“In Wimbledon’s attempt to become more boring to Americans than Soccer the longest tennis match in history ends in a draw.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_tennis_match_records

http://twitter.com/karllong/status/16875287420

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via

I’ve just finished going through this presentation from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and I’ve got to say it’s probably one of the best explanations on how organizational culture effects the performance of organizations. Reed outlines beautifully how the scale of organizations drives organizations toward the common sort of toxic, calcified corporate culture that is so common. It really makes me think that organizational culture might be one of the most important aspects of an organizations success and ironically probably the least understood by many corporations.

I’ve always been fascinated by culture and it’s ability to almost surreptitiously drive behavior in organizations. One of the most interesting and dynamic cultures that is emerging is of course the cultures on the internet, it is like an electronic petri dish of all sorts of fascinating culture that drives a whole host of tacit behaviors that we are only just becoming aware of. Think about what culture dominates on various social networks like yelp, slashdot, digg, twitter, or even 4chan. All very different cultures with different norms, purpose, symbols, and stories that drive the behavior of the members.

Nokia vs Apple, we can see how that one’s going, how about Google vs Facebook? What these matchups have in common is they are both between organizations with distinctly different cultures, one a collective and the other a dictatorship. I’m hoping that they are descriptive enough that it was obvious that the collectives were Nokia and Google and the dictatorships were Apple and Facebook

The way I would define a collective is one that is consensus driven, long running, incremental innovators. Dictatorships of course are driven by a singular personality or vision, fast moving, and favor revolutionary innovation.

Anyway, as I was thinking about these ideas I was watching a video about Grant McKracken’s book Chief Culture Officer and he brought up the idea of “cultural metrics”. I wonder if different metrics would be more appropriate for different organizations? It seems to me that collectives last longer but are slower moving and more prone to incremental innovation, so metrics that improved time to market, and rewarded more revolutionary innovation might be appropriate. Dictatorships? Not sure what would be appropriate for them, what metrics would Steve Jobs listen to anyway?

I kind of like the challenge of abbreviation that twitter provides, but I also like to be expansive, so my twitter game is how can I fill all 140 characters, here’s my most recent favorite:

“huffpo iphone/gizmo story 689 comments, techcrunch 89, mashable 22. Tech blogs still relevant? http://huff.to/dtQmfT (love the url shortner)”

Here’s another of my favorite 140 character tweets

iMarketing 101. Seth Godin’s unremarkable blog post “how to be remarkable” is the #1 result on google for the word “remarkable”, remarkable!

I have only a few words to describe this video and it’s “Release the McKracken”. It’s amazing that this video has only got 55 views on youtube, talk about under the radar. In the video Grant McCracken talks about the end of mass marketing, the end of smithsian economics, and how organizations need to become better at reading and participating in culture. Examples from Steve Jobs to Ford Fiesta.

BTW you can follow Grant on twitter @grant27

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I’m not a very religious person, if anything I’m a sort of Buddhist/Christian hybrid, I often call myself a xenophile because I actually love and seek out people who are different than me. Anyway, I do like the seasonal greetings that surround holidays because they seem like an excuse to break the ice that tends to surround people during their busy and often stressful lives. I sometimes like to interrupt strangers walking down the street with a big smile and a genuinely jovial Merry Christmas or Happy Easter, 99% of the time you get a smile and greeting back. For this reason i’ve always railed against the politically neutral “happy holidays”, I’m quite happy to accept any seasonally related greeting. Anyway, recently Easter and Passover overlapped, which they do so sporadically due to Passover being driven by the lunar calendar and Easter by the Gregorian. Anyway, I decided to tweet a Passover greeting, and was going to say “Happy Passover to my Jewish friends” but I thought it would be nice to not limit my greeting to “friends” and wanted to include a little “goodwill to all men” type thinking, so I changed it to “Happy Passover to my Jewish brethren” I then included a little disclaimer, not sure if happy is appropriate, or brethren for that matter.

A little later I decided to look up the definition of brethren which I had assumed meant “brothers” or something appropriately inclusive. Here’s the definition I found:

“Brethren is a name adopted by several Protestant Christian bodies which do not necessarily share historical roots. These groups grew out of the Anabaptist movement at the time of the Protestant Reformation (16th century).”

The irony of this faux pas is right up there with my bout with procrastination which spawned this post.

It also reminded me of a brilliant segment from the Simpsons where Dr Nick, after a tank of gas explodes says “inflamable means flammable? English, what a language”

This was a featured presentation on slideshare.com and I LOL’d so hard at the front page I had to look through the whole presentation, as it turns out the preso is as good as the front page. This is packed with tips about not just looking for a job but understanding that the era of personal brands has turned the job hunt on it’s head, as it has with many business practices. Check it out and congrats to HappyKatie who put the preso together, great stuff.

I’m thrilled to announce that I’m joining a new company, NetBase as their Director of Social Strategy & Design. As anyone that reads this blog knows I’ve been convinced, ever since I started working on the internet in 1997, that it will radically and deeply transform business as we know it. Not just how we market, not just how we advertise, but how businesses create and deliver value. That transformation is well under way, some companies are leading, and some are being dragged, but few are untouched by the consumer revolution that is in progress.

I’m particularly thrilled to now be part of the NetBase team because I believe that our technology is going to allow companies to be much more strategic and less reactive to the new consumer landscape. In other words we’re going to help companies stop getting dragged and give them tools to help them create new products, services, and creative that will connect to the new consumer.

I’ve written more on the topic over at the NetBase blog, where you can also download a paper we released today called “Netnography: The Marketers Secret Weapon – How Social Media Understanding Drives Innovation”. I’m looking forward to hearing thoughts, feedback and questions about the product so please don’t be shy commenting on the NetBase blog

Oh, and as you know I’ve been working with Traackr for the last few months helping them with strategy and marketing, and that has been an amazing experience, but being in Boston the commute was getting a bit much so now i’m going to be in Mountain View. Seriously though, Traackr is an awesome product, if you want to find influencers in your industry they are THE company to talk to.

shortest post ever, thoughts?