those ideas in full

Regent's Park, 5th February 2007

Here are the ideas the team shared at the very start in a meeting mentioned in maps:

Steve's presentation was not so much a thought-out idea as a gathering of thoughts. Many Economist readers, he supposed, would have sent a letter to the editor and would have moved from being communication Luddites to being heavy Internet users, but probably wouldn't download a podcast.

Were there any low-hanging fruits, perhaps an 'online weekend companion', perhaps a sort of digital Intelligent Life (The Economist's 'engaging lifestyle magazine')? Perhaps there were synergies to be derived from combining data from The Economist's 'World In' and 'Cities' Guide', with local community information and blogs? Perhaps a way could also be found to secure weekend advertising through a new service like this?

Subsequent discussion focused on covering leisure, presenting advertising in a more relaxed environment and easing the transition into the digital life.

Tom used chairs to display his hand-written posters (PowerPoint happily wasn't possible in the park). Influenced in particular by Netvibes' web content aggregator and personalised portal service and the way in which he consumed the web, he presumed that this kind of behaviour would become more widespread.

He proposed an 'Economist Reader' homepage service, which would combine comments by magazine readers on Economist articles, a bookmark feature (like de.licio.us) to enable users to find out what other Economist readers are looking at on the web, a community-based service echoing digg pages for citizen journalists, an 'Economist Sandbox' (a little like the Wikipedia Sandbox) in which readers could play with Economist data and repackage them and a profile page where users could put up their CV Facebook-style.

There was much discussion of The Economist's intelligent readership, how much it has to say and how much readers have to offer each other.

Stewart's proposal didn't specifically relate to The Economist Group and was much more broad-brush in its approach. It took as its starting point the idea that the Internet is about communication rather than information. Why not, he asked, let people create interest groups and subscriptions within given geographical areas, helping to find local services, a football team or somebody to have a date with? Economist readers want to meet other Economist readers, and a service like this could be combined with geolocation technology.

Discussion centred around existing services like twitter and the more business-orientated linked in and why they were more popular in Asia than in Europe.

Joanna's proposal tended to ask questions rather than offer solutions. Before coming up with ideas of what to do, she felt the team should ask things like:

• What do people need?
• Should they try to do something for a lot of people or only for a specific group?
• What can The Economist Group do to fulfil people's fundamental needs?

Everyone agreed that this was an important corrective to the previous discussion they'd been having.

Ludwig's idea, as you'll have guessed, was 'Economist.kids'. He proposed using The Economist's data, skills, resources, reputation and values to create an Economist-like service aimed at a much younger audience. It could include a moderated Wiki, advise on job seeking, writing and all aspects of learning as well as offering financial and political information and news.

Much of the discussion was around how to commercialise this service without alienating the target audience.

It was very early on and Mike, in leader/facilitator role, didn't bring a proposal to the park.

Following these ideas through the project, you'll have noticed that Ludwig's Economist.kids proposal made it through to the last two in April, largely due to its author's enthusiasm for the project. Or, as his Myers-Briggs profile said: 'May appear so unyielding that others are afraid to approach or challenge them.'

When the Bavaria/Lughenjo idea emerged, centring on universal primary education and a broader philanthropy exchange, it had no real roots in any of the above ideas (except that Intelligent Life has a strong philanthropy theme), although it was the result of returning to Joanna's 'what do people need?' approach. But the final HiSpace social/knowledge network proposal had obvious roots in Tom's idea and in some of the discussions they'd had in the park in early February.

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Credits:

T-shirt: cafepress.com
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the practical visionary

'The Practical Visionary' is the title of a Strategy & Business article published in 2008.

It's a good article, though curiously it offers a case study of the trajectory of the US National Basketball Association's CIO after his arrival at the organisation in 1999. Which is fine, except that the article is making a particular point about the role of the CIO today. (Incidentally, I had to check whether 'The Power of TODAY' had become a business mantra to match The Power of Now in the realm of personal development.

A diversion on cows and vegans

Google gave me prodigious results, but I had no energy to plough through the first 50 pages in order to find out the real number that it would eventually drop down to. I suspect that I had no energy because I'm not a vegan. Vegans run marathons where we carnos jog mere furlongs. I learnt this from the magnificent Steve Pavlina, who was No. 2 on Google's results list for 'The Power of TODAY'. No. 1 was a page at Microsoft.com. I don't think I've ever intentionally visited that site (though my computer probably visits regularly, especially late at night). Anyway, Steve's got a whole thing going about trying to change habits by deciding to do something for 30 days rather than for ever. Like giving up smoking or arms dealing or child abuse. (He doesn't say the latter two; they're my interpolation your honour.) He gave up meat first of all and then, feeling the onset of scorn for lacto-ovo vegetarians - and rightly so, in my opinion, as they betray a palpable lack of rigour - he gave up eggs and dairy products. As he goes on to tell us:

Well, I lost seven pounds in the first week, mostly from going to the bathroom as all the accumulated dairy mucus was cleansed from my bowels (now I know why cows need four stomachs to properly digest this stuff).

Now I'm no farmer, but apart from suckling calves, I don't think I've ever seen a member of the cow family eating butter or cream or yoghourt or crème fraiche or any of that kind of mucus. They generate it, but tend not to ingest it. But perhaps Steve was 'avin' a laugh. No. No, he can't be. Because he goes on to tell us that,

Recently I competed in Toastmasters International's annual humor speech contest... I won at the club level but lost the area contest. Technically I came in last place because I was disqualified for running over the time limit. If you go even one second overtime in these contests, you lose automatically.

Enough. Believe me, he wasn't 'avin' a larf.

Back to the practical visionary. As Michael Farber and his co-authors tell us,

the model 21st-century CIO... is training his focus on the demand side of the IT business equation, where the needs of the business are paramount, rather than spending most of his time on such typical supply-side concerns as cutting IT costs...

In case it's not immediately obvious, that means that he or she is getting involved with planning the corporate strategy and helping to deliver it, rather than spending too much time worrying about whether people's PCs work or the intranet's secure. (Of course, those things still matter but, in this case, the guy had several years from 1999 onwards to fix them before moving on to strategy.)

They go on:

The strategic CIO has never been more important to the future of the organisation. As operations and markets become more fragmented, there is an ever-greater need for IT to bind together a company and augment its collective intellect... IT can be used to address problems of mounting complexity and to help an organisation move into new products, new processes, and new markets, at home and around the world. New technologies are always changing how companies operate internally and how they look at their customers, suppliers, partners, sales channels, and markets.

Remember that Mike was CIO at The Economist Group, where he was doing exactly that - rolling up his sleeves and getting involved on the innovation front line.

Reading on, the article could have been written about Red Stripe:

The new CIO has an opportunity to change the way organisations adopt and use technology. Moreover, the time for changing it has never been better. The range of Web 2.0 technologies - social networking software, video-sharing sites, multi-participant simulated environments, and creative exchanges - has sparked a level of excitement not seen since the early days of the Internet.

Isn't that what we've just been saying? I'll keep quoting:

CIOs should study all the new technologies coming down the pipeline, whether or not they appear to be suited to the CIO's company or industry. CIOs need to take the time to think about their potential strategic value, not today, but five or 10 years from now. And they should talk with their peers within the company about how such technologies might fit in with strategies they too are seeing down the road. If CIOs aren't keeping these emerging technologies on their radar, it is at their peril: they can bet there's a competitor out there who is.

In all these respects, the six months that Mike and his team spent on Project Red Stripe seem to have been right on target. They were even talking explicitly about developing an idea that would reflect where the Group should be in 5-10 years in terms of its internet presence. And any one of the team could brief the Group on where and how to look to find out what's over the horizon.

So, we come back to the perception thing. Though I haven't witnessed this for myself first hand, my sense from the recent silence about Red Stripe at The Economist Group is that it's not seen as a success. Yet, in an odd way, I think the way it turned out could be one of the best outcomes.

For example, far from being surprised by the Financial Times's move into offering high priced (c. £2,000 p.a.) social networking sites for its executive readers in areas like Media & Technology, Property and the 'Luxury Sector' in February 2008, the Economist Group knew all about the pros and cons and had in-depth research on the idea at its fingertips.

Equally, from early 2008, changes at the economist.com website inevitably began to reflect some of the possibilities previously discussed by the Red Stripe team and rejected as 'too incremental'. Now, of course, some of these might have happened anyway, but the team regularly invited Economist executives into their room to share their thoughts, which were also shared more widely on the team's blog. And Mike and other members of the team that have stayed with the company are available to discuss their inside knowledge of everything from starting a predictions market to 'intelligent product placement' to an open-authoring wiki. [Interestingly, Mark Frazier at OpenWorld contacted me to ask if the team ever discussed setting up 'action-oriented wikis around the opportunities/strategies discussed by the Red Stripe team — for public allies/co-creators to move them forward?'. As far as I know, they didn't do quite that, but the data was all stored and made available via Central Desktop for exactly that purpose.]

[You can see an interview with Mike about his role as CIO here. ]

Dilemmas:

If you give smart employees the opportunity of a lifetime, how do you hang on to them once the excitement's over? [For once, there's an answer to this one. Help them to move on, if that's what they need to do. Stay in touch. Maybe they'll come back even more fully fledged.]

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Credits:
No consumas lacteos - 'equality'
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