It used to be called “getting over” but you don’t hear that expression anymore. You expect it in the public so that’s not getting over. You join the private to get away from it and resent it when it shows up, which it does, more than ever. Some now call it hustle.

• The moderator continually requests that participants keep their comments within the topic, framework and agenda but the hand keeps going up and the interruption is “just this once”.
• The group’s charter includes never using the group for business solicitation or self-promotion and a new member tries to sneak one in that’s barely camouflaged and the interruption is “just this once”.
• The professional service provider provides free, search-able access to ideas, solutions and content but the uncommitted client interrupts to ask for and discuss what’s already easily available “just this once”.

This self-management technique is the best way to discern if you’re the perp or the victim of getting over. Ask yourself “what would this look like if everyone chose to do this just this once?” The key word is choose. Don’t choose or settle for the wrong hustle, unless you’re Superfly.

I confess. I rarely comment. But since I want to participate more I thought Google Buzz might be a good sharing and discussion platform.

So this is what I’ve observed after a few days experimenting with Buzz: very few tech/business people, often referred to as celebrities, dominate the public discussions. The vast majority of those who follow them race to make comments, agree or disagree, troll, rail against, offend, self-promote, cross-promote, ask for something, spam, praise and sometimes add value. This of course, is nothing new in public discussion groups.

What’s different and dramatic now is the scale…something like 10 million Google Buzz posts the first few days. So I followed a few of the celebrities, and observed how they engaged an almost instantaneous swarm of tens of thousands of followers. My sense: a collective need arises that I can only describe as: “Do You Care About Me?”. And I thought…do they care? How? And what does care even mean?

I can’t think of a better starting point for any brand (including global microbrands) to grow and develop in the Web 2.0 and beyond world, than to ask those questions. This is my first pass at a framework to facilitate that process. I followed a model that I created years ago for knowledge awareness, and its been valuable.

Why do it? Because to care is the natural state and point of power. Its also a state tremendously negatively affected by contradicting and limiting complex belief systems that inhibit growth and development.

“I Care” – is there a better way to change the status quo?

Embodiment: the “E” in DRIVE

One of the 5 elements of the RedShift DRIVE Self-Awareness and Change Leadership Model, and key to shifting identity in the emotional/neurobiological dimension, is Embodiment.

Huge change shifts can create the perfect storm of heightened unwanted feelings combined with an increasingly perceived need to refute emotions. But to put on a false front is to live in conflict with oneself, blocking the motion of being and diminishing creativity, natural influence and personal power. The result is unhappiness, frustration and resistance that spreads when what is denied and can no longer be contained, is projected onto others. In extreme cases, it escalates to a toxic environment, self-harm, abuse and violence.

Feelings freely expressed, on the other hand, are valuable pointers to what people believe, and how they perceive themselves, in relation to change in their personal, professional and organizational lives. Awareness of those beliefs means they can be examined and replaced if they’re not aligned with what’s desired or with a new direction. Its a mistake to create an environment in which change must take place in mind only. That’s because identity, as well as the moment-to-moment choice to protect or grow, is embodied at the cellular level. Awareness includes body awareness. Expression comes through the body as well as the brain. Organizations can unlock institutional culture (collective beliefs) as well as institutional knowledge.

Social tools, computing and networks support an environment in which lasting, multi-dimensional change can occur; in which creative power is unlocked through participation, inclusiveness, authenticity, and transparency and in which leaders will continually sense and re-align the levers of growth and protection.

An underlying technology of the machine tool industry I was involved with was tribology, concerned with friction, lubrication and wear. Round and cylindrical parts last longer when the hardness and smoothness is improved and continually lubricated. The need for tribology grew when tolerance for friction decreased as engines became smaller (example: compact cars) and applications became more critical (example: artificial hip joints).

Without tribology applications, anything from grit to human antibodies will abrade, erode and eventually destroy surface finish.

Its a good metaphor for how to respond to the changes and uncertainty resulting from an increasingly smaller and connected globe, lack of tolerance for bad systems and replacement of worn-out structures.

Worry, doubt, ego, hubris and what Julia Cameron beautifully describes as giving in to “the temptation of despair” will just as quickly erode individual and collective human potential as a speck of dirt will destroy a bearing. Self-aware people and organizations are vigilant about thinking, assumptions and expectations. The result is a mirror-finish belief system or culture that deflects what’s not wanted and functions smoothly, regardless of circumstances.

Relationships, networks and social capital provide the lubricant.

I’m not surprised that the most inspiring essay I’ve read in years is written by a motorcycle repairman, who also happens to be a great writer and who has a Ph.D. in political philosophy. His essay contrasts the levels of critical reasoning, intuition, judgment, experience and metacognition in both the bike shop and in the think tank. The former wins hands down.

Although I’ve never been a mechanic I did work for a decade in the machine-tool industry, both as corporate controller and entrepreneur/start-up partner. But the industry was in decline so I got an MBA and a year later started my career as a knowledge professional, specifically a Web 1.0 strategy consultant. It didn’t take long for my elation to turn to disillusion.

I remember a conversation I’d had with one of our solution architects, which in Web 1.0 meant he could write a paragraph and include a diagram. I showed him a brochure from my former company that I’d co-founded, highlighting one of our portable, lathe-mounted superfinishing machines that we designed and manufactured. He smirked and remarked “boy, you’ve come a long way”. The web consulting company merged several times and was eventually absorbed by a larger Web 1.0 company which then went away several years later. I think my co-worker ended up in financial services. After a another short interactive strategy consulting position I became self-employed. The machine-tool company I’d co-founded was under-capitalized and it folded. I lost touch with my former partners but occasionally drive through the industrial park where we were once located.

Its been 10 years but reading the essay reminded me exactly how I felt when the people who made concepts disparaged the people who made capital equipment. I’m grateful that I still have the traces of grease and oil in my blood to be able to appreciate one of the writer’s examples of the kinds of crises that industrial workers and mechanical engineers experienced on an daily basis.

I once accidentally dropped a feeler gauge down into the crankcase of a Kawasaki Ninja that was practically brand new, while performing its first scheduled valve adjustment. I escaped a complete tear-down of the motor only through an operation that involved the use of a stethoscope, another pair of trusted hands and the sort of concentration we associate with a bomb squad. When finally I laid my fingers on that feeler gauge, I felt as if I had cheated death. I don’t remember ever feeling so alive as in the hours that followed.

But what I most identified with in this essay, is author’s description of the “feel” of the knowledge work jobs he’d had and how most everything about management and process contradicted anyone’s ability to produce great, creative work in order to churn out banal, yet profit-maximizing, output. Perhaps I’m over-idealizing my former life, but I don’t remember that kind of creativity stultification in my machine-tool days. But I still cringe to remember how as Web 1.0 consolidated, management continually tightened the throttle on critical reasoning and creative ideas that didn’t fit with their formula. They hated it and I couldn’t live without it. So, like the writer, I got out, not by opening a motorcycle repair shop but by starting my own solo professional service firm. I’d had enough of a taste of “process management” as a Web 1.0 knowledge worker to realize that if I wanted to create and produce at and beyond the level of which I knew I was capable, I’d have to do it as an independent.

Yet like him, I can imagine the possibilities of a more entrepreneurial, post-crisis economy and some resurgence of industry, the trades and the artisans. And I have faith that there’s even a chance for new and better knowledge work as hierarchies flatten and social business models and technologies replace conformity, formula, centralization and control with collaboration, networks, sharing, ideas and critical reasoning. He eloquently describes how our quality of life depends on it.

Our peripheral vision is perhaps recovering, allowing us to consider the full range of lives worth choosing. For anyone who feels ill suited by disposition to spend his days sitting in an office, the question of what a good job looks like is now wide open.

RedShift:12-Month Social Media Experience

I realized that its been exactly 12 months since I decided to get involved with social media. I’d already been blogging for a number years, but prior social media experiments were disappointing. Its good that I gave it another chance.

There’s so much out there about how to use social media for professional and business benefit. It can be daunting to find the right information that you can relate to if you’re a small business or professional service provider just getting started. That’s why I wanted to present my experience as a story and a picture. I didn’t follow a plan; I just dove in.

The experiential, test and learn approach worked great for me and it was right that I waited until the social networking applications allowed users full control. If I made a mistake, or changed my mind, it was easy to edit or delete. I needed that.

I didn’t have a plan beyond wanting to connect with people and bring my content to a higher level, and I think that was a good thing. I developed my own social media models and tools as I learned and gained experience. The more I learned, on my own and from others that I connected with, the more clear I got about where I was going with social media and how it integrated with my my business. It was an iterative, not linear, progression. That’s typical for me, but that’s me. Success in social medial looks and feels different for everyone and there’s nothing wrong with figuring out what’s most valuable to you as you work with it.

My only strong recommendation is to not get bogged down in a lot of advance research or planning, or wanting to be like others. That’s because of the sheer volume of information out there and the huge numbers of people involved. Just start. You’ll figure it out as you go along.

I think that iterative processes and learning are better expressed in visuals and I’m hoping readers will relate to some of my activities and milestones in the diagram and hopefully can imagine their own. I’ve tried to illustrate how my social media experience for a small professional service firm is an ongoing, fluid work in process.

I’m pleased that I’ve built a good foundation and platform for growth, have new relationships with excellent people, and have expanded my personal and professional influence. The biggest return at this point is the content I’ve developed and integrated through repeatedly expressing my ideas, insights, beliefs and observations for my small, high quality and growing community.

The only cost was my time and its been well spent. In fact, after only 12 months, my social media experiment has morphed into my most important small business system. Its become the cornerstone of my intellectual and social capital development and hopefully, in the near future, a driver of increased awareness of my brand by people who need what I offer.

For small businesses and professional service providers in the connected and conceptual world, social media can definitely add to the Value of You!.

RedShift: The New ROI-Of You

If everything you read or hear about money and finance contradicts your present experience, what you want and where you’re going, why look or listen? Think about it: do you want the so-called “experts” to determine your worth?

You may protest, saying you have $100 in the bank and owe $20,000, so you know you’re toast. Really? By what criteria? Most of the financial valuation criteria was designed for a world economy that bears little resemblance to the present, and maybe none to the near future.

So perhaps:
You’ve heavily invested in your physical well-being that will likely prolong your life for 20 years. Is that not a high-yield investment?

You’ve created a global micro-branded business that is not generating much revenue. What about the many intangible assets that can be amortized? How much? How long?

You’re beginning your encore career and are concerned with making yourself and the world better. How do you value your present and future impact? On how many lives? For how many generations even after you’re gone?

You’re sticking out, for 8 more years, a job you despise to meet your financial goals. How do you value what you really owe for that 8 years, or beyond?

The probable scenarios are countless. What does yours look like?

Remove your attention from the 100% negative financial reporting and boldly claim and create the value of you. Its not a fantasy. Its creative authority. Perhaps your -$19,900 negative worth is actually +$4 million. Which will you intend?.

Social Media:Community Snapshot

Social media will increasingly become more important to businesses that must find new ways to gain influence and increase attention share in peer-to-peer (friends) networks.

However, the strategies being developed to help companies accomplish this are often loosely based on a traditional sales and marketing funnel analogy, identifying community members as:

• visitors
• prospects
• leads
• opportunities
• customers

The funnel goal is to focus efforts on the people who are most likely to be influenced to take action and move them through the funnel.

This is an effective social network model but is based on assumptions that are not applicable for many businesses. The graphic simply illustrates a non-linear social community model as a connected group of people, including a tiny percentage who talk and a very large percentage who listen only, and who all have latent needs. Often, that’s it!

In this model, people (peers) who listen only to other people (peers and brand) may be just as likely to be influenced as the small percentage of people (peers) who talk. And there’s no way of knowing what the brand (people) can do to facilitate that. It requires experiential learning.

Because many communities look and act like this, its critical that business social media strategies differentiate assumptions from myths and not base their quest for quantitative metrics and ROI on those myths. Its harder to do that than it sounds because we individually and collectively (culture) identify with what’s worked in the past. Its what we “know”.

But success could mean testing many assumptions about the 95% of community members who listen only, and learning how to earn their attention and better understand them. Compared to traditional marketing methods, its a less clear, test and learn approach, dependent more on time than money. But that should not mean a casual or haphazard, half-hearted approach to social media.

Regardless of how tentative you feel about it, or how small you start, take it seriously. This is the future, and whatever the size of your business, an important decision you’ll make and change that you’ll lead.

Social Media and Business:Computing Shift

Business Users & Social Media:Creating Natural Influence

There’s little doubt that the coming explosion of social media will greatly impact how businesses will interact in the future. The problem is that many of us who will influence businesses through our consulting, speaking and writing are mostly talking to each other and preaching to the choir so to speak.

The general consensus is that authentic communications, not technology, must drive social media initiatives. I agree with that. But the more I talk to traditional businesses of all sizes, the more I hear concerns about the short and long-term integration of internal and external social networking with their enterprise systems.

So I’ve been following Microsoft’s direction as they re-position their business and enterprise systems for social computing on the server platform, the cloud platform and combinations of those. I don’t approach projects from the technical side but I’ve come around to the importance of aligning social media strategies with corporate computing strategies. That means understanding how both are evolving and corresponding, as well as following Microsoft’s direction.

The graphics show my preference for shifting power to end users by giving them the choice, independence and synchronized data inherent in cloud models. Although this is an ideal, its likely a long way off for most traditional businesses. I don’t need to be in I.T. to understand the implications and that none of these proposed enterprise system change models are simple.

But I do think that an effective traditional business social media strategy must incorporate the clients’ enterprise systems: what they have now, what they plan for the long-term and Microsoft’s social computing direction. For business social media initiatives, technology doesn’t lead, but it matters.

Social Media - Medical Device Industry

I have a former background in machine-tool, as a controller and later, a partner. A key market was medical device which has continued to grow, 6% annually in the U.S., which manufactures a large percentage of global product.

Despite industry consolidation, approximately 80% of the more than 8,000 U.S. medical device firms employ less than 50 people. What they lack in resources, they can make up in agility and responsiveness to highly specific customer needs and requirements which include R&D partnerships and new market applications for existing products and processes.

Success for the small medical device manufacturer requires continual research, a focus on promotion, internal knowledge sharing and collaborative partnerships. For these reasons, as well as their insistence on getting the biggest (measurable) bang for their media investments, medical device companies can greatly benefit from social media.