Facebook, Diversity, and Leadership in the C21 Corporation

Posted on June 26, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

In her latest Reuters column, Lucy Marcus (@lucymarcus) smart, suave authority on board governance, welcomes Sheryl Sandberg’s appointment to the Facebook board – as the first woman, and a second executive voice from inside the corporation. She also notes, though, that since Zuckerberg controls more than half the stock, when push comes to shove he will get his way.

The Facebook story will no doubt be used for case studies of several kinds as we move ahead, whether or not it justifies its vast valuation and survives into the next decade as the mainspring of social networking (both propositions, as I have argued before, to my mind highly doubtful).

4 key issues are raised here that go much wider.

1. It’s unfortunate that the term “diversity” has come to be associated with the need for women to be better represented in traditionally male preserves, and other ethnicities in traditionally white. There are indeed issues of equity to be addressed. But the core need for “diversity” on boards and in leadership more generally has less to do with gender and pigmentation and everything to do with perspective. Monochrome and monogendered bodies are far less suited to governance. And while that has always been true, at a time of rapid, exponential, change, it is risible that anyone could suggest anything other. Radical diversity of perspective is crucial to managing increasingly rapid change.

2. As Lucy Marcus notes, Facebook has shown itself out of step with the slow “spring” in corporate governance – both in board diversity and also, strikingly, in the old-style control that is built into Zuckerberg’s position. That is (in my words) we have a company presented as the key to the new social economy being governed like a Victorian family business. I am not without deep admiration for Zuckerberg’s creativity and vision; but it is his plain failure to understand this point that makes me most uneasy about the company’s capacity to weather the coming years. Such a concern is constantly reinforced by the plain bad decision-making that keeps flowing from the top. Latest: the ridiculous email switch this week – pitching 900 million people into unwanted email accounts.

3. What 21st century corporations need above all, and especially those driven by digital technologies and congruent social attitudes in constant flux, is an agile capacity for decision-making and responsiveness that will come only from deep and open-textured conversation at their heart – and candid social engagement across the organizational boundary. That is, contrarians need to be appointed to boards, and social engagement to reach far higher than the joke of a privacy referendum recently triggered in the aforementioned Facebook. Both contrarians inside and an open boundary with customers, prospects, and the wider culture, will prove worth more than their weight in gold; and prove key drivers of competitive advantage. Facebook has displayed interest in neither.

4. The core question is a model of leadership, personal and shared, for Century 21. The old-tyme Fordist models worked well back in the day – the Great Leader, the supportive and largely consensus-minded board of buddies, the trusting stakeholders/market. In all respects this situation is now history. Except that so many of our long-established companies are still trying to make it work. And leading allegedly new-economy companies such as Facebook, while they are driven by constantly exploding digital technologies, are striving to replicate a model that cannot thrive in the new context of constant, innovative disruption – while social is eroding the organizational boundary and shaping the possibilities faced by the corporation.

I see Microsoft as the last of the behemoth Fordist survivals. The titans of a century ago, Ford and Carnegie, would have recognized it, admired its founder, and generally resonated with his post-leadership generosity. Apple has straddled the models, driven by genius, and blessed so far by much good luck. Whether our focus is governance, leadership, social media, or social responsibility (to which Apple has slowly awakened through its sign-on to Fair Labor), the C21 company will look nothing like the grand successes of C20. Among the slew of first-generation digital behemoths (we can throw Google into the mix here), Henry Ford would just have been too much at home to give me confidence they can evolve rapidly enough to flourish rather than simply (if they do) survive.

And it’s notable that Rupert Murdoch, a C20 titan if ever there was one, discovered Twitter at the turn of the year and is engaging frequently and personally (you can tell; he can’t type well and keeps saying things that make his PR people cringe). Strikes me he may have it in him to adapt faster than Zuck. Sorry.

Is Facebook Doomed? https://futureofbiz.org/2012/06/04/is-facebook-doomed/

Facebook’s board needs more than Sheryl Sandberg | Lucy P. Marcus.

Three Caveats for Social Search

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Many strands are brought together in this smart review of the coming merge of social and search, which will take much further the secondary role social is already playing in some search engines.

It raises 3 core questions.

1. I am entirely happy that clever algorithms should put together the strands of my digital (and analog) life to my benefit. I am entirely unhappy if there is no clear way found to keep this info entirely, forever, private to me; unless I choose to part with it for cash or some specific service.

2. I am also happy to have a tailored version of search operating in particular situations (so when I search “weather,” the first hit is my local weather not the dictionary of meteorology. But in less obvious cases not only do I want a choice, of social search and, as it were, asocial search; I want a flashing light to remind me that my private universe is being mined, not the universe out there.

3. There’s a fundamental distinction to be drawn between biographical, geographical, or personal preferences in matters of, say, food and music; and broad issues of information and opinion. So it is not at all OK that a Democrat should get a view of history and politics designed to be favorable to him or her; or that doubters of human causation of climate change should receive preferentially material favorable to their cause.

Search and Social: How The Two Will Soon Become One | TechCrunch.

via Three Caveats for Social Search.

Spreading the Word: Knowledge Diffusion now we’re Digital

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I recently addressed a conference on global education, and was asked to look in my keynote at the special situation of “resource-poor” areas. I don’t think my approach went down very well (one senior figure in the room, a former UN official, described it sweetly as “crap”), but I still think I’m right!

What I said was that the digital revolution, combining the digitization of books and the spread of mobile in Africa, was re-weighting educational resources; and would soon allow the delivery of high-level educational programs with almost none of the traditional resource pre-requisites in place.

Here’s a case in point: Nice report on the use of e-books in exactly that situation. At the other end of the opportunity scale we have the new programs being launched by Stanford, MIT, and Harvard. But we have just made a very small beginning. In general, education has been very slow to be disrupted, and my sense is it will change very rapidly over the next 10 years – on the same scale as publishing at the moment. This will not all be good, but it will be enormously good for distance delivery at very low cost of what have been expensive western educational perquisites.

Worldreader: An E-Book Revolution for Africa? – WSJ.com.

Data, Privacy, Data, Privacy, Data, Privacy – and Business: 5 Principles

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At the core of 21st century business lies data. And as the digital revolution envelops more and more of our activities that core will only get bigger.

We have become most aware of these issues in the context of social media and the biz models that have grown up around advertising as a way to sustain enterprises that are free to the user/consumer.

But of course it goes deeper, much deeper. National security issues, health, transportation – a thick strand of data/privacy concerns and opportunities runs through sector after sector. In this illuminating piece in the NY Times, the spotlight is on Acxiom, a vast aggregator of consumer data whose name is known to few.

These 5 Principles are clear:

1. Every day, more of our lives will be digitized.

2. Every day, there will be more business opportunity in the mining (refining is the word Acxiom likes) of the data.

3. For a stable business environment to flourish, without GMO-style revolts or data scandals such as have punctuated the short history of social media, we need to move towards consensus policies that give business maximum freedom and citizens maximum control over their lives and their digital output – through the optimal mix of self-regulation and legal oversight.

4. Concerns over cybersecurity are growing. Every expert I know is more more worried all the time – as we aggregate data and in the process raise the risk of its being released by accident (another laptop left on a train) or theft. Some of the smartest people on the planet are entirely focused on hacking into our securest systems, and they keep scoring. Risk assessments need to be candid and – unless this raises its own security issues – public.

5. In these days of globalization and cloud, there is no way to avoid global standards.

Acxiom, the Quiet Giant of Consumer Database Marketing – NYTimes.com.

10 Amazing Facts about Twitter

Posted on June 16, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

10 Amazing Facts about Twitter

1. It is far simpler than Facebook and yet has far more uses.

2. It is accessible from almost any point on earth and at any time.

3. It connects people and knowledge seamlessly.

4. You can have one-on-one chats with friends and strangers 24 hours a day, either in semi-public through @ messages or in private with DM.

5. It supplies me with a free staff of hundreds of expert researchers and communicators, whose chief delight day by day is to tell me what’s new and what to make of it.

6. Twitter relationships can lead quickly to real-life connections, and when you meet a Twitter friend IRL it’s remarkable how much you already know of each other. Whitney Johnson, author of Dare Dream Do, has called this TWIRL – Twitter – In Real Life. Twirl can be an amazing experience. That’s how I met Whitney! @johnsonwhitney

7. As knowledge is expanding exponentially – faster every day – only one thing can enable us to digest, focus, grasp, what’s new and important: The Miracle of Reciprocal Curation. Each of us scans what’s new for each other, in a mutual gift relationship that has enormous power. Twitter is the best mechanism for it we have yet devised. It’s a Reciprocal Knowledge Engine.

8. A Reciprocal Knowledge Engine is key to enabling us to scan the future, as the future is coming in faster every day.

9. Every corporation and government can use Twitter to engage one-on-one with customers, prospects, and citizens. Forget focus groups and traditional market research. And turn elections from 2-yearly, 4-yearly events into continuous engagement.

10. Twitter opens the organizational boundary of the corporation. We now have two-way communication – the key to transformation in every institution, as the values of customers and employees sync – and customer needs reshape corporate culture.

#Blodget and Broadcasting and Why I think TV is Over

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Henry @HBlodget of Business Insider not exactly for the first time has been causing controversy – now about TV, not Facebook.And here’s a neat piece from @TerryHeaton summarizing his case and agreeing with it – to the effect that TV as we know it is falling down the same hole (my metaphor) as print journalism.

I probably agree with Blodget more than Heaton does. First thought about it seriously at a private event in London several years ago when Jeremy Hunt, who is now the UK govt minister for culture et al., and in hot water over Murdoch issues, was still in opposition. His topic was his approach, when the Conservatives got into government, to “independent” (non-BBC) television. He is a very smart fellow; it was a lively presentation. But when I got around to asking my question, which was to the effect “why do you think it has a future; everything is migrating to the web and asynchronicity, and the moreso the younger you are,” it was pretty obvious he had not thought about it.

It’s a marvel that just as the moving image bounds every further up the exponential curve of consumer demand in C21, its classic purveyors are like deer staring at that bright spot that used to sit at the center of the screen in the old days after we turned it off.

Local Media in a Postmodern World, Part CXXVIII, Henry Blodget is Right: TV is in Trouble.

via #Blodget and Broadcasting and Why I think TV is Over.