Mapping Strategy

Rodney King Writ Large

Interesting short article on a new aggregating layer emerging in the media value chain. Sites like NowPublic and YouWitnessNews are taking advantage of the radical deputization of citizen reporters as cell phone technology has taken off. As with blogs however, the revolution that creates new possibilities also creates lots of trash that must be sifted. I particularly liked this characterization by NowPublic's CEO, Leonard Brody:

"Telling someone they are going to be a citizen journalist is like telling them they are going to be a citizen dentist; it requires training and the average person just can't do it."

Not sure I entirely agree with that. One might have said the same thing about most information professions at some point in history only to be proven wrong as technology, tools, awareness and skill levels advanced. In one sense, this is not all that big a leap from the blogosphere except for the imprimatur of professional news organization and the attempt to screen for quality. Not an enviable task. If you're in Brody's pioneering position, you get to see all the dreck up close.

Whither China?

Wide-ranging, informative article on Mao's legacy, speculating on a range of futures for China.

Every society changes from one day to the next. But the economic and social transformation in China, especially since the beginning of the reform era in December 1978, has been particularly startling. Mao regimented the Chinese people, oppressed them, clothed them in totalitarian garb, and denied them their individuality. Today, they may not be free, but they are assertive, dynamic, and sassy. A mall-shopping, Internet-connected, trend-crazy people, they are remaking their country at breakneck speed. Deprived for decades, they do not only want more, they want everything.

Change of this sort is inherently destabilizing, especially in a one-party state. Social unrest, writes Samuel Huntington, becomes especially dangerous when political institutions fail to keep up with the forces unleashed by economic change. That is the dilemma of the Chinese Communist party, which, even as it has sponsored uninterrupted economic progress, has itself changed remarkably little from Mao’s days, and still stands in the way of meaningful political reformation.

As Tocqueville observed, “steadily increasing prosperity” does not tranquilize citizens; on the contrary, it promotes “a spirit of unrest.” [emphasis added]

... It would be difficult to underestimate the role played by wireless communications and the Internet in this phenomenon. Societies change—or reach a “tipping point,” to use the contemporary term—when enough people begin to think simultaneously in a new way. These days, Chinese thoughts and emotions travel through optical fiber at the speed of light—there are 123 million “netizens” in China, and 34 million of them are bloggers—and the Chinese are holding nationwide conversations for the first time in their history. Ideas—like, for instance, the idea of representative government—start out small and spread rapidly via countless chatrooms and online forums...

...so far, China has been more successful than any other country in regulating its Internet community; but this is a battle in which it will never be able to claim final victory... Today, the regime survives because no single cause has united the Chinese people and impelled them to march en masse to Tiananmen Square.

Focus on Failure - Misinterpreting the Blogosphere

We note several high-profile critiques recently of blogging and the 'blogosphere', including this one in The Financial Times and this one in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required). Both articles cite recent figures from Technorati putting the number of blogs in the vicinity of 30 million and still growing at a rapid rate. Previous surveys (e.g., from friend and fellow blogger and executive Jeffrey Henning) also put the number in the tens of millions. What's at issue here is what to make of it all. Daniel Henninger writes in the WSJ:

...it looks to me as if the world of blogs may be filling up with people who for the previous 200 millennia of human existence kept their weird thoughts more or less to themselves. Now, they don't have to. They've got the Web. Now they can share...

The human species has spent several hundred thousand years sorting through which emotions and marginal neuroses to keep under control and which to release. Now, with a keyboard, people overnight are "free" to unburden and unhinge themselves continuously and exponentially...

The power of the Web is obvious and undeniable. We diminish it at our peril. But what if the most potent social effect to spread outward from the Internet turns out to be disinhibition, the breaking down of personal restraints and the endless elevation of oneself? It may be already.

Taking an even dimmer, more partisan view (though interestingly, from a political perch opposite to Henninger's) Trevor Butterworth writes sarcastically and condescendingly in the FT:

...blogging would have been little more than a recipe for even more internet tedium if it had not been seized upon in the US as a direct threat to the mainstream media...
...in 2004, blogging had its Battleship Potemkin moment, when swarms of partisan bloggers rose up to sink CBS’s iron-jawed leviathan Dan Rather for peddling supposedly fake memos about Bush’s national guard service.

This seemed to prove one of blogging’s biggest selling points - that the collective intelligence of the media’s audience was greater than the collective intelligence of any news programme or newspaper. It also showed that blogging was irrepressible - that power was shifting from the gatekeepers of the traditional media to a more open, fluid information society...

But as with any revolution, we must ask whether we are being sold a naked emperor. Is blogging really an information revolution? Is it about to drive the mainstream news media into oblivion? Or is it just another crock of virtual gold - a meretricious equivalent of all those noisy internet start-ups that were going to build a brave “new economy” a few years ago?

Shouldn’t we just be a tiny bit sceptical of another information revolution following on so fast from the last one - especially as this time round no one is even pretending to be getting rich? Isn’t the problem of the media right now that we barely have time to read a newspaper, let alone traverse the thoughts of a million bloggers?

The purpose of this post is not to rehash all of those arguments but to draw two recent historical analogies and let readers form their own conclusions. (Side note: blogger 'Chester' has a useful critique of the Butterworth piece here.)

Analogy number one is the desktop publishing phenomenon. Define and date it any way you like, but around the time I got my first 'real' computer (a Mac, in 1984 - not counting my dad's TRS-80 color computer with which I occasionally fiddled) it seemed that almost overnight everyone was in thrall to their ability to print... stuff. On a college campus at the time, I was confronted with fliers, posters and invitations in clashing fonts, screaming for attention, making one pine for the days of carbon paper and hand stencils.

Finding 'bad' examples of how to use one's graphics-enabled computer and printer was easy.

Sudden technological empowerment had created a do-it-yourself movement whose participants didn't know what they didn't know. The higher arts of graphic design and communication were thrown overboard before anyone appreciated their usefulness. To make an analogy on top of an analogy, they were like lepers with power tools, cutting off digits without knowing it.

A critic might easily have concluded in the mid/late 1980s that the disciplines of 'good' print output had been permanently washed away in a tide of amateurish dreck. They would have been wrong. An initial period of chaotic experimentation led to better tools, better awareness of production values and ultimately much better end product (in this case, printed material). It is still possible to create badly designed hard copy, but no longer necessary (or excusable). Anyone extrapolating from the most democratic and undisciplined period in the evolution of desktop publishing has been proven not just wrong, but dead wrong.

So too with the World Wide Web ten years later. I was involved in scenario planning workshops on the subject at the time. It was commonplace for participants in those workshops, as well as early pundits (plus some with a strong agenda, e.g. AOL) to ask "where's the beef?" Where, they would ask (and not without justification) were the compelling commercial applications, the directory services, the high graphic production values, the development tools, the security, the payment systems, the multimedia, the governance mechanisms, the eyeballs, the hits, the intellectual property protections, the higher-level standards, the public awareness, the last-mile connections and most of all the order? Where was the bandwidth, the ISP competition, and the international participation? And (years later - too many years in some cases): where were the business models to justify significant investment? All of the critiques were correct in the narrow, proximate sense. They were utterly wrong in calling the web revolution an inadequate fad.

The point? During the hyper-growth phase of virtually any technologically enabled, democratizing phenomenon it is easy (and tempting) to find and extrapolate from the really bad, distasteful, stupid, even dangerous examples. Pornography. Scams. Dreck. And juvenile use of the medium by... juveniles (as well as adults posing as same).

Such simplistic prognostications are right in a narrow sense and utterly blind in another. Right about the individual examples. Wrong about how much the examples are indicative of the medium itself, as opposed to the people initially (and most visibly) empowered by it. As Henninger hints, the real target of such critics ought not to be the medium (e.g., blogs) but the cultural norms driving individuals to use them in societally dysfunctional or valueless ways. That's a harder target to take on. Or as Butterworth notes (but does not accept), it is the aggregate - the blogosphere - not the individual blog that turns the phenomenon from curiosity into potentially revolutionary development. At its best, the blogosphere is a cauldron without precedent for incubating ideas, vetting facts and honing arguments.

Were this post not too long already (and had I more time to research it) I suspect that similar dynamics surrounded the development of papyrus scrolls and the printing press. Banal and utterly forgettable uses of those media over centuries have not impeded their revolutionary impact in toto.

Blogs may or may not turn out to be as revolutionary. And if they do, they will probably not be so in precisely the same ways. But to dismiss their multifaceted impacts based on an easy survey of individual blogs (the vast majority of which are indeed quite skippable) is to miss the larger point. To say that all ponies crap in their stalls is true. Young thoroughbreds do also.

UPDATE: Aussie consultant, futurist and best-selling author Ross Dawson also comments on the FT piece, prefering symbiosis to parasitism as the best way to describe the evolving relationship between blogs and the mainstream media.

Open-Source Scenarios: Group Hug in the Wind-Tunnel?

Jamais Cascio over at WorldChanging has a concise description of what scenarios are good for, along with a proposal for 'open-sourcing' them:

Rather than tying the organization to a set "official future," scenarios offer a range of possible outcomes used less as predictions and more as "wind tunnels" for plans. (How would our strategy work in this future? How about if things turn out this way?)

...there's no quantitative, logical process behind scenario creation--no combination of factors that always leads to a particular scenario result, no matter the author--but there is still a methodology that can be opened up. The pieces that go into the creation of the scenarios, even the pieces that don't end up in the final narratives, can be valuable in their own right. By making these pieces "free" (as in speech, not beer), the overall capacity of scenario-builders to come up with plausible and powerful outcomes can be improved.

Blogs, prediction markets and wikis are already forming up what he describes, albeit bottoms-up rather than top down. Each has become a hyper-open form (and forum) for vetting ideas and observations - fertile sources  though ones not yet easily harnessed to the discipline of high-stakes decision-making. Some of the best blogs do a reasonable job of painting mini-scenarios but they're hard to compare. The most carefully constructed prediction markets can also do a great job - when people are inclined to trust them, which isn't often... yet.

One thing that's lacking with blogs, prediction markets and wikis (admittedly different animals) is a scenario framework in which pieces can be re-arranged. Traditional scenario methodology makes this hard because those pieces (as Cascio points out) can come in all shapes and sizes:

...as broad as "global warming" or as narrowly focused as "next version of Windows delayed again." They can, unfortunately, also be quite silly...

Prediction markets impose a strict form but - so far anyway - have not made good use of open-source principles. (We're told this is changing.) The F/X (Foresight Exchange) has been effectively open source for over a decade but remains a messy experiment closer to group science-fiction writing than anything else. When anyone can float a prediction 'security' the conversation quickly degrades into chaos, or worse (thin trading).

The scenario approach we've used for years imposes a strict form on the pieces (aka, 'events'), trading off the advantages that truly open-ended brainstorming early in a scenario process against the clarity, modularity and comparability that are essential later. For decision-making, tracking and the accountability of the exercise, the idea pieces need to adhere to a common form even as they may still cover a wide range of issues and address them with varying degrees of granularity.

What actually happened? What did not happen? What path is actually unfolding? What else should we watch for? What do we do about it? Such questions are hard to answer when there's no common language for what's being tracked. When everyone can propose not only their own way-points on the map but the symbols and nomenclature of the map itself, the result is a Tower of Babel. As scenarios, prediction markets and blogs are pulled together into new forms, the result will be a powerful combination of vision, real-time collective intelligence and objective measurement. Open-sourcing alone won't necessarily accomplish that.

The International Intelligence Summit - Rehearsing Divergent Futures

Life has interfered with blogging these past few weeks. (My family and colleagues might tell you that's good.) With this post, I'll report on a talk I was grateful to have the opportunity to give  last month at the International Intelligence Summit (IIS) in Crystal City, Virginia (just across the river from Washington, DC) - less on the summit itself. Apologies for the delay.

The IIS is an interesting affair - non-profit, non-partisan, truly international (thus the name) and (ironically given the subject matter) very much open to the press and pre-registered public. This was my first time attending. It was also my first time at a professional gathering that included bomb-sniffing dogs and large men in flak jackets with earpieces carrying sub-machine guns in the lobby. A client who'd helped organize part of the proceedings felt - upon seeing and participating in one of our scenario workshops - that people (and a few large organizations) he knew would benefit from hearing more about the methodology. He was right. More on that in a moment.

As many readers may already know, the IIS was made even more 'interesting' this year by the release on day one of material out of Saddam's archive of tapes that had been freshly translated from the Arabic by one Bill Tierney - a U.S. army vet and former UN weapons inspector.

I'll refrain from repeating a story that's been well covered already, or opining on the veracity of the material. I will observe however, that it represents just a fraction (estimates I've seen range from two to four percent) of what will in time be known about a regime, a place and a period in history that some think we understand well already. We don't now and that's frightening.

It is exactly this kind of gradual and highly distributed accumulation of evidence and insight, on such complex and open-ended  questions as the pre- (and even post-) war state of WMD in Iraq that lends itself to processing by distributed collective intelligence 'engines' - blogs, prediction markets and wikis to name just a few. Centralized, highly 'siloed' legacy approaches may work in the short term but they're ill suited to the sheer volume of material that eventually comes out. Or to put it another way: More eyes and more minds make for more understanding.

At peak, the conference drew somewhere in the vicinity of four hundred people. (I did a quick count of the heads at the keynote.) It included a number parallel 'tracks', all of which were fascinating. I attended talks on Iran, North Korea, China, Syria and others that seemed desperately obscure out of context. High-end falconry as a money-laundering mechanism for Middle Eastern sheiks. Threats to maritime assets and transport grids as a result of flotillas of small fast suicide boats e.g., in the Persian Gulf. Fascinating if frequently scary stuff.

One comment I heard repeatedly was to the effect that "each of these sessions is highly educational but I can't easily knit it all together". Indeed. Thus my talk on scenarios.

I had the slight misfortune of being positioned head-to-head on the schedule with author and analyst Richard Miniter next door - a talk I'd like to have seen myself. Nonetheless, enough seats were filled at my talk that it made sense to conduct it formally. Ultimately we ran out of time to take every question at the end.

The focus and title of the talk: 'Rehearsing the Future' - an apparent but highly deliberate oxymoron. How does one rehearse what one doesn't know? To boardroom ears that seems nonsensical. Management teams plan for the future. They speculate about the future. They project the future. They budget for the future. They seldom if ever rehearse the future - not in the way that other teams do anyway - not to the point of being able to recognize emerging patterns as a team and respond to them instinctively. The heavy burden of coordination and the inevitably flawed, hasty thinking that occurs in the heat of 'battle' impose a heavy cost on those who have not rehearsed a range of future 'plays'. In other words, scenarios.

My main point in the talk: Other kinds of organizations practice all the time. Sports teams. Pit crews. Orchestras. Armies. Police units. Most teams spend the vast majority of their time rehearsing. Not management teams.

Interesting factoid. I spoke with a colleague yesterday by phone. Until recently, he'd headed up strategic planning for a major U.S. city orchestra. The standard in that industry? 75% rehearsal time: eighteen hours out of a standard musical work week of twenty four - the rest being the performance. And that doesn't count the months and years of extracurricular  rehearsal time that individuals must engage in. Seventy five percent. What's the corresponding figure for a corporate management team? I doubt it's as much as seven percent in the most tight-knit strategically oriented organization.

The other major point I made - that seemed to get heads nodding - was that there are two types of uncertainty: actuarial and creative. Confusing the two (and applying the wrong planning system to deal it) can lead to ruin.

The first type of uncertainty - actuarial - involves events for which there is some known history that's highly likely to continue: the growth path of a stable industry, the frequency and severity of earthquakes or tsunami, the incidence of death from certain classes of disease or accident. Such things can be planned for, or at least insured-against. The risks are well understood. Probability dictates that such events come in clusters more often than not (leading to panic that present trends might continue). But they're inevitably punctuated by long periods of calm - periods that lull people into complacency. (Sure, lets build more condos on the beach at Cape Hatteras or below sea level in New Orleans!)

The second type of uncertainty - creative - is more difficult for organizations to wrap their arms around and impossible to insure against in the classic, monetary sense. For example, what was the 'probability' circa 1970 that snowboards (and the as-yet nonexistent entrepreneurial providers who would invent them) would cut into the ski industry?  The term 'probability' doesn't even make sense in that context. One could only imagine an innovation that might challenge the traditional franchise.

Or the 'probability' circa 1980 that digital photography would into silver halide (wet process) film sales? Again, nonsensical to ask the question in that way - at least at that time... when there was still time to do plenty about it... when many strategic options were still open to the established players. There was no meaningful 'probability' before the advent of computers and powerful memory chips. Only a creative scenario process could have helped Kodak to rehearse a future in which ribs might start showing on their once fat cash cow.

Or imagining circa 1990 that small committed bands of people might commandeer large airplanes and fly them into tall buildings on purpose, taking out much of the communications grid for the financial industry (among other nasty, evil things). As we noted sixteen months ago: "the four-day shutdown of U.S. exchanges after 9-11 raised pointed questions for the industry in New York".

It is only with hindsight that some are claiming we could have predicted and prevented the events of that tragic day. Yet there were signs, including this insightful documentary on PBS' American Experience chronicling the simultaneous hijacking of four large airliners by Middle Eastern terrorists in early September... of 1970. That was not enough to bet on at the time, but enough to warrant imagining: what would we do if...? ...the essence of scenarios... the essence of rehearsal for a future that sometimes stubbornly refuses to be predicted long enough in advance to do anything useful about it.

Customer Dialogue - Prediction Markets Play a Role

I've been meaning for some time to blog this piece by James Surowiecki in the last Forbes (Oct. 24th issue). It doesn't so much break new ground as set prediction markets firmly in the context of customer interactivity, new product development and product/service enhancement.

Customers make their wishes known with their dollars. This is a crude kind of communication, but it does work surprisingly well--businesses actually do adjust to what customers want. It’s startling, in fact, to realize how much communication is contained in a simple decision not to buy. At the same time, exit leaves a lot of information out, which is to say that there’s just a lot about what customers want and don’t want that companies never discover...

Now, though, everything is up in the air. The tools to change communication from a monologue to a dialogue are already with us, most obviously on the Internet, where customers are already having very loud conversations with each other on sites such as Amazon.com and ePinions and throughout the blogosphere. More strikingly, there are now markets, such as the Hollywood Stock Exchange (where people can buy and sell play-money shares based on how they think movies will do at the box office), where customers are producing collective--and remarkably accurate--judgments about the future of products.

As a result, commerce is going to increasingly shift away from older forms of communication -- signaling and advertising will be both less necessary and less effective because consumers can now get good information from so many sources--toward something that resembles a real conversation. In effect, voice will replace exit. Some steps are already being taken in this direction, with some companies tapping these prediction markets for insight into what customers want and others actually opening up their design processes to their customers. But there is a long way to go. In the end, for commerce to really communicate, information needs to flow in both directions. Companies are very good at talking. Now they need to start listening. [emphasis added]

Having run more focus groups than I can count in my career, I like the idea of PMs as a way to get around the "one loud voice" problem. That can also be a problem with mining customer service data for new ideas. Prediction markets literally force the loudmouth to put up or shut up - while giving the broad, silent majority an easier way to weigh in on the marginal improvements that can mean the difference between competing well and merely getting by.

Fast Ideas, Right Ideas, Best Ideas

I'm not sure what to do with this, but before I lose the thought, I figured I'd throw it out there. In further pondering my baseball experience of Friday, it's occurred to me that memes (ideas) can have at least three interesting properties: speed (of propagation),  correctness (against some subsequent objective, observable standard), and suitability (to a particular purpose, e.g., in the sense of innovation and problem-solving.) To make a gross generalization, the blogosphere is heavy on the first, but light on the other two - a hyper-democratic if endlessly interesting rumor mill more transparent than what it supplants. As MIT's Blogdex notes:

Ideas can have very similar properties to a disease, spreading through the population like wildfire... contagious media... Webloggers'... links... act as markers for the subjects they are discussing... like tags placed on wild animals... [Blogdex] looks across all weblogs and generates a list of fastest spreading ideas.

Prediction markets - applied to the right kinds of questions - are heavy on the second, but only as applied to ideas already established in the form of discrete market contract questions. They can quickly incorporate the expected impact of new, fast-moving memes and information, (with the key benefit of weighting confidence in that insight), but only within the narrow context of a particular market already set up.

Somewhere at the intersection of blogs and prediction markets is an as-yet poorly defined space that I'll call   'knowledge evaluation' (KE), where ideas are generated ad hoc, and assessed by a collective 'mind' against some firm standard in near-real time. Ideafutures gets at part of this by allowing users to generate their own contracts. Blogshares gets at another part of it by allowing trading in the future traffic and link density of particular blogs. Neither one has really taken off, though both continue to putter along in the background. Marc Steiger prophesied a form that strains credulity in a silly sci-fi book.

What Steiger glossed over, (and what I see no good solution for today) however, is how to evaluate ideas for solving problems that may not ever get implemented as solutions in the real world - that is, ideas for which objective correctness may never be determined. That non-measurement is a result of the evaluation process itself is a recursive and unsatisfying notion, to say the least.

Why is this a valuable, or even interesting space to think about? Because as far as I can divine, rapid accurate assessment of the suitability of new ideas is itself an unsolved problem for corporations and other large organizations seeking to allocate scarce resources - particularly but not exclusively around innovation.

I've had a number of conversations about internal markets (I hesitate to call them prediction markets), for assessing the hypothetical potential of a product that may or may not get built. They're a useful way to take the temperature of a group - better certainly than most of the political finger-in-the-wind mechanisms or falsely precise financial analyses I've observed in my consulting travels. But without an ultimate payout - an externally verifiable, objective 'close' to the market - the correctness of that evaluation is open to question.

Such markets, while arguably improving the state of the art for measuring innovation, fall short by rewarding primarily consensus-sensing behavior. I.e., the market 'pays' those best at figuring out... where the market will go. To be fair, there's a role for that kind of information - not unlike vast numbers of Wall Street traders who profit handsomely from knowing much about market psychology and little about long-term discounted cash flows: indicative of something, but just as often murky, volatile and (at least temporarily), misleading.

Not that this closes my initial wide-open thought, but what may be the better hybrid are futures contracts to reserve manufacturing for a product still in the labs, (or in a service business, for the scarce time of key people or process resources), incorporating the risk that the idea will never be implemented. That's recursive too, but I think it's an improvement. Intel has run such markets on an experimental basis for capacity at its hugely expensive wafer fab facilities and claims success over existing mechanisms.

Just a thought...

BusinessWeek on 'Cyberspace Collectives'

The June 20th issue of BusinessWeek carries this roundup of several phenomena, technologies and vendors for on-line communication and collaboration. Right alongside services like Skype and KaZaA, and discussion of the impact of blogs - all of which count millions of subscriber/users - is a short discussion of some of the more prominent prediction market experiments, including Eli Lilly, HP,  Newsfutures, Intrade and the IEM. BW has been wrong before, but in a month without anything else truly remarkable going on in the space, it's another mark of legitimacy for what was once seen as a nutty fringe idea.

Short Report: Conference Board on Measuring Innovation

Apologies to regular readers for the recent dearth of posts. I've been consumed with assisting my brother and his family through his cancer situation - which recently took a turn for the worse. Blogging time and energy have been at a premium.

Yesterday provided a brief if equally exhausting respite from that focus for a day trip to New York City through an at-times harrowing Nor'Easter rainstorm, complete with car-buffeting high winds. There I chaired a panel at the Conference Board's Innovation conference on 'Measuring Innovation'. After a ten block run to make up for traffic delays, my own presentation kicked off, skimming across several 'big themes' in innovation measurement, and diving briefly into thoughts on applying prediction markets to innovation assessment: happy to share if you pop me an e-mail.

As I'd hoped, the panel was lively and diverse, including (in order of appearance), Patrick DeSouza, CEO of Plainsight Systems, Glen Mohr, Principal at the Otter Group (speaking on behalf of Merrill Lynch), and  friend, traveling companion and fellow triathlete, Kim Blair, Founder and Director of the MIT Center for Sports Innovation. The session was well attended. I can't do justice to the range of things discussed, but a few common threads from my notes included:

• The value of bottoms-up mechanisms (including prediction markets and blogs) not only for generating innovative ideas, but for evaluating their potential. The standard big-company complaints about the difficulty of instilling cross-silo collaboration and the danger of hierarchy crushing valid ideas were a major theme in the larger conference.
• The elusive if universal corporate goal of harvesting and managing collective intelligence, (e.g, through blogs, to generate grassroots energy and ideas within corporate walls.) IBM provides one of the most recent, prominent examples - as reported here, here and here. (Deep skepticism alert on that: subject of a future post.)
• The tricky timing and delicate group process issues involved in 'down-selecting' innovations to take forward (or to resurrect from the circular file.) This process was described as more art than science in both large and small company settings.
• Sharp differences across industries in the pace, precision and purpose of innovation initiatives, with the fault lines between sporting goods and high tech being perhaps the best example.
• The challenge of getting innovators to embrace dumb, simple, non-sexy applications when they're accustomed to a diet of chasing (and sometimes catching) profound if risky world-changing applications that require more capital and a much longer fuse.

We only had time for one question, but it was a good one: "How can one meaningfully measure and manage an organization's capacity for innovation?" I won't say it stumped the panel, but neither did we (nor the audience) have a succinct, proven answer. As I look out my backyard this morning while writing this, I'm inclined to think that that challenge is akin to manage the squirrels I see there: possible... but not easy.

Blogging Lunch

I just returned from a delightful and informative lunch with longtime friend, former colleague and all-around software/web innovator Jeffrey Henning of Perseus Development Corporation. A conversation with Jeffrey is always lively and stimulating. Ours was particularly so as a result of 'bottomless' Diet Cokes (him) and iced teas (me), served by super-attentive waitpeople. Watch for some insomniac posts here or on Henning's blog late tonight.  :)

Jeffrey can lay claim to at least three distinctions in the blogosphere: 1) being an early homesteader, (he was one of the first 40,000 bloggers on LiveJournal; he now blogs using a private tool he developed from scratch), 2) attending the first Bloggercon, and 3) conducting two of the only surveys of any note on the shape and size of the blogosphere itself - something I wrote about here back in April. He recently attended Blog Nashville.

What was the most surprising finding from those surveys, I asked? "Blogs are a medium of the young." On a proportional basis (tens of thousands out of tens of millions), blogging hasn't yet caught on with grey-haired folks like us - which is not to say that it hasn't caught on. Some degree of formalization, stability and 'corporatization' has begun to creep in, as entrepreneurs like Nick Denton of Gawker Media see and fill gaps between salaries asked by eager young writers and revenues available from consolidated advertising - as featured in this piece in last Sunday's New York Times, however business models for all ages still vary widely.

Those inclined to dismiss blogs because of youth dominance of the medium should note that that finding doesn't conflict with a concurrent rise in business-related blogs, e.g., as chronicled in this BusinessWeek cover story earlier this month. Excerpt:

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they're simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they're going to shake up just about every business -- including yours. It doesn't matter whether you're shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They're a prerequisite. (And yes, that goes for us, too.)

We agreed that in a business such as consulting, where one's product is one's thinking, blogs were increasingly essential. That's true to a lesser extent in other industries as well - even hard-goods manufacturing, e.g., in R&D and product development. Or to put it another way: name an industry where honest interaction and thinking/dialogue about 'what's next' weren't things customers might value.

Henning agreed with my observation that - as nascent as they are - corporate and even CEO blogs represent the beginning of true 'customer conversation' as outlined in the 2000 marketing classic "The Cluetrain Manifesto", (published quite coincidentally by Perseus Books Group - no relation.) As the Cluetrain authors note, (and as  I've often written, e.g., here, here, here and here), blogs are going to be useful to business to the extent that the distributed, human, hyper-democratic forces they represent can find common ground with a natural (and completely rational) desire by business entities to regulate a consistent, common message.