How Cities Outlast Companies

Last week on the Fast Company site, a piece titled 'How Short-Lived, Slow-Moving Companies Can Become More Like Fast, Creative Cities' , a review of some of the research of physicist Geoffrey West on the growth and development of cities, caught my attention. It was a familiar read since I had previously blogged about West and his research in December 2010 in a post called 'Physics, Cities, and Corporations'.

By way of review, West describes a theory, based on extensive research of world cities and over 23,000 companies, that cities tend to follow a pattern found in other complex ecosystems; most often, they grow in stability, success, and creativity as they increase in size and grow more diverse. With rare exceptions, cities tend not to disappear. In contrast companies tend to look more like mammals, getting slower as they increase in size and bureaucracy, and then growing old and fading away entirely.

Why did I want to essentially re-post on the same topic once more? Well, the original piece ran a few days before Christmas 2010, and somehow I get the feeling that physics and demographics were not really all that compelling for most readers who might have had visions of sugarplums and all that going on. And second, last month a talk given by Professor West about his theories and presented at the TedGlobal2011 event was posted on the Ted site. A copy of the 17-minute talk is embedded below, (email and RSS subscribers will need to click through to see the video).

While West's theories are highly provocative, they don't really start to offer organizations, particularly large ones (or ones that aspire to grow large), ideas on how to prevent that inevitable slide into the kind of growth stagnation and slow decline of vibrancy, creativity, and energy that seem to ensnare so many large and mature organizations. Why does it have to be that with increased size, organizations seem to be destined to slower rates of growth, and eventual disruption at the hands of smaller, faster, more agile competitors? While cities, on the other hand, seem to thrive with growth, and when you dig into West's data, see increases in efficiency in many measures - energy use, infrastructure requirements, creativity, etc.

Obviously this topic is interesting to me, since I've posted on it twice, (and watched the TED video a couple of times), so hopefully this will resonate with some of you that might be inside organizations that seemed to have lost a step as they have grown larger. 

What are some of the ways that you can help instill some of that energy and agility that most of your smaller competitors are using against you? What, if anything can you take from the growth of urban areas and city ecosystems that might apply? 

What's more valuable, the content or the platform?

It is no secret, at least here in the USA, that the traditional newspaper and print publishing industries have been forced to undergo significant change, adaptation, and even re-invention not only to thrive in the new digital economy, but merely to survive. While the last decade has seen the rise of new information sources architected completely for the digital age, and some other long-time industry standard bearers adapt to this new world, many others have failed and have declared bankruptcy. Being in the print news business certainly has not been easy, and for those organizations still fighting the battle for reader's time and attention with the incredible array of options for news and information that are available, it certainly seems that creativity, innovative ideas, and fresh thinking might be the only way to get by.

Two such enterprises, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News think they have one of these fresh ideas. They plan to buy Android-based tablet computers, pre-load them with their news organization's content and apps, then re-sell the bundle (at a discount), to try and generate interest and ongoing subscription revenues for their digital content properties.  Some additional details from the Ad Week piece describing the plan:

On July 11, the two papers plan to announce a pilot program under which they will sell Android tablets with their content already built in at a discount. Icons on the tablets' home screen will take users to digital replicas of both newspapers as well as a separateInquirer app and Philly.com, the papers’ online hub.

The idea of giving away or selling devices has been widelydiscussed in the publishing industry, but the Philadelphia experiment seems to be the most aggressivepush in that direction thus far.

Greg Osberg, CEO and publisher of the Philadelphia Media Network, the entity that includes the papers and Philly.com, believes the company is making history with the program, the cost for which he estimated will come in somewhere in six figures. The deal lets the Philadelphia papers keep all the revenue and the consumer data, though, which will give it a read on how people consume newspaper content on a tablet.

A pretty bold move for sure. The Philly news organizations (correctly), get that the tablet market is where tremendous interest and consumer adoption are taking place, they can see hundreds if not thousands of locals riding buses and trains playing Angry Birds reading the news of the day on tablets and smartphones, and therefore want to create and exploit an opportunity to try and merge a real consumer need - 'I want a tablet', with a manufactured need - 'I want to read the Philly Inquirer'. 

It seems today that every publisher, consumer website, online productivity tool, and even increasingly enterprise technologies meant to support functions like recruiting, performance and talent management, analytics and the like are developing solutions for mobiles and tablets, and aggressively marketing the same. And this makes perfect sense given the market's reaction and almost insatiable desire for all things mobile and tablet. 

I wonder, particularly in the HCM enterprise technology space, if we will see a 'Philly Inquirer-style', marketing approach soon as well. One where the solution provider does more than simply demo their tablet-ready solution to an eager buying audience, but rather offers the entire package, pre-loaded pre-configured, and ready to work. Walk out of the meeting toting your brand new, ready to rock, Human Capital Management tablet. I know I am oversimplifying, but you get the idea. How many of us try on that new pair of kicks in the Foot Locker and just have to wear them home?

Corporate IT departments have been doing this kind of thing for ages, supplying staff with PCs and laptops with the 'official' image and set of applications that are supported. But today, I wonder if this process is too slow, too inflexible and not designed for today's much more demanding consumers of enterprise technology.

Any vendor out there in the space already doing this? If you know of someone, drop me a comment.

The Downside of Finding Exactly What You're Looking For

Last night it was 4th grade homework time at Chez Steve, and the spelling/vocabulary assignment entailed looking up a set of words in the dictionary, taking note of their definition and part of speech, and providing some reference information about the selected word's position in the dictionary itself, (page number, guide words, etc.).

As we, (really Patrick the aforementioned 4th grader), worked through the assignment, he made the expected observation of a modern 10 year old, one that is pretty savvy as to the power and value of the web to help us all navigate through life's little challenges. Per Patrick, 'Why would anyone use a real dictionary if they had a choice? Wouldn't you just use Dictionary.com? It's way faster.'

And he was right, at least to a point. Paging though a giant, old, slightly moldy book searching for 'reign' and 'colonel' must have seemed like a pretty unenlightened waste of a precious few minutes, when the fast, easy, and generally accurate (or certainly accurate enough), information could be found at Dictionary.com.  After all, using the online service would have taken him exactly to the result he was looking for. Type the word into the search box, click 'go', and you're there. No wasted time, no tedious searching around. Just results.

But since the assignment had very specific instructions, 'Use a real dictionary, you know, a book', Patrick was forced to kick it old school, and page though the volume, checking the guide words at the top of each page, doing a little mental alphabetizing to try and efficiently find the words of interest.  Definitely a slow process, certainly not one in synch with our modern (even, perhaps especially for a 10-year old), need to have instant, immediate, and complete information with the click of a mouse.

What we found out though, which is sort of obvious for those of use who remember fondly relics like real dictionaries and (shudder), printed almanacs and encyclopedias, is that much of the fun, and the excitement, is discovering things we were not actually looking for. On the dictionary page for 'colonel' we found 'colossus', 'colophon', and 'Colorado potato beetle'. All awesome and amazing words indeed, all deserving to be found, even if they did not have the good fortune to be included on this week's list of 4th grade vocabulary words. Words that would have remained undiscovered mysteries without using the old book.

Does it matter that we are, increasingly, trading exploration and discovery for efficiency and productivity?

Is it important that we tend to prefer to leverage whatever solution gives us the 'right' result in the fastest possible manner?

Certainly the internet and the connected world have given us all remarkable, tremendous, and unprecedented access to knowledge, insight, and expertise - most of which is just a few searches and clicks away. But if we leverage this resource to tell us only exactly what we are looking for, well then, in a way we have simply replaced one dictionary for another, albeit a larger and more colorful one.

A dictionary that opens immediately to the word we seek, without letting us trip on colophons or Colorado potato beetles along the way.

Ask the Tweeps?

A knowledge worker in search of information or answers to specific issues or problems has several possible alternatives at their disposal to attempt to find the right answers, and solve their problem.Flickr - Thomas Hawk

Options:

1. Ask an internal colleague

2. Search the available company information databases or systems

3. 'Broadcast' a question to numerous other internal colleagues, or even the entire company

4. Google it

5. Leverage 'external' contacts, via e-mail, phone, or social networking

Lately, it seems like more and more I am turning to my 'external' networks, usually my Twitter friends, when I have a question, issue, or am looking for some opinion and feedback on issues that are not 'inside' in nature.

My question to you is : Who do you turn to when you are in need of information, or insight?

Do you find yourself asking your Twitter, Facebook, or other 'external' contacts more or less than your co-workers?

Are your 'external' contacts more important and vital to your success than your co-workers?

And finally, what should organizations be doing (if anything), if indeed many employees are relying on external contacts and social networks for answers and information?

Let me know your thoughts.