Category: Gravity Medium

Nonprofits and engagement media

I’m out of the nonprofit world these days, but I’ve spent some years in it, so I’m not at a total loss as to how things work and how cultural norms accrue. I’ve got my opinions, to be sure.

So when I saw, via FriendFeed, a post from Beth Kanter — Seth Godin’s Non Post About Nonprofits: Deers in the Headlights? — I was curious. I like both Kanter’s and Godin’s work and this seemed to be generating some buzz. So I clicked over to both Kanter’s post and to the original Godin post: The problem with non.

Quite a bit of the conversation was on Kanter’s site, so I joined the fray with the following post-length comment…

I was, until recently, trying to develop engagement media practices inside a public media company. It was a disaster, but not for the reasons most nonprofit managers would point to.It wasn’t about the tiny budgets or the excessive time required. It was about EXACTLY what Godin was talking about: resistance to change and slothful, good-enough-for-a-nonprofit management practices. It was also because the traditionalists liked their ivory tower positions; they liked speaking from on high to the little people in the audience. I was told we didn’t want to get the public involved in public media — that’s too messy.

Godin has nailed it and the reason for the violent response is precisely because he nailed it.

Lots of nonprofit workers, after a while, develop a sort of victimization mythology that serves the stagnation problem. “I don’t have enough money, so I can’t do this, so I can’t make more money… woe is me. But I’ll keep at it because I’m such a nice person. And maybe someone rich will come along and notice me. It could happen!” I saw that all the time.

Is it all nonprofits? Nope. But it’s a lot of them. Of the 2 million out there, how many are really creating engaging relationships with donors or their constituents regularly? Maybe 10,000? Whatever the number is, it’s not enough.

Here are the key nonprofit organization questions you have to answer:

  1. Who are you, why are you here, and why should anyone care? (And if you spit out a mission statement, you just failed step 1.)
  2. What are you doing today to build authentic, meaningful relationships with donors and potential donors? (Mass mailings via any means don’t count.)
  3. What are you doing today to build authentic, meaningful relationships with the individuals, firms or communities you serve? (Look up the words “authentic” and “meaningful” before you answer.)
  4. What are you doing today to connect your donors and your beneficiaries, either directly or indirectly, so the donors feel energized and involved and the beneficiaries feel supported and involved, too? Or in other words, how are you building a community around your mission? (And broadcasting doesn’t count as connecting.)
  5. Given #1, what tools will best help you handle #2-4? (Notice I made no mention of Twitter or any other social media tool.)

charity:water is just the beginning. There’s a new generation of donors growing up right now and they won’t take your call or your e-mail or your mass mailing. But they will respond to an earnest call for help, especially from a friend they know. The next-gen trick is to be that friend first.

Nonprofits had best start making new friends. Because the old ones are dying and the broadcast campaigns (e-mail blasts, newsletters, appeal letters) will largely die with them. There’s still a place for building awareness, but action will come via relationships.

Godin’s pointing all this out through this post, his recent Tribes book and plenty of other posts. It’s a tough message, especially if you’re a “victim” inside a change-averse nonprofit (or a for-profit, for that matter!).

From here, you can deal with it — seeking new ways to engage your community — or just hope he’s wrong.

Frankly, I think it’s more fun to engage with your community regardless of what Godin says. But if proving Godin wrong sounds more fun to you, enjoy.

What I didn’t mention in my comment was my own immediate experience with fundraising for a cause via social media — via connections built across my own “community.” It was a small, first effort. But it was the collective action of a group of people with no nonprofit organization whatsoever. We came together to help a friend we’d literally never met.

For my generation and especially for Generations Y and Z, the old impersonal “broadcast” approaches used in public media and across the nonprofit spectrum will have diminishing returns.

But if I know you and you know me and we know we care about one another in some meaningful way — if we’re engaged in each other’s lives — the support will be there.

Alaska public media falling apart

Updated 16 Sep 2011. Updates at the bottom of the post.

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Things are tough all over the public media world these days. But if you think you’ve got it bad, you should try working in the Alaska public media world. It’s brutal.

In case you hadn’t heard or figured it out, I was fired from APTI back in March, along with our news director, ostensibly for failing to “align” with the CEO’s preferred — and secret — strategy of merging all the public radio and TV operations in the state into a single company (there are roughly 25 separate companies). We were firings #3 and #4 from a management team of 7, all in less than a year. The GM hired a personal friend to replace us literally the next day. Oh, and the rest of those 7 managers? Only 1 is left, and that position was demoted below management level last year.

So if you’re feeling down about pay freezes, furloughs or being laid off, just be glad you’re not living with this series of unfortunate events (and these are just the ones from memory)…

August 2008

  • APTI (Anchorage): Reorganization – General Manager (GM) fires Communications/TV and Development directors; no one hired to replace them

December 2008

  • APTI (Anchorage): Award-winning and beloved statewide program, “AK” is canceled, staff terminated

February 2009

  • APTI (Anchorage): GM decides a statewide merger of all public radio and TV stations into a single company is the strategy of the future; GM doesn’t announce his intentions to the rest of the company or the other stations in the state — stations that have been suspicious Anchorage would try this one day
  • KTOO (Juneau): It’s revealed — privately — that the Juneau-based stations are roughly $250,000 in the hole due to falling underwriting sales and other issues
  • KUAC (Fairbanks): It’s revealed — privately — that the Fairbanks stations and statewide TV service (AlaskaOne) lose roughly $1,000,000 per year, but the University of Alaska Fairbanks fills in the financial hole annually

March 2009

  • APTI (Anchorage): Strategy change! News/content and broadcasting/web directors fired; GM’s personal friend hired to replace them (a print journalist and professor with no broadcast or public media experience)
  • KUAC (Fairbanks): GM quits to take a job out of state; he’s not replaced

May 2009

June 2009

About that last item… I met with and worked with KYUK’s GM a few times. He was one of the good guys. He resurrected the station’s finances and dealt with the privations of living in rural Alaska — a far cry from his decades of work in the Lower 48. I won’t name him here as that’s not really my right to do so — you can look him up if you’d like. But I can say I sure wish he had taken the GM job in Anchorage back in mid-2007. Things could have turned out very differently for a great group of people that have persevered through so many challenges in the last few years. They don’t deserve the chaos they’ve inherited.

Crystal Ball Time

I have no idea what the future holds for public media in Alaska. Public radio — of the rebroadcasting NPR variety practiced in Anchorage — is probably pretty safe, barring straight-up mismanagement. Pubradio gathers a good chunk of change in Anchorage and the cost structure is comparatively light. Public TV is another story. The cost of merely rebroadcasting prepackaged material is excessive and traditional TV production is out of the question for pretty much all the stations in Alaska (without special project funding, which goes to outside contractors anyway).

Internet effects on the business models are definitely coming to urban Alaska, as are demographic shifts that represent brand new media consumption habits for which public media outlets aren’t really prepared, at least not here on the continent’s edge. Those changes will occur slowly, accumulating quietly until, one day, it’s just too late for the old guard to meet the new challenges, and that’s when public media either gets more government funding (a bailout) or it just disappears.

For the Alaska stations, and especially APTI in Anchorage, the biggest problem remains the same one I identified when I started working there in late 2004: You must answer two questions: [1] Who are you? and [2] Why are you here?

Those questions remained unanswered for my entire career in Alaska’s public media world, no matter how many times I asked or how hard I pressed for an answer. (The current GM thinks he answered those questions with a “strategic planning” process everyone regarded as a waste of time.) But without knowing, deeply, the answers to those seemingly-simple questions, it doesn’t matter what “strategy” you have — you’ll drift, you’ll live off the good intentions of past supporters. Without those two answers your future will be created by fate, happenstance, luck and disaster rather than by coordinated effort around a shared, meaningful goal that’s relevant to the world today.

But enough of all that. What happens next in the 49th state’s 50th year? Hopefully nothing worthy of adding to the harrowing list above. Public media up here needs a breather.

And maybe, one day, new leadership.

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UPDATE: 15 Sep 2011

A few weeks back, the other shoe dropped. APTI and the other Alaska stations officially gave up on merging the stations together into a unified company. They are continuing to look at unifying the TV service.

This is both a relief and a vindication.

In the months leading up to my ouster, I was clear with the CEO in that I opposed the organizational merger concept, though I agreed that the TV services should be unified since they were so deeply and unnecessarily duplicative.

In place of pursuing a merger, I specifically recommended the organization spend its energies on reconnecting with the local community, not trying to create some mythical “all Alaska” media firm. There were so many things we could do to create meaning and value locally, in Anchorage, that we didn’t need to create a bunch of new work, namely beating back the obvious wishes of those local Boards and communities we’d have to take over.

Now that the merger push is dead, Alaskans that favor local public media can breathe a sigh of relief. Too bad it took 3 years of dragged-out talks and $88,000 of CPB money to get here. I should have just charged CPB $44,000 for the advice I gave on Day 1 and they could have pocketed the other half.

The last thing still under consideration: merging the TV signals into one. This is a slam-dunk and should have been pursued years ago. Oh, wait… it was!

Many years ago (the mid-1990s) 3 of the 4 Alaska public TV stations merged their signals into AlaskaOne. Anchorage was the only hold-out — they wanted to retain local control and — the real reason — local fundraising (cha-ching!). Back then, local PBS stations were pretty localized and raised a lot more money. But over the years all the stations converged on the same schedules as PBS tightened control over common carriage and everyone gave up local production and scheduling capacity as their fundraising and ad sales collapsed.

Today, merging Anchorage into the AlaskaOne family should just be done. The schedules are carbon copies anyway. Hell, I’ve been in favor of PBS just going all C-SPAN and taking the signal national and being done with it. But that’s another story. For now, let’s hope AlaskaOne finally captures Anchorage public TV and APTI turns its attention further and further toward local media and local public services.

Well, except for all the money made by rebroadcasting NPR stuff.

Social Media ≠ Fundraising

This week a friend sent a link to an AP story — Is your Facebook ‘charity work’ doing any good? — focused on how nonprofits can’t expect social media/networking. This prompted one of my patented long-winded replies. I figured I’d share it with a broader audience here.

These articles alternatively amuse and frustrate me. They group all “social networking” together in one phrase, and then spend all their time talking about Facebook and annoying ad campaigns. Then the article is over 500 words later and you feel dumber for it — you have no idea what to do next.

To me, social networking is not a fundraising system or method. It’s part of an ecosystem of relationship management, co-creation and social participation. And there’s no “one way” or system or technology or platform to make it work for you. Moreover, not everything WILL work for you.

Consider… go back and read the article and wherever it talks about “social networking” substitute “direct mail.” Is anyone suggesting that direct mail, on its own, is the savior of fundraising operations? Does anyone propose that direct mail is a way to reach everyone you want to reach? Is it the only way to maintain a relationship?

We have a spectrum of tools available to us today that weren’t available 10 years ago and certainly not 20 years ago. It requires that we learn some new techniques along the way, but the baseline fundraising proposition must remain the same: “we do X (something good) for you and for the ‘community and we deserve your financial, emotional and public support, please help us and your fellow man.” That’s it.

What I would say about social networking is that it’s different from all prior fundraising technologies in one fundamental — and market-changing — way: It allows donors to find and talk to each other. Rather than being a one-to-many communications model, it’s many-to-many.

Just think about that for a bit. This offers tremendous upsides, but also tremendous downsides. If, for example, your nonprofit is not behaving well in the world (in the eyes of some donors), they can spark a revolution against your current leadership, strike out on their own to create a competing service and so on. Because they can find one another now, they can use the social networking fabric against you.

Scary? Well, yes. But so long as you behave in a way that’s engaging, open, supportive and so on in your public communications, tribe leadership and interactions, you likely have little to fear. The nonprofits that put old-school fundraisers on the social media bandwagon will regret it — because those folks will use it as a bullhorn / bully pulpit, and that will fail gloriously and publicly.

Social media is, more than anything else, a leveling of the playing field and the productive networking of a formerly passive audience. What happens next is up to the people that use it — both in the nonprofits and in the philanthropic community (which now includes tiny players, not just the rich).

Transparency, openness, honesty, creativity, fun, sociability, seriousness of purpose, and tribal leadership are required to make social media work for you / with you. Anything less and the results will likely be unpleasant.

"I'm in the Audience Business"

In addition to covering developments in the technology sector, This Week in Tech — the flagship of Leo Laporte’s podcasting network — often hosts guests directly participating in the media revolution that’s already in progress. And they often have illuminating conversations about what is and isn’t working in old and new media spaces, and in the spaces in between.

This week the conversation offered this little gem from Shira Lazar, a young pro in both new and old media (at time index 5:14):

“For me, I say I’m in the Audience Business.”

Bingo. This is the future for nearly all media (but not absolutely all). If you don’t have or can’t maintain control over media distribution in a 1-to-many distribution model, then you must learn to engage an audience.

This is also known as building and leading a Tribe.

Be sure to listen to TWiT 190 from about 3:20 to 13:00 for the complete old/new media and audience conversation. Plenty of relevant ideas for public media leaders.

Out of the mouths of (27 year old) babes

If you’re involved in public radio, this is required reading / listening.

Jesse Thorn, host of public radio’s The Sound of Young America (which is really a podcast that happens to be on a handful of 25+ public radio stations nationwide), speaks with Josuha Benton (Nieman Journalism Lab / Harvard) about his notions of creativity, business, media scale, public radio economics, audience interaction, passion, awesome content and more.

In particular, he nails the problems of the public radio industry today: the saturation of the older, educated white market and the industry’s pull back from attempts to stretch into new market segments with old formulas. He also keenly understands and explains the financial models in “the system.”

Because what Thorn proposes is that public media programs, hosts, writers, and others do is, well… make great content and directly interact with the audience that gels around the content and experience. He’s suggesting you build a Tribe.

Take a listen…

While listening, pay special attention to his observations about how he pays himself for his work, how he interacts with his audience, and how small-scale his show’s production model is. Also pay attention to how he thinks programs in the future will work — using mass media as “calling cards” or “advertising” for the interactive media experience the programs are creating.

From a Tribes perspective and a mass media model perspective, there’s only one other major national project I know of that’s doing the same thing: Planet Money, in a tiny, experimental pocket of NPR. And that could be said to be an outgrowth of the defunct Bryant Park Project.

There will remain a place for mass-produced and mass-appeal general news production. But for everything else, and especially for any local station that wants to survive, your future is in building a community around awesome content and services, a la Jesse Thorn.

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Bonus Listening: If you haven’t heard the SxSW presentation by Merlin Mann and John Gruber on creating content online, that’s your immediate next destination. Indeed, here’s your reading list for surviving in the 21st century media world:

Double-Bonus Listening / UPDATE 2009-04-19: Thanks to the unstoppable Jesse Thorn for stopping by with a comment (below) and sharing the link from the discussion at the 2009 Integrated Media Association conference in Atlanta. Highly recommended, too. Thanks Jesse!

Shirky on the collapse of newspapers

This is, hands down, the most important piece on the collapse of the newspaper industry that will be written all year:

Clay Shirky succinctly wraps up the last 20+ years of media history in just a few pages and explains how and why the newspaper industry will ultimately disintegrate.

He points to a future for journalism, but admits it will be a messy future, much as the world of information control and dissemination was utterly upended in the 16th century with the application of the printing press.

This piece reminded me of a speech given by Michael Rosenblum at the IMA conference in 2007. I have a whole hour of his storytelling and exhortations to take action on video, but here’s a brief (3:30) clip of just one story of technological innovation:

For those still clinging to news-on-paper notions: prepare your eulogies. Technology transforms society, whether you like it or not. Your horses are dead. The bowmen are here.

21st century leaders foster talent, not scale

I’m starting to (finally) get back into reading great stuff from around the web, fueling some new thinking. I stumbled across this nugget from consultants with frequently insightful writing:

…the rate of learning, innovation, and performance improvement within the institution must match (or exceed) that of the surrounding environment if the institution is to survive (or thrive). Given that innovation is inherently a human activity–one performed by talented individuals–it follows that talent will pull institutions into the 21st century.

That’s because a rapid rate of innovation cannot be programmed from above. At best what institutional leaders can do is to create the environments–the “creation spaces”–that foster innovation and faster learning. But here’s the rub: many of these institutional leaders are caught in the mindsets of the previous generation of infrastructures and the related assumption that scalable efficiency is the key to success. Talent, on the other hand, is under increasing pressure to get better faster and will either leave institutions that cannot help them or become catalysts for change within those institutions.

[full article]

Let’s just say I can vouch for the above quote 100%.

Questions for public media firms, leaders and talent:

  • Does your corporate culture, as led from the top, regularly share, explain and praise positive examples of media innovation both inside and outside the firm?
  • Do stakeholders in your firm’s success understand the risks of stasis in a rapidly-changing media and business environment?
  • Do you have a plan, a process or even just a notion of how to ensure everyone in your firm is learning substantial new things every year, every quarter?
  • Which activity absorbs more of your time: protecting sacred cows or fulfilling a mission in a presently-relevant way?
  • Is your firm innovating in media creation and delivery at a rate that matches or exceeds the media changes in your service area? (note that media changes occur at variable rates based on where you are)
  • Is your solution to a changing media environment becoming “too big to fail” (AIG) or becoming “too vital to ignore” (NPR)?
  • Are you leading a tribe or building an audience?

The letter I didn't send

The vast majority of public television viewers are kind, intelligent, supportive and understanding people. Generous, too. Lovely folks that I’m delighted to work with every day.

But there are also …pardon me… assholes.

Below I’ve included a viewer comment I got this week (with identity obscured), and the reply I never sent, but wish I did. I actually had the message in draft, but never clicked the Send button.

A little background: We are in our spring pledge drive right now, and that always upsets some people because much of the programming most PBS stations run during pledge is way, way outside the norm. It’s widely assumed that the people “giving” during pledge drives are actually “shopping” for stuff (books, DVDs, etc.) and don’t really care terribly much about the core public TV mission. I think it depends on the program and the viewer, but in general it does seem like regular viewers lose their beloved programs as they are broadly displaced by those giving — or buying — around the specialty programs.

Anyway, on to the letter…

VIEWER FEEDBACK
Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 10:18 PM

As usual, throw the mission statement out the window and run reruns of Yoga and Guru’s and fake Irish Can Can dancing, over and over, and over and over. Some os us, a slim minority agreed, are interested in seeing the Treasury Secretary, not some twisting body parts for over paid middle class white folks. You know there is a Depression going on, but what do you care, too caught up with being local t.v. stars. GET A CLUE… either give us the news or give up the Charter to maybe an outfit in the Valley. Because you people are through the looking glass infatuated with your own stink. NEWS … not fake gurus !! I mean, the Babtist Temple idiot guy makes more sense then those dumb asses you peddle.

Oh, one other thing… this person has written nasty e-mails to us at least twice a year for several years now. He never fails to send the most bombastic and horrifying rants, and he always threatens to start his own station.  He sends in his hate both about our TV and our FM stations, depending upon which one “offended” him most recently.

I wish I’d sent him this reply (but didn’t)…

Ah, Mr. Xxxxx… Your hate-filled comments about pledge drive programs, our staff and volunteers and viewers that don’t keep in line with your expectations have arrived in our e-mail once again. I would think after several years you’d get tired of leaving this bag of flaming dog poop on our doorstep.

Yet, ironically, what your regular rants suggest is that you’re watching our station. Watching quite a bit. More than most people.

But you’re not paying as close attention as you could.

Because while in the past we’ve pre-empted virtually all Charlie Rose episodes during pledge drives, this time we made adjustments. THIS time, we’re running nearly all the Charlie Rose episodes during pledge (4 out of 5 each week). Sure, they may slip from 10pm to 10:30 or 11pm, but they’re on the air. We made extra work for ourselves — without adding staff — just to keep Rose fans hooked up with their favorite show.

Some viewers have noticed and appreciated the effort and even became supporting members because they recognize both the value of the program in their lives and the fact that we paid attention and changed things to respect their interests.

But not you. After all, why break with tradition?

I highly recommend you start your own public TV station. That way, you can have a front-row seat for what could very well be the death of an entire industry as the proliferation of TV channels and the Internet explosion thins the air so much that you can’t breathe. Meanwhile, thousands of your colleagues across the country collectively scratch their heads, trying to figure out just how to fund the business while still serving the public interest (more than any other TV service out there).

Go ahead — hire the lawyers and bicker with the FCC over licensing. Build a tower, buy a transmitter, hire a staff. Find a building, build a studio, buy cameras and then pay PBS hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for the privilege of airing their programs, leaving you no capacity to serve the local audience in a locally-relevant way.

Then you, too, can have the pleasure of reading some of the nastiest viewer comments you’ve read in your life — in the middle of the night when you’re trying to catch up, just once, with the mountains of work on your plate, left there because you can’t afford to hire staff to run the business efficiently.

In a situation like this, a little Irish dancing, a little yoga, and yes, even Yanni sounds pretty damn good.

As far as we can tell, this particular “fan” of public television has never given a dime.

What do you think — should I have clicked Send?

Digital Public Media: From Broadcasting to Leading a Tribe

Thanks to @garyinalaska, I was invited to speak at the Alaskan Apple Users Group (AAUG) on March 4 in Anchorage, on a topic more or less of my choosing, but dealing with “digital media survival.”

I took that notion, applied it to public media, and tried to bring forth my current thinking about how we in the public media space — at least where I am these days — must change in order to better serve our original mission and do it in a sustainable and meaningful way. Broadly, I suggested we must move from being a purely broadcasting-focused firm to leading a “tribe,” as Seth Godin would put it.

Frankly, my presentation needs work. A lot of work. But the core ideas are there. We’re only just getting started on this in my firm, so I should be able to revise this in the future once we’ve got more experience. For now, however, here’s the presentation files as well as lots of links that are the foundational pieces of the notions presented. I’d love to hear your comments or suggestions, and if you take these ideas and expand upon them, drop me a link.

  • Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, by Seth Godin (Amazon.com)
  • Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, by Seth Godin (free at Audible.com)
    Godin’s book on the tribes notion isn’t perfect (there are complaints out there about generalities that aren’t backed up with examples), but it’s quite good and I suspect it will form the backbone of our strategy going forward. It is not a prescriptive book; it has no “instructions” — it’s more faith than religion, if you know what I mean. In any case, as I noted in the presentation at AAUG, if all we in the current public media are doing is talking at people instead of communicating with and connecting people with shared interests and values, we’re not likely to survive. Content is free. Distribution is free. Contact, context, connection and community are priceless.
  • Seth Godin’s blog
    Godin covers the tribes notion periodically and relates tons of next-generation marketing and communications concepts; highly recommended reading for just about anyone.
  • Seth Godin Talking About Leading a Tribe (YouTube, 6 min)
    Audio quality is a little weak, but crank it up and you’ll hear everything you need to hear. Godin succinctly hits the notion that companies are focused on interrupting you enough to trick you into buying their products or services, but they don’t care about you.
  • Seth Godin: Sliced bread and other marketing delights (TED / YouTube, 19 min)
    TED Talks are legendary and Godin does his typically masterful job talking about marketing. This one is not about tribes, but the notions covered are integral to understanding how our historic mass media model is failing. It’s 19 minutes, but it doesn’t feel like it — he’s a wizard of fast presentations that are smart, funny and revealing.
  • “No One Cares About You” (YouTube, 2 min)
    Short and to-the-point advice to companies that think they need to get into social media to tell the world about what they are doing. Surprise: people don’t care about your company.
  • Kevin Kelly / The Technium: Better than free
    This piece set off a ton of blogosphere and public media commentary last year because Kelly sets forth not only the notion that you can’t stop things (media) from being free, but that there are still ways for companies and individuals to create value and gather revenue. Brilliant stuff.
  • Kevin Kelly / The Technium: 1,000 true fans
    Godin refers to this piece in Tribes, and rightly so. It’s a seminal work in the new media world, as it proposes that an artist can surivive if only he or she can find 1,000 true fans/supporters. Godin suggests, rightly, that the number might be 1,000, but it also might be 100 or 10,000 or 1,000,000 — depending upon your situation. But there is a number, and you need those true fans.
  • The Cluetrain Manifesto
    Now 10 years old, the Cluetrain is still being studied as companies of all kinds try to understand how to behave in the new media, interactive world. The 95 Theses are priceless.
  • Clay Shirky: “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus”
    Shirky addresses the rise of television in concert with the industrial revolution and how it acted as a “cognitive heat sink,” yet now people are participating in media creation rather than simply passively consuming it. Critical to understand because it signals and explains how and why people are, more and more, rejecting
  • Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody (the web site)
  • Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody (Amazon.com)
    Subtitled, “The Power of Organizing Without Organizations,” this is a critical idea that public media companies must understand. There are aspects of running a public media service that require the power of a formal organization. But engaging with and leading a tribe cannot be achieved by a pure firm (or corporate) approach because it cannot scale. But if we can “organize without an organization,” we can get there. Of special note are his brief references to “cost of coordination” and how and when a firm (a formal organization) is useful and when it stands in the way of progress.
  • Umair Haque / Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab
  • Umair Haque / Harvard Business Publishing
    His writing is perhaps the most dense of any of the links here — it’s probably a half- or full-generation ahead of contemporary economic thinking, so it can be hard to follow. But if you’ve got an imagination to see a world that doesn’t quite look like ours and a world that operates on different economic principles, expectations and practices, you should be following Haque. Those in traditional mass media — especially commercial media — will ignore Haque at their peril. By the way, his PowerPoint slides on co-creation of content (at Bubblegeneration) are equally dense, but there’s a kernel of public media’s future in there: a collaborative approach to media capture, editing and distribution that we could never have considered in the past.

Thanks again to @garyinalaska for the invite. The crowd was great!