Winning by Sharing

The intelligent player realises the team is the real star

Are some football managers experts in collaboration?

I love football. I love Arsenal lead by the enigmatic, wily Frenchman Arsene Wenger, who said many years ago, "The intelligent player realises the team is the real star". And those of you who follow football around the world know that despite a long trophy drought, most football fans, commentators and pundits agree that Arsenal plays the most attractive form of football in the English Premier League. In fact, very much on par with with Barcelona, who tend to buy a lot of Arsenal players.

Now there's some research to support this pearl of wisdom but first some background.

One of the key discoveries so far of Complexity Theory is that co-operative processes in general seem far more likely to survive than isolated, rampantly selfish entities. This moves successful evolution away from the original 'principle of natural selection' to a more holistic, symbiotic view of adaptability, wherein survival is a group or team effort.

Scientific American recently published research suggesting there is a Surprising Problem with Too Much Talent.

Extract:

"Researchers looked at three sports: basketball, soccer, and baseball. In each sport, they calculated both the percentage of top talent on each team and the teams’ success over several years. For both basketball and soccer, they found that top talent did in fact predict team success, but only up to a point. Furthermore, there was not simply a point of diminishing returns with respect to top talent, there was in fact a cost. Basketball and soccer teams with the greatest proportion of elite athletes performed worse than those with more moderate proportions of top level players.

Why is too much talent a bad thing? Think teamwork. In many endeavours, success requires collaborative, cooperative work towards a goal that is beyond the capability of any one individual."

The most fascinating insight is how baseball is one game where too much talent is not a problem as it does not rely on nearly as much team cooperation because it's a game where fundamentally of one player against a whole team (not unlike cricket). Read the whole thing.

If you think about it, with hindsight our social history is almost embarrassingly about collective effort, rather than individual triumph. If you're an Arsenal fan you'll know that we often say that "Arsene knows". His nickname has been 'The Professor' in the past, even though he makes the most inexplicable, often infuriating decisions about the team and his players. Has he been ahead of the game all this time? Is doing better with less the next big thing in collaboration?

Are you an Explorer or a Map Maker?

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Shameless self-promotion.  LinkedIn hit the 100 million member mark in March 2011 and CEO Reid Hoffman sent a personal email to the first 100,000 joiners suggesting that this group laid the foundations for its exponential growth several tears later, the super connectors who heavily influence the success or failure of the network.  I was joiner number 5,471. 

Those early days in social media were a lot of fun but an interesting mathematician called G.H. Hardy once said: “When the map-makers arrive, you know the real explorers have already moved on”.

Are you an explorer or a map maker?

 

Some learnings on community outreach and the value of authenticity

I’ve previously written about some community outreach work we conducted on behalf of Mornflake, a 300 year old British cereal producer.  We devised and managed a UGC video competition to support the launch of its new products by adopting a highly innovative approach to community outreach to find a wide variety of video creators.

We partnered with a group of independent thinkers based in Lithuania, Minciu Sodas  led by Andrius Kulikauskas.  This network spans many continents and countries.  For a modest fee Minciu Sodas harnessed the individuals in its network to;

1. Work openly using public wikis to collaborate and create seeding content
2. Research and catalogue over 500 online communities of  interest
3. Approach and engage those communities in an authentic way
4. Document the outcomes and learning from our experiences

To this end we have published the findings of this work in the hope that other community managers can learn from and build upon this very unique approach to community outreach.  The key coordinates are:

1.    List of 500 UK online communities with some data on member stats
2.    A full report on how we did this, the benefits, outcomes and some of the downsides

I’ve been working in the online community space since 2001.  In that time, I’ve never seen such a successful approach to seeding and community outreach. Nor have I seen a report as comprehensive as this.  The social web is a crowded place and even well known brands with big budgets underestimate the effort and skill required to achieve high levels of participation.   

A big UK household brand, Oxo, commissioned a video competition around the same time as Mornflake’s where its winning entries were aired on TV during the X-Factor finals.  Mornflake’s campaign generated more videos in less time, and almost certainly at less cost.  This is the value of authenticity.

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Is your network black or white?

Image via Wikipedia

"Mapped out on the screen, the story became clear: The medical community was actually divided into two sub-networks split apparently by ethnicity, with one sub-network dominated by physicians with mostly Asian names and the other with mostly European names.

Connecting the two, like a spider suspended on a thread between two webs, was the dot for Physician No. 184 - a doctor the company's marketing department and salespeople barely knew".  Interesting study on the value of social networks and why Super Connectors

are so important.

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Engaging the customer using social media

Big thank you to my friend and colleague Anna Pollock for this insightful talk at Unicom's conference on Engaging the Customer: getting it right with social media.

Engaging the Customer with Social Media

View more OpenOffice presentations from Anna Pollock.

I particularly like slides 36-39.  What do these people have in common?  Just brilliant.

Network leadership showing us the way?

Last year, a well known business network offered to buy Ecademy (note: I am a shareholder of Ecademy). It was a reasonable offer but the manner of the acquisition just didn't sit right with Ecademy's founder, Penny Power.  The offer had caveats, the key one being that Ecademy URLs point to the acquirer's home page until such time all its members are 'integrated' (transferred, sucked in, hoovered up) after which Ecademy is switched off.

Penny Power refused to sanction the wholesale destruction of a community she's nurtured for 11 years.  This kind of schizoid thinking is not a good sign for the members of the interested party, which number millions nor indeed for the future of its business.  Let me explain what happens when you 'just buy lists'.

A few years ago eBay bought Skype for $2.8 billion.  There was I thinking eBay would integrate Skype to add another dimension (level of trust) to the buying experience or maybe even enable people to sell services as well as products.  No.  It turns out eBay just thought 5% of their equity was worth 100 million email addresses to promote their service to.  Three years later eBay had to write down a loss of almost $2b (two thirds).  This has all the hallmarks of MBA Authoritarian mentality - rape, pillage plunder, the consequences of which untold millions around the world are suffering from.

Here's a little message for you guys (and you know who you are);

"What counts is not only what leaders do and how they do it, but the inner place from which they operate"  C O Scharmer

.....or even better "look and learn" from Penny Power's example of how to lead.

Why women have ruined the world

An article published this week in Management Issues calls for female leadership arguing that perhaps the testosterone male approach (that is; rape, pillage, plunder) may not be the kind of leadership we need in the 21st century. "The dominance of a male, macho, risk-taking business culture is at the heart of the world's economic woes – and knee-jerk rescue plans may be making things even worse".

It's prompted me to reproduce a post I wrote a few years ago derived from the uncompromising news produced by The Yellow Times which was forced off the web by the Republican war machine prior to US/UK invasion of Iraq. Paul Harris, a Canadian freelance journalist wrote an article called Why women have ruined the world.  In it he says;

"It has been my experience over a half century, most of that alive, that women tend to be much better people than men: more honest, more loyal, more caring, more thoughtful, more trustworthy, and much less dangerous. But women are to blame for the state of the world because they have utterly failed to take charge of it". He goes on to say;

"I am proposing a new world order - not that crap that George Bush the Elder was always talking about or even the biblical stuff that believers are always trying to force on others. I mean something real, something substantive; something designed to fix the mess we're in. I am proposing a political movement whose sole purpose is to convince all the nations of the world to change their laws so that only women can hold political office."

The article ends with;

"Think this is an idiotic notion? Then think on this: If men don't run things, there is no Hitler. There is no Mussolini. There is no Napoleon. There is no Hirohito. There is no Attila. There is no Genghis Khan. There is no Inquisition. There are no Crusades. There is no Robert Mugabe. There is no Ariel Sharon. There is no Stalin. There is no George Bush; Wouldn't that be a safer and happier world?"

I happen to agree with him.

When men are in power, the difference between rape and seduction is only a question of salesmanship. They exercise power in a manner that is actually weakness disguised as strength.

In general, my experience of participating in online communities and social networks in the past few years is that despite their male dominance (in their early stages of development) the posture, attitude and expression of these communities are predominantly female. By this I mean people are genuinely welcoming, offer unsolicited benevolence, guidance and assistance and freely give the most valuable thing that anyone can give; their time. This isn't normal for most of our male dominated organisations and institutions. 

Strong & Connected

Research to be undertaken on platforms for enabling group/team based collaboration as exemplified by ki work.

University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has published its Key transformative research focus on four main areas: Virtual organizations for distributed communities;  high-performance computing; data, visualization, and interaction; and education and workforce development.

NSF article goes onto describe....

PRAC is another smaller-scale program that provides money for people to travel and develop their collaborations. So you might say that's money to develop virtual organizations.

Signs of fractional work continue to emerge.

Corporate & Confused

Twitscoop - Search twitter, see what's hot right now.  Corporate & Confused are major themes of conversation in Twitter.  Random coincidence or causal links?

Nokia et al. Ignore iPhone at your peril?

A friend of mine polled some of her friends last week to comment on the statement: "If you don't write applications for iPhone, then you might as well count your business obsolete".  My response;

Having completed a couple of projects in the social media space recently, I detect a trend very much in favour of Apple.  Remember that big ad/new media agencies are the key influencers of big brands, and they're all advising/pushing iPhone.  I know of one global brand who's core revenue comes from business users (with Blackberries), and they're doing iPhone first.  It can't be beaten as a truly useful mobile internet experience. 

The social trend in the mobile space cannot be underestimated, particularly iPhone's support for current favourites; Twitter, Facebook, MySpace.  Mobile users are three times more populous than internet users (3.3bn versus 1.3bn), iPhone's potential is considerable because of the enriching experience it offers - it's also perceived as very cool, a fact that cannot be ignored in a world of consumerism and the effectiveness of the manufacture of desire.   There's been a low intensity 'meme' knocking around for a few years now that goes something like this;

Why can't big business give their employees applications and devices that enrich their experience rather than dull, clunky applications - 2 years ago at Aviva they were still using green screen mainframe technology to book rooms.   This can't go on, and Generation Y talent entering the workforce are far more likley to work for companies that offer digital/application experiences they're used to.  There is a great deal of evidence to support this.

Probably all the current apps for the iPhone have 'been done' on Symbian.  Apple just makes it easier.  It is I think that simple.  A VC fund has just been launched - $100m to fund iPhone applications.  There are a lot of money men who want to be associated with iPhone's success. My guess is this doesn't happen often in the Blackberry world.