The TrueTalk Blog

21st Century Control - The Video!

More thoughts on the challenges facing modern-day corporations. In an age when openness, transparency and engagement are adding exponential value, too many organizations continue to play by an antiquated ruleset. The key is the courage to let go of old style control.

I look forward to your thoughts. (Sorry it's so long.)

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Your Workplace: What Works? What Doesn't?

I'm very interested in your thoughts about these questions. Please comment or make video responses.
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Changing Change

We all carry around mental models of how things happen. Sometimes, those models prevent us from seeing things we need to see.

In particular, there's the matter of "change." I take that up in this video.

Zappos Zappy Hour

Lots of companies are blogging. But I haven't seen one like online shoe store, Zappos.com. 

Most corporate blogs are, well, boring. They're more like brochures than blogs.

Zappos is different. Theirs is a hoot.

Watch the first video and tell me that you wouldn't know immediately whether or not you'd want to work at Zappos, or, for that matter, buy shoes from them. It may not be your cup of tea but they're lettin' you know who they are and a lot about their approach to doin' business.

Then, watch the second and imagine your CEO as the video's star. Or, if you're the CEO, ask yourself whether yours is the kind of business that would benefit from you leading in this way? (Remember, these are people in a privately held footwear business. Fashion people. Merchants. Lot of logistics and  Web people. Young. Smart. Home office in metro Las Vegas. Sounds like fun, doesn't it? Take a look.)

If anybody asks you about what "authenticity" means in business, refer them to the Zappos blog.

Today's Problem: Create Relentlessly

Create, or die.

That's pretty much it today.

Now, I know that sounds dramatic. After all, there are plenty of sleepy businesses doing quite well, thank you very much, in tired markets. But, come the apocalypse, those businesses will be in a world of hurt.

Apocalypse?

Yeah, think about advertising. Was there a more established formula than advertising's? The past 50 years had taught everyone what ads were: messages beamed at eyeballs. Oh, sure, people complained, but we kept buying and buying and buying.

Then, the apocalypse.

The Internet showed advertisers that their customers were sick of being interrupted and spoken to like idiots. So sick, in fact, that we'd do anything in our power to shut off those interruptions.

But that didn't make us unwilling to buy, nor did it make us any less curious about what to buy. It just made us less willing to listen to those blaring, blinking irritants.

So...what's a marketer to do?

Well, how 'bout what Diesel's doing? How about not just affiliating your brand with all things hip, but actually doing hip things? Like sponsoring a competition amongst artists and designers to create something interesting, provocative, beautiful on a very large scale. That's what they did in Diesel Wall.

And then, just to be sure we all understand why they're doing this, they speak to us in a voice that very many of us find very familiar:

In any given moment in our daily lives we are bombarded by messages we didn't ask to see. A never ending stream of mass produced cerebral pollution offering at absolute best nothing more than needless want. Diesel Wall was born out of a need to salvage what precious public space is left and to fill it with something worth saying. We will take your powers of disuasion [sic]; your ability to disrupt; incite; excite; inspire and intrigue; to make comment; to make beautiful; to make real; to make people think again. The ultimate goal of Diesel Wall is to create a fusion between the private space of galleries/institutions and the open space of the city…to drive new direction in urban landscapes and recharge them with creativity.

"Cerebral pollution." Doesn't sound like the kind of thing a brand would want to be associated with today. Is your company, "message green"?

See? That's the difference relentless creativity makes.

Hat tip: The continually excellent IF! from PSFK

Robert and Gary Get Hassled

There are many ways to recount Robert's story. I chose to frame it within an organizational context because, well, that's what I do. It also has enormous social and political implications but we'll leave those for another time.

iTunes version

Hermes and Apollo On The Job

Years ago, after reading this wonderful little book by Charles Handy, I began helping corporate clients to understand their organizational cultures in archetypal terms.

Students of myth know that there are no greater contrasts than those between Hermes and Apollo. Looking through some quotations this morning, I came up on this brief poem by W.H. Auden that captures something of the spirit of those contrasts.

The sons of Hermes love to play,
And only do their best when they
Are told they oughtn't;
Apollo's children never shrink
From boring jobs but have to think
Their work important.
- W. H. Auden, "Under Which Lyre"

Excited, Talented People: Still The Key To Greatness

No matter what great technology your business may have, no matter the power of its brand, no matter the height of its barriers to entry, no matter the size of its balance sheet, the key to great companies continues to be the energy and performance that can emerge from a great group of excited, talented people focused on a common mission they believe in. I've seen that again this week here in Denver and it's a joy to behold.

Now, if only these guys could follow suit on Sunday, my week would be complete! Go Jints!

Neither Either Nor Or

Kevin Kelly is one of my intellectual heroes. His thinking is so clear and far-reaching that I always learn something from him.

In this post, Kevin uses controversy concerning the taxonomy of life by biologists to shed light on questions of technology. He writes:

I venture further to suggest the same thing will happen in our classification of technology. At the moment, a phone is a phone is a phone. But already we see phones and cameras melding in the future. We see computers and TVs converging. We see computers and film falling into each other. We see cars becoming entertainment theaters, and shoes becoming health monitors. As technological devices and services become more complex, their boundaries of identity will blur and overlap.

Eventually, the distinction between living species and technological species will also be primarily one of convenience and habit, as genetically engineered organisms accomplish what machines used to do, and machines do what biological organisms used to do.  We'll end up identifying a device as a probability index. It is mostly phone we say, with a little bit of photosynthesis bacteria. Or this notebook is kinda of alive. It is para-living, in that 50% neighborhood of life. 

The splitters will be the last to acknowledge artificial life, or AI. While the lumpers think that both are already here, but lumped into a group we don't yet have a name for.

The problem? The either/or mindset. I've written about either/or thinking here before. The need for clarity and simplicity drives our desire to achieve "The Answer."  Efficiency rules; effectiveness be damned. Bathing babies, prepare to be tossed. Parsimonium uber alles!

Particularly in times of crisis (no, this is not a regurgitation of the faulty "crisis = danger + opportunity" meme) the seduction of parsimonious choices is practically irresistible.

Resist it.

One way to do so is to read Roger Martin's recently published book, The Opposable Mind, which illustrates ways that successful business leaders transcend this lose/lose mindset through what he calls "integrative thinking." Simply put, Martin found that leaders like Procter and Gamble's A.G. Lafley and Red Hat Software founder Bob Young consider more problem features to be salient, resist the temptation to ascribe simplistic causality to systemic effects, approach decisions holistically, and creatively resolve tension among opposing ideas. And, they use this mindset relentlessly, because, as Lafley put it when asked about a P&G plan that achieved both cost cutting and innovation:

We weren't going to win if it were an 'or.' Everybody  can do 'or.'

Another way? Give us a call...we can help.

GenoJunk

Seth Godin  writes this sharp, incisive post about the ways in which residual aspects of cultures haunt many modern organizations. Seth's talking about the mindsets and practices that make organizations what they are; the reason it feels so different in one company than it does in another.

Seth calls these cultural constituents, "vestiges."

Sometimes, like the little feet on the back of a whale, it's easy to ignore the vestiges. Other times, it's entirely possibly that they prevent you from achieving your goals.

Here's an excellent example:

[The] production values of an HD TV show are lost in the YouTube environment, yet plenty of studios and advertisers are having trouble giving up the staffing and hierarchy that served them so well in the other medium. So the vestiges remain, slowing down the entire process (and making it a lot more expensive.) 25 people to film a three minute clip is just silly, but it makes sense if you look back at how they got there.

Implication?

If you're working hard to work around a vestige, maybe it makes sense to work just as hard to get rid of it all together.

Ah, but shedding these deeply ingrained features -- no matter how maladaptive --  is about as difficult as anything you could ask from an organization. It's the rare group that succeeds in re-making itself on this level.

And, remember, somewhere in that gene pool there are influential people (meme agents) who believe that those little legs just might come in handy some day.

Update: And here we have John Batelle giving good advice to striking writers thinking about starting their own company: shed the vestigial thinking.

Do it smart, lean and right on the web. In short, don't do it in a packaged goods way. Do it conversational.