The Social Organization

Women & Leadership Cont.

Dennis Howlett, an enterprise software expert, blogger at ZDNet and my favorite contrarian Brit, was kind enough to consider me worthy of inclusion in his recent post on 'Women and Leadership'. It was an interesting request of his - he wanted me to react to a recent McKinsey Quarterly piece titled Centered Leadership - and it got me thinking quite a bit.  I read the Centered Leadership article but really didn't relate to the perspective. It identified five dimensions that make women in business successful:

• Meaning
• Managing Energy
• Positive Framing
• Connecting
• Engaging

This all sounded a bit like a visit to a zen spa with lots of therapeutic self-awareness sessions.  I don't mean to completely pan it but who doesn't need to find meaning in their work?  And who doesn't need to manage their energy levels? To me, it wasn't exactly helpful and so what I gave Dennis was my own list of top 10 things to remind yourself of as a women. However, like the other women Dennis interviewed I am not entirely comfortable making generalizations across gender lines. I do believe that there are more men with certain traits then women and vise versa but it's not a clear line.

After I submitted my list to Dennis I had a really interesting conversation with my brother about this - he is a executive at a large company in Germany and had an interesting European angle.  His perspective was that highly successful people in the business world are those that take on more responsibility and accountability than suggested by their role and position and that people are promoted only after they exhibit the skills needed for the promotion.  In short, highly successful people don't stay in their box or play by the explicit rules.  He went on to say that women in Europe particularly had a difficult time stepping up and taking on more than what was explicitly expected of them.

This was an a-ha moment for me.  I was completely incorrigible as a kid and my parents often came down hard on me for not being polite enough....not so dissimilar to the way many other parents deal with their girls.  For me, it didn't really take..but I suspect most women were better behaved than I was as a child.  I always had too many ideas and got too excited about things to really be very polite.  As an adult I hope I've become an acceptably polite individual...but I still get an idea and run with it.  And maybe that is the real take away for women who want to succeed.  Do more than is asked of you. Take on projects you are not really responsible for. Figure out how to get projects done regardless of how the explicit process should work. Ask for forgiveness instead of asking for permission. And don't feel bad about it.

So...back to the bumper sticker: Good Girls Don't Make History

The Rise of Innovation in the Hub

I've worked in technology in Silicon Valley and Boston and the environments are pretty different.  In Boston you often get the inferiority vibe...I guess now that our sports teams have won their share of national titles we have to keep the inferiority complex going somewhere.  From my perspective, having worked in both places, Bostonian technology people are simply less social.  In Silicon Valley, whether you are an engineer starting out or a tech executive who has been in the business 20 years, the weeks are filled with happy hours, launch parties, breakfast meetings, impromptu office parties and the like. In Boston you tend to go to work and go home. Breakfast meetings and launch parties happen occasionally but more often than not, they are intra-company affairs.  Networks in Boston take a long time to develop and are based primarily on who you have worked with in the past.  This may be partly geography - there are a few more logical hubs of activity in Silicon Valley, San Francisco's SOMA district, Palo Alto, & San Jose but that seems like a poor excuse since Waltham, Burlington, & Kendall Square in Cambridge now have significant critical mass.

Now that I am back in Boston and working in the social media world things seem to have changed and I wonder if we are at a tipping point - as least in this market.  The community has leaders - Chris Brogan, Laura Fitton, Doug Haslam, Todd Van Hoosear, Adam Zand, Maria Thurell, Alexa Scordato, Amanda Gravel, Aaron Strout, Jim Storer,  Steve Garfield, Beth Kanter, Adam Cohen,  Mike Langford, C.C. Chapman, and many others who are very active and instigate tweet-ups, conferences, rock climbing get togethers, dinners, apple picking trips, etc. sometimes formal and sometimes spontaneous. This is critical because while this crowd knows each other pretty well, they are also adept at pulling others into their vortex making new people feel welcome and growing the community - and they do not represent just one company or one discipline.  There are also enough local technology companies in this space. Mzinga, Communispace, Awareness, Lotus, Cymphony, MoCo Space, Sermo, ChoiceStream, Trip Advisor, and MatchMine are all local software companies working in the social media space in some capacity. Topaz Partners and Perkett PR also participate extensively from the marketing side of things.  This all rolls up to make Boston a real Hub in this particular market and to me, feels a lot more like what makes Silicon Valley so powerful - a critical mass of technology, business, and marketing professionals dedicated to the same vision.  To investors and potential employees who are interested in this market, it makes Boston the place to be.

Like the Red Sox, and the Patriots, Boston seems to be coming into its own in the software industry and taking a leading role in pushing innovation and adoption. Our challenge now - convincing all of those talented kids coming out of MIT, Harvard, BU, BC, Wellseley, Tufts, etc. to stick around and play. That, and we need some better cafes and restaurants to hang out at on the 128 loop so I encourage any of you who are thinking of starting your own business - we need a couple of cool, hip, unique places to hang out somewhere between Waltham and Burlington - essentially we need a Buck's of our own.

Participating In the Market

Today is Blog Action Day to fight Poverty and while I haven't done much to fight poverty lately other than donate to the Heifer Project, I do have markets and equality on my mind.

Yesterday I gave a presentation titled "This Little Piggy" done by Mzinga's talented Alexa Scordato:

This Little Piggy Went to Market

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: summit marketing)

At its most basic, the message of the presentation is "the market is moving online" but the more nuanced message is that markets are all about access to information. When access to information about a product - whether the product is stocks or candy - is unevenly distributed, someone has the opportunity to make more money than the product is objectively worth.

What I mean by that is if I as the consumer am offered a piece of candy for $1 at my corner store...and don't have any information about where else that candy is offered and at what price, I am unlikely to object paying that price.  However, if I know that the store across the street is selling that piece of candy for 25 cents, I am unlikely to buy it for $1.  Same goes for cars, stocks, software, groceries. 

My point to the marketing crowd yesterday was that if you want to maintain high prices and margins on your products (and that is the reason marketing exists to begin with), marketers need to know more about their customers and the market than their customers know about them and their market.  The internet has disrupted the balance of power between companies and their customers because it dramatically increases the distribution of information...and now customers often know more...and know they have choices where in the offline world they may not have. So...social media marketing is not just about keeping up with the tools and methods your customers are using, it is about keeping up with them in terms of what they know - all of which is captured in conversations.

Getting back to Blog Action Day... what does that online market dynamic do for the impoverished?  First and foremost, the digital divide is an enormous issue - if one segment of our society has to operate from a position of information weakness, they are likely to pay more than they have to for all sorts of things...which seems ironic in the extreme. So getting online is important.  Second, access to information is not alone enough - the ability to sort, filter, and find information from reliable sources is also critical which suggests education is a key component. Operating in an information economy without the skills to filter is a scary thing. 

Do I have a solution. No, I'm afraid I don't but also I don't think the topic of information inequity and its various ramifications are talked about enough in the always connected, gadget friendly crowd I tend to hang out with online.  What do you think? How can we help?

Got Leadership?

Communities, like any organization, need strong leadership to be successful. Leadership in communities, however, needs to come from many if not most of the members of the community. Strong communities are ones where there is a lot of discussion, dissent, and negotiation. Strong communities often include a lot of tension. Strong communities are made up of people with strong opinions who are not afraid to voice their opinions but also have enough respect for other members of the community that dissent can be negotiated without escalating to anger and resentment.

The problem? There is not enough leadership to go around. There is not enough empathy to go around. There is not enough respect to go around. There is not enough listening to go around. There is not enough strength of character to go around.

How do we get there? The best way to learn how to build strong communities is to experience a strong community first. It requires time, mentoring, observation...things that in the business world we often don't allow for.  In business, we need to show progress quickly and be show effectiveness.  The cadence of business and the cadence of communities are quite different - as is the leadership required.  Seriously considering developing a community for your business? Look for the really smart people in your organization who don't quite fit the management mold but are always pushing the envelope...and put them in charge of the community - and give them the time to explore other communities.