Tag Archives: leadership

#91 – FAKING MATURITY – MARK MOORE

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I’ve been thinking about the old Hans Christian Anderson fable “The Emperor’s New OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAClothes” lately.  It’s been on my mind as I read current articles regaling us with tales of corporate leadership and management run amok.  It also brings to mind some of the fabled business cases of the past (like the SAP implementations at Hershey and Levi Strauss) where a grand vision was cast and hailed by all as a marvel right up until reality set in and bit hard.  Much of what I see along these lines I think can be attributed to some level of what I’ll call “faking maturity” by organizations that, quite frankly, should know better.  And the fall out at times can approach nuclear grade waste. Continue reading →

Mooselodgism: The Biggest Challenge to Organizations

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Most associations and organizations are becoming or are going the way of moose lodges.  This is the biggest challenge to all organizations over the next 20 years.  So, what is mooselodgism?

Moose, Elks, Masons, Daughters of American Revolution (DAR) and other service organizations were prevalent for hundreds of years.  They were staple and anchored the social service activities in many communities.  But, they have largely disappeared.  Why?  They couldn’t adapt to technology and couldn’t change to meet new requirements.

We’re seeing this now in most organizations and assocations.  Think of the organization or association you belong to?  How many folks attend a meeting?  What is the demographic of the folks who attend?  How are decisions being made or not made?  How diverse is the population who attends meetings?  How does the organization use technology to manage itself?

Don’t think Mooselodgism applies to you or to the US?  What’s the most prominent organization in the world?  US Congress.  They US has a $1000 billion deficit.  Congress can’t make a decision and solve this problem that impacts all of us.  Go figure if Mooselodgism is real or not?

 

Forbes.com: “Why Google and Facebook Might Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Years”

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From http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/04/30/heres-why-google-and-facebook-might-completely-disappear-in-the-next-5-years/:

… In the tech Internet world, we’ve really had 3 generations:

  • Web 1.0 (companies founded from 1994 – 2001, including Netscape, Yahoo! (YHOO), AOL (AOL), Google (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN) and eBay (EBAY)),
  • Web 2.0 or Social (companies founded from 2002 – 2009, including Facebook (FB), LinkedIn (LNKD), and Groupon (GRPN)),
  • and now Mobile (from 2010 – present, including Instagram).

With each succeeding generation in tech the Internet, it seems the prior generation can’t quite wrap its head around the subtle changes that the next generation brings. Web 1.0 companies did a great job of aggregating data and presenting it in an easy to digest portal fashion. Google did a good job organizing the chaos of the Web better than AltaVista, Excite, Lycos and all the other search engines that preceded it. Amazon did a great job of centralizing the chaos of e-commerce shopping and putting all you needed in one place.

When Web 2.0 companies began to emerge, they seemed to gravitate to the importance of social connections. MySpace built a network of people with a passion for music initially. Facebook got college students. LinkedIn got the white collar professionals. Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon showed how users could generate content themselves and make the overall community more valuable.

Yet, Web 1.0 companies never really seemed to be able to grasp the importance of building a social community and tapping into the backgrounds of those users. Even when it seems painfully obvious to everyone, there just doesn’t seem to be the capacity of these older companies to shift to a new paradigm. Why has Amazon done so little in social? And Google? Even as they pour billions at the problem, their primary business model which made them successful in the first place seems to override their expansion into some new way of thinking.

Social companies born since 2010 have a very different view of the world. These companies – and Instagram is the most topical example at the moment – view the mobile smartphone as the primary (and oftentimes exclusive) platform for their application. They don’t even think of launching via a web site. They assume, over time, people will use their mobile applications almost entirely instead of websites.

We will never have Web 3.0, because the Web’s dead.

Web 1.0 and 2.0 companies still seem unsure how to adapt to this new paradigm. Facebook is the triumphant winner of social companies. It will go public in a few weeks and probably hit $140 billion in market capitalization. Yet, it loses money in mobile and has rather simple iPhone and iPad versions of its desktop experience. It is just trying to figure out how to make money on the web – as it only had $3.7 billion in revenues in 2011 and its revenues actually decelerated in Q1 of this year relative to Q4 of last year. It has no idea how it will make money in mobile.