Is Fun the Real Indicator of Success?

Recently I came across this paper on the “Engagement Economy” that talked about the social and behavioral motivators for turning the focus of current crowdsourcing from simply getting people’s attention to getting people’s engagement.

While the benefit of getting people to innovate, contribute and deliver value on a mass scale is obvious, the drivers for what creates such participation often eludes current business thinking. As someone who works on complex web services to get people to participate on a mass scale, the focus on behavioral drivers is obviously key. In the process of delivering successful projects and ventures, I’ve even identified the construct for what creates such behavior change:

Goal = Motivation + Feedback

In other words, in order to achieve the desired outcome, you need to first identify people’s motivations towards that outcome and then design the feedback mechanisms so that they can immediately gauge the benefits of their efforts towards it. A simple example is weight loss. Making that goal engaging has to tie in the motivation of why you are trying to lose the weight in the first place, and then deliver the feedback mechanisms such as your bathroom scale to inform you of your progress. The mechanics of less calories and more exercise is a given, the motivation and feedback measurement as indicated here are the most important factors.

The key factor driving that behavior towards sustained success is whether or not I’m having fun doing it. What? Neither going to the gym or foregoing dessert is fun for most of us, so what the hell am I talking about?

Consider what “Fun” is in the first place. From the perspective of game designers and piles of research on behavior change, “Fun” basically boils down to a specific type of self elected work we find rewarding. How is fun work? Well, think of what you do for fun. Play games? Watch a movie? Take a holiday? Aren’t all of those things about “doing” what gives you satisfaction? It’s even simpler than that when you consider that everything you enjoy doing is just work that makes you feel like you’ve achieved something and you got the benefit of it almost immediately after starting to do it. In other words:

Fun = Activity + Joy

So what does fun have to do with Success? Especially when we typically think of success both in our business and personal lives as a result of hard work? It’s the “work” part. We work for a payoff that we believe the work will result in. The closer the payoff is to reality, the more “Fun” we have, and the further it is from reality, the more depressed and disappointed we get.

Understanding this construct may be the real key to success. When we can design activities that give us immediate feedback towards our objective and we can compare them in relationship with others, we now have the framework for success in any context.

Simply put: Fun=Success.

Think about it. Whether success equals profits, market share, popularity, loyalty, love or any number of things we crave both professionally and personally, the path to getting there inevitably involves work that gives us immediate feedback to let us know we are getting there. In other words it involves having fun!

So the next time you think success involves dissatisfying work that you have to do, maybe it’s time to readjust your radar. If you’re not having fun, you most likely are off course.

Photo: Nunshavingfun

Social commerce = Data transparency?

This book promo video above makes a compelling case for the power of social media, but for those of us who are trying to create value on the emerging web, it’s still wishful thinking for interactions that have yet to materialize.

Today Readwriteweb announced that Google is offering revenue sharing through Adsense for videos that become YouTube sensations. That’s a cool thing for the creator and advertisers, but what about the millions of us that helped make the video popular in the first place? Anyone with a basic understanding of crowdsourcing already understands that the motivation of promoters isn’t financial but social credibility. So if you want your recommendation to be relevant, be prepared to be exploited by those who see your activity data that you still do not have access to!

While that may be the case today, does that really have to be the construct to usher in the next era of social commerce? Especially given the flux in the content space as voiced by thinkers like Gerd, the flux in the commerce space with Free vs. Paid debate and the flurry of privacy issue headlines around providers of platforms trying to leverage user data to their benefit?

A while ago, I proposed three shifts I observed and one in particular was about the democratization of intelligence. I believe that this may be the most significant factor in opening up the access to all as Anil talks about here and alleviating the core issues of privacy, piracy and promotion in the highly volatile content space. The next market innovations around energy and finance (what is money other than a exchange of information) may well be dependent on whether or not we can democratize data simply and transparently.

The real data to be democratized is not really about a users’ personal data mined in the process of interacting in the vast social ocean of the web. Besides the obvious privacy implications evident with the recent Facebook privacy lawsuit, the usefulness of such data is still predicated on the assumption that the consumer user is on the receiving end of the platform provider and advertiser’s “targeted” strategy. Meanwhile, all the benefit indicators for making data transparent are becoming apparent when we look at web constructs as ecosystems vs. channels. Simply put, data in an open system creates value for all participants, while data mined with the intent of the one-sided capitalization of it looks lame and discourages participation, such as this botched experiment with the marketing of the Tron release.

OK. So the problem may be evident, and you may even buy into the notion that I’m actually making some sense, but how do we even begin to propose revealing usage information consumable by everyone? A major interaction design challenge to say the least, we are also talking about a new behavior of sharing a common context of information across various parties with completely different motivations.

The trade secrets of how I’m actually approaching it for solutions I’m currently working out is obviously not for this post. However, the quick blog post answer is simply about perspective. In other words, it’s just a matter of how you look at it.
For example, the weather is nothing more than ecological data that is shared within a common context for all life on the planet. A dark cloud formation is interpreted and reinterpreted depending on the context of the recipient,but the context of the sky is common to all. A farmer looks at it differently than a little girl who made plans to play outside that day, but the meaning of the cloudy day (or data set) is both simple and commonly understood regardless of individual context. If we can start to think of sharing data with all participants in our market ecosystem this way, we may actually be on our way to creating value for all and even create new value for the next wave of prosperity to come. Thoughts?

Is Top Heavy Bound to Topple?

While the headline may be obvious, the modern organization, steeped in traditions from the industrial economy is still struggling to find meaning around where the value is these days. The compensation and status infrastructure is still catering to those who fudge the numbers, sell the creations of others they do not fully understand and woo the investors with their schmoozing prowess.

While the social web is quietly leveling the playing field in the background the seduction of creating nothing yet earning everything from cash to accolades shine like dollar signs in the eyes of hopefuls in the back room cranking out the innovations. These hopefuls now think “One day, I too will have the corner office and my underlings will drop the blood, sweat and vacation days to make me look good just like I do for my boss!”…and the cycle continues…but does it have to?

As Obama points out in his recent speech on the economy: “We need less of people who move numbers around and more Scientists and Engineers” he says, with what I hope is a clear message to those who hoard access and contacts because its their only leverage in a world that is quickly becoming a real meritocracy over the illusion of it and back room power plays.

This is not just about organizations that think they are invincible, but the entire economic construct today which put its faith at the top. When we build in silos and look to the top for our salvation, we are ignoring the emerging networked power all of us have to change the way the world works. The next may seem disturbing to the status quo, but is asking why the CTO makes less than the CEO not a valid question? Why does the founder profit less than the VC? Why does the scientist earn less than the marketing executive?

The answers to these questions may seem obvious to those who’ve accepted the current business paradigm where access to the sales and investment channels were scarce. However, in a world where the value actually comes from those who create complex innovative things without the friction to entry into markets of the past, these are more than just questions, they just may be an indicator what type of skills are valued more than ever. If you’ve built a career on not much more than the ability to persuade things in your favor, you’d better watch it! A new breed of innovators who understand brand, behavior change and social connectivity are about to change the rules.
Now more than ever it’s the creators turn to rule. Those who innovate real value no longer need the name on your building to get to the buyer, they also don’t need your marketing department when they have Facebook friends and Twitter followers, and very soon will not need your capital when p2p lending soon turns into the standard financial instrument for change. Capital is already chasing ideas and not the other way around, and the value is across the network and what’s at the top is merely an illusion.

So will the top heavy fall? If Wall Street is any indicator, I think you already have your answer. Thoughts?

Is Talent Getting The Flock Out?

Gourmet cafeterias, martini hours, casual Fridays and more were supposed to keep talent confined to the organizations that invested heavily in the brand mantras that glued the less connected in the past, but is that still true now? Xing’d, Spoke’d, Facebook’d, Twitter’d and LinkedIn workforces may not be paying attention to the company credo much when it comes to working with people who raise their game and careers to the next level.

I’ve written about the natural migration of talent networks as theory in years past, but the reality of it is taking shape worldwide now! The smart people in your company no longer trust the company to contain all the resources they need to move forward. They get their knowledge from others who have nothing to do with the organization and figure out new ways to connect, share and collaborate with people outside the corporate walls.

Highly sensitive innovations subject to NDAs have cross-pollinated with FrieNDAs (NDAs between friends), and there’s no turning back. Relationships based on shared creative contexts trump those based on those sharing a common signature on their paychecks and option grants. So what does all this mean for organizations going forward? Can innovation really be contained? Does the corporate structure really make sense for how people actually work?

Maybe in the short-term; however, I have a feeling that the alliances of the future have nothing to do with artificial constructs like “Company” or “Administration”, but the social constructs we’ve known all along like friends and family. What do you think?

The Next 3 Shifts?

Keeping up with the incremental changes in social media, emerging technologies, energy, education and more is often a thankless job until the knowledge acquired suddenly becomes relevant for an objective where it can be applied. Even so, what is really happening is often clouded by what appears on the surface. Why is Twitter important? Why should we look at eWallets in relationship to credit markets? Why does the holy grail of mobile marketing still seem to elude the savviest of marketers? Why is P2P sharing ReMixing the media landscape? Why does business move at lightning speed compared to the speed of the education system? Why are there layoffs now in the emerging cleantech industries like solar, when alternative energy is the darling of the media and investment communities?

The answers I think are more about the underlying shifts over the topical movements that make the headlines. These shifts affect society, economics and culture in fundamental ways that never really surfaced ‘till now. The thinking here isn’t new, the ideas behind a connected world of all things living and created date back to king Ashoka’s time, but the manifestations enabled by a connected population is more than just the ideas, but the active manifestations of what they mean to all of us. From my humble perspective, I think they are the following:

1.The personalization of time:

The ability to quantify time directly contributed to the productivity of the relatively advanced society we know today. As the measurement became standardized, i.e. clocks, time zones, etc., we created other commonly shared contexts like the workday or the weekend. In other words, time, or the measure of it against our ability to contribute towards progress remained constant. That is, constant until now.

Today, as most of the knowledge working population can attest to, time is relative to how they manage their personal schedules against what they need to achieve to be productive in society. We work around the clock within windows of time most convenient to us, sync calendars for meetings and errands, and manage time mostly on our own terms.

The large organizations that fight this shift are increasingly finding themselves at a competitive disadvantage. “I’m working when my competition sleeping” is not only commonly heard, but how groups manage idea creation/time variables win in the marketplace as evidenced by agile startups toppling legacy businesses everywhere. Time now, for all intents and purposes is relative to the individual and beneficial those who understand how to leverage it to their benefit.

2.The virtualization of self:

Whether we realize it or not, our asynchronous virtual existence is everywhere we look. The virtual and the real is merging at a rapid pace as more and more physical objects and locations become data points and our digital profiles become aggregators and curators of all of that information relative to our worldviews.

Geeks like me now manage the activity on the profiles I’ve set up on various socially connected services like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed etc., but as my life becomes more and more digitally complex, my inclination is to automate managing my relationships rather than burn hours managing my profiles. The global brain of our collective consciousness is too vast a resource to navigate without our virtual selves guiding the way.

This is not unique to me, but to all the digirati who for example use SocialToo to manage their activity on Twitter. The net effect is that we have limited attention available to connect to all things and people important to us. We didn’t have this problem when our “social network” was limited to the people we knew around us, and our desires for things were limited to physical objects we can see and touch within immediate transport. The world is now bigger and smaller at the same time, giving rise to a need to aggregate and manage our connections from a customizable virtual concierge paradigm over distributing our attention to individual profiles. We are now both virtual and real to the rest of us, and there is no turning back.

3.The democratization of intelligence:

What the virtureal YOU living in asynchronous time need more than anything else to function is actionable information to make sense of what to do next. When our mobile devices give us turn-by-turn directions or when we pull up a saved bookmark, we are already participating in the next shift: the democratization of intelligence.

Of course we’ve already been participating in managing our activities based on data patterns giving us predictive signs to act such as a cloudy day prompting us to carry an umbrella, but this is much more significant, because the data is far more granular and specifically relevant to us than ever before. From where to eat, what to buy, who to talk to, where to go, what to expect, when to invest and in what, and even actually when to take out your umbrella, meaningful displays of relevant data is morphing our actions into predictable patterns we are forecasting at any given point in time. This is significant because this frees us from trusting any singular source of information to act on to acting on aggregated, relevant information we trust.

We are now in a position to teach ourselves and ultimately think for ourselves independent of external bias. If we look at the relationship between belief vs. understanding historically, it is evident that the more you can prove with certainty (science), the less we need to rely on faith and the proportionately the stuff we can prove has a larger share than the stuff we still “believe”. Ideologies around “knowledge leading to true freedom” have been the beacon of all human wisdom through the ages. Now we may actually be headed there.

These concurrent shifts are not yet felt in totality but the signs are ever present. The idea that all things are connected and interdependent is not new, but the ability to feel it is evident each time we put a query in a search box of the world’s biggest information repository. The business of energy creation and distribution from renewable resources is not just a trend for the times, but an inevitable realization that capital is connected in a networked system that lives and breathes with others. Unidirectional distribution of everything from information (old school advertising) to energy (pollution) to capital (financial system crash) is making that point over and over.

The obstacles (though temporary) are the creative destruction of power structures that have traditionally benefitted from this unidirectional distribution. Change however is less tolerant of what “was” regardless of how much the powers that be want it to be so. So, of course the status quo is busy trying to figure out a workaround to preserve their powers in this shifting landscape, but as history has confirmed, change always wins out in the end. The real question is that if these indeed are the underlying shifts, how will we make them work to our advantage?

Can We Teach Ourselves?

Sugata Mitra shares his research on educating children in developing countries with the TED audience above, and it brings up a compelling point we may understand intellectually, but never quite muster the courage to implement in real life.

This next video makes a similar point about today's education system legacy that hasn't really evolved past the Victorian era even as we experience the current state of flux in the knowledge economy:



While most of us in the knowledge economy achieve our expertise from self-directed learning, somehow it seems to elude the educational establishment. The objective viewpoint of "power vs. progress" is not such a simple equation when it is emotionally charged with the activity that gives people the means to succeed in the system.

Intellectually we can agree that it is no longer about "Knowledge" but "Learning" as Alvin Toffler famously quoted: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

However, practically, rote learning to pass the SATs is not only common practice, but a formidable institution.

Meanwhile, technologies like Context Discovery can potentially make consuming information less time intensive and creating info mashups towards value a higher priority, but sadly that doesn't quite exist yet in the mainstream wisdom.

So how does the education system reform itself globally? Can we really teach ourselves? What is the design of the system that makes that a reality? What are the barriers to adoption for such a system? What is the first step? Thoughts?

What is the Future of Money?

From the developing:

to the Developed markets:


We've heard the cashless world predictions at 2008 Lift Asia recently, a couple of years ago from Bruce Sterling and even from Howard Rheingold back in the late 90's, but where is the realizable vision headed?

The benefits of a self adjusting mobilized version of transactional value are obvious. Less crime, better market value as its adjusted to market demand in real time, ubiquity and transportability in a borderless world are just a few of its merits.

But will the powers that be let it fly?

When six companies that control all the transactions in the world try to snuff out a direct transaction platform like Revolution Money, is mCommerce really going to keep much more powerful governments from stopping the next financial innovations? Those who benefit from currency being a closed system will not cede their apparent powers in the name of progress. Just as they will not truly educate the public to question them as we see in the political process in the US.

So what is then the Future of Money?

Maybe the real question to ask is what is the objective of money? If at the core it is a vehicle to transfer value, then the visions are already clear. If however, it is a tool to protect national interests over global progress, than it's a different issue requiring different strategies to to move forward.

If you are trying to reinvent money for a connected, interdependent market ecosystem of a world, what would you do? What would it look like? Thoughts?

Concept to Reality?

Cool ideas like this wearable motorcycle capture our imaginations, but what does it really take to turn such innovations into reality? Of course there are infrastructure investments, a business model and supporting ecosystem to make something like this both a viable and affordable, not to mention government support to fend off the current commercial interests (think big oil lobbyists) to keep such innovations off the road for good...

I'm a big fan of Shai's efforts with the Better Place Electric Car as recently featured in this Wired article, but the road is long and hard as any entrepreneur trying to bring truly disruptive change can attest to. Even the simple fact that the original design for the iPod (see image below) was conceived back in 1979!



The truth is that there will always be a gap between a solution and market adoption. Because demand alone cannot navigate through the politics of commerce. What is possible though is the momentum of demand accountability we can now generate with social media tools available to us all. The video was posted on YouTube so that I can comment on it here, and you can share it with people who can actually make the case for bringing it mainstream. That's the power WE now have, and we should exercise it fully. Thoughts?

What Drives Three?

Ancient concepts of three interdependent components contributing to the well being of the whole, like the third eye depicted in the mask above have remained integral to many cultures over the ages for a reason. The rational explanation may be that it is easy for humans to process three interrelated things such as father-mother-child for the nuclear family or CEO-CMO-COO for the global business, but maybe it goes a bit deeper than that...

After a recent conversation with a friend about the three components that keep a business going (Distribution-Development-Operations), it suddenly occurred to me that maybe there is a deeper truth here that applies to all the three-pronged dynamics in the universe.

The obvious examples of the minimum requirements of legs on a stool, spokes on wheel, etc. are a given. They are about the structural rules which even translates to everything from writing to persuasion to choice architecture. The "a-ha" wasn't really that, it was the nature of the relationship which hold the three together that is most fascinating.

Within every architectural case there is a:

-Driver: Something that inspires the need
-Developer: Something that answers the need by creating
-Derivative: Something that is produced as a result needing to be managed in order for the cycle to continue

In most business paradigms, the "Driver" equals creating and delivering the market, i.e., sales and marketing..., The "Developer" equals the development of the product and/or service, i.e. R&D, engineering, design, architecture, etc... and the "Derivative" is the management challenges of a growing organization, i.e. operations.

The realization that the other two cannot exist without the "Driver" is crucial in understanding how all three pronged systems work. It's very easy to get distracted and spend energy on the "Developer" (trying to make the product perfect) or the "Derivative" (designing the most efficient operation management system) while losing focus on what drives them.

This is universal regardless of context, and definitely not limited to business. Here are some other examples:

1. Family: Providing, Nurturing, Prioritizing
2. Learning: Stimulus, Knowledge, Recall
3. Relevance: Need, Choice, Context

See what I'm getting at? What do you think?

Venture Communism?

This video from the Fortune 2018 conference panel raises some interesting insights that may actually shape the Internet businesses and experiences to come.

The key takeaway for me was the discrepancy between the short term thinking of those who control the money against the long term value equation the connected commercial landscape enabled by the Internet actually IS.

I've written about my systemic approach to brands, experiences, business models and more here many times, so I won't bore you with another reiteration of the same concepts, however, I want to ask just one question that may set the context:

If the world is truly becoming an interconnected and interdependent ecosystem virtually just as it is physically, how long will traditional power structure paradigms (governments, VCs, companies) actually benefit by trying to control it?

BTW, Here's an interesting take from Bill Gates on a related matter.