Announcing #virtualgovcamp’s first sponsor – Jadu’s Spacecraft design agency

I’m delighted to say we have our first sponsor on board the good ship VirtualGovCamp, and it’s our friends at Jadu, who are promoting their Spacecraft design agency!

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Our approach to design is well considered and successful. One size fits all isn’t the way we work and we recognise every project is different. We start with a blank piece of paper and embark on a journey of discovery and work on the basis of being one team, focused on, and committed to collaborative success.

We are experts in understanding your organisation and your audience, helping you realise your desired outcomes. That’s our commitment, our passion.

Check out what Jadu have to offer on their website, or go straight to finding out everything about Spacecraft!

Learning from Marissa Mayer and Yahoo!

 

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I’ve just finished reading a book about Yahoo! and its current CEO, Marissa Mayer. A fairly slim tome, I got through it in a day on my Kindle.

It’s well worth a look for anyone interesting in how technology companies work (or in this case, don’t) and also how large companies can go around changing the way they work.

Overall, I think if Mayer is given enough time, she can make Yahoo! relevant again. It might not be in the shape that perhaps many of its investors would like, but it could once again be innovative and delivering real value to its users.

More on Yahoo! and Mayer by John Naughton and Jason Calacanis.

Here are my big three takeaways from the book.

There’s no fix for not knowing why you exist

Yahoo!’s well documented problem is that nobody knows what it is for. It’s birth was as a straightforward directory for the emerging web, something that is just no longer needed. All it has is a homepage that still has lots – although a decreasing number – of visitors.

Strategically, this is a killer. Not having a commonly understood vision makes it incredibly hard for an organisation to move forward, particularly during a time of change.

Before Meyer’s appointment, Yahoo!’s board had a decision to make. Was it a media company or a product company? They plumped for the latter, and appointed Meyer, who had a great track record in product development at Google.

Great start, but was everyone bought into the vision of Yahoo! the product company? Did they have the stomach for the fact that it would take years to move the company forward in that direction?

Undoubtably this is the biggest challenge at Yahoo!, and indeed any other organisation that has a problem identifying its reason for existence.

Stack ranking – no matter what you call it – is a bad idea

On her arrival, Meyer faced a problem – Yahoo! was overstaffed and had a lot of people who weren’t performing. Her solution was to bring in a performance review system that she had experienced at Google, and was used in other tech companies.

Here’s how it works. A manager sorts everyone on their team into five different rankings – from totally smashing it, to utter failure every quarter. These rankings over a period of time decide how big someone’s bonus is, or whether they even keep their job.

Sounds pretty standard. But where stack rankings differ is that managers have to have a certain percentage of staff in each ranking. So even if everyone on your team meets, or even beats, their targets, some of them will still have to be rated as failing.

This kind of thing can work well in the short term, in that it quickly weeds out those who really aren’t performing. Soon though, it starts to breed resentment, mistrust and a lack of collaboration.

The case of Microsoft’s use of stack ranking is a good example of how it can create a poisonous corporate culture.

Pitting employees against each other, no matter what the short term gains, is not the way to build a healthy, collaborative environment to work in.

Hiring is hard – but you have to get it right

Probably Meyer’s biggest failure at Yahoo! (so far) was the disastrous appointment of Henrique De Castro as Chief Operating Officer.

He joined the company with a huge financial package and when it didn’t work out, it ended up costing Yahoo! over $100m (!) for little over a year’s work.

A huge, costly, mistake and perhaps what makes it so bad is not the money wasted, but the time. The point of hiring De Castro was that it would enable Mayer to focus on product while someone else took care of the day to day media and advertising business.

For any organisation, hiring the right people is just so important. The people in an organisation forge its culture to a massive extent, and the time wasted, expense and sheer pain of getting it wrong can be incredibly damaging.

Shared CDO – looking for alignment

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A key role for any CDO in an organisation is looking for, and creating, alignment.

The obvious one in the digital sphere is looking for alignment between the organisation’s preferred outcomes, and the needs of the people who use its services or products.

Take channel shift as a fairly obvious example. The outcomes that a council wants to see are more people using cheaper channels to access services and interact with it.

The needs of the people doing this interacting are to have efficient, usable services that let them get the help they need with the minimum of fuss.

By aligning these two things, a strategist can easily plot a course where developing high quality online services gives both sides what they want.

Not aligning them, by focusing too much or even exclusively on the organisation’s outcomes, will lead to failure to achieve either side’s objectives – because even if people want to use online services, they won’t if they are poorly designed.

It is possible to think of alignment as a tool for making things happen. Within an organisation, there will be many different motivations and objectives. Senior leaders want one thing. Service managers another. As CDO, you will have your own.

Rather than trying to convince people to do things they don’t feel they want to, the better approach is to consider what their preferred outcomes are, and align them with your own.

Finding this alignment allows you to build a shared sense of purpose and mission, and will reduce the friction you get when people feel like you are trying to make them change against their will.

Some personal hopes for 2015

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I don’t want to call them resolutions – doing so means failure if they don’t come off. However, there are a few things that I hope will happen in the next twelve months.

1. Focus more on writing (or, creating and communicating)

When it comes down to it, the thing I most love doing is writing. Not proposals, or reports, or meeting notes – but creative stuff, on this blog and my newsletter.

Actually, maybe it’s a bit more than just writing – it’s communicating ideas generally. Attention seeker that I am, I do love speaking at events, and I see that as being a similar activity.

You could also roll in stuff like my podcast, which I really enjoy doing and need to put back onto a more regular footing. It ought to be possible to get at least one a month done.

On the blog I have managed to have a good run over the holiday period, having the time to think about what to post and to actually write it up has been super valuable. I’d love to be able to carry on publishing a reasonably substantial piece every day, or perhaps at least three times a week.

I’d also like to figure out a why of publishing shorter bits, maybe quick posts that point to an interesting website or app, or a news story perhaps. Also, the bookmarking I do of interesting stuff elsewhere on the web could be made more of I think, but am not sure right now what that might look like.

Finally, the newsletter needs rebooting. I managed to get quite a few issues out last year but would really like to be able to stick to a weekly publishing schedule in 2015. Of all the things I write, the newsletter is probably the most rewarding, especially in terms of the feedback I have been getting.

2. Get a proper job

Yup, I think it’s time. It’s four years since I left my last permanent post, at Learning Pool, and the last proper public sector role I had was at the information authority back in 2008.

Freelancing is fantastic in many ways, and it does suit me to a certain extent. However, it’s also exhausting. Even when you have what feels like a long term contract, you can’t let the networking or business development side of thing drop for a moment, because in six month’s time, you’ll be needing something new to do and need to be on people’s radar.

I also want to be able to actually deliver something that has my name all over it. As a consultant, you’re only ever supporting others to achieve things. Having a real single focus is something that appeals to me right now – particularly if it is going to be something that has a real positive impact on people’s lives.

Finally, I think the time is right for my family for me to have something more stable and a little more consistent in terms of working hours and levels of stress. I’d like to be able to experience something approaching a normal life, even for just a short while, and I owe it to Catherine, Ben and Ruth to try my hardest to make that happen.

So what does this mythical job look like? Well, something fairly strategic, where I can bring my experience of working across a number of organisations to bear. It’s no coincidence that I have recently been blogging about the ‘shared CDO‘ idea and that sort of role is definitely one I would love to have a crack at.

3. Do some real L&D

Just before Christmas, I started doing a course on CodeAcademy – the basic one on Python programming. It was really helpful in terms of doing some learning for learning’s sake – after all, I’m not going to be getting any work as a developer any time soon.

I’d really like to be able to do some proper learning this year if I can. I’ve been looking through the Open University course catalogue – but to be honest I’m not sure if the more formal courses are really for me, and of course there’s the cost.

So maybe the thing to do is to stick with the informal stuff, do some courses on the various MOOC platforms that are out there and other training sites like Lynda, and basically build my own curriculum.

4. Make something happen around digital capability – particularly in local government

In the context of work, I’m passionate about two things mainly – the internet and learning and development. My work in 2014 at the Department of Health helped me to combine these things, and if I took a regret away from my time at Learning Pool it was that I didn’t do anything significant to boost digital skills in the workplace via their amazing community.

So, during 2015 I’d like to be able to work on something that can contribute to the digital capability agenda, particularly in local government where it’s probably most needed right now.

I have some ideas on where to start, and no doubt I will be sharing them in all their half baked glory here on the blog soon.

Some favourite things from 2014

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Here are a few of the things I’ve really enjoyed on the internet in the last 12 months. Some new, some not so new.

Hope you find something useful in them!

Mobile apps

  • Nuzzel – this does a great job of surfacing all the content that your connections are sharing on social media, with the most popular stuff at the top. Means you never miss a great article just because you weren’t looking at Twitter at the right time! Link.
  • Overcast – the best podcast listening app there is. Has taken over from Pocket Casts for me this year. Link.
  • Just Send – a really neat app that lets you send email without going near your inbox – quickly send mail without being sucked in! Link.

Podcasts

  • Clockwise – podcast network Relay.fm launched this year and it’s full of great shows. Clockwise though is my favourite mainly due to its brevity – 30 minutes, with four guests discussing four technology issues. Short and sweet. Link.
  • Roderick on the Line – more long and rambling than short and sweet, and one to lie back and wallow in. Merlin Man and John Roderick just talk stuff, and it is as entertaining as it is fascinating. Link.
  • Try Doorbell – Robert and Lloyd talk about technology and work, and trying to survive modern life. Link.

Blogs

  • Stratechery – so good I pay extra to get more of it. Ben Thompson’s writing and analysis is top quality and usually bang on the money as well. A must read. Link.
  • The Information – another subscription service, providing around an article a day, The Information has a great mix of breaking tech news and analysis, without deluging you in thousands of posts like some of the others do. Link.
  • Brain Pickings – A wonderful cornucopia of interesting stuff around art, literature and culture generally. A great place to go to get away from digital stuff every now and again. Link.

Newsletters

  • Benedict Evans – great analysis and links, every Sunday, covering the world of mobile mostly. Brilliant stuff! Link.
  • Michael Coté – somewhat irregular, but always a fascinating insight into the world of emerging big IT. Link.
  • Next Draft – ten interesting news stories every day. A great summary of what you might have missed, with a dash of humour. Link.

Services

  • ThinkUp – a lovely service that provides human scale social media analytics. None of the Klout-score style nonsense, ThinkUp is full of helpful tips and advice, and useful information. Link.
  • LinkedIn – a curious one this as LinkedIn has been around for a long while, and for much of that time has been pretty boring, annoying and pointless. This year though, I have started to find it super useful for getting in touch with people who just aren’t present in other online networks, and also for republishing my blog posts there. It brings a new audience for my writing and creates new potential connections. Link.
  • IFTTT – a neat bit of internet plumbing, IFTTT makes my life easier in so many ways. I just hope they sort out a good business model, as I don’t want them to run out of money and disappear! Link.
  • Pocket – this year I really started to use Pocket properly, thanks to a tip from Steve Bridger. It’s such a great way to catch up on articles that I spot during the day but don’t have time to read, and means my phone is always full of interesting content. Link.
  • Rainmaker – this is where my blog – the one you’re reading right now – is hosted. I’m barely scratching the surface of what the platform can do, but basically it is a supercharged version of WordPress. It has all that SEO stuff built in, and also has functionality for adding a membership scheme to your blog, and community forums as well. I’m hoping to be able to test some of this stuff out in the next year. Link.
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