edward P. Jankowski, Age 97
Edward Jankowski, 97, passed away this past Wednesday night of natural causes. He is survived by his son Jack Jankowski, his son’s extended family and a grandson, Chris Heuer (that’s me). Jack’s son Tony Jankowski recounts Ed’s pride and happiness to know that the Jankowski name is carried on through his children, and now their children, where recently 5 generations of Jankowski were photographed together beginning with Ed, his son Jack, Jack’s son Tony, Tony’s sons (AJ, Tyler, Clayton) and AJ’s son Tristan.
Ed was a kind, faithful, friendly and happy man with a keen mind who was loved by all who knew him, and all he met. Active well into his 90’s, he played golf five days a week until arthritis and artificial knees with expired warranties denied him his mobility and grace at the age of 92. Old age had begun to take its toll the last several years, but his warm smile and character never suffered.
A grave side memorial service will be held on Saturday November 9, 2013 at 11am at Woodlawn Caballero Cemetery and Funeral Home in Kendall on 107th Avenue where he will be buried next to his wife, Louise Jankowski.
Born in 1916, he saw the depression through the eyes of a teenager, eating so much chicken as a child, he would never eat it again in his life. The son of immigrants from Lithuania and Poland, he lived a comfortable middle class life with over 36 years in retirement. His life was rich with experiences uncommon for most men of that era. He lived an active lifestyle boating, fishing, golfing and spending as much time in the sun as he could after many cold winters shoveling snow in his native Chicago. His life was largely defined by the love he had for his wife, Louise, with whom he spent more then 50 years of his life. Though she passed in 1993 a few months after Hurricane Andrew tore through the home in Perrine, FL that he and the rest of his extended family had called home since 1976, he remained faithful to her until the day he died.
After working at a parking garage in Chicago for a number of years in his younger years, he was promoted to the role of driver for a family businessman who owned many downtown Chicago garages in the 1930’s. He was fortunate to be off on the day in which his boss, his replacement driver and several others were gunned down in a Chicago Gangland Shooting at a barber shop in a style all too typical of that era. After proving he was not involved in the incident to the satisfaction of the owners family and colleagues, he got another job, which ultimately lead him to the career of his lifetime as a machinist in a factory.
When WWII broke out, with a newly born daughter with Cerebral Palsy, he was able to stay away from the front lines while supporting the war effort building B-25 bombers, routing miles and miles of electrical harnesses for hundreds of planes. When the war was over he found work at Continental Can/Whitecap building, running and maintaining the machinery that produced cans and the tops to bottles and jars. He was exceptional as a machinist and could figure out any engineering problem easily with his sharp mind and soft heart, building close ties with both co-workers and management.
In the early 1950’s he left the city of Chicago behind to move to the suburbs of Glenview, IL where he literally built his first house which stood till just a few years ago at 34 Lincoln Street. His can do spirit inspired his children, Amanda and Jack. He loved them dearly though he could never really tell them, as the stoic men of his era didn’t have that sort of emotional expression in their repertoire. He gave his daughter Amanda every chance for success by encouraging her to live a life of a normal child as best as possible despite her Cerebral Palsy. Ultimately she was one of the first ‘handicapped’ children to ever graduate from a public high school in the Chicago school system.
He stayed with the same company for over 25 years until taking an early retirement at 61 to move along with the entire extended family, including his wife’s sister’s family to live near each other in Miami. He would say, “it’s just too damn cold. I want to be where it’s warm.”
His daughter Amanda lived with him throughout her life except for brief marriages to Leo Heuer, the father of her only child, Chris, and the second love of her life Frank, until her untimely death in 1995 from Cirrhosis after a life long struggle grappling with the frustration inherent in a brilliant mind and beautiful soul trapped in a broken body. Ed’s gregariousness was passed down to his family and you can see him in their smiles and when they smile through their eyes. Mandy as she liked to be called, touched as many if not more lives then Ed did learning to roller skate, volunteer in her son’s school and being a recognized member of the communities in which she lived.
Ed and his wife Louise loved to just get in the car and drive. Every winter vacation would involve a drive from Chicago to Miami Beach, through Louise’s home state of Kentucky to visit with family and friends. In later years, before her death, they would drive from Miami to Naples where they would stay a few days at their favorite beachfront hotel listening to the waves roll in and watching the sunset. They never did get to Las Vegas together, a lifelong dream, but through their senior citizens club at St Louis Church in South Miami, they would often go over to the Bahamas on day trips aboard Sea Escape, or to Orlando to visit Disney World. When Epcot opened they took their grandson where he saw and was forever enraptured by a technology driven future and the realization that we could always develop new ideas to make the world a little better – a trip that ignited his imagination and set the stage for his entire life.
Mostly, Ed and Louise just sat together, read, and held hands. While he didn’t express his love in verbal ways, the light of love shined brightly in his eyes whenever he would look at her, ensuring that everyone, especially her, knew the depth and breadth of his heart. Every day after work at the factory she would welcome him home, he would make his martini, kick off his shoes and sit back in his La-Z-Boy to enjoy a pipe before dinner. She was briefly a cook for a high school and was a wizard in the kitchen, but most importantly she was a guiding force as the matriarch of the extended family.
In Miami he had to wait several years till he was able to get a spot as a member at Briar Bay Golf Course, where he played every weekday for almost 30 years. Between the golf course and his senior citizen club, he watched as way too many of his friends and family passed away, with only a handful of people who knew him still on this earth today. He and his friends would always get to the course early and vie for a position to be the first to tee off. He made friends easily, always courteous, always smiling and always with a witty comment at the ready.
Even though he was retired, he joined a business men’s bowling league at Don Carter’s Bowling Center where he bowled every Thursday night from the late-1970’s until the early 1990’s. For some reason he took his grandson with him (me), feeding him quarters to play video games, buying him French fries and letting him play pool. His teammates always got a kick out of the way his grandson exchanged bards and smiles with him, occasionally celebrating his multiple strikes and high scores, but mostly giving him shit and warning him to ‘not choke’. Even then, he still smiled and laughed, and his teammates were encouraging to that young child as it persisted until he went off to college, and even then occasionally when he returned for a visit. After picking up a bit of golf in college, Ed half-jokingly remarked to his grandson that he never took him to the golf course because that was the only place he could find peace and quiet.
His daughter’s cerebral palsy was bad enough that she couldn’t bowl in the traditional way. But there was a bowling league for people with disabilities, and every Saturday night he took her, his wife and his grandson to that league where they volunteered and she learned how to use a special ramp to direct the ball down the lanes. Ultimately, unhappy with the quality of the ramps that they loaned out, he built her a new and better one, and he ultimately built several for other members of the league. That ramp increased her average by almost 20 points to the delight of both son and daughter.
Bowling ran in the family, and the family spent a lot of time at Don Carter’s Bowling Center with his grandson ultimately getting a small college scholarship for the sportsmanship he displayed in his traveling league, a trait that was most certainly imbued in him by Ed.
After outliving both his wife and his daughter, Ed was fortunate to have many friends with whom we would occasionally go out to dinner and often play penny ante poker one day every week. While he was often alone, he was never truly lonely, until the last of his friends also passed and his body gave way to old age.
His son Jack and his wife Joanne ultimately took him in to their home after getting to the point where he was no longer adequately taking care of himself. They looked after him for nearly a decade, ensuring that he didn’t have to go into an institution for his final years. Only a few days after going into hospice last week, he passed away at approximately 8:10pm the day after his wife’s birthday, November 6, 2013.
Author/Grandson’s Note:
I’m sad that I wasn’t there for him at the end, to help guide him, to give him comfort and to let him know it was ok, that he was loved. What he did for me can’t be put into words. When Louise passed, I was living in Philadelphia and they didn’t want to worry me because they knew I would want to fly down there to be by her side, so they called me the night before the triple bypass from which she ultimately didn’t emerge. I told her in that call that it was ok, that she could let go if she wanted to and that I would do my best to look after Ed and Mandy. I know she was staying around to do that job herself.
Unfortunately I didn’t know that Ed had been slipping the last couple of weeks, and worse the last couple of times I did call, I wasn’t able to get him on the phone because he was either sleeping or in the bathroom. I didn’t call enough in the final weeks because it had grown too difficult to talk to him when he just repeatedly told me about his medical struggles and his desire to just die and be done. Our wonderful family doctor, Dr. Zimmerman, had said for 20+ years that he would live to be 100. He was almost right.
When both my mom and grandma passed away, I asked grandpa Ed a big favor. I asked him “Please don’t die before I have kids. I want them to know you.” He was such an amazing man and I was so selfish. I know in part he hung on because of this request. We had a very special bond, more then just grandfather and grandson. We had become friends from those nights in the bowling alley and all the times he drove me around to football practice, to my computer programming classes at community college to school events and yes, to Disney World/Epcot.
He taught me to drive in Cutler Ridge mall. He gave me his favorite car and I wrecked it less then two weeks later, though not my fault. He not only ensured that I was able to go to college and get the first college degree in our family, but he loaned me money to start InfoApps in 1999, and again when I got into financial trouble when my consulting work wasn’t going well. He was my rock. I am who I am because of the opportunities, support and love he gave me.
When I saw him last in June, I took him to buy new shoes. We went to Florsheim and ended up buying what he told me was the most expensive pair of shoes he ever owned. We went to Outback Steakhouse for his favorite meal with my aunt and uncle as we did for almost all of my visits over the last decade. When we were alone I told him that it was ok, that he could let go and that when he was ready he could move on. It was a difficult conversation, as he never knew how to respond to such direct and emotional discussions. But he nodded, understanding.
I left that evening and wept for almost 15 minutes as I drove up the Palmetto. I had a sense that it was likely the last time I was going to see him. Of course I hoped differently, and we had planned to see him this Thanksgiving for one of the first holiday meals together in many years.
Instead, I cashed in those tickets to pay for the trip to his funeral this weekend.
Don’t ever hesitate to call or visit. Don’t ever hesitate to express love. Don’t ever think something doesn’t matter. Everything matters. Every word. Every deed. Every thought. Every heartfelt gesture. Make the most of them all with the loved ones you have while you have them.
I was fortunate to have had him in my life as long as I did. But I still feel robbed. Yes, I go on, and we persist. I have a wonderful wife and a crazy happy life where I get to enjoy the world more then most, compensation perhaps for early struggles and difficult days. But I have what I have because he, and my grandmother and my mother believed in me and gave me a loving home and every opportunity to become something greater then where we started. That love and encouragement made me believe in myself enough, and find enough courage to try to make a difference in this world. Sometimes it is that courage to try that is all that is needed to inspire others, but without love, respect and compassion in the intention of the work, it would be nothing and I would have nothing.
I learned all of that and more from Edward Peter Jankowski, my gramps. He was my best friend. I will miss him so much. I just want to play 9 more holes with him, or share one more meal, or just one more loving embrace. I won’t be able to do that again, but I have 44 years of memories, more then most get with their grandparents, and for that I am forever grateful.
Given his condition of late, I must admit I am happy he is not suffering any longer, it was indeed time to go, and I am sure my grandma had something to do with it, helping him shuttle off his mortal coil and join her in spirit.
After the inevitable grieving over the next few days and weeks ahead, I will celebrate his life and I will go on. Through my life, Edward Peter Jankowski, his big heart, his infectious smile and his legacy of kindness to all will live on.
UPDATE: During the funeral service I spoke with my cousin Tony and updated the obituary to reflect conversations Ed had with him about his son’s extended family carrying on the Jankowski name. The story of my name is much more complicated. We should have changed it to Jankowski, but I just got used to it. Though I never knew my father, and my mother remarried to become a DeNormandie, I felt that since I was born a Heuer I would remain a Heuer.
The service was simple. We had a brief open casket viewing on the parlor which I had thought I would forego, but after his son told me he looked peaceful we went into the room to see him and say good bye. I felt a much lighter feeling then I expected and was glad to see him one last time. At the graveside, after the preacher read some bible passages I gave a short eulogy to celebrate his life and basically told everyone to read this if they wanted to hear the rest. Facebook posts referenced as eulogies. Wow. But how appropriate. I think he would have been embarrassed knowing how many lives he touched through this post and the one I made to Facebook the day after he died. For me though, I was glad to let people know how special he was, and how much he touched this world and how much he shaped me. I am forever grateful to have had him in my life so long.
The Social Business is Dead Conversation Continues
Posted by cheuer in Future of Work, Social Business, Unconferences on October 30th, 2013
I was humbled to see that my “Social Business is Dead! Long Live What’s Next!” article on Brian Solis’ site struck a chord with a lot of people, igniting conversations around the web, inside big Social Business vendors and in online communities. It was shared in a positive context over 1,000 times, but it also seems a few people saw the hyperbole of the headline and didn’t read any further. Some friends like Stowe Boyd, even accused me of not understanding the difference between social media and social business – despite the fact that he knows differently from direct personal conversations, and from my work to define both concepts over the years in conversations just like this one taking place now about the future of work.
It is unfortunate, but not uncommon, to deal with these sorts of less than flattering comments in the egosphere of social media. Today more than ever, what we need for us to move forward is respectful and honest dialogue where we can discuss underlying concepts without unnecessary personal barbs. My post was about much more then marketing or memeology. It clearly wasn’t about social media in the external or marketing sense. A thorough reading of the lengthy article demonstrates I am most interested in hacking away at the underlying problems to develop new models for this new age.
Language is but one, albeit important, part of my Social Business is Dead post. The language we use must reflect our deeper intention and must resonate with its intended audience. In this case, the people who decide where to invest their organization’s capital was foremost on my mind. Words can divide us or unite us. They can inspire us or dampen our spirits. They can lift us up or cut us down. They can also describe a very complex idea, in seconds instead of hours, if you share a cultural or historical context with the writer, or if the concept can be readily conveyed through other devices and metaphors.
This is why we have talked over the years about the need for the back and forth of conversation to create understanding. Reading a phrase or a sentence is often not sufficient to understand where someone is coming from or where they are seeking to go. This is also a problem with our sound bite driven news cycles and those taking other people’s words out of context to make one position seem stronger at the expense of another. If we truly care about driving forward positive outcomes for an organization, an industry or even society, we need to engage in respectful dialog with each other. We need to create an opportunity to really HEAR what someone is meaning with their words instead of passing it through our own biases and filters and distorting their intention and meaning.
It is for this reason that I made a call for leaders to come together in my post on Defining The Future of Work at the Work Hackers Summit. It is time to convene those who are using different language to define the future of work to create a compelling vision, discuss our differences, and find common ground to be stronger together then we are separately. Whether you are talking about Enterprise 2.0, Social Business, Responsive Organizations, Agile Business Enterprises, The Future of Work or any other term du jour, we are all mostly aligned around common outcomes using different language and different distinctions. Whether you use a combination of a Symposium and Open Space like we will be doing with the Work Hackers Summit, or you participate in a Chautaqua like Boyd suggests doesn’t matter. Coming together is what matters. Learning what methods work best in which situations for achieving key results matters. Spreading and sharing our success matters. Convening a diverse set of perspectives in respectful dialog matters. And what matters most to me, as with Social Media Club previously, is helping more individuals realize their power to fix what is broken and to create greater value for themselves, their employers, their clients and society.
So What Was The Real Point of “Social Business is Dead”?
The point I was trying to convey in my article on Social Business is Dead was in part about the language around Social Business losing its power and allure, but ultimately about the need for an easier to understand vision for the future of work, to define it’s unique characteristics and to collaboratively work together on the development of a map on how we get from here to there. It was also, in part, about a need to inspire and empower more individuals to find courage to hack work – to fix what is broken, and to strive to adapt the world to us ‘unreasonable’ people. It was also, obviously, about saying something a little controversial to expand the conversation I’ve been having with consultants, technology vendors, VC’s, authors and senior executives over the past several months.
In Boyd’s piece, he puts this in different terms saying that “Social Business isn’t Dead, But It Isn’t Enough Either”, in part supporting my underlying position while debating my headline. While I am grateful that he would respond directly to me in his blog post and share it with his readers, it is strange that he didn’t seem to disagree with my “Social Business” being dead position when I spoke with him about it at the Work Revolution Summit in September.
What I know, and you know if you are reading this, is that the world has fundamentally changed. The connected society in which we now live is markedly different from the post-industrial one. Organizations have to change structurally, operationally and technologically. More specifically, they need to recognize that, in Bill Jensen’s words, “humans aren’t resources, they are assets and should be treated accordingly.” But ultimately there is so much that needs to change in light of our recent technological and sociological advancements, it is nearly impossible to address all of it in a single post or even a single book.
In today’s world of business, EVERYTHING MATTERS, and there is no simple string theory yet to describe the future state we seek. Which is why I am calling for us to come together at the Work Hackers Summit in early February 2014 (details TBA) to talk about it respectfully with one another. We need more entrepreneurs to develop new tools for self management as I am doing with my new startup Alynd. We can shine a light on the things that are no longer working inside large organizations and small ones as I did during my time at Deloitte. We can each contribute our insights from our experiences and make a bigger difference together.
What I know is that the organizational structure needs to change. The way the organization is governed needs to change. The way we work together needs to change. How we create value needs to change. And yes, how we talk about it needs to change too.
What I also know is that none of this might happen until there is total collapse of the corporate structure or the socioeconomic environment in which we operate. I am hopeful this need not be the case, but we have seen this happen to countless industries as demonstrated in Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report for 2013 where she points out how the mighty have fallen and our need to rethink everything. This revolution needs to come from the bottoms up AND the top down, everyone, from every perspective needs to rethink what they are doing and why.
What I tried to convey, and what many people who read the entire Social Business is Dead blog post realized, was that there is a need for action. That leaders, change agents and work hackers alike need to find courage, tell the emperor he has no clothes, embrace failure, and continue to try and fix things. As I said in my closing paragraph:
Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is not to get caught up in the words, but to connect with each other and figure out how to re-imagine our broken corporations and set about trying to fix them. Fail fast, fail often and find the greatest success possible.
I tried to get a lot of the points I saw as leading us to our future into my post, perhaps I just used too many of them.
I tried to paint a picture of the pain so many people are experiencing inside their broken organizations and to explain why the most talented are fleeing big organizations.
I tried to explain that the word “social” is not the word that is inspiring leaders to invest in better models, better processes or better people.
I also explicitly stated:
While I believe Social Business’ time has come and is now gone, I still am one of the believers. The idea, the need and the opportunity are simply too huge to ignore. Words are powerful. Words are important. But the idea is too big, the pull too strong and the need too great to be held back by the failure of two words to win the attention and budgets of corporate leaders.
Thankfully, my article resonated with many people and seemingly only turned off a few.
From my perspective, it is great either way because we need the conversation. Don’t let the debate or debaters distract you from what really matters. It’s not what I say or do that will change your world. It’s not what anyone else says or does. It is what you do. It is what you say. And as I close again, I will cite one of my heroes who has lifted myself and many others… as Howard Rheingold says “what it is –> is up to you!”
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Chris Heuer is the founder of Mentor Bureau, a global collaborative of Startup Mentors focused on #SmoothScaling over #Hypergrowth. He has invested his life in working to create a better society through personal and community efforts that brings people together such as Rysing Tyde and Social Media Club. To learn more about Chris, visit his profile on LinkedIn.