Is “The Right Thing To Do?” the right thing to do?

Posted on December 12, 2012 by David Tebbutt

Last December we embarked on this blog with little idea where the journey would take us. We just felt that a lot of people of good will were out there with good ideas about how to make our world better. All we had to do was find them. Or, better yet, for them to find us.

And, through a mix of word of mouth and downright cajoling, they delivered their thoughts, based on their life experiences, for us to share with a wider audience. And, for that, we are truly grateful to every one of them. Here they are:

As you probably know, this site is non-commercial. Everything is voluntary and the most anyone gets is the opportunity to see their words published and to give themselves a slight exposure to a wider audience. Some benefit from this more than others. No names, no pack drill.

I’d just like to say “Thank you” to every contributor and reader and wish you all seasonal greetings and a happy new year. We’re going to take a bit of a break now. I’ll leave you with a list of the contributions and perhaps you’ll enjoy reading some of those you missed.

Why things will get better - from a Matt Ridley TED talk
Entrepreneur Extraordinaire, Felix Dennis, on Good Fortune
Never mind GDP, what about Gross National Happiness? - from a Chip Conley TED talk
Reconnecting kids with the school curriculum - Ray Maguire
Has the Khan Academy found the right way to educate? - from a Salman Khan TED talk
Why green makes business sense - Ben Goldsmith
Is sustainable growth a myth? - Clive Longbottom
Rag and bone men of the information world - Euan Semple
The power of community Mark Chillingworth
Where’s the ‘social’ in ‘accountancy’? - Martin Banks
Mind the gap - Hussein Dickie
Inhumane HR behaviour - Tracey Poulton
Listen! (To the right people) - David Tebbutt on Cognitive Edge work
Get on the trust trajectory - Rob Wirszycz
Baby, bathwater, beware … - Anne Marie McEwan
Is green the new gold? - Tarquin Henderson
Hunters got us into this mess – will farmers get us out? - Dr. Bill Nichols
Fairtrade, Organic or Me-Me? - Andy Redfern
How sticky are your labels? - David Tebbutt
Reputation is deeds, not words - Tari Lang
Passion + talent = magic - From Sir Ken Robinson’s work
Authenticity vs perception - Dr. Bill Nichols
Could the fly save humanity? - Jason J. Drew
Ignorance and prejudice - Ibukun Adebayo
Superstorm Sandy: what would you have done? - David Tebbutt
Doing the right thing – even when no one is watching - Neil Crofts
Stubbornness – The Nailhouse Principle - Drew Buddie

So, what do you reckon? Is “The Right Thing To Do?” the right thing to do? Do you know anyone who would like to share their learnings from real life for the greater good?

Please point them at me trttd@tebbo.com. Thank you. (PS It could be you too!)

Superstorm Sandy: what would you have done?

Posted on October 31, 2012 by David Tebbutt

No-one knows the timescale but it’s highly likely the human race is doomed. It could be from the sun – doesn’t matter whether it gets hotter or colder, either way we’ll be snookered. It could be from our own actions – short term, like nuclear war or long term like our attacks on the environment that supports us. The question for all of us is whether we should act en masse and at great expense to head off the human-induced changes or take a more fatalistic view. What will be, will be.

This week’s massive storm in New York City has done a brilliant job of focusing attention on what can happen when an extreme weather event hits. And remember that, by the time it reached New York City, hurricane Sandy had diminished to a ‘tropical storm’. Yet, the surge of sea water was still fourteen feet high. No doubt this was partly due to the funnelling effect of the estuaries and rivers that lead to New York City. But the reasons don’t matter greatly, the City clearly could not cope with such a rise.

Environmental specialists had been warning New Yorkers for many years that sea levels are rising and that storm surges can exacerbate such rises. They warned of the sea level being four foot higher by mid-century and, indeed, measures have been taken by a few organisations to make sure that water ingress is prevented to their properties at that level.

This made not a blind bit of difference this week. And, by the time the sea levels rise, it will make even less difference. The mildest storm could result in something similar to this week’s events.

Let’s look at money. Dr Klaus Jacob predicted that the flooding of the subway tunnels under the Harlem and East Rivers would cause them to be unusable for nearly a month, or longer, at an economic loss of about $55bn. Compare this with the estimated cost of three storm barriers to protect the City – $10bn. The trouble is that the people bearing the cost of the latest storm are different people to those who need to spend the lower cost of prevention of future storms. (Except, of course, they are all citizens of the New York area.)

“What’s all this got to do with me?”, I hear you ask. Well, plenty. Just as the New York storm appeared to come ‘out of the blue’, so other climatic events could hit you out of the blue. The question for you is, “how much effort should go into preventing, adapting to or clearing up after such an event in your area?”

Do you do effectively nothing except talk about it a lot? Do you work on prevention which means reducing the harm we’re doing to the environment? Do you work on adaptation, which means accepting things will happen and creating evacuation plans and the like? Or do you work on clearing up the mess after each event?

What do you think is the right thing to do? And why?

Could the fly save humanity?

Posted on October 3, 2012 by Jason j. Drew

We take for granted the fact that we should recycle our glass, newspapers, tin and more recently plastic and water. Businesses and services have sprung up to enable us to achieve this. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Creating and discarding nutrients in the form of sewage, manure and abattoir blood has a far higher environmental impact. When we start to recycle these we will be truly on the path to some sustainability for our planet. As the old Yorkshire saying goes – where there is muck there is money. Let me explain.

Nearly one third of the fish we take from our seas – some fifty million tonnes a year is used in our industrial agricultural and pet food industries. Yet at the same time we dispose of hundreds of millions of tonnes of nutrient-rich waste.

It is not just our human food waste – from supermarkets and food processing businesses – discarding unsightly but perfectly good apples and oranges or out of date but edible foods. It goes much further – it takes as much land, diesel, water and our precious seas to make the bits of a chicken that we eat as the bits we throw away. This waste is as full of valuable nutrients as the bits we eat. Our manure – both animal and human – is also a key source of valuable nutrients. Most animals only take in a small percentage of the nutrients that pass through them – in nature this is recycled.

An animal would drop its manure on the field or die in the bush and nature would recycle the waste nutrients using insects. A fly would lay its eggs on the waste nutrient source, the eggs would hatch into larvae and birds and fish would eat many of those larvae or flies – recycling the nutrients – as well as cleaning up the bio-hazard. It is a case of horses for courses or rather flies for waste. Each species of fly and its larvae are naturally adapted to different types of waste.

A few years ago, I realised that this natural process could form the heart of a new business. I decided to industrialise fly farming. We take waste nutrients from slaughterhouses – blood and guts – and feed this to the eggs laid by our fly breeding stock. These eggs hatch into larvae and grow at an enormous rate once you take away the environmental factors that stop this happening in nature.

One kilo of fly eggs turns into 380 Kilos of larvae in 72 hours. Larvae are what free range chickens in fields and fish in streams eat as part of their natural diet – ask any fisherman! This natural source of protein has been increasingly replaced in our industrial farming operations with the more readily available fishmeal. The chemical composition of fishmeal is almost exactly the same as that of fly larvae – which is why it was chosen as a substitute.

So we’ve copied nature and led the process of making protein from waste nutrients profitably, sustainably and on a large scale. We are already in production and we believe that we can produce Magmeal at scale for around $900 per tonne which compares favourably with fishmeal – which is currently around $1350 per tonne, and likely to rise unless the oceans can be better managed.

The world urgently needs new and sustainable sources of protein. Fly larvae fed on existing waste nutrient sources is one of these. Perhaps the adage is true – where there is muck there is money – and sustainability!

Fairtrade, Organic or Me-Me?

Posted on July 25, 2012 by Andy Redfern

According to my wife, cynicism is neither big nor clever. She feels that cynical remarks and sarcastic comments are the preserve of those who’ve lost their zest and zip for life. Sadly, running an ethical retail site brings me into contact with a lot of cynical people.

“What do you mean by being ethical?”

“How do you know your products are ethical?”

“That ethical tag is just way of making me pay more, it doesn’t prove anything.”

“Now we’re in a double dip recession, you’ve had it. No one can afford to buy ethically anymore”

This final comment was made by someone looking to get a cheap deal. He felt that no one cared about ethics; people only cared about money when the chips were down. He felt that Fairtrade was just a cynical marketing ploy to extract more money from him.

So, have people thrown their ethics out of the window? Do they no longer care about the ethics they claimed to hold dear during the good times?

Well, the picture is mixed. In the world of grocery shopping, the two giants of the ethical labelling world are Fairtrade and Organic. In the UK, certified organic product sales fell by 3.7% in 2011 with a number of supermarkets culling offerings and failing to add new own-label organic items. Fairtrade on the other hand grew by 12% over the same period with giants like Tate and Lyle switching huge quantities of its supplies to Fairtrade sources.

We can draw an interesting conclusion from this apparent difference in the relative ethical tags. I contend that core customers of both labels are unchanged and it’s only at the margins that organic customers have slipped away. When even Nick Clegg and his lawyer wife claim they can’t afford to shop at largely organic Waitrose, there is clearly a perceived high price to pay for ethical items. But I would suggest that it is all about motivation and belief rather than price.

When I first heard of fair trade in 1983, it seemed so obvious a concept to treat developing world suppliers fairly that I expected supermarkets to switch entirely to fair trade within three or four years. 30 years later, with sales of over a £1billion per year, it’s a huge niche market but capturing the hearts and minds of consumers has been a slow process. The ‘problem’ is that many consumers ask, “What’s in it for me?” So Fairtrade has always had an educational element at its core to help people understand why it is the right thing to do.

I believe that this is what makes Fairtrade more recession-proof than organic. There never was a “me” benefit with Fairtrade. People support it because they believe it is right and so, even when money is tight, we tend to stick to our key beliefs. The Organic shopper is more diverse. The dubious “me” benefit of organic being better for you was tough to prove scientifically, so the fad-led consumer has moved on to the next thing to make them feel better.

This is a key lesson in long-term sustainability. People will commit to a brand and its products in the long-term if they believe it is the right thing to do. Fads come and go, but things which support our core beliefs are here to say. Doing the right thing may prove to be the most radical marketing strategy yet.

Hunters got us into this mess – will farmers get us out?

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Dr. Bill Nichols

It used to be boring. But five recessionary years have confirmed ‘retention’ as marketing fashion’s ‘new black’. It’s all that stuff everybody vaguely knew but most didn’t practice: loyalty, lifetime value, relationships. And, take note, it’s no fad. Just long overdue.

In traditional marketing, acquisition – making the next sale – is king. Understandably. It emphasises the next win, the thrill of the chase. It adopts the language of the ‘hunter’ (as top business developers are called in consultancy): you target the punter and you ‘knock him over’. It offers glamour and rich reward. And, in a final and most egregious flourish, it is the essence of the disaster that has engulfed banking. If you combine PhD-complex products, human ‘hunter’ instinct and cultures incentivised only to hit the next sale or deal, then why is anyone surprised by Barclays et al?

Poor old retention, meanwhile, is hard, continuous work. Long-term and longer yawn. Such ‘farming’ simply doesn’t have the same sex appeal as hunting. It won’t justify a bottle of Bolly! As an early boss summarised: “so long as we win more than we’re losing, who cares?”

Answer: well almost every business. For example, stemming a typical annual 25-33% churn means survival in tough times and will pump the bottom line in good. Leveraging the recommendation value of loyal client-advocates often underpins 50% of new business in a professional services or considered purchase environment. Focusing on your ‘share of wallet’ (say of a customer’s eating out preferences) may not only yield growth but also innovation for the long-term.

How does it work? Well don’t panic. This isn’t an ad for an expensive CRM software implementation. True, that might help when it comes to downstream execution. But first focus on how you create the retention asset: customer goodwill.
Think of customers’ ‘goodwill’ as a series of bank accounts. Keep them nicely in the black and you can ride out problems and build opportunities. Run them on ‘empty’, or into the red, and the smallest incident may mean you lose the customer.

Research finds six major ways to credit your customers’ goodwill accounts. As you might anticipate, people expect to be satisfied with service and utility. And many are committed to brands and relationships.

But evidence suggests that the most valuable is satisfaction based on pleasure. Your product ticks all boxes (utilitarian satisfaction) but do customers enjoy their experiences? Your waiter’s timing is impeccable but does he ever make customers smile? Your project reviews are perfectly organised and beautifully presented but does anyone have fun? And, note, this pleasure (or hedonic) satisfaction unerpins a very potent customer behaviour i.e. public advocacy or willingness to endorse your product in an article or on stage.

Next comes fairness (much loved of course by Brits). Please note this isn’t about some philosophical absolute. It is, rather, about perceptions. If a customer believes that you deal fairly in all aspects from pricing to after-sales service, it creates an unstated ‘my word is my bond’ relationship. Fairness is especially a strong defensive currency. It creates resistance to switching (‘yes, ABC is cheaper but I trust XYZ’) and it supports exclusive preference (‘I know we could easily walk to Beta or Gamma Restaurant but I’m at home at Alphas’). Note to any new potential entrants to UK banking: build even the most basic reputation for fairness and just watch the customers pour out of the old discredited high street players…

And finally: well it may be the ‘new black’ but your opportunity is that most people really don’t know how to wear it well. Retention isn’t about ‘targetting’ with a loyalty card or knocking them over with a special loyal-customer bonus. That’s hunter language…. Effective retention is about engaging, working together, creating mutual opportunities… It’s simply the right thing to do. Isn’t it?

Is green the new gold?

Posted on June 27, 2012 by Tarquin Henderson

Sadly the Environment seems to be increasingly one of Westminster’s favoured battlegrounds. A place where the Treasury can show who really is boss while the Department for Energy and Climate Change (led by a Lib-Dem) attempts to grapple with some of the most challenging issues facing our country today.

I say grapple but I could also (again sadly) say fumble or stumble as there has been an alarming amount of dilly dallying at times on the timing and structure of key environmental policies – but that’s the theme for another post. The key point here is that despite all of this political posturing, the green agenda is not going away and nor can it.

We’ve all heard the view that now we are going through the economic wringer, any thoughts of doing something good for the planet have to take a back seat. That is a view fostered in the main by never-knowingly-under-lunched City types who much prefer to assess business on the levers they best understand and to avoid harder to assess, in number terms, contributory factors like social and environmental responsibility. I think they are missing the point and not just because we all need to ‘save the planet’. (A euphemism for ‘save ourselves’, by the way.)

Environmental issues need to be put into a stronger business context because they are just as relevant to many businesses’ balance sheets as the cost of raw materials, payroll or competitive pricing. That might seem a bit of a stretch but this is really not the warped view of the strident environmentalist lobby. Managing energy use in business today is about making your business more competitive.

A number of factors are at work. Here are three of them:

Firstly, the simple cost of energy. Despite some recent decreases, the general trend is for a steady and inextricable increase in energy costs – to heat the factory, power the machine tools, light the call centre, turn the turbine.
Then there is an increasing trend towards supply-chain compliance. If you make sandwiches (or trucks for that matter) for a supermarket, the chances are that they will be placing increasingly punitive penalties in place if you don’t cut their environmental mustard. Or they may just choose to work with someone else. While that is a factor already with some clear precedents in the Food & Drink sector, we are seeing signs of other markets adopting this strategy – manufacturing, aviation, entertainment and leisure.
Also, while there is a lot of carrot in the Government’s approach to encouraging consumers to be more efficient in their energy use, it’s the big stick that is being used increasingly with businesses. The Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) is already causing disquiet among the UK’s largest businesses – it’s effectively designed to place an energy tax on the country’s biggest energy users. My colleagues and I believe that this approach will begin to filter down towards SMEs before too long. The basic message being, “if you haven’t got your energy act together then the Government are going to strongly ‘encourage’ you to do so …”

What many businesses are missing is the will to do something about all this. To date, unless you are a power user of energy there has been little compulsion to do anything. It’s simply not been that important. My view is that those businesses, no matter how small, who grasp the concept that good energy management can be good for business, will improve their competiveness and their bottom lines. So green can be made into gold.

Baby, bathwater, beware …

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Anne Marie McEwan

William Hague said recently, “There’s only one growth strategy: work hard.” Without daring to go near the politics of that statement, I have to say that it would have made more sense to say “work smart.” You can flog your guts out working hard the same old way but if you don’t take into account the changing world and intelligently figure out how to work with it, then you’re likely to exhaust yourself and fail into the bargain. Sorry William.

At the moment, you hear a lot of buzz around ‘social business’ or, before that, ‘Business 2.0′ and similar sounding slogans. The trouble with such ‘paradigm shifts’ is that they all imply a jettisoning of past experience. How stupid is that? And, no, I’m not taking a pop at anyone or any organisation in particular, just making the point that ‘new’ is often complementary to some of the ‘old’.

Some of the ‘old’ is with us, rallying under a new banner. “Organisations are networks of formal and informal relationships.” Geddaway. Of course they are; they always have been. The difference now is that we have software and communication tools to massively improve their effectiveness.

We have the legacy of the first wave of smart working, in particular, “the need to make innovation everyone’s business and to empower workforces to ‘take action that will benefit the customer without layers of bureaucratic approval’.” Lessons learned from the successful pioneers of these working methods are invaluable input to what’s needed now, in this even more uncertain and chaotic world.

We need to build flexible systems with adaptability, integration, disciplined collaboration, innovation and knowledge sharing in mind. This isn’t a lazy set of buzzwords, each is a vital consideration as we invent our way to a better future. I could have added more – discovery, sharing and co-creation, for example. The point is that the networked world really is a network of brains, knowledge and information sources all orchestrated for the collective good. ‘Collective’ in this case has to include customers which, by extension, means suppliers. Otherwise you won’t have any customers when the current turmoil ends.

Turmoil? No, I’ve not made a big deal of the ways in which the world is changing and the challenges we face because I assume you know. But, just in case, try these for size: ageing populations; shifts in global economic power and declining industries. The latter being replaced by new high-value industries such as: bio-tech; electronic gaming; renewable energies; and so on. Adapting to change is not easy but the status quo is no longer a place of refuge.

The future of work is visible. Most of the ingredients exist, even though we’re bound to see more come along. It doesn’t matter; we have enough to act. We can blend the old with the new and connect up to internal and external knowledge flows.

Here’s an example taken from a presentation by Alistair Moffat: NSN, a 60,000 person organisation formed from parts of Nokia Networks and Siemens Communications, faced the challenge of accelerating the emergence of a common culture. It chose to use discussion forums to create The Culture Square, a forum where company‐wide conversations could take place.

People were encouraged to talk freely and anonymously without risking dismissal for saying what they believed.The values and attitudes of the Chief Executive and his desire to nurture an organisational culture consistent with adult-to-adult relationships, where people could disagree without being disagreeable, were core to how the conversations unfolded and, indeed, succeeded. The Culture Square came to represent trust and inclusion., revealing the important issues that people were most concerned about.

Each person involved in innovation and problem-solving can be augmented by the knowledge and capabilities in their network. This is massive. And it’s at our fingertips. Yet what are many businesses doing with social technologies, the potential turbochargers of change? Imposing a blanket ban.

How blinkered is that?

Anne Marie wants you to know that she was aided and abetted by David Tebbutt in the creation of this post.

Get on the trust trajectory

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Rob Wirszycz

Who do you trust these days? Your holiday company or TripAdvisor? Your PC provider or a user forum? Your mates for an introduction to a new partner or an online dating service? I could go on, but you’ve probably caught my drift. The world has changed. Whether it’s automation or crowdsourcing, there are now better ways to achieve the results you want.

What does this mean for suppliers of goods and services? Once upon a time, they were the source of information and knowledge about their products. And, yes, they were trusted. Many of them did apparently sensible things like outsourcing crucial elements of their operation to low-paid people in far-flung lands who did the minimum they could get away with. This worked for the accountants but not for the customer. Producer-efficient but not customer-effective. No wonder trust and respect evaporated.

We’re waking up. We inhabit a world where we expect the right answers, where we demand high levels of service, where we switch on and get everything we need and, crucially, where we’re used to transferring our business to somewhere more amenable if we feel let down by a supplier.

We don’t actually care much whether we get our answers from an automaton or from a human as long as they’re the right answers. My car tells me when it thinks I’m tired. I don’t mind. It’s usually right. It knows because it looks at time behind the wheel and my driving pattern. I love it (the car that is) so much that I’ve not so much bought a car as bought a driving experience. My every need – service, insurance, monitoring for advance warning of problems en route – is taken care of by the manufacturer’s IT service network, in which the car is a wifi node.

If trust is at the heart of business these days (as it always should have been) then it’s clear that many companies have taken their eye off the trust trajectory. They simply don’t ‘get it’ and continue with their traditional behaviours. They worked in the past, why shouldn’t they continue? Because their customers are different, their expectations have changed and this can only accelerate as the good companies show up the bad. Switching, in most cases, is a button press away. And that button press might dissuade many other people not to use your services too. That press, and all the others, could add up to a massive thumbs down for you.

The good companies, the ones that do ‘get it’, use smart humans and automation driven by data patterns to achieve a positive effect, with the traditional middle bits – outsourcing and out-tasking – being disintermediated. Companies are taking back control and protecting their reputations. At one extreme is the expert interpretation of context, and at the other lies self–service, augmented by knowledge and data. Each aims to completely satisfy the needs and desires of the customer. The boot is now well and truly on the other foot. The customer’s, that is. And we like it. We use this approach to learn where to go on holiday, where to eat, what to watch, who to date, what jobs exist, how to travel to work, how to lose weight, how much my house is worth, and so on.

If your business is unaware of this polarity, then I have bad news for you. You won’t last. If you’re a personal services company – hairdresser, window cleaner, housekeeper – you’ll probably last longer than most. But even your lives will change as people increasingly find you, and drop you, by what they read online.

You are increasingly, not who you think you are, but what others think of you. Collectively. Get it or die.

Mind the gap

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Hussein Dickie

Large income disparities are very destabilising for any economy. In the UK this is a very real problem. This graph shows the Gini Index for the UK to 2009. (With kind permission of the Institute of Fiscal Studies which owns the copyright.)

A coefficient of 1 would mean one person receives all income, while 0 gives everyone an equal share. Among all developed countries the UK has the largest growth in income inequality. By contrast, Scandinavian countries, France and Germany have actually managed narrow ‘the gap’.

Most people were appalled by the excessive salaries and bonuses that bankers paid to themselves and found the practice immoral and bad business ethics. The government told us that it only concerned a few bankers and we should accept this to stay competitive in the global market.

Monetary Financial Institutions are of concern because they should fulfil key socio-economic functions, i.e. providing liquidity to consumers and small businesses. However they have become a self-serving industry more occupied with gambling and speculation for their own profit interests and quite disconnected from the needs of the rest of us.

But, let’s face it, if you could create money from nothing and 65% of your income came from interest, wouldn’t you want to create and lend as much as possible? This, combined with a compensation policy that encourages this behavior, is one of the major drivers for the widening of ‘the gap’.

In the five years 2004 to 2008 the money supply (M4) in the UK almost doubled in five years. £1.3 trillion was created by our MFI’s and lent, with interest, to consumers, businesses and the Government. The relevant part of the Gini index – below – shows that wealth at this time accumulated increasingly to the rich. ‘The gap’ widened.

The chart below divides the taxpaying population into 10 deciles, each containing roughly 3 million people; the poorest to the left and the richest to the right. As you can see, the richest ten percent got 37 percent of total compensation while the poorest ten percent actually lost 1.3 percent of theirs.

About 1.3 million people work in the banking industry (4.2 percent of total employees in the economy). Of them, 702,000 are represented in the top decile. In other words, 23 percent of the richest 10 percent are bankers.

The next chart compares the growth in banking compensation with the rest of the economy. Up to 2008, banks ran at 11 percent compared with 4.3 percent for the rest of the economy. After that the banks booked £30 billion in losses and remuneration dropped by 8%. But, as you can see (green line), it was only a short interlude, then remuneration continued at the rate they had become accustomed to.

Part of the banks’ 11 percent growth rate could be explained by the increasing number of employees but this would only explain about 2-2.5 percent. And it doesn’t explain why compensation grew again after 2009 when employment actually declined sharply and has still not reached the level of 2008.

The red caps in the next chart show the amount bankers received over and above the ‘rest of the economy’ growth rate of 4.3%. This amounts to an average £6.4 billion per year.

To set this into perspective; The poorest 3 million in this country receive only about £10 billion out of the total compensation pot, those little red caps would make a huge difference to their standard of living. Or, if the government received this extra cash, it could reduce the deficit by a massive four to five percent per year.

Yes, fiscal measures can help distribute wealth more fairly but, really, we need to redesign our banking system; one that stops private banks creating money from nothing, stops them taking risks on the back of taxpayers and compensates employees for the right reasons. Such systemic changes will stabilise our economy, end those boom and bust cycles that victimise mainly the poor, and liquidity will start flowing to where it actually produces something real.

Many lessons in history teach us that the path we are on at the moment will lead to revolt and socio-economic instability and, eventually, the collapse of society and depression. Could the recent riots be a portent?

Rag and bone men of the information world

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Euan Semple

We are all aware these days of the need to make better use of our available resources, whether this is recycling our domestic waste or minimising our use of energy guzzling technologies. We apply these green principles to our physical environments – why shouldn’t we apply them to our intellectual environments as well?

In the world of business we waste an awful lot of our existing and available knowledge. We reinvent the wheel on a regular basis when we have perfectly good, well documented wheels available to us. We don’t tap into the accumulated experience of our staff. We store vast amounts of information at considerable expense, often making it hard to find in the process, and then feel overloaded with the trivial bits of information that seem to get in our way on a day to day basis.

The main tools currently for business communication are the email and the Word document. Email is commonly cited as one of the main sources of stress and frustration in organisational life. This is largely because it gives priority to the sender of information. The amount of information coming into our inbox is not in our control and we still feel an obligation to respond to things that have been sent to us. Mostly what we are sent are Word documents which have become very formulaic with multi-page reports the norm simply because they are written to a formula and a template.

We could do so much better by than this by using social tools which can add immense value both in the reduction of daily noise and in a greater ability to reuse our existing knowledge. Blogging and Twitter are teaching us collectively how to point and as more of us do this we develop networked sense-making which enhances our ability to learn and improve. We build networks of people to follow who are good at finding, and sharing, the good stuff. Our networks filter the web for us on a daily basis and they dig into our old information to retrieve the gold dust.

These tools are also teaching a more concise form of writing, potentially a whole new form of business literacy. They require us to give context to information and to add value. Unlike email, this time the control is with the receiver of information and they know it. If you don’t make a difference for someone else with your use of social tools no one will subscribe to you – they will tune you out.

Bloggers are the rag and bone men of the information world. They root around in the rubbish tips of information, picking over the bones and finding the good bits. They combine discarded writing in new, innovative and productive ways. They re-discover long forgotten information and breathe life into it by giving it context and meaning. When they combine in networks they offer the possibility of increasing the usefulness and longevity of your information as never before.

The Right Thing To Do

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Category Archives: Sustainability