Why Twitter’s IPO is looking ridiculous as well as sad

Posted on October 5, 2013 by Nigel Cameron

Twitter 6×6 (Photo credit: Steve Woolf)

It’s hardly news that women don’t dominate technology companies, or indeed most companies, or governments (though the news that Rwanda‘s parliament now has 64% women members is fascinating; I wonder who will be the next president . . .). Point is: While denizens of the C Suite and Board members need to have a really smart grasp of the business, to use the old not-many-women-are-engineers defense against women high-level appointments is becoming absurd. Here, the New York Times points out that now Twitter is in process of going public, the public knows it is yet another men’s group. The board is entirely male (and, ahem, white). One woman, a new hire, Vijaya Gadde, is to be found in the executive office (she’s General Counsel).

This is ridiculous to my mind not become it isn’t “fair” (I have consistently argued that the equity case for appointing women to top jobs is both unreasonable and dumb), but because value will not be realized in this fast, fast-shifting economy without widely diverse expert perspectives at both C-Suite and director level. This is not simply an argument for women or other “diverse” groups. It’s a value-driven case for diverse thinking, including the seriously contrarian.

We have already noted that the IPO is also sad. Sad, because at some point a major social company will wake up to the fact that the logic is for social companies to be social in their governance. We need smart thinking on governance as well as technology, and smart mechanisms that will reward founders and other early risk-takers without locking up the results of their efforts with Big Oil governance. (See Facebook‘s share system, which together with its board membership and the role of its founder locates it clearly on the Carnegie/Murdoch side of history; and Twitter’s plan for a classified board. Sigh.)

We’re waiting for the tedious old-economy governance and financing approaches of these smart, C21 companies to find alignment. It has yet to happen.

http://nigelcameron.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/we-need-to-talk-about-twitter-reciprocal-knowledge-engine-plus/

https://futureofbiz.org/2012/12/11/please-may-we-have-a-social-social-network/

Curtain Is Rising on a Tech Premiere With as Usual a Mostly Male Cast – NYTimes.com.

The #MOOC Thing

Posted on May 25, 2013 by Nigel Cameron

I’m simply bemused. Not only are MOOCs crouching in the wings, threatening to destroy the mass-university system we have spent a century building as the capstone of our education systems. But key leaders within that system are embarking on behavior as hazardous as it comes. While entirely failing to see what lies in their future (the laying waste of all they know) they are engaged in speeding the process. It is not exactly the deer transfixed in the headlights. It is the deer rushing toward the car.

Let’s be clear. There is absolutely nothing that the massed ranks of higher educators can do to prevent what is afoot. But what they should be doing is thinking and acting strategically to engage the entire re-making of the universe of post-secondary education. Instead they are dallying, toying with it, offering sample MOOC-type courses. As if the global flood could be forestalled by the digging of ponds.

Here’s some very interesting data from one university that has been experimenting, neatly summarized by someone who has been carefully tracking the discussion.

And by the way: I am by no means uncritical of the likely impacts of MOOCs on higher ed, though they will lead to huge benefits for those who would otherwise get none of it – among other things. But the economics of AI-delivered education are unstoppable and global. The combination of ridiculous inflation in the cost of U.S. colleges, and the move of the UK to a fee-based system, will ensure their swift triumph in the Anglo-American world.

While I am at it – as I have asked before – when does USAID or some similar agency (or the Gates Foundation?) launch a full free undergraduate degree program – initially for Africa and other parts of the world? Of course, the moment it does the market for over-priced U.S. degrees will collapse.

Um, innovation is afoot . . . .And guess what, it’s disruptive. Hugely so.

Donald Clark Plan B: Report on 6 MOOCs turns up 10 surprises.

Of Time and Management – and Women

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Nigel Cameron

Sheryl Sandberg at the World Economic Forum (Wikipedia)

As the “Can we have it all?” discussion moves on to “Lean in,” Yahoo recalls its homeworkers, Europe stresses over board quotas, and – just today – Mary Louise Kelly, NPR’s former Pentagon correspondent (and fellow alum of Emmanuel College, Cambridge) tells why she chose to lean out . . .; my question is, what’s the question?

That is to say, when an issue proves intractable, it is generally the case that the question’s wrong, or if not wrong that it’s not the best one to be asking. Re-frame the question and the logs unjam. (Note to self: my new website re-framing.com needs to be activated.)

As to the issue of women’s gaining top roles in management and government, I am a medium-term optimist. Indeed, I am not sure if optimism is the word. I anticipate a tectonic shift, in which women come to dominate the ranks of senior managers and leaders in something of a mirror image of the patriarchy of the 1950s. Seems to me that huge shifts in our society and the innovative nature of our businesses will rapidly bring to the fore managers and leaders with high capacities to engage change and to bridge ideas and people. While there are men who excel at both (and, no doubt, women who do not), it’s obvious that of the current crop of males and females one of these human halves wins hands down. I am not here today to account or philosophize. Merely to note.

That having been said, how to get there – and catalyze the process? In a helpful WSJ column, start-up CEO Jody Greenstone Miller seeks to re-frame the discussion. It is not, she claims, that women lack the drive to “lean in” – it is that they do not like the assumptions of the 24-hour executive culture in which “60-plus hours a week” is the norm into which they are being asked to lean. How organizations break down tasks, how they assess their people, how they rate quality over against quantity – these are not (my phrase) laws of nature; they are assumptions of corporate leaders and the cultures they help shape.

In fact, one of the many ironies of the digital revolution to date has been the degree to which communications capacities have been vastly improved and, at the same time, led to the very opposite of better control over time, distance, and availability. The deep naivety that leads so many grown persons to grasp their smartphones and interrupt family dinners, dates, business social occasions, driving – and no doubt showers and yardwork – as if this is somehow a superior way of living and working is risible. (See this embarrassingly candid tirade against Piers Morgan by his wife: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/life-in-a-goldfish-bowl–im-tired-of-my-husbands-tweet-nothings-20130130-2dl3t.html)

Point is: These technologies are enabling much more sophisticated work patterns, just as innovation requires them and the social changes that are finally offering women other than token roles in executive leadership demand them. While most of them would deny it absolutely, the phalanx of traditionalists who dominate the corporate world remain the legatees of an approach to leadership and management which we might broadly characterize as Fordist and which (while it was brilliant and indeed innovative in its day) is an increasingly deadly drag on efficiency and effectiveness in the emerging industries and society of C21.

I have written before of the competitive advantage being squandered by company after company as they ignore women applicants (and social media) with drunken abandon. I’ve argued it has been a tactical blunder to frame this question as one of equity (rather than advantage), which is one reason I am no enthusiast for quota solutions (though some other interventions such as requiring more board turnover work to everyone’s advantage). https://futureofbiz.org/2012/07/07/the-two-most-stunning-facts-about-american-business/

Point here is: Time and communications management, together with the project-focused approach that fits innovative companies and products and other natural shifts, are slowly moving us in a direction better suited to women, innovation, and also (once they start to get it) men.

Jody Greenstone Miller:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324678604578342641640982224.html?mod=wsj_share_tweet

Mary Louise Kelly: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/03/11/when-the-sheryl-sandberg-approach-fails.html

The MOOC Scoop: Innovation and the Naive

Posted on February 22, 2013 by Nigel Cameron

MOOCs, Innovation, and the Naïve

A thoughtful piece by Clayton Christenson and Michael Horn was challenged this morning on Twitter by John Hagel @jhagel: “Sorry, Clay, we’re thinking much too narrowly abt MOOCs as disruptive force – is it really just-in-time mini-courses?” That may not be a fair way to characterize their position (see the link below). But it surely notes the wide-scale naivety of most of the movers in the MOOC game. This material is fissile. Read to blow in a global chain-reaction.

[My earlier discussion:https://futureofbiz.org/2012/12/20/yes-we-really-do-need-mooc-state-level-and-global/ ]

It has long been clear that online education would become transformative. It has just taken longer than anyone might reasonably have expected. There are many reasons, ranging from broadband speeds to the clannishness of the academy and its accreditation systems to the rather simple fact that thinking analogically (out of the box, for those who prefer to speak in cliches) is hard. Smart people find it especially challenging. Their smartness equips them quite brilliantly to avoid the need for it. You will see this principle in action (it needs a name) everywhere from the Fortune 500 C Suites where no-one needs to take social media seriously (or, for that matter, women execs) to Washington, DC, where most of the time some of the shrewdest of men (and some women) are looking in their rear-view mirror.

Back to MOOCs. There has been “distance education” for over 100 years (begun back in the heyday of the USPS), and even now mainstream higher ed sees that as the template for what the internet can deliver. Along the way there have been wondrous and complex efforts to duplicate the environment of the classroom online – complete with cameras in a real room and all the accoutrements of a campus at a distance.

Finally, the efforts of one or two major schools and a handful of renegade faculty have led to the offering of “massive” courses (yes, gaming is the model here along with the silly lingo) and the daring principle of “open” access (pioneered in the UK by the Open University, but anathema to the due-process calculus of American schools and their peer accreditors). A famous early experiment, when using rather primitive email-based methods an academic offered a course (was it in Byzantine history?) and recruited hundreds of applicants, led nowhere. Suddenly, catchup.

And as elite schools play around by offering a course here and there, and entrepreneurs join them – in search, as is proper in even the digital world, of a business model – we now confront a move by a whole tranche of midlevel colleges to use the MOOC technology to offer sampler courses in their traditional programs. I could not avoid the broadest of smiles as I read the report. They seem genuinely to believe that an add-on course or two will help with recruitment. They seem to have absolutely no idea that they are playing not so much with fire as with a nuclear chain reaction. However exactly this comes about (I offer some suggestions below), the MOOC is set to devastate western higher education as we know it. Even in the UK a similar grassroots effort is now underway, with the British Library as a partner.

Here are some trajectories that, jointly or severally, are set to lay waste what for generations has been “higher education” in the United States and elsewhere.

· I have argued elsewhere that the United States itself (perhaps through USAID) or one or more of our major foundations should very rapidly develop a global MOOC-based university offering full undergraduate and graduate degrees. My view is that such an initiative would offer the west a major strategic advantage vis-à-vis other contenders for global influence, and could initially take advantage of widespread knowledge of English (and, then, French, Spanish, Portuguese) in the developing world (Africa in particular). If this is done, there will immediately be blowback since the nature of the MOOC is that there is essentially no marginal cost for one more student, and the offering is accessible internet-wide. That is to say, these offerings would sweep the United States also.

· A second salient into the future may emerge from initiatives taken by individual states or chambers of commerce or other entities with credibility and resources intent on improving the quality and flow of college-educated students and aware of the increasingly prohibitive cost, to states and individuals, of the standard approach. Let’s say state A takes an initiative and plows money into it while closing state university campuses to pay the bill. Again, the project will not be containable within the state. The key would be a first mover with the credibility to challenge the supremacy of the peer-accreditation system. I am actually a fan of that system (versus the European statist option), but it has institutionalized establishment control. We may expect other players to join the regional accreditors in standard-setting. Since the cost to the user will be zero, the control that accreditors have exercised through federal recognition of their decisions for student aid purposes will become moot.

The point is clear. Once a degree-granting MOOC is up and running, its impact will be viral, across the length and breadth of the internet. It will very rapidly destroy the economic model that sustains our current higher education system. Those colleges presently toying with offering sample courses in this subject and that had better look to their laurels. Many of them will not be around in 10 years’ time, and some I suspect in five. Some turkeys now veritably preparing for Christmas, while others believe it will never come.

I am not saying that this is all going to be to the good. But some facts seem clear and it helps us not at all to pretend otherwise:

MOOC economics – no marginal student cost – will lead to huge global institutions as well as niche efforts with base funding from foundations, governments, religious institutions, business leaders, in a vast free-for-all.
New, global accreditation mechanisms, probably competing with one another, will emerge.
There will be carnage among the current midstream state and private institutions without the branding and/or endowment to buck the supply and demand curves.
Huge new opportunities will be opened worldwide to hundreds of millions who currently are excluded; a dramatic driver of global innovation and development.
The plain initial focus on tech subjects and others readily susceptible of AI teaching and grading will give place to a wider curriculum as AIs rapidly improve their capacities.
The human/social dimension of these enterprises will mesh with exponential developments in social media.

Beyond the Buzz, Where Are MOOCs Really Going? | Wired Opinion | Wired.com.

If MOOCs are the answer, what is the question? (hastac.org)
Mentored MOOCs for Global Learning? (rebeccafrostdavis.wordpress.com)
UW-Madison to offer free public online courses starting in fall (jsonline.com)
MOOCs : A pivotal development in higher education – or a complete miss? (voxxi.com)
British MOOC Provider Expands; Prime Minister Promotes It in India (insidehighered.com)
Coursera and edX add universities and hope to expand global reach (insidehighered.com)

Yes, we really do need MOOCs – state-level and global

Posted on December 20, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

When the venerable Economist magazine decides to take up a theme, you know it has arrived. Now MOOCs.

I shall come back to this, again and again. But for now, three things we need to note.

1. MOOC-based disruption is coming, whether we (or should I say the higher ed establishment, for-profit and mainstream) like it for not. By and large, “we” do not, and we have made that plain by covering our heads with a blanket hoping it will go away. My estimate: within 10 years, 50% disruption of higher ed in the west. Akin to the impact of digital disruption on publishing in the past ten years.

2. The curious way in which initial efforts have been rolling out – from Stanford and MIT, for example, directly and indirectly – is an important talking point. Institutions with little fear of oblivion dare to experiment, if slowly. Institutions facing the firing squad – like the mid-level state universities and generic liberal arts colleges – are busy focusing on faculty meetings and tenure and the chatter of a world about to be hit by a stray asteroid.

3. Two terrific opportunities to be seized.

(a) Innovative states can immediately (as in, within 12 months) develop MOOC/Khan academy models to overlay and supplant the existing systems.

(b) The United States, through USAID or another agency, can develop a global (initially English-language) university offering full undergraduate programs free of charge and without prerequisites. The former has a chance of saving American education, and thereby the American future. The latter of vastly extending our influence, especially and initially in Africa where English is widely accessible. But moves into a range of languages will soon be AI-based. This will finally be more significant for U.S. global influence in C21 than another dozen carrier groups. I do not exaggerate.

So, let’s get moving in 2013.

Free education: Learning new lessons | The Economist.

Brands will shape Global Labor Standards: Apple-Foxconn Company

Posted on October 30, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Tim Cook, Apple (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When Apple signed on to Fair Labor I wrote a column in which suggested that the logic of their decision – a big shift in approach post-Jobs – would be to bring about alignment between western and Chinese labor standards. Nothing that has happened since has changed my view. Not that this will happen overnight, of course. But it’s the result of several potent forces that are shaping, not least, this company’s effort: branding and global communications. Whereas these forces twisted the unwilling arm of Nike what seems a long time ago, the superlative quality of the Apple brand and the explosion of social media are together pouring gas on the flames.

While it has been traditional to label western brand efforts to ensure decent manufacture conditions for their products as “corporate social responsibility,” the logic of the Apple case demonstrates that it is naive to see CSR as an adjunct effort, or a marketing ploy, or as anything other than central to value. It’s a case where the values-value connection (another theme of mine) is especially glaring.

The harrowing case of the Foxconn worker with severe brain damage, whose family is now going to the Chinese courts to seek to maintain full company support of their son, drives the point neatly (if tragically) home. This man is, as all can see, a de facto Apple employee, whose conditions of service are so far removed from those of the guys at HQ as to be hard to compare. As his family struggles to ensure that he has long-term care after an undenied industrial injury, they have a bullhorn to the world, and that includes the fashionistas for whom the latest Apple gadget is a must, and who have helped drive up its astronomical share price and stack up a mountain of dollars that could buy Facebook twice over for cash (or buy everyone on the planet a half-decent bottle of wine). As the technological gap, and the design gap, between Apple products and those of its rivals narrow, the brand magic is going to be even more key – and therefore even more exposed.

It was a smart move for Tim Cook to jump into Fair Labor, and then arm-twist Foxconn into big wage increases. It would be even smarter for them to leapfrog the moral/CSR competition and drive excellence in Chinese manufacturing and labor practice without needing to be pressured further.

http://bclc.uschamber.com/blog/2012-02-03/csr-and-burden-outsourcing-apple-opens-door

Foxconn goes to court over severely injured worker | Business Tech – CNET News.

To the Bankers of Sibos: Integrate and Innovate from the Board down

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Credit: bsterling

The world’s global financial community’s annual bankers’ “Davos” should be a time for urgent reflection and remediation for our financial institutions.

It’s time for high-level integration for innovation – and that begins with the Board and the C-Suite of this very traditional set of institutions at a time of explosive disruption. They have a long way to go.

“The past,” as novelist L.P Hartley famously wrote, “is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” When it comes to the future, we ain’t seen nothing yet. The pace of change is picking up very fast, and institutions – and whole industries – unable to keep up are finding themselves on the wrong side of history.

Let’s be candid. Banking has never been everyone’s favorite industry. Hardly a customer has had a consistently happy experience on the retail end. And the events of 2008 have left a sour taste that may last a generation – like the losses that millions of citizens have accrued as a result. “Too big to fail” sticks in the craw of Americans of left and right – and makes capitalism, markets, risk, look ridiculous. It takes a lot to make Big Oil look good. And one way or another, the business-as-usual revolving door relationship between Wall Street and the Treasury/supervisory agencies and the Hill and the While House (donors . . .) is tottering. It may survive an election cycle or two. Not more.

So what’s ahead for the bankers? They are sailing into a perfect storm.

First, three potent waves they need to ride. If they don’t, can’t, won’t, then all the clever innovation ideas on the planet will not help them.

1. Service. Banking has to rebuild its brand from the ground up as a “service” industry that is actually seen and experienced as a service. Example: GEICO. Insurance is boring and costly. GEICO customers love their company. I called them the other day to sort out a problem, looked forward to it, enjoyed the experience, and am smiling as I recall it. Banking must be seen to be re-inventing itself as a service.

2. Shared. While “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) has now been almost universally adopted as an element in corporate strategy, by banks like everyone else, it continues to be handled by most players as an adjunct exercise. Michael Porter‘s notorious prognosis that “shared value” is properly the only source of value, incorporating the traditional bottom line and the “CSR” extra, has been treated with derision in private and sometimes in public. Banking must be seen as a leader in building shared value.

3. Social. “Social media” remains an outlier in most mainstream businesses, and barely registers in banking. Not only is social vital to customer service and marketing; more fundamentally it is emerging as the driver of innovation and the continuing renewal of corporate culture – which, as we know, is the cause of all competitive advantage and value creation. Banking must be seen to take the lead in social engagement.

Second, two (of many) special challenges coming their way.

4. Retail. Retail banking is ripe for dramatic innovation. It is almost entirely mechanical, and the perfect subject for machine intelligence. While we debate separating retail from banks’ investment operations, the former is peeling off in its own. The launch in the past few weeks of the Wal-Mart/American Express Bluebird debit-card based banking system is the first major shock. Look at the fee structure (to the consumer, there are none at all), the utter convenience (I opened an account online in literally 3 minutes), the services (huge range and they will be added). Traditional retail banking is ripe for collapse.

5. New currencies. This is more esoteric, and for another post, but from barter to Bitcoin the consumer need for standard money-based transactions has begun to shift. Just begun.

Third: What banking needs in the midst of all this and more is the skill-set it has so far shown it lacks above all else: flexibility, imagination, the capacity to turn on a dime, all those smarts that are distinguishing both New Economy successes and traditional organizations demonstrating themselves capable of re-invention. The core enabling capacity lies in a combination of board governance and executive leadership, and, specifically:

6. Diversity across generations, genders, perspectives, and disciplines. I discussed this in respect of gender diversity and engagement in social media in an earlier post – https://futureofbiz.org/2012/07/07/the-two-most-stunning-facts-about-american-business/

We know the problem, but to give an example: in a recent study American Banker found that of 9 large financial institutions operating in California 8 had boards that were at leas 80% white and 80% male. http://www.americanbanker.com/bankthink/board-diversity-greenlining-1039171-1.html

It’s unfortunate, to my mind, that gender diversity issue has been widely perceived as an issue of equity. It’s about value. And whereas in times of stasis a non-diverse board may have worked very well, in times of revolutionary change is represents the voluntary addition of a huge and indefensible element of risk to every decision. Boards and C-Suites need to represent diverse perspectives of all kinds. Only thus will these institutions designed to thrive in an entirely different environment have an opportunity to flourish a second time around in a dramatically different and ever-changing marketplace.

Otherwise, as Kodak and other failed and failing once-great companies like RIM are constantly reminding us, the market is unforgiving. Technology and other emergent forces are toppling the very assumptions that made old-style organizations successful. The logic of service, shared value, social media, and radical diversity at the top level, is finally the logic of the market.

My take? The next decade will see the disruption of financial services on a scale comparable with what has happened to print publishing in the last one. There is everything to play for. But thanks to Moore’s Law and globalization and other forces on the loose in C21, the clock is speeding uo all the time.

Sibos – Sibos – Osaka, 29 Oct – 1 Nov 2012.

Sibos conference of global financiers opens in Osaka (english.kyodonews.jp)

Death and Tech: Our failure to manage driving and devices

Posted on July 24, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

We really, really aren’t good with risk. Who recently pointed out that more Americans were killed last year by furniture in their homes than terrorism? And it was in the august British Medical Journal, of all places, that I read recently that there is no clear evidence that wearing a cycling helmet saves lives. And so to the roads, and technology . . . .

The number of fatalities on America’s roads has begun to rise, and it’s plain that thousands of deaths and many thousands of injuries are attributable to one cause: the cellphone. The weak generic category “distracted driving” is entirely unhelpful. Of course eating fries and drinking iced tea, like turning on the radio, can distract. Nothing, nothing distracts like a device, whether used for texting, tweeting, or speaking; handheld, or handsfree.

The intrusive commingling of us and our machines has found its most difficult entry into our everyday lives at this simple point. And while we have also proved highly ineffective at regulating cellphone social conduct, no-one dies because of cell-yell in a Starbucks or atrocious manners at table (though people do die all the time crossing railroad tracks with phones glued to their ears; a tragic end, but essentially death by moron).

Meanwhile, thousands of bodies are being mangled on our roads. Think of a massacre of 100 men, women, and children; then another the next week; then another every week; and you will get the idea. It is probably many more.

3 quick points:

1. We have failed as a community to address this issue, and for various reasons the checks and balances of the law have not solved our problem (multi-billion dollar settlements against providers, or manufacturers, along the lines of tobacco and asbestos would resolve the issue overnight; they may yet).

2. The evidence suggests that “handheld” bans that permit “handsfree” use – and are the legislation of choice at the moment – are a trick. Some studies suggest handsfree may actually be more dangerous, since we are less aware that our focus is in a conversation, not the car, than if we had to hold the item as a reminder. Certainly it seems to be no safer. It offers the specially dangerous thing, the illusion of safety, which in fact exacerbates the risk. People often have lengthy “legal” handsfree conversations for business and personal reasons and consider this normal daily activity.

3. One notable Australian study suggests that cellphone use while driving is exactly as dangerous as alcohol use; that is, that DUI is the same whether the influence is wine or a legal handsfree conversation. Yet we demonize “drunk drivers” with draconian penalties; handsfree chitchat is almost a required activity of moms in suburban minivans. (This is perhaps the single most ridiculous example of the illusions of “science-driven” policy, as I recently pointed out in discussion with a relevant expert at the NIH; he had read the Aussie document and had no defense to my argument.)

We all know what needs to be done. Cut the handsfree/handheld illusory distinction. Up the penalties. Or just make driving under the influence legal. Your choice.

No Evidence That Cell Phone Bans Are Effective, Report Shows – ABC News.

via Death and Tech: Our failure to manage driving and devices.

The C-Suite: Social-free Zone – but IBM’s report says things are cool

Posted on July 23, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

IBM’s Watson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

IBM‘s latest report on global CEOs – Leading Through Connections – makes fascinating reading and I commend it to you in extenso. It is packed with data and based on interviews with many hundreds of the top corporate (and some other) leaders.

But I have a problem. I just don’t find it very convincing. The answers are too good, too positive, too forward-looking. And on�the core issue of “leading through connections,” social, while the nostrums are as expected the evidence (as we know separately; see various earlier blogs here and much elsewhere) is that hardly any top CEOs (or CIOs! hard though that is to believe) are engaged with social at all. In fact, the evidence suggests that the Fortune 500 C-Suite is largely a social-free zone.�

My problem is that knowing this distracting fact undermines my confidence in the generally smooth prose of the report at large.

Read it, and read the social-usage evidence, and try to make sense of a situation that looks so good from the outside (or, should I say, from the inside; it’s the CEOs themselves who shaped the data in this document).