Showing up for those you care about.

I’ve been thinking a lot about personal relationships.

Moving to a new country means inevitably slackening physical ties with close friends, and despite Skype, the experience presents lots of opportunities to have some in-depth conversations with yourself.

How important are relationships – even to introverts like myself, who relish time alone?

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out they are pretty bloody important.

That being said, being caught up in the blossom of new city, old comforts gone, I’m a keen observer and sponge of all the energy and behavior around me, and also acutely aware of my own.

And you know what’s weird? I’ve only really started to see how a certain genre of relationships – facilitated by technology – is affecting our happiness.

Sure, there are plenty of positive connections and stories of relationships not previously possible before da INTERNET, you can find evidence of these “real life” online>offline relationships under every rock of our culture, from internet dating sites to the truly incredible Facebook stories site (launched just this week).

The sort of relationship phenomena I’m referring to however is “the cop out” mate. The ability to flake out via text or a Facebook message, mere hours before a party started or a coffee date with your friend. It’s the sort of behavior fueled by ubiquitous access to real-time communication and a lack of physical (or even verbal) connection. A whole new kind of relationship standard is being born around these two factors. Just tonight on the train home I heard a couple arguing over the indeceny of a friend to only respond to a golf invite the day before, when they had emailed during the week. Old mate rituals are not as reliable as they once were.

More and more, this is the norm. We can drop out at a moment’s notice and avoid the awkward “I can’t make it” conversation with a SMS.

What does this mean? This enables us to do exactly what we prefer to do exactly when we want. So you get home, tired from work and over talking to people? You don’t need to head out to your friend’s Facebook event you RSVP’d to this week … really you just want to hang out at home, and with minimal effort or conscience you can back out of a commitment and you can satisfy your present needs. What I think is most confronting, both as a behavior I observe in myself and others, is this goes beyond ditching loose connections, which seem easy to revive at a post/tweet/SMS notice, and crosses into the full spectrum of relationships.

How does not turning up affect you? You’ll probably never know exactly, but chances are bailing out of these little, seemingly inconsequential moments might not work out in your favor.  We are starting to sacrifice developing and building on personal relationships for the long haul with alarming ease. Aren’t we all such suckers for instant gratification?

Remember when you had to get driven around to your friend’s place for a play date? I’m guessing all that playing the sandpit/doing each other’s hair/baking cookies/watching movies with your mate added up to something special. Even if your mum had dragged you kicking and screaming to your friend’s house, at the end of it all, hanging out with your friend just made you feel good, didn’t it?

Tonight my Dad sent me this great story, which was definitely not going to fit into a tweet, but I felt it was worth pasting up in a post to share, and to remember myself.

“I just finished taking an evening class at Stanford. The last lecture was on the mind-body connection – the relationship between stress and disease. The speaker (head of psychiatry at Stanford) said, among other things, that one of the best things that a man could do for his health is to be married to a woman, whereas for a woman, one of the best things she could do for her health was to nurture her relationships with her girlfriends.At first everyone laughed, but he was serious.

Women connect with each other differently and provide support systems that help each other to deal with stress and difficult life experiences. Physically this quality “girlfriend time” helps us to create more serotonin – a neurotransmitter that helps combat depression and can create a general feeling of well being. Women share feelings whereas men often form relationships around activities. They rarely sit down with a buddy and talk about how they feel about certain things or how their personal lives are going. Jobs? Yes. Sports? Yes. Cars? Yes. Fishing, hunting, golf? Yes. But their feelings? Rarely.

Women do it all of the time. We share from our souls with our sisters/mothers, and evidently that is very good for our health. He said that spending time with a friend is just as important to our general health as jogging or working  out at a gym.

There’s a tendency to think that when we are “exercising” we are doing something good for our bodies, but when we are hanging out with friends, we are wasting our time and should be more productively engaged—not true. In fact, that failure to create and maintain quality personal relationships with other humans is as dangerous to our physical health as smoking.”

Cut off those which dance around the periphery if you aren’t digging them, but make sure you show up to the genuine connections, old and new. Those special connections, which get lost in the ocean of instant messages and instant networks, they are rare and worth paying attention to.

photo credit: Sharon Pruitt

Telling your own story.

Are you someone that wears many hats? How do you explain that to others?

James Aviaz wrote a post last week about Australians’ struggle in New York to define themselves.

Being able to articulate your skills and the value you bring is critical to getting what you want.

In many ways all of us are Jack-Of-All-Trades. Our own unique recipe of environment, personality and life experience means in reality we have, and continue to, wear a lot of hats, both professionally and personally. ‘Experts’ know how to package it all up to make every moment (and trade) seem entirely relevant. Which it is.

James’ right though, many of us don’t feel comfortable bragging about our ‘specialness,’ let alone recognize it.

Learning to weave together seemingly distinct parts of your experience is important for two reasons:

Firstly, for you.

Making sense of all of your experience, weaving together common threads, is a great exercise in self-awareness. How did you get to where you are today? You may see your life like a Choose Your Own Adventure, but there are guaranteed to be some epic footnotes.

Then, for others.

When you create a story it means other people will be able to start telling it on your behalf.  We often talk about building advocacy in relations to brands and organizations, but what about building advocacy, or at least a picture of sense, around you?

In a interview with NY Brand Lab Radio, HBR contributor Dorey Clark talked about the need to help people make sense of your experience.

‘People tell themselves stories of other people, explanatory advice enables people to put us in boxes. We need to recognise that and we need to run with it…Develop an outside perspective. You are probably sitting on huge chunks of expertise you think is disparate, but it’s not.‘

How does what you are doing now – because you were first a pizza-maker then a banker  - make you far better today than other people doing the same thing? Is the story compelling enough to be repeated by someone that isn’t you?

If people don’t know what you are doing or how to tell your story then you are vulnerable to others deciding for you. That pigeon-hole Aviaz describes, will be of their choosing, not yours.

Don’t wait. Instead of spending the next 9,000 hours practicing violin till you become an expert in the symphony orchestra, sharpen your pencil and take stock of what is looking back at you in the mirror up to this point.

Buster Benson posted a challenge today to ‘make a list of things (big, small, obvious and crazy) that I believe in, as of today‘; it’s one way to start this process of connecting all your dots.

On a deeper personal level, developing your own narrative will help you shape your life.

One of my favorite posts from last week was ‘The Story of Your Life as a Work of Art‘, a guest post by R.E.F Riskin on Venessa Miemis blog:

‘Have a narrative for every discipline you care about, every person that you care about, every part of your body, every part of yourself, every idea you bring into this world, imagine the world as it would be without your presence, then imagine if you had infinite love and finite time.’

Being here in the city of big dreams I can see now, more than ever, how defining yourself through your merits shouldn’t be viewed as egotistical or game-playing but as a necessary way of setting the scene so both parties can work together as best as possible.

Help yourself by learning how to tell your own story well.

Beyond connectivity: a new digital divide.

My brother and I were sitting in a cafe on the weekend cooking up all sorts of ideas about what comes next in our digital world. Around us was the usual: kids on iPhones instagramming their way to a cooler social capital, toddlers playing on iPads and grandmas writing restaurant reviews like

this.

Five years ago, maybe even two, you wouldn’t have considered all the generations would be so connected, and social. Today this atmosphere is the norm on a lazy Sunday in a western, first-world nation. Lots of us are online and connected, frequently outside our homes. And it’s not just the tech-elite or upper crust that are connected. The rest of the world is catching up.

As we peer into the future, it is not about who is connected that separates us, but how they are connected.

In his talk at the National Press Foundation dinner last month, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt presented this new kind of digital divide, wrapped up into three distinct groups: ultra-connected people, the connected contributors and the next five billion.

Ultra-connected people are the tech elite, for them technology will disappear and become a part of everyday life, just like electricity. Imagine a seamless connectivity where computer cables are as old school as having a home telephone.

Connected contributors are the middle-class digital natives who inhabit the mainstream spaces of the web. They have learnt how to subvert government restrictions and highlight actions that otherwise would have remained hidden, crowd-based platforms/models like ushahidi, Kickstarter and The Awesome Foundation are their online watering holes.

The Next 5 Billion are skipping copper wires and heading straight to smartphones as they become more affordable. According to Schmidt, the inflection point for this group is when smartphones drop to $70…and when the price gets down to $20, smartphones will be in “literally every pocket.”

Yet despite connectivity spreading its way to the remote corners of the world, is the gap between top and bottom actually closing?

“A lot of people think technology will bring the world closer together, but because of the speed at which technology is developed and its cost when first released, those at the top of the food chain will get farther and farther ahead.”

Getting everyone connected is no longer the end point – was it ever? – instead, it opens us up to a variety of more complex, interconnected problems.

When you and I are able to join and participate in more advanced ways than others, what role or responsibility is ours in determining the direction of this network of machines and minds? Are those at the top contributing or influencing ‘the collective intelligence and the global conscience’ more than others?

Well, it was a lot to think about for a Sunday.

Especially with all the interruptions on our phones

Which begs the question, are the ultra-connected set paying attention?

You only need to look around this cafe and consider the local population’s obsession with Angry Birds or Facebook notifications to see that deep thinking and consideration is frequently taking a back seat at the top of Shmidt’s connected tree.

But I do love his utopian description of developers as the engineers of human freedom.

Armed with unlimited processing power, vast amounts of information, and widespread manufacturing capabilities, being ultra-connected gives us pretty much any solution we desire.

The added layers of complexity that connectivity brings are easily escapable by short-term distraction, and for those that recognise it, are a unique opportunity to help shape what comes next in our digital world.

Managing an ESN? Never miss a good chance to shut up.

Phoebe Venkat wrote a great post earlier this month ‘Top Six Tips for Launching an Enterprise Social Network‘.

She spoke about the Community Manager’s itchy finger, the tendency to want to jump in and solve everything.

My fingers were itching to type a response and let this person know how wrong he was. I wanted to show him some great examples to try to change his mind. Just as I was about to fire off a manifesto, I paused and told myself, “let the community respond…don’t speak for everyone.”

She raises a good point and typically one of the most challenging for Community Managers.

Never miss a good chance to shut up.

If your previous experience is in corporate communications or HR keeping quiet can initially feel unnatural. There is a tendency to lean back into more established and formal controlled message delivery. Managing an Enterprise Social Network (ESN) departs from old-school structures of cascading information as communication is flattened. Effectively, everyone has a microphone.

As a community manager you shouldn’t be starting all the conversations. You shouldn’t be at the top of the ‘Top Posters’ list. You shouldn’t be the first responder to every conversation and smacking down every troll.

Community managers today are focused on facilitating people and making sure the community is a lively place to be.

As Phoebe highlights, this means setting the table so that others can join.

Here are three more tips for Community Managers I’d add to Phoebe’s list:

1. Don’t post all the time.

Let the community wander and go off topic by themselves. Sometimes they don’t need to hear from you, but they need to grow by themselves. Posts may not be on-point 100% of the time but you need to give people a voice without feeling like they are on Big Brother. Real conversation needs time to simmer without intervention. Resist the urge to start a new post just to ‘spark conversation’. You don’t want to become that guy; the one that seems to be posting for the sake of posting. Keep in mind relevance and resonance, as participation in social networks relies on voluntary adoption. Slow down with the posting and let other people do the talking.

The challenge for community managers is to not be the number one poster in your network.

2. Stop being the human google.

Community Managers feel personally responsible for every unanswered thread.

You are not the human google and you are not expected to be! Your value as a community manager is as the most connected person in the organisation. Instead of spending your time searching for answers to other people’s questions, introduce them to someone who you think will have the right answer. It doesn’t have to be a long thread of introduction, just ‘@ mentioning’ the person’s name which alerts the right person to the thread.

A good community manager is more involved ‘behind the scenes’ – they’ll alert members to relevant discussions and encourage them to get involved instead of trying to answer everything by themselves.

3. Do dive into the behind-the-scenes stuff.

Shutting up and listening unearths gold. Listen to not just key messages from executives, or discussions on the company strategy, but what people are talking about in general. This will give you some idea about the culture. It will help you identify outliers, build benchmarks and incentives, and see what the company are really interested in.

What posts are getting the most comments? What are getting the most likes? Look for your hotspots.

At Yammer we have a feature called Leaderboards which give you access to this sort of activity really easily.

Too often a community manager’s ears are focused on what people are saying about ‘me’ or the company’s key messages and product. If you zoom out a little you’ll start to spot macro trends.

Do not be deaf to the real conversations going on.

Your role as a community manager is as much about guiding conversation as it is to connecting people to relevant discussions taking place, and listening to what is really being said.

Your windscreen is bigger than your rear view mirror.

It’s interesting to take a step and regard where you have been paying most attention this week… future, past, or present?

I have been paying a lot more attention to the future for a while now, and I don’t think it’s the coolest habit for your life. Whether it has got to do with living out of a hotel room, upcoming events to organise next week or the impending move to another country, I’ve been forced into a mode of constantly considering ‘what’s coming next?’

I think in daily life this is probably a shitty, exhausting habit. I am forgetting to smell the roses.

But as it turns out, many leaders actually think this is a pretty neat way to work.

Jeff Smith, CEO of Suncorp surmised his looking forward/looking back outlook in this way;

“Your windscreen is bigger than your rear view mirror.”

During his keynote at Evanta CIO Summit earlier this week Jeff told the story of cultivating a forward-looking culture. He is constantly asking ‘what’s next?’ and encouraging his staff to ask that of him, their superiors and colleagues.

‘Your culture is how work gets done.’ 

Looking forward improves innovation cycles and gets things happening, faster. Suncorp are able to break new ground and set higher bars because they don’t rely on what has been achieved in the past.

While 24/7 future focus in your everyday life may not be healthy, keeping it at the forefront when you are at work is awesome. It untethers you from familiar comfort zones.

Similar thoughts echoed through Fred Wilson’s blog yesterday; a reader had asked about Fred’s personal favourite posts:

He responded:

“There are a few that I think are my best work but I don’t think too much about them.

I’m not really into looking backwards.”

What I’ve learnt from these perspectives is how looking back has a tendency to blur your vision of what’s up ahead. If you work on a project as if you already know its outcome, you’re not doing it right. Doing something radical and new, means breaking out of old habits. In particular, paying a lot less attention to the past than we are used to.

What has come before is just a small tiny mirror in comparison to what lies ahead.

Shaving the yak.

Steve Hopkins taught me a funny saying the other day.

We were working together as he was going through his inbox, when he threw his hands up in despair,

“uh…we’re yak-shaving”.

Yak-shaving is that time when you set out to do something and end up completely off-track – bogged by little details, that actually seem crucial and dependent on the goal at the time, but later turn out to be irrelevant.

We’ve all been there.

When you realise you are so far obscured from the original goal you set out to achieve …you may as well be shaving a yak.

Merlin Mann and Danny O’Brien give this example in MAKE Magazine:

“You start out deciding to tidy your room and you realize that in order to do that you’ll need some more trash bags, so you need to go to the shops, which will involve you getting out the car, but the car needs gas, so you’ll need to go to the gas station first, which means you should probably find your gas discount card, which involves finding your keys, which are in the room somewhere…“

It is such a good term, and makes me think about areas in my life where I might need to pause, reevaluate and adjust the course to get back on with the task at hand.

Some common yak-shave situations I stumble on in daily life

- Anything with A LOT of stakeholders in a project

- Running an event or party

- Making a creative decision

Does what you are doing square with your goals? Or do you find yourself off in some fiddly task that actually bears no relation to what you are meant to be doing…and…hang on a second….it looks like it is in fact creating dominoes of dependent tasks to finish in order to reach the end goal?!

Well, when you find yourself shaving a yak, proclaim it! and then refer to Merlin Mann’s handy post and give yourself a mini-review.

“I think that lavishing yourself with 10 or 15 minutes of mini-review doesn’t just get your head in order. It also causes you to consider seriously for a moment whether a given, seemingly important yak is really worth shaving at all.”

Leadership and different generations at work.

I attended the CIO Evanta event in Sydney today. The last session of the day was Avril Henry who spoke about motivating, managing and surviving different generations at work.

Often I cringe when I hear people talk about generational divide. Maybe it’s very Gen Y of me, but I’d like to challenge the idea of generational siloes and suggest it is instead a mindset.

To me, splitting out characteristics according to a generation is a bit like splitting them out according to a star sign. Sometimes they seem to fit perfectly, other times you twist them to make them fit perfectly.

Every day I work with CIOs and CEOs who share the same open, ever-curious, digitally savvy mindset used to describe those born after 1982.

Earlier today Jeff Smith, CEO of Suncorp described his organisation’s forward-focused ‘what’s next?’ culture, which is strongly driven from the C-suite. Giam Swiegers, CEO of Deloitte is always asking for feedback from the entire organisation, and open to a challenge across hierarchies, including graduates. Jeff and Giam are poster children for the Y Generation; both are constantly curious, and always asking ‘why are we doing this?’

The audience today, including Henry, were CIOs and mostly middle-aged. She described them as ‘veterans that dominate board rooms around the world.’ And not in a good way. They are digital dinosaurs obsessed with job security. Henry suggested that this top level of management must be ready to learn new, unlearn old and relearn again the ways of thinking and leading in order to survive today’s workplace.

In an era of change, I feel everyone should be ready to learn. We should be asking ‘what can we learn from one another?’ up, down and across the organisation.

While there will always be elements which define us by our generation – recessions, wars, growing up with the internet – open mindsets or fresh thinking cannot be gleaned from a circle of advisors simply because they were born the same year the iPad was released.

In fact, I know plenty of 25 year olds who are digital dinosaurs. They do not know how to use Twitter. They abhor it. They often get tasked with running the company’s Twitter account because ‘well…you kids understand these things.’  Assuming all gen y’s are social media experts, open to change and highly adaptable is dangerous. It’s like assuming you rented a great DVD without really looking at the box…then realising you just rented Gigli.

If you really want to survive today’s increasingly complex workforce, it means looking beyond generational borders in your organisation and picking out those with a passion, curiousity and thirst to get things done. For me, these are the future movers of work and the people that are going to be most important to learn from, no matter their generation.

Focus. Saying ‘no’.

Today someone at work shared a video of Steve Jobs explaining the importance of saying ‘no’.

For Jobs ‘no’ is the key to remaining focused.

‘Apple suffered for several years from lousy engineering management, there were people going off in 18 different directions…the total becomes less than the sum of the parts. Micro-cosmically they might have made sense, macro-cosmically they didn’t.’

It is hard and often counterintuitive to say ‘no’ when you have a ton of good stuff going on. You’re not just killing off the obvious, bad things – though they should definitely go – it’s likely you’re pressing pause on some really fun things. In my case I really enjoy writing this blog  but needed to pare back for a few days in order to kick up a few gears in other areas of my life.

If you master the art of saying ‘no’ you’ll soon be freed you up to move ahead with the bigger picture.

Often we are not saying ‘no’ to a company or another person, but to ourselves.

It’s empowering, by making a decision not to do something, you are instinctively saying ‘yes’ to something else.

Yammer velocity

Last night I did an interview with Triple R about Yammer, its growth in Australia and the upcoming Yammer on Tour event here in Melbourne.

You can listen to it here.

It’s exciting to be a part of a company operating at such velocity.

Today we released an all-new analytics dashboard, announced we are going to double our headcount and our CEO took a stand against Yahoo’s patent troll move.

Every day there is growth. I can’t recall ever working at this speed. It’s fast-paced, pushing the edge and a lot of fun.

If you feel like joining us, check out our jobs page or come and say hello at Yammer on Tour.

Hub Melbourne launches Hub 2.0

This Thursday Hub Melbourne will celebrate their first birthday and expansion into a new space. (Register for the party on Thursday night here before tickets are gone.)

 

Ross and I were lucky enough to be some of the earliest Hub members as Yammer set up local operations here early last year.

It’s exciting to see Hub grow so quickly. Only a couple of months ago I wrote a post describing the 20-30 people you may see working here on a given day. Today you can easily double those figures.

Beyond the space, the amazing Hub team – Brad, Jan and Ehon – have been busy building a culture of collaboration and community, truly revitilisating what it means to be “at work”.

Steve’s post pretty much sums it up:

‘Hub Melbourne has attracted people from all walks of professional life; be it social entrepreneurs, individual contractors/freelancers/consultants, corporates looking for a third space for it’s staff and even silicon valley startups like Yammer and Change.Org. It’s created a vibrant mix of events that occur on most nights now, ran by it’s members and it’s played host to some great larger scale events such as Mindful.

Curious about coworking? Check out this great video which explains why people are ditching their cubes or home offices in favour of spaces like the Hub.

Pop your head into Hub Melbourne the top floor of Donkey Wheel House, 673 Bourke St sometime.

Yammer on Tour in Australia

In a couple of weeks time we will have our very first series of Yammer on Tour events here in Australia.

A lot has changed since I started with Yammer this time, last year.

You may have seen the infographic floating round the web a month ago, Yammer ‘pretty much everything tripled‘ or our recent announcement Yammer raises $85 million in new venture funding. Thing are growing fast and it’s exciting to see Australia is also a part of that.

Just last week we welcomed Sarah Forsterling, our sixth Customer Success Manager to the local team.

It has been a pretty interesting last year for enterprise social networking in Australia. I’ve certainly noticed a shift in organisational mindset from ‘why do we want social?’ to ‘okay we get social, we need it, but how do we do it well inside the enterprise?’

If you are using Yammer in your organisation or thinking about it, you should definitely pencil in our March events (27th in Sydney and 29th in Melbourne). It’s an opportunity to hear from other customers how their company made the journey to an ESN – always much more fascinating to hear directly from organisations managing the challenge, rather than me telling you about it!

You can register here for Sydney or Melbourne.

I also invite you to join our Yammer on Tour Australia external network where the community, including speakers and attendees, are hosting discussions in the lead-up to the events. Sarah Forsterling and I are community managing the network, do let me know if you need a hand.

See you at Yammer on Tour!

Ditch perfection.

Tonight I joined a panel to discuss how social media impacts learning in an organisation.

In my experience, one of the biggest challenges L&D professionals face has less to do with technology and more to do with planning and managing ‘the change’.

Adding social to workplace education introduces a new concept: rapid iteration. Information is constantly refreshed. Anyone can add to it. Learning spills outside the classroom walls. Education doesn’t have to ever stop at a scheduled time.

These consequences require a major shift in thinking and attitude.

Primarily, no more perfection and control.

Previously, these sort of traits were well-matched to rolling-out workplace learning programs. Boxes were ticked. Competency evaluation forms were completed.

A+, 100%, 10 out of 10.

These are qualities we strive for in most areas of life.

As years of schooling will testify, to achieve a perfect score in anything requires an enormous amount of discipline. You have to lay out – in advance – all the parts necessary to fill the ideal whole.

But what about when you can’t control or foresee all the moving parts?

Earlier this week Sarah wrote about the advantages of not knowing where you are going. Joe Robens wrote about letting go and cherishing moments. Last week I learnt a lot about the constant tension in chasing harmony.

Our world is in a constant state of flux – thanks in part to a revolution in technology.

As we become more connected, we create more opportunities, we add complexity and fluidity.

This mirrors the fundamental shift in the way that learning is happening in organisations. Social media means that everyone can access a range of people and services to support their own learning, and knowledge is forever in ‘beta’ – live and constantly updating.

Any efforts to maintain a rigid grip on our lives and learning experiences go against the grain.

In order to make sense of where we are now, we need start loosening the old anchors.

Ditch perfection.

Instead, stay nimble.

And don’t let all those blind spots get in the way, just get on with it.

The change toward human freedom in business.

I just re-watched this great MIT lecture by Thomas Malone, who wrote The Future of Work in 2004 – the same year that Facebook launched.

Malone’s ‘future’ describes an organisation built on decentralised decision-making. Leadership has moved beyond ‘command and control’ to ‘coordinate and cultivate.’ Technology is a key driver.

These concepts are very much coming to bear in the organisation in 2012.

He shows an awesome video at around 35 minutes about an audience of people ‘co-piloting’ a simulated plane through a set number of targets. The point being ‘it may be possible to have much more decentralised control than we usually assume is possible. If we do that, we may be able to take advantage of much more of the true energy and potential of the people in our organisations, than today.’

This reminded me of how Yammer‘s engineering team operate today.

Small cross-functional teams made up of specialists in different areas come together to work on a particular feature. Rather than management getting involved, one of the tech people on the team is appointed the tech lead. Just like the co-pilots in Malone’s example, the engineers are participants in the definition of the things they are building, steering themselves through a number of targets rather than just having them assigned.

Vision and priorities are still controlled centrally but – unlike the traditional workflow in an engineering organisation – execution is decentralised to those closer to the ‘doing’ work.

This enables human freedom at work. Teams can continuously innovate independently.

A key tool in enabling the process has been the product itself. Yammer as an enterprise social network (ESN) enables the engineers to connect to their team, and share information necessary to make the right decision in real time.

An ESN also gives management visibility into the communication and decisions of engineers, so they can ensure everyone continues in the right direction.

Malone’s prediction that ‘technology will impact communications so much that employees will make sensible decisions for themselves instead of just following orders from someone above them, who supposedly knows more than they do, in a management hierarchy‘ is here already.

More than the technology itself, Yammer is a signifier of the change toward human freedom in business because decentralised, collaborative and self-organising values were baked in from the beginning.

As Malone says, ‘it’s the technology that makes this possible… but the thing that will actually shape how these changes will unfold over the coming decades, well you need to think more deeply about what changes are important to you.’

 

Striking the balance.

I’m a Libra so apparently I’m balanced.

These days I’m finding it increasingly difficult.

How to steady the tightrope between work and play, offline and online; craving the energy of a big city and wanting to escape to the countryside?

This weekend was good to restore some balance. I did the sorts of things that have been lacking in my lifestyle lately. Cooking, wine-drinking, reading books, creating things, playing with the dog. Switched off the screens and paid attention to what’s happening around me.

Over New Years I did the same. A week off the grid in the rainforest.

I don’t always have the option to run away to ‘tech rehab’. Neither do I have the want.

It’s what Hugh McLeod calls The Sex & Cash Theory, ‘balancing the need to make a good living while still maintaining one’s creative sovereignty.’

Whether it’s making a living or making it all work, if you are a human, you are going to struggle with duality in your life.

The “sexy” stuff – creating art, jumping out of planes, writing that novel – doesn’t match up with the “cash”, the things we do to survive, like day jobs, sleep and eating.

We are told it can though. That we can make it all work. If we just try a bit harder.

Women often bring up this debate around work/home life balance. Artists inevitably struggle with the tension between doing creative work and  ‘work that pays the bills’.

So what to make of it?

I’ve come round to thinking that chasing any harmony is going to be a lot of hard work. Possibly elusive. You are chasing things that are always going to be in direct conflict.

The exciting part is owning up to that chaos. The division between wanting to be one way or the other does not result in two discrete entities, but rather a continuum from one extreme to the other.

The idealistic picture you have of freedom – the pot of gold you are chasing – is not necessarily the one you really want. Do you really want to sit on a beach every single day and never work again?

We want a variety of things. Not just to create art or to be in a movie or get paid to play video games or be part of the NY Knicks; we want to eat, sleep, drink, talk, and dream some more.

Dad and I were looking at black and white photographs tonight. We got talking about what makes a monochrome picture amazing. It’s not just the white and black but the range of shades in between.

So who are you, really, and what do you want? Lots, I reckon.

Interview with CNET

As part of my commitment to take an analogue weekend, I’m not plugging in to write a post myself today. Instead I’ll be cooking and using my hands away from the keyboard.

However, an interview I did with CNET just got published. It was a lot of fun to do. From talking about my day job to reminiscing about eating coconuts on a deserted island! If you’re interested, you can check it out here.

Getting over a bummer.

So today I lost my computer which totally sucked. Especially when it was the beginning of blogging every day for 30 days.

By ‘lost’ I mean totally died. What remains in my possession is a bag of microchips called a solid state drive that will have to be sent to a data centre in Brisbane to see if they can recover anything.

Amazing that’s all it comes down to. All those hours/days/months plugging away at a keyboard; the writing, the music, goddamnit the photos. They are all just a few chips in a bag.

When ‘it’ happened – the ominous all-black screen and three beeps on loop – I had that terrible panicky feeling you get when you lose something really valuable.  My heart sunk. Oh my god, this isn’t happening. End of the world type stuff.

To be honest, I never thought I’d have that sinking feeling about technology. I’ve lost enough iPhones last year not to care. I’m not that attached to stuff. Ask those that know me and they’ll tell you I regularly throw it out by the garbage bag.

I hated that I was getting so bummed but I couldn’t stop thinking about the last six months of effort that just got cremated. Pages I had been writing in preparation for this. Gone. Presentations that I was going to be giving. Gone.

My work and identity and brain had been so bound up in this MacBook Air that I felt like they had simultaneously evaporated.

The other thought running through my head was that I wasn’t in a fatal car accident so I should probably get over my first world problem.  By some weird twist of fate, later today I ended up in hospital with some health complications. It put things in perspective pretty neatly.

I’m going to take this opportunity to open my eyes to what is going on around me. In real life. And not rely on the keyboard so much.

It’s probably something that was necessary but I didn’t realise at the time. I’m glad this is happening. It might spark some original ideas that don’t come from the internet. It seems like these days the only new content or thoughts or ideas that I have originate from material I see on the net. And you know what? Just last night I spent the evening responding to emails instead of enjoying a home-cooked dinner with my Dad. Whoa.

It’s time to take an analogue weekend.

See you on the other side.

I transcribed this from a voice memo I took while I was driving today. Cheryl Lin mentioned she had been using it to brainstorm posts the other night. I’d always thought drawing in a notebook was a good sketchpad. The voice memos, although painful to listen to your own voice, are actually amazing for getting out what’s in my head, there’s less of a chance to alter your original intention when you are talking off the cuff, as oppose to translating thoughts onto paper.

The magic of books.

This week I went back to my old high school.

I was asked to speak on the the value of reading, books and literacy as the Ambassador for the National Year of Reading.

Here is a copy of the presentation.

For me, reading whet my appetite for travel. Books influenced the places I saw and connected me to people I met on the road. Reading gave me a broader understanding of where I had landed, the culture and the history of a place, before I got off the plane to explore it myself.

There’s something about books that will always trump the web. All the effort that goes into producing one book; edits, re-edits, interviews, and years of people’s lives. Reading a book is a completely different sensation to accessing the instant, information everywhere stories available on the web.

It’s a relief, an escape, an immersion into a different world.

I was shocked to learn that a staggering 46% of Australians have difficulty reading. 46%.

Almost half of Australia can’t read newspapers, understand the instructions on a medicine bottle or read sufficiently to meet the most basic demands of everyday life and work, let alone read a book.

It was good to reflect on how reading has shaped the life I lead.

How has it changed yours? What can we do to encourage children to read – and level up the 46% missing out?

National Ambassador for Reading 2012

View more PowerPoint from Bryony Cole

ESN & Innovation best practice: Do not underestimate the importance of leadership.

I began re-reading the Public Innovator’s Playbook on the plane and realised so much of the process involved to nurture bold ideas in government mirrors the process of nurturing an Enterprise Social Network (ESN) in an organisation. (This is hardly surprising. Companies, including Deloitte use ESNs like Yammer as the backbone of their innovation program because they can diffuse information and ideas much more efficiently than formal channels of communication.)

One point the author Bill Eggers emphasises is leadership as the first step to baking innovation into the fabric of the company.

Having some experience in both innovation programs and implementing ESNs, the most common setback I’ve seen leaders face when they decide to roll these out is convincing themselves it will just work.  There’s a misconception that once you’ve purchased the platform/licence, you’re done. In reality, you’ve only just made it to the starting block.

“Innovation – any new idea – by definition will not be accepted at first. It takes repeated attempts, endless demonstrations, monotonous rehearsals before innovation can be accepted and internalized by an organisation. This requires courageous patience.” – Warren Bennis.

The book reiterated the importance of a systemic approach to introducing innovation – starting from the top.

‘The role of leadership is not merely to “think” or “strategise” but also to implement. Leaders help transmit an idea generated by an individual or small group to the entire organisation. They also build a coalition for change.’

Innovation programs and ESNs alike are part of a new vision of separating chain of command from chain of information – leaders must embody this.

Broad brush strokes of executive “endorsement”, such as company-wide emails, are no longer enough. In short, innovation and ESNs are not just about ticking a box.

Strong and public leaders in an organisation need to set an example and truly engage with the platform; submit ideas, ask for comments, experiment.

‘Creating an innovative organization requires addressing issues that influence behaviour. For instance, when employees are asked to share their views openly, are managers ready to get honest feedback that shows what is wrong? Or will they get embroiled in a blame game, trying to corner the employee into thinking that she is wrong?’

By having leaders involved and embodying the process from the outset it builds credibility and sends a clear signal for other managers to emulate. Change in behaviour ripples out to the edges of the organisation.

Eggers uses the example of a ship.

‘For a ship to turn left, its rudder has to turn right. For the rudder to turn right, the trim tab has to go left. A captain knowing the way the whole system works together prevents the ship from going off-course. A systemic view allows an understanding of the interrelationship between key variables and how changing a variable affects the entire system.’

Figuring out a C-level engagement plan can be a lever, influencing the direction of a huge ship.

Often employees will not need a lever to see the change in direction – they already have ideas about how the company could change and have intuitively figured out how to use an ESN. The value of a leader demonstrating engagement to these employees cannot be underestimated, it invites advocates to come out of the woodwork. Once empowered, these innovation champions will do the heavy-lifting to convert other employees to the organisation’s new route.

Creating an innovative organisation requires addressing issues that influence behaviour, starting from the top.

There are plenty more steps in the process, but don’t skip this one.