Organizing without Organizations (or Hush! Caution! Echoland! Here Comes Everybody)

Consider the following:

• In 1992, the Boston Globe runs news stories about a Catholic priest who abused children for decades before being pulled from rotation among parishes. Boston parishioners are upset, but their anger lacks any organizational punch. The most they can do is mutter into their missals and write a letter or two. The Church leaders treat the scandal as an internal affair, and the incident dies down. In 2002, the Globe runs similar news stories about yet another priest, John Geoghan, who abused children for several decades. This time the parishioners create an organization, Voice of the Faithful, whose ranks swell to 25,000 people within a few months. Voice of the Faithful's clout is such that after decades of successfully squelching criticism and revolt, the local Catholic bishop is forced to resign.
  
• In the 2004 presidential election, Howard Dean’s supporters organize online, produce surprisingly large crowds of supporters at events, and raise more funds than the rival campaigns. Despite this show of strength, Dean does poorly in the primaries and the nomination goes to John Kerry.
  
• In 1992, a young Finnish programmer posts a message on a message board, announcing that he’s going to free operating system as a hobby. Fifteen years later, the free operating system, Linux, is running on nearly 40% of the world’s servers.
  
• One morning in Cairo, an Egyptian blogger is arrested for libel. Using Twitter, a micro-blogging service (micro-blogging is blogging with very short blog posts), he informs his friends, who rally lawyers, and by 11 pm that night he is free.
  

What all these stories have in common is that social tools such as email enabled people to communicate and collaborate in ways that would have been unimaginable a decade or two ago. Email, wikis, blogs, and social network sites such as Facebook and MySpace make it easy for people to connect to one another and share information. The cost of communicating is negligible. The speed of communication is almost instant. The ramifications are many.

As Clay Shirky, an IT consultant and teacher at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, writes in his new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, social tools like email have changed social behavior forever. Not all online social endeavors will succeed—the Dean campaign failed because it had a committed core but lacked a broad, committed base—but many will succeed, a few wildly so. As the Boston diocese discovered, when large numbers of people suddenly have the ability to organize easily, they become a powerful, just about unstoppable force for change. New broad-based movements can start at any time. And no traditional organization or government can contain them.

We're all aware of at least some of the impact of these tools: all the teenagers on Facebook, solicitations from PACs for emailing Congress, and so on. But few of us have surveyed the broad effects of these tools in a systematic way to gain an understanding of how people, social contracts, and software are all interacting. Shirky gives us this survey, and it's lucid and thought-provoking.

He points out:

"We now have communications tools that are flexible enough to match our social capabilities, and we are witnessing the rise of new ways of coordinating action that take advantage of that change. . . . These tools have radically altered the old limits on the size, sophistication, and scope of unsupervised effort."

Email, blogs, and wikis dramatically lower the cost of coordinating group efforts. They enable groups to organize quickly and easily and to take on daunting projects that traditional organizations, with their hierarchical structures and cost-consciousness, would never consider. When organization becomes easy, more people will organize. When more people can organize, new forces for change will sweep society, affecting government, business, culture, and personal lives.

In just under 300 pages, Shirky explores the characteristics, implications, and results of the new types of social interactions and organizations that have emerged in the past decade. Here’s a quick survey of some of his insights:

• The power law distribution (think of the curve you’ve seen in discussion of the long tail phenomenon) describes all sorts of social behavior, from contributors to Wikipedia to the popularity of blogs to programming work done on open source software projects.
  
• Participation in most social systems follows a power law distribution. A few contributors do most of the work. Most contributors do almost nothing. The work of the industrious few provides so much value to the less industrious majority, though, that they feel motivated to contribute, improving the breadth and quality of the entire project.
  
• If the majority of blog entries, MySpace pages, and other online content strikes you as trivial and inane; don’t worry. It doesn’t really matter, because you’re not the intended audience. These communications are public, but their intended for a select audience of friends and family. Shirk likens blog posts such as “What’s happening, dude?” to a conversation overheard in a shopping mall. Comparing the artistic quality of a blog post or MySpace page to a story in the New Yorker misses the point. And you will be overlooking the manifest transformative power of these new tools, were you simply to dismiss them because of their low editorial standards.
  
• As communication moves online, it becomes permanent through digital archives. Until now, most of what was preserved was official. Now everyday remarks are by default permanently "on the record."
  
• Social tools like the Web site Meetup.com enable small, splintered groups to meet and form. People who have explicitly left organizations (such as churches) can now easily organize themselves.
  
• Group projects follow this pattern: offer, tool, bargain. Someone initiates the group by making an offer, the group uses a tool to undertake group activity, and the behavior and expectations of the group are governed by an explicit bargain. Selecting the wrong offer, tool, or bargain can doom a project. That said, the particulars of group projects are so varied and complex, it would be folly to proscribe specific offers, tools, or bargains categorically.
  
• The best ideas in an organization usually come from people who bridge social groups within the organization. They’re able to assess a situation with a fresh perspective, and they feel less compulsion for conforming with peers and for preserving the status quo of a department.
  
• "No whining!" is a rule common to many social groups (and if that upsets you, please keep it to yourself).
  

Shirky does an excellent job analyzing the results—intended and otherwise—of new forms of social organization, such as meetups and groups like Voices of the Faithful. Whether you’re interested in applying some of these group dynamics to your business, or you simply want to read an engaging account of how these tools are changing the world you live in, you’ll find this book well worth your time.

POSTSCRIPT

As a Joycean, I feel compelled to mention that the phrase "Here Comes Everybody" is a kind of motif from Finnigans Wake, where the phrase serves as the basis for all sorts of other phrases with the initials HCE. For a list of HCE phrases, which you can imagine applying to social networks in all sorts of ways, click here. As you might guess, the title of this blog post, "Hush! Caution! Echoland!" is an HCE phrase from FW.

The Importance of Benevolence for Business

Paul Graham of Y Combinator has a thoughtful essay on how wildly successful start-ups (e.g., Google) often behave like non-profits. He discusses how being good can help a company become more focused, resilient, and successful.

You'll find a print version here and a video version here.

Keeping a Small Business Focused and on Track

In the CrowdVine discussion thread for the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo, Tony Stubblebine of Crowdvine asked people what tricks they use to keep their business on track.

Here's my answer, drawing on my experience with a number of organizations:

To keep a business on track, I use:

1) A strategic plan that lays out major goals (e.g., win at least 3 reference customers in key market X), each of which can be tracked by objectively measured milestones or supporting goals. Almost everyone thinks of a revenue target as an obvious strategic goal—and it can be—but it's just as important to think about other goals that address the company's position in the market and the company's various capacities (engineering capacity, sales capacity, etc.). In some cases, it might be better to settle for a lower revenue target while managing the company in such a way to address a latent deficiency. For example, it might be better for a cash-strapped company to manage its activities and sales expenses to end the year with more cash (but lower top-line revenue), instead of blowing out a revenue number with expensive sales campaigns and ending up with nothing in bank (again) and no ability to, say, hire critical engineers for the product overhaul planned for next year.

The main thing is to ask: Where do you want to be by the end of the year? What do you want to have in motion? Capture those ideas in specific goals and objectives.

All the company's major activities should be subsumed in the strategic plan. If you're working on something, you should be able to identify which one of the 5-10 major goals for the company it relates to. (And if you find that you've identified more than 10 goals, pare them down, especially if this is your first time trying to manage operations for an entire fiscal year according to a strategic plan.) Every organization, even small consultancies and non-profits, should develop and manage to such a plan. At the end of the year, you should be able to look back and judge how well you've done. If you've developed a good plan, you're going to find that you've not only hit your revenue goals, but that you've built a stronger organization that's better positioned for success.

2) A company mission statement or a summary of core values (see Collins and Porras' "Built to Last"). For example, I consider being responsive to customers to be one of the highest values for my work. One of the ways I keep my business on track is by asking myself several times each day, "Am I being responsive to my customers? Is there someone I should be calling?" If there's a value or behavior that's key to your company, note it. Write it down. Live by it.

I also:

3) Align technology to support #1 and #2. Take advantage of what's new (e.g., some of the great stuff that's going to be shown off at the Web 2.0 show), but don't get distracted. Use everything you can find—from software to devices to the right office chairs—that eliminates distractions, promotes productivity, and helps your employees meet your organization's goals while working in accordance with core values.

4) Hire people who are genuinely interested in growing a great business. (Suggestion for hiring managers: mention that you have a strategic plan, and see how the candidate reacts. Does he or she ask to see it, or does he or she simply nod and move on?)

Fire and Motion

If you had to reduce your business strategy to three words, what would they be?

For Joel Spolsky, the co-founder of Fog Creek Software and author of blog Joel on Software, the three words would be "Fire and Motion."

"Fire and Motion" is a military phrase that refers to firing your weapon (and causing your enemy to cower), while running forward (thereby gaining territory and through your promixity to your enemy, improving your aim).

Spolsky explains how everyone from small businesses to large companies like Starbucks can use "fire and motion" to drive their businesses forward.

Spolsky's article appears in the April edition of Inc. Magazine. You can find an online copy here.

As a metaphor, "fire and motion" does a good job of conveying the relentless activity that successful businesses engage in. But I find the idea of "firing" a little vague.

Spolsky cites the example of Starbucks throwing McDonalds off their game. Starbucks educated a lot of America about what coffee could be (at least compared to the watery stuff served in most restaurants) and offered customers a superior sipping and dining experience—purple armchairs and wood paneling beat hard plastic chairs every time.

But it's hard to derive this strategic approach simply from the idea of "firing." Firing is attacking the enemy. Undoubtedly Starbucks is attacking McDonalds by marketing good coffee and giving their customers a more comfortable environment for consuming fast food. But Starbucks could have interpreted "firing" with some other strategy for attacking McDonalds: cheaper burgers, more burgers, aggressive advertising, etc. And these other approaches would not necessarily work as well as the strategy Starbucks has chosen.

To fire with maximum effect, it's important to pay attention to Spolsky's comment about successful companies setting the agenda for their markets.

If you look at a competitive market, the successful company is always the one setting the agenda and forcing competitors to match it. For example, JetBlue's version of fire and motion came in the form of a superior customer experience.

This is the key: To fire effectively, you've got to be more than busy. You've got to set the agenda.

That's where a blue ocean strategy comes in. A blue ocean strategy creates new products and services that redefine the costs and benefits of a solution, enabling a company to move from an intensively competitive "red ocean" market to a new "blue ocean" market, free from competitors.

A blue ocean strategy sets the agenda for a market:

• JetBlue redefined the US airline market
  
• Starbucks redefined the fast food market
  
• Yellow Tail redefined the US wine market (it's now the top selling wine in the US)
  
• Salesforce.com redefined the sales force automation market
  

To gain sufficient fire-power, you've got act on a blue ocean strategy. Simply keeping busy with traditional tactics (promotions, store openings, etc.) doesn't cut it.

This is why I recommend that management teams develop value curves for their products and markets, then use those curves to develop a blue ocean strategy designed to deliver dramatic growth. (Value curves are described by Kim and Mauborgne in their book Blue Ocean Strategy. I help start-ups with this type of planning.)

By comparing value curves, I can understand how Starbucks is firing at McDonalds. I can see what Starbucks is adding and subtracting from the traditional fast food experience. I can get a sense of how Starbuck's choices relate to its costs and prices. And I can better understand how Starbuck's new fast-food agenda creates trouble for McDonalds, and why McDonalds is now responding the way it is (i.e., with better coffee and more stylish decors) to align itself with the market as Starbucks has redefined it.

So, be relentless. Use "fire and motion." But to figure out how you're going to fire and what ammo you're going to load, develop a blue ocean strategy.