Portfolious

40 years ago, Toffler said, ‘It will be a long time before the last bureaucratic hierarchy is obliterated. For bureaucracies are well suited to tasks that require masses of moderately educated men to perform routine operations.’

Bureaucracy makes sense where no radical change is taking place, but it stands to reason that a startling increase in change in the environment around us calls for a shorter life span of organisational forms. Likewise, hierarchy becomes inefficient when we need more info, more interaction, quicker decision-making, rapid action.

There are all sorts of psychological and social consequences of ditching traditional hierarchy and opting for a meritocratic society. For example, if you really believe in the idea that those with the talent and skill will get to the top, by default do you believe those who deserve to get to the bottom will sink and stay there?

Leading on from the previous post about the coolness of chaos…
 

Have you ever had to deal with a big lumpy piece of complex old software that was written years ago, then updated countless times, new bits added on, a new guy adding another bit, bolt-ons, sticking plasters and fixes… until it’s a big slow cumbersome piece of crap nobody can change or work with?
 

That’s pretty much industry as it stands – and other big systems for that matter (e.g. government, education). Since the industrial revolution, we’ve built up this massive ball of crap. Now nobody can do a damn thing with it.
 

The most obvious example that’s hurting right now is the whole free thing. We can listen to music for free. We can watch TV shows for free. We can read books for free. This of course screws record companies, publishers, broadcasters… oh yeah, and then there’s the whole fact that we don’t pay a blind bit of notice to advertising. The big massive balls of crap are stuffed because they’re prisoners within their own structures – too slow, too fat, too inflexible. They’re waiting to die, with their fingers in their ears, screaming ‘lah lah lah!’ as nimble network-based businesses spring up under the radar, taking over the world at lightning pace.
 

At the end of the day, all a business traditionally does is ensure people get paid. That’s it, when you think about it. Traditionally the big boys get paid much more than the little boys, but it’s just a bunch of individuals getting paid.
 

Now, think about the overhead in a big-lump-of-crap business. Big shiny offices, management structures, HR departments, blah blah blah. Think about MARKETING BUDGETS… zillions and squillions… to make sure you sell LOADS to make sure you can pay the overheads and pay the individuals (staff, bosses, shareholders etc). So we pay more to make more to sell more to pay more.
 

And it ain’t just the hippies who know sustainability is an issue. We need to stop producing so much crap. Reuse, reduce, recycle and all that jazz. Yet still we need to make people want more so they buy more so we sell more to pay individuals.
 

What if we scrapped all the crap?

What if there were no management structures?

What if there were no multi-million advertising / marketing budgets?

What if there were more or less no overheads?

Answer? We wouldn’t need to sell as much, so we wouldn’t MAKE as much. Sweet! It isn’t rocket science.
 

And could we do business without these business-as-usual / this-is-business stuff that costs so much? Hell yeah. It’s already happening. It’s soooo easy to change from ground level, as a bunch of individuals, with no management, a pinch of leadership and a sprinkling of magic dust – in comparison to attempting change from the ‘top’. It’s no surprise that people feel pretty darn good when they’re an individual within a collective, creating profit through good growth, without all the psychologically, environmentally (and every other ‘ally’) damaging self-fulfilling prophecies inherent in business as we know it.
 

I mean, we all know we went a bit crazy over the past few years (decades). We all got a bit carried away. It’s like full on raving in the 80s/90s (or whatever equivalent!). Bloody hell what a blast. Dance your face off – time of your life. But after a few years everybody starts to feel like crap, go nuts and realise it’s no fun any more and life’s better when you feel good. The individuals-formerly-known-as-consumers are just started to ease off the uppers. They’ve been turning your brain cells to mush and it’s much nicer to be wide awake.
 

So what now? Sit back and wait until the chaos period is over and this network-based commerce phase kicks in and emerges as the new status quo?
 

Err… that would be pretty boring.
 

Instead you could join a tribe. Or you could start one. Soon it’ll pay way more than your job (if that’s what you care about)… and really when you get into the swing of the new way you won’t give a toss.
 

Take it a leap beyond ‘markets are conversations’ into the realms of DOING, not planning. ACTION IS THE NEW FORECASTING.

Let’s compare for a moment. You can compare in terms of pretty much anything: efficiency, effectiveness, happiness…

Some brief examples:

Communications

C: Spread from the top down
T: Spread from anywhere to everywhere, via the centre

Growth

C: Recruit from the top, hiring below
T: Recruit from anywhere, hiring everywhere

Innovation

C: Creation from the bottom, managed from the top
T: Creation from everywhere, no management needed

Bliss

C: Everyone spends their time inside the company’s expensive box, developing ideas with others from the same company
T: Everyone works from anywhere, developing ideas with a diverse range of people they like to spend time with

I know which one I’d rather join, or start.

Seth Godin’s recent post here hit the nail on the head. He says ‘TV advertisers are finally discovering that YouTube + viral imagination = free media… The biggest shift is going to be that organizations that could never have afforded a national campaign will suddenly have one. The same way that there’s very little correlation between popular websites and big companies, we’ll see that the most popular commercials get done by little shops that have nothing to lose.’

Funny he should say that. It’s exactly what we Scrmblrs (’scramblers’) are up to (Scrmblr is a global network of producers who create low cost, good quality video and audio content… what you might call anti-ads).

Unlike Fraggles, Doozers love to work all day long; and they hate playing games. With the help of various Doozer machines and vehicles, they build elaborate constructions all over Fraggle Rock, like towers, buildings, roads and bridges.

Their building materials, Doozer Sticks, are made of radish dust. Doozer Sticks are the Fraggles’ favorite snack, and they love to eat the buildings that Doozers build. The Doozers don’t mind their buildings being eaten; if the Fraggles didn’t eat the constructions, the Doozers would run out of building space.

Doozers and Fraggles usually show very little respect towards each other. It’s very rare for Fraggles and Doozers to make friends.

The Doozers all work together in a society that values cooperation in order to further the common good (which is very much contrary to the Fraggles, who place a high value on individualism and independence).

The Doozers pride themselves on the good work that they do, but no Doozer is allowed to take personal credit for their work – that would mean that they thought their work was better than everyone else’s, and would be destructive to the communal spirit. Competition is seen as a vice that occasionally afflicts Doozers. Again, this is very unlike the Fraggles, who love to have races and competitions, and who take pride in their individual jobs and passions.

Are you a Fraggle or a Doozer?

Do you keep creating stuff that gets eaten by those big Fraggles?

Should you stop building stuff out of Radish Sticks, so it doesn’t get eaten? How will you avoid running out of space?

Do you keep eating stuff those little Doozers build?

Do you think of yourself as a cool media Fraggle… but keep having to take a deep breath and quash fleeting realisations that you’re actually a Doozer and what you do is fundamentally pointless unless you change something???

Someone asked me yesterday what exactly Punk Capitalism means…

Punk was all about a DIY revolution, rejecting authority and hierarchy, working for yourself without taking cues from the mass market, setting up businesses that aren’t fussed about competing and place purpose over profit, advocating that we should produce as much as we consume. Nowadays we’re all working more independently and struggle with crappy managers / bosses, we want richer experiences and creativity is our most valuable currency. We’re coming to the end of the Industrial Revolution cycle… the final nails are going in the coffin for mass production (and in turn mass marketing) – starting with the internet making it free to transmit stuff digitally ourselves. Now punks in lab coats are working on things like 3D printers, already in use by Adidas, BMW, Sony etc for making prototypes. Once these are available in our homes there will be no boundaries left between producer and consumer – just creativity. It’s not far off Star Trek replicators! Then nobody has to be bribed to do shit jobs. Phew! What we deem piracy is the best form of distribution in a Punk Capitalist world.

My previous post mentions this here; and refers to this book as the ultimate Punk Capitalism and piracy resource.

I just spotted this article from last year, in which Michael Grade, ITV’s Exec Chairman and ex BBC Chairman slates Joost and YouTube, labeling them ‘content parasites’.

He said, “The day that Google or Joost or any of these people start investing £1bn a year in UK content is the day I’ll start to be worried.”

Duh! I’ll bet those cash wad buffers in his big shiny office don’t feel so protective now. Sound proof, maybe, but not protective. Forgetting the cumulative talent of the people of the world perhaps? Err… completely forgetting the whole essence of scalability and the power to organise without organisations and their £1bn budgets??? (I hear Yahoo’s Chief Exec made a similar daft remark at a conference the other day – they’re all screwed).

Meanwhile, more recently, ITV reported a loss of £2.7 bn for 2008 and subsequent staff cull. And what do you know, Google’s revenues exceeded those of ITV.

A fundamental law of physics (in one formulation) states that left to itself any closed system will always change towards a state of equilibrium from which no further change is possible. One example is swinging a pendulum… if you hold it up to one side it’ll be in a state of extreme disequilibrium, then as you let go and it swings back and forth, gradually losing energy, it’ll come to a standstill.

Other examples include many media agencies and advertising agencies. You know why.

Someone said to me today, ‘but we need to prove the ROI – how much is it [implementing a vision that gives power to the people, to cut a long story short] going to cost and what will the return will be? How do we show that listening to the customer has better ROI than direct marketing?’

Errr…. I’m not even going to answer that.

Our obsession with plotting loads of numbers in loads of rows in so-called forecasts, that ‘demonstrate ROI’ may be a comfort blanket for some, but are forecasts ever accurate or meaningful? If we look back at them later (which we seldom do thoroughly, because they’re so irrelevant and unfriendly) we’ll be astonished (or not) at how far off the mark we were.

Way too many business models set themselves up for equilibrium. A scalable business model should be fractal in nature… infinitely scalable, independent of any company’s resources. You should be able to zoom all the way in… or all the way out… and see a repeatability, recursiveness and simplicity. We should focus on setting ourselves up to leverage the unforeseen opportunities, rather than attempting to predict the unpredictable and produce reams of comfort crap on autopilot.

The rotary motion of a harmonograph produces a series of complex drawings influenced by relative frequency, amplitude and direction.

Brands should communicate with a harmonic balance between relative frequency (WHEN… don’t interrupt), amplitude (WHAT…loudness…don’t shout / broadcast) and direction (WHERE… targeting, permission).

Companies should seek to produce beautiful pictures… not chaos (disharmony / dissonance). Business models that can be boiled down to a simple, beautiful picture tend to have inherent scalability.

A few words on the publishing industry, inspired Alan Rusbridger’s [Editor in Chief, Guardian Media] recent comment that “These are the last printing presses we’ll ever buy”; and by an email I just received which included the quote “I would never read a book if I could talk half an hour with the person who wrote it”.

Decline factors…

- Inefficient many‐to‐many supply chain = high levels of wastage

- Risk adverse publishers hamper the emergence of new authors

- Entry to distribution channels is a fundamental barrier to new publishers setting up

- Market data isn’t successfully harnessed to allow better decision making on which titles to produce

- Publishers place more emphasis on fulfilling orders than on understanding customer needs

- ICT adoption is only as fast as the slowest adopter in the supply chain, so uneven skills levels between companies hampers innovation

Given that individuals now have the power to organise without organisations, it’s time to get out of the way and enable readers and authors to interact. We need to strip away copyright hang-ups and enter into the Web 2.0 spirit of sharing and co-creation (it’s going to happen whether those with the sand slipping between their fingers like it or not, so everyone might as well admit it and leverage all things ‘free’ in lucrative new business models instead of clutching at straws while they die a slow death). While we’re at it, how’s about stripping away all the supply chain complexity and providing tools and environments where authors and readers can communicate directly; and gain all the benefits of doing so in a mutual value exchange.

Publishing, music, film… very similar problems, very similar solutions. Armies of fanatics aplenty. Massive opportunities.

Check out The Music Industry Manifesto for a good dose of common sense.

Reading is a means of learning, self‐educating, exploring and broadening horizons. Ultimately, it’s all about DISCOVERY. Think for a sec how we’d advance loads of fundamental human endeavors if we stopped putting up barriers to discovery, for misguided (non)commercial gains.

If discovery is the action, the state required to achieve it is RESONANCE.

Everything has a natural frequency of vibration, i.e. its resonant frequency. For instance a glass smashes when a sound causes a vibration that matches its resonant frequency; or the millennium bridge sways like hell when the pedestrians wobble it at it’s resonance frequency.

Brands are trying to find consumers’ resonant frequencies. So when a company gets it right, they really vibrate (?!) that individual and forge a powerful emotional connection (lovemark).

BUT… we humans are surprising. We resonate at unexpected frequencies (for instance a middle aged business man might listen to hip-hop, or conversely a teenage rapper might be a Mozart fan, or a fitness trainer smoke fags and snort cocaine, or a coke addict worry about taking aspirin).

Not only that, but resonant objects (i.e. musical instruments, or people in this instance) usually have more than one resonant frequency (harmonics). We will easily vibrate at those frequencies, and vibrate less strongly at others. We will “pick out” our resonant frequency, in effect filtering out all frequencies other than our resonance. We’re bombarded with so many marketing messages that we’re helluva picky about what we listen to. If it doesn’t resonate with us, it’s just white noise, just more boring intrusive marketing messaging crap that we don’t want or care about.

Get it right (in an integrated way) and a brand can resonate with us on heaps of different levels, through various channels, forming a compelling experience.

So don’t do boring, presumptuous marketing. Move and shake markets and emanate good vibes to each individual customer.

It’s like clubbing. For some people, the clubbing experience resonates on various levels: thumping tunes at 140 beats per minute, ecstasy, clan mentality, laser lighting, physicality… and it makes them buzz and dance like hell. Or rich foodies: the dining experience resonates on various levels: their helicopter landing outside the restaurant in Lourges, the gold-plated oversized gate posts, the whiff of truffle oil and foie gras… the wine waiter talking through appropriate selections, the handshake from the proprietor over dessert…

Tailor the experience, but NOT prescriptively. Provide tools, environments, useful and interesting stuff. Then GET OUT OF THE WAY, hand over the reigns and let the people of the world do what they want. And what d’ya know… scalable marketing, unlimited by your resources.