reboot11 – recapping days 0 and 1

Ah, I promised some learnings, did I? First one: it turned out a good idea to arrive early, that is on Wednesday afternoon, the day before reboot. When I got to Kedelhallen some people were already there and while I was too late for getting into Wemind’s event there I happened to meet Kim Bach, with whom I had a very cool conversation around everything in between anarchy, bread baking and zoos and then a nice walk to the pre-reboot boat trip.

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I guess there have been some photos taken at this boat-trip, which was nice and a good start to an evening at the Copenhagen beaches  …

OK, now onto some of the talks on day one, I arrived early too:

Matt Webb started the talks, demanding more cultural invention – if only as a way to do more interesting things. Agree, we should stop “solving problems” and start “inventing culturally”, if this means going for the deep thinking. Needless to say that it all related to “design thinking” – and yes, “design has to invent, to create new ways of doing things, and to contribute to culture”.

David Weinberger, here I can say it with Peter’s words: “David Weinberger, who I always love to see talk, spoke about the web being a morally charged tool, and about optimism”. Yay, nice video, found via Peter:

Missed the talk by Matthias Müller-Prove, but went into Martin Jul’s session on what we can learn from Japan when they rebuilt after World War 2 – as they called on Deming for ideas, the session evolved into a collection of management principles (“Reboot your management“), some of whom are equally fitting our world of Enterprise 2.0.

It concerned Deming’s 14 principles for management, the humanistic, long-term thinking, keep learning, use the scientific method, and build from quality philosophy, that helped shape companies such as Toyota and Honda..

Researching the background of his work, it was interesting to see how the World-War 2 Training Within Industry principles played a big role in shaping his ideas and how its focus on operating from a basis of scarcity – such as saving material, time and labour to win the war faster, plays so well in an entrepreneurial setting and in cutting through the big-company trap of just throwing more money at problems.

Back from reboot, now onto blogging (again)

I am back from reboot 11, after basically two action-packed days on Thursday and Friday, and more socializing on the following weekend. Turned out to be a good idea to prolong the Copenhagen stay, not only was the weather very fine but got to meet some cool people too. And it sure helps the post-event wind down – happening when you have to retreat from the special reboot athmosphere into something more regular.

So I want to collect some takeaways based on me attending selected sessions (I was at nearly all of the keynotes) – yes, you only get a limited view of what was happening, but with sometimes five or six talks in parallel, and more longer-lasting side-projects running all of reboot time this is just the way it is. And of course it only is a part of my braindump mindmap …

My highlights included talks by (in no specific order) Matt Webb (check out his presentation), Lee Bryant and Bruce Sterling. That said, Bruce Sterling’s closing note was grappling, but some were supposing he’s making fun. I will leave that to your judgement, check out the video with him explaing his talk in short words:

Overall I learned a lot, not alone in the sessions but also in the many informal conversations happening around the conference. And while I am not feeling that much rebooted it inspired me to tackle some things anew, to refurbish some stalled mental investments and encouraged me to think about changing and tuning some of my approaches by giving me hints and inspiration (like “What does it mean to be an expert in social media?”, “How do I want to proceed with partnering, i.e. consulting in teams?” and more). Moreover, I decided to put more energy in my blogging once more, that is stepping up the frequency, together with being more flexible as to the ways it’s employed.

This was influenced in a way by Stowe‘s talk at reboot, which reminded me how lucky we are when we’ve got our own, self-designed venues to publish to the web. And while Twitter is cool (I think it’s way cooler than Facebook for that part), Friendfeed is great at managing (work)-lifestreams and other tools have their merits as well, blogging, that is putting up stuff with a permalink and means to comment, is still the difference between living a life of self-direction or dwelling in digital favelas. And I can still push all of what I want into the other feeds …

Why is Google Wave a tsunami?

wavelogoWhy is Google Wave important? Well, the toys of today are the tools of tomorrow, a compelling keynote for a developer conference is cool and all, but there’s more on the upside:

  • Google Wave is poised to reshape (rewires I say) the nature of communication (yes, more face-to-face real-timelineness communication), improving the web experience. We probably need to experience and use it a while to understand its potentials completely …

– A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
– A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
– A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

And as we’re moving onto more real-timeness and collaboration already (think Friendfeed lifestreams, real social bookmarking and annotation, social news and more), this is much more than another Google service:

  • Yes, it’s a promising product, framework and protocol.
  • Yes, it’s got an API which is devised to allow “developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves”.  With HMTL 5 and a supportive browser we get an app that is part wiki, part chat, part forum, part collaborative office and document (nah, content) sharing tool and part email. We get multi-user real time editing – be it in uploaded photos, videos or other stuff (alas, you can’t edit the photo or the video but you can collaboratively tag the uploaded files). It’s possible to play-back the history of the document to see how it evolved (think wiki page history on a ton of steroids).
  • Yes, the platform will be open-sourced, it will be able to run on any server, so it won’t belong to Google. It’s a standard thing so whoever is hosting waves can build no walled garden (you listen Facebook, do you?) but must ensure interoperability (yes, like with plain old mail). One step closer to living in the cloud of distributed apps and data. And it’s playing along the lines of integration and adaptivity … so I can’t wait to put this on my own servers

At last, one more thing, something that explains why Google is such a remarkable company – it’s the story behind Wave. Starting from the question “Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?” they have achieved a lot. And Google’s introductory blog post has the innovation story, ie. why it must have been Google to say yes to this idea and on the early days of Wave (more on Google innovation culture, ie. a company whose unique culture shows through in small ways):

When Lars Rasmussen first floated the idea, Google co-founder Sergey Brin wasn’t impressed. “He came to me and he said ‘This may sound kinda crazy, but we’re going to reinvent communication and we just need a bunch of engineers to go of to Australia for a while and we’ll get back to you after a couple of years,'” Brin remembers. “It was not a very compelling proposal.”

More wave information at the usual places, like Techcrunch, Tim O’Reilly (Open Source, Open Protocol, and Federated Wave Clouds), Forrester, Mashable

And yes, you can sign up for Google Wave updates

Webcast on Virtual Collaboration

Via Twitter I found this Webcast, sponsored by Cisco. It’s a +twenty-minute conversation with Jessica Lipnack (who also shared her experience in doing the webcast – “How BusinessWeek makes sausage, I mean, webcasts“, sic!) and Karen Sobel Lojeski, author of “Uniting the Virtual Workforce: Transforming Leadership and Innovation in the Globally Integrated Enterprise”:

This is an interesting discussion, that somehow bridges across time – connecting the old-timer “virtual collaboration” with the young guns of 2.0-enabled collaboration. No real conflict in there, like with Knowledge Management many good ideas were formulated back then, that are gaining visibility and traction now thanks to a wider diffusion of tools and connectivity (and a changed understanding and dare I say, acceptance of underlying principles and methods, too).

So, when the both of them are putting the fire on outdated management models I applaud them, even when I don’t agree with everything they hold (oh, this overdrawn focus on face-to-face, a few seconds before they’re saying that we’re having a romantic notion of face-to-face working). But this is normal, given that we’re talking about a really complex subject here, technologies (shared teamrooms, videoconferences, whatever …) are rather easy to figure out in comparison.

Symbiotic relationship between Web 2.0 and the Enterprise

Nice presentation by Shiv Singh of AA | Razorfish on the blurring between the (at first sight disparate) worlds of social networks in the enterprise and Enterprise 2.0. There are at least 5 reasons why it is a symbiotic relationship:

1. Facebook enters the Enterprise
2. Principles of Trust everywhere
3. Big Ideas & Little Ideas matter
4. Social Graphs serve as a bridge
5. Organizations have changed

Well, exactly my point about the importance of informal organization, when the collaboration infrastructure that’s available (determines ?) supports and complements “levels of feasible autonomy”, an autonomy that’s needed to fully leverage the capabilities of knowledge workers (and their creativity, their potentials to explore weak ties in their social graphs, their chances to float little ideas with potential, and more). So, while we shouldn’t neglect the nice things we can do with Enterprise mashups, SaaS, “the cloud” and all, this is technology at the heart. Yes, there are more areas where Web 2.0 in the Enterprise may help in reaching growth and resilience and Dion is giving a concise rundown. But many interesting things are related to the social fabric of the Enterprise 2.0, and Shiv Singh is reminding us about that.

ps. Shiv’s implementation lifehack (“People don’t start collaborating on the first day. You first need to provide context & content and champion entrepreneurship before fuelling participation.”) has me agreeing only halfway. Sorry, but to me entrepreneurship as characteristic of organizational culture is more of a journey than a starting point, nothing bad about this – you may very well change your organizational culture with 2.0 as driver of change. Not all pieces of an organizational culture need to be in place for good results.

How the web challenges managers

Continuing the topic from the last posts on distributed leadership and what’s gotta change, I am now adding Hal Varian to the mix. He got interviewed by the McKinsey Quarterly last year, but the video just got published. Asked on how the Web challenges managers he says that executives in wired organizations need a sharper understanding of how technology empowers innovation. So watch the six-part video – he’s talking about flexible innovation, corporations and work, free goods and value, workers and managers and on reshaping industries (image leads to the McKinsey site, video is not embeddable, somewhat awkward policy):

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Two highlighted notes on his underlying theme of knowledge work and the relation to distributed leadership and the role of the CEO – first one about corporations and work:

[…] the kinds of innovations I think will arise on top of that will be innovations in how work is done.  […]

If you look at the beginning of the 20th century, we saw the rise of mass production. Henry Ford and the entire team were down on the factory floor raising this, lowering that, speeding up the assembly line, changing the way things were built, and were able to extract far more efficiencies than were available before. I think the same thing is happening now with digital technology. When we’re all networked, we all have access to the same documents, to the same capabilities, to this common infrastructure, and we can improve the way work—intellectual work, knowledge work—flows through the organization. And again, in my opinion, that will lead to a substantial advantage in terms of productivity.

Second one, again about the changed information infrastructure enabling and demanding both close-to the action decision-making and CEOs with a feeling and insight into data:

[…] You also want to be able to visualize the data, communicate the data, and utilize it effectively. But I do think those skills—of being able to access, understand, and communicate the insights you get from data analysis—are going to be extremely important. Managers need to be able to access and understand the data themselves.

You always have this problem of being surrounded by “yes men” and people who want to predigest everything for you. In the old organization, you had to have this whole army of people digesting information to be able to feed it to the decision maker at the top. But that’s not the way it works anymore: the information can be available across the ranks, to everyone in the organization. And what you need to ensure is that people have access to the data they need to make their day-to-day decisions. And this can be done much more easily than it could be done in the past. And it really empowers the knowledge workers to work more effectively.

Funny, the tricky word collaboration never gets mentioned, but we know it structures those fluffy “flows of information and knowledge”.