You’re going to have to change your management style

I spend a large part of my year in conversation with managers working hard to try and understand today’s younger workforce. The pain they’re feeling is palpable. The evidence of change is overwhelming. Making the necessary changes, at times, seems impossible. The hope is that the challenges are being interrogated and slowly but surely acted on.

Business Week has a great article called, Working with China’s Generation Y. It’s a well written article that does a fantastic job describing a younger workforce entering today’s business world in China.

In urban China, Gen Y is a group of exceptionally talented people. No other generation in Chinese history has received such high-quality education for so many people. Chinese Gen Ys are single children born under China’s one-child policy. According to studies such as those by Posten and Falbo of the Guttmacher Institute, China’s solo children perform significantly better academically than peers with siblings. These single children have grown up in traditional extended families (including four grandparents and two parents), under pressure since kindergarten to pass entrance exams. This means that the child’s educational performance has been a top priority for six adults.

The article describes the different approach of this younger set and the challenges that face today’s managers (Baby Boomers and Generation X).

For Gen Y, the good boss is like a kung-fu master who stays in the background, teaching through small hints. The good boss is highly available to his employee and has trust in them. He is balanced and nonemotional. He knows how to share his skills without talking much but rather expresses himself in the right dose, at the right time and place. It is not about telling workers what to do but waiting for the right time to drop by their desk and ask: “Have you asked yourself X? Perhaps you might have tried Y?” Difficult to achieve? Yes, but it is important to show Gen Y why they should respect their boss—and then they will.

I often get the sense that the current set of managers are caught between the reality that they will have to adapt their management style, but also hoping (pleading) that this younger set will do the the adapting, instead of the other way around. Attachment to ‘how it’s always been done’ is a powerful anchor for many managers not wanting to do the work required to make the necessary changes.

Bottom line is that change is required in order to ensure a successful business into the future. It may take some time, but it will have to happen. Today’s younger set will not, and can not change sufficiently. For one, they don’t have a view of ‘how it’s always been done’. They only know who they are, and are going to need those older than them to do the shifting.

Twitter 10 Billion – quality not quantity

In the last few hours the 10 billionth tweet was tweeted on Twitter. As one would imagine there was all kinds of hype and excitement, as Tweeps with the necesary skills attempted to predict the time it would happen, and I imagine even be ‘the one’?

My last tweet was 9999989724. Wild. Will be at 10 billion by next tweet. – @Scobleizer

… and then seconds later….

Yup, already hit 10 billion. My last tweet was 10000011727 so now we can get on with real news. – @Scobleizer

This morning when I woke up it was all over, and followed:

Twitter reaches 10 billion tweets. (2 artcles)http://bit.ly/cApU1O http://bit.ly/a7KKcD – @MelanieMinnaar

…. to find who the Tweep was and what they Tweeted?

I’ll save you the pain of going along there yourself. Drumroll, the 10 billionth tweet on Twitter….. was a protected user, so the identity of the person is not known, and secondly because of that, nobody knows what they tweeted.

A complete let down. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it felt like it should have been one of those moments. In hindsight I realise my expectations were way off the mark.

Here’s what it’s taught me….. Twitter is not about quantity. It’s all about quality. The 10 billiont tweet was a let-down because the quality was terrible. It also doesn’t matter how many people follow you, or how many you follow, if the quality is bad, the entire experience is bad.

Keith Coats, a colleague of mine, often quotes a mentor of his… “Worry not the size of the stage on which you will be called to perform, worry that you have something to say!”

Nuf Sed

Managing Today’s Younger People

Management in today’s organisational environment is no easy endeavor. The number of new elements that need to be negotiated and integrated in order to develop an effective management style are numerous as they are unchartered. The environment in which we work has shifted dramatically in the past 10 years. Business ‘how-to’ books are barely keeping pace as fresh challenges surface and new thinking emerges around how to survive and thrive as a manager.

Because of my business focus within TomorrowToday, I often encounter baby-boomer managers struggling to adapt to and accept the increasingly larger number of Generation X (and smattering of Generation Y) found within the workforce. Mostly it’s the vast difference in world view and value system that’s causing the angst. Boomers have done a fantastic job managing boomers. They’ve created systems, processes, management styles, reward philosophies, motivation programmes, etc that have resulted in tremendous growth and increased efficiency. As this younger group have entered the work force, they’re simply not responding and engaging in ways that Boomers have become accustomed to.

A large part of my work is assisting both of these groups (Boomers and Gen X) to appreciate their own and each other’s world views, as together we navigate this New World of Work. It’s key for all parties NOT to adopt a ‘wrong/right’ filter in this debate. Attempting to place a wrong/right label on either group just escalates the tension and ultimately never finds a resolution. I’ve found it far more helpful to frame this engagement as a ‘war of two wisdoms’. Baby-Boomer wisdom has got us here, and Gen X wisdom will take us forward. Because the ‘gap’ between these two generations is, at times fairly large, it’s critical that these two wisdoms are intentionally integrated into each other in order to avoid simply letting ‘nature’ take its course, as we wait for the younger lions to force the older lions out of the pride. This scenario, in my mind, will leave much destruction and wasted time and energy in its wake. … Continue Reading

The Internet? Bah!

Many years ago, in a South Africa finding it’s way to it’s first democratic election, a friend of mine would often say, “Don’t be a victim of your own words.” He of course was referring to saying things that might come back and bite you down the road. And in an emerging ‘New South Africa’, lots of people were saying lots of things, and plenty of them got it badly wrong.

The world of technology is another one of those ‘dramatic change spaces’ that offers up the opportunity for history to come back and bite you big time.

Here are some exerts from a Newsweek article (1995) dug up by the guys at The Next Web. Clifford Stoll, writes a piece called ‘The Internet? Bah!’. And boy does he get a whole lot wrong : ) Keep in mind that he wrote this before Google, FaceBook and Twitter.

Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

There are so many beauties contained in the article. I’m tempted to drop the whole thing in as a quote. Go and have a look for yourself : )

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

School sport as an indicator of Talent

Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers has been one of my break-through books of 2009 in the area of ‘Talent’. If it does anything to the reader, it will surely have them asking deeper questions around what talent is and how we should be assessing for it? It did at least that for me. I’ll confess right up front that I am a Gadwell fan. Yes I have read the critiques on him, and whatever you might say of him, he does one of the best jobs taking some very complex ideas and packaging them for the less educated, complex and deep, like me (and you if you’re honest).

The Wall Street Journal blog has a great article that plays in the ‘Outliers’ space, called Economists Link Athletics to Success in School, Job Markets. Wharton economist Betsey Stevenson has drawn a link between young women entering sports in high school in the US (a law change in 1972, significantly changed the ratio’s of young women in high school sport) and an increase of female college attendance and female labour-force participation.

This article adds, in my mind, to the increasing body of evidence suggesting that how we spot ‘talent’ is more complex than a battery of psychological tests, academic results and personality profiling (no matter how sophisticated they seem). There may be many other, far more robust indicators as to someone’s future value that we don’t know how to interrogate, have forgotten about, or are just not courageous enough to explore?

Title IX’s most pronounced effect was on athletics. Girls’ participation in high school sports went from 1 in 27 in 1972 to 1 in 4 in 1978. But it’s effect wasn’t uniform because states where boys’ participation in athletics was high were forced to increase girls’ participation the most. Ms. Stevenson was able to use the variation between states to tease out the effect of girls participation in sports from other factors. That allowed her to see how playing sports affected girls’ success later in life.

Her conclusion: A 10 percentage-point rise in girls’ participation in high school sports leads to a 1 percentage point increase in female college attendance and a 1 to 2 percentage point increase in female labor-force participation.

Maybe athletics should be added to reading, writing and arithmetic.

Maybe indeed…..

Learnings around working from home

One of the emerging requests/trends in today’s business environment centers around the mystery of ‘working from home’. Many people talk with much  gravitas about the ‘ins and outs’. However, in my experience, once you dig under the surface a little, you discover how little they know. In fact how little is known, period, about this subject (again that’s my opinion).

You can understand then, why this blog post from Inc Magazine caught my attention. The entire staff decided, as an experiment, to see what they could learn about working from home. And so home they went, for one month. What a great project : )

This article is written one week in, and they give a brief summary of the learnings so far:

Remember to eat

Prepare for e-mail overload

Get out of the house

Get a comfortable chair

Video chat is your friend

Don’t forget to stop

You can actually get stuff done

In the article they unpack each of these 7 points. Worth following and reading for sure….

Why Gen X parents are so painful

Susan Gregory Thomas writes a great article, ‘Teachers Guide to Gen X Parents‘. Possibly the best description I’ve read as to how Gen X parents are experienced in a school context by educators and administrators, and then why they are as they are? To be honest, as a Gen X parent myself, I found myself very sheepish reading it. Having been fairly proud of my activity and involvement in my children’s school, I suddenly found myself being exposed with the possible truth behind all that ‘involvement’.

In preschool, we’re the ones anxiously arranging developmentally appropriate playdates for our Siouxsie-and-the-Banshees-T-shirt-clad three-year-olds. In kindergarten, we’re frantic that other parents’ children are starting to read cat and rat, while our Ruby and Dylan are still having trouble identifying lowercase letters. We think the gold-star system and its ilk are archaic and punitive, and we want to have a meeting to present our suggestions for alternative achievement systems.

By grade school, we’re demanding to know why the math program is not challenging enough for our child. We email our complaints about the seating chart. We openly deride the arts instruction and may rally other parents to the point of a coup d’état. By middle school, our kids have schedules and professional support staffs that resemble those of corporate lawyers. Look out, high school: We’re coming.

Thomas suggests the reason Xers as parents, are like they are, is because of their own school experience. Because we didn’t have, in our opinion, a great education experience, we’re determined not to let that happen to our own children. It’s not that we have any evidence that this is in fact what’s going on, we’re going to make sure there’s absolutely no chance it will.

We’ve been taking care of ourselves since we started going to school, and we don’t trust authority figures, because they weren’t trustworthy when we were growing up. Our parents didn’t know what was going on at school, and our teachers didn’t know what was going on at home. We’re not going to let this happen to our children — not even for a second. We’ll do whatever we have to do to make sure our kids get what they need.

One of those great articles worth reading. Be warned if you’re an Xer. It may knock you, as it did me, down a notch or two : )

Gen Y in Japan not consumerising

Interesting article from CNN Go Asia on 8 Feb 2010 about Japanese Gen Y simply not buying.

How times have changed. Japan’s Generation Y have become famous for hating to buy anything. They were first reluctant to buy cars. And now we find out that Japanese youth are also disinterested in motorbikes. Sales for 2009 were a mere 10% of the market’s peak some 23 years ago.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that this younger set are different. Generational Theory suggests that each generation, based on the world they grow up in, develop a set of values that in places are different to the generations before them, and those to follow.

I guess what can be surprising is just how different they are! The challenge from a marketing and product development perspective is trying to read these trends and shifts in order to respond accordingly and quickly. Around the world, in most countries this market segment is a large segment. They’re large in number and in wallet size. Not seeing their changing needs and wants can be be detrimental to any business setting their sights on them to secure future growth and revenue.

In most developed world economies there is still a healthy baby boomer population to support short term sales and growth, but once they begin to exit the economy, business is going to have to pander to the younger set coming through. The developing world economies don’t have that luxury. They need to adapt and adjust to these young people NOW!

As this article suggests, this particular group in this particular country are not simply interested in a different colour, shape and size. They’re fundamentally different. Business is going to have to radically change how it goes about what it does, or hope and pray like crazy that they’ll change their world view. Fat chance in my opinion.

Latest TomorrowToday PodCast available

We continue to find the correct content to upload onto our PodCast. Currently we’re taking some of our blog posts and reading them, and then uploading a new one once each week.

The latest PodCast (uploaded today) is Barrie Bramley reading his post around Jacob Zuma, his latest child and what he and the ANC possibly don’t understand about how young people understand respect, in contrast to their parents?

• To subscribe automatically to our feed in iTunes, click here
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President X – a one year review

Author, Tammy Erickson, does a nice job in a Harvard Business Review post taking a look at President Obama through the filter of Generation X.

President Obama is arguably the United States’ first President who is a member of Generation X. (I say “arguably” since the boundary line between Boomers and X’ers is subject to debate. Born in 1961, in my view, he’s the vanguard of the next generation leaders.)

She does a nice job focusing on a few characteristics she suggests belong to Gen X and how these display themselves in the world of President Obama. Some of these include:

• Options thinkers
• Richly multicultural and diverse
• In general highly pragmatic
• Fiercely dedicated to being good parents

Her closing observation, is that Xer leaders can fall into the trap of having multiple options, which works in an increasingly comlex world, but this needs to be backed up with a decision for action.

In a world as complex and rapidly changing as ours, I admire the X’ers’ bent toward multiple options. I’m skeptical of anyone who argues there is only one way. But I also admire those who, after considering multiple options, present a persuasive and engaging case for the course they’ve chosen. Perhaps this is one change we will see in President Obama’s approach over the year ahead and a useful lesson for all X’er leaders.

I don’t trust you

I don’t trust you! Well it’s not exactly that, it’s just that I trust you less, if the Edelman TrustBarometer is accurate in it’s 2010 report. As The Next Web summarises:

Mainly that the trust in global business has risen across the board. Something surprising was that trust in all forms of media went down. When it comes to information about a company, stock or industry analysis reports topped the list for credibility at 49% while social media bottomed out second to last — only above corporate advertising — at 19%.

That said, it means you trust me less as well.

Confession: I’m a bit of a Twitter addict. It’s changed my reading world, educated me, and brought more interesting thoughts into my head than I’ve had in a while. Am I wrong for trusting your tweets? Are you wrong for trusting mine? I must say, I don’t tweet anything I haven’t read first. I don’t simply retweet because a ‘trusted source’ tweeted it first. I work hard to ensure that everything that leaves whatever Twitter app I use (and I use a few) is interesting, and plausible to at least me. So do you not trust me then?

I’m not sure I’d have answered the TrustBarometer the way they suggest others have. I’m aware that there are plenty of Twits (used in the traditional sense of the word) out there who are using social media platforms to be cute and clever, but at the same time spewing a fair amount of untruth, spam and the like, but I block those babies as quickly as they pop up.

As in the conversation my colleague, Graeme Codrington, and I had around China and Google a few weeks ago, I’ve invited Graeme to weigh in on this post with some of his views, and yours if you feel like you’ve got something to say, so let me put some questions out there:

1. Are the results of this survey simply indicative of a transition we’re going through around Social Media platforms, as people learn how to filter for themselves? We’ve not really had to do this before on such a large scale. We’re used to filtering an entire newspaper. Either you liked what the entire paper stood for, or you didn’t. With individual user generated media (Social Media) you’ve got to continually make a call with each individual you come across, with very sparse personal information to go on.
2. Is business right in their unwillingness to embrace this space? Have they seen something the rest of us haven’t? Big business is panned all over the place for it’s lack of engagement in the Social Media space. Is there a collective wisdom bubbling underneath the surface evidenced by experienced communication people within business seemingly ‘not knowing how’ to engage, but possibly sensing something others haven’t?
3. Is Social Media just a fad, an experiment of sorts, or will we learn the skills to use these new channels effectively and overcome the garbage that is possibly contributing to this lack of trust the Edelman TrustBarometer speaks to?

I’ll leave it there to give Graeme, and others, some space to reflect….

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should

My colleague in the UK, Graeme Codrington, posted “3-d TV is here” a week or so back. It’s a short post about Sky News launching 3D TV.  When Graeme writes he’s normally very definite in his opinion, and he’s not scared to put it out there. If you read his 3D TV post, you’ll notice he ends with a fairly ‘limp’ conclusion around the future of 3D TV. I haven’t spoken to him about his lack of definite view, but based on his post, I share his same feelings around 3D TV. I think it’s a limp idea.

• Perhaps it’s because I haven’t seen the ‘new 3D TV’s’ needed to enhance 3D in this medium. What I have seen (my kids movies) has always left me feeling a little disappointed, experience wise.
• Then there’s the idea of 3D glasses lying around my house. We already have enough of a problem storing, not standing on, dropping, and spilling things on multiple remote controls, all sorts of Wii controls, iPod chargers, iPods, etc, etc. The thought of more paraphernalia to enhance my viewing experience far from excites me.
• While we’re on the glasses, how many are we going to need? Or will it become acceptable to ask friends to bring their own? And how silly might I look with ’sunglasses on’ when friends or family come around to watch TV?

The obvious next step from 3D is going to be  holographic TV (Holy TV?) . That’s 3D on steroids. That isn’t going to need any extra goggles to watch, and while it may mean some new equipment in the viewing area, the massive leap in expeirence from what we have now to that, will be worth whatever pain I may have to go through.

Is 3D then, simply a transitional technology between now and then? If it is, I’m guessing those that run the TV world have done their sums and figure they’re going to sell enough boxes to make the investment worth it? I’m not sure it switches me on enough to get into the game. But then again, peer pressure and great advertising may be all they need to make me a convert.

Still I do think there are times when being able to do/create/buy things doesn’t mean you’ve got to. I think this may be one of those times. Time will tell, and in the mean time I’ll go over to Graeme’s house to watch on his 3D telly : )

‘I am the President’ doesn’t mean what it used to

What if a Board Meeting was like the State Of The Union?

Thinking About Thinking suggests that if board meetings looked like a state of the union, the agenda would play itself out like this:

“The CEO would make his way to the board room through a processional in the company’s hallways, flanked by clapping employees, shaking hands and giving thumbs up to the staff along the way.

The meeting would start with the CFO announcing the entrance of the CEO, and all board members standing and applauding.

The CEO would stand at the head of the table, with the CFO and CTO sitting in oversized chairs on a raised platform behind him.

All powerpoint slides and the projector would be replaced with a teleprompter.

When the CEO talked about cutting spending, lowering the burn and a hiring freeze, investors on both sides of the table would stand up and applause.

When the CEO talked about changing the healthcare plan to cover all employees and shareholders, the investors on the left side of the table would stand up and applause while the other investors sit stoicly.

Thereafter, the CEO would have to remind all investors that their job is to represent the shareholders, not their own partisan interests.

Rather than talking during the meeting, the CTO and CFO would convey their opinion by smirking, giggling, and giving standing ovations as the CEO spoke.

Meanwhile, outside legal counsel, sitting in the first row facing the CEO, would never applaud and would be generally expressionless throughout.

At the appropriate time, the CEO would give a carefully calculated shout out to his wife who is sitting at the outer edge of the board room next to some carefully selected key partners and customers.  She waves at the mention of her name.

The CEO closes the meeting by saying God Bless this company.”

Nice one : )

Why you shouldn’t change your Twitter Profile Pic

There are literally thousands of articles and opinions out there spelling out the ‘laws’ of how to use Twitter. If the authors of those articles were honest, they’d admit that those ’so-called laws’ are really just opinions. Their opinions. How on earth can anyone claim, at this early stage in Twitter’s life, to have a list of irrefutable laws’?

This post falls into the opinion category then. An irrefutable opinion according to me : )

I’m on Twitter everyday. Several times a day. It’s become the biggest influence in my world when it comes to learning. I’ve come to trust the voices and thoughts of a group of people, many of whom I have never met, to share their insights in a variety of fields that interest me. Even some that don’t.

I follow aprox 400 people, and as I scroll through my Twitter feed on my iPhone (I use 4 different Twitter Apps) my most relied upon method of finding those people I really enjoy is through their Twitter Profile Pic. I imagine I should be using their usernames for this, but I don’t. I’m a picture person. I possibly should be using ‘Twitter Lists’? I don’t, I’m a picture person.

And so when someone updates their image I lose them in the noise of my stream. It sometimes can take me weeks to re-orientate myself to their new image.

And that’s my irrefutable opinion then. It’s also a plea to those interesting people I rely on everyday. Don’t change who you are. You don’t need to update your ‘image’. I’ve come to like and appreciate you just the way you are : )

P.S. While writing this I found a mildly amusing post on 10 types of Twitter Profile Avatars. Click here to see for yourself.

Designed by women – can you tell?

A great little ‘image test’ appeared on FastCompany last week. It’s a focus on architecture and whether you can tell by looking at a building whether it’s been designed by a woman or a man? I couldn’t tell very easily at all. I thought I was being clever when any of the buildings that had some sort of phallic design to them I guessed as men (isn’t that what we’ve always been told) but I wasn’t always correct.

Take a look for yourself and see if you do any better than me. There are some beautiful and interesting designs in the mix.

Talent is a Four Letter Word

The title of this post comes from a reply to a tweet I once posted:

Does anyone have a better word for ‘talent’? Does business really think it’s a big issue? Is there some other ‘thing’ we should be noticing?

TomorrowToday’s Top 10 most read blog entries at the end of 2009

TomorrowToday’s blog has been up and running since September 2004. We have over 1750 posts on our blog, filed under 35 different categories. We’ve not done this before, but here are TomorrowToday’s most read blog posts as of 31 December 2009:

10.) Time Magazine – the future of work
9.) How’s this for the latest craze
8.) Tell me and I will forget show me and I may remember involve me and I will understand
7.) Navigating This Differently Connected World – exploring the impact of social software on business today
6.) ‘Weeping’ by Josh Groban, errr actually Bright Blue
5.) The Talent Reboot
4.) Good to Great to Gone
3.) Back to the Future – Rethinking Strategy
2.) Detailed Introduction to Generational Theory
1.) ‘After Shock’ – the five trends disrupting business in the next 5 years

So there they are. If there was a writing award in TomorrowToday it would certainly go to Graeme Codrington (based in the UK for now, and traveller of the world) for the most written and the most read. Correlation between the two? Me thinks so.

A Conversation around Google and China

I began a brief e-mail conversation recently with my colleague in the UK, Graeme Codrington, around the China v Google story. Or Google v China, depending on who you side with : ) I thought I’d take it online with Graeme, in case there are other voices that would like to weigh in on this very interesting unfolding story?

For those who aren’t in the know, very simply, Google has accused the Chinese government of hacking into the Gmail accounts of Chinese activists to get hold of confidential information. In light of this, Google has effectively decided not to play ball with the Chinese government any longer. (Read here for a more detailed round up)

Effectively it’s a clash of two worlds, two powers, two philosophies, and two of a number of other things.

• China represents the old world. Google the new world.
• Google is the heavyweight in the virtual world. China the heavyweight in the real world.
• China subscribes to a more closed command and control philosophy. Google to a more open invite and participate philosophy.

For a really quick and easy read that pulls this sort of thinking together, read this Harvard Business Review Blog entry.

The quest for monopoly, monopsony, and control. That’s yesterday’s high ground, and China’s focused like a laser beam on it. China’s moves are the textbook stuff of b-school’s blackest arts. Through larger distribution, fiercer litigation, greater exclusivity, cheaper and faster production, a bigger cash pile, advantage is gained.

But the high ground has shifted. The new high ground is an ethical edge. It’s not about having more; it’s about doing better. It’s not about protecting exports, pressuring buyers and suppliers, price discriminating against the powerless, and programming consumers to buy, buy, buy — it’s about making people, communities, and society authentically better off. It’s not about caring less — but caring more. It’s not about ruthlessness. It’s about mindfulness.

Of course the story is in it’s infancy. Of course there’s much skepticism that surrounds it. For example Google has been here before and didn’t respond like this, so why now?  Google also derives only 2% of it’s income from China, so taking a stand that may lead to them having to pull out of China isn’t as costly, as say, Microsoft or Intel.

My fascination with the story centers mostly around the stand off of these two world powers. Each starting from a very different place, but building towards what could be a spectacular case study for all of us. I even wonder if it has the potential to shape how we relate to each other in the future?

My question is, will Google have the courage to take a firm line and keep it?  And possibly a little more complex, is this stand-off the equivalent of what the Berlin Wall was for Russia and the US? Only this time it’s a virtual wall. And if so, what are the consequences to people in China, and people outside of China?

Death and Twitter make for a horrid exchange

Yesterday, in South Africa, Manto Tshabalala Msimang died from a liver complication that had been plaguing her for some time now. She is a former health minister, and her time spent in that role was fraught with controversy because of her seeming lack of will to embrace ARV’s to treat HIV. Because of this stand, she has been accused of causing the death of thousands of South Africans. Some have even suggested she should be charged with crimes against humanity.

I think it’s important to note, especially in a South African context, that feelings about her were held by a cross-section of South Africa. The debate was fully inclusive and representative.

Yesterday as the news of her death began to seep into the media conversation (both non-non-traditional and non-traditional) Twitter began to heat up. There’s some speculation as to where it started? Just Curious does provide a view of the time-line and the heat generated by 5FM radio jock Gareth Cliff.

To get a view for yourself, see the search for ‘Manto’ on Twitter. Click here.

However you re-construct it, I was hit by some of the following:

• Death is a human thing. It’s not owned by one culture or one people group. Who dares to say that one group does it better than another? It’s very human. It reminds us all that we too one day will enter into it’s domain (www.we’lldietoooneday.com). Showing death some respect, and compassion to the family of those who have lost is not only right, it’s human.
• When someone dies, I find it pretty difficult to say anything to anyone. Silence seems to be not only an appropriate response, but the most gentle and caring. A hug, a gesture, just simply being present in the space of those who have just lost, seems to work best. It’s awkward, and it’s clumsy, but I find it works.
• If you do decide to speak, what words are sufficient to speak into what has just happened? You can’t do it in a sentence. So you end up bumbling along making a whole lot sound like not much at all.

So when the news broke on Twitter, and some people put their views out there, it did become terribly messy. There was huge emotion surrounding Tshabalala Msimang when she was alive. Those emotions were all still there after she had died. You can imagine what people end up saying when all you have is 140 characters? It’s blunt, it’s raw, it’s so in your face. There’s no place to explain, expand only express and explete.

The conversation one day later is whether people were right or wrong to put their views out there? Gareth Cliff has become the poster child for who did it bad.

I do think the exploration should be shifted slightly. It’s not about whether people put their views out or not? That’s inevitable. It should rather be around the forums we use and the timing of our comments? Would it have hurt to hold a negative, critical view for a day or two in respect of the family (at the very least)? Is Twitter a good forum for putting out such strong and potentially damaging emotions and thoughts?

The forums we use and the timing to speak by are age old questions. But they do need to be re-discussed from time to time. Especially in a world in which communication channels and platforms are changing as fast as they are.

In a Web 2.0 world, business has it’s head buried firmly in the sand

I’m curious. Curious about business’ lack of engagement with Twitter  / FaceBook / Tumblr / Google and everything else Web 2.0. I would have thought that any communication channel getting the sort of traction, focus, attention and subscription that these channels are getting, would have business engaging like a love struck teenager who’d just discovered their perfect partner?

But it’s not so. So not so. So far, the majority of my experience and observation is that business has been an extremely poor performer in these spaces. Take a look at these points from Jeffbulla’s Blog:

1. 73 percent of Fortune 100 companies registered a total of 540 Twitter accounts.
2. About three-quarters (76 percent) of those accounts did not post tweets very often.
3. More than half (52 percent) were not actively engaged (This was measured by engagement metrics such as numbers of links, hashtags, references and retweets.)

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Navigating this differently connected world – Exploring the impact of social software on business today

The emergence of online social networks (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc) has profoundly impacted the way we communicate, associate and organise ourselves. It has left industries and companies grasping frantically for a response and a strategy that will allow them to seamlessly combine the world they know with a world that is fundamentally unfamiliar. Businesses need to explore the emerging shifts, changes and trends of this new world and create an approach that can be adopted in order to construct a meaningful and appropriate way forward to survive and thrive in this differently connected world.

The idea of social networking and communicating is not new. We have communicated through grunts and smoke signals, hand gestures and printing presses. We’ve been networking since we first spotted each other. It’s the mechanisms we use, the rules of engagement and value placed on our engagement that has changed with time. We all know the phrase “it’s not what you know, but who you know that matters”. It’s not a new concept or idea, its origin can probably be traced back to when we first realised we needed something from each other.

The emergence of these distinct and unique social networks is influenced by and influences the different generations of workers. Generational Theory can be a useful general filter to lay over social networking and these new forms of communication. This as generational theory focuses on the value systems or worldviews of individuals. And certainly as we look at the very different worlds the various generations have grown up in, both their value systems and worldviews differ when it comes to social interaction.

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M-Pesa, Vodacom, Nedbank and Rob Shuter

Earlier this year Rob Shuter (head of Nedbank Retail) resigned from Nedbank and joined Vodacom as Financial Director. It was an exciting move from my perspective as I watch mobile phone companies (and technology in general) redefine how we do business. Not necessarily the companies, but users who adapt the technology to find innovative ways to run their businesses differently. The big question I was asking was what happens when someone with intimate retail banking knowledge and experience (especially of Shuter’s profile) gets a significant position at a mobile phone company? What happens after what comes next?

I’ve not seen anything obvious in the press, and have quite possibly missed it, but this week a couple of pieces of the puzzle dropped into place. Enter M-Pesa.

M-Pesa is an amazing Kenyan innovation, and describe themselves as:

M-PESA is a Safaricom service allowing you to transfer money using a mobile phone. Kenya is the first country in the world to use this service, which is offered in partnership between Safaricom and Vodafone. M-PESA is available to all Safaricom subscribers (Prepay and Postpay), even if you do not have a bank account. Registration is FREE and available at any M-PESA Agent countrywide. The M-PESA application is installed on your SIM card and works on all makes of handsets.

My sources suggest that M-Pesa has radically transformed the banking space in Kenya and left the banks flat-footed and out of the equation. Around 15 million people use M-Pesa to transfer money and make payments. Kenyan banks (collectively) have a third of this number as customers. M-Pesa has transformed banking access to the previously un-banked, who are found predominately in rural areas in Kenya. Areas that traditional banks have little to no access to.

The person I spoke to this week had some of the following to say about M-Pesa:

M-Pesa has made the sim card more valuable than a credit card.

M-Pesa is transforming how aid is distributed within Kenya.

M-Pesa has fundamentally re-defined the banking space.

Kenyan banks have not found an ‘anti-dote’ to M-Pesa’s presense, and possibly wont or can’t, simply because they’re unable to redefine themselves.

Maybe a little over-enthusiastic. But the hype and the numbers do confirm his thoughts.

Enter Shuter, Vodacom and Nedbank….

What if Vodacom’s next move is to bring M-Pesa to South Africa? Both Safaricom (M-Pesa’s master) and Vodacom are subsidiaries of Vodaphone. Certainly they have someone with huge retail banking experience in Shuter, and he has intimate knowledge and I imagine a solid relationship with Nedbank.

What if? Watch this space. This may be what happens after what comes next…..

The World of Tomorrow (If The Internet Disappeared Today)

This is a great read (look) at what the world would look like if the internet disappeared today. A photo contest by the readers of Cracked.com. Some really fun stuff to think about how much the world has changed : )

While there’s a lot that’s funny, there is a reality check and reminder at how much has changed in our lives in such a short time. How much we take for granted because of the internet, and how much we wouldn’t have in our world if it never existed. Certainly we could do without some of it, but also how much we can do, how many people we’re in touch with, how many connections we have (meaningful and meaningless) because of the networked world we now live in.

It’s probably too large to think about, so for now, take a look and smile for a little while : )

And to be honest I don’t get the winner? If you could help me with that I’d be grateful…..

Barrie is the Jozi Town Crier

Thanks to our PR company (SimonSays Communications) I’m the Johannesburg Town Crier.

It’s been a fun and interesting role to get into. One day you’re a consultant around future trends and people and the next day you’re getting your head around what it means to be a Town Crier? Feels like a large responsibility. Especially in a ‘town’ as big and diverse as our ‘little Jozi’. What to post, where to find it, how to go about it, what to write, not write. how to be fun and interesting?

I even get rated by those that follow the feed on Twitter, and imagine if I don’t do a good job I get ‘voted’ right outta there. I’m certainly getting a feeling for public office in this new role : )

The people behind it are Happn.in and describe the service as ‘Twitter with a local focus’. In South Africa there’s currently a Town Crier for Jozi and the Mother City. And then there’s a scattering of Town Criers around the world.

Some stats around Happn.in:

Happn.in gives Twitter a local focus. For each Happn.in city, there is:

• A current list of Local Twitter Trends
• A Local Twitter Feed, in which locals can send and receive information to each other.
• A Local Town Crier, a person trusted by the community to tweet interesting, relevant information once a day.

There are approximately 283,492 people following Happn.in in 110 cities around the world.

There is also a general Twitter user, @happn_in, from which updates on the project will be sent.

And some background:

Happn.in began in early 2009 in response to the rapid growth of Twitter. We saw that Twitter was becoming a valuable source of information, but the interesting content was getting buried. We started Happn.in to pull some of this useful information out of the noise, specifically, the answer to the question ‘What’s going on near me?’

Happn.in was built with the long-term idea that localized communities can benefit from Twitter if they can find and talk to each other. We will continue to update the site with features that aid this goal.

Of course anyone can post info about Jozi by simply adding the hashtag (#hi_johan) and you can get the Twitter feed and follow here.

It’s been good for me to work at getting my head around a broader Jozi happn.in community in order to put as diverse a spread of stuff I possibly can. I’m only a few days in, and hopefully improving all the time? Time will tell and so will the votes : )

Vacation 2023 – I don’t want to go

I just read a fairly depressing forecast (from FastCompany) for the future of vacations. Specifically the year 2023. It’s based on the fuller article from ‘Forum for the Future‘ where they’ve developed four scenarios for 2023 in the tourism world (specifically the UK). A brief summary of the four from the FastCompany article:

In the “Boom and Burst” scenario, economies prosper, advances in air travel make vacations cheap and easy, and fuel efficiency has allowed the industry to stay on target with carbon emissions regulations. But there’s a catch–the massive increase in tourism leads to overcrowding in many destinations and the degradation of wilderness areas.

The more dire “Divided Disquiet” scenario imagines that a “toxic combination of devastating climate change impacts, violent wars over scarce resources and social unrest has created an unstable and fearful world. This has made traveling overseas an unattractive proposition,” so most people just stay home. In the “Price and Privilege” scenario, high oil prices make travel the exclusive domain of the rich, while the “Carbon Clampdown” scenario imagines that the government has regulated climate change and educated the public so thoroughly on the carbon price of travel that most people only want to take “ethical vacations” to volunteer or learn about other cultures.

The reality of vacationing in 2023 will probably be a combination of these scenarios, with high oil prices, disappearing wilderness, carbon quotas, and advances in air travel (i.e. biofuel-powered planes).

It does help give some perspective as to why wealthy people around the world are currently buying up coastal properties and game reserves. Simply because, in the future these investments will be worth massive amounts of money.

To download the full 2023 tourism report go here.

Entrepreneurial Edge – CNBC Africa

If you’re watching CNBC Africa this evening (15 October) at around 20:30, you can catch Entrepreneurial Edge (hosted by Chris Bishop), with at least one of it’s guests being me : )

The focus of the programme is future trends impacting entrepreneurs, and we chatted around education, skills development and Web 2.0. The two other guys in the interview were Dawie Olivier (CIO – Sasfin) and Devan Naiker (Dep CEO – Services SETA)

There was some nice stuff being thrown around in the short time we had. Thanks to Kate from SimonSays Communications for arranging and for being there to do my hair (really not necessary – I need a lot more than hair help)

CNBC Africa is on Channel 410 on DSTV.

Stop Tweeting about these…

Had to smile as this post from The Oatmeal this morning. It it Monday morning, and if anything it’s bound to give you a little smile. 10 Things you need to stop Tweeting about.

It’s a large and often question I’m hearing these days: what is Twitter all about? I’ve got it down to 3 categories of Tweets in order to explain it:

• The ‘I’m having a shower’ crew
• The ‘I’m at a conference/church meeting and this is what going on’ gang
• The ‘I’ve just read this great blog post, and you should too’ group

Or put another way:

• What I’M doing tweets
• What WE’RE doing tweets
• What YOU SHOULD be doing tweets

They all seem to have their own following based on the people I followers. There are some that cross over, but most people seem to stick to one particular genre.

Of course there are the ‘do business with me / look at my sexy profile online’ folk. But they’re despicable, in my opinion, and simply shouldn’t be allowed on Twitter. They do have a right to play with the rest of us, but it’s a pain in the butt to have to look at their tweets when I’m looking for something to feed my soul.

And yes, for some of you reading this, what and who I discover on Twitter does feed my soul : )

WTF, Google?

FastCompany has a great post, with the same title as this post, on some of Google’s glitches. Of course, as they point out, when you’re processing the volume of stuff they are, they’re bound to make a few glitches. They mostly relate to attempts to return searches and ads that are in line with what the user has requested, and then royally messed up. And a couple of them are royal.

My fave of the bunch they showcase is this one. It’s a Google Ad within an article someone’s written. Certainly not the kind of ad you want period, and definitely not at the beginning of an article like this:

I’m sure there are some that love that Google doesn’t get it right every time (Microsoft and Yahoo!! come to mind) but I like that technology isn’t perfect and that it creates some humour for us every now and then : )

Building your own healthcare community

Many years ago when I was in community development, some of the cutting edge thinkers were promoting the idea of less professionals and more community involvement in ensuring the growth, development, safety, etc of family. It was a simple but profound concept of building a care system less reliant on the ‘usual suspects’ (professionals) by involving people around a particular family who had an interest in them, who spent more time with them, and who, if integrated successfully could provide more useful and meaningful support.

There was a book I remember having to read while studying called ‘The other 23 hours’, that made the point in a residential child care environment. The book was written to encourage Child Care Workers, and to see the value and importance of their role. Social Workers in these setting often got all the glory and were seen to be the most important people in a child’s world. But as the book pointed out, a child may only see a Social Worker for 1 hour each day (and that’s a lot), there were another 23 hours in their day.

FastCompany has recently posted an article (The Future of Healthcare is social), and they’ve done a great job outlining similar thinking for healthcare, with technology as a large enabler. It makes sense in this arena as well. Our health is something that needs 24 hours of proactivity. We can’t afford or expect professionals to be available for all that time. But if we can assemble a community of people around us, who care about us, and who’ll get involved with us, and then enable it all with technology, we may find ourselves in a far healthier place than we currently are.

Even when we do our best to stay healthy, we still get sick. Coping with sickness in our already hectic lives can be challenging. In addition to looking out for her parents, Susan manages the health of her two kids, her husband, and herself, and she looks for ways to save time and money while still getting the care that they need. Recently, for example, Susan’s son woke up with a sore throat and a fever. She used an at-home strep test to rub a swab of her son’s throat culture onto a card. Within minutes, the test results confirmed her son had strep. Through an embedded RFID sensor within the card, the test results were wirelessly transmitted to her computer’s reader. On her computer, she was prompted to connect the incoming test results to her son’s personal health record. Next, she used her personal health network to book the earliest visit for her son within a 10-mile vicinity. Susan elected to electronically send her son’s strep results in advance of her appointment, allowing the receiving retail clinic to accelerate her visit by pre-issuing an e-prescription. Before leaving her computer, Susan selected her son’s classroom network, comprised of his teacher and the parents of other students, and sent out a message that her son had strep throat and would be home for the next several days.

It’s a longish read, but definitely worth it. If not just to see where health care might go, I’m fairly certain the thinking will at least change how you see other parts of your world.