Web 2.0 Expo: Transforming Your Company To Embrace Empowered Employees and Customers

My first session on Tuesday: Transforming Your Company To Embrace Empowered Employees and Customers - by Josh Bernhoff and Ted Schadler (both of Forrester Research).

Much of the talk could probably be found in their book Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business.

They are into empowering individuals through technology. They showed a diagram of the "ladder of participation" - from passive web watchers to activist participants:

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/ross/470424239/)

There are 4 technologies that empower consumers:

1. Mobile devices
2. Social technology
3. Pervasive video
4. Cloud computing services

The authors took us through a brief history of the web illustrating the change in business-to-personal relationships. Empowerment is the next part of the story.

Social computing is the new customer service. This is all where's it at for the future. In this new environment, the company can NOT lock you out! Instead, companies need to respond holistically to the era of the empowered customer. How to achieve it? It's very hard.

Existence of empowered customers make it took easy to spread negative images about your company through viral techniques such as Twitter, Youtube, etc.

Instead, a company should cultivate HEROs: Highly Empowered and Resourceful Operatives. These are the people who will like your product so much they will function as goodwill ambassadors, and spread recommendations, nice stories, and other good words about your product and company. Clearly, a customer transaction no longer concludes with the purchase of an item. Now, it's ideal if the customer develops an ongoing relationship to the product and company. (Raises the participation and stake of the company.)

How to get there? There are 4 steps to build customer influence:

1. Identify the mass influencers
2. Deliver excellent customer service
3. Empowerment through mobile devices
4. Amplify your fans

(This ties up with previous Web 2.0 talks which spoke about how word-of-mouth from fans is probably among the best advertising you can receive.) No. 1: Who are these consumer influencers? In the US alone, people create circa 500 billion impressions of things. According to Nielson, the number is just under two trillion!!! People really want to let others what they think of things. Peer influence is highly concentrated: only 6.3% of adults create 80% of the influence impressions. (Reminds me of email paradigm: 10% of participants make 90% of the content.)

No. 2. It is these groups on which you need to focus. Deliver a groundswell of customer service. Good example: Best Buy.

No. 3. Empowering people using their cellphones. Example: AutoTrader.co.uk. They allow you to take a pic of a car and the software will automatically identify it for you!

No. 4. Amplify your fan activity. Good example: Marty Collins. Also: Microsot had a video conference of what do you do with your pc. It was a big success and enabled Microsoft to aggregate fan activity.

But here's the challenge for companies: Only empowered workers can serve empowered customers. Increasingly, customers are assuming the duties once owned by IT specialists. Companies should regard the consumerization of IT as not a problem but an opportunity. To know what's happening "out there," to remain engaged with the world of the customers, you need to empower the employees.

IT staff is accustomed to having sole responsibility for software. But now we're seeing that employees are using applications not sanctioned by IT - why? To get the job done better. If the employer throws up barriers, the workers will still find ways to get around them. So employers need to approach things differently.

Companies need a new contract - a new way of letting works increase their work productivity by any means they can, any software they can. Some examples: A worker within Black & Decker created instructional videos using YouTube. Black & Decker then created their own YouTube channel to support these efforts. At IBM, Gina Poole made collaborations possible using their Intranet.

How does the employwer support the empowered employee? With a HERO contract. Employees can create, but must know the company's mission, and the boundaries must be carefully spelled out. Bosses need to think differently about technology: Works need mobile apps, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc. Business manager need to recognize that technology is now part of the landscape that they can't ignore. IT has to stop being a barrier and let workers create and flourish in the work environment.

Not surprisingly, all these ideas were anticipated in The ClueTrain Manifesto some 15 years ago. Examples: Thesis #12: The networked market knows more than companies about their products.

There are 3 models for efficient groundswell among customers:

1. Build a service team
2. Integrate service and marketing
3. Make service a core value

Also ClueTrain Thesis #42: People talk to each other directly inside the company. This results in 5 ways to maximize collaboration:

1. Extend existing tools
2. Create value
3. Dedicate people to project
4. [lost the rest, but it's in the book]

It was a very nice talk. Unlike previous talks I've seen, this one really tried to wrestle with the notion that employees must be up to the energy of the consumers. They must be "on call" to explore whatever software, sites that consumers are using which could add value to the product.

Closer to the library world, the only place I've really seen this work is at the Smithsonian, where they have their own social network. Of course, most community libraries probably don't have the staff or resources to create and maintain these networks. There's no reason to think they'll be static, or will stay on one platform or one site. So being an empowered employee will require a great deal of committment and work. It's not going to be a job "extra responsibility" but will soon be an essential responsibility of every job.

For me it was one of the best talks on Tuesday, well presented. It elaborated on themes presented in the earlier Web 2.0 Expos - namely that there is so much more one can do if one harnesses the energy of customers - letting them create, and giving them a space (e.g. a company social network) in which to create.

Preparing for Web 2.0 Expo NY

I've had a fairly busy summer working extra hours voluntarily to get things done. But I've still been observing various aspects about Library 2.0, Web 2.0, and similar issues.

The biggest issue has been the economic downturn and its effect. To my eyes, this has resulted in the abandonment of the sense of experimentation and discovery. So many of the ideas of just a few years ago - experimentation, trial and error (no inhibitions at being wrong), and thinking of new possibilities - seem to be replaced with a focused effort to use several tools as extensions of existing modes of communication. All the bigger ideas suggested and articulated by people such as Michael Casey and Michael Stephens - all the implications for flattening management, of blurring the boundaries of work hierarchy, of empowering people from various parts of the organization - appear to be forgotten, with organizations sometimes resorting to management methods that should have been extinct in the 1950s.

It will be interesting to see if there is still the air of spontaneity, discovery and of fun at tomorrow night's Ignite. And it will be interesting to see who shows up for the Web 2.0 Expo. The first year in New York it appeared to be comprised of a combination of business types, geek types, and people just wanting to learn. Last year I believe there were fewer people and most seemed to be specifically into marketing, programming, web development, and similar areas. To be sure the high price assures limited variety of those in attendance. Note to O'Reilly: Thanks for non-profit discounts.

Time prevented me from a full write up of blog posts (I still have the notes from last year). Hopefully I'll do better this year, as I attempt to commit most of my notes to Twitter.

Requiem for Library 2.0

Update: Administration of the Library 2.0 network has been handed over to Steve Hargadon. Never underestimate the power of the Internet to influence!

This requiem is not for Library 2.0 in general, but for the Ning network, Library 2.0. This week, its founder, Bill Drew, let us know that due to inactivity, he was closing down the site and looking for ways of archiving it.

The Library 2.0 Ning group is not old - I joined in Spring 2007 when there were several hundred members. When news of the network first spread (mostly by email), membership soon hit 1,000, then 2,000, and continued to grow. Currently there are over 4,000 members of the network. It caught on at a time when many wanted to learn about Library 2.0, but there was no obvious email list or web destination.

The excitement the group generated encouraged us to go out into the Web 2.0 world and actively engage, experiment, think of ways of harnessing Web 2.0 to create Library 2.0 concepts. It made us realize that the world is now going to be different, shifting from a stable environment to one that is ever-changing. No longer would there be one way to do things: we encouraged each other to try multiple ways, and maintain using the ones that worked while discarding those less useful, while keeping an eye open for whatever new tools or ideas may be on the horizon.

I see the Library 2.0 Ning network is a victim of its own success. We are now discarding the less useful: the Ning group was a good starting point, but it had (as Ning still has in all its groups) a number of inherent obstacles that prevent easy communication. Emailing through Ning is slower than molasses as is messaging. The entire site always felt lugubrious to me, so that once I became adept at RSS, I simply followed the feeds and avoided the site.

But its advantages were many. I met so many people through the Ning group (both virtual and face-to-face) who I have continued to keep up with, or who know me so that when the occasion arises, I feel comfortable in communicating with them.

Most importantly for me, through the group I came to recognize that Library 2.0 was not just about using cool new tools. The bigger issues were what the effect these tools had on all of us and the way we interact with the world. These issues gave rise to crowdsourcing, fostering a flatter world where one should question ownership of information, questioning traditional modes of management, advertising, publicity...in short, nearly everything we do, whether on a social or individual basis. Library 2.0 (and of course Web 2.0) will continue to change the way we look and do things for the coming years as more and more people begin to recognize how to integrate the Internet into their lives.

It still is a pity that the Library 2.0 Ning group should go. I would love to see at least an email incarnation of our community -- even though I know email is not a favored method of communication for the current generation of college-age people and younger. Twitter is too limited for substantive discussions.

Whatever its future or demise may be, I would hope that all librarians throughout the world continue to maintain the group's excitement which led us to discover each other and new ways of thinking and engaging with the world.

Web 2.0 Expo: Thinking Visually: The Value of Geting Visual in Social Business by David Armano

The third talk I attended on Tuesday November 17 at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City was David Armano’s “Thinking Visually: The Value of Geting Visual In Social Business.” (Armano is the principal of the Dachis Group http://dachisgroup.com, consultants in social networking.)

Here are his slides - they're necessary to refer to for my summary, since his point is that visuals can greatly assist putting ideas across:

http://www.slideshare.net/darmano/the-value-of-visual-thinking-in-social-business-2287291

http://bit.ly/4Nbwm4

I saw Armano's presentation at last year's Expo:

http://furtivelibrarian.blogspot.com/2008/10/web-20-expo-micro-interactions-in-20.html

In my summaries last year I think I did a disservice to both David Armano and Brian Solis (who spoke last year, and whom Armano mentioned). It's difficult to convey certain ideas in words when what you're trying to convey is the usefulness of imagery. I think a number of us chuckled this year during Armano's talk when he told us that visual design was really simple - he made is sound like all you have to do is make a couple of strokes and voila! An image.

But people like Armano and Solis don't realize that they're visually talented. (I consider myself musically gifted and know few people understand music the way musicians do. I believe this is true also with those devoted to graphic arts.) So Armano (and Solis) tend to underplay the effort involved in creating images, and, perhaps, sometimes don't have the full vocabulary to convey in words the power of visuals (their mode of communication is visual). Despite their facility at creating images, the uninitiated should never think that it is simple - it isn't, and I feel most of us would do well to not bother with learning design, but leave to people who have a life-long need to express themselves visually (i.e. graphic artists).

So on to the summary. Armano warned that his talk was not specifically about social media but that is overlaps with it.

He started with a Chinese proverb, which could stand in part for what Web 2.0 is about:

Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember;

involve me and I’ll understand.

Involving users is more than just showing things. Armano showed a visualization of the effect of social networks, first shown on his blog: darmano.typepad.com

Small and large ripples are visualized, spreading out to reach and overlap one another.

Gets to the issue of the visualization of paid digital media vs. earned digital media

The attention of consumers is shifted to networks and streams.

Image of the “wheel of marketing misfortune” very nice

He cited the book Made To Stick (by Dan Heath and Chip Heath) which is about ideas that can are retained in the mind. Most people find visuals a valuable complementary aid to understanding abstract ideas. Think for moment: Which of your five senses would you fear losing most? A majority of people respond with their sight.

He then showed us several minutes of a video he liked very much: History of the Internet, which uses PICOL (PIctorial COmmunication Language) icons to convey history with an elegant simplicity:

What it takes to get visual with the 4 Ms:

• Metaphor - finding a convincing correspondence between word and image
• Model - (for developing experiences) (one can combine: metaphor and model)
• Mindmap - to get all ideas mapped out
• Manifest - take something complex and make it simple

Six steps for getting visual:

1. Empathize: see the world as a child, asking fundamental questions: observe - ask - explore

2. Memorize: commit thoughts to memory - putting anything on paper is a path to memorization

3. Analyze: take a step back

4. Synthesize: filter the signal from noise

5: Visualize: see it, then do it

6: Materialize: make it tangible, make it stick

Combing that with the four Cs of community: Content, Contest, Connectivity, Continuity.

Two examples/case studies:

1. How to visualize a "dynamic signal"? What does a signal look like? Sample images taken from Google. Then making it stick: keep the image simple. [slides 34-39]

2. What about "hiveminded"? What does the word suggest? A collective consciousness - a swarm of bees. What makes a hive? Bees...hive...honeycombs - these ideas suggest a hexagonal design - reducing a hive to one honeycomb. The end result visualizes a swarm of signals on a hive. [slides 40-47 ]

Armano went on to remind us that however creative, these visuals are for the purpose of social marketing. He suggested a checklist for making your coentent more visual and said that you need to use your brain and eye in thinking about web content.

Why is visual content useful?

• It gets peoples' attention quickly
• It helps us to learn faster and more effectively
• It lets people do their own thinking
• It helps us tell stories

Here is some reading to help you get started:

Envisioning Information by Edward R. Tufte

Selling to the VP of NO by Dave Gray

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug (no. 1 of user experience books)

The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam

Web 2.0 Expo: Kristina Halvorson: Content First

Kristina Halvorson [Picture taken from Flickr - not from Web 2.0 Expo]

The first talk I attended at the Web 2.0 Expo was “Content First: Why Content Strategy Will Save the Web” by Kristina Halvorson, of http://www.braintraffic.com/. She is author of Content Strategy For The Web. Her presentation strongly underscored her belief that content is the major part of the web and that people involved with the web need to have conversation on content strategy (i.e. to recognize its primacy).

Her slide presentation (which can be read alongside my summary) is here:

http://www.slideshare.net/khalvorson/content-first-web-20-expo-nyc

[It should be remembered that the words that follow should not be taken literally as Halvorson's words, but my transcription of her talk, which may not accurately reflect its content.]

She began with a quote from Walter Landor (the “grandfather” of branding) who defined a brand:

“A brand is a promise. By identifying and authenticating a product or service it delivers a pledge of satisfaction and quality.”

A brand tells its audience they will be satisfied. Examples: the Gerber baby: it gives you a sense of safety and security. Another quote (from The Brand Bubble By John Gerzema and Ed Lebar):

“Brands are now used more than they are preferred...Functional benefits and relevance now outweigh the intangible and emotional allure of a brand.”

In other words, customers own the brand. For example, Babycenter.com equals “safety and security.” We’re not going to see it in a product, but rather on websites. We consume content offline. When we're relaxed and focused it is easier for us to take in information.

When consumers are online, they’re engaged but also distracted by numerous activities. Online, we don't just see or read about brands, we USE them.

So why is our online content generally bad? Why can't we create content that is meaningful and enjoyable?

Ultimately, content matters. According to Jesse James Garrett in his book The Elements of User Experience:

“The single most important thing most web sites can offer to their users is content that those users will find valuable.”

But we marginalize content. Content is often last thing to be considered or delivered when creating websites. This is affirmed by blog entry “The Cure for Content-Delay Syndrome” by Pepi Ronalds, appearing on website “A List Apart” <http://www.alistapart.com/>.

Skllset.org is a website designed to help understand careers and opportunities. They provide an ideal of web office structure. Ten years ago there was no content manager as part of the web design team. Neither was there a SEO (search engine optimization) specialist or a usability specialist.

Back then, web teams spoke about general things but not about web content. It used to be that the copywriter was brought in towards the mid or later stages of web site design. But copywriting is based too much on the old model of writer, editor, proof reader, reviser, etc. How did we get there?

Richard Saul Wurman (the founder of the idiom Information Architecture) wrote:

“I thought the explosion of data needed architecture, needed a series of systems, needed systemic design, a series of performance criteria to measure it.”

Influential books: Edward R. Tufte, Envisioning Information; and Jesse James Garrett, Elements of User Experience. He lays out the problem of content within the user experience.

Content is not a feature. It's messy and complex -- an ever-evolving thing that can turn into a monster. In their book Web Redesign 2.0, Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler say the way to deal with web content is to “accept it, plan for it, charge for it.” Halvorson disagrees.

Halvorson’s idea: you need to have a content strategy - something which plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful usable content.

Content can be: text, data, video, audio. But the major hurdle of all of these is text (including text that you see and that which you don’t see [i.e. metadata]). Strategy is a plan for obtaining a specific goal or result.

Content strategy helps us understand context of content – what, why, how, for whom, by whom, with what, when, where, how often, what next, etc.

A negative example: website of Quicken: designed not for or about the user, but is about selling Quicken. Compare that to:

Mint.com -- a personal finance site. Note the emblazoned banner: “the best (free) way to manage your money.” This website is not about Mint.com, but about the user. It is a website whose design is based on user's fears and desires. We didn't come to this website to learn about Mint. We came to fix our financial life. Secondary to that is using Mint.

If you fail to consider user goals in seeking your business objectives, you won’t deliver useful content. If you can align user goals with your business objectives you’ll strike the right balance.

Three examples of companies that deliver useful content and do it well:

1. REI (cold weather clothing and gear): They provide a library of articles (texts and videos) that help all levels of visitors. There are 100-200 original articles by staff members (not aggregated from other sources) targeted to specific activities. They've invested in an in-house editorial team.

2. Room & Board : On their website they don’t just tell you about the furniture, but have interview with their artisans. They let you behind the scenes to show you how these artisans have created the furniture. (This helps the user to establish a connection with the products.)

3. Ford Models . Their YouTube channel brings users “backstage” where they have interviews with models and designers. Studio artists and models deliver real-world tips and tricks about makeup, hair, and taking care of oneself. So it brings people not just backstage but delivers useful information to users (and potential models and Ford candidates). They simply asked: “What do girls want?” to determine how they should model their website.

So...

How does content strategy work? There are four parts:

Plan. Create. Deliver. Govern.

Plan:

Process:

• What do we have?
• What are we trying to do?
• What do our content ecosystems look like? (all factors that have impact on living thing of content)
• What are our opportunities, risks, and success metrics? (SEO) - How are you going to measure success? (fixing content is not a measure of success – you must measure how success is made)

Your content is organized by a content inventory. This inventory only identifies content and a few notes. It is a quantitative audit by which you obtain:

• measurable project outcomes.
• content recommendations for your project:
• What do our content ecosystems look like?
• What are our opportunities, risks, and success metrics? Consider external and internal factors.
• The Plan:

Your plan should form a continuous circle of learning / creation / examination, or Create, Deliver, Govern.

This is the mantra of social media: you must be ready to stay engaged. No longer can you create content and then leave it to dry out, age, and spoil.

What do you get? Multiple benefits: better user experience, great brand consistency, new operational efficiencies, better risk management, improved SEO, and more effective personalization and targeting.

How can you start?

Currently we think of content as the responsibility of a writer. But it requires more functions. We need to recognize content as a complex thing and the responsibility of many. Marketing tasks in all their variety are activities which can be considered content. We must have processes in place that recognize the web as an eco system.

In closing Halvorson admonished us:

You are a publisher - treat your content as a critical business asset.

No matter how you get your content onto the web – by email, Twitter, IM, etc. – you are publishing content to the web. Recognize yourself as a publisher.

Web 2.0 Expo: Some thoughts

I enjoyed this year's Web 2.0 Expo more than I thought I would. I was concerned that it might be a repetition of last year’s. Fortunately I was wrong. Some of the speakers were the same, but (from what I could see) they offered new views on a variety of issues.

Before I provide summaries of the individuals sessions I attended, I’ll offer some general comments about the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City.

Last year, overhearing talk in between sessions, it seemed that one of the most pressing concerns was how to monetize the Internet and social media, and determining ROI (return on investment). This year, though ROI was still on people’s minds, its concern seemed to be much more muted (based on my sense that there were fewer hard business types present). Rather, I sensed that the geeks who had entered the business world had come to the expo to reinvigorate their love and fascination of computers and the Internet. They came to explore new ideas and keep track of what they could bring back to the office or file away for later use.

The keynotes last year seemed to me rather perfunctory, whereas this year many were a highlight of the event. I first saw Baratunde Thurston portray @the_swine_flu back at IgniteNYC on June 1, 2009. Even then he had the audience howling with laughter. This time he spoke on hashtags in Twitter, but I was amazed at the way he delivered his speech. It wasn’t a speech: it was a dialogue with the audience. As an occasional stand-up comedian (and an editor for The Onion), he knew he had to get the audience right away. He succeeded, making his presentation among the most memorable presentation of the entire Expo. It is a model for all future presentations.

The sleeper for me was Beth Noveck, Deputy Chief Technology Officer For Open Government at the White House. Noveck spent over about 35 minutes in conversation with Tim O’Reilly, discussing the President’s Open Government Initiative. She described a direction for openness in the White House that would foster greater participation (and therefore activism) in political life. One of the first advantages of openness was making sure that no lobbyists would enter those who advise the president – and having the list of official visitors made public was a step to making sure no lobbyists would appear. She also singled out Manor, Texas, a town of 5,800 people, for the superlative efforts they’re doing to create a transparent government on a town level. You could feel the audience breathing “wow!” as she held them in attention, describing what they hope to achieve, including influencing other branches of government to be as open.

Much has already been written about – and by - Danah Boyd, her keynote speech, and the phenomenon of “tweckling” (an amalgam of Twitter and heckling). In brief, saddled with an unexpected and difficult situation for presenting her paper, Boyd was unaware that the Twitter feed being projected behind her began to comment negatively on her presentation, even to becoming derogatory. To be sure, even if the audience was correct in suggesting that she was reading her paper too fast, the nastiness was uncalled for and not constructive.

As ugly as it was, the situation suggested that the typical academic talk – of standing and delivering your totally prepared paper – is now a thing of the past. Today we're at Presentation 2.0: You must establish a relationship with and engage your audience. Do not depend on content alone to do that for you. Of course, attendees were spoiled by Thurston’s presentation – he spent a good five minutes warming us up, getting our attention, and establishing a memorable exchange with us even before he began sharing content. [Side note: When Michael Stephens (instructor at the Graduate School of Library Information Science at Dominican University) addressed staff at the New York Public Library, he began at the back of the auditorium, slowly making his way to the front, while asking short questions and getting answers. He was working the crowd.] This kind of Presentation 2.0 – which is as much performance as presentation – is now going to be necessary when conveying information to an audience, particularly if there are distractions such as slides, or simultaneous Twitter feeds (even if they are not projected, many conferences now have a backchannel, so it's not going to go away).

Despite the many good sessions I attended (summaries of which I hope to post soon), what I felt missing from the Expo were more opportunities for networking. In this day and age where the Internet enables quick and usually free dissemination, there has been much talk questioning the need for traditional conferences, when presenters could simply post their talks online.

Therefore attendance at a conference needs to emphasize the attributes beyond the papers, and that is usually networking. There is a need for more social interaction. There were a few opporunities: lunch time (often less than an hour), and pre-meeting coffee and tea in he lounge area:

Last year (which I sensed had significantly more attendees), one lunch allowed people to group themselves based on interest. I reported on sitting at a table labeled Museum 2.1 and discovering interesting people. It would have been a good idea to have this option available for all lunches. Instead, we were left to seek out others with similar interests on Twitter - not an efficient method of networking when you're with hundreds of people.

I was happy to have suggested and created an archive of tweets for the Expo - many thanks to Twapper Keeper. Even a staff member of O'Reilly thanked me. Access the archive here (Over 12,000 tweets as of the morning of November 25.)

Art Encourages an Enthusiam for Learning

I don't often quote people without adding something original. But a two-year-old article from the newsletter of the Council on the Arts and Humanities for Staten Island has stayed with me which I'd like to reproduce - if only for my own use. The original is here on page 9: http://bit.ly/yUQRB
or:
http://www.statenislandarts.org/newslettr-downloads/Newsletter_Sept-Oct-07.pdf

The author, Carolyn Corbo of Public School 50 directs this (apparently) towards parents of young children. But I feel there's much to be learned even for adults in these 10 maxims. For librarians - or advertisers, or anyone for that matter - the key is getting the individual engaged. This is more possible in a non-judgmental environment where art is exercised ("arts" is not restricted to graphic arts).

It also challenges what I feel is a very American notion (and erroneous one): that "arts" or "entertainment" are an add-on that can easily be jettisoned or placed on a very low priority in times of economic or other difficulties. If arts lead to all the things Corbo suggests, then they are as important as any other subject or occupation for psychological health and communication.

Here is Carolyn Corbo's:

Art Encourages an Enthusiasm for Learning
The Importance of Art Education for Every Child

1. Art develops fine motor skills when we use a scissor or thread a needle.
2. Art develops organizational skills, the 'how to', step-by-step in making a weaving, building an armature or painting.
3. Art making promotes critical thinking--your children look closely at great works of art, analyze and make inference about what they see. We learn about people from distant lands, different cultures and traditions.
4. Art making promotes independent thinking. Your children make decisions about what colors to make, shapes to cut, how to change their work.
5. Art reaches children of all learning styles--it levels the playing field.
6. Art making promotes focus and attention to detail. Even the most active children are engaged when painting a picture or making a sculpture.
7. Art nutures the spirit and stimulates the imagination.
8. Art builds self-esteem.
9. Art making provides our children an opportunity to express their feelings and ideas about their world.
10. Art making is process oriented where children explore different art mediums. Children are encourages to take risks, think for themselves and become problem solvers.
    

Michael Tushman's SLA talk on change management

On March 23, 2009, the New York Chapter of the Special Libraries Association (SLA) hosted Michael L. Tushman, professor at the Harvard Business School, in a talk on "How Should We Manage Change in the 21st Century?" Held in the JP Morgan Chase Conference Center (top floor), the setting offered some stunning views from downtown Manhattan (Liberty Island to the left, Ellis Island to the right):
Tushman's area of research is on technology, innovation, teams, change. He hoped to dwell on the role of the library and information in innovation and change. His PowerPoint is on the SLA NY Chapter website.

He started with a list of private and public firms, small and large and asked: what's the unifying theme among them? (Slides 2-3 of his PowerPoint.)

Some responses: they were firms that dealt with technology and technological change, and most had issues of growth. Many are great organizations that died; some came back. Changes occurred in markets and customer requirements.

Other commonalities: most companies had a near monopoly. They used technology for either growth or rebirth. It's a pattern for successful firms. Tushman mentioned that he'd been looking at such firms for a while, to help understand and build ideas on how and why organizations evolve over time. Then he helps companies to understand those ideas.

Why is it that great organizations almost always fail when the world shifts? (And right now we're in the middle of one of these "world shifts.") Why in such situations do leaders become losers?

Response: they don't see what's happening in front of them. Example: Wang Laboratories didn't believe the personal computer would be a threat. Incumbents - almost always - don't believe in the change. Why is that?

Emotions, fear of loss, - what do they fear loosing? Power? Money? Status? It's arrogance, and an inability to see objectively. It can happen when change is too rapid, and when one is too complacent.

Who's responsible for this kind of failure? The CEO? The board? Top management team? Organizational culture?

Let's take the story of the Swiss watch industry. (PowerPoint slide 4.) There was a pattern of continual decline of numbers of companies and number of watches being made, gradually being overtaken by Japanese watchmakers.

Then Tushman introduced the concepts: Incremental change, architectural change, and radical change (or discontinuous change).

In 1970 the Swiss were no. 1 watchmakers. But quartz watch movement represented for Swiss a discontinuous change. Who would be a customer of a mechanical Swiss watch in 1970? The high-end customer. But a quartz watch is for everyone - it's inexpensive and accurate. Swiss makers actually made quartz movement, but the heads of Swiss companies ignored that information until 1980 when they were practically bankrupt. So they developed Swatch in 1981 as a response to the new forces. They had the technology in 1970, but ignored it until they went bankrupt. (Usually firms wait until they're broke before they take drastic steps to innovate.) Also a similar thing happened with the American tire industry: demand for belted tires sunk while radial increased. (PowerPoint slide 5.)

Slide 6 shows the evolution of the Disk Drive industry: 146 firms founded; 125 were failures. As disc drives get physically smaller (an architectural innovation - going from larger sizes to 8 inch, 5.25 inch, 3.5 inch, etc.) different customers shop for different companies. Firms which lead in one format generally don't lead in the next.

What it takes to exploit your existing business gets in the way of exploration. What we're (at Harvard) trying to do is build businesses that can both exploit what they do (and are good at) and explore for the future.

The problem is that the more you exploit today, the less good you are at exploring tomorrow. Tushman tries to help organizations to do that, but the problem is that they're contradictory forces.

We have a wonderful executive program at the Harvard Business School. Eight weeks, full room and board (and of course 6 superb faculty members) for which we charge $60,000. We hold it twice a year. We're enormously proud of it.

What are the technological challenges that business schools face? What is threatening our world? The answer: online distributed executive education. Who is the leader? University of Phoenix. HBS's way is based on face-to-face interactions. Online courses is an entirely different way of distributing content through the web. Instead of $60,000 a year, they charge just several hundred dollars. So what are schools thinking? They're thinking: "Such online programs wouldn't attract our customers." But over the course of time, such programs are going to get better and will gradually siphon off students from Ivy-league schools.

Look at the Sears building. The company built (what was then) the tallest building in the world. That says something about how they perceived themselves. They're in Chicago. Look at the horizon in Bentonville, Arkansas (beginning of Walmart, Inc.). At first Sears had cornered the city market, and Walmart had the rural areas. By distributing so many catalogs, Sears didn't encourage the country folks to visit the city. All of a sudden, Walmart opens in Chicago - and that spells the end of Sears.

This pathology is deep. The better you are in the short-term, the worse off you'll be in the long-term. It strikes the best people in the top rooms. This issue of cultural lock-in, blindness -- leaders don't see the changing world - this imbalance between the short term and the long term. These are brilliant executives who catch a disease: they're believe their great (an invincible). When they start to fail, they almost always need an outside agent to come in and "lead a revolution" in the corporation. (examples: IBM.)

A happy story: The Ball Corporation (slide 13). They've continuously followed both paths of exploit and explore simultaneously, and have been able to grow and change with the times. When asked what is the company's identity, the CEO responded: we're a container corporation. That "vision" has enabled them to pursue various avenues for development while maintaining their identity.

Note that this is not just incremental change, but incremental change and incremental revolution. What doesn't change is their identity: who they are.

That's one of the key ideas resulting from the research we've done: an over-arching frame (or vision), innovation streams, punctuated change, and an organizational design that permits exploration.

Punctuating change: the only way to get the future - revolutions, incremental change, and revolutions again. Revolution: when the whole organization is turned upside down. Strategy, structure, people, processes all shift at the same time.

Culture of an organization: values, norms, the climate. The social structure. Who is responsible for this organization - who makes it go? People not with formal power but with informal power. They are the nodes of the social network. The coalition of power brokers.

Tushman recalls a client who had formal power, but not social power. Whenever you try to implement change, you need a coaltion from the leader, his team, and those within the social network. You need that if you want to move into the future.

The architecture to exploit people, processes, and structure is different from the architecture needed to explore. Tushman used the word ambidexterity: an organization that can have completely different cultures, completely different competencies, completely different structures, completely different processes.

The challenge: to build an organization that both lives in the past and lives in the future simultaneously. It's a contradiction; Tushman asks senior leaders to host that contradiction: to honor the past while at the same time create a new culture. That is a managerial feat: to live in both worlds.

Imagine you're in Rochester, NY in the 1970s, and you hear of digital imaging. What would be the reaction? As it happened, a librarian in the audience was there at the time and she described the reaction to digital imaging as: arrogance, indignation, and fear.

To conclude, Tushman cites the company Toyota as profiled in the book "Extreme Toyota." His summary: They live in "a state of disequalibrium where radical contradictions coexist, propelling Toyota away from its comfort zone and creating healthy tension and instability within the organization." They are a world of internal paradox - a state of equilibrium and disequilibrium simultaneously.

He then showed this image:
He concluded by noting that the role of leaders is to build organization that can go "there" (where the signpost above points). When someone pointed out to him that the image sends a mixed message, Tushman responded "Yes! Exactly right! Exploit and explore." It requires two completely different organizations, a contradiction that the leadership team must embrace. You want the punctuated change in the exploratory culture, and incremental change in the exploitative culture.

That's his idea: this notion of end capabilities, streams of innovation, the role of the senior team exploiting and exploring, and building multiple and inconsistent cultures that are held together by this notion of identity.

The event broke up as evening settled on Manhattan: