21st Century Organization

Virtual Worlds in Business: Unisfair, ITE Expo Inworld, Ludium II

A number of interesting events revealing the burgeoning business use of virtual worlds, and indications that more to follow:

1. Unisfair and Conference 2.0

Thanks to Nitin Karandikar at Software Abstractions for a detailed and insightful review of Unisfair, a conferencing platform described as a combination of:

"WebEx with Second Life, with a dash of LinkedIn thrown in". 

Unveiled at the Web 2.0 Virtual Events for Enterprise Unisfair indicates another enterprise software wave to watch.

2. International Technology Expo Inworld

Via Bill Lessard who spent last week busily preparing for the event, a pointer to the International Technology Expo, ITE’07 held inworld April 20th-22nd. Striking is the global reach of companies participating. Not surprizing as indeed Second Life is "virtual" but interesting to consider the far reaching new business opportunities opened.

3. Ludium II: Synthetic Worlds and Public Policy

From colleague Victoria Axelrod who closely follows Edward Castranova's research through the Synthetic Worlds Initiative at Indiana University, notice that registration is open for the Ludium II conference. 

Numbers are limited as the conference will be conducted as a live game but based on the topic, "Synthetic Worlds and Public Policy", stated intent, and Castranova's influence, outcomes and consensus reached could be far reaching:

"Ludium II will bring together experts on virtual worlds from academia, industry, and government to play a live-action political game leading to an extremely serious, timely, and important contribution: a consensus Platform of 10 Statements answering the question "What policies should real world governments have with regards to synthetic worlds?" The hope is that this Platform will provide answers when legislatures and administrators wonder what to do in response to the critical public issues that will be raised by these unique social technologies."

~  Jenny Ambrozek

NETworkMINDS - Forbes 90th Anniversary Issue

28 essays from great minds tell the story of our connected lives quartered by Breakthroughs, Lifestyles,Technology, and Community in the May 7 issue of Forbes magazine -  The Power of Networks.  For anyone not familiar with all aspects of a connected world or needing a means to connect the dots, this issue should do the job.

Editor William Baldwin kicks off the issue with a re-framing of Metcalf's value of a network with Zipf's Law in his editorial, Making Connections.  Zipf. a linguist, used the frequency of words  usage  as the  determiner of value not just the number of connections in a network. 

Plotting word frequencies, Zipf observed that the numbers corresponded to the reciprocals of the words' ranks on the frequency table. If the, the most common word in English, appears 10,000 times in a book, the tenth most common word will appear 1,000 times, the hundredth most common 100 times.

The sequence of receding values 1, 1TK2, 1TK3 …, called the harmonic series, crops up in all sorts of places. There's Zipf in the size of cities, in the popularity of Web sites, in the familiar rule of thumb that says a handful of good customers account for the bulk of a company's sales. If you have 1,745 customers, the 80-20 rule says the top 20%, or 349, will deliver 80% of the dollars.

Forbes.com has created a Corporate ORG Chart Wiki  in beta which is a great start for helping the "hierarchy dependent" to possibly map the "informal organization" where we know the real work gets done!  Let's all use the Forbes Org Wiki for this purpose as well.

Congrats to Forbes for the grand tour from our brains "synaptic networks" to the collective character our "global community" to do good.

~Victoria G. Axelrod   

StarFLAG - Complexity Over Rome

Massive flocking behavior of starlings over Rome provides everyone with an easily graspable visual of complexity and its emergent qualities.

Jonathan Rosen's short piece in the New York Sunday Times - "Flight Patterns" is worth watching as he narrates from his written article even if you are only interested in the beauty of birds patterns in motion.

The StarFLAG site, mentioned in the piece, provides a more detailed description of the interdisciplinary research on the science of complexity being conducted on the starling phenomena.

Several of the themes the group plans to explore are "the mechanisms of decision-making and how information propagates among different agents, up to the level where collective decisions on the evolution of the system are taken."

One specific area of interest is economic herding behavior which may impact stock market bubbles and crashes.

Their more general themes include "models of complex collective dynamics" which may give them insights into " the competition between individual opinions and the influence of the group." The benefits may be in our future ability to predict, in complex collective movements, the emergence of "group panics or rapid adaptation to a changing environment." Both of which have practical value for organizational sustainability.

~Victoria G. Axelrod

Michael Eisner on Story Driven Content: CNBC Video

About.com podcasting guide John Haven's interview with Dan Rayburn, at the April NYC PODCAMP revealed Streaming Media magazine is nearly a decade old.  With that industry context it was interesting to hear Michael Eisner in a CNBC interview forecast that with increasing Internet speed within 1-5 years mainstream, professionally produced content will be streamed.  With the amount of news video especially already available online is streaming video not already arrived?

Eisner also makes attention getting comments, especially for traditional media companies, about the:

".. sea change in story driven content not controlled by gatekeepers beginning with movie theaters, exhibition and broadcast and cable, and government, licenced venues, as big a sea change as invention of motion picture camera."

and suggests that the changes are:

"... more important than people understand .."

Recommended listening.

Hearing Eisner talk about "story" I thought about Steve Denning and his pioneering efforts to promote "storytelling" for knowledge sharing in organizations and the more recent efforts of Shawn Callahan at Anecdote.  As the experience with participatory media, starting with instant messaging and more recently blogging, is that consumer use drives enterprise adoption, I wonder if Eisner's focus on "story" indicates growing use of '"storytelling" in organizations too.  Anyone care to predict?

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Grocery Biz Innovation? Trader Joe's L O N G Barcodes

After writing here about Tesco's customer research preparing to launch in California I was interested when a colleague remarked on the barcode printed on the full bottom flap of  Trader Joe's Organic Honey Macadamia Grainfest cereal.  It's signifcantly longer and wider than the traditional barcode on the bottom, for example, of the General Mills Cheerios package.

I can't help but wonder:

WHY the bigger Trader Joe's barcode? 

Does the larger barcode streamline scanning and reduce check out time?

From WHERE did the different barcode idea spring?  Somebody in distribution or a Trader Joe's store? Or perhaps the scanning software vendor?

Speaking at the 2004 Leading in a Connected World conference Ranjay Gulati made the case for viewing organizations as moving from "product" to "relational focus" and presented a model of the "relational organization" including employees, customers, suppliers and partners.

I'm curious from which part of the Trader Joe's ecosytem the large cereal box barcoding innovation emerged.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

PODCAST Camp NYC Success, Energy & Rick Santelli @ the Board of Trade

Post the success of PODCAMP NYC I've been considering WHY. 

This morning listening to CNC's Rick Santelli reporting from the Chicago Board of Trade around 8.40am provided some real clues.

Speaking about stock market statistics Mr.Santelli said:

"I love the market.

  It's my passion, my hobby, my job."

Video is here. Appears near end of segment.

PODCAMP NYC overflowed with people passionate and enthusiastic about podcasting, many working hard to turn a hobby into a job and business.

The energy in the room was contagious and noticeable because it is so often missing from established organizations. The work of Rob Cross and his colleagues at the Network Roundtable first focused my attention on managing energy in organizations.  Here's a recommended paper, fully available only to Roundtable members.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Note to CNBC: Love your TV channel but despite your HEAVY promo of the new web site have to tell you in my experience it's CLUNKY and your search engine needs serious help. Had to go to Google to locate Rick Santelli's bio (with bonus of discovering how widely he is mentioned.) And if perchance anyone at CNBC is reading, WAY too much CNBC branding in the header IMHO.

Listening to the Customer: FT Book Review

Interesting Financial Times review today of "Hidden in Plain Sight: How to find and execute your company's next big growth strategy" by Erich Joachimsthaler, Harvard Business School Press.

Extracts examples of companies perceived as effective listeners, including Apple for the IPOD, Mastercard and Frito Lay (for advertising and branding,) and State Street's transition to focus on providing financial information. Story of UK based Tesco's efforts to enter the grocery market in California describes what the process of listening to customers can entail.

Jonathan Birchall, the reviewer in closing suggests that while a "fascinating tour around the global block on innovation" the book would have been "more exciting to read" before the widespread awareness of AG Lafley and Jim Stengal's focus on rethinking innovation with toothpaste at Procter and Gamble starting in 2000, or GE's Jeff Immelt's resurrecting the post of "chief marketing officer", "appointing Beth Comstock who had worked on identifiying the needs of customers in 10 year's time".

Book listed as not yet available on Amazon.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

What Does It Take to Make a Network Work?

Seeing organizations as interconnected networks is not new, however our need to understand how networks work has become critical.  The drivers of complexity, scale and internet speed are forcing a new look at both informal and formal network patterns of relationships.

Patti Anklam, author of Net Work: A Practical Guide to Creating and Sustaining Networks at Work and in the World translates her insights and years of experience as a consultant to boipharma, telecommunications, manufacturing, financial services,governmental agencies and as an executive at Nortel, Digital Equipment and Compaq-HP into accessible language for anyone seeking a better grasp of human network dynamics.

On April 19th Patti will be leading an interactive presentation to the Organizational Development Network of Greater New York on What it Takes to Make a Network Work. 

Join us for an exciting exchange on the value of networks to their members and the impact they create.

~Victoria G. Axelrod

Enterprise 2.0 RAVE: Please Join Us

Enterprise 2.0 RAVE speaker Bill Ives has posted in detail about the event scheduled for New York May 21-22. I've heard keynote speaker Andrew McAfee speak twice now, first with Ross Mayfield keynoting last year's Interop in NY and more recently at the FAST Forward Search Conference in San Diego. An Andrew McAfee/Euan Semple exchange at the FAST conference caused a flurry of blog conversations on the issues around Enterprise 2.0 adoption especially among FAST Forward bloggers but also here.

In addition to Andrew McAfee, Euan Semple and Bill Ives, the RAVE offers an opportunity to meet Kathleen Gilroy, Jim McGee, Joe McKendrick, and Susan Scrupski.

I'm honoured to be participating too in an event that provides a unique opportunity to address the challenges and potential "Enterprise 2.0" tools present organizations. Given the nature of the event spaces are limited. 

Use this link to receive discounted entry.

Susan Scupski points to a couple of must read recent articles from Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in the Spring 2007 MIT Sloan Review and a McKinsey survey on Web 2.0 adoption that make essential RAVE background reading.

Hoping to see you May 21-21 in New York.

~ Jenny Ambrozek                                 

PODCAMP NYC: Energized Media, Rising Stars & New Roles

Even for a remotely cynical TechVet like Bill Lessard Saturday's NYC PODCAMP left no doubt podcasting is REAL and a growing media force. Attending a NYC Podcasting Meetup had shown me podcasting had arrived, but Saturday's gathering with 1,000 plus entrepreneurial individual podcasters and emerging businesses to support them, was an eye opener.  The conference challenge was choosing among an abundance of interesting sessions. With apologies to ther presenters I had to skip, here are my highlights:

• Jason Van Orden- Consultant, author, interesting session on blogging and podcasting basics.

Reminded me to dig for Dave Winer's 2005 admonition:

"Not having an RSS feed for a business site is like not having business cards."

• John Havens- About.com podcasting guide hosted a terrific conversation with Streaming Media Executive VP Dan Rayburn, an industry veteran and blogger. (StreamingMedia is an Information Today Inc. company.)

• Nancy A, Shenker, President of OnSwitch revealed real world marketing experience in her refreshing presentation on communication "timeless truths" including:

"Experiences, Relationships, Mind expansion and Memories"

and reminders about:

"trust, quality, manners, true interest, loyalty"

• Heath Row, now Research Manager with DoubleClick, encouraged thinking about interactive online advertising. Tagging ads. Interesting.

• Reena Jana, a Business Week writer who also produces their "Innovation" podcasts, provided an invaluable business of podcasting presentation despite the technology limiting playing her podcasts!

My quick sponsor count numbered about 50 with some companies like Podango no doubt paying more for their branded room.  Credit for most creative and fun promotion goes to Adam Varga for his podcasting cards reading. Thanks Adam for the heads up about my challenges! OddPodz provided an environmentally conscious goodie, a recycled calico tea bag?  Did I understand that correctly? After intriguing conversations with founders Jocelin Ring and Karen Post, I'm adding OddPodz, "a community for the creative class", (soon to be headquartered on the "Creative Coast"), to my companies to watch list.   

Take Aways

1. Emerging business and job opportunities in podcasting.

Growing fields include podcast marketing and publishing networks. Podcasting 'stationmaster" is a new job title and actors are finding work as podcasting hosts. Interesting the number of entrepreneurial Canadians represented from interactive marketing agency Caprica to enthusiastic zine producer Vergel Evans.

2. Wake Up Call to Established Media Brands

Business Week's experience reveals the value for traditional media in using podcsating to promote their content and brand, and create new sponsor opportunities. My sense is if you are an established media brand not strategically using podcasting your brand potential is in decline. Anyone care to tell me I am wrong?

Congratulations to the NYC PODCAMP organizing team and to all the individuals and sponsor companies who pitched in to make it a rich, and can you believe, "free" event.  Testimony, as the open source movement has demonstrated, to the power of networks and individual contribution and sharing. Thanks to colleagues Kiki Mulliner and Jeffrey Keefer for sharing the day and encouraging me to attend.

~ Jenny Ambrozek