Here’s another look at the problem of getting heads in the C suite round #social. Remember, very few CIOs in major companies are personally engaging with social media like Twitter and blogs; most report through the CFO (there’s a downer and a big blunder); and another study recently showed how little B2B companies were making use of social feedback.
What a mess. And what an opportunity. Anyone say competitive advantage?
Following up his earlier work on the bizarre fact that most Fortune 250 CIOs show little personal engagement with social media, Mark Fidelman zooms in on the guy who comes top of his rankings and is therefore the most social CIO in corporate America.
SAP’s Oliver Bussmann warns that CIOs are putting their careers in jeopardy if they haven’t dived into the social ocean.
I suggested recently that the great majority of CIOs should be shown the door and make way for replacements more in tune with the shockwave that social is spreading not simply through marketing but ultimately every aspect of 21st century business. The naive notion that you can just hire people to do it for you needs to be stamped on. Not that the CIO needs to have day-to-day involvement with the corporate presence. But if he or she does not blog about fishing or tweet about Hollywood then there is no fundamental understanding in the C suite of the revolutionary dynamics at play in this fluid and fast-changing social landscape.
My earlier piece: https://futureofbiz.org/2012/04/13/social-risk-seems-cios-think-social-is-beneath-them/
SAP’s CIO: You’re Putting Your Executive Career at Risk if You’re Not Social – Forbes.
Fidelman’s earlier piece: http://harmon.ie/blog/04-04-2012
Giving credence to the outlier thinkers in our midst might have avoided things like the Wall Street crash. Photo: AP
As the Arab spring continues to unravel into an Arab summer, the most important lesson is that hardly anyone knew it was coming. Much like the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Wall Street could it be that as much as conventional wisdom may be conventional it is not always reliably wise?
I recently hosted a conference in Washington on the future of nanotechnology. All kinds of experts were round the table talking tech and policy and business. Then one of them made a stunning statement. She was there on behalf of a big, mainstream environmentalist group. “I have never,” she stated, “been on such a diverse panel in Washington.”
There was a brief but palpable intake of air around the room. I thanked her for the compliment before adding that I was now more concerned for Washington than I was before.
Whom do we invite round the table when the questions are big and the stakes high? It tends to be those in the centre; the mainstream thinker whose wisdom is regarded as conventional.
When will we ever learn? We are still paying for the lesson we learned from Wall Street in 2008.
Conventional wisdom can be dead wrong, even in the hands of the smartest people because they tend to agree with each other. People with way-out views are kept at arm’s-length.
Whatever the issue, if your views deviate too far from the mean, however articulate you may be, you are unlikely to get invited, funded or promoted.
We have learned a lot this past generation about the value of diversity in age, gender, and ethnicity but we have learned little about the enormous and growing value of diversity of opinion.
Of course, we do disagree about a lot of things. With friends, and with co-workers. But we live in communities of ideas that set boundaries around acceptable diversity of thinking, and make sure we keep out those who challenge our shared assumptions.
We don’t want to rehash old issues we regard as closed. We don’t want to give room to opinions we find deeply objectionable – or threatening. Most of us find it challenging to take forward our thinking when there is someone in the room always, always asking why?
So our natural tendency is to put unconscious faith in Groupthink, the tendency for everyone’s thinking to move in the same direction to the exclusion of any serious questioning.
People in management know all about this as a problem for work groups and other teams. But it is more insidious and far more dangerous on the grand scale.
What brought Wall Street down, and with it threatened the entire global order? The G-word. And on smaller scales: what led Monsanto into huge losses in the late 1990s and ensured that Europe rejected genetically-modified food? What led Detroit to near-oblivion as they insisted on producing 1950s-style autos into the 21st century? What about the power company TEPCO and the nuclear disaster that the entirely predictable tsunami sparked in Japan?
Knowledge is building very fast, disciplines are converging, globalisation is changing the ground-rules of everything. Change powered by Moore’s Law, the digitisation process and the revolution in communication is driving shifts in the technical, economic and social order that most of us strain to grasp. Yet the faster change takes place and the greater its disruptive, innovative power, the harder it will be to make good choices.
So who should be party to the conversation? This is where the outliers come in; people who are articulate and serious, but outside the mainstream assumptions that generally drive conversations. Experts tend to resist the participation of thosewith unorthodox opinions. It needs to become the norm for them to sit round the table in every discussion. All articulate voices round the table; all the time.
This approach is hardly new. The century before last, US poet, essayist and journalist Walt Whitman asked the question his own way. “Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?” In the 21st century, great value lies at the extremities of opinion; and we need to harvest it as we move through change faster than we have ever known before.
First appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, June 9, 2011.
Terrific post here from @ginidietrich on silos inside the C suite. Seems to me that the two greatest enemies of everything in 2012 are silos and groupthink. They do of course go together, as when we climb out of them to do allegedly creative strategy together the problems of salience et al. emerge.
The situation of the C suite atop the traditional hierarchies of a functional organization is in fact a subset of the problems we have in handling knowledge when data has exploded and the age of expertise is in a significant respect over. It’s those who bridge knowledge silos who shape what comes next. Modeling and applying this in our organizations, one would have thought, was 101.
In a largely historical op-ed in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, Michael Lubell of CUNY and the American Physical Society lambastes the current parties for their inability to agree on the priority of science funding – in marked contrast to earlier efforts over the past generation when, despite differences of emphasis, bipartisan collaboration led to big increases in the public funding of science and technology.
My take? Three quick points.
1. This brings us back to the question of the question. How is it framed? Little by little, broader concerns with budget, disaffection with “big government,” and stories of weird research projects (always findable, and some plainly are weird), have chipped away at the semi-consensus. I think there’s more to it, and am not sure if the big increases in public science finding would continue anyway for several other reasons. But the issue is framed differently now.
2. I sat round a table recently with the CTO of one of our major tech companies and asked him why, when his organization has strategy people working for the chairman, and R and D people working for him – all with timelines of 7-10 years in their heads – they have federal relations people in DC told that around 18 months should be their time horizon. That is, why have not our major tech companies done the heavy lifting in driving forward the politics of the long term? Also a big issue. My sense is that their deciding to do so, and agreeing long-term goals on which for all their diverse interests they can work together, will prove central to the possibility of a prosperous and secure American tomorrow.
3. Back of the conflicting ideological agendas in Washington lies a remarkable degree of unanimity in, as it were, the “corporate culture.” I have written elsewhere about the divide between the District and the Valley (search this blog or see my Kindle e-book Innovation President). It is vast. Our creative, entrepreneurial culture is almost entirely divorced from our political culture. This is true across the parties, and despite fine people and good initiatives. The cultures are deeply misaligned, and few people at either end care. That’s the core issue here. Budget levels, and an inability to collaborate on agreeing them, are presenting problems. Their cause lies elsewhere.
It’s not my view that more money is “the answer,” though federal S and T spend is very important. There are many other questions that need to be addressed if we are going to ramp up American S and T leadership, and resulting innovation, for the next generation. In the past I have proposed the abolition of academic tenure (through an appropriations rider), restructuring of funding agencies (we could start off with a new one taking 10% of existing non-DoD spend and based in the Valley), cabinet positions for the Science Adviser, the CIO, the CTO; and more besides. I’ve also proposed moving Camp David to the Valley (my friends out there are horrified by the traffic implications) – as the first step in the migration of the federal government to the west coast that I believe to be probably inevitable and certainly desirable in the first Pacific century.
Our C-PET motto is Asking Tomorrow’s Questions. It’s all about the questions. Washington is a city full of smart people with answers. Get the questions right and things will change.
Lubell: Science Funding and the Ideological Divide : Roll Call Opinion.
Some weeks back we discussed the fact that Fortune 250 CIOs have remarkably limited engagement in social media. Indeed, it is so remarkably limited that there should be a slew of vacancies – once their bosses work out what is (not) going on.
Now comes a report that both underlines the seriousness of this situation for companies with an interest in the 21st century, and partly explains it. 42% of major company CIOs report to the CFO. In smaller companies it rises to 60%. Plainly, in half our corporations we are working with a depressingly old-economy model in which the CIO and the IT team are seen as technicians placing and maintaining the interconnected typewriters and filing cabinets which constitute the comms/data systems of the firm. Routine stuff, to be kept under the spendthrift thumb of the spreadsheet guy. (Really, who could make this stuff up?) So: CFOs have a major role in CIO recruitment as well as supervision and budget. And they are hardly likely to demand personal engagement in social media (what’s that?). If 4/250 CIOs blog, the proportion for CFOs is probably well under zero.
What these studies have highlighted is a cavern of unawareness deep in the heart of half our companies (at least).
My take? There shouldn’t be a soul in the C Suite who is not personally splashing around in the social space. If that sentence were taken to heart in the bastions of the U.S. corporate scene, it’s hard to conclude they would not be much better placed for what comes ahead. Because “social” is becoming central to marketing, product development, customer relations, and everything else that determines success – and the more central the younger the customer base.
Take home? CEOs and CIOs need to become best friends;and the CFO needs to be taken out of the loop, like tomorrow. The CIO/CMO relationship is also explored in this poll, and needs to be close. One problem with the whole “C” way of looking a things is that by defining executive leadership in functional terms it is increasingly out of kilter with the cross-functional efforts that emerging technologies and their social impacts enable and bring to the center of tomorrow’s needs and opportunities – and that, mercifully, excellent organizations have learned to engage at all levels.
Perhaps the CIO is an anachronism of the days of “IT.” We are now post-IT. IT itself offers a component within the CIO role, but the CIO is not CITO. The CFO reporting stats suggest that is exactly how he/she is (still) seen. The issue is information, not technology. Information is the business of every function. The CIO needs to emerge as the information leader, the Chief Knowledge Broker (CKB), of the organization. With techies to back up as and when needed. The last person on the planet to whom the CKB should be reporting is an accountant.
My piece in response to the Fidelman/HBR report:
http://nigelcameron.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/social-risk-seems-cios-think-social-is-beneath-them/
The post I am responding to here:
Do CMOs, CIOs, and CFOs Embrace Each Other? – IT Management – myITview.com.
I’ve just emerged from SOBCon in its hometown, Chicago, with gratitude to @LizStrauss for the invitation and her colleague Terry @Starbucker St Marie.
Some quick thoughts after a remarkable weekend as the long tail of posts, tweets, texts, continues to flow. More thoughts may follow.
SOBCon is a conference like no other – in which infinite effort has been spent on process as well as content; a fulfillment, at one level, of the generally frustrated vision of unconferences to draw on everyone and avoid the fallacies of schooling; a pudding rich but never quite over-egged; a place, a space, a gathering of people decidedly in community. As I just shared with a new friend, I’m not sure if I spent the weekend being remade or beaten up. OK, you get the picture.
Here just one comment, about SOBCon as a space. The lush, deeply engaging, very personal presentations I leave for the moment to others to discuss, though they make sense only inn the context of the space. (Check the #SOBCon hashtag to get a whiff.)
But this. SOBCon is a place. A space. With rich features evident to newbies as they walk in. The air has been specially treated. The food infused with secret sauce. A magical kingdom, in which the quality of relationships new and old, and – because this is always how it flows in our human community – the character and depth of the communication, are heightened.
To those for whom conferencing is all in a week’s work, including some of the finer efforts, it is always striking when a space is created in which persons and ideas can actually engage; strangers can be open with each other; bonds can spring up almost as fast as cards are exchanged. Well, this weekend in Chicago that was true to a high degree. What’s especially interesting with SOBCon is that this is not the result of its being carried on in secret. I am no great enthusiast for the “Chatham House Rule” that is sometimes used to encourage candor and honesty – which basically renders an event and its participants off the record. SOBCon was streamed. I know because I got message from people saying they could see me in the crowd. The on/off the record approach has value in enabling officials to be interesting and remain employed. It has little impact on the quality of the engagement. Conversely, there can be engagement of a special quality without its illusions.
That’s why in our work at C-PET we have placed much effort and emphasis on the quality of the community we bring together to address the great questions of tomorrow and today. These are not communities of old friends, though they are enriched by such relationships scattered through them. They include many who are strangers. And what is said in public is not private. But the cultivated space means that trust, even between strangers, is set high. So in conversations public and private there is candor. And, as well we know, when one person is candid, shares personally, confesses challenges and discusses defeats, the resonance is potent and the character of the conversation infectious.
At SOBCon this goal of, shall we say, a cultivated public/private inter-personal space for ideas – was achieved to a high degree, spurred by the fact many participants had been SOBConners before, and the social setting over several days – which went all the way to karaoke (some pics from that are in the tweetstream!).
Our business and policy worlds are full of answers. What we need most are spaces in which we can pose questions. Questions can only be properly posed when the space is right. And while this has always been true, as Moore’s Law drives exponential technological change and human events move at a pace faster than we have ever known the questions become more important, and the need for a space within which we can gather to consider them more pressing.
So huzzah to Liz and Terry, and the SOBCon community. As I move back and forth between the worlds of policy and business I know there is nothing we need more.
Anne Marie Knott from Wash U biz school raises briefly a profound question: how to maintain a major R and D budget when returns are graded quarterly and markets fluctuate by the second. Which always makes me realize how much better, in fact, is our corporate decision-making than it really should be. Out there is one alternative universe in which is really is the current stock price and the next quarterly report that shape every decision.
I’ve written elsewhere that, as it happens, the principal-agent problem (both here and also in the political realm) ends up helping to mitigate short-termism, since executives (like pols) want careers, and careers require reputations for long-term effectiveness. There are other reasons too, the most legitimate of which lie in the minds of long-term investors (of whom there are still a few).
The point Anne Marie Knott makes tellingly here is that what she terms the research quotient (RQ, a way of measuring research commitment/effectiveness) offers a different slant on capitalization. My somewhat broader point would be that the market needs to find ways to place a more reliable value on both such balance sheet commitments and the willingness of the executive team to take short-term hits for long-term value. That might involve polygraphs in the C Suite. It certainly (sigh, don’t we know) involves coming up with salary and bonus structures that deliver what is needed rather than what gluttonous execs feel is their desert for a good day’s work. This may seem like rocket science, but as Elon Musk is demonstrating, rocket science isn’t necessarily, well, rocket science. And the growing shareholder revolt on executive remuneration, reaching most recently to Barclays and now very much a mainstream effort, can’t fail to help.
At the core, it’s all about the long term. And the fact that as change comes faster innovation becomes both more necessary and more risky is driving a very different kind of corporate culture from that to which big companies used to aspire.
Some time back I wrote and then revised a piece on both my Twitter use and the power of Twitter as a machine for building knowledge through mutual or reciprocal curation – what perhaps we can designate a “reciprocal knowledge engine. ” Google just told me that it could not find the phrase, so it looks like it’s mine. Here’s the piece: http://nigelcameron.wordpress.com/future/why-twitter-matters/
I don’t really have a lot to add on that score; seems to me this medium/platform is pregnant with capacities to enable the building of cross-disciplinary, convergent knowledge, in a world defined by the data explosion of the exaclasm and the exponential need and opportunity for understanding – as a prelude, one would hope, to wisdom in decision-making in the face of global risk.
Point about Twitter, though, is that it is also many other things, and yesterday’s post discussing the proposal that our @ addresses serve as our personal universal locators is not without merit. Then again, it’s a source for every crowd one could wish, from flashmobs during demos to the nuclear flashmob that was unleashed on SOPA. And market research. And (another recent theme in this blog) C-Suite engagement with stakeholders. Of yes, and if you must, the Lady Gaga fan club and the PR people from our favorite pols. And on and on.
Which suggests: Twitter as a corporation or a brand may or may not have immortality. In general, businesses in this space are ageing fast (not good news for current valuations). A rival could pick it up, mess it up, close it down. Or, more likely, a nimbler, smarter, son-of-Twitter will emerge in 20 months’ time and we will all feel how MySpacey Twitter used to be.
But in all the social media melange, in Twitter we have lighted on something far more valuable than the other platforms, useful for particular purposes though they may be. It’s why many of the smartest people on the planet are spending serious time here every day of their lives. And (back to reciprocal knowledge) they are my research assistants. And I am one of theirs.
@dorieclark’s post on transparency and leadership draws attention to both the need and the opportunity that social media offer executive leaders to put themselves out there, known by their stakeholders.
Yes and yes, but there’s more. The famous example of Paul Levy’s blog on how to run a hospital dates way back to 2006 (!); his example of using Youtube to make video messages for the global company network offers a handy and economical mechanism, but of course it’s for one-way (and, for example, UBS has had their own closed-circuit company TV channel for many years – I remember being interviewed on it more than a decade ago).
Point is: 2.0 is 2-way, engaged, social rather than broadcast, transparency through interaction in place of statement, web 2.0 used to its complex multi-layered exponential advantage – and, as it were, corporate governance 2.0 as we have government 2.0 in the public sphere.
Which isn’t to say that execs need to spend all their time chit-chatting with whatever Qwerty-qualified interlocutors wish to catch their attention. Plainly. But sampling, risking actually saying things, learning free of the corporate filter what stakeholders and potential stakeholders actually make of things. And, back of that, as I don’t tire of saying, immersing themselves in the social culture which defines the rising generation and offers the leading edge experience of every emerging market.
A very particular transparency results when leaders mix with mere mortals, and the risky joy of social is that it enables exactly that. That’s why I admire the way @rupertmurdoch has jumped into Twitter this year, plainly tweeting for himself (he isn’t a good typist). He says he reads the incoming, and I can believe it. Make what you will of him, he has a brilliant capacity to engage in popular markets for ideas and communication, and he realizes that Twitter is a (one could argue the) core knowledge pathway of today. It may not endear him to those who were unendeared by him before. But this man is learning.
And in the process he is setting a tremendous example to every News International exec – indeed, every one in the Fortune 500 – of the need to risk engagement with social media. If he would go one step further and be more evidently responsive, it would be even better.
Corporate governance 2.0 has yet to take much shape. Let’s get to it.
Transparency is the New Leadership Imperative – Dorie Clark – Harvard Business Review.
Marc Andreessen's Tweets in Blog Form
The latest news on WordPress.com and the WordPress community.
FutureofBiz.org 