Endless Knots

Face-to-face for the Oreo tweet

Being a three-screen watcher of the Stupor Bowl, which tells you a lot about my interest in football (see for example, The Stronger Women Get, The More Men Love Football, introduced to me by my nevertheless-Patriots-loving Daughter #1), I had a great time tweeting during the famous Lights-out of 2013. (Further disclosure: When the Pats are winning, I can't resist regional pride.)

Thus the now-famous Oreo tweet came up right away in my feed, even though I don't follow the cookie (never mind, I can taste it just thinking of it, scraping my teeth across the icing, dissolving the cookie on my tongue -- you're welcome, Nabisco, for the commercial).

Which made me curious about how decisions were made such that the tweet was up nearly simultaneously with lights-out. Lacking the time to turn this into investigative journalism requiring my actually contacting the ad agency responsible for it (360i.com), I did the next best thing: I read the posts from others. 

According to Buzzfeed's "How Oreo Got that Twitter Ad Up So Fast" (thank you, Rachel Sanders), the answer is co-location:

"We had a mission control set up at our office with the brand and 360i, and when the blackout happened, the team looked at it as an opportunity," agency president Sarah Hofstetter told BuzzFeed. "Because the brand team was there, it was easy to get approvals and get it up in minutes."

...The key? Having Oreo executives in the room, ready to pull the trigger.

My questions: Could they have made the decision as quickly if everyone was not in the room? Who came up with the idea originally? Were they shouting to one another? Sharing one large screen? Several? Were the Oreo execs making the call on every tweet (they had a near constant flood of tweets, of which this was only one)? Had they set out operating agreements for what would go live and what needed approval beforehand? Were the most senior Oreo execs online and watching the quick-acting team that garnered so much buzz so quickly?

Someone will make this a case study in social media, for sure. And it will be interesting to see what lessons are drawn about collaboration and proximity from it.

 

 

 

 

 

Which organizations have the best virtual/flexible/agile work policies?

This is a request for information: I'm looking for examples of how companies, nonprofits, and NGOs (even government agencies) implement their flexible work policies. Also known as virtual/distributed/agile/collaborative work approaches, these guidelines can cover everything from carpooling to work-from-home to hoteling to who-knows-what.

I'm gathering this info for a talk I'm giving for a global company--virtually, of course--at the end of the month.

Which companies have the most innovative approaches? And what pitfalls have they encountered? As always, I will credit anyone who responds in my presentation, a practice I've adhered to since I began giving talks umpteen years ago--and write a post here also giving you credit.

Thanks so much!

Collaboration 2.0 by 3-year-olds

Confused about collaboration and what it really means? Lake and Finn help here, leaving us with a bit of a cliffhanger. Perhaps they'll be back to finish the story.

 

 

Transcript in case you are not familiar with "WordGirl" from the Planet Lexicon, who introduces words like these.

Me: First say collaborate.

Finn: Collaborate.

Mom: Can you guys explain what that means?

Lake: Collaborate means work together with two people.

Finn: Yes.

Mom: Who likes to collaborate?

Lake: Dr Twobrains and Granny May and Chuck and Toby. Likes to collaborate.

Mom: Cool.

Ethan: What do you have to say, Finny?

Finn: And there's two monsters, two monsters in WordGirl, yes.

Ethan: Do they collaborate?

Finn: Yes. Mom: Who are the two monsters?

Finn: The energy monster and that green monster.

Mom: Oh.

Me: Are they collaborating too?

Finn: Yes.

Me: What are the collaborating on?

Finn: On a mission.

Lake: What kind of mission?

Finn: A mission that stops WordGirl.

Me: A mission that stops WordGirl.

Ethan: Exciting.

Mom: And then what does WordGirl do?

Finn: She goes, she pretends that she's in jail.

Mom: And then what happens?

Finn: It's over.

Mom: Oh. She doesn't get out of jail?

Finn: She does get out of jail. She finds a way to get out of jail.

Mom: Cool.

Lake: ???

 

 

 

"Make bureaucracy sexy"

Give yourself the gift of 12 minutes listening to Jennifer Pahlka's TED talk, "Coding a Better Government." She knows. Jen founded and is executive director of Code for America. Simple description: "Helps governments work better for everyone with the people and the power of the web."

 

I met Jen about five years ago when she called asking me to participate in what became Enterprise 2.0, then called Collaborate 2.0 ... I think. Liked her instantly. Plus she gave her daughter one of the all-time very cool names: Clementine.

We'll be posting more on this shortly but in the meantime listen to what she has to say. This great quote is at about 9 minutes.

 

 

The origin of good ideas -- again

Summer Turner, Director of  Organizational Development & Communication at Omgeo, has "turner-ed" me on to this excellent Steven Johnson video, taken from his book, Where Good Ideas Come From. With apologies to Mr. Johnson for a horrid over-simplification, he says what we know as group-lover cliches: two heads (if not more) are better than one, that ideas take a while to germinate (he does a nice riff on Tim Berners-Lee's 10-year gestation of the web), and that "the great driver in technological innovation has been the historic increase in connectivity." But he says it so well and with great examples.

We too have said this in a few of our books, even constructed a slide about it (see below) about a dozen years ago with clients at Shell Oil, that relates connectivity to the evolution of organizations. We've come a long way since smoke signals and tin cans. Technology innovation aside, connectivity even allows us to "innovate" -- invent, I guess you'd say, new organizations.

Great stuff, Steven. That your middle name is the same as my grandmother's makes me think that we're, how do you say, connected. Check out his website here.

 

 

 

 

Extremely connected and incredibly creative

Thanks to Robin Chase, the extremely insightful founder of Buzzcar (and cofounder of Zipcar), whom I got to know when we both participated in Springboard, please enjoy this metaphor of how one thing can lead to another in the hands of an artist, in this case (see NY Times, "Turning a Page, the Joseph Herscher Way," "[who] builds Rube Goldberg machines in Williamsburg, Brooklyn."

 

 

 

 

 

Ware & Grantham: Managing Remotely

I'm about to give a series of workshops ("Managing a Remote Workforce") and to make sure I'm current on the best thinking, I naturally did my (re)search by googling that title.

Up came this great white paper, Managing a Remote Workforce: Proven Practices from Successful Leaders, from my old friends and colleagues, Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham. Their research was sponsored by Citrix, the gotomeeting folks.

Here are five practices that I've "stolen" (with their permission) for what I'm presenting today and tomorrow:

1. Develop formal, explicit, strategic programs with senior management sponsors

2. Work differently

• Redesigned business processes
• New technologies
• New ways to communicate
• Outcomes measured, rewarded not monitoring employees

3. Training is critical

4. Collaboration technologies are central to success

5. Unsuccessful without thoughtful planning; aggressive implementation; significant organizational, cultural change

 

Take that, Gladwell: Vinegar, onions, social networks, and soccer nuts a revolution do make

For anyone who still doubts (Malcolm Gladwell) the role of informal communication, aka social media, in bringing about monumental change before the whole world's very eyes in Egypt, see today's lead story (headlined in print version) of NY Times, "A Tunisian-Egyptian Link That Shook Arab History."

Excellent, detailed, and insightful reporting lays out the sequence by which, the online subhead reads*: "Two-year collaboration of dissidents gave birth to a new force — a pan-Arab youth movement dedicated to spreading democracy in a region without it."

I've been pondering this post for nearly two hours, trying to figure out a way to summarize the low-tech/high-tech amalgam that so fundamentally reshapes the chemistry of the future. I can't do better than to quote the first few paragraphs, though the whole thing is definitely click-worthy. In fact, I just read a bundle of grafs from one of the jump pages (there are two) to a traveling family member. It's remarkable, friends, right down to the people in Cairo (perhaps elsewhere) protecting themselves with "body armor," if you can call it that, made of "cardboard or plastic bottles...worn under their clothes to protect against riot police bullets."

Here's the beginning of David Kirpatrick and David Sanger's remarkable journalism:

"CAIRO — As protesters in Tahrir Square faced off against pro-government forces, they drew a lesson from their counterparts in Tunisia: 'Advice to the youth of Egypt: Put vinegar or onion under your scarf for tear gas.'

"The exchange on Facebook was part of a remarkable two-year collaboration that has given birth to a new force in the Arab world — a pan-Arab youth movement dedicated to spreading democracy in a region without it. Young Egyptian and Tunisian activists brainstormed on the use of technology to evade surveillance, commiserated about torture and traded practical tips on how to stand up to rubber bullets and organize barricades.

"They fused their secular expertise in social networks with a discipline culled from religious movements and combined the energy of soccer fans with the sophistication of surgeons. Breaking free from older veterans of the Arab political opposition, they relied on tactics of nonviolent resistance channeled from an American scholar through a Serbian youth brigade — but also on marketing tactics borrowed from Silicon Valley."

These are big claims for a lede article in the paper of record. The reporters go on to substantiate the assertions in the next section, headlined "Bloggers Lead the Way:"

"The Egyptian revolt was years in the making. Ahmed Maher, a 30-year-old civil engineer and a leading organizer of the April 6 Youth Movement, first became engaged in a political movement known as Kefaya, or Enough, in about 2005. Mr. Maher and others organized their own brigade, Youth for Change. But they could not muster enough followers; arrests decimated their leadership ranks, and many of those left became mired in the timid, legally recognized opposition parties. “What destroyed the movement was the old parties,” said Mr. Maher, who has since been arrested four times.

"By 2008, many of the young organizers had retreated to their computer keyboards and turned into bloggers, attempting to raise support for a wave of isolated labor strikes set off by government privatizations and runaway inflation.

"After a strike that March in the city of Malhalla, Egypt, Mr. Maher and his friends called for a nationwide general strike for April 6. To promote it, they set up a Facebook group that became the nexus of their movement, which they were determined to keep independent from any of the established political groups...

"Just a few months later, after a strike in the Tunisian city of Hawd el-Mongamy, a group of young online organizers followed the same model, setting up what became the Progressive Youth of Tunisia. The organizers in both countries began exchanging their experiences over Facebook. The Tunisians faced a more pervasive police state than the Egyptians, with less latitude for blogging or press freedom, but their trade unions were stronger and more independent. 'We shared our experience with strikes and blogging,' Mr. Maher recalled."

And on it goes. I could continue excerpting but it's better for you to read it yourself. It is more than evident that those responsible for this miraculous transformation in the geopolitical scene simply used the tools of their time, just as the Committees of Correspondence used a nascent postal service to refine their strategy and tactics among a million or so people in a troublesome land that became the US of A.

Which brings me back to the title of this post: The naysayers around the importance of new media also disparage those who have had the courage to keep at it. Again, it's people who made the difference here. Thank heavens they had such powerful tools with which to communicate.

Last thing: the Times article says the protestors have been strongly influenced by "an American political thinker, Gene Sharp." I've never heard of him. Start following the links from here, which include the Serbian youth movement, Optor!'s, which helped bring down Milosevic.

And when you lose faith again that dictators can be deposed and retreat to thinking that the future looks terribly bleak even in places where there are no dictators, only zealots, turn your attention to the next generation. Perhaps one day "they" could become ideologues too but the best part of this story is that there is no monolithic "they" this time. Just a loosely structured network of energized activists whose architecture of revolution--and tools--are barely understood.

Also, see Nicholas Kristof's "What Egypt Can Teach America" in yesterday's NY Times.

* I never realized before how different the print and online heads are in NYT articles - subtle but different.

Uptick in teleconferencing

Re: the volcano disrupting travel and thus promoting virtual working: One of many articles to come in the next few days, I'm certain, this, thanks to Amy Millman, "Stranded Travelers Turn to Teleconferencing," by Kevin O'Brien in the NY Times. My favorite anecdote:

In one case, a couple stranded in Dubai decided to televise their wedding vows over a Skype video conference to guests gathered for their wedding ceremony on Saturday in England, Ms. Milosevich said.

Saves on catering costs, never mind those costly centerpieces.

Iceland causes virtual teams to finally erupt

From Reuters/Ingolfur Juliusson, plasmastic

Quite a good post ("Eruptions") from Hugh Tonks at workshifting.com. Clever walk around his team looking at what the shutdown in air travel has meant to them. How many more volcanoes will it take before virtual teams gain some respect?