Jan
29
In deep and personal - with Tracey Emin
Filed Under Digital Engagement, Innovation, Mobile | Leave a Comment
Tracey Emin is one of my favourite artists, ever since she won me over years ago at Sensation. I find her work profoundly prophetic. My favourite is her ‘Sparrow on a Stick‘ sculpture for Liverpool - a wonderful gift to the city that will grow in stature over the years. But now when I look at her famous tent ‘Everyone I have ever slept with‘ or ‘My bed‘, I see a 3D portend of MySpace or FaceBook pages (I can hear my colleagues shouting ‘Well you would James wouldn’t you!”).
Her article in The Independent today was wide open, honest and self-giving as usual. Within it lay a interesting story…
“Most mornings I wake up about 6am. These days, i have a flask of hot tea by my bed; I turn on Radio 3, crush three pillows underneath my neck and lean my head back at a 45 degree angle. I roll my eyes into the back of my skull, as far as possible. I then stretch out my hand, knowing that i should pick up my book but I always pick up my BlackBerry. I have this thing called the 6am club. There are a handful of people whom I can text or email at 6am, and they will reply to me immediately. Their thoughts will not be minor; they will be weighty, profound and somewhat philosophical. This is the morning time when the darkness is outside, but we still have the fantastic feeling of being alert in our womb-like nests. It’s a safe place from which to send out these deep thoughts.”
Mobile, personal, networked, creative and intimate - the sort of thing I was anticipating last year and expecting to hear first from someone using an iPhone, but here we see it on a BlackBerry.
Jan
17
Plane goes down - Twitter goes up
Filed Under Digital Engagement, Innovation, Mobile | Leave a Comment
“There’s a plane in the Hudson’. This tweet (for the uninitiated, a micro-blog post of 140 characters or less on Twitter) and the above photo taken on a mobile phone, flashed almost instantaneously across the globe within only a few minutes of the miraculous river landing of Flight 1549. The interest was so high that the main Twitter servers collapsed under the load of 500 view requests every 20 seconds.
I struggled to understand Twitter’s value although Stephen Fry’s excellent broadcast on the subject finally helped the penny to drop. But here we now have a case study of Twitter at full power.
Ironically, the cause of the catastrophic engine failure was a large flock of birds!
Jan
14
Here Comes Everybody - Clay Shirky
Filed Under Enterprise 2.0 | 2 Comments
Clay Shirky has been a proponent of collaborative communication since the birth of the Internet, more recently focusing on crowdsourcing. Have a listen to his fab presentation at the RSA ‘Here Comes Everybody: the power of organising without organisations’; an analysis of the social media explosion and what can happen when the public gets hold of these tools - for good or ill.
Jan
5
Stephen Covey, the author of the best-selling - now almost cliched - “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” thinks that there is a positive cultural shift taking place as organisations that have bitten the bullet and are seeking to empower their employees through openness and transparency, find hidden resources and extra creativity to lay the seeds for new growth.
“I find that people are very capable and resourceful when they’re not in the dark. Open the books, show them what’s happening. If you get them involved with the problem, they’ll be part of the solution. They may come up with ways to cut costs other than cutting people.”
“Leaders need to be open, authentic and real”. Covey says, “If there is no real trust and genuine integrity, then it just becomes a kind of fake program of fake democracy which will worsen it”
He goes on to say that companies with an industrial age “adversarial low-trust culture” are tending to cope less well. The car industry comes in for particular criticism with one exception - Toyota.
Research seems to be supporting this, have a look at the the recent YouGov employee engagement survey ‘The New Rules of Engagement‘ that I have been involved with.