sviokla.com blog

Dr. Robert Ballard and his team have used robots to explore the mid-Atlantic ridge where our earth births her new "skin" by oozing out lava more than15,000 feet below the sea’s surface — an environment of 300 degree Celsius sea water, full of metals and toxic acids. The team expected to find no life, due to the harsh condition and lack of light.

And yet to their wonder, they found life teeming around these volcanic vents, discovering creatures from tube worms to large clams living by chemosynthesis — not photosynthesis, the process which was thought to be central to all life on earth.

How did Ballard’s team do this? By having new probes that explored things beyond the reach of normal human perception, and, just as importantly, by bringing to bear the best talent in the planet — rapidly. Advanced digital devices allowed for the craft to be created to effectively probe the ocean’s depths. After the initial discovery, they quickly tapped into a network of experts already hooked up to Internet2, an academic internet which runs 10,000 faster than the internet in your home or business.

In another instance, a group of neuroscientists, psychiatrists, neurophysiologists, and geneticists gathered together at Calit2, a supercomputer and visualization lab, headed by Dr. Larry Smarr — where there’s a 40 by ten-foot visualization wall which has tens of thousands of times more resolution than the most advanced HDTV at Best Buy. This team used the spectacular display space to simultaneously look at CAT scans, genetic and statistical data. By being able to see all the data together, and have the minds of all those experts working in harmony, they were able to identify two genes that they suspect are involved in causing schizophrenia. It is still early, but the participants claim that this vital discovery would not have been possible if they were not able to see all the data, in detail, and in its entirety as a group.

These scientists are using technology to recreate how advanced knowledge work is conducted. Organizations need to look to the experiments in these labs to redesign how their highest value-added knowledge workers do their work — through how they are connected, what information they have access to, how that information is modeled, and how they solve problems.

Unfortunately, I do not know of a single commercial organization that is looking at this problem — consciously. Some do it by default when they create "trader cockpits" for capital markets traders, but they don’t spread that knowledge to other areas. More perniciously, many organizations routinely give those employees who create more profit for the organization the same commodity information and coordination tools that the most junior person uses. Where else do we assume that those who add the most value should be given the same amount of support and concern?

Most leaders don’t realize that the entire world-wide personal computer revolution is based on thinking that is about as old as the fundamental engineering of the Space Shuttle — circa early 1960s. This thinking was not invented by the technology titans of the time, IBM and AT&T. Instead, it was invented by Xerox (which at the time was just a copier business), and the Rand Corporation, supported by academic and military work.

There are many fathers of the personal computer revolution, but two efforts deserve central attention here: The Augmented Knowledge Workshop, headed by Doug Englebart, and Xerox PARC whose first employee was my friend Alan Kay. These two groups created the personal computer — and with it, graphics, desktop analogy, networking, shared files, video conferencing, calendars, address books, word processing, presentation graphics, and even the mouse. If you look at Doug Englebart’s speech from 1968, his computer and software were more advanced and had better performance than many that we use today — forty years later. He did have a large support staff, but couldn’t we do at least as well now?

Why was it so good and inventive back then? Because those geniuses were not trying to create tools — they were trying to understand the whole problem. They were willing to look deeply at how people really think and use information; how groups work together, and even how people perceive. If you take the time to look at the Englebart video you will see that the software was very fast. Why? Because they knew that people became vastly less productive when they have to wait for the information to come up. Think about that the next time you boot up Word or Excel. These brilliant designers did not just take off-the-shelf stuff and try to optimize it — they were willing to actually invent.

I don’t know about you, but I think it is time to go back to some fundamental innovation around the way high-performance teams conduct complex, time pressured, knowledge work. Creating value and solving new problems in new ways is essential to competitiveness. But executives must be willing to invest in new ways of doing work — and to take some risks. The costs of these efforts are dwarfed by their potential value, but because it takes new, bold thinking to explore this territory, not the lazy mentality of benchmarking or optimization, it will need true leadership to make it happen.

As William Gibson, the famed Cyberpunk novelist said: the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. I think the future of knowledge work is here. It’s about figuring out how to create new ways to gather vital information, and linking the experts physically and virtually into a much richer, faster data-world. It is only through this type of reinvention that we’ll get the breakthroughs we need.

Google tapped into an existing set of mental relationships to make their model work. Think of Andy Warhol; Andy worked with Campbell Soup Cans and Marilyn Monroe. Google did similar work with page links. Wikipedia, on the other hand, is comparable to Avon Products — Avon, which just reported that they have 5.8 million representatives across the globe, has thrived for the past 123 years because it has a well-designed architecture of participation, as Tim O’Reilly so brilliantly termed it. Wikipedia took off because their method to harness user contribution was also facile and effective.

So where does Wolfram Alpha, the new knowledge search engine which is scheduled to launch this month, fit in? It was created by the genius Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica — a spectacular tool to work with, visualize, and even embed complex mathematical functions and scientific data. Some have said his new project may rival Google because it goes well beyond simple searching of information to computation of useful knowledge. For example, if you ask it "What is the GDP of France divided by it population?" it will not only get the results, but you can look at the details underneath. (Try that on Google!) I also think it competes Wikipedia because it is a useful reference resource.

I do think that this tool is a great advance, and I can’t wait to use it. Furthermore, I think it heralds a wave of new specialty knowledge tools. Think of Google as the Sears Roebuck of search — there are many "specialty" stores yet to be launched to meet different tastes and needs. But I don’t think that Wolfram Alpha will be as widely used as Google is because it does not tap into a well-distributed, universal meme or structure as Google did; nor has the brilliant scientist figured out the architecture of participation — an easy to understand method for anyone with the desire and skill to help make Wolfram Alpha a better tool and knowledge base. If I want to help build Wolfram Alpha, I don’t know how to begin; I do with Wikipedia. I am optimistic that if Wolfram can think of a clever way to have his audience help him map more and more of the world of knowledge into the syntax and semantics that his tool uses — if he can figure out the Wolfram-pedia — then his approach will be a hit.

There is a wonderful tension between the universality of use and the usefulness of a tool. Contrary to popular belief, the most powerful tools we create as humans take effort to learn to. Mathematics, language, biology, all take years to become fluent in. Put another way, any literate person can use Google in their own language — it takes seconds to learn. But the process of becoming literate takes years to master. Google "rides on top of" our ability to read and write.

One of the great tragedies of the current computer revolution is the widespread expectation that every piece of software should be easy to use. Well, easy-to-use tools such as Google are useful to everyone, but because Google assumes that people will not make the effort to learn anything, they have to provide simple — even simplistic — interfaces. If the mass public expected that they might have to do a little learning and work, Google, Microsoft, and others could provide even more powerful tools for helping knowledge workers — but our education system and culture expect nothing of us as users. It is unfortunate.

Wolfram’s tool, due to its deep logic and structure, will make demands on users — and in order to use it well, people will need to learn some new concepts and a query language. This means it will not have the widespread adoption of a Google-like tool. Still, I am optimistic. We all need search tools, and we should have other, more sophisticated tools that can help us participate in the creation of new knowledge, and new ways of looking at information. Attention is a vital measure, but not the only one that counts.

One way Wolfram might enhance our learning about his tool would be to mash up Wolfram Alpha with Twitter (which is Warhol/Avon-like), because one of the great challenges of using Wolfram Alpha is to format the right question to solicit an interesting answer. Twitter would be a great way to share and publish queries that had cool answers. Again, I think if he can tap into the Warhol/Avon effect, he’ll have faster adoption, and we’ll all learn more along the way.

This is also posted at Harvard Business School.

Chris Curran & John Sviokla

Duct tape is universally useful because it is incredibly simple, almost infinitely flexible, easily available, and cheap.  Twitter shares all these attributes.  Twitter is a new layer of communication which can be overlaid on everything – just like Duct Tape can be used to repair a chair, or make an artificial flower.  Anyone can use the web and their phone to both send and receive tweets (messages of 140 characters or less) – for free.  It enables people to send messages directly to one person, groups to self form, or to send a tweet to everyone who follows you.  Some people only follow a few dozen compatriots, Guy Kawasaki follows over 100,000 people and has almost 100,000 followers, as well as creating (with some help by others) over 28,000 tweets!  By way of comparison, the Boston Globe had a circulation in 2008 of about 350,000 – falling at a rate of 8-9% per year.  As a pundit, Guy is using Twitter to build an ongoing audience. 

But it is so much more as Chris pointed out on his blog, the range of applications is spectacular.  From online commentary for any off-line event, and the New York Times developed a great visualization of the tweets during the super bowl to Pepsi’s integration of Twitter with geographic information at the spectacularly popular South by Southwest music, film and interactive media festival to Whole Foods recipe tweets.  Almost every major media outlet is tweeting, the Apple App Store has over 100 Twitter applications, and there are over 100 free tools that have already bubbled up. 

How did this seemingly trivial application that Jack Dorsey created in two weeks back in March 2006 as a way for him to know what his friends were doing grow into this global phenomenon?  We think it is because of three critical things: first, the design is simple, modular, scalable and cross platform.  Messaging used to be a youth dominated phenomenon, but just walk into any business meeting and think about how similar tweeting is to blackberry email.  As social animals, we humans are addicted to communication and understanding how our social group is acting and thinking.  In business this is very practical, and in social settings very entertaining. 

Second, Twitter has an open technical architecture.  As Chris has pointed out, it is an example of an application that sits “in the cloud” and is available everywhere.  The interfaces to the capability are simple and well defined in their Applications Programming Interface (API), which makes it easy to plug into their messaging capability. 

Third, and perhaps most importantly, it is very easy for people to join, and to self organize around topics, companies, individuals, and events.  In this sense it is an incredibly “democratic” medium – with all the control at the ends of the network.  Our Diamond Fellow David Reed wrote about Reed’s Law in Harvard Business Review many years ago about the power of self-forming networks and it is because of their very flexibility of organizing that makes them so powerful. 

Twitter is, and can become so many things, we are suggesting three questions to think about – but they are only a start. 

1. What are people saying about my brand?  There are many tools that can help you track how people are talking about your company, or issues your customers are thinking about, or complaints?
2. How can I connect and build a direct communication between my firm and all the customers who want to follow our tweets – on their phone, web, or other device?  It is cheap, direct, and growing.  There is no downside, as long as you put thoughtful effort behind the initiative.
3. What capabilities should my firm have so that we can use the right tools to track topics and conversations being tweeted about in my industry, product/service area, and target market?

We believe – as other pundits have pointed out – that this current wave of the internet is becoming more real time and populated by many mini-applications like Twitter that will be assembled together to create functionality.  Senior executives should care because marketing and sales has always been about communication, references, and word of mouth, and Twitter turbo charges that hugely human process.  Furthermore, we believe that the new “links” that Twitter creates with its Tweets, among and between people and groups will some day be mined for superior search and attention management – just the way Google uses page links to power its search algorithm today.  It is only a matter of time before Google or Microsoft buys them and integrates the functionality into their platform – and it will be part of how every company communicates and markets.  Now is a time to get a jump on the competition! 

Many pundits are railing about Cisco’s move into the server market because the company’s current gross margins are 10-20% less in the server market than in their core router market. What these critics miss is that the evolution of computing is to create corporate clouds of functionality and storage — and those who control the architecture of the cloud will dominate the commercial relationship. (This post is also at the HBS site.)

What the heck does it mean to have a "cloud"? It means that the functions you want like storage, communications, and applications, don’t need to live on the device you have in front of you. You can get them on demand from the network. This is an old idea and aspiration, but it is starting to come to fruition for four fundamental reasons: first, there is much more demand for portability, and due to power and weight constraints, the device you carry with you will continue to ask for functionality from the network, as the iPhone does, not have it local to you as your PC does. More lightweight PC tablets and smart phones are sold than PCs and the difference is increasing. Second, the bandwidth, at long last, is starting to be there so that a connected device’s connection is not so slow that it kills the experience. 3G cell phones are barely fast enough to have a decent network experience. The new developments in bandwidth promise to create a much better network experience because the response time will be there.

Third, at any given time it is estimated that 85% of the computing capacity of the work is sitting idle, consuming hundreds of billions of dollars in power. There is no doubt that it is much more efficient to run all your computing as one big network, that can load balance the capacity — rather than having lots of fragmented machines, so there are significant cost savings and economies of scale to be had by going to a cloud approach. Fourth, and most interestingly, the IT industry now puts out as much carbon as the airline industry, and IT is growing at a much faster pace. If we have a carbon cap and trade system as the Obama administration desires, there will be significant incentives to go toward cloud computing because as Larry Smarr, director of the CalIT lab puts it — we will need greener bits. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! All use cloud computing and have data centers in states with high percentages of hydro-electric power so that they can have greener bits for their customers. It is for these four reasons I believe that the promise of cloud computing will finally be here.

Well, if I’m right about the above, then Cisco, like any self respecting strategically aggressive, innovative, market leading company, wants to try to control its own destiny by capturing what Kim Clark many years ago called the "strategic control point." In any technology industry, there is a set of intellectual capital and organizational capability which gives you the high ground from which you can extract higher economic rents. Microsoft did it in operating systems. Oracle started with high performance databases, and added ERP. Cisco is realizing that as HP and IBM begin to provide integrated cloud computing, that those large firms will try to marginalize the role of routers to be simply a part of their overall solution — eventually eviscerating Cisco’s margins. Cisco, rightly is holding onto its strategic position in their account relationships.

Is this move risky? Absolutely. Do they have a choice? Sure, but they will have a lot less bright future if they are willing to cede the architectural control of the customer and their offering. Also, I’m sure they have a few tricks up their sleeves like the ability to provide superior bandwidth and more storage across the network than the competition — which means that it might be IBM and HP that feel the pain, not Cisco.

Our economy relies equally on rational economic transactions and mutually felt trust in the trustworthiness of the system.  In this current economic downturn there have been many parallels made to the New Deal and its Keynesian simulative effect which was the palliative for social improvement before the Great War, which was the “real” engine of our recovery.  The narrative has embedded in it a deep cynicism which implies that in order to break out of our current malaise we may have to wait for a war to provide the focus, and spending we need.  But I don’t think it was the economics of the war alone that helped the economy, but rather the non-economics of the war – the great sacrifices, the common cause, and the individual commitment to the group good – not in a “communist manner” of sharing the spoils but in the personal manner of bravery and sacrifice to our collective benefit, which lent support to the economic recovery in a way not measured by monetary, tax, or fiscal policy. 

It takes a spirit of common sacrifice and a “gift” culture to create a store of trust which is as multiplicative as any Keynesian monetary policy.  Put another way, when people see those in power acting in a gift culture, with the spirit of common cause and generosity, it creates a tangible asset of trust which underpins credit, money, and markets.  This idea has been well documented in micro economics by Dan Ariely, in his paper “A Tale of Two Markets” which shows how gift transactions like helping someone move a couch, are fluid and make both parties feel good.  Paying a meager amount for the same “help” actually profanes the gift culture and lowers effort.  As Dan says, imagine if at the end of Thanksgiving dinner, I asked my mother-in-law how much the meal cost? 

So what?  Well, when President Obama limited cash pay of the senior executives of the major financial services institutions to $500,000 he aimed too low.  He should have asked them to work for $100,000 and said it was a service to the nation.  He should have made their sacrifice and gift explicit.  At $500,000 he profaned the potential gift culture by bringing the whole effort into the money culture – while “limiting” it.  In effect, he asked his mother in law how much he should pay for Thanksgiving dinner. 

I believe there are many extremely capable executives who would be willing to help, if they were asked to give a gift of their time.  Their gift, like the great sacrifices by individuals in WW II (which were vastly greater), would help rebuild the trust bank.  After all, this was at the core of Kennedy’s brilliant notion, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country.”  This administration wants to tap into this vein of common good, and has often said we must “sacrifice” – but they have not engaged the gift culture directly, and thereby the sacrifices that people do make will be which could help build the common store of trust will be blunted at best, and at worst spilled entirely.

So, our bold President has to improve his ask – and create a gift culture at the top – from which we can all benefit, and which, strangely, will help underpin the rapacious markets whose mantra of self interest reigns supreme.