The Circus and le Cirque

Over the long weekend, my wife and I took L to see the Shrine Circus at the Centre Point Mall in North York.

Looking at the kids on the back of this elephant was a trip down the memory lane:

Despite all the controversy around the use of animals – a Twitter search for that event will return at least as many protests as praises – I have to admit that one of my earliest and fondest memories as a kid is playing with a lion cub in some anonymous circus, duly recorded in a badly preserved picture (I’m the one on my father’s lap):

The last time I’ve been to a traditional circus – i.e., excluding the Cirque du Soleil – I was a 9-year-old living in the same city I was born at. I vividly recall my friend Drausio petting a camel and getting sprayed with drool all over his face – no picture of that, unfortunately , and no relationship with the delicious camel drool Portuguese dessert, or “baba de camelo”.

Back then, having a circus coming to our city was a big deal, as the only other mass entertainment available for kids was to watch old movies on Sunday’s matinées. Old is an understatement: I actually remember going to a black-and-white Tarzan movie featuring Johnny Weissmuller. Most Disney cartoons didn’t get distributed beyond the large cities, but you don’t miss what you never had, so I have no complaints there. The pluses of growing up on the countryside outweigh by far the constraints – in my naturally biased view, of course.

Not much changed since: the Shrine Circus 2009 show was not very different from the ones I used to see so many years ago: no high-tech involved, just the artist, the act and the public, all frozen in time and space. Hopefully I’ll be proven wrong here, but I think I just saw the last few breaths of a dying art. I quoted Evan Solomon (CBC) a few months ago saying that “when a new technology comes, the incumbent never dies: it simply goes after deeper efficiencies”. The innovation pipeline does not always work like that, as typewritters and the telegraph can attest. Radio, TV, movies, games and the Internet all fragmented the entertainment space in formats that are more easily consummable, forcing live performances to go after deeper efficiencies.Thus, circus performances will live on through the several forms of Cirque Nouveau, but somehow the amateur spirit is gone as shown in this Wikipedia excerpt:

Cirque expanded rapidly through the 1990s and 2000s, going from one show to approximately 3,500 employees from over 40 countries producing 15 shows over every continent except Africa and Antarctica, with an estimated annual revenue exceeding US$ 600 million. The multiple permanent Las Vegas shows alone play to more than 9,000 people a night, 5% of the city’s visitors, adding to the 70+ million people who have experienced Cirque. In 2000, Laliberté bought out Gauthier, and with 95% ownership, has continued to expand the brand. Several more shows are in development around the world, along with a television deal, women’s clothing line and the possible venture into other mediums such as spas, restaurants and nightclubs.

I used “amateur”, but the precise word is “mambembe” – no idea on how to translate that from Brazilian Portuguese. So, in the mambembe spirit, I’d like to conclude this post with this very amateurish video with my favourite circus song:

Kiva.org and the future of philanthropy

Two months ago, Bernie Michalik kindly set up a virtual card-blog for my IBM farewell, complete with a donation widget from ChipIn, raising $165 as a parting gift. After scratching our heads for a few weeks, we finally figured out how to cash that amount via PayPal (after paying quite a hefty fee).

Inspired by Jamie Alexander, of Pass It Along fame, I then decided to use the opportunity to try out Kiva.org. Kiva was recently featured at Time.com as one of “10 Great Ways To Spend Your Tax Refund”.

Kiva’s mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.

Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs around the globe.

I divided the amount among 5 entrepreneurs, and you can follow the progress of those loans here.

Conventional wisdom suggests that good deeds should be kept to oneself, but the more people know about services like Kiva and MicroPlace, the better. Kiva’s success led to an unusual supply-demand situation last year: having more money available to lend than people asking for it, according to this New York Times article. But just to keep things in perspective, take a look at some of the possible shortcomings too, so that you can make a conscious decision.

In the next few years, I expect more and more institutions who depend on public donations to follow Kiva’s “data-rich, transparent lending platform” model, showing exactly what happens to your contributions throughout the whole value chain. Donations are scarce resources, and being transparent goes a long way in gaining credibility and loyalty.

Is failure overrated?

As seen in Biznology (slightly modified to avoid overlapping with previous posts in this blog):

Is learning from failures overrated? When emphasizing the importance of learning from errors, are we actually creating a culture of losers? Read on to hear arguments on both sides of this discussion and make up your mind. Your company’s survival in the long term may depend on it.

I’m in San Francisco this week, speaking at and attending the Web 2.0 Expo at the Moscone West. In a number of sessions, the speakers emphasized that failure is an important part of the innovation game. Knowing that I also tend to subscribe to that theory, and commenting on the Charlie Brown comic strip I embedded in my previous blog entry, a colleague at IBM pointed me to an interesting piece written by Jason Fried, from 37signals, who challenges that whole concept: “Failure is overrated, a redux”. It’s a good post, and the comments are also worth reading. To have a complete picture of the discussion, I suggest you to also read the New York Times article Jason refers to, “Try, Try Again, or Maybe Not”.

As it’s often the case in heated discussions, I initially found that Jason was defending a completely different perspective toward failure and learning, but this comment of his on another related post made me think that the difference is mostly one of weight.

“Everything is a learning experience. It’s just that I’ve found learning from your successes to be more advantageous. (…) I’ve always found more value in learning from the things that work than the things that don’t.”

I definitely can live with that position. What I have more trouble with is the cited Harvard Business School working paper. Here are some excerpts from the NYT article:

“The data are absolutely clear,” says Paul A. Gompers, a professor of business administration at the school and one of the study’s authors. “Does failure breed new knowledge or experience that can be leveraged into performance the second time around?” he asks. In some cases, yes, but over all, he says, “We found there is no benefit in terms of performance.”

(…) first-time entrepreneurs who received venture capital funding had a 22 percent chance of success. Success was defined as going public or filing to go public; Professor Gompers says the results were similar when using other measures, like acquisition or merger.

Already-successful entrepreneurs were far more likely to succeed again: their success rate for later venture-backed companies was 34 percent. But entrepreneurs whose companies had been liquidated or gone bankrupt had almost the same follow-on success rate as the first-timers: 23 percent.

If the article is accurate – and that’s a big if, considering that this is still a working paper – it seems that the HBS research is not actually proving that “when it comes to venture-backed entrepreneurship, the only experience that counts is success”, as stated in the opening paragraph. It basically demonstrates that enterpreneurs who managed to go public or filed to go public are slightly more likely (going from 22% to 34%) to have a repeat, but isn’t that expected?

There are several factors that come into play when filing a venture to go public, and having done it once gives an entrepreneur some knowledge of what it takes to get there again. I actually find surprising that, even with that edge, the rate of failure is still very high. Another way to interpret the same data is: roughly two thirds of entrepreneurs who were successful the first time (and I’m using the same loose definition of success here) fail the second time. If anything, the data tells me that success is also overrated.

The “learning from failures” approach makes more sense when you take a granular approach to it. Every single initiative you undertake is composed of a vast number of small wins and losses. You definitely can learn from both outcomes, so regardless of which one will teach you the most, embrace successes AND failures. The fundamental message when advocating a culture that allows failure to occur from time to time is to avoid analysis paralysis, or even worse, denial by hiding what went wrong and exaggerating what went right.

The bottom line is that innovation entails good risk management and shares many features with the financial world. Low risk initiatives are likely to generate low returns, and don’t give you much of a competitive edge. Being bold may lead you to collect wins and losses along the way, but also can reward you more handsomely overall. Knowing that, it’s important that you balance your innovation initiatives the same way you handle a portfolio: diversify them and adjust the mix to your comfort level. During economic downturns like the one we are going through now, it’s easy to panic and stop innovating. Keep in mind that a solid and consistent long term approach to innovation may determine your ability to survive in good and bad times.

Tony Scott, Fernando Pessoa, Michael Jordan, Innovation and Failure: Am I the only vile and errant one on Earth?

This is an updated version of a post I originally wrote for my internal IBM blog back in 2006. Some of the points there are still relevant today.

As the downturn in the global economy continues, many companies adopt a cautious approach towards innovation. In some ways, tough economic times may actually be a good opportunity for companies to innovate and differentiate themselves from the competition. Borrowing from the punctuated equilibrium theory, innovation may occur in bursts when facing major shifts in the ecosystem. Also, as Google likes to claim, creativity loves constraint.

A few years ago, I was fortunate to listen to a talk about innovation by Tony Scott, who carries the impressive track of being a CTO at GM, and a CIO with Disney and Microsoft. In my poorly written notes, here’s what he said, or more precisely, my recollection of what he said back then:

• Innovation is a combination of inspiration, perspiration, persistence and really good marketing.
• Good architecture principles, according to Vitruvius Pollio (referred by some as the first architect) are order, eurhythmy, symmetry, propriety, economy, commodity, firmness and delight. We tend to focus the least in the last one.
  
• Competition and cooperation can co-exist.
  
• Create a culture where you’re allowed to fail from time to time.
  

Innovation implies exploring new possibilities, and learning from mistakes. An error-adverse culture cannot expect much innovation to occur.

In our continuous pursuit for innovation in the enterprise, we need to have a frame of mind where we take some risks and we accept failures, admit them, and learn from them. If you don’t tolerate errors, or deny them, you are just freezing yourself in your current position. In a world changing at a very fast pace, the status quo means staying behind and it just creates an environment where nobody dares to innovate. Enterprises could learn a lot from:

• All projects that went over budget
• All innovative ideas that failed to realize potential gains
• All bids and proposals lost
• All products and services exhibiting a shrinking market share

I also like this Michael Jordan quote:“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” As basketball wisdom goes, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

Note that I’m not proposing that we should create a culture of losers. The idea I’m trying to convey can be summarized by “His Airness” again: “I can accept failure, but I can’t accept not trying.”

One of my favourite writers/poets of all time was the Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa, who wrote, as his heteronym Álvaro de Campos, the gem below about the denial with which we tend to approach failure.

For the Portuguese and Spanish speakers out there, try the original version, “Poema em linha reta.

Foursquare Poem

I’ve never known anybody who’s had the crap beaten out of them.
All my aquaintances have been champions in everything.

I, so often shabby, so often swinish, so often vile,
I, so often, unforgivably, a parasite.
Inexcusably filthy I,
Who so often haven’t had the patience to shower,
I, who so often have been ridiculous, absurd,
Who have publicly wiped my feet on etiquette’s tapestry,
Who have been grotesque, paltry, servile, and arrogant,
Who have silently suffered besmirching
And when I haven’t been silent, have been even more ridiculous;
I, who have been a clown for chambermaids,
I, who have felt the winks of stevedores,
I, who have been fiscally embarassed, who have borrowed and forfeited,
I, who when the time for blows arises,
Have recoiled in advance of the possibility of blows;
I who have suffered the anguish of ridiculous little things,
I declare that in all the world I am without par.

Every one I know who speaks to me
Never did a ridiculous thing, never suffered besmirching,
Was never anything but a prince – all of them princes – in life…

If only I could hear another human voice
Confess not sin, but disgrace;
Confess not violence, but cowardice!
No, they’re all The Ideal, to hear them tell it.
Who in this great world will confess to me that even once they were vile?
O princes, my brothers,

God damn it, I’m fed up with semi-gods!
Where are there people in the world?

Am I the only vile and errant one on earth?

Women may not have loved them,
They may have been betrayed – but ridiculous, never!
And I, who have been ridiculous without being betrayed,
How can I speak to my superiors without reeling?
I who have been vile, literally vile,
Vile in the most paltry and infamous meaning of the word.

(I couldn’t find the source for the translation above, so if anybody knows it, please drop me a note so that I can properly credit it and ask for permission to have it here.)

ROI 2.0, Part 3: We don’t need a Social Media ROI model

Malcolm Gladwell, in his hilarious TED talk on spaghetti sauce, tells the story of Howard Moskowitz’s epiphany while looking for the perfect concentration of aspartame to use in the Diet Pepsi formulation:

Howard does the experiment, and he gets the data back, and he plots it on a curve, and all of a sudden he realizes it’s not a nice bell curve. In fact, the data doesn’t make any sense. It’s a mess. It’s all over the place. (…) Why could we not make sense of this experiment with Diet Pepsi? And one day, he was sitting in a diner in White Plains (…). And suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, the answer came to him. And that is, that when they analyzed the Diet Pepsi data, they were asking the wrong question. They were looking for the perfect Pepsi, and they should have been looking for the perfect Pepsis.”

Tangent note: Most TED talks are a treat, but this one is particularly funny and thought-provoking. If you haven’t seen it yet, consider paying it a visit. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you may like the TED app too!

Over the last few years, many in the Social Media space have been on a quest to find the perfect ROI model for blogs, micro-blogs, wikis, social networking, social bookmarking and other animals in the ever growing Web 2.0 zoo. You’ll see opinions ranging from “we don’t need ROI for Social Media” to “Web 2.0 has to rely on a lagging ROI” to “ROI 2.0 comes from time savings”. In a way, they are all right and all wrong at the same time. Paraphrasing Doctor Moskowitz, there is no perfect Social Media ROI model, there are only perfect Social Media ROI models.

Since 2006, I’ve been talking to several senior executives in multiple industries and across geographies about the business value of Web 2.0, and have noticed a wide range of approaches when deciding whether or not (and how much) to invest in social computing. For companies in the forefront of the social media battleground, such as newspapers, book publishers and TV channels, investing heavily in new web technologies has often been a question of survival, and decision makers had significant leeway in trying new ways of delivering their products and services, with the full blessing of their stakeholders. On the other side of the spectrum, in sectors such as financial services, social media is not yet unanimously regarded as the way to go. I’ve heard from a number of banking and insurance clients that, if Social Media advocates don’t articulate clearly the returns they are expecting to achieve, they won’t get the funds to realize their vision.

Most players in Government were also very skeptical until the Obama effect took the world by storm, creating a sense of urgency that was not as prevalent before. Since then, government agencies around the globe seem to be a bit more forgiving with high level business cases for social computing initiatives inside and outside the firewall. However, to balance things out, in most of the other industries, investments in innovation are being subject to even more scrutiny than normal due to the tough current economic environment. So, having a few ROI models in your pocket does not hurt.

The following ROI models are emerging, and we can expect a few more to appear in the near future.

1. Lagging ROI

Last year, I spoke to the CIO of a global retail chain and he had an interesting approach towards strategic investments in emerging technologies. Instead of trying to develop a standard business case based on pie-in-the-sky ROI calculations, he managed to convince the board of directors to give him more flexibility to invest in a few projects his team deemed to be essential for the long-term survival of the company. For those, he would provide after-the-fact ROI metrics, so that decision makers could assess whether to keep investing or pull the plug. He also managed expectations by saying upfront that some of those projects would fail, but doing nothing was not an option. By setting aside an innovation bucket and establishing a portfolio of parallel innovation initiatives, you can hedge your bets and improve your overall success rate.

2. Efficiency gains or cost avoidance

Many of the early Social Media ROI models are based on how much time you save by relying on social media, converting that to monetary terms based on the cost of labour. While this is certainly a valid approach, it needs to be supplemented by other sources of business value. Unless you are capable of mapping the saved minutes with other measurable outcomes derived from having more time available, the most obvious way to realize the value of being more efficient is to reduce head count, as in theory the group can do the same work as before with less people. If that’s the core of your business case justification, it may fire back in the long term, as some people may feel that the more they use social computing, the more likely it is that their department will be downsized.

3. Proxy Metrics

Some of the ROI examples in the Groundswell book and blog rely on proxy marketing metrics, i.e., what would be the corresponding cost of a conventional marketing campaign to achieve the same level of reach or awareness. For example, when calculating the ROI of an executive blog, the authors measure value by calculating the cost of advertising, PR, SEO and word-of-mouth equivalents.

4. Product/Service/Process Innovation

The value of customer or employee insights that end up generating brand new products, services and processes or improvements to existing one needs to be taken into account. Measuring the number of new features is relatively straightforward. Over time, you may want to figure out the equivalent R&D cost to get the same results.

5. Improved Conversions

Back to the Groundswell book, one of the ROI examples there shows how ratings and reviews can improve conversion rates (i.e., from all people visiting your site, how many more buy products because they trust the input from other consumers, compared to typical conversion rates).

6. Digitalization of knowledge

By having employees blogging, contributing to wikis, commenting or rating content, creating videos and podcasts, companies are essentially enabling the digitalization of knowledge. Things that used to exist only in people’s heads are now being converted to text, audio and images that are searchable and discoverable. It’s the realization of the asset that Clay Shirky calls the cognitive surplus. That was an elusive resource that didn’t have much monetary value before the surge in user-generated content. Naturally, a fair portion of that digitalized knowledge has very little business value, so you need to find metrics to determine how much of that truckload of content is actually useful. You can infer that by using cross-links, comments, ratings or even number of visits.

7. Social capital and empowerment of the workforce

There is certainly business value in having a workforce composed of well connected, well informed and motivated employees. What metrics can be used to assess the degree of connectivity/knowledge/motivation of your human resources? Several social computing tools give you indirect metrics that provide a glimpse of the metrics you can exploit. Atlas for IBM Lotus Connections, for example, gives you the ability to see how your social network evolves quarterly, and can help determining how many people are associated with some hot skill (full disclosure: I work for IBM).

As you can see in several of the emerging models listed above, there are often three types of inputs to develop ROI calculations:

• Quantitative metrics that can be obtained directly from the system data and log files
• Qualitative metrics that are determined using surveys, questionnaires and polls
• Dollar multipliers that attribute arbitrary monetary value to hard to assess items such as a blog comment or an extra contact in your social network

For the monetary value, I would suggest to adopt a sensitivity analysis approach, working with conservative, average and aggressive scenarios, and adjusting them over time. Just don’t go overboard. As I stated in a previous post, there’s an ROI for calculating ROI. ROI models should be easy to understand, as decision makers will often frown upon obscure calculations that require a PhD degree in financial modeling.

In summary: we don’t need one Social Media ROI model, we need many of them. None of the ones emerging now is perfect, none will ever be. You may need to have a few in your toolkit and develop a sense of which one to use in each case.

Previous ROI entries:

ROI 2.0, Part 1: Bean counters vs Innovators – The need for a real exchange of ideas
ROI 2.0, Part 2: Storytelling and Business Cases

IBM: Building a smarter planet

Note: most of you probably know, but for full disclosure, I work at IBM.

Update: just added some more meat to the post. Succinct is a quality that I definitely don’t have.

Sam Palmisano is speaking this morning at the Council of Foreign Relations. You can find all about it at today’s edition of the New York Times: “IBM’s Chief Sees Technology Leading a Recovery”.

Andy Piper has just blogged about it, so I’ll try not to just repeat what he said – but I whole-heartedly agree with him.

In our daily, mundane working life at IBM we go through mostly small peaks and valleys, but from time to time we get inspirational moments like this, when it feels good to be part of IBM. Google claims that their mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. The smart planet point-of-view tells me that we are paying attention beyond just data. IBM’s reach and breadth positions it uniquely to aim higher than that. We have the potential to be a key enabler of a smarter, sustainable, better world by applying technology and business acumen. Our 3-letter acronym never looked so visionary.

I worked in University research for some time, doing obscure biochemistry work around fireflies, and also on the interactions between ferns and a Brazilian species of moth. When you are deep at work, you keep wondering why you are doing that, and how that is going to change anything in the world. I actually gave up on becoming a scientist mainly because I was not able to see the big picture, and I couldn’t explain to a normal person what my research was all about.

I firmly believe that having an easy to articulate vision is fundamental to keep focus and understand where we all fit in the big picture. A vision does not accomplish anything by itself, but fuels our passion, especially during the dull moments of doubt, like when doing expenses or sitting for hours at airports.

Of course, the actual challenge is to go from vision to realization. In a week where change is in everybody’s mind, the announcement’s timing is impeccable. I hope that a few years from now I can come back to this post and grin, seeing that the promise was fulfilled.

Yes, we can. But “will we?” is the question for all of us to answer.

Meritocracy, Pauline Ores and the multi-dimensional IT Professional

Yesterday, I started reading “Crowdsourcing: why the power of the crowd is driving the future of business”, by Jeff Howe. I did not actually buy the book, it was given to me as part of the attendee package at the IBM Social Media event I attended 2 weeks ago at Ogilvy & Mather.

The book has good insights, covering the emerging reputation economy, where, contrary to conventional economics, rewards are often not measurable by dollars but by the desire to contribute to a worthwhile cause or just the “sheer joy of practicing a craft” and get some peer recognition for that. I like this quote in particular:

Crowdsourcing turns on the presumption that we are all creators – artists, scientists, architects, and designers, in any combination or order. It holds the promise to unleash the latent potential of the individual to excel at more than one vocation, and to explore new avenues for creative expression. Indeed, it contains the potential – or alternately, the threat – of rendering the idea of a vocation itself an industrial-age artifact.

Many years ago, I had a manager who told me that he could not give me a good rating in my annual assessment because I had done 3 totally different things that year: started as a Unix Admin, moved to a Performance Engineering role, and ended the year as a developer. According to him, you had to pick one role and stick to it, as nobody could do more than one thing really well. Needless to say, I couldn’t disagree more with the previous argument. It would be ok if he thought that I tried 3 different things and didn’t do particularly well in any or some of them, but saying that nobody can do that, and recommending anybody to be a one-dimensional professional sounds very Fordist to me.

Some people ask me why I blog about apparently non-work related subjects, such as vacation trips, soccer, or Moleskine Art. I wish I could blog even more about things not related to Web 2.0 or social media or conferences. We all have multiple vocations. I know IBMers who are great photographers, parents, writers, cooks, graphic artists, actors, athletes and scientists, and there is no reason for any of us to strangle those vocations to focus solely in our current professional role. In fact, both our careers and our workplace can greatly benefit from being more multi-dimensional. As work becomes more virtual, global and dynamic, and the pace of change accelerates, we all need to be more like Da Vinci and Marco Polo than assembly-line workers.

Furthermore, Web 2.0 and Social Media are leveling the professional playing field. Two quotes by Pauline Ores (who is the IBM personification of Social Media Marketing) during the O&M event caught my attention:

1) In the Social Media world, the most powerful person is the one who shares the most.
2) Control in Social Media is like grabbing water: the stronger you grab, the less you hold. There’s a right way to retain water, but not by being forceful.

Disclaimer: that’s my recollection of what she said, so don’t hold her accountable for the exact words

Not too long ago, knowledge workers had incentives to hold what they knew close to their chest, as a way of keeping their employability. The more they kept to themselves, the more their company and fellow employees would depend on them. This happened because the distribution of information was very inefficient, and the higher up you were in the food chain, the more channels you had to be known by others.

In the YouTube age, where everybody, anybody can broadcast themselves inside and outside of the firewall, the advantage of saying things from a higher hierarchical post had shrunk considerably. According to Howe, a meritocracy is now in place, where the only thing that matters is the quality of the work itself. If you believe you are the Subject Matter Expert in SOA, Internet Marketing, z/OS or Performance Engineering, you need to make evidence of that widely available. An increasing number of people won’t care much if your title says “The know-all see-all tech guru” or “Executive <something>”. If you know it, it should be made evident by the crumb trails you leave behind you. Your knowledge needs to be searchable and discoverable (not sure if those words exist, but you catch my drift).

Sacha Chua is one of the best examples I see of that trend. I learned a lot from just observing her working habits over the last year or so. Ten years ago, a recent hire direct from University would be years away from being known and respected across the enterprise. By sharing what she knows and what she does to the extreme, she is arguably more influencial than others with many years of job tenure. This is not a generation Y thing, as I see her more as an exception than the rule even among her young cohorts, and there are many boomers and Xers like her at IBM and elsewhere.

The one line summary for this post: If perception is reality, you only know what you share.

Minor update: fixed a typo in the final quote.

Sapere aude: Dare to think on your own

I remember as a kid my mother explaining to me that, in Japan, people referred to Korea as “cho-sen”, meaning “Land of morning calm”. Being a pain in the neck since my early years, I always wondered how one could possibly say “land of morning calm” using just two syllables – that’s when my mother gently suggested me to shut up .

Latin shares some of that hidden magic with Japanese and can also express a lot in a few words. Ad augusta per angusta, Caveat emptor and Urbi et orbe all seem to have this elastic semantic property. My favourite among the short Latin quotes is sapere aude, which mysteriously means “Dare to think on your own”.

In the last couple of years, I have read my fair share of business books (or at least portions of them, as I’m admittedly a lousy reader):

• Get things done
• The long tail
• The world is flat
• Wikinomics

and I’m currently reading:

• Web 2.0: a strategy guide
• Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
• Here comes everybody
• Thinkertoys

While many things can be learned from those books, they are written in a way that can lead us to refer to them as gospels, and not simple sources of opinions.

Likewise, many times we see the use of blank statements disguised as common wisdom justifying policies or courses of action. Here are some that examples:

• You can’t teach an old dog new tricks
• Jack of all trades, master of none
• Perception is reality

The real world is so much more complex than that. And I don’t mean to say I’m immune to that: from time to time I catch myself unconsciously trapped in that herd mentality. That’s why I enjoy to hear people who disagree with me, as they may be my only chance to snap out of it

If we have to choose a blank statement to adopt, I like this one better: “when everybody thinks alike, nobody thinks much”. If everything looks rosy and everybody is agreeing with you, think twice. And above it all, sapere aude.

Santos-Dumont, The Wright Brothers and Innovation

This is a post I wrote long time ago in my internal blog at work and decided to publish here too, as it seems to still be current

Unless you’re Brazilian or an aviation enthusiast, chances are that you have never heard about Alberto Santos-Dumont. Most people in the world would not hesitate in saying that the Wright brothers invented the airplane. However, some claim that “the only witnesses to the Wright brothers flights (…) were typically close friends and family”, while “Santos-Dumont made his flights in public, often accompanied by the scientific elite of the time, then gathered in Paris” (read more about it here and here). The picture above (from Wikimedia Commons) shows one of his flights in the Bagatelle field (close to the Eiffel Tower). PBS aired “Wings of Madness”, a good documentary about Santos-Dumont, last year. Here are some excerpts from the program description:

In the early 1900s, the most acclaimed celebrity in Europe, and arguably the world, was a fashionable, frail, Brazilian-born aviator named Alberto Santos-Dumont. (…)Tiring of balloons, Santos built the 14bis, an ungainly tail-first flying machine that nevertheless made the first powered airplane flight in Europe in 1906. At that time, the Wright brothers’s secret early flights were widely disbelieved, so Santos and his adoring public were convinced he was the first to fly. When Wilbur made his triumphant European tour in 1908, Santos had to face the terrible realization that the Wrights were the true pioneers after all. But just before his long slide into illness began, he designed an exquisite new airplane out of bamboo: the Demoiselle, or Damselfly. One of the classic aircraft of the pioneering era, it was the true forerunner of today’s ultralight planes.

An interesting aside from this discussion is that the Gartner’s hype cycle around emerging technologies was already in full display mode 100 years ago: Dumont went from the technology trigger all the way to the plateau of productivity in a decade and was very hyped for a while to the point that the local Dayton Daily News in 1903 stated that the Wright brothers were emulating Dumont (Orville and Wilbur lived in Dayton):

In any case, the true answer for the question “Who invented the airplane” is: none of them. Or better yet, all of them: Orville, Wilbur, Alberto and several others pioneers, all should be credited with the invention of the airplane. We tend to like simple answers, and so we just accept that Gutenberg invented printing, Thomas Edison the light bulb and Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas. In reality, all inventions and findings in the world are composites of ideas and experiments run by several people. That’s why I strongly believe that our current models governing intellectual property are outdated and preventing us from unleashing the true power of innovation. Our copyright laws are way too strict, and patents many times are inhibitors, not drivers, for new inventions.

Note that I’m not advocating that all IP protection should be dropped. However, the big accomplishment that should be awarded is not the idea, but the execution. Ideas are cheap, good implementation is the real challenge. This concept applies even in the case of artistic works like music, movies or books. Just imagine what would happen if everything was governed by a Creative Commons-like license, where anybody, everybody could share, remix and reuse whatever they want. Often times we see songs that were very flat in their original recording to become masterpieces with some novel interpretation. If we lower the barriers, even disasters could be rescued. Can you improve on “The Godfather” I and II? Unlikely. “The Godfather
III”, on the other side, had some good ideas ruined by a few really lame ones. The potential for a great movie was there, but it was never realized. You’re just left wondering “what if”. Of course, movies are not that easy to tweak, but scripts are. I bet that the last three Star Wars movies could benefit from better writing.

It would be interesting as a social experiment to establish a 5-year moratorium on all IP-related claims and see what would happen: chaos and the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it or an explosion in innovation. At a minimum, this approach would help us to find out how much control is actually needed to foster innovation.

New York – Part 2 of 2: The business

The client event I was attending in New York was held at the IBM office in midtown, just a couple of blocks from the Central Park. Nice office, even better location, if you ask me.

In the afternoon, we spent a few hours visiting several retail locations in Manhattan, courtesy of an IBMer who knows that area inside out, and was very kind to pick the cream of the crop. That was a great opportunity to get a glimpse of what retail will look in the near future by observing what’s being tried in the flagship stores. Here’s the highlight reel.

• The Cube Apple Store – I’ve been to several of those in Canada and in the U.S., but this one is special. Open 24 by 7, 365 days a year, this place is incredibly crowded during the day, so I highly suggest you go there after hours – I went twice, at 4 pm and 2 am, and had a much more civilized experience in the wee hours. The store is actually underground, and the glass cube is the street level entrance. Taking the stairs down gave me the feel that I was entering the Louvre, as the cube reminds me a lot of the pyramids by IM Pei. Somehow, this store feels like a temple dedicated to the Apple brand and technology. I posted some pictures below, but you can see much better ones, and some movies too, here.

• Niketown – Talking about Apple, the Nike store ostensively co-brands Nike+ with Apple. I’m not a runner – in fact I hate running – but this is so cool that I may even try it one day. The whole store is very well thought, from the colour palette to the overall layout and the glass tubes to transfer items from the storage rooms to the PoS (point-of-sale) stations. Other cool feature is the NIKEiD.STUDIO: you can create shoes customized to your taste and have it delivered to you – if you live in the U.S., of course.

• Nokia Flagship Store – A three-story mecca for cell-phone fans. The huge screens behind the phones are interactive: they can react to actions such as text messaging and handling of the mobile devices. Very cool and blue. You can get more details about it here.

• Citibank – As city regulations around the world become more strict towards visual pollution, retail stores are becoming more creative and using colour and shapes as brand identity clues. I just mentioned the blueness of Nokia’s store. Citibank is using the Chevron format in the façade of its branches. This particular branch is very modular, with sliding internal walls to provide ample spaces during business hours and access to ATMs only after hours. Another curiosity there is a terminal for client feedback, which was used to request a water cooler to be brought back after the branch redesign. Who would’ve thunk that clients would miss the good and old drinking fountain?

• Bank of America – This branch has two interesting features: a bookcase with finance-related books &amp; magazines is a comfortable living room setting, and banners at the top with a timeline showing how BoA’s history is deeply ingrained in the U.S. history. I know it sounds trivial, but it was very well executed. Unfortunately no pictures could be taken inside.

• Commerce Bank – Open extended hours, including Saturdays and Sundays, this branch has some kiosks with free souvenirs (like pens) and also a coin counter game for kids: if you get the total amount right, you’re eligible for a prize.

• ING Direct Café – This is the one that blew my mind away. This is not a bank office or a branch. It’s more like a Starbucks store, including free Internet access, and it was insanely packed when we visited. Why would a bank do that? Many reasons, including probably some that I have not even thought about yet. Having coffee is a very social thing so people just go there for a break, and while in there, there are some cross-selling opportunities. In the second floor, there’s a space for people to meet or learn about financial services. What a great way to associate a pleasant experience with a strong bran. They also sell souvenirs, including toys for kids with Cedric and Amy, ING characters from Planet Orange. If you were wondering why I tagged this entry as “web20forbiz”, there is your link! You can read more about it here and here.

This was a really long post, sorry about that. I should give a prize too to anybody getting to the end of it.

On innovation, barnacles and Darwin

Two weeks ago, while visiting the St Joseph Market in Barcelona, I found this thing that promptly caught my attention:

I thought: live “percebes”? WTH is a percebe? And why is this thing so expensive? Then I took a closer look:

Naturally, I googled it some time later, and found the following:

The percebe is a delicious, edible gooseneck barnacle. Seafood lovers proclaim the succulent lusciousness of its slippery, slurpable innards make percebes earth’s best-tasting seafood.

It didn’t sound very appealing to me, and I did not know what a barnacle was anyway. You know, when English is not your first language, barnacle is not a word that’s likely to show up in a casual conversation or in your ESL classes. Of course, I then googled barnacle and found that it was simply what in Brazilian Portuguese is known as craca. My immediate reaction was: What???!!! Some people eat cracas and say that’s the best-tasting seafood on the planet? It’s like my mother saying the best part of the chicken is the neck. (I never actually tried it, but I still don’t believe her).

All this googleness finally paid off, as it led me to find by accident that barnacles played a pivotal role in Darwin’s breakthrough evolutionary theory, as described in the book Darwin and the Barnacle (by the way, Google Book Search rocks!). According to Wikipedia, Darwin was the first to fully study and classify barnacles. No surprise there. I used to tease a friend of mine for studying the behaviour of sea urchins (well, they basically don’t do much of what regular folks call behaviour), but barnacles are even worse, as most of them spend their lives cemented to a rock and barely move. If I were to choose a species to describe, barnacles would probably be very low in my list.

What is really interesting in this story was that it took Darwin more than 20 years between formulating his theory and publishing it. He was a 50-year-old man when he finally published The Origin of Species. Contrary to Thomas Edison, who seemed to come up with new things every 5 minutes (come on, 1,093 patents in his name?), Darwin had one major innovative idea, and it took him almost a lifetime to develop it. But when he finally published it, it changed the whole history of life sciences.

Innovation comes in different sizes, packages and frequencies. I can only imagine a guy like Darwin working for a big corporation today and writing in his annual performance review: I’m almost there; I just need 12 more years to finalize this idea of mine. The other thing that caught my attention is Darwin’s independent thinking, and his openness to change his mind when faced with facts invalidating his beliefs:

I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men. I have steadily endeavoured to keep my mind free, so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject) as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it.

He wrote that late in his life, and it’s refreshing to see that even after all his accomplishments, he was still keeping an open stance and an inquiring mind. How’s that for a role model?