RonAmok!

Last October, I described the reasons why companies need to look beyond advertising, marketing, and PR to experience the full benefit of social media technologies. In November, I discussed the importance of seeking the 10X business solution instead of blindly shoehorning new technologies into existing business practices. Today, I want to expand upon both of them by addressing a fundamental question that anyone running a business should ask themselves.

Technology and Management

Successful businesses are built upon efficiencies. The most competitive companies solve problems faster, cheaper, or deliver higher quality products and services than their competition. Technology has played a pivotal role in the quest for efficiencies. For example, innovations in water-power and automation led to the Industrial Revolution, which in turn established the basis of the modern corporation. For the past two-hundred years, management decisions surrounding technological advances have been driven by the premise that efficiency is attained through centrally locating resources such as capital, matériel, and labor.

Until recently.

New technologies are chipping away at this premise and opening a new field of thought. Is it possible that the road to corporate efficiency may actually run through the decentralization of corporate resources instead?

Many Hands Make Light Work

For two centuries, management’s role has been to steward centrally located resources. Good managers distribute work among employees, monitor their progress, and ultimately ensure that the work product is completed optimally. During this era, automation squeezed inefficiencies from centrally-located corporate resources, in turn obsoleting employee jobs (the resource) while sparing managerial jobs (the resource stewards).

The emergence of social technologies, however, has changed the rules. Not only have they opened access to distributed labor forces, but network technologies have introduced automation into tasks once reserved for managers. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, for example, divides large projects into small tasks, distributes those tasks to a networked labor force, and then assembles the completed tasks into a final work product.

But, what if we took the concept of distributed labor to the next level? What if we combined rapidly dropping hardware costs, popular social networking technologies, and automation to create an application-specific network? Might such a system give companies the ability to tackle problems that were once considered impossible through resource centralization?

Networked Hands Make Even Lighter Work

The moment that the Fukushima nuclear power plant released radiation into the air last March, Japanese citizens were forced to deal with the worst type of terror–an invisible, tasteless, odorless, and potentially deadly foe. They immediately wanted to know the answer to three questions:

1. How much radiation was released?
2. How far did the radiation travel?
3. What were the health risks associated with a particular level of exposure?

Simple questions, yet who could they turn to for reliable answers?

Typically, the responsibility to build a country-wide radiation detection network falls to large, centralized organizations…like a government.  Unfortunately, while governments posses the resources required to build such networks, historically, they’re rarely the best arbiters of sensitive information. So, that’s when a worldwide group of concerned individuals considered using modern technologies to build their own. Just one week after the tsunami hit, a newly formed nonprofit organization called Safecast took on the challenge. Their goal was to gather radiation data and place it into the hands of the people who needed it most.

The organization’s top priority was gaining access to cheap, portable, radiation sensors. After creating a design based on an open source hardware platform, Safecast turned to Kickstarter to fund its manufacture. In the project’s Kickstarter Video, David Ewald explains, “The long-term goal of this project is to create a network of radiation sensors that can provide real-time data both in times of crisis and beyond.”

Over six-hundred people from around the world responded to the request, donating $36,900 to build these sensors. So far, the organization reports that it has collected over 1.25 million pieces of data.

But there’s a difference between collecting data and making it useful for the people who need it. Safecast publishes a page that contains six different radiation maps, each created from various (distributed) sources. For example, blogger and OpenIdeo founder, Haiyan Zhang, took the live streaming data coming out of data aggregator Pachube and piped it into Google Maps to create a real-time view of the radiation cloud over Japan. Similarly, other third-parties created maps that mixed and matched data from not only Safecast’s mobile and fixed readings, but also data from the Japanese government, non-government organizations, and activist citizens. The diversity of these maps creates a validation; if you don’t believe the data from a specific source, it’s easy to compare its readings with those from other sources. The net result is information that Japanese citizens can use to make life decisions.

To Decentralize or Not to Decentralize?

The Safecast story offers a new lens for companies to view their businesses through.

• The organization was formed in one week to solve a problem that probably would have been impossible to solve just a few years ago.
• It raised $36,900 in start-up capital through distributed funding.*
• It used the data aggregation services of Pachube to harness the power of distributed data sources.
• It welcomed the distributed labor services of concerned global citizens, who in turn used their talents to translate raw data into a human-readable form.
• It proved that the solution to this type of problem is best served by a decentralized as opposed to a centralized approach.

Companies should consider these lessons by asking the following question:

Can social networking technologies help us create new products and services, or at least help us deliver our existing ones much more efficiently?

Perhaps this question will help lead your company to its next 10X solution.

Photo Credits: Mill Girl: Library of Congress, Interpolation Map: Lionel Bergeret

* Five months later, The Knight Foundation added $250,000 to the cause.

This past Friday, my friend Mike asked if I wanted to burn off some Thanksgiving calories on the basketball court. I jumped at the opportunity.

In between our games of one-on-one (Mike beat me two out of three games, BTW) we discussed my recent decision to expand the focus of RonAmok! beyond “social media for marketing and PR” to include new advances in hardware, software, and networking technologies that allow individuals, businesses, nonprofits, and governments to accomplish things that couldn’t have been conceived of just few short years ago. In between dribbles, we discussed the ramifications of crowd-sourcing, machine-to-machine communication, and the Internet of Things.

That’s when Mike, stopped, held the ball for a moment and asked, “But, what’s the link between social media and your new direction?”

“They are one in the same,” I answered, realizing that at first blush, the statement sounded crazy.

All communications require three things: a message, a recipient, and a method to connect the two. A medium carries messages to intended recipients. It doesn’t matter if that medium comes in the form of a traditional broadcast, the press, the Internet, a social networking site, drums or even smoke signals. The ramifications of easily digitized content delivered through cheap distribution networks has blurred the media lines. Therefore, rather than caring about how the message is delivered (the medium), communicators should care more about accomplishing a specific goal by matching medium with message.

The economies of scale resulting from our ability to cheaply digitize, distribute and present messages to the right audiences have opened exciting new possibilities. However, in order to take advantage of this scale, we must determine the optimum connection between medium, message, and purpose.

Communications decisions must be driven by purpose first, followed by message and medium. Ask not what Facebook, Twitter, or crowd-sourcing can do for you. Ask how they can help fulfill your company’s purpose.

I recently brushed the dust off an old, unpublished manuscript and was surprised to find its messages more applicable today than when I wrote them in 1998. For example, here’s a passage from an interview that I had with entrepreneur and philanthropist, Arthur Nelson:

The most successful business entrepreneurs solve problems through non-linear thinking, meaning that they don’t look for incremental solutions. Instead of squeezing twenty-percent more efficiency out of a process, they either radically alter the productivity of it, or eliminate the process entirely. Successful entrepreneurs don’t take baby steps to solve problems; they take quantum leaps, seeking solutions that are orders of magnitude more effective, by changing the rules and applying knowledge from seemingly unrelated sources. They ask themselves questions such as, “Why do we need this process at all?” If the process is required, they ask, “How can we make this process ten-times more efficient?” or  ”How can we equip our employees with tools and ideas that’ll make them one-hundred times more effective?”

After reading the passage, I couldn’t help but ask the following question: “Have businesses sought the 10X solutions offered by their new ability to digitize, distribute, and present content cheaply?”

Sadly, the answer is no, as companies continue to seek incremental solutions to their tired old problems. But why?

Seeking the 10X business solution is a risky proposition. It requires special skills that typically don’t manifest themselves within the ranks of those who are frequently tasked with adopting new technologies. Middle managers, for example, are trained to mitigate risk, as opposed to embracing it. They’re compensated to seek incremental solutions, such as squeezing an extra 20% out of a process that perhaps should have been reevaluated years ago.

If your company wants to find the 10X solutions to its problems, it needs to place these new communications technologies into the hands of its entrepreneurial thinkers. Then, after your non-linear thinkers have solved some of the company’s most important problems, the high-priests of process and best practices can be tasked with squeezing an extra 20% out of them.