In the strategy of shamelessness it is still, paradoxically, a requirement to maintain some cool. This amounts to predetermining what kind of "online presence" is needed, and why, backed by the right tools to generate that online presence. Where should people find you online? who should they meet when they find "you"? and why should they (from their perspective) find "you" the way that they do? Assume that they are wherever they are not because of you but because of what that channel offers them; then determine what version of yourself is appropriate to have appear in that channel. "You" might be different from one channel to another, but the different "You's" need to all be appropriate representatives of the brand you are trying to maintain.

Humphrey Bogart got to say it first: "The only cause I'm interested in is Me."

Then there's the famous Andy Warhol saying: "In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes."

As for blogs, it's more like "in the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people." (I can't remember who it was that said that, but the quote is certainly memorable, and the citation for it is probably retrievable via Google, etc.)

Strategically, there are different levels of shamelessness, with blogging and online social networking holding down the opposing goalposts. (Incidentally, Archestra is not a blog, although it runs in blogware. Archestra is, instead, just an open studio.)

Surely, blogging is important to marketing, particularly with the aspect of staging a "market" of ideas about what you sell. But blogs are just the booth in the marketplace. Blogs are inherently editorial, and the only reason we would expect one to succeed is because of the popularity of the personality that is the explicit editorial energy of the blog. (Note: not being a blogger myself, I can't claim to have any expertise on making one work; but having subscribed to several in the past, I found that I only go to the ones where I feel like I am interested in the person whose blog it is. Moreover, with zillions of blogs out there, the fatigue factor of going through yet another new blog is a real impediment that makes it just seem unnecessary. What gets me past the impediment is either a recommendation from someone or a sample of the subject handling that shows me the blogger is unusually interesting.)

Wikis are a bit like blogs in that they have a subject focus, and that subject attracts a crowd (you would hope), but the subject focus is maintained by a crowd, not by a singular editorial personality. With a wiki, one always hopes that peer criticism will culture the crowd towards "wisdom", as they like to say.

Finally (for the moment), the point of a social network is that the crowd moves its focus around and shares what it finds by talking to each other. Focal points emerge rather than being prescribed. But the sharing occurs because of people in the crowd who are already interested in each other and keep introducing who they know to other people. This thing about "buzz" is about when the communication gets flowing strongly about an emergent focalpoint.

A marketer should look at how the online forums* perform compared to each other:
- blogs establish relevance
- wikis establish credibility
- and social networks (which I hereby impertinently deem "SOX"), being where markets actually live, establish importance

(Let's face it, most people who have used the term "SOX" outside of baseball could not tell you who Sarbanes is nor Oxley nor whether their company would survive an audit. So why should they get to monopolize the acronym? In the real world, social exchanges are vastly more interesting, and after I've said "wiki" a few times in a row I'm not interested in two-part five syllable elaborations. SOX it is. Could be lonely, but I don't care.)

* apologies to anyone with a language degree

The rule of thumb is that concepts are not property. The challenge is to wrap "property" around the concepts, so that the property is where people go to find the concepts. Since the value of the property is to some degree related to its scarcity, it is not difficult to understand what to do next.

- Use of ideas can be licensed in certain contexts.

- Information is either confidential or it is not, and you can sell access to confidential information.

- Knowledge is proprietary only if you have the ability to control the context of the knowledge delivery; control is all about packaging (whether the package is a venue, an event, a medium, or a box). You can sell the package; you can also sell delivery.

The rule of thumb is that concepts are not property. The challenge is to wrap "property" around the concepts, so that the property is where people go to find the concepts. Since the value of the property is to some degree related to its scarcity, it is not difficult to understand what to do next.

- Use of ideas can be licensed in certain contexts.

- Information is either confidential or it is not, and you can sell access to confidential information.

- Knowledge is proprietary only if you have the ability to control the context of the knowledge delivery; control is all about packaging (whether the package is a venue, an event, a medium, or a box). You can sell the package; you can also sell delivery.

To get probability on their side, leading thinkers usually have to choose to think about something that approvers already want to implement.

This certainly distresses the notion of "innovation", except within the sense of "infusing the accepted with newness". But that is not an outright knock on anything; it simply points to a reason for having the notion of "pragmatic innovation".

Much leading thought throughout history has been pretty rapidly dismissed as "impractical", which of course should have meant "unable to be put into practice"... But with 20/20 hindsight we are able to know at least that what is undoable for one outfit is merely inconvenient for another. And yet another may have no resistance to the idea at all and let it rip, wherefore the popular "disruptiveness" tag in the vocabulary of the betting pundits who track ersatz innovators.

Thought leadership is safe. It doesn't carry along with it the stockades, burnings-at-the-stake, smear campaigns, or other proven techniques used to enlighten leading thinkers about their impracticality. In fact, when you get right down to it, thought leaders are "voted into office", more or less like successful consultants, which means that they are the product of followers, not vice versa. This explains why the best-known thought leaders hardly ever have a hardluck story about finding followers...

In the other camp, leading thinkers sprout of their own accord and may carry on for quite some time with no followers at all. Some leading thinkers get lucky: they wind up being befriended either by a thought leader or by an influential producer who can spell "pragmatic" but isn't worried about it for the time being. But conventionally, the bridge between leading thinkers and thought leaders is the kind of engineering called "R&D".

The problem is that if R&D is not funded well enough, then the bridge may not reach all the way across. So the issue mainly comes down to who will sponsor the way that the R&D is adequately funded.

Leading thinkers really are often into fundraising, but a lot of fundraisers aren't any good at it. In a healthy organization that wants to be progressive as well, the case for funding thought leaders is not so hard to make, but the exceptional organization strategizes funding of its leading thinkers.

So, how do you get it going at such a late stage in the race?

The first part is to pick my Vice Precedent. Eventually, I’ll get caught for something, right? and why not just tell people what it is in advance, especially if it's something that's just more me? Thanks to the internet, people are confused... there’s no longer any sense of priorities amongst most of the self-indulgences that actually get us from Monday to Tuesday and from Tuesday to …

…. oh, you meant vice “president”… hmm, in that case, it would have to be the guy from truTV, Marc Juris, executive vice president and general manager, who showed me that if you can’t be the head, at least keep it on straight. For example, the other day he was saying, "Reality has a connotation of not being real, of being phony… We felt that because (our programming) was real, we couldn't call it reality." There aren’t that many people running around with that kind of clarity now.

The second part is I’m going to play the gender card.

How does that make sense? Wouldn’t you be running against two men?

Well, what difference does that make? The point is, I accuse them of being guys, and then they both screw up their responses to that more than I screw up mine. That’s what voters care about.

What’s the third part of your strategy?

It’s very simple, a call to action, but it might be hard because it calls for breaking a tough habit. When you’re president, you should have a limited number of Stupid Points to work with, not term limits. If you spend up all your Stupid Points too fast, you’re out! and someone with fewer Stupid Points should take over. This might not be the other person from your party who is hanging out in the other wing of your big white house. Think about it, if it’s your party at your house, and your party gets seriously boring, people need to be able to go to another party at somebody else’s house, right? Really, it’s not such a new idea, but we can’t be wimps about it.

Is that it? Any other parts?

Well, aside from the challenge of getting enough ME-dia attention, I’m working on getting an additional line added to the list of nominee names on the ballot, right below the third party candidates. If I’m successful, it should just say “Surprise Me: __________________”

(Happy Birthday Diana! xo - M)

Category: Stuff That Totally Speaks For Itself. (here)

Some actual music, too. (Copyright Gary Radford, Marie Radford, and Stephen Cooper.) (there)

But if you can't drag your butt to the site, there's at least this excerpt:

Verse three is based on Foucault's response to the charge that his work changes constantly. Foucault responds: "What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing - with a rather shaky hand - a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same:"

That's what I call a smackdown.

Scientists unlock mystery of 2,000-year-old computer

As reported in 2006 by the CBC (i.e., Canada, yesterday) a then-recent study in the journal Nature had revealed the device known as the Antikythera Mechanism to be actually a complex means of tracking the movements of astronomical bodies for use in navigation.

As reported in 2008 by the American newspapers (i.e., USA TODAY), the same device, known as The Mean Sun Wheel, held 30 bronze gearwheels marked with instructions, allowing the user to link the cycles of the heavens to "the very mundane Greek games" (i.e., the Olympics).

Tthat particular usage, scholars believe, was primarily by wealthy sponsors of the games, for scheduling purposes -- putting the wheel in the same class of "information technology" as satellites, but not in the same class as television broadcasting, with which advertising spawned the Olympics Hype Cycle -- used for tracking the movements of earthly bodies -- nowadays far more important than a mundane thing like weather.

The only question here is already asked and answered: whether the 2,100 year old Mean Sun Wheel, given that it still works and all and doesn't even need batteries, can hold its own against a much bigger machine: marketers. Marketing's vanguard, the American press, took two years to find something in it that rated worth mentioning again. Maybe it's time to move to Canada.

Why is portfolio management often misplaced amongst these efforts? There are two predominant reasons. For one, practitioners of these efforts often mistake scorecards and dashboards for portfolios. And two, portfolios are often pursued under "performance" requirements (i.e., requirements to increase the rate of return on equity), whereas the actual purpose of a portfolio is to provide a model for the commitment to the opportunity, defining how value will be recognized, not how "value will be generated and captured".

The language that helps to understand where portfolios help goes like this: "what is the benefit of the investment model?" Obviously, one model could be modified or even discontinued and replaced, while still addressing the same apparent opportunity. At the least, this simply acknowledges that two competitors may chase the same prize in different ways, with both making progress (without predicting which one will prevail or even whether one necessarily must). But within the model, other key actions are generally positioned as catalysts or governors -- including things like identifying a distinctive market niche and specially producing for it, tracking the cost of scaling up for the demand level in that niche at a given quality benchmark, and exercizing policies to keep decisions and approvals predictable throughout changing circumstances -- all relative to a certain type of enabling stakeholder who is the primary beneficiary.

Bruce MacEwen's industry-leading website Adam Smith, Esquire offers an opportunity to gaze into the abyss of metrics and walk away without jumping. In the article
"How High Quality Are Your Lawyers? (How Can You Tell?)"
a close reading shows contrasting business models contesting notions of "performance @ cost" and "value @ quality". In the competitive situation covered, one upstart model strategically goes after a chunk of the opponent's business by bringing customers the performance/cost equation, surprisingly leaving the traditionalist competitor to justify how pricing for that same chunk of business could rationally be based on value/quality. What makes this all interesting, notes MacEwen, is the idea that 99% of what the traditionalist does is what the upstart can steal away.

For those of us who fell out of the old hot habit of saying "disruptive innovation" once a month, this looks like news, but not new news. Still, there are some fresh perspectives worth bringing to this contest.

As seen in the diagram below, the different models above are easily distinguished by what they actually offer, making it inappropriate (for managers) and intellectually dishonest (to customers) for either of them to masquerade as the other. Customers buying into cost/performance are investing in the promise of efficiency, while those buying into value/quality are investing in the promise of reliability.

In MacEwen's article, we are sensitized to the problem that high-prestige value/quality law service firms institutionalize a significant unmanaged cost in the form of "available overachievers", against which these firms then build a hedge by charging premium prices beyond rational evidence of economy for the customer. But what is sold as the justification for this pricing? Their quality?

To be sure of avoiding management posturing, "quality" here must mean only one thing: adherence to the promised appropriateness of the deliverable versus the stated need. Consider that meaning against the question of what it takes to get quality: the value/quality firm proposes that by exceptional capability they eliminate the risk of not getting quality. Therefore, the key variable that this firm actually addresses is unpredictability in the customer's need. As an operational tactic, the value/quality firm hoards talent in order to avoid outsourcing and to presume agility.

But the cost/performance firm basically argues (by demonstration) that legal work requires only competency to sufficiently meet most stated needs -- not a matter of being exceptional but instead simply correct for the task, which eliminates unnecessary effort from the equation right off the bat. Of course this presumes a degree of predictability in scope of need -- and agreement on the scope becomes the main feature.

The discussion above intends no effort to offer a wisened critique of law firm strategy. That said, on the surface there are no truly important differences between marketing professional services in law versus other disciplines where subject matter expertise is the raw material and advice is the product.

Idiosyncracies in the legal services industry will of course provoke distinctive problems and solutions there, yet these are probably driven more by the state of mind of the customer - which is the underlying important difference because it is the competitive arena. Oversimplifying MacEwen's article, the difference between the value/quality firm and the cost/performance firm is that the former sells confidence while the latter sells credibility.

Are there spats? One accusing the other of con games, and the other accusing the first of being incredible? MacEwen's article says yes; but what is further interesting (per evidence of the illustration above) is the opportunity that both types of firms can objectively profile themselves on common ground (efficiency, capability, reliability and acceptability) -- and use those profiles to determine how to optimally segment and grow a shared market. When they don't do that, you can bet it isn't because the customers don't care.

"Why do top managers, steeped in theories of good business strategy, still make bad decisions? While ignorance and hubris sometimes play a role, the brain itself—how we think—is also a culprit. Insights from behavioral economics help explain why we don't always think rationally and how our logical flaws can lead to bad strategic decisions."

On a day like today, when the stock market dropped over 300 points, the catchiness of that intro is in the contrast between the confidence we want to have in logic and the confidence we want to have in our ability to use it.

Getting strict, we might have to say that when strategy is based on logic, strategy is interpretive -- because in different hands, the same logic might lead to different strategy and/or different strategic outcomes.

But why doesn't it make just as much sense to place the first faith in the strategy and then find the logic to execute it? Well, it does; it's just that in this mode, the "strategy" is not a performance; instead it is a proposition that supplies the point of view to be used when managing functions.

McKinsey's discussion seems to be poised to warn us away from the problem of management personalities corrupting objectivity, and further, poised to argue that this should be the right warning because we can assume that there is usually going to be sufficient objectivity to correctly navigate to the correct destination. That is, the most prominent assumption that we can read into the McKinsey caution is that it's not cool to split from the plan. Logic shall bear decisions and decisions shall bear the plan and the plan shall be righteous.

But isn't that still letting the bad boys off the hook? Levity aside, coaches bring the game plan to the players knowing this: that the players actually have to play, which means that the players will improvise their way to the opportunity to comply, if they understand the strategy -- "strategy" which is again essentially a point of view and not a performance prescription.

Strategy is about belief in the value of your position. It is esentially about where you're going to be, and why you're going to be there. Because of that, any position within a hierarchy of operational dependencies can be a strategic position. In effect, a position represents the opportunity, so the most direct way for a leader or manager to damage the potential of a strategy is to make decisions that inhibit or prohibit the players' opportunity to align and coordinate their compliance to the strategy.

Because of that, we want a model of coaching to rely on, not just retraining (or re-straining) of senior staffers to the logic-decision-plan mode. We want an observation-design-motivation mode just as much if not more. We want the sideline clipboard.

Chief Information Officer

• Serves as the company’s top technology infrastructure manager


• Runs the organization’s internal IT operations


• Works to streamline business processes with technology


• Focuses on internal customers (users and business units)


• Collaborates and manages vendors that supply infrastructure solutions


• Aligns the company’s IT infrastructure with business priorities


• Developers strategies to increase the company’s bottom line (profitability)


• Has to be a skilled and organized manager to be successful

• Serves as the company’s top technology architect


• Runs the organization’s engineering group


• Uses technology to enhance the company’s product offerings


• Focuses on external customers (buyers)


• Collaborates and manages vendors that supply solutions to enhance the company’s product(s)


• Aligns the company’s product architecture with business priorities


• Develops strategies to increase the company’s top line (revenue)


• Has to be a creative and innovative technologist to be successful

1. Infrastructure affects the bottom line (what you get to keep), while systems affect the top line (what you get to get). Of course, this goes a long way towards explaining why a CIO would report to a CFO, while a CTO would report to a CEO. More importantly, it indicates that strategic resourcing can be a CIO's calling card, but that strategic positioning can be a CTO's calling card.

2. Much less explicit but still clearly in evidence is the difference between being a chief operations technologist (a.k.a. CIO) and a chief business technologist (a.k.a. CTO). Naturally, the easy way of understanding how to assess their respective progress and performance would rely on understanding the consequences -- of not having good infrastructure (provision of operations technology) and not having good systems (provision of market interaction technology). But getting it figured out in positive terms has stumped the panel often enough and long enough that these job descriptions still have to get spelled out long after the hiring has been done . What's still needed furthermore to get the dust to settle is a plan of co-production between them. Whereas neither effort alone could get the whole job done, the combined efforts of the two groups would offer a company an office of Business-IT Alignment...

"I'd be curious if anyone can come forth with any data to show that in fact (as opposed to in repute) more expensive law firms produce better results, e.g. can it be shown that the investment banks who had the largest losses on their mortgage portfolios were served by lower reputation law firms?

Once this conversation settles down, I will start a separate string (and perhaps a wiki to really pull something together) on what I consider to be the core issue: how can we develop a definition of VALUE in legal services that is meaningful and useful, and not simply measuring inputs like hours spent, diligence of lawyers, law school attended or reputation of the firm. With such a definition of value, I think we could expect that some lawyers' reputations and income would go up, but some would not."

Let's dig into that overall observation by making the undercurrents obvious.

1. "Value" is a label for the significant distinctions attributed to something. "Value" in professional services is 3-dimensional, at minimum. A certain method of co-operation with the customer interacts with a certain type of target outcome at a certain level of effective cost to the customer. The method, outcome, and customer cost are variables, each having a range of acceptability, which in turn allows some universe of acceptable overall impact to sprout from their combination. Now, from that dynamic, some professional service providers are great at being predictably consistent within a smaller universe (range of impacts) that the customer prefers. Some are great at being agile enough to cover a larger universe, keeping up with a customer who has more volatile preferences. And there are several other "flavors" of competency that a service provider may have. Ultimately the provider wants to be paid for the competency, and then be paid even more for a competitively greater level of competency. But the customer wants to pay for customer satisfaction, which is something different. And what mediates the balance of the two things is often just culture. I wouldn't choose to drive a perfectly good Tercel to the White House Christmas Ball, but I could; and I wouldn't choose to drive a Bentley to the 7-Eleven, but I could. In fact, I could use either car to get to either destination.



2. That's all well and good in theory, but in practice the realization of the potential value is hugely affected by the ability of the customer to appropriately and effectively align to it. (There is even plenty of historical evidence that customers sometimes buy based on how they wanna be seen, not based on how they really are.) That reality is the "forest". Relentless pursuit of profit is the bulldozer that strips the forest. Atomic metrical inputs like law schools and hours spent risk merely being "trees", where excessive attention obscures the view of the forest and therefore obscures the proper understanding of the value.
Profit and arbitrary metrics actually must not dominate an analysis of value. Instead, value, properly identified, can be correlated with profits and other interesting measures, and the correlations may be revealing or even exciting.


3. The final point from the above is that it is probably important to use rigor in discussing value, because "value" is not a reliable synonym for other things that deserve their own names, such as "competency" and "satisfaction", and "culture". It's important to know what is actually being taken into consideration and not gloss over things for convenience, because otherwise we find out too late that we're actually sitting on some key coordinate that does not allow us to "get there from here" (i.e., to the necessary value) on time. Meanwhile -- if we would like to elevate the discussion of value from the 3-D space of CustomerCost /Outcome/Method to the 3-D space of Competency/CustomerSat/Culture, while remembering to map the current coordinates in both spaces, well that's fine.

But it's not so important that there is any state of being absolutely "right or wrong" about what is real or what is actual.

Instead of right or wrong being the decisive criteria, what matters is that knowledge as an embrace of abstraction is different from knowledge as an embrace of concreteness.

Abstraction leads us to expect that future experience will have some particulars; concreteness leads us to accept that current experience has some particulars. Abstraction provides models; concreteness provides examples.

In both cases, selectivity is a critical determinant; maturity in knowledge broadens our scope of selectivity.

And in both cases, our mind invents experience as well as receives experience. Note that we constantly take models as examples of something, and we constantly take examples as models of something...

This "flexibility" shows that as an ongoing phenomenon, our knowledge is continually tested by the activity of inventing and receiving particulars into what we call our awareness.

In the Brainstorm illustration on that page, the title of the Venn diagram (below) suggests that a blank area in the top center intersection would have been labelled "Actionable Insight".

The question we first posed to Dwyer was: shouldn't this intersection be titled "Policy Compliance" and stand as the third factor, instead of "actionable insight"? One can readily argue that a full reckoning of profit and advantage (the very central theme) must include this risk management dimension, and it proves to be so in actual practice but simply has (typically) more influence as a constraint than as a lever.

In a brief offline interview, Dwyer replied, noting how his system works:

"The point that I was making was to identify three elements that contribute to profitability by optimizing the management and execution of a supply chain... The three I chose were all meant to be levers or enablers to achieve higher profit... [Within those three] the combination – or intersection – of intelligent applications built on a responsive infrastructure and accurate, timely data is what enables 'actionable insight'... I would agree that achieving policy compliance at the lowest cost would definitely impact profits... but I would not choose the constraint of policy compliance over the enabler of actionable insight. "

Interpreted with lots of wiggle room, Dwyer's descriptions in the BPMStrategies article strongly suggest that the role of agile technologies is to generate transparency [largely internal] across the heterogeneous organization -- while the role of integrated real-time data is to generate transparency [largely external] across the organization's multichannel embrace of suppliers and customers. Respectively, albeit oversimplified, this amounts to an organization knowing what to do and how to do it, complemented by knowing what it should be acting on and why. In both cases, timeliness of correct information is critical. But to highlight the most important issue, it is the matter of being actionable that makes being insightful worthwhile.

Additional consideration of Dwyer's formula leads to this summarization: knowledge management, business intelligence and performance management may converge to drive sustainable competitive winning, if you know how to make them converge. We view this as a matter of management information systems being deployed strategically rather than just tactically.

To put this back into the proper original context of Dwyer's discussion: the improved mechanics in question are driven by business process management (BPM), business decision management (BDM) and service oriented architecture (SOA). The strategy challenge is to realize and exploit the correspondence of these approaches with the management of information. For example:

Development: SOA : Process efficiency

Production : BPM : Performance Effectiveness

Research : BDM : Actionable Insight

In a follow-on to this discussion, we could consider the recently published arguments in The New Age of Innovation by C. K. Prahalad and M. S. Krishnan on how global resource networks represent the new supply chain mechanics and how the arguments express the information/mechanics correspondence. For example, in the coverage of the book provided by Information Week's Bob Evans, the key idea noted is that Darwinian forces of customer-centricity require transformation of a supply process into a service, causing the B2B (business-to-business) supply chain linkage to operate more in B2C (business-to-consumer) mode -- which changes the kind of information necessary to manage success. Says Evans: "resources must be shifted continually... " and "processes must be shifted from a focus on millions of customers to the individual."

Punchline: for many enterprises, the prospects of future success resemble hitting a moving target from a moving launchpad. To be able to execute that strategy, there will first need to be a strategy for enabling the execution.

It's customary to eschew information overload; but the key to their useful combination is not the specific information compared, rather how the available information is positioned in the overall scheme of interpretation. As seen in the picture above, intents and impacts which superficially represent "how things are going" will relate in terms of the "5 W's and How". Seeing the certain blending of factors here, it is easier to realize that most insights will be moments of correlation that are the prize for maintaining ordinary but diligent awareness in a variety of ways.

But just like money, insights are mainly worth the use to which they are put. So, whether this big picture describes the competency of an individual savvy person or of an enterprise, it tells something about being strategically capable but the goods are in the doing after the learning.