The Intrapreneur Thing

As many of you already know, I recently joined Deloitte Consulting LLP, where I will be working with a group of people that are building out the firm’s capabilities in the digital/social/mobile arena. For me, this is not just a return to the consulting life — where I have spent most of my career [...]

Our National Malcolm Gladwell Obsession

When talking about Gladwell in public forums, I sometimes quip that he has been caught in the middle — Malcolm in the middle — of the virtual world and the physical world, and left alone defending one of them. That might be true, but I think that this might be less of a problem for him than it is for us. I spent some time collecting and sifting through the hundreds of articles and blog posts about Gladwell since the article in October. Many of them are angry and disappointed, as if Gladwell, somehow, has let the world down (argument = with influence comes responsibility). At a time when so many people around the world are making their voices heard and practicing the hard work of social organization, the idea that one person could stand in the way and let the world down seems antiquated (perhaps a topic for a future discussion that even Gladwell would find interesting).

Enterprise 2.0 Adoption: Does It Have To Be So Hard?

Anyone who has spent any time in the enterprise 2.0 business – for me, it’s been five years – will admit this, if pressured: by far the greatest challenge for the market is not corporate fear, cluelessness, or laziness – the usual scapegoats. The challenge is something far more elusive: getting people in the company to adopt the program meaningfully, persistently, and scalably. The truth is that many enterprise 2.0 programs fail to gain traction because they actually require work. In the enterprise, culture matters, and culture is not something you can easily add, game, or integrate, like the latest 2.0 widget.

“Todos Vuelven”: Thoughts About LatinVision’s Summit

Rick added a really interesting innovation to the panel format — he asked the panelists to each tweet four comments before the event so that he could grab the screen shots and prepare them as slides. He then mixed the order of the slides, so as to ensure a fun and lively conversation. Gotta say, I have served on many panels, and this one by far was the best yet. Credit goes not only to Rick — a masterful, funny, energetic moderator — but to Carlos as well. As producer of the event, Carlos was wise enough to give more time to this panel than others might have. Both the panelists and the audience benefited.

A Place of One’s Own (On the Social Web)

The world is changing. We are moving from a site-centric world (site in the old sense of the word) to a network-centric world. But it’s a new world with lots of uncertainty. How does a business deal with the fact that Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn have such a great presence in the network-centric world? Ignore them? That would be wrong — just as wrong, in fact, as it would be to ignore the largest players in the real world of real estate. But a safe bet would be for businesses to invest in a little real-estate of their own, and grab a piece of the American dream. There’s a nascent market of “enterprise 2.0″ companies (I am with one of them) ready to respond to the market, and already the market is beginning to see the value. I’ll share more as I move along — I’ve been on the job (officially) less than one week. But it’s one of the most interesting and exciting markets that I’ve competed in for quite some time. It’s a great place.

The Out Crowd: Why “Crowdsourced Creative” is Both Smart and Good

These many experiments have given us something else to think about — the use of the word “creative,” which, as I noted, is a term that the advertising community has branded and defined too narrowly. As the entire universe of crowdsourcing has demonstrated, the work that people can be tapped to do is the most important stuff there is. For the essence of “creative” is creating, the making of things, without which there’d be nothing (literally). And, as companies like MOFILM, Aniboom, and Talenthouse are demonstrating, the things we are talking about are potentially great things — this is not the world of amateurs, but a newly organized world of professionals — and people on their way up (e.g., MOFILM has done a great job connecting with students in film school) — who are motivated to work (at least part of the time) in environments that are less hierarchical and more network-centric. That, of course, has long been one of the promises of the social web, but I believe that “crowdsourcing creative” is pushing the outer edges of social technology design and that we can all learn a lot from it. I’ve been watching this market for quite some time (disclosure = Aniboom was a client of my agency a while back), and these are three things I’ve observed.

Teaching the World to Touch

Touch is not a new technology. It’s been around many years, but mostly as a labs-and future-of-technology showcase. Of course, the iPod/iPhone changed all that, and it’s fair to say that Apple and its many device-manufacturer followers have been teaching the world to touch for several years now. I got a good reminder of this about a year ago when I picked up a magazine and unconsciously spread my fingers over the print, attempting to make the type bigger; the iPhone had already trained me to use a computer UI to navigate the world of physical media (a creepy but enlightening moment). But what many people are discovering this month is that touch is a much more compelling modality when the form factor — the size, weight, and field of play of the device — is right. Many things that worked OK on the iPhone work even better on the iPad. If the iPhone was the first device to begin to teach the world to touch, the iPad may usher in a bigger wave of education. And if that happens, all the hype surrounding Apple’s magical device will be deserved. Because of if the world learns to touch, computing may in fact change forever.

Are Southern Accents Contagious?

I am in Savannah this week for a talk with teachers at the city’s fabled school of arts and design. It’s my second visit tot the city, and almost as soon as I set my bag on the ground at the airport taxi station, I was overcome with the irresistible urge to speak in a Southern accent. I almost did — a lady on line ahead of me asked a question, and it was all I could do to hold onto my New York/New Jersey/Northern California cadence, a 50-year plus work-in-progress that one might think is undoable. But undo I almost did. I’ve seen it happen to others. Years ago, a college girlfriend, whose family hailed from New England, moved to South Carolina and 18 months later she easily could have passed for a lady in a Tennessee Williams play (”lemonade, lemonade … made in the shade”). Didn’t make sense — and it didn’t seem right. But over the years I noticed the effect on other people.

So what is it about southern accents that make them contagious, if in fact they are contagious. I’ve decided to crowdsource this question, here on this blog and through several social networks. But to get things started, here are a few pet theories of mine, developed at different times over the years, reflecting the different stages of evolution of my cynical self, which leans neither North, South, but probably East.

Bubble Bathing on the Harvard Business Review Blog

Very interesting entry yesterday on the Harvard Business Review blog (one of my new faves). Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab, has posted a short, sharp screed about the “social media bubble,” complaining that it is “largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships.” I’ve got many issues with the logic of Umair’s argument. At times, I can’t tell if he’s complaining about the failure of social media to live up to its own hype or the failure of social media to live up to the early hype of the Web in general (as when he writes, “there’s this old trope: the Internet runs on love. Equally, though, it’s full of hate: irrational lashing-out at the nearest person, place, or thing that’s just a little bit different.”). And I can’t yet tell if Umair wants to save social media from itself, or whether he just wants to burst the bubble (he’s in the industry, so I am betting on the former). But I do like the he’s chosen a forum like the HBR blog to launch this conversation. At the moment, I see 57 comments from what looks like a broad range of readers. And he’s promising a follow-up on “we can do” about this sad state of affairs. I’m waiting for the next post impatiently. This is an important conversation and I hope Umair guides it well.

Innovation by “Design”: The Case for Social Media

Good post by Roberto Verganti on the Harvard Business Review blog. Topic is how “user-centered innovation” is not sustainable…. It’s an interesting perspective, and one that might add depth to the discussions many businesses are having today about the design and implementation of social media. The bias in this world — and it’s a good one — is for user experience. But our rational obsession with the user can easily obscure the difference between the work that UE/UI professionals do and the work that social-media innovators do. Both are important, but it’s important to see them on different horizons, to borrow from the old McKinsey model for corporate growth. Even Facebook — a company that has developed the gold standard for user experience in social media today (a standard that CEO/founder Mark Zuckerberg proudly calls “elegant organization”) — will sometimes ignore the crowd and bet on a feature, a functionality, a concept that will play big in the future (i.e., across a later time horizon).