President Gore, where art thou?

Al Gore moves people.

First, friend Flemming Wisler, who heard Gore speak in January.

"We heard a man who no longer has anything to prove. Who is past all bullshit, and who is now concentrating on his life's mission to put the earth's climate problem on the popular agenda."

And now friend Eric Eggertson, who heard Gore speak last week.

"Gone is the wooden, humourless politician, as presented by the media in his presidential fight against George W. Bush. In its place is a voice of confidence, a man willing to poke fun at himself and his cause if it will win support for the fight against global warming."

Back in December, I was having coffee in a little café in St. Mary's, Georgia (elevation: sea level). A couple of good old boys were sitting behind me. One was urging the other one to see An Inconvenient Truth, Gore's film, without fail: "Hit'll wake ya up! Lemme tell ya this: that ice pack melts, you and me gonna be runnin' charter out of Macon!"

With all respect to Flemming and Eric, the Danish and Canadian PR vote doesn't count. But when you can get a couple of Bubbas talking global warming on a chilly December morning, you might be on to something.

Technorati : al gore, an inconvenient truth, eric eggertson, flemming wisler

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 06:48pm in Conferences, Politics | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1)

John Naisbitt: "Don't get so far ahead of the parade that they don't know you are in it."

Crossposted from Fremtidens Relationer.

I first "met" John Naisbitt at about 0200 on a Sunday morning in 1983, in the bowels of the US Naval Intelligence Processing Systems Support Activity (NIPSSA) in Suitland, Maryland, USA. Looking for something to read on a slow mid-watch, I borrowed Megatrends from the senior watch officer.

What an awakening! 24 years ago, few spoke of globalization or the deindustrialization of the US, EU and Japan. Few contemplated how hierarchies would be affected by the rise of networking. Nobody said stuff like "the new source of power is not money in the hands of the few, but information in the hands of many." Yet, these concepts and more are the running themes in Megatrends. More to the point, they are the running themes today, in 2007, in The Economist, Fortune, Wired, the Financial Times, and the Hindustan Times.

I wish I could say reading Megatrends was an "A-Ha!" moment for me. If I had been perceptive enough to give the book far more thought, I might have made some very different choices at an age where even small choices have great effect. But I was 21, a Cold War was on, and while I helping run a communication network most civilians wouldn't see the likes of until the late 1990s, I hadn't the imagination to mull over what would happen when it did go mainstream.

(An aside: roll forward to 1995, IABC's International Conference in Boston. Jeff Hallett gives a speech on networked communication that prompts more than one communicator present to think seriously about how networks, the Internet, will affect business. I realize, now, it's no coincidence Hallet is the first person Naisbitt acknowledges in Megatrends.)

So Naisbitt's keynote at CIFS' Don't Stop 02 conference was a must-hear for me. Naisbitt, who speaks without slides, notes, lectern or podium, sketched out several trends or "mindsets" from his new book Mind Set.

Visual on the rise, text receding

Globalization is a big driver here. Globalization means almost any ordinary good can be produced so cheaply that almost no one can compete on price. Quality, too, is no longer the preserve, and thus the competitive advantage, of the few. So design, an entirely visual attribute, and one inherently unique, is now far more important.

• Naisbitt pointed to the trend of "upscale designs for common goods." That's certainly true enough; the Moleskine is nothing but a notebook on design steroids.
• He pointed to the rise of "photography as fine art," noting that while many of us carry cameras around all the time (on our phones), photographs made the old-fashioned way are fetching USD 1.7 million at Sotheby's.
• Architecture: "the most important of the visual arts", taking on new significance
• Graphic narrative: fastest growing publishing area. 9/11 Commission report issued in comic book form

Sequence is the enemy of making connections

4..14..23..34..42.... what comes next in this sequence of numbers? I'll get to it, but first....

Naisbitt explained that, at the end of the 1800s, Queen Victoria was told that London would stop growing at population of 4 million, as it would simply be impossible to remove the droppings of the horses required to service a larger city. Already then,100 tons of dung were carted away daily. London's population today is 8 million -- Victoria's advisors failed to foresee the automobile, even though it had been invented.

Naisbitt: "look at things as a picture puzzle, a jigsaw puzzle. Nothing sequential here. If you look sequentially, you won't make connections."

If you are looking for a mathematical solution to the problem Naisbitt posed, you may as well give up. 50 is the correct answer, and the sequence is the stops on the 8th Avenue Express of the New York subway. "Sequence is the enemy of making connections."

You don't get results by solving problems. You get results by exploiting opportunities

Naisbitt: "people can be divided into opportunity seekers and problem solvers." The Indian IT industry is an example of opportunity seeking. When Y2K loomed, IT labor capacity in the West was tight. So the Indians, seeing opportunity, offered Western companies an enormous pool of IT skills. When the dot-com bubble broke, Western countries slashed their IT budgets -- and the Indians, seeing opportunity, offered to provide the same services as Western providers, but at much lower cost.

Naisbitt calls Hillary Clinton an example of a problem solver. When President Clinton was elected, Hillary Clinton used enormous political capital trying to "solve" the US health-care problem, a problem that simply cannot be solved. He calls Arnold Schwarzenegger an example of an opportunity seeker. Usually, it would have been impossible for him to climb the ranks of the California Republican party to become governor. But by seizing the chance offered by the recall referendum on Gray Davis, he leaped past the Republican organization and was elected after a 76-day campaign.

Another opportunity-seeker is Fred Smith, CEO of FedEx. While US policy makers debated how to "solve" the problems of US Postal Service, Smith saw and exploited an opportunity to build a new, private service based on time and reliability.

More Naisbitt Mind Sets to come in a later post!

Technorati : conference blogging, copenhagen institute for futures studies, desirable roasted coffee, don't stop 02, futures studies, futurists, instituttet for fremtidsforskning, jeffrey hallett, john naisbitt, megatrends, mind set, nipssa

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 01:39pm in Books, Business, Conferences, Management, Society, Writers | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (3)

Podcamp Europe: Count me in!

I still have a lot to learn about podcasting, so I'm happy to hear of Podcamp Europe, to be held in Stockholm, 12-13 June. I'm there!

Technorati : podcamp, podcamp europe, stockholm

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 10:01pm in Conferences | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1)

Heads up, friends: IABC handouts, AAF videos online

The International Association of Business Communicators recently held its conference in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Speaker handouts are online.

The next weekend, the American Advertising Federation held its conference in San Francisco. It filmed some of its presenters, and has published an archive.

I've been browsing both, comparing the social media/live web presentations, and am concluding that IABC was streets ahead of AAF this year (a turn-around from 1995, where AAF had a firm handle on "Web/Internet" when IABC attendees were walking out on John Perry Barlow).

It's an hour, but here is one of the AAF presentations. For info purposes only, PR practitioners might want to have a look at how some of our ad comrades are approaching social media.

Hat tip to my dad.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 07:52pm in Advertising, Communication Skills, Conferences, IABC | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (5)

Hobson/Holtz/Jenkins Social Media Handout

Neville Hobson invited Shel Holtz and me to join him for a panel discussion about social media here at IABC's International Conference.

We weren't sure how many to expect, but wound up with a standing-room only crowd of 100-120 for the 3-hour session.

Here's the handout... feel free to contact any of us about it. Joseph Thornley liveblogged the session in two parts.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 12:37am in Conferences, IABC | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (3)

Light blogging ahead

Stale coffee? Not here. But we have to invigorate the beans from time to time.

Reboot 8.0 starts tonight with a harbor cruise. I'll be doing that, the first day of the conference, and the dinner tomorrow night. I'd love to be on hand for day 2, but my friend Christine and I will be headed for Vancouver, for IABC's annual conference. I haven't attended in three years, and the last two times I did attend, my days were largely taken up with meetings about the governance of IABC. This year, I am  going  simply to enjoy the platter of speakers.

Neville Hobson has asked me to be a part of his panel discussion on Sunday, along with Shel Holtz. That should be fun -- I've never walked away from these two knowing less.

I see both conferences as private time, so I will not be blogging directly from either conference, unless time allows. But I will pull together notes on the other side.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 01:13am in Conferences, Desirable Roasted Coffee | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0)

Doubleheader conferencing: Reboot & IABC

Too wild... Reboot 8.0 in Copenhagen ends the day before the International Association of Business Communicator's international conference opens in Vancouver.

I've decided to go to both, figuring I can thus get into that "conference zone" that let's me soak up a lot of good learning while giving me ample time on airplanes to think about it.

Readers, if you are going to either, let's meet and have a chat.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 09:46pm in Conferences | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1)

Welcome to the world of Karl Marx

"Welcome to the world of Karl Marx" is Arie de Geus' greeting to corporate leaders. "Capital is a commodity. Human talent is not."

Here are my notes from the Don'tStop01 Business Innovation Conference we are holding here in Copenhagen. Arie de Geus was head of Shell Oil's Planning Unit for 38 years.

People have little loyalty to companies:

New MBAs stay in their jobs less than 5 years
CEOs stay about 2-3 years.
Shareholders hold their shares about a year

This isn't loyalty.

Why is this? What does it mean.

It's certainly very contrary to the view that I have of what constitutes a successful company. My view is very different... my view is based on some interesting things we learned at Shell.

In the 70s, we asked ourselves "who should be our example?" What companies should we look up to?

We made a study. We asked a team to go out into the world, and find companies that were older than Shell, more than 100 years old, who were leaders in their industry, and who still had their corporate identies intact.

27 companies met the definition.

Siemens, more than 150 years old
Dupont, more than 200 years old
Mitui, 300
Sumitomo, 400
Stora, 700 years old

What characterizes these old companies? What let's them survive. It's clearly not "cultural" because we have American, Swedish, German, and Japanese companies on the list.

We found they shared these traits:

1) Financially conservative. This is bad news for investment bankers. These companies want to keep their own money in their own pockets, and don't want someone else's money. Surviving for centuries means never having a banker pull the rug out from under you.

2) The leaders of these companies are sensitve to the world around them. Leaders were outward looking people, and are often highly active in the society around the company. Dupont has produced generations of US senators. If your leaders are out there in the world, active, they will note changes in society and keep asking "what will this mean for the company?"

3) Strong sense of cohesion and company idenity. Leaders and staff know what the company stands for, and are happy to identify with those values.

4) Management style of tolerance. Lots of space on the margins for new or different activities.

That led me to my definition of a corporation: a good firm is financially conservative, has staff that identifies with the company values, and has management that is tolerant and sensitive to the world in which they live.

That's not what they taught me in the economics department when I was in university in Rotterdam. There we were taught that  companies are institutions that produce goods and services for which other people are prepared to pay a price. The successful company combines labor, capital and land in an optimal way: Minimize cost, maximize price, maximize profit.

This is still taught.

Three definitions. Three different implications.

1. Where there is no loyal relationship to the company, it's every man for himself. It becomes the tragedy of the commons. The measure of success is maximation of  shareholder value.

2. If we accept the classic definition, the one still taught, we must accept the company as an economic machine. The measure? Efficiency and maximization of profit at short notice.

3. And my definition: human work community aimed at continuity from generation to generation. Goal is survival and self-development in a changing world. Measurement is life expectancy.

Which is the right definition? Which company would you want to work for? If you lead a company, which would you want to create?

Let's think about three things.

1) A study done at Stanford in the early 1990s showed that long-living companies produced, on average, 15 times more profits over 60 years than the stock market average. Human work community meets the goals of life expectancy, profits, and shareholder value.

2) When we look at the oldest companies, we must remember the hundreds of thousands of companies that died. The average life expectancy of a company is less than 17 years -- as low as 4 years according to a recent UK study. If you have to choose what sort of comapny you want to create, your choice is quite stark. Choose wrongly, and your company will be dead before you are.

And let's not say "oh, that's just survival of the fittest, that's the market at work." The death of a company is not gratuitous. People suffer. And if we accept that companies are like people -- they get wiser and better as they grow older -- then the death of a company is a tragic loss of knowledge and wisdom.

You may say "survival of the fittes, free markets". But I cannot believe the death of a company is gratuitous. People suffer. And don't companies get better as they get older, much as we do in life.

3) Finally, we are in an age of fundamental change. Capital is now a commodity; it is no longer a scarce production input. This is enormously significant: in the last 50 years, we have had near constant GNP growth, and we have saved 20% to 30% of this a year. Our world is simply awash with capital. Capital is no longer dominant.

In fact, capital is a commodity -- the capital market is a buyer's market, not a seller's market. So if you are choosing what business to create, why on earth would you structure it to maximize the return to the supplier of capital, the shareholders? That is very short sighted.

No, today, labor -- human talent -- is the scarce production factor. And if you would succeed you must have a management style that makes the most of that human talent. 

Corporate leaders: you live in the world of Karl Marx. Your core asset, the asset that is the value of your company, goes out the door every day. I really wonder how you sleep at night, because you have no idea if they will come back. So you better create the conditions so that they do.

Technorati: business innovation, dontstop01, Arie de Geus

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 11:35am in Business, Conferences, Copenhagen, Corporate Governance, Corporate Management, Management | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (5)

“Don’t Stop” Business Innovation Conference asks Desirable Roasted Coffee to blog (and I said “yes”)

I love all my clients, of course, but I have particular affection for the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies.

My other clients are typical businesses: the halls are buzzing with folks rushing around to the next meeting, wrapping up from the last meeting, whacking out emails about that meeting, slapping their foreheads as they read the minutes from that other meeting they were too busy to attend.

Now, I don't want for a moment to imply that people at my other clients aren't "gettin' it done" -- they most certainly are -- but over at CIFS, you tend to see people just sitting quietly reading books. Staring dreamily out of the window. Writing books.

Because what they do is peer into the mists of the future and report back what they think they see. And not just for some ivory tower purpose; no, no -- their job is guiding businesses (including some of my other clients) into the future.

Pretty cool job, when you think about it -- being paid to think. As Seth Godin et al note in the Big Moo, most of us run around all day frantically putting out fires and responding to other people. Just having an hour or two a day to think, to imagine, to wonder what if, would be immeasurably valuable for both ourselves and our companies. So imagine having that for a job!

So when CIFS asked me to blog and podcast from their upcoming Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow conference, I didn't need a second invitation.

I'll contributing to the Don't Stop blog leading up to the conference, too. Client Gitte Larsen posted her interview with speaker Adam Morgan, director of eatbigfish. Here's a taste:

"Why is it important continually to think about tomorrow?

Adam Morgan: There are probably obvious answers to that, but my interest is in challengers. I think one of the things that characterizes continuously successful challengers rather than those who fade away after a while, is that they are very restless people, naturally, and they are continually looking and searching for new opportunities to reframe the way they engage consumers on the respective markets. I think that restlessness and hunger are some of the things that certainly characterize continued success..."

Indeed, I believe that restlessness and hunger are two of the very few motivators for innovation -- whether you are a corporation or a home gardener.

Technorati: dontstop01, CIFS, Copenhagen, Denmark, futures studies, Adam Morgan, eatbigfish, Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 06:18pm in Conferences, Copenhagen, Denmark, Desirable Roasted Coffee, Management, Politics, Society | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (2)

OPML for all Les Blogs 2.0 attendees and speakers

Stuart Mudie has taken the great trouble of creating a zipped OPML list for the blogs of every attendee and speaker at Les Blogs 2.0. More than 400!

How cool is that? Thanks, Stuart!

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 05:30pm in Conferences | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0)

Put this on your conference calendar: LIFT 06 -- Life, Ideas, Futures. Together.

From Laurent Haug comes news of the conference he's organizing in Geneva in February:

LIFT 06: Life, Ideas, Futures. Together

Some of the most talented observers, explorers, and builders of the moment will gather in Geneva in the early days of 2006 to talk about the important topics of our changing world. The Internet, emerging technologies, global solidarity, design, and big ideas, be prepared for two days of intense ideas sharing and networking.

You are invited to hear the likes of:

Robert Scoble (Technical Evangelist and blogger at Microsoft),
Cory Doctorow (world #1 blogger and coordinator of the Electronic Frontier Foundation),
Euan Semple (head of Knowledge Management at the BBC),
Matt Jones (designer for Nokia's strategy dept.),
Hugh MacLeod (the best European specialist of Internet marketing),
Stefana Broadbent (ethnologist observing how people use technology),
Xavier Comtesse (Director of Switzerland's biggest think tank),
Marc Laperouza (specialist of new technologies inChina),
Régine Debatty (We Make Money Not Art),
Jeffrey Huang (Harvard Design School),
David Galipeau (UNAIDS),
Craig Duncan (United Nations)
and a lot of other amazing speakers.

To see the complete speakers list, point your browser to:
http://www.lift06.org/doku.php/people:speakers

For the conference program:
http://www.lift06.org/doku.php/about:program

The speaker's list is particularly good: brief bio of each speaker, along with an explanation of why that speaker was invited to speak.

Technorati tags:
Lift 06
Technology Conferences
Geneva

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 12:36pm in Communication, Conferences | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0)