Bruce MacVarish Notes

Google Unlocks Voice Data

Google announced that starting today, you can download a copy of all your Google Voice and other communications data.  

This is a huge move by Google that unlocks new value for end users, for application vendors and advertisers by enabling new ways to benefit from our communications and conversation data.

The value of voice communications is no longer found in the connecting of conversations but rather in the data, analytics and relevance derived from the conversation content.

 

 

 

Creative Leaders

A Knowledge @ Wharton study on why creative people can lose out on leadership positions found that creativity is the single most important quality for success today.  

Yet, the study found that when it came to hiring and promoting practices, today's businesses consistently marked down the creative managers and bypassed them, selecting less creative types.

We are in the midst of transition from an industrial economy to a networked information economy.   As a result,  the sources of value creation and growth are also shifting from natural resources and industrial capital to information resources and creative networked capital.   I'm not the first to highlight this, but here are a few earlier posts on the topic if you're interested:

extracting new value from data,

the value of data 

strategy in the Edge Economy

the creative value of Data + Design

I believe this is a big deal as new companies are formed and incumbents look to redefine themselves in new growth markets.

Creative Leaders understand how value creation is shifting away from our industrial legacy resources toward business models and architectures optimizing resources found in networked information.  For more context, here's an excerpt from a recent Forbes article on "Why Steve Jobs Couldn't Find a Job Today"

"The argument goes that America was blessed with lots of fertile land and abundant water, giving the country a big advantage in the agrarian economy from the 1600s into the 1900s.  

During the Industrial economy of the 1900s America was again blessed with enormous natural resources (iron ore, minerals, gold, silver, oil, gas and water) as well as navigable rivers, the great lakes and natural low-cost transport routes.  A rapidly growing and hard working set of laborers, aided by immigration, provided more fuel for America’s growth as an industrial powerhouse.

But now we’re in the information economy.

Those natural resources aren’t the big advantage they once were. Foodstuffs require almost no people for production.  And manufacturing is shifting to offshore locations where cheap labor and limited regulations allow for cheaper production.  And it’s not clear America would benefit even if it tried maintaining these lower-skilled jobs.  

Today, value goes to those who know how to create, store, manipulate and use information.  And success in this economy has a lot more to do with innovation, and the creation of entirely new products, industries and very different kinds of jobs.

Unfortunately, however, we keep hiring for the last economy.  While we “get” the need for innovation, we don’t seem to understand much about how to “do it.”

Are you a Creative Leader?   Do you understand the new rules of value creation in the networked information economy?  

If you are hiring a leader, are you hiring an industrial-age leader or a networked information-age leader?  

Research would say your company's success or failure will depend on your answer.

Not all Graphs are the same

Chris Dixon, CEO of Hunch, recently presented at a GoogleTechTalk at the Google New York office.

Chris talked about the value of Graphs ... as in social, communications, intention, taste graphs ... the evolution toward Graph Wars ... and strategic choices important to developing graphs.

 

I was particularly interested in his question:

"How are Communication Graphs related to Social or Taste Graphs?"  

While there may be some overlap in "nodes" that appear across all 3 graphs, there are many "nodes" that are distinct.  As a result, we should expect to see the use of each graph as the source for distinctly different services for users.

Because not all Graphs are the same, the value of network analysis and new graph based services will continue to grow.

Dare to Share in the Enterprise

From the Socialcast Blog:

 

Games @ Work

I wanted to refresh my thinking on the Guiding Principles of Game Design @ Work from my earlier post. 

 

The Guiding Principles for Games @ Work were focused on making it easy for collaboration leaders and business users to:

1. Define clear boundaries, shared problem(s) and a community of collaborative business users

 

2. Assign satisfying tasks or roles that enable business users to excel and be part of something "Bigger"

 

3. Build nonmonetary incentives into a game economy to strongly motivate individuals to accomplish group aims.

 

4. Deliver hyper- transparency of information about users' skills and teams’ real-time performance 

 

5. Create a virtual economic marketplace for information and collaboration

 

6. Open multiple real-time sources of information and communication upon which to make decisions

 

7. Structure as a project-oriented organization that can easily be disbanded and reformed based on tasks and skills

 

8. Recognize individual, group and company achievements in a clear, specific way

 

9. Open visibility into all skills / project / social networks of communication across an organization

 

10. Adapt multiple, purpose-specific communications mediums to improve speed and efficiency of collaboration. 

 

With a little vision, strategy and design, it is not hard to see how game design principles will be shaping the future of communication and collaboration applications.

 

Trust Deficits in Social Networks

"Social networks have something of a trust deficit, which will either limit or make “more expensive” its ability to offer new services.  The product teams at social networks have proven their ability to offer compelling services in exchange for personal information, but our research shows that people place a relatively low value on their social information. 

For social networks to offer products in exchange for higher value information such as health records, physical location, or email/IM history, they will need to offer even more compelling products, services and outcomes to consumers."

Timothy Morey,

Frog Design,

Who do we trust with our personal data

Evolution of the Enterprise Applications Industry

John Mancini, the President of AIIM International, provides his perspective on the evolution of enterprise IT in one slide:

Personally, I like the way John describes the shift from managing "a web page" to managing "a conversation" as we see systems of engagement emerge in the enterprise... but...

While the balance of the slide is specific to Enterprise IT and the companies that define the era include traditional enterprise players like IBM, Digital and Microsoft, it isn't clear to me that Google and Facebook have had the same level of ENTERPRISE impact (yet?).

If you dig a little at this line of thinking, you clearly see that each era was/is defined by a number of different sources of value and competitive advantage.  

With a hat-tip to insights gained from the work of Geoffrey Moore, Umair Haque, John Hagel, Valdis Krebs and others, I like to describe the transition we're seeing in the enterprise applications industry this way:

 

Combining the two models, we have a hint at the opportunity for enterprise application vendors moving forward.   Helping users manage conversations, relationships and transactions with and across the enterprise is a significant source of new value and growth.

A couple of questions to consider as the enterprise application industry evolves to a "network of information nodes":

1. Will Google or Facebook be "the best known" enterprise vendor as outlined by John in the Social and Cloud era?

2. What comes after the Social and Cloud era?

A Big Audacious Vision

Having a compelling Vision for a lean startup, the creation of a new enterprise product or pursuing a new growth opportunity is vital to success. 

All need an audacious Vision that gets tested, refined and synched throughout the Customer Development and Product Fit processes.

Sean Ellis, who has advised a number of successful startups, highlights the importance of an audacious vision as he leads his new startup - FREEjit

"In the age of the lean startup, we often forget about the importance of vision.  

A big audacious vision is critical for attracting venture capital and for getting the early team to “take the leap.”  It also stimulates the emotion/passion needed to fuel your team’s persistence to blast through inevitable hurdles.

Achieving your vision requires first getting traction.   The most realistic way to get traction is to break down your vision to something very relevant now for the sweet spot of your target market.  

This MVP (minimum viable product) is a bridge between concrete customer needs today and your big audacious vision."

The "Future State" of Work - Changes & Skills for next 10 years

GigaOm has an upcoming conference Net:Work that will explore the challenges and opportunities presented by a new culture of work and key tools and technologies for collaboration.

They put forward a report from Gartner that outlines 10 changes over the next 10 years that will impact how we work and collaborate in the future.

It is interesting to consider how Gartner's report compares to a similar report from The IFTF on key workplace skills for the future.

Gartner's view of how work changes includes:

1. “De-routinization” of work.

“Non-routine” activities that cannot be automated, such as innovation, leadership and sales, will dominate employment: By 2015, 40 percent or more of an organization’s work will be “non-routine,” up from 25 percent in 2010.

 

2. Work swarms.

Rather than traditional teams of people familiar with each other, ad-hoc groups or “work swarms,” with no previous experience of working with each other, will become a commonplace team structure. Gartner’s “work swarms” concept sounds similar to the Noded philosophy, which describes how groups of individuals, often but not necessarily geographically distant, come together to form temporary or recurring project teams.

 

3. Weak links.

Weak links are the cues people can pick up from people who know the people they have to work with. Exploiting our own networks will help us to develop the ties that are required for participating in wider “work swarm” opportunities.

 

4. Working with the collective.

Being able to influence the complex ecosystem of suppliers, partners, clients and customers will increasingly become a core competence.

 

5. Work sketch-ups.

Informality will define most “non-routine” work activities; the process models for these activities will be simple “sketch-ups,” created on the fly.

 

6. Spontaneous work.

Seeking new opportunities and creating projects around them is likely to be an opportunistic, rather than strategic, activity.

 

7. Simulation and experimentation.

The culture of Google’s “perpetual beta” is likely to spread to other industries, with rapid prototyping taking place in very public environments.

 

8. Pattern sensitivity.

Extrapolating from history and experience will become less reliable; the ability to detect and parse patterns and trends in society will provide better insights.

 

9. Hyperconnected.

With formal and informal work diffused across organizational boundaries,  the support mechanisms for workers (healthcare, HR, IT) will need to evolve to support fuzzier, ad-hoc relationships between people and departments.

 

10. My place.

The boundaries between home and work life are already blurred. Balancing almost 24/7 availability against burning out will become a critical skill.

Designing for Displayers (not Consumers)

Luke Wroblewski points to Geoffrey Miller's presentation at the Warm Gun Design Conference and his opening keynote "Evolution & The Central 6 Traits that Make Consumers Tick" on how evolutionary psychology explains why people put their possessions on display for others.

While Luke and Geoffrey focus on consumers, it is interesting to think about how this approach to design might influence product design for business users.  

Clearly, "business displayers" exist within the enterprise.  As the consumerization of IT continues to evolve, treating business users as "business displayers" may dramatically change the approach and design of business products.   

Here's a video of Professor Miller's presentation:

 

In addition, Luke does a nice job summarizing Miller's points.  I highlight a few below: 

Display not Consumption

People don’t buy products just to consume them. They buy them to display them.

Consumption (as in consumer) is a misleading term. While it’s true most animals spend all their time foraging for things to consume, display reaches much more deeply. Display is a highly natural instinct it pervades the animal world in mating, territory marking, and more.

What People Display

What do consumers want to display about themselves?

Central six mental traits: we are driven unconsciously to display these traits to anyone who will listen:

1.  
   1. intelligence,
   2. openness, 
   3. conscientiousness, 
   4. agreeableness, 
   5. stability, 
   6. extraversion. 

The last five are “the big 5” personality traits.

All 6 of these traits are fundamental and ancient across all species; they are genetically heritable; stable across life & cultures; attractive to mates, friends, kin; and can be judged and measured accurately.

If you are unhappy with someone it is usually because they fall short on some of these traits. We have evolved thousands of words to describe these traits.

Intelligence: verbal, spatial, social, emotional. All of these are correlated.

Openness: novelty, fantasy, aesthetics, liberalism, globalism. Most product creators are more open then their audience. Any advertisement that feature openness will appeal to some and alienate others. Openness drives rapid acceleration of new brands.

Conscientiousness: discipline, planning, ambition, order. The ability to plan ahead.

Agreeableness: kindness, honesty, modesty, tenderness.

Extraversion: last surviving trait from Myer Briggs. Shy vs. outgoing. Get positive feedback from act of talking. Plays out in consumer world through analytics, word of mouth, etc.

Everyone in business will overestimate openness, conscientiousness, etc. as they tend to over index on these traits.