CCJRNL

Spomenik: Retrofuturistic Monuments of the Eastern Bloc, via Brain Pickings

Morgan Freeman as Count Dracula on The Electric Company

 I always say that people reveal themselves most intimately through bookshelves and spice racks. For me, barf bags do a lot of metaphoric work, because I am quite literally (with barf bags) keeping what people want to throw away. My story collection revolves around what people throw away – talent, promise, trash, personal history. In any case, if you put someone’s obsessions / collections under a microscope, you almost invariably find the most pressing questions that person (chooses to?) ask his or her self.

Interview with my brother-in-law, author Robert Glick, about his barf bag collection.

"Vast, unidentified, structures have been spotted by satellites in the barren Gobi desert, raising questions about what China might be building in a region it uses for its military, space and nuclear programmes."

When an organization’s external digital presence is inconsistent or incoherent, this is nearly always a symptom of deeper internal structural problems, such as:

Silos: The people responsible for digital work are isolated from the rest of the organization. They can’t get the information they need to support other teams/departments until it’s too late. The digital lead or team ends up becoming a quick-turn-around production team expected to blast emails without strategic input or considerations for member engagement. The digital lead may not be seated at a high enough level within the organization to be proactive, or the digital staff may be a sub-unit of an existing team that has a director who does not represent digital well for leadership or cross-team planning opportunities.

Personality Fit: You have the wrong person in the digital role—he/she may have some historically appropriate skills but otherwise brings the wrong attitude and is unable to work collaboratively with others. Digital work interfaces with all aspects of an organization, so the person responsible must be open-minded, solutions-oriented, and ideally a delight to work with. If your digital lead creates resistance, or seems conditioned to say “no” more than “let’s figure this out,” you are—at best—stifling the growth of your organization’s digital program. At worst, you are enabling the growth of a toxic environment around digital work, and your organization may spend years trying to recover.

Overload: The digital lead or team has too much to do and is unable to prioritize work. This is one of the most common conditions we see. Your leadership may have undue expectations for how long R&D or even basic online operations should take, and they don’t know how many requests are coming in from all angles. Often the digital team isn’t the right size to keep up with increasing demands, or the digital lead is unable to prioritize the work on their own. Sometimes, they don’t know how to say no to requests that are unrealistic or that don’t fit their vision (if they have one—see the next point). Leadership can exacerbate the overload by asking the digital lead to chase after new bells and whistles, which they may not have the confidence or experience to push back on.

Lack of digital vision: The underlying issue beneath overload is typically the lack of a framework to strategically prioritize resources for digital work. Every organization needs a digital vision to set a direction that supports the core mission and business goals of the institution, and to evaluate whether the inevitable new tools, creative ideas, and campaigns “fit” with the strategic approach and should be undertaken. Strong digital teams prioritize new opportunities—and kill bad ones—using a simple rubric of “viability and fit.” To measure viability, they need to be experienced and networked enough to know what’s going to work in the digital world, and empowered enough to stand up to people who don’t. To measure fit requires this vision.

Lack of organizational vision: The problem may not actually be with the digital team at all. A good digital communications or engagement strategy can’t compensate for a missing organizational vision or outdated theory of change, both of which have to come before you can establish a digital framework. If you can’t clearly articulate what your organization is specifically trying to change in the world, how to realistically achieve that change through your current actions, and how your supporters can play a meaningful role in making that change happen, then you’re just asking your digital team to create pseudo engagement with increasingly meaningless actions. It may be the toughest thing to do, but spend some time re-evaluating your overall game plan, offerings, brand story, and engagement model, and then re-evaluate your digital work to support that.

Great analysis and advice regarding challenges in managing and governing the digital function in organizations - by Jason Mogus (@mogusmoves) of Communicopia, Michael Silberman (@silbatron) of Greenpeace, and Christopher Roy (@christopherroy) of Communicopia and Open Directions. Don't miss the followup piece on Four Models for Managing Digital: http://www.ssireview.org/opinion/entry/four_models_for_organizing_digital_wor...

More than any other figure in technology, Jobs’ impact was a very personal one. Steve Jobs was Apple. You cannot reduce Apple’s approach to technology to set of objective design principles like “elegant user experience” and “minimalism.” You are pretty much reduced to saying that Apple represents a Jobsian approach to technology, personal foibles and all.

As a result, Apple technology does not carry with it the sense of inevitability that a lot of technology does. Digital music players, smartphones, touch interfaces and tablets had to happen (indeed they already had before Jobs took an interest) but the iPod, iPhone and iPad did not have to happen. In that sense, there was an Apollo-like grandeur to the things Jobs did. German V2 rockets and communications satellites had to happen, but we did not have to go to the Moon. And as with the Moon, we may never go back to the places Jobs took us.

Perhaps melodramatic, but actually a great encapsulation of the unique quality of Apple products under Jobs -- more art than science, "they did not have to happen."

Globalization as Liquefaction

This post is really about my dissatisfaction with the static units of analysis for globalization. We are reluctant to embrace more fluid units like streams because they seem so small in terms of population sizes.  It seems wrong to basically ignore the 90% of the world who are never going to venture beyond the borders they were born within.

Yet, I find that it is far easier to understand globalization as a system of such human flows, than it is to understand it in terms of nations, states and multi-national corporations. It is the actions of the 0.3% that will ultimately drive the fates of the 90%. The cultures that play host to streams are starting to see their evolution being driven by the very act of hosting streams. There are entire regions in the Indian state of Kerala for instance, whose culture can only be explained with reference to the gyre that transports Keralites back and forth from the Middle East.

Venkatesh Rao on population flows.