It has been interesting to watch the story unfold and it certainly has provided an opportunity for chatter in the office – not like we need an excuse.  Was the phone intentionally lost? Was it really a next generation iPhone?  How long will Gary Powell keep his job at Apple?  At one point it was impossible to keep up with all the stories, which comes to show how much ink Apple commands no matter what the situation is – well yeah, it was about the next generation iPhone after all….

For me the best part came yesterday, when Lufthansa tweeted an offer to Gary Powell for a complementary Business Class trip to Munich to enjoy German beer and culture.    I find this was a clever way for a company that had nothing to do with the incident and is not even in a related industry to get into one of the most talked about incidents of the week.  This was clever and fun and it made many of us laugh and, as beer lovers, wish we were Gary Powell – at least for a split second.

Vance gives plenty of column inches to critics’ who characterize “Microsoft’s path as a long spiral toward irrelevance.”  Author Nicholas G. Carr says, “I think Microsoft is still moving pretty slowly as it shifts at least part of its business to the cloud.  Some of that is due to its corporate culture, but I think most of it is due to it trying to protect very lucrative businesses with high profit margins.”

Moving slowly has been the death of many a lumbering giant, from the T-Rex to General Motors.  Is it even possible for a giant to be quick and agile?  If you’re Dwight Freeney, yes.  But if you’re a multi-billion dollar company, the issue is still an open debate.

In June, Chris Anderson wrote in Wired that “the next new economy, the one rising from the ashes of this latest meltdown, will favor the small.”  To underscore the point he quoted venture capitalist Paul Graham: “”It turns out the rule ‘large and disciplined organizations win’ needs to have a qualification appended: ‘at games that change slowly.’

And as we all know, tech can change the landscape overnight.  So why did the August 29-September 4 edition of the Economist declare in big, bold font on the cover: “Big is back.  The return of the corporate giant?”  Well, one of the reasons the giants “have the advantage again,” as the magazine put it, is because of “the emergence of companies that have discovered how to be entrepreneurial as well as big…..giants (that) are getting better at minimizing the costs of size…while exploiting its advantages.”

Entrepreneurial as well as big.  That feels like the crux of it to me.  But sometimes a company can have the desire, but the behavior doesn’t match.  How many PR pros have worked with clients who allocate most of the PR budget to today’s commodity cash-cow products, while leaving the innovative products–yes, the ones that can be tomorrow’s cash cow–tin-cupping for resources?  Unfortunately, it still happens all the time.

What I like about the Economist’s take is it’s not “either/or.”  Big can be entrepreneurial.  But it takes a lot more than professed desire and a great messaging document.  The question isn’t whether big companies can be big and agile; it’s more whether they will be as rare in the business world as the Dwight Freeneys are in the NFL.

]]> http://text100.com/hypertext/2009/10/can-big-be-fast-and-does-it-want-to/feed/ 0 http://text100.com/hypertext/2009/08/change-we-canpitch-to-the-trades/ http://text100.com/hypertext/2009/08/change-we-canpitch-to-the-trades/#comments Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:46:43 +0000 David Bailey http://text100.com/hypertext/?p=421 Less than 48 hours after hearing U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra address a gathering of Churchill Club members at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, I find myself a bit skeptical about what I heard.

Big picture, I’m delighted we now have a Chief Technology Officer, and I’m heartened that he’s ostensibly focused on the right metrics, like how the U.S. compares to other countries in terms of rate of innovation, how we are using technology in government, and where we stack up in terms of higher education.  (If you want the details, see the full report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation here; if you want the short version: at present we suck on all of these rankings.  And if we keep going this way, we’ll be, well, suckier still.)

But I’m not convinced the work Chopra is embarking upon will turn those mega-trendlines back in the right direction.  Chopra is articulate, passionate and clearly “of the Valley,” as demonstrated by his resume and his penchant for moving fast.  But for me, some of his early examples of innovation in government fell flat.  In the works is a new U.S. Immigration web site, for example, where people will be able to see in much greater detail where exactly they are in this byzantine process.  I’ve no doubt this is needed and useful (I have a friend who is losing hair and sleep over this very issue).  But is it game-changing?  Hardly.

More compelling (not to mention inspirational) was Chopra’s example of how a group came together in Virginia and applied Web technology to create updated science textbooks in a fracton of the time it used to take (see more here).  Better still, that content is now being used in other states across the country, and the program certainly has the potential to make a greater impact.

Positive steps, to be sure.  But there was so much talk of “what can we do in 90 days?” and “what can we do without any need for new legislation or incremental budget?” that I couldn’t help but think of the “quick win” mentality that, while very often useful, is sometimes undertaken because the Big Stuff is just too damn hard.

Someone asked about the woeful legacy systems that pervade government; I didn’t hear a clear answer on how that will be addressed.  Robert Scoble asked Chopra how he would address things like the Marines banning Twitter (Scoble’s broader point being, of course, that such decisions might discourage innovation in government).  At first, Chopra brushed it off as not in his remit to get involved in military decisions about security, but then acknowledged that overall, the government is so behind he couldn’t access his own financial information from the White House because his browser was a decade old.  I couldn’t help but feel like his exasperation was the most telling–and unscripted–part of the evening.

Quick wins and proof-of-concepts are without a doubt staples of Silicon Valley and illustrative of good, old-fashioned tech entrepreneurial spirit.  But the real measure of success is whether those “POCs” take off–as in, become commercially viable.  Grab market share.  Change the world.

Aneesh and team don’t have to change the world of course–just the biggest and most powerful country in that world.  I got the distinct sense from this week’s event that the Valley is rooting for Aneesh, and ready and willing to help.  But let’s think big.  That’s ultimately what technology innovation has always been about.

If it’s hard for him, it’s hard for anyone. And, of course, the still evolving media landscape bears witness to this fact. No need to rehash the lowlights of the last half decade in news, but the lack of a frontrunner for a sustainable business model for the news industry is evidence that more turmoil is still to come.

In thinking more about Scoble’s and others’ comments made during last week’s panel discussion on the future of communications (see initial post here), an underlying current throughout it all was the quest to add value for whatever audience you’re speaking with.

Liz Gannes of NewTeeVee acknowledged that what she was doing wasn’t much different from what newspaper columnists have traditionally done and Chris O’Brien of the San Jose Mercury News and the Next Newsroom Project acknowledged that the printed paper likely won’t be the core of what the Merc eventually becomes (he also made an interesting observation that the radio remains the place where Bay Area commuters consume most of their media yet radio is frequently omitted from these sorts of discussions).

On the hunt for value...

Remove the delivery vehicle (the paper, a blog, the radio, TV, etc) from the conversation and what remains of news is the information itself (which you could argue is as it should be). And with no barriers to entry and general information overload, the information needs to add value. Anything less and relevancy will wane, no matter who you write for.

Richard Brewer-Hay, principal blogger for eBay over at eBay Ink, said to me afterward he’s most intrigued how newer communications channels have enabled two-way dialogues (or even many-to-many) rather than the traditional one-to-many. That, he said, fundamentally changes the value proposition for journalists and audiences. This works great for Richard because he’s able to leverage his role into a true dialogue with eBay’s community. Letters to the editor just don’t cut it anymore. The letter to the editor presents a voice, but it’s a voice that isn’t replied back to and doesn’t spawn other conversations. It’s the tree falling in the forest and no one is quite sure if anyone else is around to hear it.

Post into any story and you’ve now contributed to a “live” conversation, and impacted the rest of what’s to come and can see how it all plays out. Likewise, fully formed conversations can get built up through many voices all riffing on whatever original content gets posted to the Internet.

But this doesn’t necessarily equate to value. Wading through a hundred comments on a story is rarely fruitful. I would rather have Seymour Hersh writing his stories for the print New Yorker in a 1-to-many conversation as there is absolutely no value I can add to his content. I am in listen-only mode when he’s talking.

Indeed, the construct of news doesn’t need to change. Journalists still need to be able do what they’ve always done best: Find the facts, find the viewpoints, and distill them down for the audience in a compelling manner. But a journalist who can’t add value beyond a press release essentially becomes commoditized by the press release itself.

Journalism today can be as biting as any time in the past, but the amount of information currently accessible and the number of viewpoints being thrown at us from experts and non-experts alike has had the effect of shortening our collective attention spans and reducing our tolerance for status-quo deliveries. The voices who have the greatest impact and can cut through the noise with impactful analysis – no matter whom they write for – will be the ones we seek out. Everyone else will just fade into the background as white noise.

Somewhat unfortunately, the tolerance for any slippage in this area will be minimal. If Robert Scoble is not adding value to the conversation, the collective public will banish him immediately and without remorse. Someone else will be ready and waiting to take his place, and we’ll be ready too. It’s a vicious turn, but it’s the world we live in currently. Here’s hoping that the people who deserve to be heard find their audiences and financially-viable platforms to support them.

Photo credit: Paul Keleher

And I suspect our Text 100 teams around the world didn’t quite appreciate the significance of launching the first global Chinese tech brand when they unveiled Lenovo in 2005 either.

I’m not claiming Text 100 has changed the world (well, not that much anyway!) but by virtue of being the granddaddy of tech PR firms, we’ve often had the privilege of a ring-side seat at great moments in technology industry history.

I got that feeling again this week when Text 100 had the opportunity to represent the Russian Venture Company on its first US press tour and business development visit. Like India and China before it, Russia is starting to build up its technology industry and it’s not hard to imagine this country of 140 million people offering 60,000 new IT and engineering graduates each year could soon live up to its billing as one of the high-potential ‘BRIC’ countries.

And if Russia does realise its technology potential – aided by the investment dollars of our newest client and the expertize of entrepreneurs and VCs from Silicon Valley – then we’ll be proud to say: "Text 100 was there at the beginning!"

David McCulloch