#socialtourettes #sloppyslang & #thetyranny #ofmemyself-i

01 Friday Apr 2016

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ego, handles, hashtags, idetity, lazy, Nihilism, pointless, puntuation, Social, social networks, twitter

#wellinever

#haveyounoticed

#everyonesdoingit

#speakinginhastags

@andhandles

#noreasonatall

#anyphrase

#randomrambling

#hashtagged

#pointless

#socialtourettes

#cantstop

@flicking&clicking

#myspacebar

@myinterfaceplace

#everyonesaddicted

@thedropofaphat

#spewingsymbols

@screenafterscreen

#lookatme

@tom

@dick

@&harriet

@thatsmyname

#dontwearitout

#apeakinginriddles

#slice&dicelanguage

#inthesocial

#shittylittleditties

#presstoimpress

#everykeyisme

#typelikeabastard

#twothumbsonfire

#headupmyarse

#littlestory

@bout

@jack&diane

#crossedthewasteland

@madelegends

#notasmartphoneinsight

#getmeabed

#myheadispinning

#cosIjustcantstop

#hashtagging

#mylife

#away

#tillthelastdrop

@creativity

#slipsmymind

#pointlesspunctuation

#sloppyslang

#f%*kall

#bangformybuck

#notfeelingit

#justsaying

#fuckit

#anything

#is

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#living

#one

#word

#at

#time

#especially

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#thefirstword

#is

#fashion

#ohwell

#theonlytruth

@me

@myself

#goodbye

Profit, Purpose, Evil & the realm of journalistic Uh Duh!

30 Wednesday Mar 2016

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Adam Lowry, Alinsky, Be Evil, Big Kahuna Burger, Corporation Tax, Cultural, Duh!, Economic, Environmental, Firms of Endearment, Inc magazine, Infectious Feelgood, Kevin O"Leary, Natural Capital, Passion, purpose, Resilience Strategies, Rules For Radicals, Social, Social Responsibility, Tax Evasion

Headline: Go ahead. Be Evil.

Sub head: Do you need a social mission? Hell, no. Profit is the mission

How weird. If Inc’s leader piece in its March issue is anything to go by one might think that the jury is still out in business-land about whether profit is the only fundamental Purpose or Mission you need.

I’m thinking that perhaps they were just looking for a headline. And for that you need the polarities. A publisher’s master-class in the application of Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals perhaps. Remove the grey. Black or White. or nothing. Set Kevin O’Leary’s profit purpose against Adam Lowry’s social purpose; light blue touch-paper and see what happens. O’Leary’s blue collar good fella folksy says it the way it is ‘honesty’ versus Lowry’s campus cool, organic jaw-lined post-grad Karmic intensity.

Celebrity Purpose Smack-down. Hoo-haa.

Sadly, post reading, it all felt a little disappointing. I was expecting something incendiary. Perhaps I missed the point. To be fair I thought we’d got beyond this a while back.

Purpose is about founding and rooting a business in something beyond the balance sheet and the share price – creating a north star for it that reaches beyond the pure objective of profit. Its not about Profit OR Purpose. Double Duh! Its simply about developing a healthy and respectful relationship between the two.

Purpose is about developing resilience in a business both in social, cultural and environmental terms as well as economic ones.

Purpose is about passion, determination and belief at work in a company for good – the infectious feel-good of making shit happen both individually and collectively – and the nurturing of a centre of gravity that enables a company to absorb turbulence and short term impacts.

Purpose (social or otherwise) can have a simple premise – for example – to want to build a thriving profitable and resilient business able to relentlessly reinvest in stimulating and securing increasing and sustainable growth to create wealth, jobs and ever-improving communities is an admirable purpose.

The lever word in this is resilient. And resilience comes from not overdrawing or pillaging the sources of capital a business needs and demands to be profitable.

A company’s Social, Cultural and Environmental Capital accounts need to be as healthy as the Economic ones.

A balanced book should show the positive impact column of the business in credit even after you’ve accounted for everything in the negatives impacts column . And Purposeful businesses seem to be far better in achieving this balance.

This is nothing to do with setting up a charitable book on the business. If water depletion or obesity are negative externalities of your chosen business then you need to account for and invest in mitigating them – reductions, off sets, replenishment and prevention programmes become critical and central to your profitability accounting processes. To ignore them is to foster vulnerabilities and turbulence in the fabric of the company and in its ability to thrive.

Any ‘shareholder’ who compels or lobbies a company to ignore the business case for Purpose and the behaviours and actions pursuing it demands is in effect trying to short the company. Between lengthening a business’s odds through the relentless and passionate application of Purpose or shortening them by sustaining a myopic obsession with Pure profit, I know which one I find more ‘evil’.

Why Mr. O’Leary thinks that purposeful companies are missing the point of a business – to be profitable – I am not certain.

A quick rummage in Firms Of Endearment’s most recent stats show that companies driven by purpose and passion outperform the S&P 500 by 14 times over 15 years.

To be clear, I think we’re getting there but still have a way to go. I am certainly not advocating that every company featured on Firms of Endearment’s list of big purpose Kahuna Burgers is some scion of the Gods of Good.

A number of multi-nationals who like to be seen a Purpose driven with a clear sense of the power of Stakeholder over Shareholder modelling still seem to find a way of rationalizing very shifty profit accounting to evade stonking levels of Tax. A number of them sit on Firm’s of Endearments list of the great and the good.

How do they reconcile Endearment with almost criminal levels of tax evasion I am unsure.

Perhaps they’re a little tied up with other things at the moment.

Perhaps they just don’t agree with the simple theory that if your business’s performance, competitive advantage and increasing profitability is rooted in the quality and wellbeing of the indigenous workforce you employ, you should invest in the fiscal infrastructure of the society that creates that workforce – keeps them healthy, safe, secure and living in a stable thriving society. It’s called Corporation Tax.

Or perhaps it’s just that they are too busy passionately pursuing the intelligent, enlightened and relentless re-direction of profits for the purpose of executive redistribution.

or perhaps they’re just Evil!

(cue high fives, whoop de dooping and general chest bump, you d’Man-ing.)

#voom, voices & the murmurations of the twitterati

31 Tuesday Mar 2015

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#voom, A.I., beauty, Communications, desire, dynamic data, ecosystems, entrepreneurship, flocking, geolocation, mobile, murmurations, nature, Old Street, ornithology, phenomena, pitch to rich, recognition, Social, social brand, social mapping, Social Purpose, starlings, Twitterati, Virgin Media Business, voice

There’s something rather magical about the fluid shape shifting phenomena of social media.

And it has reached far beyond the slangy codified data dynamics and scale numbers thrown around Old Street hot desks of doing.

Dependent on the context and the lens through which you view them, there is something truly phenomenal in the surges swoops and sweeps of the numbers and the geophysics of how where and when they occur

Having just launched the Virgin #voom/Pitch to Rich campaign (not personally of course but as one of a very large team) I have started to view social phenomena through this lens and things are looking quite beautiful. And revelatory.

The staggering social reach and the dynamics of flocking in the social media networks around the campaign and some of the numbers being achieved (45.2 Million social media reach in 6 days-ish) has for me stretched far beyond the need for collective nouns.

(How the #voom/pitchtorich campaign reached this scale of impact is a much larger thing to consider. But the finger points to the spirit, mood, exceptional impact and revelatory nature of the Branson films Bruce Goodison of Sundog Pictures created from the various pieces of paper and email chains – supported by some leading media thinking and doing across a substantial number of interrelated and interdependent media channels, partners and audiences)

The wave of furious activity #voom/pitchtorich has inspired in the social networks bears a closer look. The irony is that the further back you stand the closer you can observe the ‘nature’ – the physical virtual dynamics – of its social phenomena.

Originating in a clumsy joke of mine about twitter and birds flocking – I slowly came to the quieter joke of murmurations of twitterati. I am always astonished and in awe of murmurations of starlings. There is an ‘otherness’ to them – as if they are in thrall to a different dimension of existence – to the magnetic turbulences and older forces at work in the world that remain otherwise unseen.

It is also incredible to think that we as humans get to observe them in ways they will never know from the white heat heart of their furious purpose.

Perhaps the same is true of ourselves in relation to our virtual otherness and the collective behaviours and actions in which our virtual selves participate.

I have always sensed that the shape shifting mass of a murmuration carries its own ‘voice’ within it; a relentlessly changing imprint of cadences, inflections; sharp punctuations and sublime emphasis – an ornithological oratory written across the sky.

It then occurred to me that if we mapped our social murmurations – by numbers and actions across time and space we could perhaps visualise our own greater voice carried within them.

For example if there was a social campaign that could be plotted not only by number of participants (flock) but by intensity (altitude) geolocation (topography) and time (horizon) – perhaps we could create animated murmurations of social phenomena.

If we could do that we could then perhaps study the patterns and nature of them in much the same way that we study sound waves and voice recognition patterns.

And perhaps with the wider ambition of attribution, we could begin to recognize traits and characteristics in each pattern that helps us to define the real voice at work and its source and integrity.

Just a thought that I would love to explore a little more.

Invisible Telecoms, the looking glass & the Hidden Art of IT Qi

14 Thursday Aug 2014

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competitive advantage, create and capture value, customer centricity, Digital, hyper speed, Invisible Telecoms, IT, Martial Art, operational innovation, opportunities, Qi, qualitative growth, resilience, Social, Solutions provision, systemic excellence, Tech, tech reflex, telecoms, Zen

I have become an adherent to the new martial art of business. I can now see the entrepreneurial wood for the IT trees.

And in true zen stylie, what I see is all about what is unseen.

A statement of the bleeding obvious perhaps BUT in the realm of your tech and IT systems and solutions partner who enabled them, out of sight is truly out of mind.

We should not only embrace the invisible Matrix nature of IT and tech deployment. We should grow to love it. And for good reason.

The Now you see it Now you don’t approach to best in class tech and IT – apparent only by its absence denotes a win for the business.

Invisibility is success.

Because Visibility usually means you’ve a little way to go yet.

Like the word Digital. Or the word Social. IT and tech, while still top of the conversational pile and being touted as the next best C Suite thang, are patently still under-performing.

While we still say them out loud, put them on presentations, flag them, budget for them, mention them loudly in lifts it simply means they are not yet embedded properly. They are not optimally integrated. If they were we would not need to point at them.

In certain areas of business the idea of anything becoming invisible is a measure of its success. Sustainability is a very good example also of this phenomena. While there is still a CSO, and Sustainability has not migrated up into the Marketing or Operational functions, Sustainability cannot be said to be truly integrated into the nature and fabric of the business.

Much like Sustainability, Tech and IT should, in its explicit and visible form, seek to become invisible – working towards a strategy of divine obsolescence.

Moving from an explicit visible tangible to becoming internalized, implicit, invisible: transforming into a discrete reflex or innate ability within the business: when something becomes second nature, it means that the fluid, synchronised nature of it is seamlessly connecting and connected with the ‘flow’.

IT & Tech, much like HR, is no longer a support activity as it was in the old model of Value Chains, an administrative prop to paperwork systems and communications in an analogue world. Through intra and extra nets, digital and social service improvements and propositions, operational innovations and the new world order of hyper speed intelligence and data as a primary driver of most businesses competitive advantage, IT & tech is now woven through every dimension of a business.

So to set out to deliver Invisible Telecoms – to make the measure of success the degree of visibility of IT & tech dimensions of the business is compelling.

If you are a solutions provider in the area and your goal is to work with clients to embed IT and telecoms to such a degree that they become invisible – transforming into the company’s systemic operational reflex, the synaptic system controlling the optimal operational ‘flow’, then your goal has exceptional commercial value.

The ambition to take it to the nth degree until it becomes the company’s ‘second nature’ if you will presets a business for greater flexibility agility and focus.

Invisibility also becomes a very clear metric of customer centricity.

If you’re in the business of selling IT and tech, in the real world of value, you need to move from pushing buttons boxes and fibre to selling the space to think and act on building a more resilient business through tech.

You need to be in the business of selling Mind-width not bandwidth: free your mind and your ass will follow as Funkadelic sang. Unlocking the entrepreneurial reflex in the business by liberating the customers mind of Tech & IT distractions – leaving them free to concentrate on creating exceptional ‘flow’.

To a customer Invisibility is about the goal of making IT & Tech less and less present in my eye-line: less of a priority: less visible in my inbox everyday, dropping away to being something that just ‘is’. The concept of turning IT & tech into a truly ethereal concept for a business is brave and powerful.

Creating the Qi model for smart businesses, changing the whole way we thing about IT, moving it from rational and engineered to being truly systemic, flow orientated and about cultural and social vitality and wellbeing – wellbeing from the inside out.

Qualitative growth is hard to see or imagine let alone define and capture through a complex maze of surface connectivity, functionality and capability. The ability to mine qualitative growth opportunity needs to be a reflex in the business facilitated by invisible technology and hyper speed connectivity. The systemic fabric and infrastructure needs to be able to act at the speed of the human mind and work well in advance of it.

Time to remove the IT bandages and unsee what is beneath. The degree of how much is left unseen will be down to the mastery of the CTO and their digital partners in crime.

This truly is the looking glass and the wormhole rolled into one. A world of infinite possibility only recognisable in each successful step towards a wholly more resilient and differentiated business – one focused on unleashing minds to do what they should be doing. Walking the talk is not an app that you buy; its a disposition that you live.

White rabbit anyone?