DARPA seeks algorithms to create stories from info fragments

One of the nicest aspects of blogging is when a reader points you to an interesting article you hadn't seen. I'd like to thank reader S.E. August for this reference.

Wired's Danger Zone blog reported last week that DARPA is looking to sensemake various forms of data by combining them into stories.

The Cognitive Edge training I took last week discussed (among many other topics) gathering narrative fragments into composite stories as a way to make sense of a situation and convey that information to others. Similar thus far. A possibly reality-defying assumption follows, though. According the Danger Zone post:

The author of this tale, however, would be a series of intelligent algorithms that can pull all of this information together, tease out its underlying meanings, and put it in a narrative that's easy to follow.

In the Cog Edge method the sensemaking is done by a group of humans, not a computer. The assumption is that distributed cognition of a group of people can elicit meaning where a single person, or a computer, cannot. I'm not up on the latest in artificial intelligence, but I'm doubtful that an entirely computerized approach can yield anything of use.

Perhaps a partially-computerized method, where fragments were gathered (sampled?) by machine and sensemade by humans, would work better. Or if the fragments could be human-coded as they were captured the significant or related ones might be easier to isolate. I don't know. Can any readers weigh in who are more optimistic that a totally-computerized approach might work?

A link to the DARPA RFI is here.

(Photo by cote via Flickr creative commons)

sensemaking, narrative, stories, DARPA, communication

The value of the "ack" in personal networking

My technical background is in computer networking. I spent my twenties studying network protocols, designing queueing systems, and working on security issues. It was a great experience that is still useful today, 20 years later, now that everyone uses that Internet thing.

One principle of networking protocols is the idea of guaranteed delivery versus nonguaranteed. Basically, when you send a message over the Internet, it is broken up into tiny pieces, called packets, and sent down the line, mixed up with all sorts of other packets, and finally reassembled into a message on the other end.

With nonguaranteed delivery, the message is just sent out, and the sender doesn't really know if it got there (believe it or not, there are good applications for this). With guaranteed delivery, by contrast, the receiver sends an acknowledgement (or "ack") to the sender saying, in essence, "I got your message, thanks."

The "TCP" in TCP/IP is a guaranteed delivery protocol.

I was thinking about this because I am doing less computer networking these days and more personal networking. Emailing, Twittering, spending time on the phone. And the "ack" concept works just as well here. (Another metaphor for an ack is a "handshake." I like that one.)

Email, to me, is a nonguaranteed delivery protocol. From a technical standpoint, that's nonsense--Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP), of course, sends acknowledgements to your mail server when your message is delivered. But I'm talking about personal communication.

When you send an email, you don't know if someone got it unless they respond. This is the "ack." For much email, lack of acknowledgement is fine. But for others, acks can be very important to maintaining and enhancing your relationships. For example:

• If someone refers a prospect to you, you should first acknowledge that you got the referral (thanking them is also good!), and you should send another ack when you get or don't get the business. The referrer is curious to know, and also wants to see if you follow through on referrals.
  
  
• If you ask someone a question, and they respond via email, a short ack is good. "Thanks, that helps." They know then that you took the time to read the response and (hopefully) make use of it.
  
  
• If someone asks you a question on email, and you don't have time to answer, you should acknowledge you received it and when you think you might be able to respond. That way the sender doesn't sit waiting for your response to arrive.

There are probably lots of other good times to send an ack. Please post your own ideas in the comments. Thanks, and I'll try to acknowledge all the contributions :-)

Tags:
relationships, networking, communication, email

A silly but fun use of Twitter

Many people say, "What on earth is Twitter good for?" and there are lots of answers. One in particular: it's really great for providing a real-time status of a bad Mexican wrestler-monster movie that you watch while you eat dinner at the bar. See below (note to those unfamiliar with Twitter: the first post is at the bottom; the last is at the top). Enjoy!


Tags:
Twitter, communication,

Getting out the stories of Burmese prisoners--an heroic feat

George Packer's Interesting Times blog from The New Yorker yesterday discussed Human Rights Watch's honoring of a Burmese hero, Bo Kyi. Mr. Kyi had been held as a prisoner by the Burmese government, enduring the brutalities of that unique brand of confinement. Upon his release, Mr. Kyi moved across the border to Thailand and founded an organization, Assistance Association for Political Prisoners in Burma, the mission of which includes "report[ing] on the military regime’s oppression of political prisoners who are presently detained in various prisons."

My Kyi's remarks on accepting his award were powerful, and are excerpted in Packer's post. I found this passage particularly striking:

We have a way to communicate with the prisoners and get their stories out. I cannot tell you how we do this. I do not want the Burmese regime to find out. But I can tell you that these stories fill the pages of our reports and those of Human Rights Watch.

The media use these stories. So do political leaders around the world. Over time, the stories of these prisoners generate pressure on the international community to take a stand.

Burmese dissidents are outgunned and outmanned. But they have ideas and stories on their side. Who doubts they will win someday?

Tags:
change, dissent, leadership, protest, communication, storytelling

"Sesame Street simple" communication with a story

My first reaction to this Bob Sutton post--"Sesame Street Simple: A.G. Lafley's Leadership Philosophy"--was a slight recoil. Perhaps because I thought we had tapped out on learning from A.G. Lafley (can't we let the man run his company in peace?). But also because my natural communication style is not "Sesame Street simple." Unsure of that? Read this blog for a while.

But, after letting it sit a few weeks, I'm starting to get what Sutton is saying. He's onto something important about communicating with and influencing large numbers of people:

...although executives who talk about many ideas and complex ideas will be viewed as smarter -- wiser and more effective executives pick just a few simple messages and repeat them over and over again until people throughout the organization internalize them and use them to guide action. Constantly changing messages lead to the "flavor of the month problem" where people don't act on the current message because they have learned that, if they wait a few months (or days) the message will change (managers in such organizations become very skilled at talking as if they are acting on the flavor of the month, but not actually doing the thing that senior executives are pushing at the moment.) And making things overly complicated may make the senior executives seem smart and feel smart , but if a message is too complicated to understand, it is also means that the implications for action are impossible to understand as well.

Managers "talking as if they are acting...but not actually doing" recalls the damaging "false urgency" that inflicts many companies, as John Kotter discusses in his new book.

There's a way to do "Sesame Street simple" in a way that provides powerful insight and direction. Telling a story. Stories can be understood by everyone. They can be retold and honed for a particular group ("what's our 'the consumer is boss' story?"). They can convey complex lessons and spawn deep discussions about meaning.

That's a "Sesame Street simple" approach even I can understand.

(Photo: Hokey Pokey Elmo from Toys R Us)

Related Posts:
On John Kotter's "A Sense of Urgency"
More on "A Sense of Urgency"
A.G. Lafley: "The Consumer Is Boss"

Tags:
change, innovation, leadership, management, communication, storytelling

How to ask your clients uncomfortable questions

We know when selling that we need to probe our clients' needs, ask sensitive questions, or, on occasion, ask for favors. To some people, this comes naturally. The rest of us can rely on this advice from Ford Harding about how to pose some of these tricky questions to clients--questions that can be uncomfortable to ask, but essential to expanding a network and growing a business.

A teaser:

Purpose: To be seated next to possible client at party
Words: I have wanted to get to know [name] for a long time. Would you consider seating us near each other at dinner?

Read Ford's entire post.

Tags:
sales, networking, communication, questions

Corporate change #5 - role of consultants in "bringing the outside in"

In earlier segments of this thread, we discussed how "bringing the outside in" is imperative for companies to keep aware and humble enough to avoid complacency and drive their organizations forward successfully. By contrast, companies in which the context inside the company drowns out voices from the outside tend to attribute their successes to their internal competencies, blame their failures on outside entities, and stagnate their way to failure.

I was talking to an old customer earlier in the month about working to help companies learn about the world outside. "Exactly!" he said. "Companies need people like you to come in and help them learn about what customers think."

To a point, yes. Having an outside perspective that is less invested in the company's culture or politics is valuable. But not at the expense of a broad, internal effort to understand and make sense of the outside world.

Referring to the business complexity literature we've touched on a few times in this blog, the world outside is a complex, messy place. It's constantly changing. So old information, and limited sources, are not very useful. To gain the best, most supple understanding of the outside, a company needs lots of eyes and ears, a diverse group gathering and interpreting information, and creating stories about it. Consultants should be among that group, but not the only or the most credible source for outside information.

Management's job is to enable that story-creation, create systems for capturing and making sense of it, and above all to honor and use it to create strategy, spur innovation, and otherwise enable Kotter's "sense of urgency."

That's a job that even McKinsey might hesitate to take on.

Prior posts in this series:
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

Reading list:
Gary Hamel, "The Future of Management"
John Kotter, "A Sense of Urgency"
Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff, "Groundswell"
Dave Snowden & Mary Boone, "A Leader's Guide to Decisionmaking," Harvard Business Review, November 2007.

Related post:
Complex business problems need diagnosis

Tags:
change, innovation, leadership, management, communication

Corporate Change #4 - don't leave engaging with the outside to marketing/PR

In the prior post in this series, I talked about galvanizing the will to change through "bringing the outside in"--learning what customers, the press, influencers--really anyone--thinks about the company, its products, its marketplace, industry, etc.

To which a reasonable person might ask: "Isn't that my marketing department's job?" Especially with newer tools like blogs, wikis, Twitter, etc., marketing is taking the lead in engaging with the "groundswell."


While marketing has a significant role to play, they cannot own this function, any more than finance can own any decision that has to do with dollars and cents--it's too big, too comprehensive and too important to be limited to one group. Here are several reasons why:


Marketing is obsessed with brands & messages. Brands and messages are relentlessly positive--who buys a negative message? But learning comes from both positive and negative stories. There are threats as well as opportunities. Marketing is asked to convey messages, not to understand the world in all its messiness and complexity.

PR is asked to get positive stories out there, and to counter negative perceptions--not to learn or to inform the company. True dialogue involves listening--even when the conversation is negative or you don't agree with it--and trying to find lessons in that. Perception is reality, and PR tries to change perception--what we're talking about here is, by contrast, understanding reality.


The view of both is too limited. Different parts of the organization have different things to learn from the outside. Operations needs to learn new ways of working. Product management needs to understand how customers actually use products. HR needs to know how the workforce is evolving. Groupthink is also less likely when a diverse group of people is examining the world--with more likelihood that sound actions, and commitment to achieve them, will result.

Comcast's experiment with Twitter-based customer service (see example here of "Groundswell" co-author Charlene Li Tweeting for help and Comcast responding) works because the Comcast guy is trying to solve a customer problem, not deliver a message. If Charlene ends up feeling better about Comcast, it is a side effect, not the intent, of the action. The tech is also in a position to learn deeply about this customer situation and, I'm certain, to disseminate the learning to colleagues.

Imagine this fictional Twitter dialogue if Charlene had to engage with marketing instead of with a real tech (I've reversed it for readability. In real Twitter, the newest message is on top):

charleneli: @comcastmktg My connection keeps going in and out, happens every few months. Comcast Cust service has no idea why. Any way to escalate?

comcastmktg: @charleneli That's hard to believe. Comcast has the highest network reliability in the industry.

charleneli: @comcastmktg Yeah, fine. Can you help me with my question?

comcastmktg @charleneli Of course. One more thing. Did you know we have twice as many HD channels as DirecTV?

charleneli: @comcastmktg What? Who are you? Can you get me to someone who can help me?

comcastmktg @charleneli Right away. Please email help@comcast.com and you'll get a response within 24-48 hours. Have you heard about our community service initiatives?

charleneli: @comcastmktg Aaargh!

Coming next: what is the role of consultants (written by an actual consultant!) in bringing the outside in?

Prior posts in this series:
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 5
Reading list:
Gary Hamel, "The Future of Management"
John Kotter, "A Sense of Urgency"
Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff, "Groundswell"

Tags:
change, innovation, leadership, management, communication, social media

Corporate Change #3 - Bringing the outside in, for real

OK, so you've read my prior two posts on the subject of corporate change, and recognized your need to greatly enhance the information you get from the outside world. Now what?

You'll need to embrace a few basic principles (it won't be easy!):

Enable employees:

1. Reward curiosity and information sharing
   
2. Make time and space for employees to engage with the outside world--wall-to-wall meetings are a no-no
3. Tap existing conduits to the outside (sales force, retail clerks, customer service reps, marketing, investor relations)
   
4. Ensure your information systems and policies don't get in the way

Listen hard:

1. Don't tune out bad news
2. Try to assemble information from many constituencies (customers, competitors, employees)
3. Embrace raw/inarticulate/emotional input
   
4. Honor dissent
   

Create systems and methods to gather and utilize information:

1. Deploy information "commons" where information can be posted, commented on, and passed across and up to aid in decisionmaking
2. Systematically gather information relevant to your business and add it to the commons
   
3. Regularly gather and sensemake commons-generated information
4. Use the information to inform strategy, planning, organization, etc.
   
5. Demonstrate to the employees that the information is used, to encourage ongoing contributions
   

Most companies are not ready for this. Some are. Those that aren't: start getting ready. If you think implementing the above is a lot of work, think how hard it is to navigate out of a crisis--an avoidable crisis, if only you paid attention to and utilized what was going on all around you.

In the next few posts, we'll dig into some specific high-value areas of bringing the outside in.

Prior posts in this series:
Part 1 Part 2 Part 4 Part 5

Reading List:
Gary Hamel, "The Future of Management"
John Kotter, "A Sense of Urgency"

Tags:
change, innovation, leadership, management, communication

Corporate Change #2 - Why are companies so inwardly focused?

In part 1 of this series, we discussed one key reason companies fail to change even though it's vital: the inability to, using John Kotter's term, "bring the outside in." In other words, companies don't choose to look outside their walls to see what's happening around them, assess the implications, and absorb that into their strategies, products and operations.

Why is this so?

Reason #1 - The Community Effect
A company, as it expands from one person, to ten, to one hundred, to a thousand and beyond, takes on the identity of a community. The employees usually work in an office or plant together. They get information from the same sources--the company newsletter, intranet, staff meetings (more on that later). They spend more time with other employees than with anyone else other than family. A culture develops that inspires curiosity about what's happening inside and reduces it about what's happening outside.

Reason #2 - Leadership Arrogance
I talked to a former client last week and told him about some work I'm doing mining insights from customer-service calls. He told me, "Our CEO thinks he's just like our customers." Since this CEO sees himself as a perfect proxy, there's no reason to dig deeply into customers' feelings.

Reason #3 - Information Flows Top-Down
Leadership serves on outside boards, goes to conferences, talks with consultants. They are tasked with creating strategy, which requires some curiosity and information about the world outside the corporate walls. They process that information into strategy documents, brand images, mission statements, etc., and send it down the line.

Leadership likes orderly information, not the messiness that real engagement with the outside world creates. Most leaders believe that employees don't want that much engagement (in some cases they may be right). Employees realize that the highly-packaged, spun information that they receive is bland and biased. I recently re-encountered a saying familiar from my early working days: "We workers are like mushrooms. Leadership keeps us in the dark and feeds us s--t." I heard that expression countless times till I became a senior leader--interestingly, I never heard it after that.

Combine reasons 1, 2 & 3 and you have an inwardly-focused, uncurious company. Information is either packaged pablum from above, or internal gossip. Conduits to the outside--front-line customer service reps, retail clerks, B2B sales people--are drowned out by the inside talk. Marketing communications staffs engage with the external but are dedicated to sending out messages or countering negative news.

What we've created here is company-as-fortress. Suspicious of the outside, comfortable with colleagues, uncurious. Information is routinized and bleached of content and contrast. Clearly, there's a lot to be done to realize Kotter's prescription to bring the outside in. We'll begin discussing how in the next post.

Other posts in this series:
Part 1 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

Related posts:
A competitive advantage: employees who spend their day talking to people
Time to start listening to front-line employees

Reading List:
Gary Hamel, "The Future of Management"
John Kotter, "A Sense of Urgency"

Tags:
change, innovation, leadership, management, communication

Time to rescue "corporate change" from cliché bucket

Every company recognizes the need to change, correct? There are so many failure stories describing the terrible consequences of companies standing still that no executive in her right mind would ignore the need to reinvent the business on a continuous basis. We hear this all the time:

"The only constant in our business is change."

Yeah, right. Even if the idea is understood on its surface, companies worldwide are doing a terrible job of implementing it. If you read the newspaper, outside of mergers and acquisitions, change occurs only when companies are in crisis.

In other words, only when the situation is so bad that it can no longer be ignored or rationalized away do companies take on the hard work of reinventing themselves. What does this mean? As Gary Hamel wrote in 2007's best business book:

...In recent years, entire industries have been caught behind the change curve. Television broadcasters and newspaper publishers, record companies and French vintners, traditional airlines and giant drug companies, American carmakers and European purveyors of haute couture--all have been struggling to rejuvenate seriously out-of-date business models. Sure, many of the companies in these industries will regain their footing--eventually. But in the meantime, billions of dollars and millions of customers will be lost. Such is the price of maladaptation. (p.42)

No CEO wants to squander billions of dollars of lost opportunity--not least because of the primordial urge to save one's own skin. Yet it doesn't happen. This week's series of posts takes on one large reason why change rarely happens without crisis, and a way to start a fundamental culture change that can help instill the ability to recognize opportunities and threats and move more quickly to address them.

The root of this thinking is John Kotter's great new book, "A Sense of Urgency." Kotter takes his lifetime of study of organizations and wonders why so many organizations are so complacent, or worse, running around frantically accomplishing nothing. I'd like to focus on one reason why:

...Organizations of any size or age tend to be too internally oriented. Even people who know this fact often underestimate the size of the problem and its consequences. The disconnect between what insiders see, fee, and think, on the one hand, and external opportunities and hazards, on the other, can be astonishing at times--even in organizations that are producing very good short-term results. (p.67)

Kotter's prescription for companies is to "bring the outside in." To inform their people and thinking with a knowledge of the environment outside the company's walls. That's what we'll elaborate on in our next post.

Other posts in this series:
Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

Related posts:
Best business books of 2007
On "A Sense of Urgency"

Tags:
change, innovation, leadership, management, communication

Behind the Google Chrome comic

The New York Times discusses Google's decision to use a comic to illustrate the thinking and concept behind the new Chrome browser, including an interview with Scott McCloud, the creator of the comic. A notable quote:

“I don’t think the potential for comics in nonfiction has been exploited nearly as much as it could be,” [McCloud] said. And what they can teach people should not be underestimated. “When you’re on an airplane and your life depends on it,” Mr. McCloud said, “comics are going to tell you how to open an emergency exit.”

(Photo: a page from the Google Chrome comic)

Related post:
The Chrome Comic book
On "Understanding Comics"

Tags:
communication, comics, visual

The Chrome Comic Book

OK, so everyone is writing about Chrome, the new Google browser. But the most innovative thing about it so far is the comic book used to explain its objectives and design.

Comic books are great communicators. They provide a very flexible palette for explaining things (as Google did) or telling stories. If you're interested in creating comic books for business use, you should check out these resources:

"Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud--the best reference on what a comic is and how it works.

Bitstrips.com - a very cool place to make your own comics if, like most of us, you can't draw.



Josh Neufeld's A.D. - an epic retelling of the story of Hurricane Katrina, in comic-book form.

(Hat tip to Patrick Byers at Responsible Marketing)

UPDATE 9/3/08: Just learned that Scott McCloud (discussed in this post) actually drew the Google Chrome comic. I thought the drawings looked familiar!


Related posts:
Josh Neufeld's story from The Mistake Bank
About "Understanding Comics"


Tags:
communication, comics, visual

There's a web2.0 hammer for lots of business nails

I was talking to a prospect today and they mentioned that their recent expansion had created an entire new level of people involved in their business. In other words, their staff now was communicating with end-clients through an array of agents and contractors, which had not been the case as much in the past. This raised the concern with them that they would not hear stories, both good and bad, from the front lines, and that they would struggle to communicate out to those end-clients.

After they finished speaking, I offhandedly said, "Have you thought of starting a social network where your clients, agents and contractors could all contribute?" Their kind of business has some strong unifying factors and a social network, to me, was a natural step to aid in the kind of communication they wanted.

They grabbed right onto the idea. It brought to mind Josh Bernoff's ("Groundswell") recent statement that few will make a business out of providing web2.0 tools to consumers, but many companies will thrive if they can create tools for use inside businesses.

And in today's business world, there are opportunities to use these tools to greatly improve information flow, collaboration and idea generation. Here are some thoughts:

wikis...for group collaboration
social networks...for communicating with customers/partners
blogs and RSS...for communicating and listening to the broader industry or world at large
social bookmarking...for sharing interesting ideas
microblogging...to create a feeling of a virtual workspace

There are countless other possible examples. Andrew McAfee has an interesting take, where he assigns tools based on the strength of people's ties. He also usefully points out that these tools work best when structures are allowed to emerge from the interaction of the participants, rather than being imposed by some authority.

(Picture by gerard79 via stock.xchng)

Related post:
Dell's web2.0 efforts pay off

Tags:
social media, information technology, web2.0, collaboration, communication,

Dell's web2.0 efforts pay off

Dell has taken a beating in the marketplace (both the commercial marketplace and the reputation marketplace) over the past few years. When founder Michael Dell took the reins again, you had to wonder whether his presence back in the CEO chair would really mean something, or would Dell slip into permanent stall mode like so many PC makers of the past (remember Gateway?).

So it's notable that Dell has distinguished itself among consumer electronics companies for embracing the capabilities of web 2.0 to engage with customers and influencers. According to the excellent new book "Groundswell," by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, Dell used a PR crisis created by a blogger to jump-start its participation in social media, by 2006 was monitoring blog posts on the company, proactively seeking out problems and responding to posts, if necessary reaching out to users with technical support.

That effort has expanded to include sensing problems by monitoring Twitter (as well as using Twitter to communicate with end-users and others).

Today's Wall Street Journal points out that Dell has mastered the art of energizing the "groundswell" to build publicity for its products:

Dell Inc. hit a viral-PR home run last week when photos of a not-yet-released computer -- a candy-red miniature laptop -- swept across the Internet, creating excitement in advance of the release.

The buzz wasn't an accident: It was the payoff from a year-long effort by Dell to engage more directly with bloggers and others who write about the company online....

Engaging with blogs isn't just a defensive move. It has also changed the way the company promotes its products. Chief Executive Michael Dell brought the buzz-generating candy-red computer to The Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference with the goal of showing it off to some of the bloggers in attendance.

A writer from Gizmodo, a popular gadget blog, saw the new computer and snapped a few pictures, which he posted on the Internet. The company then posted some official pictures on its own blog, and the story took on a life of its own. Dell's blog post says Gizmodo "caught" Michael Dell with the new computer.

I own a Dell computer, a beige minitower from the old days. It's a nice, boring computer. Dell's efforts in web 2.0, however, are the opposite of boring.


Related posts:
Is your marketing department confused about web 2.0? ("Groundswell")
Twitter and "Every Minute Accounted For"
Companies stall because they don't listen to customers

Tags:
social media, information technology, web2.0, marketing, blogging, communication, Wall Street Journal

"Communication Lessons From the Deaf" - one week in

I've been thinking a lot about the communication lessons post I did earlier in the week, and the article that inspired it. I've been trying to employ the principles and become a better listener and communicator. Here are the basic lessons:

1. Look people in the eye when engaging in conversation
2. Don't interrupt
3. Say what you mean as simply as possible
4. Stay focused

They sound simple, but are very difficult to implement, especially when you've developed deep habits of multitasking, jumping to conclusions, and talking around a subject. Here are some specific things I'm doing to try to implement the lessons.

I am trying very hard to hear people out, to let them finish their thoughts (and even allow a little silence afterward) before I talk. I'm finding this yields a very different conversation, one with longer statements, but less misunderstanding and frustration, like the article says.

I've taken a couple of steps to try to stay focused. I do a lot of my work on the phone. When I'm on a call now, I leave my desk and sit in a reading chair. In other words--I leave the computer, which is the biggest multitasking temptation out there. I also refrain from taking notes till a phone call is over. This is quite difficult for me. My notes are a bit of a mess, but I'm learning that hearing and absorbing everything that's said is better than having perfect notes--since perfect notes by their nature can't capture everything in a dialogue.

But the hardest by far is #3. Saying what you mean. In that I envy my former boss, a Swede, who was very direct and "crisp," to use his term. Even though he sometimes could rub you the wrong way, you never, ever were unclear about what he wanted, what he thought, or what he meant to say.

So I've still got to work on that.

I'll report on progress again next week.

communication, oral communications, effective communications

A Hollywood producer's master class on business storytelling

Following on to yesterday's post on political storytelling--in the December Harvard Business Review, Peter Guber, best described, I guess, as a Hollywood mogul (former head of Columbia Pictures, producer of "Batman" and "Rain Man," among others), writes about "Four Truths of the Storyteller" (link - $$).

It's an excellent article, and encapsulates in seven pages most of what it takes "Made to Stick" 200 pages to describe. Appropriately, he starts with a story, about charming Fidel Castro into allowing his team to shoot a documentary in Havana harbor. But he goes much further, to illustrate why storytelling is important in business--"for the leader, story-telling is action-oriented - a force for turning dreams into goals and then into results."

Guber's four truths are as follows:

1. Truth to the Teller - in other words, authenticity, via candor and revealing of emotion. One of the biggest assets stories bring is the light they shine on the teller herself. (One frequent criticism I've heard in story workshops--"this reveals more about the author than the characters"--isn't all bad.)
   
   
2. Truth to the Audience - Guber defines this as "the promise that the expectations of the listener, once aroused, will be fulfilled." As one of my writing teachers once put it, "a good ending is both surprising and inevitable."
   
   
3. Truth to the Moment - a good story adapts to the context in which it is told. This does not mean that it is synthetic, but that it absorbs the energy and atmosphere of its surroundings. Perhaps a detail that was not important in one telling becomes vital in another. This is one way in which a good story differs from a bad story--a good story can be retold many times without becoming trite or cliched. Guber emphasizes the need for preparation--a story is like an iceberg: some information is revealed, but far more information lies beneath the surface. And the storyteller must know all of it.
   
   
4. Truth to the Mission - finally, the story must be bigger than the storyteller. As Guber puts it, "mission is embodied in his stories, which capture and express values that he believes in and wants others to adopt as their own." He mentions as an example Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, whose storytelling ability helped grow a modest idea, microfinance, into a worldwide phenomenon. (Here's a Yunus story that was particularly inspiring to me.)

In his introductory column, HBR editor Thomas Stewart wrote, "'Four Truths of the Storyteller' [is] one of the smartest leadership articles you'll have read in some time." I agree.

storytelling, business, narrative, leadership, communication, Harvard Business Review

On Gary Hamel's "The Future of Management" part 5 - Final thoughts

Hamel talks frequently in the book of enrolling the entire company in innovation. Among all the obstacles to achieving this--the lack of democracy, the weight of inertia--the biggest one in my view is the information gap. Comparing the volume and depth of information I had access to when I was a senior executive to the paucity I had in any other position--the difference was staggering. (Note: you can find excerpts of "The Future of Management" here.)

It's no wonder that people can't or won't contribute meaningful ideas for the future when they don't know what the strategy of the company is, or what the core competencies are, or what happy customers like and angry customers hate about the company.

And companies simply won't share enough information for employees to be a valuable part of the innovation process. (If the guy in the printing department is limited to knowledge and context of printing, he's not going to be able to contribute as much as he could.) Perhaps it's concern for confidential information leakage, or for PR fallout, or that management simply doesn't trust in the employees' ability to add value to innovation. At any rate, there isn't nearly enough information sharing with the rank and file.

So where does this leave us, at the end of "The Future of Management"? For one, with a feeling that the top-down, hierarchical, command-and-control model of management is in decline. But also that the next model has yet to be even devised, never mind perfected.

It will certainly be technology-driven. It will be more collaborative, and less proprietary (like P&G's open innovation process). It will be more engaging and rewarding for most employees. There'll be even less job security, and few places to hide if you want to skate for a while (and get paid for doing so).

But will companies look like Google, which for all its innovation still relies on hordes of internal staff; or like movie studios, which form and reform teams of independent contractors for each project; or like open-source communities, which solicit volunteers and manage via a peer-review process and offer of public recognition?

Will people be paid a salary, a price per innovation, or in equity?

What will managers do? Collect and distribute data, perhaps? Administer the market-making systems? Or vanish entirely?

Over the next twenty or twenty-five years, we shall see. It will be an interesting journey.

Other posts in this series:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4


innovation leadership creativity reading list democracycommunication

Sports sponsorships--perhaps not a waste of money

Sponsoring sporting events or teams has always to me seemed more of a CEO ego trip than a serious marketing program. When my wife's old company, Alltel, rented a corporate hospitality box at the BellSouth Classic golf tournament in Atlanta, they had to recruit company spouses (like me and my friend Steve) to fill box space on the weekdays. Great for me and Steve, but great for Alltel? Didn't seem so.

In the September Harvard Business Review, Professors Stephen A. Greyser (Harvard Business School emeritus) and Francis Farrelly of Monash University in Australia argue that sponsoring sporting events has a distinct value for internal marketing--that is, building company identity and culture and enhancing morale (free link). Farrelly and Greyser write:

The French banks BNP and Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas (Paribas) used sponsorship of the French Tennis Federation as a unifying element in employee communications to promote acceptance of their postmerger identity and to describe the new company’s future direction. Indeed, the logo and livery of the merged bank were launched primarily through the association with tennis; tennis merchandise and posters of tennis events were distributed widely through the combined network of branches. Moreover, rather than sponsoring just the French Open at Roland Garros, the new organization, operating as BNP Paribas, worked with the tennis federation to develop other events, including a masters competition, that would create further opportunities to engage with staff members around the sponsorship throughout the year. The resulting media exposure and the sponsorship’s internal presence inspired many employees to embrace the new identity.

These stories sound entirely plausible; yet I wonder whether there's any measurement of the value of these investments. I'm skeptical that cold, rational evaluation would demonstrate that large sponsorship investments pay off. Marketers, if you have that data, I'd like to see it.

Giving away logoed merchandise reminds me of another story from the Alltel days (I worked there once, too). Each time morale seemed to slip a little, which was more than a few times, we would arrive in the morning to find a piece of clothing decorated with the Alltel logo on our chairs. I don't know if it helped morale, but I didn't have to buy a polo shirt for quite a while.

(Photo: Manchester United players by AtilaTheHun via Flickr Creative Commons. AIG pays more than $20MM per year to get its logo on Manchester United's jerseys.)

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What are marketers to do, if customers won't accept our messages?

Karl Long at Experience Curve (and fellow Futurelabber) has produced a short but potent post on the shift from "traditional marketing and new conversational, people-driven marketing." (The impetus was the following observation from Hugh McLeod in his blog Gaping Void: "Ironies of Ironies: Companies are forever being told 'You no longer control the conversation', yet from what my buddies in the PR industry tell me, their industry is utterly thriving.)

Karl homes in on the concept of social equity. Through forums like blogs, companies and individuals can accrue value in the eyes of their customer base, post by post, link by link. (And there's no doubt that the rise of blogs has been a great asset to the PR industry. Blogs, even crappy, quasi-advertising-laden ones, are a lot of work and require communications talent.)

My two cents: since we marketers can "no longer control the conversation," we are instead listening to customers, tastemakers, retailers, early adopters, then reading the weak signals, removing the noise, amplifying, and sending the customers' message back out into the world--through blogs and other media. That takes far more creativity (and effort) than creating a catchy name, unique selling proposition, and tagline for a product, then slamming it home via advertising.

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