Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: management

  • To save the community, we had to destroy it.

    To save the community, we had to destroy it.

    When the BBC bought a 75% of travel guide publisher Lonely Planet in 2007, many people were puzzled at what the travel guide added to the publicly owned broadcaster’s mandate.

    In 2011 the BBC bought out the rest of the founders’ stakes and just over a year later management mistakes threaten to destroy the brand.

    Lonely Planet is one of the most powerful internet media properties in the English speaking world having become the dominant travel guide in the 1980s and then successfully making the jump into the online world with its website and mobile apps.

    In 2012, the site boasted of four million visitors a month with most under 35 years old.

    Key to Lonely Planet’s online success has been its community. The Thorn Tree forum provided the bulk of the site’s traffic as thousands of members discussed exotic destinations and asked or answered travel questions.

    The Thorn Tree also turns out to be the BBC’s undoing as management struggled to control members’ comments.

    At the end of 2012, inappropriate content was bought to management’s attention, with the Jimmy Savile scandal still reverberating around the corridors of the BBC, the organisation’s management panicked and announced a temporary closure of the Thorn Tree.

    Two months later, the site is back up again with strict pre-moderation of posts which has left many long time users upset and going elsewhere, if they didn’t already do so during the closure.

    Online communities are a strong assets but they are surprisingly fragile, as many popular sites have found in the past.

    For Lonely Planet users, there’s no shortage of other travel sites online and it’s going to be challenging for the site to recover.

    The Thorn Tree saga raises the question of whether risk adverse, public sector organisations like the BBC have the risk appetite to run online forums and build communities.

    By definition successful online communities are diverse and sometimes skate close to the boundaries of good taste for a careerist executive in a managerial organisation like the BBC, such risks are intolerable and have to be eliminated.

    If this means shutting down the Thorn Tree forums or neutering them, then that will be done. Management careers come before the good of the organisation.

    Time will tell whether Lonely Planet will continue to thrive under the BBC and its management, but the portents aren’t good.

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  • Necessity, innovation and the birth of the web

    Necessity, innovation and the birth of the web

    The man who invented the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee spoke at the launch of the CSIRO’s Digital Productivity and Services Flagship in Sydney yesterday.

    In telling about how the idea the idea of web, or Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), came about Berners-Lee touched on some fundamental truths about innovation in big organisations.

    In the 1990s the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva had thousands of researchers bringing their own computers, it was an early version of what we now call the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy.

    “When they used their computers, they used their favourite computer running their favourite operating system. If they didn’t like what was available they wrote the software themselves,” said Tim. “Of course, none of these talked to each other.”

    As a result sharing data was a nightmare as each scientist created documents using their own programs which often didn’t work on their colleagues’ computers.

    Tim had the idea of standard language that would allow researchers to share information easily, although getting projects like this running in large bureaucratic organisations like CERN isn’t easy.

    For getting HTML and the web running in CERN Tim gives credit to his boss, Mike Sendall, who supported him and his idea.

    “If you’re wondering why innovation happens, one of the things is great bosses who let you do things on the side, Mike found an excuse to get a NeXT computer,” remembers Tim. “‘Why don’t you test it with your hypertext program?’ Mike said with a wink.”

    There’s much talk about innovation in organisations, but without management support those ideas go nowhere, the story of the web is possibly the best example of what can happen when executives don’t just expect their workers to clock in, shut up and watch the clock.

    One key point Tim made in his presentation was that it was twenty years after the Internet was invented before the web came along and another five years until the online world really took off.

    We’re at that stage of development with the web now and with the development of the new HTML5 standard we’re going to see far more communication between machines.

    Berners-Lee says “instead of having 1011 web pages communicating, we start to have 1011 computers talking to each other.”

    These connections mean online innovation is only just beginning, we haven’t seen anything yet.

    If you want your staff to stay quiet and watch the clock, that’s fine. But your clock might be figuring out how to do your job better than you can.

    Tim Berners-Lee image courtesy of Tanaka on Flickr

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  • Throwing your problems over the fence

    Throwing your problems over the fence

    I first heard the term “throwing the problem over the fence” from a telco project manager a few years ago, it describes how modern organisations shift risk to others.

    Throwing the problem over the fence usually involves contracting out a task, the philosophy is once the contract is signed delivery is no longer management’s problem, it’s now the responsibility of the contractor. Once the job is over the fence it’s out of sight and out of mind.

    Governments, financial institutions and most corporations have become very good at throwing their problems over the fence.

    Contracting away your worries

    A core tenet of 1980s management thinking is contracting out; freeing executives from the tedious task of actually doing their jobs lets them focus on the important things in life, like securing performance bonuses.

    Of course you can’t contract out risk – risk is like toothpaste, squeeze it in one place and it oozes out somewhere else.

    Unlike toothpaste, risks have a habit of growing if they are ignored. Which becomes a problem for whoever is unwittingly on the other side of the fence.

    Railways and risk

    In “The Crash That Stopped Britain” author Ian Jack looked at the causes of the October 2000 Hatfield train accident which threw the nation’s railway network into chaos.

    Jack correctly predicted that no-one would be found responsible as the tangle of rail operators, maintenance companies, financiers, labour hire firms and regulators made it almost impossible to determine exactly where responsibility for a fatal failure lay.

    Diffusing responsibility is partly by design although originally the idea was to save costs, the theory being that tendering work previously done in house to the lowest cost provider would save money.

    Instead its caused an escalation in costs as contracting out meant an increase in middlemen as financiers, lawyers, project managers, contract administrators – of which I was once one – and many others are drafted in to manage the outsourced contracts.

    Throughout the Anglosphere – the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – the results of embracing this mentality has meant skyrocketing costs and delays in public work projects, a good example being the Southern Sydney Freight Line which was three years late and 250% over budget.

    Naturally no-one is held responsible for the delays, cost over-runs or lousy initial planning and estimating on that project, which is a happy result for everyone except the taxpayer who foots the bill.

    The Global Financial Crisis

    While the cost of building railways, schools and motorways is a chronic problem, a far more bigger issue is the role of “throwing problems over the fence” in the financial industry.

    Securitisation was seen as a magic bullet for the banking industry in the 1990s, the Basel Accords allowed banks to bundle up their entire home loan portfolios and throw them over the fence to fund managers and their unwitting investors.

    When the inevitable happened with the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, it was difficult to attribute exactly who held the mortgages, let alone who was responsible for the losses among the mass of brokers, ratings agencies, fund managers and bankers who’d profited so well from the boom.

    The only thing we could be sure of was that it was the taxpayer – you, your children and grand-children – who ended up holding the problem when the GFC’s bills were hurled over the last fence.

    On the other side of the fence

    Risk isn’t something that can be thrown over a fence, eventually it comes back in a bigger and nastier way. The question is who ends up dealing with it.

    The genius of political and business leaders in the last 30 years has been in how they’ve thrown their responsibilities over the fence while retaining the perks and privilege of holding responsible positions.

    Generally it’s taxpayers and shareholders sitting on the other side of the fence who have to deal with the costs and they aren’t getting cheaper.

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  • Poor journalism and social media

    Poor journalism and social media

    Brother’s plea shows up online failings crows the Sydney Morning Herald over social media’s role in misidentifying the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook school shooting.

    The problem for the SMH is that social media wasn’t responsible for the story. As the Washington Post reported, CNN and various other outlets misidentified the shooter as his brother who had to take to social media to correct the record.

    For the mainstream media, the Sandy Hook shooting was not their finest hour; not only did they misidentify Ryan Lanza as the shooter, but they mistakenly reported his mother had worked at the school. When the Daily Mail does a better analysis of the story than many outlets, you know something is wrong.

    Something is certainly wrong at Fairfax as the cutting of resources results in the Sydney Morning Herald being three days behind the story and factually wrong on key aspects – not to mention adding a smug headline that is embarrassingly incorrect.

    While the writer of the SMH article should be held to account for sloppy work and poor research, the real responsibility for this embarrassment lies with the paper’s editors and management who should be ensuring what appears under the masthead is accurate and reliable.

    Both The Age and Sydney Morning Herald are essential to the fabric of their respective cities, this story is a good example of the important role the SMH has in shining light on the arcane dealings of the city’s business community. Fairfax can, and should, do far better than a poor, badly researched story on social media.

    Ironically, the mis-identification story quotes media academic Julie Posetti as saying “anyone with an internet connection could now contribute to and comment on the breaking news cycle without going through the filters of the traditional media.”

    At Fairfax, those filters are broken with the breathing space from selling its New Zealand digital operation, the company’s management has an opportunity to fix their credibility problem and focus on its core business.

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  • Life in the mob

    Life in the mob

    The reaction to last week’s tragic passing of a nurse over a hoax phone call shows how hysteria and cynicism in new and old media fuel each other.

    Having created villains, in this case the two hapless Sydney radio hosts, the mainstream media creates a moral outrage to stir up the mob which in turn generates more headlines.

    As with the Hillsborough tragedy, this allows those in positions of responsibility the opportunity to avoid scrutiny and accountability.

    In this case we see the hospital management demanding action being taken against the Sydney duo while conveniently ducking questions about why poorly paid nurses are expected to act as switchboard operators on top of their already considerable responsibilities.

    Now we’re seeing calls to make practical jokes illegal – no doubt there’ll be a wave of teenage boys being prosecuted for making prank phone calls when panicked politicians pass poorly drafted laws to deal with the ‘problem’.

    Our taxes at work.

    Your mission in life is to use your brain and not to be one of the torch bearing mob.

    If it’s you the mob are looking for, then it’s best to lie low until another headline or something shiny distracts them.

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