CircaSpecting: People, Tech, and Business

Animalism and Tech

FIRST, let’s get something straight: I am not a Luddite.  I love technology.  Properly designed and used, it allows the Human Being to become more...more creative, more expressive, more informed, more motivational, more connected, more productive.

BUT, I hear a lot of chatter about how web-based this or for-the-masses that or a handful of other messianic technologies are going to liberate business people from the shackles that bind them. Beware.  Substance first, form second.

If we business people look to the advent of a new tech to fix our dysfunctional habits of communication, analysis, thought, experimentation, collaboration, and acceptance of poorly-fitting solutions -- then we are apt to find that we have replaced one undesirable master with another that is indistinguishable in the end from the former.

Either use technology as a tool, or be one.

"It did not seem strange when Napoleon was seen strolling in the farmhouse garden with a pipe in his mouth... no, not even when the pigs took Mr. Jones's clothes out of the wardrobes and put them on, Napoleon himself appearing in a black coat.... The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."  George Orwell, Animal Farm

Transparency, Trust and the Illusion of SOX

It seems fitting that last week as our local Rockies took a drubbing from the mighty Red Sox juggernaut, my mind has been preoccupied with Sarbanes Oxley. 

My wife is a third-year law student at the University of Denver.  Amazing woman.  At 38, she’s raised two kids (not including me) and learned a few things about life; so, she knows professorial bologna when she sees it in class.  She came home last week with some particularly entertaining tidbits.

Seems her Corporate Governance professor spent a class session raving about the benefits of Sarbanes Oxley, particularly how it has effectively constrained the ability of always-grubbing CEOs and hypnotized Boards to exploit and mislead shareholders.

I have two problems with this prof’s perspective.  The prof’s first assertion is that these guys and gals are, as a general rule, trying to pull the wool over shareholders’ eyes.  I’ve worked with/for many CEOs and CFOs of public companies, and my experience suggests that these guys and gals are no more and no less honorable, trustworthy, selfish, etc. than the average worker or shareholder.  Sure, they are more, shall we say, confident than the average person.  But, confidence is not a crime, and SOX cannot do anything about it -- even if it were in shareholders’ best interest to humble their CEOs (which I doubt).  In marriage, you can’t love someone you don’t trust.  Shareholder-CEO relationships are very similar: trust them or replace them, but don’t get caught in the middle relying on a piece of paper.

The prof’s second implicit assertion is that SOX is an effective restraint on the small percentage of CEOs who would otherwise abuse the system.  My wife, who’s never been in a board meeting, but who is a great student of human nature and behavior, smells a rat here, and I agree with her.  Remember, back in the 30’s everyone called for the SEC and accounting standards in the wake of the crash -- as safeguards sure to protect the hapless investor from the greedy charlatan.  But, we still had the S&L crisis and the limited partnership train wreck and the Internet hype-boom-bust and the Enron/MCI debacles.  The bottom line is this: the people running ventures are smarter than the people who write regulations -- and far faster at adapting.  So, some bad apples are going to get through, no matter how bullet-proof you try to make your regs.  Do you really believe that Jeff Skilling isn’t smart enough to have outwitted the SOX guideline-wielding accountants?  Seriously now.

So, at some point regulations hit diminishing marginal returns for society.  At some point they even become counterproductive.  SOX is a bit like a warm blanket.  Makes you feel better, but doesn’t actually make the snow go away.  And, the downside is that the cost incurred by the vast majority of systematically-honest organizations is a negative-ROI deal: shareholders are no better informed, and the company is hurt by the costs and strictures.

When Market Research Lies

I know 30 minutes is a long time on the web, but if you have ANY responsibility for understanding/meeting the needs of a group of people, you owe it to yourself to watch this 30-minuted video of Malcolm Gladwell's presentation at last year's PopTech. 

Clif's Notes version: the greater the magnitude of breakthroughness of your solution, the greater the probability that people will poopoo on it initially -- even though they will love it later.  IF you have the courage to stick to your guns.

Who Am I NOT?

Good artists often see something's form more clearly than you and I do, and sometimes that is because they have been trained to focus on negative space around the thing.  I read a great post from Brad Feld this week, in which he makes a similar argument for defining the negative space around your self -- Know What You Suck At.  You can extend his argument to a company, a product, a community, etc.

My #1: Sales Forecasting.  Don't get me wrong, I can run an quant model with the best of them.  All that science worked fine when I was at huge corporations with dominant market positions.  But, for the vast majority of endeavors, especially the creative/entrepreneurial ventures, the whole forecasting process feels like it might as well be reading chicken entrails in a voodoo hut.

Fortunately for us, being good at selling is more productive than being good at sales forecasting.

The Intelligence Paradox

Five books are required reading for all new Eyeris employees, and one of them is Out of Control by Kevin Kelly.  We require employees to read this book because it helps invert the popular perspective about technology and intelligence.  Rodney Brooks' work supports the same countercultural view.

These guys’ works provide dozens of examples from the fields of biology and ecology showing how much more effective and durable nature’s intelligence framework is when compared to the current (admittedly young) framework most of us use for managing information, people, and technology in our enterprises:

Nature: Swarms 
Distributed communication and autonomy
Layered simplicity
Hyper-redundancy

Current IT: Monolith
Central hub communication and control
Singular complexity
Zero duplication

There is an old saying "Dance with the one that brung you."  When you evaluate the success of nature over quite a few quarters, it seems pretty clear which of these approaches "brung us" -- and that’s the one which will take us home.

Fishing for a Solution?

When I was growing up in Texas, I spent a lot of time out on the lake.  Skiing, swimming, exploring, and some times just floating around.  I never really got into fishing, but at one point my father did.  One of his friends was a former professional bass fisherman (yes, some people do make a living at it -- very similar to Nascar in many ways), and Dad went out fishing with him once to try to learn some secrets.  They fished on the same lake in exactly the same spots that Dad regularly tried.  But, where Dad usually came home empty-handed, they caught plenty of fish.  Same bait, same gear, same place, same fish -- different result.  How’d that work?

Early in the day, when Dad’s friend was catching his first fish, Dad asked him how he was doing it.  The response was an instant classic that I’ve used hundreds of times since:

You’ve got to believe there’s a fish in there.

I love this simple folksy unpretentious wisdom.  It does not matter how smart you and your team are; it does not matter how much cool technology you have; it does not matter how much money or how much time you have.  If you don’t believe there is a great answer to the question or a great solution to the problem or an amazing new way to do things, you will not find it.

Leadership in ambiguous, creative endeavors is fundamentally about faith -- having it, cultivating it in others, and keeping it alive through the inevitable doldrums.

The Times, They are a Changin'

Everyone's talking anecdotally about it -- but I just found an excellent piece of research from Pew about how tech-babies are coming of age and how their habits and preferences will change the way all forms of technology are consumed and used.

Big revelations: over the next 3-5 years, a sizable new segment of the "professionals" market will emerge that has 5x greater demand than today's Early Adopters for things like peer-to-peer sharing, embedded video, sample-and-remix authoring, wikis, intensive personalization, etc.  Try to envision a BI community that's a cocktail of Wikipedia, Joost, MySpace, Skype, AIM, and Google -- makes today's BI look like downright ancient.

Interestingly, this segment is also 10x less likely to want/accept support when they try to adopt a technology -- either they can figure it out on their own, or there is probably another tool that's better.  Hmm, guess we're all going to get to compete on something besides raw functionality after all, something like pervasively intuitive usability -- or "fun" perhaps.

Click here to download: Pew Info Tech User Segmentation Research (pdf)

Whether you are a CIO or a Product Manager or a Tech Strategist, you need to spend a few hours studying this research.  Huge changes are coming.  Gotta go now -- need to replace the whiteboard walls in our recruiting conference room with Surface walls!

Can You Know Too Much?

I recently read 3 great CIO.com articles by Ben Worthen, regarding the growing strains between the technically-adroit caste of end users and the traditionally powerful caste of IT professionals.  The bottom line is that you can manage through this transition better if you stop viewing it as a win-lose situation.

Users Who Know Too Much

Tools For Managing Shadow IT

Confessions of a Rogue End-user

My favorite quote: "Messy but fertile beats neat but sterile." 

   

The Watering Hole

It's an accepted truism that data is not the same thing as information.  The former requires practical application to become the latter.  Most BI initiatives purport to focus on creating "useful information from mountains of data", but most of the sponsors of those same initiatives complain about lack of adoption of the finished platform by the organization. 

Whether an order is formed or not depends upon whether or not information is created ... the essence of creating order is in the creation of information.  Ikujiro Nonaka

That's such a powerful quote, because it captures the emergent quality of intelligence communities.  They are drawn spontaneously to information.  So, the absence of an intelligence community around a BI platform is a sure sign that the designers had a different concept of "information" than the user community does.

I'd like to Introduce you my friend, Disorder

There is a lot we can learn about organizations from looking at the world around us.  Given the relatively simple field within which I work, I am often amazed at how very relevant and useful are the learnings of our brothers and sisters working on scientific research.  Consider the following passage from Leadership and the New Science, by Margaret Wheatley.

For many years, scientists failed to notice the role that positive feedback and disequilibrium played in facilitating a system’s evolution.  In seeking to preserve system stability, they failed to note the internal processes by which open systems accomplish growth and change.  Prigogine’s work (on thermodynamics), and those who expanded it subsequently, dramatically expanded our awareness of how open systems use disequilibrium to avoid deterioration. 

Looking at open systems over time, scientists were able to see the effects of energy  transformations they had not previously observed.  Entropy, that fearful measure of a system’s demise, was still being produced, sometimes in great quantities.  (But,) once it was noted that systems were capable of exchanging energy, trading usable energy for entropy, scientists realized that deterioration was not inevitable.  Disturbances could create disequilibrium, but disequilibrium could lead to growth.  If the system had the capacity to react and change, then disturbance was not necessarily a fearsome opponent. 

To understand the world from this perspective, scientists had to give up their views on decay and dissipation.  They had to transform their ideas about the role of disequilibrium.  They had to develop a new relationship with disorder. (emphasis added)

My primary objective working with BI initiatives at our client companies is to incubate intellectual development of the culture in directions that foster improved business results.  Sometimes, cultures have a long history of idolizing information stability and information control, and that makes genuine Business Intelligence a tough project.  But, the rewards of working with everyone to "let go a little" can generate very nice growth indeed.