Teblog

The right thing to do?

2012-03-09T07:09:23+00:00

Recent events have drawn me away from Teblog and I think they're likely to keep me away. But I am involved in something much better.

First a bit of background: editing and writing much of the original paper version of Blue & Green Tomorrow gave me massive opportunities to write about the environment up to May last year; on the communication front, media skills training hit an unexpected peak in January; and, since June, I've spent at least half of my time with a company which hits every Tebbo hot button: communication, environment and IT.

The people I work with are great and we've created a neat website, demo and knowledgebase plus various social media presences. The company itself, 6Connex EMEA, is all about online events, content and collaboration, thus accelerating work and cutting the costs (financial, social and environmental) associated with travel.

But it gets better. Tracey (the boss) and I wanted to do something extra but non-commercial. Inspired by the work of the Lunar Society at the dawn of the industrial age, we wanted to get right-minded people to share their practical insights with each other and with anyone who cares about making the world a better place. (The motivation is similar to Blue & Green Tomorrow's. The difference is that it goes way beyond environmental issues.)

We've had direct contributions from people like publishing mogul, poet and forest builder, Felix Dennis and green investment wizard Ben Goldsmith. We've covered some interesting TED videos - one on Gross National Happiness and another on why things will get better. We've also had people who are at the heart of change in educational systems and one who argues that growth and sustainability are incompatible.

Some pioneering contributors and featured presenters in The Right Thing To Do?

Top row: Euan Semple; Clive Longbottom; Ben Goldsmith; Ray Maguire.
Bottom row: Matt Ridley; Chip Conley; Felix Dennis; Salman Khan.

Just this week, social networking guru, Euan Semple, contributed a great post entitled "Bloggers are the rag and bone men of the information world."

Everyone is giving their time and ideas for nothing. No-one puffs their business directly, although they can all share their credentials in their mini-bios. TRTTD exists for knowledge sharing and discussion which will provide a bedrock of thoughtful considerations for our collective future. Depending on individual circumstances, posts are either contributed, the product of an interview or are written up around an online video.

Curating TRTTD seems to me to be a much better cause than continuing with Teblog. I'll keep it open for now, but expect most of my energies to be spent elsewhere. And, if you like the sound of "The Right Thing To Do?" why not come on over. It would be great to see you there. Here are the Website and Twitter links.

Would you spam your followers?

2012-02-23T08:00:28+00:00

Should I spam my contacts? I don't think so.

Why do I ask? Because, I received an email this morning from someone I once knew slightly asking me to advocate something his brother had done. In essence the email told me exactly how he'd like me to spam my followers.

Here's his approach:

After an intro he says, "I'm writing to ask you very personally for your help ...".

I like the "very personally" since it's clearly not. It's a mass mailing.

He asked for 'likes' on three social networks, a Tweet, a Facebook mention and a blog post. He also asked for support on a couple of publicity sites and offered an opportunity for a minuscule and fleeting piece of self promotion.

Finally he describes the product in more detail and asks if I can help him find distributors.

Clang!!

That was the bin.

Am I wrong?

Does this interest you?

2012-02-22T11:42:49+00:00

In December we gave a new blog a low-key launch. We wanted to get people with interesting points of view based on their life experiences to share their views and advice with others. We called it The Right Thing To Do.

Then along came Euan's book (see the previous post) and he reminded me of what I've known for donkey's years - that a question mark is an invitation to read and maybe participate, whereas its absence suggests a 'know-it-all' exhortation.

In the past, I used the question mark a lot with magazine cover lines and column titles. But when it came to The Right Thing To Do, I forgot.

Euan is right. Isn't he?

Euan Semple's "Manager's Guide to the Social Web"

2012-02-13T14:03:52+00:00

My holiday reading included Euan Semple's, Organizations Don't Tweet, People Do: A Manager's Guide to the Social Web. It inspired me to write a review which I'll also submit to Amazon.

Here goes:

A simple question mark, for me, symbolises the difference between the old way and the new way of managing and working.

The old way is about command and control and hierarchies while the new is about personal responsibility and networks. The old way was predicated on authority (whether deserved or not) and the new way on inspiration.

The question mark I mentioned represents the difference between being closed (do it my way) and open (how do you think we should do this?).

Given a choice, who would you prefer to work for - someone who bosses you or someone who inspires you?

These, and numerous other thoughts, are what Euan Semple's "Guide to the Social Web" triggered. I reckon that if a book shifts your thinking in a significant way, then it's worthwhile. That makes Semple's book extremely worthwhile. It's a book about management thinking much more than a book about the tools available, although they can't be totally avoided. And it's rooted in practicalities, although you may find yourself resisting some of them. I'd say, "keep an open mind until you've read the whole book."

I'm someone who's been actively involved in social web stuff since just before I first met Euan in early 1985 and I've held several management jobs as well as being a writer and a columnist. (Yes, that's partly a disclosure - I interviewed Euan for a magazine article about his experience of introducing social networking tools to BBC employees and we've stayed in touch ever since. I also mention it to show that I have lived through the old way and the new way and have a certain perspective.)

I've always, right until I read this book, been a bit wary of Euan's evangelistic tendencies. But he's drawn his conclusions from the university of hard knocks and tends, when conversation time is short, to be long on conclusions and short on explanations. But this excellent book changes all that. It is a book of profound depth which reveals his innermost thoughts on each of his conclusions and practical suggestions while staying humble enough to acknowledge that other ways may suit certain organisations.

He's convinced, though, that successful organisations will all adopt social tools to a greater or lesser degree. This book is a way to accelerate management's insight and understanding of what the social web means and the potential it holds for transforming the workplace. It is not a black and white book that says, "do this, or you're doomed". Semple knows that companies have their own systems and their own ways of doing things and, indeed, that social web tools can be complementary rather than replacements.

It is a business book, aimed at business managers. And it's written in a way that each short chapter is designed to stand alone and can be read on the train, in the bath or wherever else takes your fancy. This inevitably causes some minor repetition, which you notice if you read it straight through (as I did). And, one chapter left me slightly puzzled about something, but this was the topic of the very next chapter. So I was only puzzled for a few minutes.

Have I got any complaints about the book? Well one; I really don't like the white type on a grey background which is used to introduce each chapter. Anything bigger? Hmmm. I wondered why he didn't mention 'search' very much. Then I realised that he's much more in favour of asking questions and getting recommendations than wading through search results of variable quality.

The book is 296 pages, it's published by John Wiley & Sons.

ISBN-10: 1119950554. ISBN-13: 978-1119950554.

Online Marketing 101

2012-01-01T05:43:34+00:00

If you need a crash course in online marketing, you could do worse than browse my recent collection of articles and blog posts by experts on the matter.

I had started off, a month ago, intending to investigate what's out there on the subject of 'web-based business to business collaboration' but, as I collected the links on Scoop.it, I found that 'marketing' was the theme that bound most of my discoveries together. Hence the title of this blog post.

When I was a journalist, I didn't really like having to interview marketing folk because they were too sanitised, too in control of their messages and hard to get real stories out of. (Good stories to a journalist are those which carry at least a hint of disclosure.)

However my Scoop.it investigations gave me a new respect for marketing, it really does seem to belong at the centre of B2B collaboration activities.

Here's a snap of part of my Scoop.it collection (click on the image to see it full size):

It was 'curated' by looking at hundreds of suggestions from Scoop.it, reducing them to fifty or so, then throwing out the four or five that didn't live up to the promise of the extract.

The result is a neat little package of pieces, admittedly of variable quality, but all of which helped to round out my existing perceptions of how to approach online B2B collaboration.

Since so much work went into the curation, I thought it would be silly to keep it to myself.

See what you think. It's at http://www.scoop.it/t/b2bcollaboration

Why this blog has gone quiet

2011-12-29T01:03:18+00:00

In December 2010, I wrote a blog post called "The Last Post?". Since then, I've been so busy helping two start-ups, that I barely lift my head above the parapet for my own social media. But I do blog, Tweet and post to Facebook occasionally, if I feel something is worth sharing.

The two startups are Blue & Green Tomorrow, which started life as a "Use your money to make the world a better place" magazine and 6Connex emea which provides a virtual conference, exhibition, meeting, training and collaboration service.

The first kept me busy as launch editor from July 2010 to May 2011 and I joined the second in June 2011.

Blue & Green Tomorrow continues as an online publication under the same publisher, but with a new team, while 6Connex emea will make its official debut in January 2012. (The team has been working with customers and prospects 'under the radar' since it was formed in 2010 as Big Ideas Inc.)

So there you are, if you've come to my blog expecting frequent and interesting new posts, I'm afraid that's not going to happen. But if you subscribe to the RSS feed, then if I do burst into print on my own account, you'll be the first to hear about it.

Thank you for reading this far.

David

An evening with PR/Marketing Guru, Larry Weber

2011-10-31T18:34:08+00:00

Back in May, I trotted off to meet with marketing/PR guru, Larry Weber and a bunch of other interesting people, including Jack Schofield (IT man at the Guardian for donkey's years and erstwhile competitor - we both edited PC magazines in the early eighties) and Bill Nichols an academic and marcomms/reputation consultant who, when Jack and I were competing, was Clive Sinclair's PR man. They were both on the speaker panel with Larry. The other notable people were in the lively audience.

The occasion was the UK launch of Larry's (then) most recent book: Everywhere. It's about social networking being at the heart of the future of business. He calls this 'anytime, anywhere' access the the fourth wave of computing. (I ought to know what the three earlier waves were, but I've forgotten. Maybe it was brains, internal networking and internet, or something.)

No surprises so far then. But I don't think Larry set out to surprise us particularly. More that he wants to share his familiarity with the subject matter in a non-frightening manner. After all, the people who really need his insights are those who are probably the most fearful of openness, transparency and genuine dialogue. You might think of them as the 'command and contol' brigade. While this has its place, it's probably not where the rubber of the corporation hits the road of the marketplace.

Sorry, I should be talking about Larry's evening. (And, if you're wondering why it's taken me so long, it's because I was suddenly pitchforked into a new company and I've been more than a tad busy. My conscience was pricked by a Facebook post about his recent presentation to the Public Relations Student Society of America. The headline of the post was "Social media’s impact bigger than television’s.")

At his book launch, he predicted that, by 2015, "you'll be hard pressed to find any newspapers or nightly news on TV." He says, "TV ads have got to die sometime." He may not always provide answers but he knows how to provoke fresh thinking. Let's hope the revenue replacement doesn't put the TV companies even deeper in hock to corporate sponsors.

With regard to the Fourth Generation thing, he told the story of how he sent off for brochures from all the prospective colleges for his daughter. She didn't look at one of them. She'd already done her research online. Except she didn't refer to it as online. When Larry once said to her, "I'm going online", she replied "Oh Dad, we don't go online any more. We just are." Online, that is. And a lot of people reading this will know what she means. If you're not one of them, then it's likely that his book will interest you.

Another thing he talked about was Innocentive. Companies give it problems and money and it gets its community of 'solvers' to apply their brains. Larry gave examples of $100,000 here and $25,000 there. It's all online (of course). And the winning contributor exchanges their IP for the cash. That's a great commercial application of crowdsourcing. Related to this were his comments on how social networking allows for the intense, focused, sharing of knowledge. I think his book goes further and talks of micro-segmentation of the internet so that you can find a community and go deep into just about any subject that interests you.

He is very clear that successful companies (especially consumer-facing) will have to become radically transparent, be willing to share and also to stand for something that will resonate with customers and prospects. Core values that permeate the company's business. Larry doesn't claim it will be easy, but he sprinkles his conversation with stories old and new of how companies have turned on the proverbial dime. Dell, of course. BP to a certain extent. And so on.

I was quite taken with the idea that, "big sites will die under their own weight." He said this because he believes that all the power is now in the network. Not sure that a behemoth like IBM would totally agree with this sentiment, despite its strong advocacy of social networking values. With statements like this, the evangelist in Larry seems to pop out of the closet. (My views of evangelists are here.)

Let's turn to one of the other speakers, Bill Nichols. He scored a hole in one for me with his observation that "People respond to emotion and fairness."

I have the sense that the former has been faked and the latter missing for a long time.

If Larry and Bill are right, we would seem to be heading towards a better and much more harmonious world.

Let's hope so.

Sir Jimmy Savile

2011-10-29T22:08:00+01:00

Jimmy Savile died today. I hope you don't mind me reprinting an interview I did with him some years ago for Mensa Magazine. RIP Sir James. It was good meeting you.

GOOD KNIGHT

Sir James Savile, to accord him his correct title, is more than just flash jewellery, bonhomie and platinum blonde hair. These are merely the superficial manifestations of a very practical and thoughtful man. My aim for Mensa MAGAZINE was to meet the man behind the mask.

Few knights would conduct press interviews in zip-up carpet slippers, white socks, a red sports shirt, a yellow dressing gown and what looked suspiciously like blue pyjama trousers. The characteristic huge cigar was clamped in his teeth. I asked him if smoking had any effect on his running. "None whatsoever." Does he inhale? "No, no, no, no. You'd die in four seconds if you did. It's just for the aroma. And also they kill all known bugs dead."

I suggested he identify five pivotal moments in his life. The first one, "being born", was dealt with swiftly. The second came 15 years later when he realised that, "although still being totally in love with my parents, I'd have to de-learn a lot of the stuff of life they'd handed down to me. For example, my dad was a bookmaker's clerk so he had an inbuilt distrust of policemen which I grew up with. I had to de-learn that policemen were a problem in life, but that didn't affect my respect for my folks."

His third pivotal moment involved "the taking over of the gentlest form of control. My parents brought me up for the first half of my life and I brought them up for the second half of theirs. I realised that I had a clearer outlook on life than they did. Also it was obvious that I was earning ten times more than they ever dreamed about so, for their benefit, I then re-educated them that life wasn't like they thought it was from the Victorian days."

This looks, I know, a bit smug in print, but when Savile talks you can sense a warmth and affection for his parents who, apparently, were just as enthusiastic for the reversed roles as he was.

I suggested that they must have been very special parents to listen. "It's not so much that they listened, so much as they accepted. We never discussed it in anything like detail, because I realised that there's no point in discussing it. Later, after my father had died, I took my mother - I called her the Duchess - from the family terraced house to live in a sea front flat in Scarborough, with me. She had a beautiful place looking out at the sea. Whereas the way that she and my father were doing things, God bless him, we were looking out in somebody's back yard."

Did she regret anything in terms of old friendships and social connections? "Not at all, because of the thing called the telephone. The telephone is a lifebelt to old people. They should all have free telephones. Not free calls, though, because other people will come in and use it."

The fourth moment came when he realised, "the enormous sums of money that I was earning weren't going to ruin me, change me or kill me. When you get in the big bucks those are three things that can happen. The present day is studded with stories of people who have acquired lots of money which, in several cases, has led to their early death. They were more successful than I but not necessarily as clever because they're dead and I'm alive."

I asked him what traps they fell into. "Corruption. All round corruption. Corruption of the body, the spirit and the mind. That's what happened to them. As simple as that." Savile's fifth pivotal moment was, "the eventual realisation of your life long goal and, with some trepidation, you look at it to see if the goal was worth fighting for in the first place. My goal was simple: to be loaded, with nothing to do. To me that was eminently sensible. Because to be loaded with nothing to do delivers you ultimate freedom."

He based the amount of money he'd need on the assumption he might live to 110. "I'd gone up, as it were, the rapids of life, and had gone into the calm waters of the lagoon at the top and the lagoon was everything that I hoped it was going to be on the way up. So there was no disappointment. No saying, 'Cripes, I've wasted my entire life becoming loaded with nothing to do and it's not nice.'" So the final realisation was, "Yes, I'm loaded, I've got nothing to do and it's bleeding marvellous. It's bleeding fantastic. It means that I don't have to bother to earn money, which means that I do things because I choose to."

"Other people opt for different things. You can imagine me as the trunk of a tree with no branches and my juices shot straight up the trunk to the blossom at the top. Whereas every other human being that I know developed branches - wife, family, dog, cat, son, daughter, and their juice gets diverted and doesn't usually get right to the top because it's drained off. I will never have the emotion of a wife and two kids where they're all safely tucked up in bed and I go and lock the house up and go to bed. That must be a very satisfying thing. I don't have that. Likewise, they don't have this single-minded pleasure of setting out for something, achieving it, and saying, 'Hey ho, how about that then?'."

I wondered whether he thought about doing good when he was on the way up. "In the early days, my folks were always on the fund raising kick because it was a way of life. It provided a social life - whist drives, dances, all those things. It was not only a fund raising thing, it was a pleasant evening and it had a purpose of profit to give to somebody else at the end of it. At the end of the day, you'd hear them talking 'We've made one pound four shillings. That's very good. We'll give that to the Little Sisters. They'll like that.' And I used to think, 'Cripes there's about nine people grafted their balls off for about five days. They've got one pound and four shillings. Equated out that makes it about tuppence ha'penny each. There's got to be an easier way.' It was undeniably pleasant, you understand, but then I realised that they did it as much for the way of life as they did it for the gain. But all this went into my computer up 'ere." He taps his head.

"Then I realised that if I made myself independent, eventually, I might be of more use to people. So I didn't do very much for anybody for the first ten years. And then, as it got obvious that that I might just stay, I started to do that bit more. Then there came a period where what you did for people overtook, time-wise, what you were doing for yourself. And now the ratio is I work, we'll say, one day a week for me and six days for everybody else, for free. I don't see that that's giving at all. I see that's sensible because, exactly like my folks, it also gives me a lifestyle which I quite enjoy."

I asked him what major problems he thought the world faces. "The common denominator of world problems must be, again, corruption. It is patently obvious that individual corruption has ruined many an emergent African state. It's patently obvious that corruption has ruined the country of, shall we say, Iraq. Somebody like Saddam Hussein who professes to work with God on his side but at the same time builds himself a fifty million pound palace and gasses the Kurds. Which he did. Then obviously, the guy is a con man. If he is not a con man, he is totally deluded in what he is thinking."

"Corruption spreads. If the boss is corrupt then the deputy boss is corrupt. And so is the deputy's deputy and so on and so forth, right down to as far down as it can possibly reach. If one poses the question, 'Will you ever eradicate corruption?', the answer is, 'No'. Because the resolution of the vast majority of things in the world is attempted by debate. But very few bring into the frame the thing called human nature. Corruption, in all its forms, is the bedevilment of the world."

"The alternative is within your circle, to do what you can starting with yourself, to resist corruption. At the end of the day, you have to be prepared to jettison those people who won't knock corruption on the head and get on with your own little thing. Conversely, you can have ceaseless, endless, pointless and stupid debates about so-called global problems when it's comfortable not to acknowledge the real problem, which is corruption."

Another answer, he suggests, is "sensible and honest education. Education is different things to different people. If you have a nationalist group that instructs its children to sing nationalist songs and actively hate those not of its nation, that is not education, that is corruption. So corruption can be passed on by education."

I couldn't leave without asking him about his three major honours. The first, his OBE in 1971, came while his mother was still alive. He shared her disbelief that a child from such humble origins could be so honoured. In 1980 he became a Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory, an honour bestowed by the Pope. "That," says Savile, "was a tremendous honour because, as a Catholic boy, to get a papal knighthood was totally unthinkable and was the source of much inner comfort and humility as well."

This experience was repeated in 1990 when he received a knighthood from the Queen. According to Savile, "I found all these awards of high fun content, high dignity content, and some small acceptance that whatever I was doing I must have been doing it right in the eyes of man, if not necessarily in the eyes of God. But I've got to pay that bill as and when it comes. The second bill."

I'll tell you now, I wasn't looking forward to meeting Sir James Savile OBE. Although I loved programmes like Jim'll Fix It and Savile's Travels, I was convinced he'd bury me in banter. I am delighted to say that I was wrong. He was extremely pleasant and courteous and gave very thoughtful answers to my questions. The man is undeniably kind. He is relentlessly logical. But the thing that impressed me most was the quality and strength of his convictions.

I am alive, unlike my poor namesake

2011-09-11T22:36:18+01:00

My phone has been ringing off the hook (well, it would be if it had a hook). And I see my blog has suddenly become very popular.

This is because an unfortunate man called David Tebbutt and his wife Judith were attacked by bandits in Kenya last night. The man was killed and the wife abducted.

It's been interesting to have conversations with a media that needed considerable persuasion that I was not the person who was killed. (I think they wanted to run my picture with the story.)

And I apologise for any erstwhile colleagues who got caught up in this. It's touching that they reached out to check if I was okay. Thanks folks,

Now, let's just think of the poor man who was killed, his wife who was abducted and the family whose lives must now be in utter turmoil.

Homo Imitans. People do what we do, not what we say

2011-08-22T05:42:19+01:00

The human body has two circulatory systems, the veinous and the lymphatic. They are connected, but largely independent.

Leandro Herrero's latest book, Homo Imitans, reminded me that the body corporate also contains two circulatory systems, the hierarchy and the networks. And, while each plays an important role, the networks - rather like the lymphatic system of the body - have incredible power which is underestimated, if not ignored, in most organisations.

This is a mistake, says Dr Herrero, describing the two systems as 'World I' and 'World II'. His book is mostly about World II, with the occasional nod to the enabling and encouraging role of World I in enlightened organisations.

His fundamental thesis (building on his earlier Viral Change book, which I reviewed here) is that people are more inclined to change their behaviour by copying peers that they respect than commands from on high. And, since behaviour is the only thing that counts when it comes to real change inside organisations, this is where (change) management should be focusing its energies. Dr Herrero gives due credit to authors of social networking books which cover a lot of similar ground, but his talent is in directing his thoughts and guidance slap bang into the heart of organisations that want to change but don't know how. It is also, very occasionally, a 'sell' for his Viral Change^TM practice, should you not want to go it alone.

Influence travels through networks completely independently of the company hierarchy and, in many cases, without the hierarchy even being aware of what's going on. In an organisational example, we saw it when Greg Dyke left the BBC after the stink around the 'sexing up' of the Iraq dossier - the crowds of staff, some in tears, seemed to appear out of nowhere but they were actually galvanised by the internal network.

In a non-corporate example, the recent rioting and looting in England came about largely through social networking and many people caught up in it were simply copying others who appeared to be 'getting away with it'. (The book contains a very useful 40-page annex which describes in detail many examples of social contagion with references to Dr Herrero's source material. It's called The Human Condition: a guide for the perplexed.)

All of which brings us back to the title of the book (Homo Imitans, if you've forgotten). We see what others do and we copy them. If others who respect or like us, see us doing something in a new way that makes sense to them, they copy us. If just three people copy what 'someone like them' is doing, then it's clear that such a social infection will quickly reach epidemic proportions.

The trick espoused by Dr Herrero is to find those key people in organsiations, wherever they are, and persuade them that a new way of behaving is good for them. (Obviously, it has to be good for the organisation, otherwise there's no point in doing it.) Much has been written about finding such 'champions' but less has been written about focusing on their behaviour.

Words alone are not enough. Dr Herrero likes to collect "Don't do that" posters which usually have little effect but can actually encourage whatever it is they're trying to stop. ("ABUSE OF STAFF WILL NOT BE TOLERATED", etc.) People will respond much more readily to what others do than to what they say.

The book is rich in structure and entertaining in style. It hammers home its messages and suggests new practices from a variety of perspectives. Each chapter reinforces what went before but, maybe because I've spent the the last 35 years as an enthusiast of behavioural psychology and the last seven deep in social networking, I felt I'd well and truly got the message before the end. Nevertheless, I notice I've still made margin notes right up to the last page.

I particularly like his encouraging penultimate paragraph:

"Viral Change^TM ... doesn't depend on behavioural sciences, network theory, social sciences, storytelling and leadership studies. Or even us as consultants!"

Leandro Herrero provides a wealth of persuasive examples and evidence which will help you make the case for socially-driven behavioural change in your own organisation.

Recommended.