The list of things that I haven’t done, that I have yet to do, is very long indeed.

But I refuse to be daunted by it all.

We are so over-revved, over-clocked, over-worked, over-extended….

If we aren’t careful, we could easily forget to have fun.   So in the midst of it all, I had the chance to get together with my dear friends Suzanne and Brent Ainsworth at the their fabulous Northgate Studio.  We drank wine, we chatted, we ate — we laughed.

And we recorded this song.   So here’s my Christmas gift to all of you who feel a little over-whelmed by it all.

It’s called the Social Media Blues  and if you click on the link you can play it on Radio 3 – CBC’s fabulous indy radio.   Yes, it is a little cranky, as one of my friends commented.  But it’s all in good fun.

Have yourself a “cranky little Christmas”.

What many haven’t yet realized is that within this same city is another equally creative centre — one that attracts some of the greatest minds in technology — the third largest technology centre in North America.

Most don’t realize that when they are riding the subway or walking down Yonge street,  they could be standing beside some of the giants of the tech industry.   To take only one example, how many average Torontonians know  their city  is home to Mark Surman.  Who is Mark Surman?  For those who don’t know him,  Mark is the Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, which, among many, many things brings us Firefox.  You might not know Mark, but you would have to have been vacationing off the planet to not know what Firefox is.  But did you know how it’s linked to our city?  Probably not.

In fact, most Torontonians really do not know how much prosperity the tech sector brings to the city.  How much prosperity?My friend and Allan Wilson and I were trying to guess how much this was.  Over a glass of red, we did our “off the cuff” calculations.   There are literally thousands of technology start-ups in this city.   While some are tiny,  a portion  of these companies go on to be giants like RIM.  Those “Cinderella” stories get a lot of attention.  But for every RIM, there are many, many others  who achieve a more  modest footprint.  We decided to be very conservative and peg that at the bottom level of  5 to 10 million in sales. This is not a huge sales figure for a moderately successful early-stage tech company.   Here’s where it gets impressive.  If only 100 of these companies reached those numbers, then they alone would account for a billion dollars of sales in the Toronto economy.  A billion dollars.  Without all the other spin-offs, even that would be impressive.  As one politician once remarked, “a billion here, a billion there — soon you are talking real money!”

But the reason we don’t know about these companies is that for the most part they are heads down, hard at work, trying to survive and thrive in a hyper-competitive global economy.  There’s not a lot of time for flag waving or even socializing.

That’s why events like Technicity are so important.   For those who don’t know it, Technicity is a once a year event sponsored by a number of groups — including the City of Toronto and IT World Canada – publishers of CIO Canada and ITBusiness.ca  and a number of corporate sponsors who support this great endeavour.   The event brings together people from the technology community, business and government to step back for a moment and  focus on the bigger picture.  In the words of Mark Surman, we can look at how we can make the type of environment that will help Toronto’s technology community make “Toronto like Venice in the Renaissance”.

In all the recent doom and gloom of the past years.  With all lost jobs, economic downturns and billion dollar bailouts — when was the last time that you heard a story about growth and vibrancy in an industry sector?  When was the last time you heard of a home grown sector that was taking on the world?   That’s what we heard in the audience.  And it wasn’t just opinion.  A series of presenters brought us the facts and figures that showed us the facts.  They showed how important this industry was and what a promise it held for the future.

What a breath of fresh air. Not only that, but  the organizers did a brilliant job of keeping the facts and figures that we needed into short, focused packets of info.  That left time for a series of breakout sessions designed to facilitate dialogue and information exchange.

The energy, the interaction and the spirit literally poured out into the hallways.  It permeated the conversations.  It facilitated impromptu sessions that filled every nook and cranny as the participants talked, networked, debated and imagined new ideas and possibilities.

I watched as one of the organizers valiantly tried to get participants back into the main session so the next event could start somewhere within the scheduled time.  Her job was tough — almost impossible — although somehow we did keep on schedule.

Keeping us organized was harder than you would think.  One thing you have to know about the Toronto tech community is that it firmly resists structure.  It’s a gloriously eclectic, creative, chaotic and at times almost anarchistic group.  As a veteran facilitator of industry sessions, I can tell you that the tech sector in this city makes the Occupy movement look rigid by comparison.  Even the  fact that Technicity manages to bring this sector  together once a year is an accomplishment.  The fact that it also facilitates some discussion throughout the year is a triumph.  The fact that they kept us on schedule is a miracle.

The entire event is a tribute to the organizers’ ability to, as I once heard it described, “herd butterflies”.   This group – this industry — will not be contained.  They choose where they will be, where they will meet and where they will live.   When you realize this, you realize thatToronto’s  leap into the world stage in technical innovation was not planned or created. It grew organically.  Why? Well,  in large part the tech sector is here for the same reason that Margaret Atwood or a host of artistic giants choose to be here.  They come here by choice.  The come here  because this is a great city to live in.  Things like funding and infrastructure are necessary — but they are not sufficient. On panel after panel you would hear the same thing — the best talent in the world comes here because it’s a great place to live and work, because it is a hive of activity and creativity.

I was struck by the parallels with the creation of the arts community in this city.  There is a necessary amount of funding and infrastructure, much of it provided by governments of all levels.  And there is the usual wringing of hands by those who decry this as a waste of funds.  In the midst of all of what is great, they will find the tiniest extravagance, the silliest anomaly and tout it to the world as proof that government has wasted what it spends.   There are those, to quote Oscar Wilde, who “know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Others realize the potential.  They see the  amount of economic activity it generated.  In that context, the amount of government investment is preposterously modest. In fact, in a world where governments are frantically trying to created 21st century jobs, where they will spend or risk millions and billions to save old world jobs — it’s hard to imagine anyone begrudging the modest support that this group has required.

In that context , supporting  this industry is not always easy for governments.  The  benefits are not easy to quantify.  Other sectors like the financial sector are huddle close to the city core in large towers.  It’s hard to miss their presence and their impact.

The tech sector, on the other hand, refuses to be bound by civic boundaries.  While there are areas of focus, it is spread out from Markham to Spadina.  In fact, if  truth be told — it extends all the way to Kitchener/Waterloo.  Civic pride might create the boundaries — but  the tech community moves easily and seamlessly across the gridlock of the 401 to work, collaborate and create.  They work in everything from lofts to warehouses.  For many, work and home life bleed together.  I heard one company talk about how the founder needed a bigger condo to house all their staff.

Some like it this way. For others, it is a necessity.  Many startups just don’t have the money.  Despite where they end up — almost all pass through very early stages where they are little more than great ideas, brilliant minds and energetic collaboration.  Those that grow  find that the journey from idea to revenue is a long one.  The successful learn to conserve cash.  Unless they need premises to make sales or to be near a customer — fancy offices are a luxury that few can afford.

It’s why many of us believe that Starbucks is the largest technology office space in Toronto.  The coffee is expensive, but it’s cheaper than rent.  There are tables to work on and the bandwidth is free.   It’s not a joke.  It’s also not always optimal.  It’s a meeting place, but it’s not an infrastructure that you can use to develop a company.  It doesn’t provide what so many of take for granted in other industries.  Even at the rents they pay, even with the gridlock there are reasons why so many companies stay in the downtown core.  One reason is the elaborate underground system that  means that even in winter you can wander around and meet people in your “neighbourhood”.   Chance meetings, networking and collaboration all happen in a “small town” within a huge city.

The tech industry, despite it’s anarchistic tendencies, craves something like this. Time after time I heard  people looking for ways to meet, to work, to network and to build collaboratively.  Let me be clear. Nobody that I talked to was looking for more structure.  While they spoke with respect and even gratitude for the many “incubators” in the city, nobody seemed to be looking for another of these.

Not surprising for an industry that has grown up on the the web — what they wanted was not a fixed structure or organization.  They wanted something useful, ubiquitous and transitory.   They wanted something  with the freedom of   “open space”  with the permanence to support them as needed.  Fitting to an industry that is exists because they are imagining the future not predicting it  – they wanted something that might not have been invented yet.

As I set my mind to thinking about how you plan something like this, an idea came to me.  I thought about the idea of Grid computing.  Remember that?   To quote grid computing.com, “Grid aims at exploiting synergies that result from cooperation–ablity to share and agregrate distributed computational capabilities and deliver them as service”.  Grid is also  wonderfully anarchistic, collaborative.  It’s also an idea that simply won’t go away.  Whether the original concept was successful or not, I’m not sure.  I do know that the immense power of the huge cloud networks – Amazon, Google and others — would not have been possible without it.

I wondered if that was more the model of support that our tech sector needs.  Could we have a “support network” on that same model?   Could it not be  highly structured, but instead fit the needs of the players, regardless of size?  Could it be done not by adding new resources, but by using the the unused, the temporary surplus —  resources that had a negligible incremental cost but tremendous value.  If you think of the average corporation, most have to be structured handle peak volumes and demands.   From bandwidth to premises, like the computers on our desks, we often have excess capacity.  For most of the time that extra capacity is unused and wasted.  So in the same way that the Grid computing movement sought to use wasted computer capacity – could we find a way to use other capacity in the system?

What would that be?  One obvious would be space – companies often need that, at least temporarily.  Another might be bandwidth.  These are the obvious.  The potential is enormous and goes beyond space and bandwidth. Once our ears were attuned to a new concept, we will hear and see more and more needs that one could try to imagine in this new way.   One company talked about the need for graphic design.  Another talked about the need for management expertise.  Once you start having the conversation in these terms, our own innate desire to innovate takes over and the possibilities are endless.

Once my mind started to embrace the concept, my healthy skepticism raised its head.  Questions arose.  Okay, it’s fine to think about sharing, but how would you make that practical.  If you take the idea that corporate resources are like nodes on a network, each with some spare capacity — you have to figure out how to traverse the inevitable “firewalls”.  After all, these are businesses.  They don’t let just anyone in.

Another thought. Is this all about taking?  Do we have to totally depend on a sense of altruism or civic mindedness so that companies would offer these “surplus” resources?  Isn’t there the possibility that these new and budding companies could be more symbiotic?   Wouldn’t they have things to offer — even if that were only a fresh spirit of innovation and new ideas?

How would we manage this — both the security and the “value exchange”?  How would we implement this in an industry that resists the old “command and control” necessary to build a formal structure?

This will require some  real out of the box thinking.  But again, the paradigm of the network comes to mind.  We have structures in place that trade ideas and information for services.  Hundreds of free services require us to trade time, information and sometimes attention for infrastructure.  Our digital identification is enabled by a number of structures from tokens to cookies to “open id” structures that let others know we are safe to deal with and even to store value from the exchanges.  There are literally hundreds and maybe thousands of examples of this — one of the largest is Gmail.  We happily trade information and attention, we sign up for ids on the this system.  In return, we get not just free email, but a host of collaborative applications.  There’s enough to run a business and it’s there for the taking.

From Google’s point of view, it’s certainly profitable.  More than that, the bigger it gets, the cheaper it is to add one more person.  The marginal cost keeps going down and down in response to volume and Moore’s law.  The value keeps going up, responding to volume and Metcalfe’s law.

So I ask the question.  Could we create something that filled the needs of the tech community based on this idea of a network.  Could we create a token an identification  – a passport to innovation?  If we did, what would it look like?

I’d love to to have your comments and ideas on this.  Drop me a note on the blog or via linked in or twitter.  You can reach me at @therealjimlove

The challenge?  I was undertaking at 10 day retreat.   Totally unplugged.  No phones.  No internet.  Not even books.  And – here’s a kicker.  10 days in total silence.  I would talk to no-one.  Totally unplugged.

There is a reason why none of my friends believed I would last.  Heck, I wasn’t sure myself.  I have been plugged in since I can remember.  I have had a smart phone since they had them.  I had one of the earliest Blackberries.   I’ve been connected for years.  And it goes beyond that.  How many of you have looked at USENET on a 14.4 baud modem and thought, “Wow!”    And if you have, have you stayed up all night reading threads?   I have.

When I started out, search engines were named after Archie comics characters.  That’s how far back I go.

I worked on email before people had email.  We had text messages on our old VAX systems in the late 80′s.

I’ve been connected as long as you could be connected.

So when I announced that I was unplugging for 10 days, everyone was shocked.  They wondered if I could do it.  When I added the idea that I would be silent — no talking — everyone was certain I couldn’t.

But I did.

I spend 10 days without so much as glancing at an email.   This is the guy who would sneak a peak at his smart phone while watching TV at night.  My wife used to complain – so I got her an iPhone too and she complained less.  But even as we drove into the retreat centre, I was checking email for the last time and she said to me, “We’re going to be apart for 10 days, without any communication, and you want to spend the last 10 minutes looking at email?”

I agreed, but my addiction was there.  I lived with that smart phone.  Have you ever gone through three hours of no email and wondered what was happening?   I have.  Those of you who have pushed the “refresh” button and felt uncomfortable know what I am talking about.

This was cold turkey.

This was absolutely incredible.  After a few days.

The first days were stressful.  I was vaguely aware of something missing.  The first night, I awoke, dreaming of a panic situation.  I had forgotten something crucial.  A panic attack.  What would we do?  There was nothing I could do.  I’d have to walk out of here and give it all up to deal with this.  Was I willing to do this?

I lived through those.  Then came the dreams.  for the first few nights I would dream about issues and sending emails.  Just when I would press “send” I would wake up in my lucid dream state.  I realized that this was a dream.  I had no computer.  No email.  I was unplugged.

Yes, I got the sweats.  Yes, I had panic attacks.  But I endured.

By day four I was starting to unwind.  Bear in mind, I was living the life of a monk. I awoke at 4 am and by 4:30 I was expected to be in meditation.  I meditated for 10 hours a day, with small breaks.  I lived for the walks between the meditation hall and my barracks where I stayed unable to converse with the others.

On day four I had a unique experience.  I spent a minute or two, for the first time in my life, living in the moment.  I wasn’t thinking of the past or the future.  I was just in the present moment.

Over the next few days, I experienced many more moments like this.  I’ll remember to my dying day walking along the cedar chip path in the trees, watching the shadows of the trees on the path in front of me.  The dance of light and shadow was a total delight.

I watched a porcupine make his way slowly through the forest.  I watched a chipmunk forage for food.  I hear the silence in the forest with nothing happening.

I smelled the scent of hot pine needles as a slow, hot breeze moved through the forest.

It may sound trite and I vowed not to be “born again” after this encounter, but I found stillness.   An incredible stillness.

Not that it was all pleasant.  If you have 10 days with no distractions – no email, no reading, no conversation — nothing to do but meditate and think — then you will go where I went. I examined my life.  In daytime thoughts.  In nighttime dreams.  I revisited events and memories.  The surprise?  I have very few regrets.  That was a surprise.  But at this age, I’ve managed to forgive myself for much of the damage I have done.  My bad actions have lost their power.

But I still had to face me.  I had to deal with me.  And I was able to look into the mirror and see – me.

But I lived.  Unplugged. For 10 days.

When I came back to confront my life – my emails, I was a little overwhelmed.  One thing I discovered?  I could live without a lot of it.  I have spend the past week stripping out things I didn’t need.  Hey – to everyone who has an email list, I suggest that you build a vacation freeze.  When I came back and saw huge amounts of email I was merciless. I read and if there was no value, I unsubscribed. Don’t be a pile of meaningless emails that someone confronts when they get home.  That’s an “unsubscribe” moment waiting to happen.

Anyway, I’m back.  With a new sense of purpose.  And its not just the email subscriptions that are going.  It’s everything that has no value.   And according to Sturgeon’s law – “90 percent of everything is crap.”  Only now – I can spot the crap.

10 days unplugged.  Could you do it?  I’m not suggesting you do.  I am questioning.  Do you know what the 90 percent of crap is?  That’s the only way you know what the 10 % is.   And I do.  When I went out today I walked in the warm breeze to the subway.  I smiled at the people on the way.  It was a great day.

And I didn’t check my email till I got to work.

Can you do that?

I phoned my cousin Mike yesterday to make arrangements for dinner.  We were about to compare calendars and I was stalling while Outlook came up on my machine.  Mike laughed.  He was ready.  All he needed was a date book and a pen.   He laughed and said — “I’m 51 and I still use a date book.”

Of course, as always happens whenever there’s a challenge like this — Outlook took it’s sweet time loading.  Actually, it hung for a minute, as if to prove the triumph of high over low tech.  Mike took the moment to gloat.  So he should.  And it’s okay.  In this circumstance, keeping track of a few social engagements — an electronic calendar is overkill.

But I don’t keep track of 5 or 6 things.  I have 20 or more events happening some days.  Some nights I have 2 or more meetings.  I have calls and records of calls.  I could make 10 or 15 in a day.  Each one of those could lead to several items – documents, tasks – often spread out among staff and business contacts.  Many of those people want to book appointments with me via their calendars – sending me electronic invites.   All of those contacts want me to remember them.   So I really want to link dates and events to contacts and be able to easily pull up a great deal of info.  Last, but never least, I have to keep track of a multitude of times and details from the hours that I bill to the mileage and expenses that our government (and she who keeps our books) must have as proof of even the most meager of expenses.

So my calendar is — shall we say — complex.  It has a number of components – Outlook synchronized with our CRM, my smartphone, Google for several calendars with organizations I work with and now – for those who I work with over the web, I’m experimenting with tungle.me.   As complex as all this sounds, it works.  And I’d be lost without it — it’s saved my ass many times, this mass of electronic organization.

With all of this, the guy who can’t remember what he had for lunch yesterday can remember where I have to go, who I have to see, what I did three months ago on Tuesday afternoon and — oh, yes, it’s Mother’s day on Sunday (phone mom) and Happy Birthday Phill  (Saturday).

The point?  You have to understand the task before you comment on the technology.  Yes, cousin Mike’s book may be appropriate  for him, but it’s hopelessly inadequate for me.  This system can be updated and more importantly, can be retrieved from any computer anywhere — or one of my two smartphones.  Okay, that might seem like overkill, but we develop apps for both Blackberry and iPhone.  Got you there, didn’t I?  You thought I was just a toy loving geek.  Which I am.  But there is a rationale for everything.  Not a rationalization.  A rationale.

Mike thinks I’m nuts.  That’s okay.  He doesn’t understand what I do.  That’s where the danger lies.  You have to understand how the technology is used before you can decide if I’m a prisoner of technology or liberated by it.   My cousin Mike will never understand.  Even if he did, he’s still laugh at me.  Mike is a sweet, loveable luddite and although he kids me, I know that he’s actually proud of the stuff I do.  But he has to kid me.  That’s what cousins do.

But there’s another Mike.  Michael Enright.  He has a national radio show on CBC radio.   I was listening to it a few weeks back and heard him say with disdain, “I don’t tweet — or whatever it is.” He said this with the smugness of someone who was “above that sort of thing” and with great pride.

Here’s where I draw the line.

Enright’s smugness bugged me.  Why?  Well for one, he works for the CBC – one of the most sophisticated of broadcasters with some of the best use of technology anywhere.  Their podcast library is amazing.  Their technology journalism on programs like Spark — fantastic.  Picture a show which is created from it’s blog and a mass of people linked by technology.   That’s Spark.  But it’s not just shows about technology.  Another favourite of mine is called Tapestry and it has the most incredible shows on philosophy and spiritual thought that you will hear anywhere in this world.  How do I know?  I listen around the world, thanks to technology.

Enright’s disdain was not just at technology, it was at his fellow journalists and his audience.  The social media revolution that he was poo-pooing was the very wave that was revitalizing his industry and making public broadcasting not an anachronism, but a leader in the the new world of journalism.

When I tweet a Spark episode — or when I email Tapestry or next week, when I can use our new PodPoster app to post my comments, I’m participating in a medium that is increasingly collaborative and far less a one way broadcast.  Enright is dissing — and missing — all of that.

What a shame.  Especially since Enright came to fame because of a show that exploited technology — the telephone.  Years ago, he was a stallwart on a show called “As It Happens”.   That show brought us all around the world to events and people using telephones and recording technology.  It broke the mold for journalism at the time.  It was new, brash and — damned interesting.

Which makes Enright’s little luddite lullaby seem sad.   I pass on Enright’s monologue and click on a Spark podcast — the one with the longer, unedited interview.

I won’t change Enright.  I just tune him out.  Too bad.  He’s a bright guy with a lot to offer.  But if he dropped off the air, I wouldn’t miss him.  Not like I miss Andy Berry.  He hosted the morning show which I could get anywhere in the world.  Andy Berry, who, to the time he retired was still embracing new ideas and new technology, regaling us with stories of is iPhone.  No surprise that he went out at the top of his game.

Staying receptive to new ideas — that’s the ticket to reinventing yourself.  Whether it’s a radio host or a radio network.  Even if your base is a technology that people thought was dead and gone, if you stay open to new ideas, that fusion of new and old can still keep you out in front.

I’m not as old as Andy or Enright, but I’m no kid either.   I hope that I stay open to new ideas — even when they are uncomfortable.  Whether it’s rap music or Twitter, I hope that I don’t close my mind before I really try the experience and even if it’s not for me, I hope I can try to appreciate why it might work for someone else.  Because it’s not always about me.  That’s a lesson that I learned a long time ago.

It’s my hope and my silent prayer.

Because you don’t always realize it.  When you start to calcify, you don’t think that you have a problem, you think that the rest of the world does.  Kids these days!  Or worse, “common sense”.  All those things that we use to hide our denial — when what we really mean is, I’ve closed myself off from options.

Who knows?  Maybe one day it will happen to me.  But for now, I’ll thank my luck stars that I’m not a digital denier.

At 54 there’s still hope for me – and my crazed calendar.

As inevitably happens – he brought out a recent experience where the customer service was appalling.  I’ve heard many of these over the years.  It doesn’t take much prodding and we can all come up with one.  And I want to stress that I’m not talking about simply bad service.  That happens all too frequently to count.  This was appalling service — you’d almost have to try to make it that bad.    In his case, what was promised to be a 24 hour turnaround from a major bank, conveniently done on-line turned into many weeks of trips far out of his way to the only physical location where this business could be done, many phone calls and even with all of this – never a really satisfying conclusion, let alone an apology.

Yet he told it to me, matter of factly, as only one in a history of disappointments.   It was appalling, but nothing special.

Conversations like this have been going on for years in coffee shops all around the world.  But I think something has changed.  I can see it.  We all can see it

In Toronto, where I live, a recent fair hike was handled abysmally by our Transit Commission.   I don’t think there’s any question of it.  Is is a coincidence that a picture of a Transit employee sleeping on the job went viral?  It also sparked a multitude of similar pictures.  Public pressure was so intense that some of the transit workers were considering a work to rule.  That silliness prompted some awful cartoons suggesting that a work to rule would be an improvement in service.   The whole thing threatens yet to spin out of control.

Second case in point.  The Sons of Maxwell, a touring band had a fate that is as old as musicians and flight.  A classic guitar, checked as luggage by a member of the band was thrown and damaged.  If the reports are true, the band member actually saw an employee throwing a guitar.  You have to be brain-dead to not know that throwing a guitar is a bad thing.   It can only be thought of as malicious.

What did the band do?  They complained, certainly and were told that there was nothing that could be done.  So they wrote songs about it.  One of these went viral on youtube and at last count got 7 million hits.  Seven million.   As United Breaks Guitars went into the millions, so did the losses at United Airlines.

What’s unique about these?  Well, you have to remember, this is Canada.  It’s not New York.  We used to be the most polite  nation on the face of the planet.  The old joke was that a Canadian was someone who apologizes when you step on HIS toe.

But you can kiss that s**t goodbye, apparently.  Now if you step on the toes of a Canadian, they’ll shoot you — not with bullets — but with the always ready cell phone camera.  Blame and shame are concealed weapons of choice with Canadians.

Yes, it’s as if we all woke up and discovered that the meak may inherit the earth, but the cranky get revenge.

It’s also no surprise that Canadians are turning to social media to vent that outrage.  We’ve always been the biggest users of social media.  Facebook took off in Toronto.  The groups of Linked In are full of Canadians and Twitter is on fire up here.

Not that we’ve lost our sense of humour.  This is, after all, a nation whose greatest export is comedians – some of America’s funniest are Canadians – Dan Akroyd to Jim Carrey.

When you bring together that sense of outrage, a penchant for comedy and social media a virtual explosion happens.  A recent example?  In a wave of outrage directed at our current Prime Minister, some ingenious sole got the idea of trying to see if an onion ring could have more friends than Stephen Harper, leader of our nation.  Now Stephen has millions to spend on handlers, publicists, web artists  — whatever it takes.  In fact, we seem to have an entire province of millions in population who, if they found Stephen Harper copulating with a sheep would still leap to his defense (as long as it was a girl sheep – he is leader of  a right of centre party).  Yet one lone person with a sense of humour and a social media device was able to trump this and tramp the politician down into the abyss of humiliation.

Last count?  Onion Ring – 80,000 friends.  Harper?  29,000.

Frustration?  Anger?  These are new to Canada, but we’re learning fast.

Someone told me recently that in the US, 20% of people actively hate their cell company.  In Canada?  That number is purported to be more than 60%.  In fact, judging by a recent meeting that a friend was at, it may be more.   When the head of a new upstart cell company was introduced at a recent gathering in Toronto, the audience applauded vigorously at a comment that this new company was going to do some damage to the existing suppliers.

There was an old commercial for tea that ended with the tagline, “Only in Canada?  Pity!”    I don’t think this is a “Made In Canada” phenomenon.   I do think that the fact that the anger has exploded North of the 49th parallel should be a warning sign to companies and even governments.  Canadians are the direct opposite of the the Canary that miners used to take into the coal mines.  These birds were small and sensitive, if they got exposed to gas, they reacted early and gave the miners a chance to escape.

Canadians are more like a tsunami warning device.  By the time you see a sign from them all you can do is get washed away.  It’s simply too late.

I don’t know what they put in the kool-aid in that office, but everyone was the same. I always got the feeling that they were on the edge of their chair, pushing forward, always pressing their idea as if the intensity of their effort would mow down any objections that dared rear their head.

I’d come out of a different culture, one which valued dissent. We taught, even encouraged diversity of opinion believing, as my friend Craig Hubley articulated so well, “every unanimous opinion is wrong”.

But that world ended and I found myself part of a new company with a different culture. Objections were not highly prized in this culture. You weren’t “on the team”. I learned that the hard way.

I was already an outsider. My nickname “the professor” was a badge of honour in the prior company, which was a meritocracy – you got ahead on a combination of what you knew and how well you could apply it. This new corporate culture, like so many I’ve seen since, was distinctly “anti-intellectual”. And with the fervour rivalled only by the old Red Guard in Mao’s China, they sought to weed out any ideas that they saw as “academic” or “theoretical” — words they used as epithets.

The new culture liked simple ideas. They liked them so much we got a new ones regularly. Today’s “strategy du jour” was the “value proposition”. We needed to narrow our focus to a few key areas — simplify our message and drive that value proposition into our marketing efforts. That — and only that — would turn around our sagging sales and revive our growth so that our IPO would succeed and bring wealth to those who had driven the value out of this company.

I was trying to fit in. So when the “value proposition” tsunami came through, I decided to surf it rather than swim against it.

But had I not been on this rare and ultimately short lived quest to “fit in” I would have argued that we were going about this this “back-asswards”. My sneaking suspicion was that there reason why we were in a slump had nlittle to do with our “value proposition” and had much to do with our lack of “value delivery”.

And its probably best that I didn’t raise this issue as it would have been seen (perhaps justifiably) as a attack on the management of our new owners. You see, the company I’d worked for before the new regime had survived and been profitable for many, many years, through many economic cycles. I had a unique view on this. I had been a client. I had used this company’s services many, many times — not because they’d told me what their value was in a sales pitch, but because they’d proven their value to me many times by delivering creative and effective solutions to the problems that I had encountered. As a result, I’d given them my business many, many times and stuck with them over a period of years, even when competitors came with low ball offers and made my life hell as I explained why I’d stick with them despite a higher price tag.

I was so impressed with how this company had brought all its employees to understand and deliver real value that when I finally got the chance to work for them, I jumped at it.

What we had was not so much a “value proposition” as a “brand”. I see them as two different things. A value proposition is declared. You say it. A brand is a promise delivered. The brand exists not because you say it, but because you do it — consistently, over time. Moreover, a brand can exist in the minds of your customers, independent of any promotional actitivity that you might undertake.

The two can be consistent. You can state a promise and deliver it. The difference is in origin. The brand exists because you seek and understand the needs of potential and existing customers and match these with what you can deliver. Jim Collin’s typifies this in his landmark book “Good To Great” where he describes two elements of his Hedgehog Strategy with these questions. “What are you passionate about? What can you beat the world at.” Passion and delivery give Collins’ approach the type of authenticity that builds trust. I would be proud to explain those to a client.

As a result, I love the term “brand” because to me it’s a promise delivered. Value proposition, by contrast, rubs me the wrong way. Perhaps this is the number of times that I’ve been “value propositioned” by telemarketers, sales people — it may only be my experience, but I have found that the more insistent the “value proposition” the less I am likely to believe it.

No belief? No brand.

Semantics? Or a clear idea of where we should focus. I’ll let you decide on that one. After all, you are the “customer” for this blog. Whether it delivers on its promise is something only you can answer.

Love to hear your comments.

But sometimes our experiences play tricks on us. We don’t see the real problems and the real solutions. We’ve been conditioned not to see that solutions do exist. We’ve been trained to play the game a certain way. We can only see the solutions that are “acceptable” or fit the “accepted wisdom”.

Someone once said that “for every difficult question there is a simple, direct answer. Unfortunately, it’s wrong.”

I’ve found that to be so very true. As I work with process transformation using LEAN techniques, I’ve been struck by how many times the real, lasting solutions to tough problems are counter intuitive. They go against traditional wisdom.

I’ve learned that you have to balance these contradictions. I’ve learned to do things that seemed outrageous at first but really work. You have to slow down to speed up. I’ve learned that bigger isn’t better – that you can produce more efficiently in smaller units which are produced at the rate they are consumed. I’ve learned that you have to give up control to get a disciplined regulation of an organization. Sound like nonsense to you? That’s okay. I didn’t accept half of this stuff at first.

It took me a long time to realize that biggest impediment to problem solving is the way we stick to the things we “know” and rule out new and novel solutions. We do this even when our existing solutions are what is causing the problems.

What makes it more more insidious is that we don’t even realize what we are doing this until, for the lucky few, someone comes along and shows us that the emperor has no clothes.

The problems we face are large and important. If we merely show that our current wisdom is leading us off an abyss, we have not solved the problem. We’ve created another — hopelessness. When people fell hopeless and helpless, they simply go into denial. What we need is the faith and belief that there is a solution, if only we can see it.

How do you get people to try new solutions which their whole education and all general wisdom tell them are “pie in the sky” or “dreams” or will just plain never work? I said earlier that I’ve seen the results and now I have faith. But in our scientific and logical world, faith and belief is not enough. It’s rare that any of us have the position to bring a group or an organization along solely on the basis of faith. Real leaders can sometimes do this. It takes tremendous courage.

For the rest, we need to have some proof that if we let go of our current blinders, we can find solutions to even apparently insoluble problems. Only then do we stand a chance of helping others to rid themselves of the the baggage that is obscuring the solution from their view.

The proof is out there if you want to see it. I encountered that today. I’d like to share it with you.

I saw Bill Clinton speak today. If you ever want a perspective from someone who has seen and continues to see difficult, global problems — an ex president is the place to go.

I was so amazed as he spoke so frankly of the enormity of the problems that a president sees. Clinton was amazingly candid about his perception of the world’s problems and how all of it hit his desk in his years as president. It would be – it is – easy to be crushed by the sheer weight of it all. Global warming. Genocide. Poverty. Disease. Nuclear threats. And more.

I was a little bit crushed just hearing about it all. Especially since he spoke with such candor and with such knowledge about the details and the true complexity. Some politicians make it seem that all we have to do is follow their ideology and difficult problems will go away. I remember the Nancy Reagan line for solutions to the problems with drugs and addiction — “just say no”. Someone quipped to me that her solution for the problem of homelessness would be “just get a home”.

But it sounds like such “common sense”. Remember what I said? Every complex problem has a simple solution – unfortunately, it’s wrong.

So if you want a simple, ideological solution, Clinton isn’t the speaker for you. Folksy at times, yes. But he gives us more of what I’d refer to as “complex sense”. He respects the audience enough to give them a bigger picture. No easy solutions.

No surprisingly, he talked about global warming. He pointed out that although its received very little attention, scientists are increasingly pessimistic about global warming. Where the general wisdom was that we were facing a 4 degree increase in average temperature by the end of the century, many scientists believe that we may face more than twice that – a 9 degree increase. (Farenheit) That would result in global catastrophe and a reshaping of our societies and human habitation patterns. At a minimum, our coastlines will no longer exist the way they do today. We’re not talking only about threats to low lying cities like New Orleans, or some of the islands in the world that will simply disappear. We are talking about coast lines that will be moved back, eliminating huge areas of land that will be under water. A global catastrophe equal to anything you’ve seen in one of these blockbuster disaster epics.

From there Clinton went on to talk about international conflicts. He spoke with knowledge and absolute authenticity. At one point he shared a poignant, moving confession. He felt that he could have saved hundreds of thousands of Rwandans in the genocide that went on when he was president. He pointed out as a fact, not as an excuse, that his people were blind to the problem. How does the world’s greatest intelligence gather system miss the genocide that affected close to a million people? It didn’t fit their way of seeing problems. It fell into their blinders.

All of that data, all of that information coming in. Everyone so into “group think” that they couldn’t see the problem emerging? No. I don’t believe it. I believe that the information came forward and that someone in the chain of command decided it wasn’t important. And when that happened, there wasn’t enough openness, enough leadership or enough organizational courage to challenge that sort of thinking. Hundreds of thousands of people died.

Clinton practically had me in tears. He refused to push the blame to someone else. He simply said that he’d have to live with that mistake for the rest of his life. Wow.

But if that had been all he did, I would have walked out of that room depressed. Instead, I left feeling elated. He didn’t simply rub our face in the hopelessness of global problems. He gave us some practical advice with the same power and authenticity that he conveyed in defining the problems.

He urged us not to get caught up in what defeats politicians. He said that the problem with politics is the way that they posed the questions. Politicians, he said, focus on asking “what?” and “by when?” They should be asking “how?”.

I think what he was trying to say is that when we ask the wrong questions, we can easily blind ourselves to real and creative solutions. When you are tackling a difficult problem, you have to be very careful in how you phrase the question. Each question, to some degree or other, restricts its own answer.

Then without really realizing it we are not in search of a solution, we are playing the game of admiring the problem. A game with a predictable ending. We start with optimism and end at the insurmountable problem that has defeated those before us and will now defeat us as well.

Given this repeated pattern, we can all be forgiven sometimes if we despair. How can one little person can make any real difference in this world? When someone who has been the most powerful person on the planet confesses that they have felt frustrated and powerless, it makes it even more believable.

It would be easy to throw up your hands in defeat. You could believe that the individual is dwarfed by global politics, international business, global geopolitical realities — and in the face of that, we are truly powerless.

Bill Clinton doesn’t accept that.

And bless him, he gave us some answers which proved that individuals can make a real difference – if they choose to change the game.

He gave a number of examples, but here’s one that spoke to me in particular.

We could easily say that poverty is impossible to address. We already give enormous amounts but its never enough. Is there any way to truly help people? In the midst of this never ending demand, can we really make any difference at all?

It turns out that we can – and many do. Clinton talked about a modern miracle called micro-lending. For those who don’t know about it, micro-lending focuses on loans to those who banks would never loan money to – individuals in poor regions, those in poverty, those with no assets to secure the loans.

Instead of lending massive amounts of money or aid, micro-lending lends what for us might be small or trivial amounts. But for those who receive the loan, that money is far from trivial. For them, it is the way of fulfilling a dream. lifting themselves out of poverty or changing the face of an entire community.

The classic wisdom that you need huge programs, massive amounts of money, that we need to send large contingents, that it takes organizations like the world bank to go in and tell these people how to run their economy — it turns out that this is nonsense. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a lot of cases where these macro solutions actually worked their way down to the average person on the street in terms of benefits.

Micro-lending, on the other hand has incredible and measurable results. It delivers effective solutions directly to those affected. It’s not us swooping in to help some poor unfortunate. It’s about enabling them to find their own solution.

According to Wikipedia, it’s not a new idea. It’s been around since the 18th century when Jonathan Swift inspired the Irish Load Funds. It gained world attention since the 1970′s when it was tried by organizations in Bangladesh. For those who don’t go that far back, Bangladesh was the “poster child” for poverty, with starving people, distended bellies and pencil thin limbs. The “mega solutions” were tried. Rock concerts were held. Charities showed awful pictures of starving children and brought in millions.

I don’t know how much of that (if anything) really worked. I know that people give millions and millions. How much really reaches those in need? I don’t know.

I do know that micro-lending gets right to the people in need. Why? Because you can see it directly. The money that you donate turns up in terms of loans to real people. You can see it.

I also know that in 2006, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Muhammad Yunus and the Grameem Bank for their work in developing micro-lending and in particular, focusing that on the development of Low Cost Housing.

Micro-lending works. You can prove it with hard, unbeatable facts. For one thing, the default rate is close to 0. Yes. Zero. Nada. Nothing. It’s incredible. These loans to the poorest and most disadvantaged are far, far more secure than say a load to individuals or even large companies. I’ll bet GMs bondholders would like to have place their money where it had a zero default. It’s not just a tribute to the their honest. The money truly has a return in terms of their standard of living. They can afford to pay it back.

This is not charity. These people and the small businesses that are recipients of loans pay back the principle, often with a fair although not crippling, interest rate.

A marvelous thing happens when you empower people to succeed and have high expectations of them. I saw the power of local business first hand when I worked for a wonderful guy named Jim Gowans in what was then Inco’s Indonesian mining operation. I’m not an apologist for big business. I’m talking about this leader and his team. I remember Jim Gowans focusing on local business. He pushed his staff to learn the local language. He expect the company to provide support for local businesses with its purchasing power. But he did it as a business person. If there were local businesses that could do things profitably and sustainably, he wanted to see us move heaven and earth to support them.

It wasn’t charity. It was responsible business.

Micro-lending is the same.

I’ve long been fascinated by micro-lending. To be able to do it is one of my dreams. I’ve often thought that if our business ever really took off, or if we won the lottery, that’s how I’d use that money. I dreamed of being able to one day be able to make a difference.

But I’m not the president of a huge business with millions of dollars of budget to allocate. We do well but we don’t have hundred of thousands or millions. And I haven’t won the lottery yet.

I was thinking about “what” and “by when”.

Clinton shook that apart. “Did you know,” he said, in that folksy Arkansas manner, “of a group called Kiva.org? You can be a micro-lender with as little as $25.00.”

He spelled it out clearly for us and challenged us all. You don’t have to be a millionaire or a former president. None of us can solve the entire problem. No solution is perfect. But if we all do something, the power is enormous. He pointed out that Obama’s average donor gave approximately 50 dollars. Many were poor. In the end, the Obama campaign was a juggernaut, with more than enough money to finance a great campaign.

What if we could harness that force to fund micro-lending? It turns out that we can.

I got home and checked and he was right. Kiva is a micro lender that allows an individual with as little as $25.00 to be a micro lender. You put the money in, you select the project, you get to monitor it. You pool with other individuals to create larger loans, just like banks syndicate to fund loans of a large size for them. It’s not a charity. It gets paid back and you can put it back to use again and again and again.

You can see the pictures of the people who you help. You can hear their stories. You can have a direct impact on their life.

It struck me how imaginative this business model is. It is truly a creation of the web. It adopts the networking capability, the peer to peer approach, viral marketing disciplines and leverages a web site to manage it all.

Yet there is nothing extraordinary about the technology. Nothing I could see in terms of function that couldn’t be built for next to nothing. You might even find open source programs to do most of it.

The technology is not astounding. The creativity is. A global problem. But one person can make a difference. They changed the game.

I’m sold. I’m in. I’m going to become a micro-lender. I urge you all to do it. Let me know if you do. Tell me how it works out.

So my thanks to Bill Clinton. He gave me an amazing example of technology and of social networking using a new business model. He shattered the common wisdom that one person can’t really make a difference. He showed me someone who had really changed the game.

Score one for the good guys. That was a gift for my soul.

He also left me with a business lesson These people have tackled a intractable world problem that has defeated huge governments, large organizations and others with way more resources than any of us will ever have. They did it with the same tools that are available to all of us. Our company could have built their solution on a shoe string.

But by simply changing the business model to leverage the power of technology, people and process in new ways — they issued a challenge to us all. The next time you want to complain about the recession, or your lack of resources or of how the problems you have are insoluble, it may be time to step back. Stop asking “what” and “by when” and start thinking of “how” — how you can change the game.

You can. And if you do, let me know what you did. Please. I am really interested.

So I got real value from my ticket. I learned how I could fulfil a dream and do some real good in the world. I also took away a lesson about how you can beat the world if you are willing to step away from the same old, same old and really take a creative look at solving your problems.

I got million dollar consulting advice. I’ve passed it on to you for free. Don’t thank me or pay me yet. Go and become a micro-lender for $25.00 Help some other entrepreneur. Because no matter how tight your business is, you can find that amount. It’s worth it to get the answer to so many big problems…

If you want to solve a big problem, think small. Change the game.

Thanks, Bill.

As always, I’m interested in your comments and issues.

We all do this from time to time. Say that stupid thing. Make that bad decision. Talk before we think.

Well, actually, with me it’s more than just from time to time. I do it a lot. Most of the time its just a joke that doesn’t work out. Or its the witty comment that just sounds dumb. For the most part, people are forgiving. I even manage to forgive myself. I can let it go.

But over the course of a lifetime, there are a few of these that are, shall we say, special. One or two of them haunt me to this day. I manage to keep them in the recesses of my memory. But sometimes, if I’m feeling a little down, or just in a bad moment, they return to play out before my eyes in full technicoloured splendor.

It’s times like that when I realize that I don’t think I’m afraid of dying, but there is something that sends a cold chill down my spine. They say that just before you die, your life flashes before your eyes. What if its not my life, but some perverse bloopers show of just the dumb stuff? I’m not sure I believe in heaven or hell, but if there is eternal punishment, it would be seeing every really dumb or cruel or stupid thing I did flashing before my eyes. If I had to watch that it would seem like an eternity.

Funny how our images of these things are rooted in our childhood memories. The idea that there is some way the universe keeps track of what we’ve done right or wrong something we all share in one way or another. For most of us, that view matures as we get older. Sure, Santa had a list — he checked it twice. That one was easy to let go of. But real life is a different story. It imprints on you in different ways. I remember the principal at my school who informed me that my conduct would be noted on my permanent record. I can still channel the fear of that 10 year old kid. I felt trapped. My lip quivered. I wanted to cry. Even then, I had guts. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. But it was tough. Really tough. Especially when I looked over at my mother, who was almost in tears herself. This was my permanent record?

This is the stuff that nightmares are made of. It comes and goes for reasons that escape me. It’s like that crazy dream where I’m in school and I’m naked. No idea what that one is about. Freud would probably have a field day. But I have no idea why it comes and goes. At least the dream about being naked is probably some kind of neurosis. This one about the permanent record is long past its expiry date. But its among the ghosts that haunt me. And it will still wake me up in a sweat.

So what? Everyone has their nightmares. You wake up. You can’t sleep. Some of us wander past the computer and – Google ourselves.

Some find nothing. How sad is that? Others find something even more troubling. Their nightmare is still there — on the screen.

What if that moment before we expire was a Google search? What would you find? For some of us, there are some really stupid things up there. Highly embarrassing. In the words of my public school principal, these are on your permanent record. This is even worse than your school record. If a principal said that today he’d probably be laughed out of the room – “cool, put it on my permanent record, big boy. But if you release two words of that to anybody, my parents will see you in court!” That might have been a bluff coming from a 10 year old kid. But ask any university professor why they really don’t want to go after cheating and plagiarism. Why? Who needs the grief? However slight the chance, do you want to be part of a lawsuit?

No such luck with the internet. Unless you’re some kind of idiot, suing the internet is — as they say — so not going to happen. If you are one of those idiots who think they can sue the internet, please notice that I didn’t mention your name. I don’t have to — people can find you with a few creative searches. You can run but you can’t hide.

Wasn’t it always like this? Haven’t people have been posting crazy stuff since before there was an internet. Even in the old days of dial in bulletin boards (yes, I’m that old) people were posting stuff they’d prefer their mother, current spouse, boss or their kids didn’t read. The difference was that a lot of this was done anonymously and in places where our mothers, spouses, bosses and kids were unlikely to find it.

Social networking, visual content and things like tagging have changed that. Even if you live your on-line life under a pseudonym, all it takes is for someone else to tag you in a photo and there you are.

One crazy picture of you at party doing the shooters. Or your name in a facebook group? That screaming rant that you posted on that forum? The picture of the office party with your arm around someone? Harmless? Maybe. Depends who is looking at it.

But don’t assume that nobody is looking at this stuff because it’s too trivial. Employers are googling you. Parents are turning up as facebook friends with names that sound just like some classmate. And they are freaking out at what their kids are saying or doing. Spouses are looking at what the other half is doing. Your kids are looking. Heck, your mom is probably looking.

Here’s something scary. What they see doesn’t even have to be correct. My son told me recently that he thought it was cool that I was once a drummer in a band. Trouble is, I play guitar – not drums. So was it a mistake? Or did he get confused between me and the 50 other Jim Love’s? For some reason a lot of them are creative types. Who knows? My point is that I didn’t see this. The only reason I knew about it was the fact my son told me. Which means he’s looking at stuff that I don’t even see.

I do a lot of public speaking. I know from some of the questions that people have checked me out online before they came to the presentation. It’s not that hard. But sometimes I’m amazed at what they ask.

You can miss things by just Googling yourself. There’s a whole cottage industry based on searching different aspects of people’s on-line and off-line lives. Sometimes you don’t even have to look. My wife found herself as a friend on a Facebook page and surprise, surprise – one of our kids is also a friend.

It’s not just web pages and pictures. I’ve been listening to reports from a recent trial where the evidence was the text messages that were exchanged. Text messages in court? Would you have thought of that? Do you even know that every text message you send is archived? Did you know a court can subpoena them?

Not that it takes a court order. Sometimes just a little bumbling will do. We’ve all heard the story of the the person who sent the email to the wrong person. Recently a vendor (who I’m tempted to name) wrote a note to a client which mentioned me. What they wrote about me was, shall I say, unflattering? Why? I had taken them to task earlier about acting, shall we say less than professionally — sometimes that’s my job. The difference with me was that I followed my cardinal rule. When I have something tough to say, I don’t email. I call the person.

This was one on one and it needn’t have gone any further. Unfortunately, this person decided to launch an preemptive strike, trashing me in an email to my client. I have no idea why they did this. They demonstrated their lack of professionalism in a way that nothing I would do or say would have accomplished. It got worse. Somebody in the subsequent chain of emails discovered that I was not on the list and sent the string of messages to me without realizing what was in it.

It’s actually too bad that all our meetings were conference calls. I couldn’t see the look on this person’s face when I quoted from this email — in front of their executives. Conference call or not, the sound of squirming and groveling is still something to hear.

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar said that, “the evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” Not so in the online world. One of my wisecracks is sometimes more accurate – “no good deed goes unpunished.” Cynical? Perhaps. But things can go terrible wrong even when you try to do good.

I recommended someone for a job some time ago. It’s the only time I’ve ever done this, but I gave them a recommendation although I had some minor but nagging reservation. Why? They were so depressed about losing their job that I was really afraid for them. How could I not do this? I don’t know anyone who hasn’t made a similar mistake. This one almost cost me a a friendship when the person I recommended turned out to be a total disaster. I didn’t see that coming. And it did me a lot of damage with my friend who hired this person. If I had it to do over again, I might do something different.

Bad as this was, it could have been worse. How many people have done a Linked In recommendation because they were asked to? Or did it because the other person recommended them? I don’t. Every word is true or I find an excuse to avoid it. But what if you recommend somebody and they do something really stupid? There you are, endorsing a nut case.

I’m sure you heard about Jon Stewart’s battle with the CNN television host over what Steward lampooned as as some pretty boneheaded stock recommendations. It was pretty funny to have all those clips played saying to buy stocks that are now in the toilet. It’s hard to plead that he was misquoted or taken out of context when the whole clip was there to be played. But you don’t have to be famous. I found an article of mine on a website that was done years ago. Ever read a paper that you wrote in first year? Remember what it sounded like? Guess what – for some people that paper will be searchable for years to come.

In the world of social media and the personalized internet, our lives are being pushed out into the electronic commons. And if Andy Warhol was right and we all get 15 minutes of fame, what will people see? Is it what we want to them to see? Is it accurate? Is it the person we are today? Or is it from some point in time long ago, a time that we might rather forget?

It’s all there. Things you’ve said. Things you’ve done. Things you’ve written. All there for the world to see. In websites, blogs, social networks, forums — and even in our text messages and other areas we would think were private. It doesn’t even have to be accurate. All there. On your permanent record.

There are ways to get the record cleaned up. People practice “reputation management.” They’ll tackle your concerns and try to fix those problems. I don’t know how effective those services are. Maybe someone can leave a a comment if you’ve had experience with reputation management.

My take on this? I see how valuable reputation management is when people or companies get into a real jackpot. I have no idea how much people charge for this service or even what they do. Maybe someone will leave a comment on the blog if you’ve had some experience in this area. If you are someone who provides these services, be careful you don’t make it too much of a commercial. But I am interested.

Short of shelling out some bucks to this type of service, what can you do?

I’d start by being aware. Here’s some things I do:

- If you haven’t googled yourself, do it
- Take a look at your public pages – Linked In, Facebook — all the rest
- Set up a pseudonym and alternate mailbox for forum postings
- Even when I have to register with sites, I rarely give the right data (sorry folks!)
- Don’t invite or accept friends you don’t know.
- Don’t give out recommendations unless you really mean it. I don’t have any problem ignoring requests so far. But if you don’t think you can say no or duck the question, then don’t do it at all. Just tell people that you’d love to recommend them but it makes it so difficult to refuse people that you’ve stopped.
- Don’t say, write or publish anything that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of your local paper, or given to your boss, a new prospect or just a friend. If you are angry, count to ten.
- Never talk disparagingly about a client. Ever.

Feel free to add some of your own ideas.

Most of what you need to know is common sense. It was true before the internet. There are many places in this world where it is truly, “better to keep your mouth shut and be thought of as an idiot than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.” Your mother was right when she told you that if you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything at all. And you are judged by the company you keep. So assume that everything you post or send will end up being seen by the person you least want to see it and in a circumstance where it will be embarrassing.

But how do you deal with the well intentioned items which, in hindsight, are not the stuff that you want to see with your name on it? Don’t sweat those. Take them down from your site and ask others to do the same. Yes, they will be there for all time, but people have to really be looking and if they are, there is another defense. Do like you do in life. Post a lot more of your good stuff. Let them judge you not on a single article or prediction, but on the total breadth of what you have contributed.

I have a word for those who look for one item to trap you. But I’m not going to use it. You know why.

Thanks for listening tomorrow. Or a week from now. Or ten years from now.

I think I can get back to sleep. I’m going to do one last thing and reread this before I post it. After all — it goes on my permanent record.

Jim

“This is exciting!” he says. Tonight, everything Mark talks about is exciting. Pens are not just a product. They are his product. And a pen isn’t just a product — it’s a story — a story about what it takes to produce it and customize it for his customers. If he’s passionate about his products, he’s really excited when he talks about his customers.

At 34 years old Mark, the president of Rightsleeve.com, he has a wisdom beyond his years — and he’s discovered the the real secret to success. It’s this. “Love what you do.”

If you lived through the 90′s where greed was good, or the tech bubble when things were “built to flip” or if you’ve thought about those whose greed and stupidity dragged us into this recession, Mark is a breath of fresh air.

Like people who love what they do, he’s not just playing the game. He’s changing the game.

He’s doing it using technology to advance his strategy. So that’s why he was here tonight, speaking to a group of strategy consultants in CMC Canada’s Strategy special interest group. In addition to my duties as chair of the Toronto chapter, I also chair this group, which I helped found. I love it. It’s where you can meet people who are changing the game.

But back to Mark — and how he’s using technology so well. Because he is using it very well.

There’s a lot of hype about social networking, open source, web 2.0 — the technology industry has never met a buzzword it didn’t over-hype. What’s rare are good examples of how these buzzwords can be used practically to advance your business in new and exciting ways. That’s where Mark comes in.

I met him at a seminar weeks ago. He was there, on a panel with representatives of the big vendors who were spouting the usual blah, blah, blah — buy our products you’ll be the next internet sensation, we love small business, blah, blah, blah. Sorry guys, but my business isn’t going to be energized because I buy your server versus somebody else’s. And it was also a breath of fresh air to hear someone who could say open source without being condescending. It’s hard to take people seriously when everything is a sales pitch for their product.

Mark wasn’t selling us his solution. He simply explained what he’d done, the challenges he’d faced and the results that he’d achieved. No hype. Just a guy who loves what he does.

That sort of thing has real credibility. So when Mark talks, you have to listen. And I did. Along with the rest of the room tonight. In fact, I made notes. Here’s some of the tips that picked up from Mark:

Use technology to foster conversations about important things:

Mark’s open source systems allow him flexibility to dream and adapt — and he’s used that ability to facilitate conversations about things that are important. He has taken a page (literally) from social networking applications like facebook and twitter. He’s uses these to keep people in his company up to date on key activities.

The important words here are key activities. Mark was smart enough to take the essence of social networking, not just adding some features from another application. What makes it work is that they made a conscious choice of what things were most valuable and these are selected and displayed as part of their own in house news feed. By focusing on the information that has the most value — people in his company watch it. Contrast that with what appears on most social networking sites.

There is a law called Sturgeon’s Law and it says that 90% of everything is crap. So if you cut through that and go to what is really valuable, you provide a real service — especially in these days when everybody is overloaded.

Activities, events — new clients, orders and prospects — all of these conveniently packaged, shared and used to make sure everyone knows what is going on and can contribute. I immediately thought of virtual enterprises, like our own company. We have people all over the country, sometimes all over the world. We could use this to keep everyone up to date — even though they aren’t in the office.

Hmmm.

Here’s another great idea that Mark talked about which is close to my heart. Jim Collins, the renowned business writer says there are three things that go into a strategy. You need passion and you need to know what you can do better than anyone else in the world. Mark’s got those covered. But Collins says there’s a third thing — you need to really understand the metrics that drive your business. Sounds easy, but even if they get it (which I doubt) few companies understand it. They publish reams of data or none at all. They don’t give the vital few pieces of information that guide their employees to understand what they have to do on a day by day basis to help fulfill the company’s strategy.

Mark’s company has a great approach to this as well. For example, he has a great little application which shows a sales person what their commission is going to be on each and every sale. So they can see how they are doing constantly. Motivation 101. But Mark’s company goes a step further and guides them with costs so that they can see the profitability of the sale. Sales people know what they can and can’t do. And….there’s more. Operations people are also plugged in with data they need. They can see the orders that are coming in — again in real time. They can sort it by supplier to make sure they can cover multiple orders at one time. Everyone is up to date. The old “sales/operations” feuds are reduced, if not eliminated.

I do a lot of process transformation work using something called Lean. It’s a way to radically improve customer satisfaction, quality and efficiency (yes, you can have all three).

Lean is customer centric. It says that any process that doesn’t generate value to the customer is a waste. It also says that you find ways see all inefficiency and waste. One way to avoid waste is to eliminate mistakes before they happen instead of trying to catch them in the “quality control” steps.

So picture this. Some of Mark’s customers can have their own web-site to order goods. Their standards for orders are place on the each order page — right down to the exact description of the company colours in technical terms. This is important. Companies spend an enormous amount of money on their branding. They want consistency, quality and above all — accuracy. By making all of this visible and having a preset group of items for a company on their own web store, Mark’s company eliminates the potential for error AND increases the efficiency of the process. It’s not rocket science, it’s just damn good process design — enabled by a very friendly, customer focused technology.

But Mark’s approach, like Lean, is not just about efficiency. It’s about a relentless focus on what is of value to the customer. It’s a way to really engage your customer. Once again, Mark is using technology to help. He opens up his site to allow customers to participate. For instance, his customers can comment directly on products they have bought.

That’s where this is about more than technology. It’s about courage. If you only ask questions where you know that you’ll like the answer, you are not really listening. But if you take a chance and ask — people will tell you what they really think. Sometimes that’s good. Sometimes its not.

Many companies shy away from real discussions with their customers because they don’t want to face the reality of dealing with issues. How many times have you heard those programmed words, “is there anything else I can do to help you?” when the “customer service” person you are talking to in some far distant land hasn’t helped you at all?

Mark’s people pounce on customer problems and address them. Why not? They are on the customer’s side. If the products tare substandard, they want them fixed or they want them off the list. When you really feel this way, you will have the courage to ask — in public — “what do you think?”

The added bonus is that your customers trust each other more than they will any sales person. Getting that real information adds value to the shopping experience.

This honest is the best way to engage your customers. My favourite saying about customers is from a book called “The Cluetrain Revolution” and it’s as fresh now as it was almost 10 years ago when I read it. It says that “Elvis was right. We can’t go on together with suspicious minds.” In so many companies today, Elvis has truly left the building.

As a strategic consultant, I think one of the best questions that I like to ask is “what do you want people to say about you when you leave the room?” Then I set out to help the client make that happen. Hey, did I say strategy was hard? It’s not — it’s doing it that’s hard.

Conversations in the age of social networking are no longer person to person. They are one to many, thanks to networks like twitter, facebook, Linked In and a host of others. If you can get people to say good things about the company you can get incredible coverage. How do you do that? Easy — well not exactly easy. If you want people to say great things about you or your company, you have to do things that they value. If you have an event, you have to make it a great one so that if someone is on twitter, and followed by thousands of people, their twitter message will say — having a great time @ Rightsleeve.com party. In fact, that has happened.

Doing the small things right. Relentlessly pursuing a dynamite customer experience. Having the creativity and flair to make your message distinct and worth telling. Those are the real tools of using social networks effectively — not just technology. And whether it’s giving out Rightsleeve.com underwear or his hysterical YouTube video with the tag line “friends don’t let friends buy bad promo” — everything is aimed at the customer experience.

To paraphrase my earlier question, the issue is to understand “what do you want people to say about you when they are engaging their social networks?” Then make it possible for them to say that in a way that’s fun and interesting.

Right down to his blog, Mark takes that approach. As a blogger myself, I wish his three rules which he shared were universal:

- write it yourself
- be authentic
- have fun

Notice that “mention your product” is not on the list. Be yourself. Be authentic. Have fun.

And when you do that, even a pen becomes exciting. And it’s rewarding for everyone. And I’ve always maintained that this is good for the bottom line. I won’t tell any tales out of school, but Mark’s company appears to be defying any of the trends that you are seeing in the papers. Sales are up and the company is growing profitably. And that, too, is exciting.

What can I say? Sometimes the good guys win.

I had a great time.

Thanks Mark.

Mark Graham’s company is called Rightsleeve.com and they go in to my “mission statement hall of fame” because you can actually tell what they do from what they say they do. RIGHTSLEEVE.COM uses design, promotional media and technology to deliver outstanding marketing results.

Check them out! I don’t think you’ll regret it.

I’m sure Seinfeld had a show about this — how to tell when something was no longer cool. I’m sure Jerry and the gang had some secret sign that told them when something had left the edge and simply become mainstream.

I remember when I knew that email had reached that point. It was when my parents got an email address. That was it — it was over. The rollout was complete. Global domination was achieved. Sure there might be a few left over folks who wouldn’t get with the program. Heck I’m sure there’s somebody out there with a black and white tv. But outside of a few hold-outs, the job was done.

I wrote a column once called the “dot customer” that predicted when consumer oriented e-commerce would reach that bellwether of success. It was when my wife started shopping on-line.

What I was amazed at then was the acceleration. For those of us who used it in its early primitive form, primarily as a business communication tool and occasionally as a way of keeping in touch with folks around the world — the rise of email took a long time. Years.

The move to e-commerce took a noticeably shorter period of time.

But social networking — wow. It seems like months ago that Facebook hit the scene and now — everyone is on the bandwagon. Even my sister Chris. The last Luddite. She sent me a “friend request” the other day.

Somebody told me in conversation that the biggest growth in Facebook ranks was now, as he so delicately put it, “people in your age range.”

Now on one hand, this is the triumph of Metcalfe’s Law. For those of you who don’t know Metcalfe’s Law, it’s a way of calculating the value of a network. For those who think this way, a network’s value is the square of it’s nodes.

For those who can’t quite grasp that, let me explain it the way it was explained to me. What is the value of one fax machine? Nothing. There’s nobody to send a fax to. Add one more and what is the value? It just went up — because there is someone to send and receive your fax. And there might be mutual value for them. Start adding people and the value of the network grows by doubling and redoubling — until it starts to grow at exponential rates, gathering speed like a snowball rolling down hill.

A guy named Metcalfe predicted that. Smart guy.

What I don’t think he anticipated that was that this growth of network value would itself increase in speed each time. Hence the rapid rise of social networking from uber-cool to ubiquitous.

But here’s the point where I want to ask the question. Has the network really grown in value? This isn’t me being simply a contrarian. In fact, I don’t have an answer. I simply raise the question.

Not everything that gets mass acceptance increases in value. Fads burn out, trends die. And when they die — or crash, the seeds of that destruction are hidden by the initial success. Think back to our Seinfeld model and think of a restaurant that had amazing popularity, but was on it’s way downhill while still drawing record crowds. As Yogi Berra was reputed to say, “nobody goes there, it’s too crowded.”

Or if you are astute, think of the dot-com crash. Or the recent financial meltdown. From “top of game” to “down in flames.”

Now this isn’t a big deal for my sister Chris. She might not even notice the bubble bursting — if it does. It might be a problem for a corporate sponsor who invested heavily in social networking only to see it go down in flames — if it does.

The good news is that rarely are these permanent crashes. Many times the sequence is that something hits a success track, gets over hyped, crashes and burns — and then resurfaces months or even years later under a different name. Yesterday’s Application Service Providers were replaced by today’s Software as a Service. I’m sure you can think of a few more.

But the life of some companies, people’s investments and a few careers can take some hard knocks — and they have.

So what are you to do? If you don’t get on board, then you miss the boat. If you jump in, you could go down in flames or waste your money and efforts on something that won’t pay off.

I don’t have all the answers on this one. I can offer a couple of observations. First, there are some worrying items in social networking as we see it. One thing that bothers me is that it appears to be built on a house of cards. Everyone is trying to be the new Facebook, but I’m not sure that’s sustainable. Facebook grew out of the student market and tapped into a phenomenon associated with a younger demographic. From the time when you saw how many kids you could put in a Volkswagen, to sit ins and marches — there has always been an attraction to trying to draw the largest crowd of friends together.

It’s not that this has no attraction to an older segment — but it has it’s roots and it’s big appeal to the younger demographic. Indeed, I would maintain that when this phenomenon hits an older demographic, there has to be more than simply the joy of attendance. Crowds require causes or some additional value.

I haven’t really seen that in the social networking arena yet. Not that I’ve given up. I’m a twitterer, I’m Linked-In, I “Plaxo” and — although I use it less and less, I’m on Facebook. I have contacts. I have seen some value in tracking people I haven’t seen for some time. But I work at it. I can’t afford to invest hours upon hours with no value coming from it.

Much of what happens isn’t relationships. Relationships are about mutual exchanges of value My friend Ray Mackenzie and his co-authors made that point in the book The Relationship Based Enterprise. It’s that word mutual that holds my attention. I’m struggling to see that in this new explosion of social networking.

I don’t poke very much. I tweet a little. I never throw a sheep. And if you find me on a friend finder, and I don’t know you, I probably won’t respond to your invite to become a friend. In fact, I joined Plaxo as an experiment because they seemed to be aiming at those who wanted more exclusive — and more valuable networks.

And if I said I wasn’t worried about the “Hotel California” syndrome I’d be lying. For those of you who don’t follow the reference, Hotel California was a song by the Eagles with the famous line, “you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” When I see Linked-In’s top end price of $499 per month (that’s right – per month) I wonder what the end of this game looks like.

But I don’t know where this is really going. I’m watching carefully. I’m building my network based on value and I’m finding ways to use these tools. But I’m not betting the store on them. Not without a clear indication of value. Because investing in value — whether it be stocks or technology — has a way of paying off in the long run. I’m looking for things that enhance that mutual exchange of value that defines a relationship.

How about you? I’m really interested in your comments.