Checked my iphone early today – looks like lunch will be interesting – there’s a talk on cultural differences in global e-mail tagging strategies. Never could understand why I couldn’t google up all of the old messages about the global procurement system update. I hear the speaker’s the great grand-daughter of the inventor of those yellow sticky notes I used to post all over my cubicle. It’s nice not having cubicles anymore – just grab a mobile desktop when I choose to come in, and then search out a comfortable place for the day. Today I’m arriving early so I can sit in the area that used to be the walled-in corner office of the CIO – what a view!

I’m glad I read Anne Field’s article before that huge restructuring that took place just after the dust settled on the subprime mortgage crisis [1]. Those were dark days around here. But our company was following her advised strategy – sending new talent (the ‘high potentials’ or Hi-Po’s) off for frequent short-stretch assignments in other countries so they could handle being pulled in multiple directions. And they’d give groups of Hi-Po’s a challenging problem – like applying new leadership thinking to test different structuring alternatives to better align our human capital resources with our new strategy. Hi-Po’s were also tasked with learning from experts through both formal and informal mentoring programs. It seemed at the time that they were really hand-holding those Hi-Po’s. For example, it seemed like they were always sitting down to make sure they understood the leadership development objectives for every task they were given. I didn’t know at the time, but one of those Hi-Po’s was destined to be my boss.

Since she took charge of my group and announced she was a proud Millennial, things have changed for the better. It didn’t happen overnight, but I can’t believe how well she managed change in a group composed of tough-minded people representing multiple generations. One day she both e-mailed and snail-mailed (to make sure everyone got it) an article written way back in March of 2003 by David Stauffer [2]. It helped me realize how difficult a problem it was to manage our group, and it made me appreciate how she’d taken the time to understand what motivates each different generation and what the typical sources of inter-generational conflicts might be. As a borderline boomer, I was pretty disillusioned at the time – but then she made sure I was getting plenty of training in the hottest new areas.

Today we do business much differently than back then. Things move at such a high velocity – you have to have the right information systems in place to keep you in the game. For example, when there are new jobs put out for bid, the most lucrative contracts are for quick-turnaround projects - where if you don’t get it done before anybody else who might of made a competitive bid – you lose it all. That’s right – if another bidder beats you to the deadline, everything you’ve done is lost, and there’s no pay - $0.00. It’s that simple. Of course, you can still bid for standard fixed contracts, but the margins are razor thin. So, to be in the game for these fast-paced, high pay, high risk, knowledge intensive ventures, you learn to communicate efficiently, assign people with the right skill sets to tasks with little slack, and you track your prior wins and losses to harness as much business intelligence as you can. The information systems help you predict your suitability for a win, they facilitate coordinating the schedule and exchanging the necessary digital work products, but you need 110% of the brains of your people on task at all critical times. The stakes are high – but when the pressure backs off – there’s time for some fun.

Well, that’s it for today’s blog – will be interesting to see how it get’s interpreted by the company’s IDEA (Innovation Detection and Expert Advisor) system. Our group has learned a great deal from that system. As I recall, it came from a field of study called ‘text mining,’ and it was sold worldwide by a company founded by Harvard drop-out – I hear he is a Millennial, too - and a very rich one at that.

Philosophers, opinion leaders, and legal scholars alike have struggled for years with the definition of when life begins. The debate turns to both the physical and spiritual. Well, move over and make room for the virtual. According to a new study out of New Zealand, the physical birth of a person is more and more coinciding with their virtual birth on the Internet. In many cases, a person actually has an independent Internet presence before they have an independent physical presence.

One in five parents send a picture of their newborn baby to friends and family within 10 minutes of the birth, with almost half (48 per cent) of parents taking snaps of their bundle of joy within the hour. For the parents who just can't wait for the birth, one in seven (14 per cent) have also sent pictures of their unborn baby's ultrasound scan via their mobile or e-mail - meaning almost 9000 babies each year in New Zealand are seen by friends and family before they're even born.

There is the corresponding trend of parents creating web sites or blogs for their newborn or yet-to-be-born infant.

So if the Internet has a shadow of us before we are born, and can retain a shadow of us long, long after we pass away, just how virtual is the Internet?

In earlier posts (one, two, three) I’ve discussed how blogs can be predictive of popular opinion. The main reason is that blogs acts as early adopters of news stories and ideology, and vet these for the broader public.

I want to bring your attention to some patterns we’ve noticed about Wonkosphere which shed some light on how we should think about the role of bloggers in the current political process (so-called Politics 2.0).

First, political blogs are consumed in much the same manner as mainstream media is, which indicates that readers treat political blogs not as seperate from, but rather as part of, mainstream media. Wonkosphere traffic is greatest on Monday, and tends to peak before breakfast, lunch and dinner, i.e. when people are cruising on the net to end a portion of their work day. Blogs act as newspapers for most readers.

Second, very few blogs break stories. It is a myth. From our data, the vast majority of bloggers still rely on mainstream media for the content they comment on. In fact, a blogger is more likely to cite mainstream media as they are another blogger. Thus, bloggers are primarily amplifiers rather than sources of news.

Third, the popularity of political blogs tends to follow a Pareto (power) law, meaning that there are a few blogs that have a very large number of readers while most blogs have few readers. This means that the influence of blogs is also so distributed, leading to elite blogs (e.g. MyDD, Hot Air), in the same way we have elite mainstream media sources (e.g. New York Times, Newsweek).

Put together, these patterns imply that political blogs are acting as supplements to mainstream media, rather than substitutes for it. The impact on the system is more volatility–blogs make most news spread faster, but sometimes it’s slower; blogs spread both fact and opinion, truth and slander more rapidly; only a few blogs influence opinion most of the time, but any single blog has the potential to impact everyone; and the blogsphere both enables extreme candidate-inevitability and the potential for anyone to come-from-behind in a shocker.

In the previous posts (part 1, part 2), the conclusion to this question based on analysis of the political blogosphere was: you bet. Political blogs can create and rapidly diffuse stories and opinion in a way that mainstream media cannot. Now let me turn the question around a bit, and ask: Are political bloggers predictive?

Everett Rogers was one of our great American thinkers, and his classic book “Diffusion of Innovations” is the bible concerning how both tangible innovations (like a product) and intangible innovations (like an idea) diffuse in a society. He identified that there are different “types” of people per when they adopt: first innovators adopt, then early adopters, early majority, late majority, and finally laggards. In his theory, early adopters are the most important group in terms of the likelihood of broad difussion, as they take the bold ideas from the innovators and mold them for adoption by the pragmatic early majority.

In a political context, the innovation in Roger’s model is ideology, political bloggers are both innovators and early adopters, primary voters are the early majority, and swing voters are the late majority.

Will bloggers vote in the same way that the general populace does? According to Roger’s theory, the answer would be yes. As people at the front-end of the adoption curve, bloggers have to “adopt” before the general populace does. Not all bloggers adopt the same idea–as ideological leaders, their views are going to tend to be more intense and diverse, and more ideological and less pragmatic. Nevertheless, bloggers in the aggregate will tend to move ahead of the curve and thus be predictive.

Imagine a funnel of political ideas. At the front-end of the funnel, many ideas exist in the ideological soup. Bloggers who are innovators, and the political campaigns, create these innovations, and bloggers who are early adopters select and shape those ideological innovations in such a way that they are attractive to the early majority, i.e. the primary voter.

I suspect the same dynamic in a commercial context. Early product adopters are the first to experience a new product, and are of a personality type that loves to share experiences with others, i.e. they are the ideal bloggers. If bloggers are positive, it's a good bet that the new product or service will take off. If bloggers are not paying attention, that's bad news. If bloggers are paying attention but negative, the situation may be salvagable, if you can listen to their complaints and take action.

This is the second in a series of posts addressing the question: Do blogs have predictive power?

In the first post, I made general comments that blogging communities serve as accelerators, laboratories, and early adopters. To make this more concrete, let's consider the political blogosphere, which is huge in size and very active. Since August my colleague Steve Corman and I have been running, Wonkosphere, which tracks over 1500 conservative, liberal, and independent blogs as they discuss the 2008 presidential race. Here are some observations from our "deep dive":

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A reasonable question concerning the social media is: Are blogs predictive? I will answer that question over the next four posts: first I shall answer the question from the perspective of the consumer-world, and then address it with respect to the political blogosphere, and then talk about some particular examples.

What do we really mean by “predictive”? I think de facto this question is comparative; what we really mean to ask is

1. Do blogs process and spread information more rapidly than other mainsteam media (MSM)? In other words, are they a “first mover” or “early adopter”?

2. Do blogs create buzz around something that would otherwise go unreported by MSM? In other words, are they a “buzz creator”?

In the first case, it’s the speed of the medium that comes into play. In the second case, it’s the diversity of the medium that comes into play. One cannot perfectly seperate the two, but I think it’s worth distinguising them.

First let me answer these questions from the perspective of the consumer-world. We have plenty of examples where the blogosphere, or the internet in general, kept a story alive until MSM could get around to it. Perhaps the most famous is the Intel Pentium chip flaw. For about a month it was relegated to a discussion board topic, and Intel ignored it. Because of the compounding interest in the story (who doesn’t like to take down a giant?), it stayed alive while being ignored by MSM. It is interesting to note that many execs at Intel, including supposedly Andy Grove himself, were not aware of the issue until it hit MSM.

In these cases, blogs have the potential to give a worthy story legs and sustenance until it “matures”, ready for diffusion in MSM.

The second situation is one where bloggers take a more active role in actually uncovering news and making it public. The Dan Rather-Bush draft story is an example, where bloggers quickly vetted and rejected Rather’s story as bogus, which eventually led to the “death” of the Dan Rather brand.

Another example I like to cite involves the Aug 2006 banning of Coca-Cola (and Pepsi) by two Indian states, for having tainted water samples. Most people in the US heard about it on Aug 10, from their local newspaper. It hit large US MSM (e.g. USA Today, BBC, ABC) two days earlier, and NYT led the second-wave of MSM with an Aug 07 report. There was a first wave of MSM coverage that went ignored around Aug 3, with reports from BBC, Reuters, and Toronto Sun. BUT–the Indian blogosphere had been discussing this as early as mid-June (e.g. World Prout Assembly, Mission and Justice), a month BEFORE the court ruled against Coke and Pepsi. Finally, if you were tracking Indian blogs all year long, you would have known that Indian citizens in certain towns were furious with Coke for “stealing” the water from their aquafers, and that trouble was a brewin’ as early as March 06.

So in the consumer world at least, companies know that any single blogger can create a PR catastrophe that has to be attended to; and likewise, positive bloggers can enhance the value of the brand enormously, especially in terms of attracting new customers.

Tomorrow, I’ll address these questions from the perspective of the political Wonkosphere….

When it comes to computing, it's all about capabilities - and it's still about the appliances that can deliver them. This is where Andy Grove's points in his article in Condé Nast Portfolio about his forthcoming book differ from what I can gather are in Nicholas Carr's next book, "The Big Switch." Grove makes the case that large corporations with shareholders asking for more should set their sights on cross-boundary disruptions. It's a growth strategy – one he cites that Apple Computer exemplifies by its entry into the music industry. Interesting, the appliances delivering personal music experience capabilities are really embodiments of personal computers. They allow us to manage personally selected content, aka a client/server model. So, has the PC really disappeared, or is it morphing as new industries (like music) become vulnerable to innovation and big corporations looking for new growth, i.e., the 'capability predators?' As those PC vs. Mac ads indicate, all those iXXX users out there would have to agree that PC is an old term, but they're not likely to predict that their personal pods, laptops, etc. will be totally dependent on an always-connected grid.

It's hard for me to analogize all of computing to electricity like Carr frequently does, and while companies like Apple are out there reinventing the PC as they exploit their organizational capabilities to attack new industries, it makes me wonder if the lights are dimming for Carr's simplistic view. My perspective was reinforced today when I read the article in the Business section of the Arizona Republic citing how Home Depot is now offering residential solar-power systems in all of its 55 Arizona stores. Maybe Personal Power Systems (PPSs) will be all the rage. I'm going to have to go check them out. I'd bet that PPS has some embodiment of a PC - imagine that, a 'Big Switch' that will invoke my PPS to delink me from the grid. It's not really that shocking, is it?

“The conviction was growing in me that the besetting problem was our culture's blindness to the distinction between the tool and the automatic machine. Everyone tended to treat them alike, as neutral agents of human intention. But machines clearly were not neutral or inert objects. They were complex fuel-consuming entities with certain definite proclivities and needs. Besides often depriving their users of skills and physical exercise, they created new and artificial demands—for fuel, space, money, and time. These in turn crowded out other important human pursuits, like involvement in family and community, or even the process of thinking itself. The very act of accepting the machine was becoming automatic.” – Eric Brende, from his book “Better Off”, the first chapter of which can be found here.

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Most politicians are not policy wonks, in the same way that most modern baseball players could not tell you who holds the major league record for most doubles in a season, post WW2 (Todd Helton, 59, in 2000). Hillary Clinton, who led Democrats in Wonkosphere buzz share amongst liberal bloggers yesterday (38% to Obama’s 25%), gave a speech at the Carnegie Institute on science that got science policy wonks out in force. Liberals loved it and conservatives ignored it (they were busy with Sandy Berger story). Let’s take a look at what she had to say.

Here are the basic points of Senator Clinton’s science plan:

1. “First, when I am President, I will lift the current ban on ethical stem cell research.”

2. “Secondly, I will end the politicization of scientific research that has marked the Bush Administration and restore a climate of scientific integrity and innovation.”

3. “I will also have an advisor for science in the White House who reports directly to the President.”

4. “I will increase support for basic and applied research by increasing the research budgets at the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and the Department of Defense.”

5. “I have proposed creating a health information technology infrastructure as part of my health care plan, the American Health Choices Plan.”

6. “I will pursue an ambitious agenda in space exploration and earth sciences. I’ll fully fund NASA’s earth sciences program, launch a new, comprehensive space-based study of climate change, and reverse the deep funding cuts that NASA’s and FAA’s aeronautics research and development budgets have endured in the last few years.”

7. “I think that we’ve got to make science research, technology, mathematics a career in those fields, exciting again.”

8. “Fifth, we need an Apollo-like effort in clean, renewable energy.”

I got curious–is this that far out there, or are these views mainstream amongst the candidates? This is not trivial stuff. As Chris Mooney at Seed Magazine puts it, “The next president of the United States of America will control a $150 billion annual research budget, 200,000 scientists, and 38 major research institutions and all their related labs. This president will shape human endeavors in space, bioethics debates, and the energy landscape of the 21st century.”

If one steps back far enough, the candidates have similar views on what is important re science and technology. They almost all discuss the importance of the information technology, biotechnology, and energy technology; the need to fund R&D which can fuel economic development; and the need to adapt education towards the needs of the future technology sector. Democrats tend to be more specific in their plans and favor government-based solutions, while Republicans tend to discuss technology with respect to certain other issues, such as jobs or health care costs, and favor market-based solutions. Science and technology appears to be an area where both Democrats and Republicans agree on what’s important, but differ significantly on how to do it.

I did find one Republican though that had remarkably similar thoughts to Clinton’s on science and technology: Another policy wonk par excellence, Newt Gingrich. Flashback to 2001…

Gingrich announced today in Washington that he has joined the NanoBusiness Alliance as honorary chairman…”Newt Gingrich has long been the strongest voice in nanotechnology among America’s policy and governmental leaders,” said F. Mark Modzelewski, an appointee in former president Bill Clinton’s administration who now heads the NanoBusiness Alliance. “The emerging nanotechnology sector has gained a brilliant and tested leader.”

The first thing you do is you talk about it every day. You talk about why investing over here is going to help cure cancer. You talk about investing in new forms of learning to allow young Americans to break out. You ought to talk about what we could get done in space in the next 20 years if we had an entrepreneurial spirit… It should be as possible, or more possible, to succeed in America as a scientist or engineer as it is to succeed as a rock star, athlete, or movie star. Unless you set that goal—and that’s got to be a culturally defined goal, the rewards system has to be built in—we will not sustain our leadership role in the world.

To see how they really differ though, we have to examine their corresponding worldviews. Both are so wonkish that this is pretty easy to do. Gingrich’s worldview is informed by the Tofflers’ “Third Wave”:

“For a long time, I have been friends with Alvin and Heidi Toffler, the authors of Future Shock and The Third Way. I first began working with the Tofflers in the early 1970’s on a concept called anticipatory democracy. I was then a young assistant professor at West Georgia State College, and I was fascinated with the intersection of history and the future which is the essence of politics and government at its best.

“For twenty years we [who’s we?] have worked to develop a future-conscious politics and popular understanding that would make it easier for America to make the transition from the Second Wave civilization [the one our Founders gave us] - which is clearly dying - to the emerging, but in many ways undefined Third Wave civilization [Alvin Toffler’s Centrist Utopia].

“The process has been more frustrating and the progress much slower than I would have guessed two decades ago. Yet despite the frustrations, the development of a Third Wave political and governmental system is so central to the future of freedom and the future of America that it must be undertaken.”

Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist, Mark Penn, has a completely different view; from The Spectator:

Penn’s own book, Microtrends: the Small Forces Behind Today’s Big Changes (Allen Lane, £20), that we are talking over a forest of Diet Cokes today. The book advances the central thesis that the age of thunderous ‘macro-trends’ plotted by writers such as Alvin Toffler (Future Shock) and John Naisbitt (Megatrends) is emphatically at an end.

‘The world may be getting flatter, in terms of globalisation,’ he writes, ‘but it is occupied by six billion little bumps who do not have to follow the herd to be heard. No matter how offbeat their choices, they can now find 100,000 people or more who share their taste for deep fried yak on a stick.’ We are observing ‘the niching of America’, says the 53-year-old pollster, an ever-changing mosaic of ‘small, under-the-radar forces that can involve as little as 1 per cent of the population, but which are powerfully shaping our society’. Choice has prevailed over uniformity. It is ‘the triumph of the Starbucks economy over the Ford economy’.

It strikes me that Clinton’s campaign is very much about micro-niching. She didn’t really talk about how science and technology might impact health care, or jobs, or competitiveness, she talked science to scientists.

If all the candidates were forced to study both theses and pick one, I would guess that most of the Democrats would say that they believe in the micro-trends thesis and most of the Republicans would say that they believe in the macro-trends thesis. Micro-trend people believe that in a complex system, agent heterogeneity dominates and produces numerous stable evolutionary states which dynamically change with the environment. Macro-trend people believe that in a complex system, institutions dominate as they define the behavioral rules available to agents, therefore agents are less important than rule-makers.

I consider myself very lucky that my professional career has been coincident with the computer revolution. My life, like so many of yours, would not be the same without software. It has completely shaped what I do in work and play, and how I do it. Since we seem to be in the mood to share our war stories, here are a couple of my own about a life in software.

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In our last issue, Ajay Vinze and Raghu Santanam, both information systems professors at the W. P. Carey School of Business, discussed how principles of supply chain management might be applied to public health emergencies. In the second half of our two-part look at their research, they describe their collaboration with the Decision Theater, a high-tech visualization facility at Arizona State University, to present their data in a way that will permit decision makers who are not "numbers people" to better prepare for emergencies by playing out "what if" scenarios in advance.

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To customers, there's not much to loyalty programs; on the surface they're usually just a piece of plastic and a "Here's how much you saved" line at the bottom of a receipt. But experts at the W. P. Carey School of Business say that for companies, the programs can be phenomenally more complex and important than taking a trifling percentage off a customer's bill.

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In the world of the miscellaneous, information isn't the important stuff; it's what happens between those bits and pieces that counts, according to David Weinberger. In "Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder," Weinberger argues that it is the connections we build around information that create value and meaning in our world.

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Information technology jobs rank high on the list of those most likely to be outsourced to other countries, and thousands of such jobs have been "offshored" in recent years. Despite the trend, there are ways to cut the vulnerability of your IT position, according to Benjamin Shao and Julie Smith David, two professors of information systems at the W. P. Carey School of Business. They offer job-saving tips for techs in a recent paper on the impact of offshore outsourcing.

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