Let’s start with the last question.   Why do we care?

In an age obsessed by the idea of community, I’m surprised to see that the idea is so poorly understood.  Yet community is one of the the most important words of our era.

One of our greatest desires is to participate in a community.  We need the interaction with others.  We crave the recognition of our friends, our families, our — communities.  In many traditions, the greatest punishment that can be meted out is banishment, ostricization – forced removal from our community.

Our attachment to community is primordial, a driving force, something we crave in at the most basic levels of our existence.

Some would claim that this craving for community is at the root of the force that we all call “social media”.  I would claim that we don’t really understand this –and if we did, our social media approach and behaviours would be vastly different.

Three events converged this week which pushed me to reexamine the ideas that I had about community and social media.  First was the Facebook IPO — the blatant, perhaps inevitable attempt to monetize the idea of community.  The second was writing the obituary of a dear friend and the inevitable wondering about her digital legacy — so much of our contact, particularly in the final weeks of her life was digital and not physical.  The third was a supremely practical motivation.  On Tuesday I’m in a meeting where I’m going to try to explain to a client of mine that the real economic survival of the company requires that they truly understand the idea of community and what it means.

So in the spirit of this blog, which is about changing the game, entertain my challenges and take a wee walk with me to explore the ideas of community and how they affect this thing we call social media.

We talk about Social Media incessantly.  But what is it?  If you were a stranger from another place and had never seen it, what would you say as you saw the pictures, the tossed off lines, the games –  would you think that what you see is simply the recording of individual lives and journeys — the pictures, the quotes, the videos.  Is it the detritus – the residue of our existence?

One thing is inarguable.  Since the inception of Web 2.0 – the interactive internet — and it’s offspring, social media — we have embarked on a project to create memorabilia unrivaled in size and scope by no other in history.  Yes, the Pharaohs left the pyramids.   The druids left Stonehenge.  An unknown civilization left Easter Island.  And the Myans left their own pyramids along with a calendar which marks the end of time.   Their time.  Despite the hype, our time is not yet over.

But to leave behind an imprint in a past age was tremendous feat.   It was the purview of the powerful – those who could convince, cajole or command the loyalty of a vast pool of resources, mostly human labour.  A legacy, an attempt at immortality, was for the wealthy and powerful.

In our age, we have democratized that immortality.   Our lives can be chronicled in minute and even insufferably boring details.   If Samuel Beckett had seen the internet, would he have written “Waiting For Godot”?   I’m not sure he would have had to.  And of all humans who have lived in the past 200 years, Beckett would have understood that better than anyone.

But we have gone further.  We have not only democratized immortality, but we surpassed the attempts at prior generations at longevity.  Anyone who has read Shelley’s “Ozymandius” would appreciate the irony.   In the poem, Shelley confronts the statue of Ozymandius, with it’s inscription, “I am Ozymandius, king of kings.  Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!”   The irony in the poem is, of course, that this statue is barely standing, worn by time and wind, and all that remains is a crumbling ruin, emblazoned with the inscription that starkly illustrates the futility of time and mortality.  Ozymandius despite his power is decimated by time and wind.

In a digital age, however, I am mightier than Ozymandius.  I can create an image of myself, memories of my life and events — digital images — immune from wind and weather.  They exist in the vast electronic consciousness that envelopes us all.  A hundred years from now, or a hundred million, the picture of me, digitally rendered, will be intact in every hight definition detail for any who choose to see.  Nor with the poet need to travel to antiquity.  Type in Jim Love 2012 or Change the Game and there I will be.

But is that all there is?  If so, we have surpassed Ozymandius on another level — our hubris.   I wrote an obituary for a friend this morning and I went to search for some emails that we had exchanged.  It was then I realized, they might exist, but the only reason I was going back to them was to draft this memorial.  I had not been back to them since.

What is worse?  The decaying statue that commands the unknowing pilgrim or the pristine record that no-one visits, lost in the wasteland of data.  Retrievable, but unretrieved.

Sorry for the existential journey, but it was necessary to establish the fact that interaction with others –that thing we call community — that is what is required to bring validity to our existence.

We know this.  We write hoping it will be read.   We leave photos hoping that they will be witnessed.  We log our existence hoping to share.  We put digital messages into the bottle of the internet, looking for someone to find them and retrieve them.   Our epitaph is not as threatening, far more humble and perhaps eminently more poignant  “look upon my life and… acknowledge it.  Please.”

We seek acknowledgement.   We crave relationship.  We need … community.

What is community?  Back to our original question.   The best I can come up with is that it is an acknowledgement of mutual existence.   Community tells us that we are not alone.  We are not simply nodes in a vast impersonal network.  We have something that we share.

Community is sharing.

And it is only by this act of sharing that we escape the pristine prison, the emptiness of a life fully recorded but ultimately unacknowledged.

Sharing is not simply collection.  It is not simply accumulating memories, events, notes and lists.   It is SELECTION.  It requires us to discern specific items from among the total and to select these based on their relevance, their value to others.  It requires us to step out of ourselves and look at the universe through the eyes and needs of another.  It requires that most human of functions — empathy.

Empathy is the root of community.   For it is only with empathy, that ability to look outside ourselves and appreciate the viewpoints of another, that we truly can share our commonness and our diversity.  Our fleeting moment — it might not be immortality — but a moment wherein we can transcend mortality — that is only possible when what we preserve resonates with another.

Empathy is what drove the monks so long ago, not to write their own scriptures, but to lovingly illuminate the scriptures of another.  Rather than tell my own story, I get to illuminate the story of another and, in so doing, join in a continuum of community that will last through the centuries.

That’s the place I went to this morning as I wrote about my friend who died.  I realized that one reason I cared so much about her was that she epitomized that axiom, “there nothing you cannot do if you aren’t worried about who gets the credit.”  My friend was one of those rare people who challenged others to be the best they could, who never strove for credit or attention, who lived authentically.  That’s why I cared so much about her.  Like the monks of old, she illuminated the lives of others.

So when it came to telling her story, we all read, hanging on each new note, eagerly awaiting the news of her story, her journey, her struggle.  We were part of her community.

Okay – long philosophical treatise — but where does it take us?   I hope it conveys that the real essence of what we are seeking with what we call social media is really community.  Further, that community – with it’s root “communion” – is a transcendence of ourselves.  It is only when we really look outside ourselves and seek to see the world through the eyes of others that we escape the irony, the existential dilemma of our existence.  It’s in that act that we achieve what we are really seeking.   Not immortality, but harmony.

We think it’s about logging our lives.  We think it’s about leaving that message for all to see.  But it’s not.  It’s not about collection.  It’s about selection and connection with another human being.

Our hubris is that we think that somehow our time is unique – that the issues, the challenges, the struggles that we face are happening only to us and only at this specific point in time.  But in reality, ours is a story told many, many times in history.  The only crime is that we don’t learn it.  So when I look back In history, I’m struck by another time when there was this enormous compulsion for people to archive content.  A millennium ago, hundreds of monks in vast anonymous monasteries painstakingly added snippets of knowledge to the vast library of text and image – the monastic library.

The monks logged content.  Snippet by snippet.  Transferred into the great collective memory.   The act was achingly similar.   The intention was not.

They did add their own flourish – their own art.  But that addition was a celebration – an illumination of the text.

The monk’s contribution was not a celebration of themselves.  It was a gift to all humanity.  It was not an active of narcissism.  It was an real and vital contribution to a greater humanity – a community.  It was an act of community.  Of communion.

So before you upload that photo.  Before you scribe that tweet.  Before you enter that comment.  Before you update that status.  Take a brief moment and truly ask yourself – “How will this reach another human being?  How will it bring them joy, hope, understanding or laughter — and there is nothing wrong with laughter.”   When you can answer that, in that act of empathetic selection, take your step not into a dilettantes’ diversion — take your step into the internet of community.  Don’t just educate or communicate – illuminate.

Dilettante?  Or digital monk?  The difference is in the intent.  Pure and simple.  And what a difference that makes.

When I stopped coming around, didn’t you ask why?

Now, how do I say it?  Let me try this.

Get lost.  Scram. Get out of my life.  Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

It’s sad that things have come to this.  We used to be so close.    I was your number one guy.   You remember the pet name you called me?  Elite.  I simply called you Air Canada but I did it with such affection. 

In the beginning we had so much in common.  I was Canadian.  So were you.

And I was SO loyal.  We had so much to look forward to.   My career took off.  It took off on your flights.

And oh how we traveled.  Hundreds of thousands of miles.  Every time I could, it was just you and me.  I joined your plan.  I accumulated miles and miles and miles.

I never thought of them as gifts.  I didn’t feel I was taking advantage.  I earned them.  After all — you had lots of competition — but I stuck with you through thick and thin.

Even when others offered cheaper fares.   Given the chance — I’d still pick you.

We had friends in common.  Your staff.  I knew many of them, I flew so often.   We talked.  We had laughs.  They were great.

But then  you changed.  You treated your staff like garbage.  Sadly, they learned to do the same to me.   It happened over time, but it was noticeable.  I bristled. I huffed.  I griped.

Our dinners together changed, too.  Not only were they bad — but now you were charging.  For everything.  Not just dinners.  Want something?  Better have the cash.  I don’t mind paying my share, but it was all one way.  I paid and paid.  I got nothing back.

I tried to talk with you.  You even asked my opinion.  We talked.  Nothing changed.

Eventually I did it.  I played around.

There.  I said it.  I started seeing another airline.

At first, it was on the “down low”.   I always came back to you.  Maybe I felt guilty.  We had been together for so long.

But then it happened.  There was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

For a while I stopped seeing you as much.  I had my family and other responsibilities.  It was just vacations and the odd business trip.

You resented it.  You stopped calling me Elite.  That was rather abrupt.  But I understood.  You had needs too. But then you did it.  You took back all your gifts.   That was just spiteful.

I had a hundred thousand Air Miles left.   I deserved them.   Hadn’t I taken every flight with you?  And I didn’t do it for the miles.   You were my special airline.  You were Air Canada.  So over the years I had earned and used literally hundreds of thousands of miles.  How many flights was that?

I did try to use them up.  I flew my dad to see his sister.  I took my wife to England.  I did everything to burn them up.

But lets also be clear.  This took some doing.  By the time I paid the taxes on these miles, the “free travel” wasn’t really free.  So we just didn’t hop on a plane for fun.

And I kept earning the miles.  So even when I’d use them up, I’d earn more.

I used what I could.  I saved the rest for a rainy day.  And I started to resent this.  Why was this such a problem?  I still think it was a bargain for you.  I was flying less but more often at full fares.  This summer when I went out west.  Full fare, remember?  I still had to buy my own drinks.

Too bad.  You might have won me back.  I have a few more Western clients and some new requirements to travel.  Not as much, but more than I did.

Then  you did it.  I  went to plan another trip I found out that you’d left me.  You had packed up and taken it all.  You cleaned out the account and took off.

You had warned me.  But I only missed your deadline by a few days.  Too late.  They were all gone.

I couldn’t believe it.  After all these years?

It was like a country music song.  You got the gold mine.  I got the shaft.

I phoned you.  I was coy.  Hey, it’s me.  I’ve started to travel again.  (Wait for it…)

You were cold.  “Who?  No.  Your miles are gone.  Those are the rules.”

I pleaded with you.  We had history.  Those nights  we spent together.  The months when I saw more of you then I did of my family.   The movies.  The meals.

It was like you’d slapped me in the face.  I didn’t matter.  I was a rule.  A contract.  A cipher.

I was in shock.

I realized it was over.  I’d come back to you, but now I’d been dumped.

So here’s the deal.

I can take it.  I’ll get over it.  And … I have to say that I’m a little relieved.  Yeah, sure, I wish I’d left you first.  I have my pride.

But here’s the dirty little truth.  Porter serviced me better.  Right from the start.  Even waiting for was pleasant.  Free coffee.  A comfortable place to sit.  They didn’t even ask me if I was Elite or if I was part of their plan.  They didn’t charge me for their lounge.  Apparently, they seemed to think that that the fact that I’d paid for the flight meant that I’d done enough.

I got nice food.  Apparently, you can make airline food taste good.  But wait for it.  I got a free glass of wine.  Good wine.  What  rube I looked like fishing for money.   No charge.  Wow.

Now, I’m not that easy.  You can’t just buy me one drink….

Okay, maybe I am that easy.   When the Porter staff smiled at me and said, “thanks”  like they meant it, I knew I’d be back.

To you I was just a commodity.  To quote the old joke — “we know what you are.  We’re just dickering about the price.”

And let’s get it straight.  You are no bargain.  You are a pricy bitch.  But even when you gave offered a fare that was lower than Porter’s price?  I paid the few extra bucks.   If I’ve needed to keep the cost down, I’ve been going to Buffalo for a quickie in the US.  It’s cheaper.

I think Porter understands.  The service is still great and I’m not even a frequent flyer.  Maybe they get that old Meat Loaf song — “Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad”.

So I’m not seeing anyone exclusively any more.  Another old song, “What’s love got to do with it?”  Nothing.  It’s strictly business.  You taught me that.

I thought we had a relationship.  I found out we didn’t.

But I have learned one thing.   It takes two to Tango.  But it only takes one to Porter.

And now you are writing me.  The tables have turned.  So here it is. Take me off your list.  Don’t call me anymore.

Is that too cruel?  Okay, maybe, just maybe, you could send me one last note.  Tell me that I did mean something to you.  I won’t be back.  There’s too many bad memories.   But I would like to know that you heard me.   And if you had the class to do that, here’s what I’d say.

So long, old girl.  It was good while it lasted.  And we’ll always have Paris.

After that,  I hadn’t seen Al in a while.  Nobody had.  I had asked about him. Weeks went by.  No sign of Al.  Then tonight, I saw him again, in his old familiar spot.  He had his old familiar paper cup which he pushed out as people walked by.  But there was something new.  Now he had a sign.  When I stopped to talk to him I looked at it.  It read…

“Will Read Your Blog for Food”

“Al,” I said.  ”Good to see you again, I think…”

I was a bit at a loss for words. It was good to see Al again.   Like everyone, I had missed him.  But secretly, I was hoping that he wouldn’t e back.  That would mean that he was no longer living on the street.  As unprobable as it was, I had hoped that this social media thing was not a fantasy, but a real opportunity for him.  I guess it was silly to think that he could actually make money doing it.  If the pros were having problems, why should some homeless guy succeed?
Although I have to say that Al never seemed to be “down and out”.  He was always friendly and up-beat. Everyone liked him.  We didn’t see him as just a pan-handler.    He was, part of the neighbourhood — he was a neighbour and a friend.  He knew everybody and everything.  If you wanted to know some neighbourhood news, you went to Al.  It was rumoured that one of the local businesses actually had a room for him to ensure that he didn’t live on the street. As much as all of us wanted him to succeed, it was good to have him back .  So it was with a real warmth of welcome that I reached out and shook his hand.

“Jim, my man! Good to see you,” he replied with a smile pumping my hand with a surprisingly strong grip.  Then he looked at me.  He could see my discomfort.  As if to put me at ease, he pointed at his sign and smiled.”Jim, my man…you are wondering why I’m back?  Huh?”  As we all knew, Al was perceptive.

“Yeah, Al,”  I said.  I asked hestitantly,  ”What happened to your..uh…”

“Social media consultancy?  You didn’t believe I could do it, did ya?   Actually it’s doing fabulously, thanks for asking.  I’ve franchised.  I’ve got  folks working for me.”

I looked around.

“Not here, Jim.  I off-shored that stuff.”

“Off-shored?”  I said, with genuine surprise.

“Yeah, Jim.  Off-shore.  You aren’t telling me a big IT guy like you has heard of this?  I moved part of the business overseas.  They’ve got guys there who were doing what I was for a fraction of the price.”

“But I thought you were using the locals…”

“Jim, Jim, Jim.   Margins are thin.  Lot’s of competition.”   He pointed to the other entrance of the store at another guy panhandling.   He had a dog with him and he looked, well, a little frantic.

“He’s the competition?”  I looked at the other panhandler.  ”I thought he was a friend of yours?”

“He was.  I had to lay him off.  Strictly business, you know.”  He put his hand up to whisper to me. “Didn’t take it well at all.”

“So how do you…”  I wasn’t quite sure what I was asking.  Al’s ‘crew’ were panhandlers. But as fantastic as it seemed, he really did seem to have them making money.  But now, with them all gone or ‘laid off’ what was he doing?

“How to do we get money?”  said Al.  ”It’s all in cloud, Jimmy.  Panhandling as a Service, I call it. PaaS.  Smart phones. e-commerce.  The usual”

“So who is that guy? ”  I asked, pointing to the other gentleman working down the street.

“Sad story, Jim.  He couldn’t make the transition to the cloud.  Bricks and mortar guy.  Sad.  What are you going to do?”  Al shrugged.

“So the..uh…business is going well?”

“Couldn’t be better, Jim. Could not be better.”

I had to ask.  ”Okay, Al. If it’s really doing so well, what are you doing back here?”

“Oh Jim, Jim, Jim.”   He looked at me with a mixture of disappointment and pity.  ”Everybody and their dog has a social media consultancy.  I’m long past that. That is soooo 2010!  You’ve got to evolve.  Move forward.”

I looked at him.  I was never sure if Al was just toying with me.  But now I was caught. Al went on.

“The problem with businesses today is  they lose touch.  CEO’s don’t get out and talk to the real customer.  They don’t know what is really happening. If you  don’t ever get out and work with the rest of the folks how the hell do you know what it’s really like to be on the front line.”  He shook his head and frowned.  ”That ain’t happening to me.  I’ve come back to my roots.  I’m getting back to basics.”

He pointed to his sign.  ”And when you do get back to basics, Jim, my man, you find opportunity.”  He rapped on the side of his head.  ”Opportunity knocks.”

By now Al was off and I was enthralled. It no longer mattered if it was true or not.  I just stood and listened.

“You see, it occurred to me, Jim – with all of the people out there blogging and tweeting and facebooking and linking in — with all of the people generating content — it occurred to me that there was something missing.  And do you know what that is, Jim?”

I wasn’t sure.  He didn’t wait for me to answer.

“Readers, Jim!  Think about it!”  He laughed.  ” Remember when you were talking about the ‘information highway’ and the ’500 channel universe’?  Do you remember wondering how on earth we were ever going to get enough content ?”

I smiled.  I did remember when we were trying to figure out where we would get all the content we needed to fill all of the available channels.  Who thought that our real problem would be too much content?

I thought of my inbox.  I thought of all the newsletters, the blogs, the electronic publications, the tweets, the forums.   Just thinking about it made feel overwhelmed.  Al looked at me as if he could read my mind.

“Too much, now, eh, Jim?”  Al smiled. “What’s that two dollar word you are always using.  Soo namey?”

“Tsunami,”  I said. “It’s like a huge tidal wave that can wipe out an entire coast…”

“I know what it is, Jim.  I can google too.  I just don’t use a big word when a simple one will do. It’s the web, Jim. Simple.  Short.  To the point.”

“Which is?”  I asked.

“The point is Jim, that there is something missing — we are missing people to read all this stuff.   What point is there in writing,   blogging and tweeting  if there’s nobody to read it?  That’s when it occured to me.”  Al shifted into a conspiratorial pose and shifted gears.

“Let me ask you, Jim,”  Al went on. “How much of this Sooonami  get do you act-choo-allee read?”  He saw me pondering it and moved in for the kill. “And what good is it all if nobody reads it?”

“None at all,” I admitted.  ”There is no point in pumping out content if nobody is reading it?”

“Exactly my point.” said Al.  ”That’s where I got this idea.”  He pointed to his sign.  ”I figured it wouldn’t be long before companies would be paying people to read their content.”

“So let me get this straight, Al,” I said, incredulous.  ”You think that people will pay you to read their content?”

“Not think, Jim, my man.  I know.”  He leaned forward as if to take me into his confidence.  ”At first, it was b to c play’. Started out simple enough.  We’d like them on Facebook.  Maybe add a post or two.”  He looked at me seriously,  ”But I don’t poke anyone, Jim.  I’ve got principles”

He went on.  ”After a while we started reading what they’d publish.  You would not believe how bad some of these blogs are! The average reader would say that you couldn’t pay them to read half the junk that people put out there.  Well you could pay us. ” He made a face. “But it was pretty bad.  We earned every dollar.  Even when they could string a sentence together it was all about them.  Nothing for the reader.”

He went on. “But now we are going b to b.  Businesses, Jim.  It’s where the money is.   And they’ll have to pay people.  Have you read some of the stuff they pump out? No content.  Just sales pitches.  All about them.  Some of this crap is worse than the stuff just regular people write.  So much for professionals and big marketing budgets.

“Sometimes Al hit the nail on the head.  I thought of some of the ‘white papers’ I had downloaded. I was looking for real information.  What I got were blatant pitches for products.  I didn’t mind a little bit of sales – if the content was valuable.  I was willing to accept a tasteful promo if I got what I was looking for.  In fact, if they had good content, I actually wanted to hear their pitch.  But if they had no value, if they wasted my time, I resented the ad.

“So people are paying you to read their content?”  I said  ”And business is good?”

“It’s great.”  Al smiled.  ”As long as they are writing crap, they’ll have to pay if they want someone to read it.”

“And what if they learn, Al?  What if they really start to write for the reader’s interests and need.  What if they start to really think about and understand their audience?”

A light went on when I said that last sentence.  I thought of the web design that we had done recently.  Now I realized why the designer had been so insistent that we talk about the actual people who read our web content.  We all knew (or thought we knew) what to put up on the site. We all had strong opinions.  But then she asked us if we actually read our content the way our audience read it.   Had we talked to our customers about it?   But when she asked if we watched them read it, we all drew a blank.

I remember Bill from operations joking in the bar after the session.  ”Read this stuff?  Who would read OUR web content?”  He laughed.  I frowned.  There was something not so funny about this.

Al broke me out of my reverie.  ”Besides, Jim.  You got Moore’s law.  But I got Sturgeon’s Law.”

“Wasn’t Sturgeon the science fiction writer who said that ’90% of everything is worthless?”

Al frowned.  ”He said it was ‘crap‘ Jim.  Crap!  Do you guys ever talk like real people?  With real words?”

He smiled and didn’t wait for an answer.  ”Yeah, he was talking about science fiction.  But he could have been talking about web content, email or even social media.  Most of it is crap.  People know it.”

“You’re right, Al.”  I said “You really couldn’t pay me to read most of it.”

“But you can pay me.   That’s where I come in,” said Al “It’s a great business.”

“At least until people learn to speak plainly and deliver real value — things people really need.  What would you do then?”

“Jim — I’m one step ahead of you. Like  always.”  He grinned.  I smiled back.  ”Even if they get it — and they ain’t gonna.  Even if they did fix all the crap that that they were pumping out, there will still be a need.

Even if it’s all good, the volume will kill you.   Someone has to sort through it all,   reduce the volume and get to the stuff that people really need.  People don’t have time to read it all.

“But,” he winked, ” a few people do ‘get it’.  These guys are successful. And they deserve to be. They  get people to read their stuff cause it has value.  It gets picked up in search engines.  It will be there when people need it.  Other people will link to it so it will get great search results.  Thats the good stuff.

The rest?  The rest is crap. There will always be a lot a crap.  As long as people are pumping out crap and big volumes of stuff, they will have to pay folks to read it.”

I smiled.  Once again, Al had me reeling.  I looked at my Blackberry.  It was late.  I turned to go into the store.  But before I did, I reached into my wallet and took out some change.  Then I thought better of it.  I reached into my wallet and pulled out a twenty.  I put it in his cup. I figured it was the cheapest consulting I’d ever had.

Al looked down mildly appreciative, but not as if it was the biggest bill he’d seen today.

“Smart move, Jim.”  He winked.  ”I’ve read your blog.”  He made a face and held his nose.

I smiled.  But I knew I was blushing as well.  He was right.  But I was determined to learn from this.  Tomorrow I’d read my own blog again  – this time with new eyes.  I’d read it like a customer.

I wandered towards the store thinking.  I turned to see Al talking with someone else who was looking at his hand printed sign –  Will read your blog for food.  I smiled.  And I went into the store.

Thanks Al.

There is a delightful irony that I found this little gem in a tweet.  I read it on a feed from Chris Zane who runs Zane’s Cycle.   I interviewed a few months back for “The Customer Experience Show” a podcast that I host.   I follow Chris on Twitter because he is truly one of the great experts in customer experience.  What he has to say is worth listening to.

If truth be told, I had an little extra incentive to review his twitter stream.  I got a notice that Chris had mentioned me in one of his tweets.  When you get someone who you respect like I do Chris and THEY think that you’ve said something intelligent, you want to know what it was you said.

I — like so many others — say and pass along a great deal of information.   If this study is correct, about a third of it is worth saying.  Despite the source, I don’t believe it for a second.

They are hopelessly over-estimating how much  twitter traffic is valuable.  I for one am doing my best to bring down the  average.  I don’t believe for a second that a third of what I say is truly valuable.   This isn’t false modesty — just ask my friends.  Modesty is not something I’ve been accused of  having too much of.

Frankly, if we were “batting 333″ in the content wars, life would be fabulous.

We wouldn’t have to start (and end) each day deleting emails.  I’m not talking about spam.  I’ve got a great spam filter.  Mine are  from subscriptions I thought were valuable, newsletters that have one good article buried in a pile of stuff that doesn’t interest me at all and a ton of other things I should get to but never seem to find the time for.  Like many of you, that’s how I start my day — looking at all the things I’ll never have time for or scanning and skipping quickly through mail, posts and  tweets. Sometimes something brilliant will catch my attention — or my ego (when I’m mentioned).  Otherwise, it’s all just a blur.

Like most of you, my day is a stream of electronic documents.  Do you find yourself skimming  through documents that you should probably spend more time reviewing?   Do you struggle to focus through all of the interruptions – the  calls, emails, notes, tweets, texts and people who try to get a few minutes of attention?  Does your day go by in a blur?

Moore’s Law rules – the power of technology is growing exponentially.   In a world of social media, there is another law that I’ve often quoted — Metcalfe’s Law.  Metcalfe came up with a way to explain the way networks grow in value exponentially as they get larger.

We’ve lived by these two laws for years.  More is better.  But is there a limit?  Could we get to too much of a good thing?

I love to read.  Here’s a paradox.  What’s my idea of a great vacation?  Answer –  sit at the cottage get a glass of great wine and read a good book.  My refuge from reading is to go off and read.  And it’s not just fiction.  I will read great business books.  My children think I’m insane.

The difference?  The wine and the scenery are certainly a factor.  But the real difference can be explained by another law — Sturgeon’s Law.   Theodore Sturgeon was a science fiction writer in the 1950′s who came up with the axiom, “90% of everything is crap.”

Sturgeon was bemoaning the state of science fiction, but what he said was not only prescient but more and more relevant each day.   Junk mail, Telemarketers. TV.  Even our daily conversations —   while we might not be as uncharitable as Sturgeon, we’d have to say that most of our day is spent in fairly mundane conversations.  Think back.  What did you talk about yesterday?  Same old, same old?  I rest my case.

Not only do we know Sturgeon was right, but at least in terms of work, many of us would love to change it.  That’s why when we see books like the “4 hour work week” it starts us dreaming of freedom from the barrage of urgent things that distract us from the truly important things that we yearn to do.

If Sturgeon was right, we are in deep trouble.  He was talking about a time when only a tiny percentage of the population were authors.  Everything that was written, certainly everything that was published — went through one or often several revisions.  This wasn’t just books and articles.   Even an office memo would have several drafts.

90% of everything might indeed have been “crap” – but it took a lot of effort and to produce that “crap”    Mercifully, there were limits to the volume if not the quality.

Fast forward to today. Everyone is an author.  Production is effortless.  It costs nothing to publish to the entire world.  As a result, most  of us are overwhelmed by the shear volume of content.   Yet Sturgeon’s law remains the constant.  Most of what we have to deal with is still — to use the uncharitable term, “crap”.

That’s why books like the “Four Hour Work Week” have such incredible appeal.   Imagine.  All you have to do is to filter and focus on what is important.   Sounds great.  But it’s a lie  It sounds so plausible but just try it.

Try going into your office every week, doing the four hours of high value work and then leave.  See how long your employment continues.

Unless you can unplug from the grid and be one of the lucky few who leverage a small amount of time into a large dollar value — largely by writing nonsense about things like a four hour work week — you are pretty much stuck doing the other 36 or more  hours of wading through the deep end of the Sturgeon pool.

If we could somehow magically filter out all of the mundane, the low value — the “crap” — it would be a wonderful world.   There’s an old saying in the world of marketing.  It says, “50% of your marketing budget is spent on things that are worthless.  The problem is that you’ll never know which 50%”.   That’s the problem.

But it’s not just marketing.  We have the same issue with the tsunami of content overwhelming us daily.  Even if you know that only 10% is of any value, you are never sure which 10%.

This is the trap of those who do “knowledge work”.   This is the daily reality.  Most of us learn how to cope.  We filter.  We delete.  We skip.  We skim.  But in our hearts we are know that we are all struggling to keep our head above water, living in the hope that we don’t miss something important.

That explains the growing interest in curation.  It’s a word we’ve been hearing a lot — and we’ll hear more about it as a new phenomenon in the world of software.

Curation is a a filter.  An intelligent agent goes through the volume and the clutter and brings us a distilled version, reduced to it’s essence.   Great curation does three things.  I call them the “3 Rs”  - short for reduced, relevant and reliable.

Curation reduces the volume information from a particular domain to make it more manageable. It distills things to their essence.

It ensures that the information is relevant.  Does it fit our interests and our needs?  This is more difficult than it seems.  Especially where the topic is new or unfamiliar we don’t always know what is valuable or how to describe it.   It can also be intensely personal.  We all have slightly different levels of need and the nuances of those needs are sometimes subtle.

Lastly, information must be reliable.  Accuracy is critical and in the current world, difficult to establish.  Is the story correct?  Is the source reliable?  Even if we could somehow establish these (and that’s by no means a certainty) there is still the real danger that when the information is reduced, filtering will introduce biases and inaccuracies.

Daniel Kahneman, the noble prize winning author puts it succinctly in his best seller, “Thinking Fast and Slow.” No matter how much we strive for objectivity, our brains are wired to introduce bias and inaccuracy – and to do so unconsciously.  No one, not even Kahneman himself can be a totally objective filter.

This is why the idea of curation software has such promise.  If search engines like Google’s can tame the web and help us search and find content in the vastness of the Internet — couldn’t we use that same type of filter in reverse?   Couldn’t we have information not just pushed to us, but filtered — reduced to manageable volumes?    In a world where Amazon can tell us what books we should read, why can’t we have software that can learn and even predict our needs — that will know what is relevant to us?   While we know that accuracy is difficult to automate, can we not find ways to increase the reliability of information — checking the sources and where there is ambiguity, allowing us to have several expert views.

That’s the promise of curation software. And it’s a big promise.  Like most technological developments, the promise is bigger than the delivery.  The challenge is that, despite Kahneman’s revelation that our minds are biased and often inaccurate, they are wonderful at understanding semantics — at dealing with the fuzzy and imprecise things — a task which software has only recently been able to approximate.

We are in the early stages, but there is some promise.  While we may never get a real semantic search, we are getting very sophisticated algorithms that can simulate how we analyze and how we learn.  Are they perfect?  No.  But frankly, if you read Kahneman, you’ll realize — neither are we.

Moreover, interfaces to these curation software engines are becoming more and more sophisticated.  Where once there was a tedious and lengthy question set, we now have software that “watches” your choices and adapts.  While it is still in the early stages, with IBM’s Watson and Apple’s Siri, we are growing ever closer to the ability to communicate our ideas in real language.

Still we are a long way from HAL 9000 or the USS Enterprise.  Until we reach those feats of technology, curation software remains an enabler of human expertise – a way to assist and to magnify our abilities.  It those terms, we have already come a long way indeed.

Even with it’s current limitations, in the hands of a skilled editor it’s an enormous boon.  One of my friends and colleagues, Shane Shick at  IT World Canada uses a Canadian developed package to monitor the daily output of thousands of writers and journals.  It allows him to monitor a wide range of writers and areas.  It functions as a research tool.  And increasingly, it allows him and his staff to republish the work of another writer, adding their own annotation and insight, while crediting the original author for their work.

As costs come down, curation software is available to a wider range of writers.  For even an”occasional journalist” like me, curation is an opportunity to make the most of limited time.  I have several curation engines that I watch regularly.  The tweet that started this post came to my attention because of a filter that I had set.   I’m now experimenting with curation software to feed several of the blogs that I publish which are more technical and less — how shall we say it?  Verbose?  Parts of our websites are now driven by curated content.  More to come.

Hopefully, curation will free up more time for me to read as well as write.  My passion is for words.  That won’t change.  No matter how sophisticated the software, my love will always be for the art of creation — not the act of curation.  So don’t expect me to replace this blog with a curated feed.  Sorry, but you’ll have to tolerate the 90% to find the 10% of it that is valuable.

All the best.

Jim

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

That’s what we imagine. Excitement builds. We’ll get the best people, from the best schools, people who are “up and comers”! Get me the “A” performers! No “dead wood” on this team!

What a load of crap.

First of all, it rarely happens. Most of the time, in projects or when you take over a department, division or even an company, you get what you get.  And while you can imagine in your dream world – or in some business book – that you can “clean house” and put in your own team of the very best, life doesn’t always work out that way.

You can’t just fire people at random and put in your own team.  You need to figure out who should go and who the “keepers” are.  You need to know the repercussions of any action you take.  It takes time to do an assessment.  It’s harder than it sounds. When the new guy or gal takes over, everyone has an interest in influencing your opinion of them and others.  Don’t expect to get objective facts from anyone.  Figuring it all out is tough.

Or if you have a project team that you are assembling from scratch, reality rears its ugly head again. Usually, the “very best and brightest” are also the busiest. Sometimes – as Mick Jagger said, “you can’t always get what you want.” So if Sarah, the high flyer is too busy, maybe you get Bob the, uh — “not so high flyer.”  Sometimes you get that person that the French so cutely call “un cadeaux” — a “gift”.   Most of the time you get lame excuses.  I can hear it in my mind. “Did I promise you Sarah?  I guess I did.  Sorry – that was before we got this new client.  But Bob is a real gift to any team…”

The only time you get the clean slate is in a work of fiction or a business book – which are often the same thing.

Unfortunately, I business happens in the real world. But if we didn’t – if just for that one wacky time, where we got chance to hand pick our team, and instead of Wally from Dilbert we got nothing but “A” performers – what a disaster that would be!

What? Did I just say disaster?

Yes.

Think about it. Or live it, if you ever get the chance. Because this may be something you can only learn from experience. Sometimes even the best schools graduate people who talk a great talk, have excellent grades, networked out the wazoo, maybe even head of their alumni association –  but are, to coin a phrase, “as thin as piss on a plate”.  Sometimes the “high flyers”, who’ve been promoted time and again aren’t everything they are cracked up to be. Yes, some do good things.  Few people walk on water.  And some are a flash in the pan.  It’s possible to have a string of apparent successes without any other clear talent than luck and the ability to escape before disaster hits.

So you might not get the god of commerce that you have dreamed of.   But even if you do, you may be in for a rough ride.  Have you ever tried to facilitate a group of “A” performers – it can be challenging to say the least.  I once ran a global consulting practice and I can tell you, some of my toughest times were when I pulled together the top consultants from around the world.  There was a reason we had a theme for one conference which was “check your ego at the door”. Unfortunately, just like in real air travel, not much of the baggage was checked – and a lot of people brought their egos as “carry on”.

I don’t expect you to believe me.  Maybe you’ve had different experiences.  But sometimes the “dream team” can be your worst nightmare.

So it may be fortunate that you don’t get a lot of opportunities to build these mythical “dream teams”.  Most of the time, business is like poker. You play the cards you are dealt.  Yes, there are rules that let you discard a few and pick up a few new ones. But over the course of the game the real winners make the best of the hands they are dealt.

That’s been my strategy. I work with what I have, even if it’s what everyone else calls the “B” team.  In fact, I prefer the “B” team even when I have my choice. Why? Because I get great results from them and over the years, it’s a strategy that’s worked for me.

Time and again, I’ve taken over departments where the team were regarded as under performers.  They (not me) turned things around in an incredibly short time. I’ve hired from the middle of the class in great and in simply good schools.  I’ve found people who were used to working hard to keep up, people with a real desire to learn and above all, I’ve found people who were coachable. Yes, coachable. They listen.

Funny, when my friend Doug Sparkes and I are asked to mentor entrepreneurs, we have two criteria to judge if we’ll take on a new entrepreneur.  It’s not the obvious.   It’s not their great idea — frankly, great ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s not their marks.  It’s not their connections or network. And it’s certainly not the fact that they present well – some days we’ve wanted to poke out our eyes with a fork rather than take one more powerpoint slide.  Nope. We look for two things – drive and coachability. Do they really want to succeed more than anything? And do they listen?  Everything else can be taught.

As a formula, it’s worked pretty well. Listeners succeed. Not just by listening to us. It’s listening to their other advisors, to their partners and colleagues and above all to their potential and current customers.

Listening doesn’t mean that you always agree.  It means you listen and think. In fact, a team that is always “on the same page” is a big danger, no matter how smart they are.  You need diversity, questioning and even challenging to make sure that good ideas are really good.  Some of the dumbest ideas in history have been floated by teams that had all “drunk the kool-aid”. Because it was “social media” or “mobility” or “Web 3.0” nobody questioned whether what was being presented was really a good idea.

My “B” teams are full of questioners. They ask questions — not so they can show what they know – but because they don’t have to hide the fact that they don’t know some acronym or buzzword.  They don’t have to believe everything because it’s a new hot trend.  That’s how they fought their way to the middle of the class. These people ask good questions and they listened to the answers. When you have one of these guys or gals on your team, he or she will ask — “why is that so good? What can it be used for? Why would someone buy that?”  Great questions.  And if you experience a wisp of annoyance, maybe it’s time to check your own ego and realize that they may have done you a hell of a favour.  Maybe you haven’t communicated it well.  Or maybe (actually all too many times) the emperor really does have no clothes.

Another wonderful thing about “B” teams.  They are full of real people.  Some have quirks, many aren’t the fastest talkers, they often haven’t read “Dress for Success”, or maybe they aren’t from the top business schools. Some have come up through practical programs.  Some of come up through the school of hard knocks. They are real, authentic people – some of whom only need to be given a chance.  Some need coaching and mentoring if they are going to advance.  Some are comfortable being just a team member, and have no ambition to lead (in the classic sense). Some wouldn’t be caught dead making a speach or presentation. Some have been told they shouldn’t.  But for all of these supposed “disadvantages” when you look beneath the surface, there is a lot of talent there.

But lets also be real.  Not all business is rocket science.  B teams can deliver. In the drudgery of day to day discipline and the mundane part that is every job, they do it and get it right. It’s wonderful to have great idea about how you can improve things. It’s better to do the real spadework to prove and implement an idea.

I remember back when I was starting out and got my first national role for product development and financial control. I had not studied business at that point.  I felt very insecure about it. It was only later that I went back at night to get my degree.  I was smart enough to get a book and read up on financial analysis. I could make sense of it, in fact it didn’t look all that hard, but people train in this stuff for years.  They get very expensive MBAs.   So I thought I was missing something. So I hired an MBA from a great school (that shall remain nameless) and set him to work.

What a disaster that was!  He nearly caused a mass uprising. In those days, the heart of our business was data entry.  As was common at that time, it was mostly women who had high school and not much more.  They worked all day doing the same thing over and over – accurately and quickly. That’s how we made money. Because I’d never studied at a good management school, I thought the way to train our new recruit was the way I was trained.  I put him to work doing data entry.   I had often gone down to work with them when we were short staffed or just to help out with high volumes. Sometimes I just got them coffee.  I could almost keep up on key punch although I never matched the top performers.  But I’d try my best to compete.  I didn’t think that this was doing very much.   But I did get the feeling that they while they might not walk over hot coals for me, they would stay late and put in that extra effort when needed.   For someone from the executive floor, I was almost human.  In turn, I appreciated and respected them.

The first day my new recruit was down in that area, the supervisor came to me to tell me to “get that brat out of her area”. His moaning about what a “dead end job” this was had gotten on their nerves.

To make matters worse, the new recruit wasn’t doing a particularly stellar job on the financial reporting and analysis I’d hired him to do. It turned out that although he’d passed his course on stats he hadn’t really paid much attention. Imagine my surprise to find that I had to coach him with what I’d learned from a book and some common sense. I showed him to the spreadsheets that I’d devised with great pain and with lots of weekend work.
I don’t think he ever really got it.  Fortunately, I didn’t have to fire him. Amazingly, some other department really wanted a “A” performer like him. Great school. Nice clothes. Knew how to talk. Had the right attitude. He went off to join someone’s “dream team”. I was left with my “B” team. We made money for the company and got the job done.  My rudimentary financial analysis showed that

That was a learning experience.  The first of many.

Later, as I went back to school at night to study the business and technology that I was living, I would learn that a lot of what I had picked up by observation and by simply trying to be a real human being was the best way to manage.  I learned  about things such as the Hawthorne Effect – where simply paying attention to people could generate improvements in performance.  I learned that you needed to appreciate people, to learn to inspire but more often to be inspired by real people.  I learned that by looking for the best in people, I would find it.

Time and again this proved out and my career took off — thanks to all of those “B Teams”.

But I never stopped learning – so as I struck out on my own to head up a boutique consulting company, I used the same learning and the same wisdom in my consulting.   For example – I was in a call centre a while ago. Everyone had told me that this was a dead end place, nobody cared, they should just outsource it and be done with it. It was true that they had their challenges – there were a lot of complaints.  But instead of reading reports I went to see them work. While I was there, something happened.  In a very short period, the calls spiked and the queue grew incredibly. I would later find out that there were some problems in the operation that drove huge spikes of calls into the call centre with little preparation and no training at all.

I watched them valiantly handle each and every call. Intent. Hard working. Frustrated at times, but persevering. And then I watched as the last call in the spike was handled and they crossed back to regular volume. When that call had been handled, they all stood and applauded the person who took the last call.    It was an amazing experience and one that I’ll never forget.  So much for “not caring”.  These folks were fabulous.  And watching them pointed out where the real problems might lie.

And I was confident that I’d find those problems.  I knew that this “B Team” would help me succeed — if I let them.

So keep your “dream teams”.   Give me real people who care and listen.  We’ll do great things together and I’ll be proud to be on the “B Team”.

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?

Funny how that works, Phil.  You see, I’m not a Dean.  I’m just a part time instructor at a couple of universities.  And cheating is a real problem for me, anyway.   This year I made a speech to my class – I wrote it myself.  But I fully confess to stealing the ideas from a number of my professors years and years ago — probably about the time you took your undergrad, Phil.   My profs said what I said at that class.

They said – if you cheat and I catch you, the consequences will be severe.  Fair warning.  I will move heaven and earth to help each and every one of you pass.  But if you cheat to do it – and I find out, I will make it a personal calling to make sure that you get the full consequences.

Bold talk.  I’d heard from other profs – privately – that sometimes they didn’t pursue cheating, especially if the case was “on the margins” because it was so complex and time consuming.  I’d heard stories of kids whose parents had gotten them lawyers to defend in cases of plagiarism.  If you are a prof, you have to invest the time and energy to defend yourself – when it’s the cheater who should be on trial.

Such is the modern world.  Parents intervene so that their kids don’t have to take the consequences of their actions.

Frankly?  I understand it.  I’m a parent and I can’t tell you what I’d do if one of them were thrown out.  I understand the profs as well.  The hours that you would have to invest to go through all of the process and appeals if you come down on a student for cheating.

But – as I assured my class, it’s more than bold talk.  I’m a part timer and I teach for love — it sure as hell isn’t for the money.  I teach when I get the opportunity and can spare the time, to be able to give back just a little of what my profs gave me.  My profs gave me the ability to think critically, to love learning and to understand that learning was enjoyable — but it was hard work and discipline.

My education was eclectic – I experimented with more majors than might seem possible or at least wise.  Literature , IT, Admin Studies, Psychology, Economics , Performing Arts and even a brief flirtation with Philosophy.  I took it all in.  I learned a lot from my professors.  Truth be told, I really lucked out and got a great group of profs.

I graduated on the Dean’s Honour List

.  At least I did my second time.  Again, in the spirit of truthfullness, I sort of majored in partying my first time out — and I really just worked on the stuff that I liked.  Some of my first marks were —  shall I say, “leaving a little to be desired?”

Then I went back.  At night.  Working during the day.   This time I could usually find an employer who would pay my tuition, but I had to part with almost all of my free time.  I was serious about this.

So when I hit a course that was particularly brutal, I hit the books.

I did discover one trick that I used.  When you go to all the classes and do all the readings, you get good marks.

And I never cheated. Not once.

So as I stood in front of my first year class giving my first lecture, I was clear.   “Cheat and I will catch you.  And I will devote myself to making sure you get the full consequences.”

Why?  Again, partly the respect I have for learning.  But we don’t just teach learning – we model the behaviours that go with learning.  Curiousity.  Hard work.  Integrity.

What I did want to ensure these young minds understood was that they could appeal, they could bring their parents lawyers – heck, they could even try to get me fired.  I would never back down in the fact of cheating.

And I’ll be damned, but I did catch a couple of kids cheating.  I saw the phrases and they just rang a bell or looked a little too good to be in a first year essay.  It actually wasn’t hard to track them down either.  Google is a marvelous tool.

For all my bravado, I took no joy in pursuing this one.  Wouldn’t you know it?  My two “cheaters” were sweet kids who came to every class.  They seemed to study hard and were earnestly trying to get good marks.

So why cheat?  Who know?   Maybe they were overworked or got behind in their assignments.  Maybe it was just a “lapse in judgement.”   Unfortunately — there is no excuse.  So once I thought they were cheating, I spent hours pouring over every word of their work and assembling my case.  They paid the price.  And I was not going to back down.

Students have to take accountability.  They are young adults, but adults nonetheless.

But when I caught these students cheating I took no joy in it at all.  I pursued it.

I believe by taking this tough stand that I am defending what I hold so dear and work hard to defend.

Well, thanks Phil – because that job just got a lot harder.  Now, how do I justify dropping the hammer on some kid who cheats when a Dean of an institution feels that he can get away with cribbing someone else’s work without attribution?

There’s an awful thing in business these days.  Someone will repeatedly screw up or not make deadlines or let their team down and even repeat offenders seem to have the same tired old line.  ”I take accountability” they say.  Which is crap.  They don’t want accountability — they want (as an old boss of mine once said) to go to confession.  By appearing to have the courage to acknowledge their screw ups, they expect a get out of jail card.

That’s not accountability.  When you are accountable, you take the consequences as well.   This new “confession tactic” is nothing more than an attempt to avoid the consequences.  It’s as sincere as a politician’s apology.  You’ve all seen the carefully scripted BS where the politician (why is always a guy?) has his poor wife standing dutifully by him.  He has tears in his eyes as he asks forgiveness for his “lapse in judgement”.   All of it scripted by some PR wonk to defuse the crisis.

Guess what?  That’s not accountability.  Accountability without consequences is not accountability.  At best its confession and at worst is PR BS.  I’m not into revenge.  I don’t take joy in anyone’s pain.  It’s not for me to decide whether sending naughty pictures of yourself on the internet is worthy of losing your job.  If it’s not – then boldly stand up and say that and let the voters decide.  But don’t pull this “lapse in judgement” deal and expect no consequences.  We elect politicians to have good judgement – even when times are tough.

Which brings us back to Philip Baker.  For those who believe that education is teaching kids that the only thing that counts is the end mark and they can lie, steal, cheat and buy their answers — this “cribbed speech” is no big deal.  For those who think that education involves trust, character and discipline – that scholarship and integrity are linked – we can’t have our leaders plagiarizing.

Phil – you have to resign.  That’s it.  No questions.  That’s the cost of your “lapse in judgement”.   If you don’t then every one of us who teaches or is simply just proud of our academic work or our alma matter — every one of us has to rise up and drum you out.  Sorry.

That’s accountability.

But don’t make us do it.  Next year, when I stand in front of the class, let me be able to say that even the Dean is not above it.  When Philip Baker realized what he’d done, he resigned.  That’s the best example to set.

If not, then my plan B speech would be — “I was only one of many who wrote, complained, hounded and worked tirelessly to get Philip fired.   And if YOU cheat, I’ll put the same amount of vigour into ensuring that you are also held accountable.”

It’s your choice, Philip.  Without taking real accountability, you’ve simply made it the “Dean’s Dishonour List.”  What kind of example do you want to be?   Because we are holding you accountable.

The phrase hit me like a brick.

I’ve been a consultant for over 15 years – half of my career.  It’s funny, you don’t get into this game unless you have some desire for feedback. Given how competitive consulting is, you also have to be a bit of an over-achiever.

I confess.  Yes.  I was that kid in school who had all the answers — the one the teacher eventually stopped asking, or looked vainly to each side of hoping for someone else to raise their hand, eventually returning defeated to reluctantly accept the offering of the impatient know-it-all in the front row.  For anyone who worries about my social status, you can rest easy — I got over that part. In university I became the guy sitting at the backs.  Still an over-achiever, but now a rebellious one — I learned to be cool and disdainful.   But I still knew the answer.  At least that’s my perception.

I was so full of myself, I’m not sure how the profs would bear it.  I remember one prof – Barry Callaghan — a man with an ego bigger than mine at the time (a considerable feat in those days).  Barry proudly proclaimed that, “nobody in his class got a A”.   I stuck up my hand.

“Are you telling me,” I said, “that although I’ve got an IQ that’s north of 140, I am stupid enough to have signed up with a prof who is so terrible that he can’t teach me enough to get an A?”

Barry let me live.  Just.  And, yes…I got the A.  He made me sweat blood to do it, and I worked my butt off.

Affirmation was important.

Many times in my life, I’ve seen or heard people welcome critical feedback.  Only if we know what we do wrong could we improve.  I would, on command, mouth those words, and even appear sincere.  I didn’t have the nerve to question this.  It sounds so — stoic.  So right.  But inside,  I never believed it.  It shames me to admit that I always struggled with negative feedback.  I’d sit, trying to appear interested, all the while churning inside, hearing little of what was said until one nugget, one positive — I’d hear that, I’d relish it.  I’d cling to it like Gollum with the ring.

It’s not that I shut out all criticism.  I’m my own worst critic.  Nobody is more devastating or hard hitting than me.  Even while I’m listening to praise, feeding my addiction to affirmation, my own internal critic is at work.

I once described this to others using a picture out of a comic book.  It was like I had a little angel on one shoulder listening hard fo every nugget of what I was doing right.  On the other, was a little devil telling me what I was doing wrong. For years I would try to focus on the one and ignore the other.

It wasn’t until many years later that I learned that the trick, at least in consulting, is to balance the two.  You need the self confidence to tackle tough problems.  You have to work your butt off like I did in that university class, to defy the odds and to come up with a great solution.   For the first part of my career I got that perfectly.   It was only in later years that I realized that I needed to listen equally to both the applause and the critic.  I needed  humility to take advice, especially when I was absolutely certain I was right.

That lesson was painful.  But I learned it.

It doesn’t mean that I enjoyed criticism.  I just learned — painfully and by brutal experience that I needed that feedback — as painful as it was.  I never learned to like it.  I did learn to  “suck it up” .

But eventually a light went on.   One learning for me was watching others, often consultants who had not learned this lesson.  I’d watch people so certain they were right, with clear and easy answers taken from books, making pronouncements and waiting for applause.  The best were devastating in managing any critique of their great solution.   It took years, but eventually this behaviour was a mirror — one in which I began to see my worst failings.

When I moved from industry to consulting,  I knew that the mirror sat on the other side of me.  The client was my mirror.  I had to speak the truth.  I had to give credible advice.  Yes, I needed he ego to do that.  But I had to have humility.   I promised myself that if I ever lost the feeling of what it felt like to sit on the opposite side of the desk — in the client’s shoes — I’d give it up.

Truth be told, I’ve probably broken this vow at times.  But if I did, something would give me a wake up call.  Today’s comment from this marvelous lady — who spoke of the “strangers” — spoke to me.

The strangers?   They were consultants.  This lady worked for a company where consultants were brought in.  Strangers.  And she didn’t trust these strangers.  They were giving all kinds of advice, maybe even some of it good.  From the sound of it I presume that in their meetings with senior managers, these consultants were getting applause for their work.  As there were more and more of them appearing, they must be finding some favour.

I knew what that felt like.

But I wondered — did they know how little they were trusted by this lady?  Did they care?

I’ve always known the names we’ve been called over the years.  In my early days with a CA firm, some clients called us the “suits” – in reference to our uniform of blue suits and white shirts.  I enjoyed the joke, quipping back that that we got to wear grey suits on casual day.  The clients laughed.

Over the years, I’ve heard a million jokes.  When told in good humour, I could usually laugh along.   Sometimes I would exploit this humour to bridge a gulf.   I remember in Indonesia when I invited a group of the staff to my house (unheard of, I’m told).   That night, I made a joke about the name that they called us expatriate consultants.  It’s a little difficult to translate, but let’s just say it wasn’t flattering.  When I mentioned it, they looked shocked.  I laughed.  Then they did too.  It broke the ice.

In the days when everyone was on planes and you couldn’t work in your own home town, we were nicknamed the  “seagulls”.  We flew in, did what seagulls do and flew out.  I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.  Funny?  Yes.

I laughed when I heard that as well.

But I’ve told you that criticism still stings and as much as I laughed,  I also heard what was behind the humour.  It reached me in a way that direct criticism sometimes didn’t.   It mad me think.  And I think that that saved my consulting career.   Arrogance is the death of good consulting.

I remember one day when we were discussing an outsourcing project and I questioned how we had got to our cost savings over the current costs that the client has.

“Easy” said one of the young turks at the table. At the time, he wore red suspenders under the blue suit.  The mark of a true rebel.   “You just cut 25% of the staff.  You get rid of the dead wood.”

I resented  the glibness.  These were people’s lives.

So I asked my young turk colleague, “Have you ever done a mass firing before? (I purposely didn’t use the word lay-off.  I wanted this to have punch. ” Have you ever looked someone in the eyes and told them that they were fired?”

“No.” he said, “but I’ve been involved in it.”

I didn’t even ask what that meant.  Instead I muttered some glib line about the difference between the chicken and the pig.  The answer is, of course, when it comes to breakfast, the chicken is involved.  The pig is committed.

But after my anger faded I was left with a realization.   I could be as smug as I wanted.  But if I was honest, I’d been in industry a long time.  I’d done layoffs.  I knew that lay-offs may very well get rid of some “dead wood” but more often – you slash cut a lot of live trees.

So while I could try to find the moral high ground here, it’s a lot like the old joke?

“Would you sleep with me for a million dollars?”

“Yes.”

“Would you sleep with me for ten dollars?”

“What l do you think I am?”

“I think we’ve established what you are.  Right now, we are only negotiating price.“

I could be as indignant as I liked.  But I had done what he was only talking about.   The fact that I felt bad didn’t give those people their jobs back.

I could judge his arrogance.  Or I could use it as a mirror.

Those are some of the memories that came back when this marvellous lady talked about the strangers. It still wasn’t comfortable.  After all these years, I’m at best a “recovering praise-a-holic”.   I take it one day at a time.  And I don’t like negative feedback — but I do love good advice.

And I was getting some good advice.

I could resist it, or I could use it.  I could look in this mirror and ask myself,  “have I been a stranger?”  Not for regret.  Not for self-flagellation, but as a learning experience.  Maybe I’m maturing?  Who knows?

Here’s the learning that I got.

As consultants, we may have the ear of the most senior executives — but that’s not where recommendations are going to get implemented.   Peter Drucker – the great management consulting thinker of our time said it clearly.   “The best and the brightest are volunteers.”

So as I started the session, I thanked the lady who made the remark about the “strangers”.  If there was any danger of me having anything glib in the session that I led with this group, it went out the window.  As I had in my university days, I worked my butt off – only now, not for the marks or the praise, but because I was reminded that I had a choice.  I was the “expert” – but I needed their trust.

We were in this together.  I couldn’t succeed being a “stranger”.

I dug deep.  I did my best to listen.  I offered honest advice.

As it turns out, it was a great two days, at least in part because of that great comment.  As I said good-bye to them all, I couldn’t help thinking of that old parting line — “don’t be a stranger”.

Good advice.