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Is is just me or have Enterprise Social Networks gone off the boil?
The market opportunities seem to have slowed, we can see vendors struggling in our local market.
More broadly, Yammer retrenched its entire team of Customer Success Managers globally, some 40 people, and has not replaced them with any other service to support customer adoption. Slack, Iâm Breaking Up with You, articles have started to appear - perhaps the SlackBot got on peopleâs nerves?
A cloche seems to have been put over enterprise social networking
I have three thoughts about whatâs going on:
Enterprises have read and taken lessons from the active âstream of consciousnessâ about ESNs which has been prevalent up to now. What went wrong, what needs to be done, how to make things work better, and have internalised it and feel confident that they can make progress on their own. Itâs heads-down-get on with the job. Thatâs good, ultimately thatâs the only way to make it happen.
Enterprises have sensed that âcollaborationâ has failed, and have now have some sense of it being because collaboration isnât an objective. Investments are suspended while this is being absorbed, and that itself is a low business priority. Things have drifted back to email, and perhaps with some insights derived from the ESN experience e.g. using IBM Verse âcognitive emailâ, and messaging is being used as a residual from the ESN experience e.g. the rise of Atlassian Hipchat. This group may also have had a realisation that itâs not about the tool - not about taking an outside-in approach, but about defining the purpose and getting culture into an inside-out approach to implementation. This requires a major re-think.
Enterprises have gone back to a very domain-focused collaboration solutions which are tailored to get work done for a specific group. For this, the broad âIBM Connectionsâ or Jive or Yammer solutions are sub-optimal. They are specifically very sub-optimal because the niche collaboration providers often attach a specific Special Interest Group global community to their platform. This not only brings work value to those specific practitioners but brings âhuman valueâ among like minds, and offers opportunities such as job prospects.
Iâm not sure if Iâm right about the reasons, but it could explain the current limbo. Do you feel the limbo, what do you think is behind it?
Yesterday Telstra, Australiaâs biggest telco, had a second major systems outage in a matter of weeks which took down network users and shut out customers.
These kind of "chaos theory" events often happen like this - in runs - for some reason. The banks in Australia have recently all had systems crash which havenât crashed before.
Systems which were supposed to be fail-safe and have multiple levels of technical and human redundancy fail. And "unrelated" ones fail that have never failed before.
It's like the X-Files
I think the likely cause is culture.
These systems are all programmed by humans. Telstra, and the banks, have layered patch upon patch and subsystem upon subsystem and interface upon interface on the original "core" system. And suffering still from massive 1980 Not Invented Here and "we are more complicated than any other customer in the world" have added layers of unique customisation and modifications.
The result is that no human being can comprehend how the system works and even less how it actually keeps working.
Embed that into the Jack Welch super-hierarchical fear-based culture  "don't tell me what's wrong unless you have a solution" (see yesterday on Linkedin How To Break Bad News To Your Boss ) and of course no-one is prepared to tell their boss that the systems are running themselves.
The systems creep ever forward toward the brink, and one day a butterfly flaps its wings.
A $300m software repair job is announced, and the journey to chaos starts all over again.
The solution?
There is none. Well, there is none with the current management team. The only solution is to change the culture and to replace the systems.
Typically it is far easier for the existing management team to authorise a $1 billion âtechnology refreshâ than to change the culture. That postpones the problem for another 10 years and theyâll have cashed out their options by then.Â
Fixing the problem requires changing the culture, a massive task, and then refreshing the systems. A side effect of a new culture is that the systems refresh will cost substantially less once the âwe are differentâ and âNot Invented Hereâ mindset is flushed out of the organisation. Think 40% of the previous cost.
The aftermath of prostate cancer, more specifically after prostatectomy, usually reveals itself in a series of evolving realisations that life is forever going to be different. Specifically, your sex life is never going to be the same again.Â
Itâs often accompanied by a hint of anger that this is not quite how your doctor explained that things would work out. In fact, when you ask around you find that only a small minority of men are capable of resuming âbusiness as usualâ, and the majority feel as you do about the lack of transparency of their doctors.
So, forgetting the anger and the past, you are here now, whatâs on your mind and how do you adjust?
Whatâs on your mind is how do I interest women (or my partner) and how do I have a sex life when I am sexually impaired i.e. I cannot get, or I cannot hold an erection?
How you adjust is as follows:
Think beyond sex - think intimacy. The ability to be intimate is what will attract and retain women (or your partner);
Understand that sexual intimacy is a small part of intimacy;
Learn that sexual penetration is a small part of sexual intimacy.
You need to be able to reflect, and to take the opportunity created by your experience of cancer to enlighten yourself and create a new part of your life.
For more read my post at @mediumÂ
Men, How Surviving Prostate Cancer Can Improve Your Intimacy Skills
Do dinosaurs weep? Aussie execs and social media technology
I've consistently noticed how our local (Australia) executives of many major enterprises remain proud of their disdain for social media and social media companies such as Facebook (just for their daughters) and Pinterest (just for their wives). They wear this disdain as a badge of honour as Dionne Lew has observed.
I'll use the word tragic to describe this pathetic complacent mindset. This article is JUST ONE example of how many "new age" companies are at the leading edge of everything that matters for "digital disruption" - including advanced operational applications of machine deep learning (but that's just one of the many things they have mastered).
And even more importantly they have mastered how to integrate many advanced technologies into their culture and how they do day to day business. Facebook, for example has been through four iterations of organisational structures testing how to get data science integrated into how people work. In almost every Australian organisation it's still just a department.
I'd say to our dinosaur executives "read this and weep" (the link below) except that they don't have the nous nor mindset to understand why they should weep :)Â
Facebook and Pinterest Take Big Data To Another Level by @bernardmarr http://buff.ly/1kQv6si
The path to self-confidence isnât via cosmetic incantations urging self-belief in your positivity or self-esteem. It is by fundamentally understanding the profound difference between you not minding something and not caring. Hereâs my story of how I worked this out.
It was a Thursday, 9am. The afternoon before Iâd spent 4 hours in hospital for an invasive biopsy. âYour doctor will call you in a few daysâ, they told me as I was discharged. My mobile phone rang. âYou need to book immediate surgeryâ, said my doctor. He informed me straight-out that I had a cancer which would almost certainly kill me within 5 years. About 6 months after the treatment my marriage broke down and we separated. Financially I was bad shape, in some part due to $20,000 worth of medical bills. Over the next 12 months I had to figure out how to pull my life back together, and ânot mindingâ is a part of how I did it.
Most people donât quite understand, or havenât given thought to, the difference between ânot mindingâ and ânot caringâ. Thatâs probably because they havenât had any cause to think deeply about it.
I thought deeply about it as I wanted to use the cancer incident as a platform for bettering my life, and potentially the life of others. And the very first thing to be done was to figure out how to face life again.Â
My most compelling conclusion was after about 3 months of thinking, and it was that confidence was the key. As simple as that. But it took me 9 more months to figure out âhowâ - the sustaining method to achieve confidence.
It was not about positivity
I thought about âpositivityâ and if that could be a path to self-confidence. I had a bias. I was not - am not, never have been - a fan of what I regard as the cosmetic superficial banter of the self-esteem movement, nor the positivity movement, nor the âI am a beautiful personâ âI am a confident personâ movement. No doubt there is a temporary âreliefâ and some good feelings. And group sessions and conferences where humanity is shared triggers the Hawthorne Effect of being grateful or even elated that someone else has even asked about us.
My scepticism comes from observing that the feeling of self-worth engendered by these methods never lasts.
Iâve seen people collapse from this superficial euphoric state into worse anxiety and depression than before they became hooked up in it. My conclusion is that these methods are not real. People have to continually work on them, they have to make themselves exercise these affirmations constantly. They put the cart before the horse, the tail chasing the dog. The person doesnât actually believe, they just have to keep working on believing and thinking that it will come from the outside in because of how people will now react to them. In summary it is something which comes from them but does not become part of them - not a part of who they really are.
Caring but not minding doesnât ignore the hurt
The âcaring but not mindingâ technique says that when you expose your vulnerabilities (another essential step to being confident) you will get hurt. When you experience your fears, you will be frightened, and potentially suffer. AND that you let yourself care when you are hurt. You acknowledge that hurt as real. In fact not caring is the road to self-destruction, depression and withdrawal from the present (from living).
Simultaneously you learn to accept that you donât mind. You have to learn not to mind in order to break a reflex connection. Breaking this âreflexâ at a deep automatic level is how this technique varies from the cosmetic variations of positivity. Â There is no concept of positivity here, there is the technique of breaking reactions and of separating your mind and your consciousness.
Not minding breaks the reflex reaction
The reflex, or reaction, which happens when you are hurt is between âmindingâ and âfeelingâ.
This is in-built in each of us. However people vary enormously in how they manage this reflex. If you are insulted âyou mindâ and you react. If you are rejected âyou mindâ and you react. If you are self-conscious then situations cause you to âmindâ and you react. You know from daily life that everyone reacts differently to things, and may have also observed that people who are self-confident react, and therefore âmindâ, less.
The meaning of âmindingâ and why we are different has two key factors: one is belief systems, and the other is breaking the reaction between minding and feeling. This post only discusses the latter, but it is part of the technique to gain insight into the former.
The reflex connection between minding and feeling is facilitated by your consciousness but dominated by your mind. In this case your mind is your enemy. Your mind is rushing you to judgement, and trying to force a connection between you âmindingâ and your feelings.
in other words your mind is rushing you to react. Itâs trying to show your embarrassment, expose your self-consciousness, fuel your anger, aggravate your preconceived sense of failure. Your beliefs have already told you that you will be rejected and, of course, you were. Now your mind wants to feel that pain and expose that through your feelings and to have people see you become that rejected person by your demeanor and behaviour. Your mind is your enemy.
Remember always that your mind is not you, but it tries to be you by reacting with feelings which people see and come to believe is âyouâ. You have the power to break that reflex and have your mind serve you, not try to become you. And by the way because you have that very power it shows that your mind is not you - you are much more than your mind.
How to not mind
Acknowledging that you care, and viewing the pain from âaboveâ or outside and not letting it become you through your reactive feelings, are the absolute fundamentals of learning how to not mind.Â
Not minding means:
Caring about the pain by acknowledging it for what it is, itâs hurtful;
Viewing the hurt as a natural part of experiencing life in the confident manner in which you proceeding; and,
As best you can, breaking the connection between the hurt and your body expressing the feelings being pushed at your by your mind.
This takes practice. To practice means that you must face your fears and insecurities and put them out there.
Not minding will be hard in the beginning.
Stopping the reaction and not exposing your feelings will be hard in the beginning.
But over time the hurt and pain on each occasion will become smaller, and your reaction will become less each time. Eventually the hurt will dissolve and you will have no reaction. That is your sustainable confidence which you can apply to all your fears, and improve your life and the life of those around you.
As Pink says, Try.
If youâd like to chat about this find me @adamson and on Blab.im as âadamsonâ.
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