Webstock 2010 “if you’re not embarrassed, you’ve waited too long”

Webstock is a wonderful Wellington-based web and design conference which attracts leading edge international speakers (http://www.webstock.org.nz/). One of the themes running through the 2010 conference was about fast iteration and improving as you go, rather than slowly crafting perfection "“if you’re not embarrassed when you ship your product, you’ve waited too long”; another was the idea of sharing as creating value - the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes. Everyone benefits. On the basis of those principles here, in very rough form, are some of the many memorable utterances I jotted down.

Day One
“we fall in love with things made with love”

Chris Shiflett Security centred design (Shiflett.org @shiflett)
Ambient signifiers
Tokoyo subway tunes for each train reduces burden on system of people making mistakes
Pave the cow paths and accommodate users expectations & tendencies – don’t try to modify them

Shelley Bernstein Brooklyn Museum
• Give up control
• Learn and adapt
• Infuse content with life
• Personal voice makes a difference
• Amplify community voices:
• Go to them
• Their terms not yours
• Understand the platform and work with it

Jeff Atwood Codinghorror/stack overflow
‘work’ is little slices of frictionless effort amortized across the entire community
Wikipedia represents 100 million hours of human thought – collective commons
Trust biased systems (i.e. not designed around the 1 bad user) high value released

Regine Debatty We make money not art

Quote from Gordon Pask re job of architect “not to design or build, but to catalyse them so they act or evolve”


Day Two

Eric Ries The Lean Start Up @ercries

• Change the world
• Build an organisation of lasting value
• Make customers’ lives better
Future of civilisation depends on entrepreneurship
Need practice and principles of extreme uncertainty principles of entrepreneurial management
Product development of lean startup where the problem and the solution are unknown unit of progress is validated learning about customers

Daniel Burka
Evolution cuts out as well as adds
How are we preparing for the unprecedented data rich environment we are approaching?

Amy Hoy @amyhoy
Paving the cowpaths is OK for today, but not the future
Thoreau ‘To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.'

Bec Hodgson
User generated curation - why have ETSY doing it where others can do it?
What’s the next area of privilege we can crack open?

Kevin Rose – Digg
Be an active participant in your own ecosystem

Adam Greenfield Do projects
Elements of a networked urbanism
Architecture from constant to variable
From latent to explicit
from anonymous to knowable
From browse to search
From expiring to persistent
From deferred to real-time
from wayfinding to wayshowing
from object to service
from ownership to use
from vehicle to mobility;
from community to social network;
from presence (pleasure) to performance
From consumer to constituent

Jeff Veen
Principles:
• Rough consensus
• Running code
• Applied to what we do everyday – learning as quickly as you can.

Reid Hoffman “if you’re not embarrassed when you ship your product, you’ve waited too long”
Velocity and responsiveness will set the tone far more than any one release
Speed of iteration beats quality of iteration

Mark Pesce Dense & thick
The whole talk was a highlight - the full text is here
- much better than my notes - ends with the possibility of Wellington as inventor & epicentre of the ‘web of things’. What are we doing next to make it happen?

We're very fortunate to have a conference of such calibre in Wellington. Big thanks to the Webstock team.

Having heard many speakers exhorting us to love the user and make the world more beautiful through better code, I was delighted with the serendipity of this quotation from Edina in Ab Fab on the window of a Wellington furniture store

“I don’t want more choice, I just want nicer things”

If anyone wants a Word 2007 copy of all the notes I took (with associated links wherever I could find them), I'm also happy to share those, but I can't attach the document to the blog. Contact me via Twitter (@stephaniepride) or via stephanie@stratedgy.co.nz if you'd like a copy.

PS Oh yes and the ONYAs were pretty impressive too!

The Future State: From protest to action – social media enabled shifts?

This blog post is a request for your help.

I’m working with the New Zealand Institute of Policy Studies (in the School of Government at Victoria University of Wellington) on The Future State - research on public management and public policy challenges over the next 20 years.

Looking at what’s changing now, we have a number of loosely related questions about generation and value shifts, social media and social action.

Do you know of research, statistic and/or informed commentary that would shed light on any of the following questions?

• Has the anti-globalisation movement grown, diminished or changed its nature since the highly visible activities 1999-2002 (Seattle, Washington, Genoa)? By what measures and why?

• Have other 'protest' movements changed in similar ways?


• Have social media enabled a general shift away from protest to constructive social action as a response to perceived injustice?
• If so, is this generation/cohort specific?

• Are there correlations between use of social media and being ’values centric’.

We are looking ourselves for research and stats that help with the questions below, but if you know of relevant research or information, we’d love to be pointed towards it. Any information is welcome, but particularly information that has an NZ or Australasian dimension.

I’ll collate and credit responses to these questions on this blog and post links to the IPS The Future State research work here and on Twitter when it’s ready.

I’d love to hear from you: Stephanie@stratedgy.co.nz +64 274 966 956

Beyond the Jazz era - strategy choices for the 21st century

I love musical metaphors so Anthony Tjan's piece on 'Strategy as Jazz vs Symphony' in the Harvard Business Review really sparked my interest.

I think the analogies of jazz - a 20th century musical form - and the symphony - a form originating in the 18th century - work well to illuminate 20th century choices about business strategy. There used to be a relatively stable and predictable linear development path requiring different modes sequentially - small, flexible start-ups growing over time to become large, highly structured corporates. In the 21st century start-ups scale almost overnight and even behemoths of companies need to be fleet of foot and responsive. This requires constant re-invention at the same time as holding true to core principles - more like the successive turns of a kaleidoscope than a business life-cycle. In this new context, strategy choices are no longer either/or, but “both-and -and-and”.

So I wonder whether we need different metaphors for 21st century strategy and leadership choices. In some forms of historic and contemporary chamber music, the “leader” does both play and lead. In some 21st century orchestral pieces, orchestra members make their own choices about what and when to play, following a set of conditions specific to them and their instrument, but still performing as part of an ensemble to create each performance – with or without a conductor. These are still emergent forms and have no agree ‘name’. In the same way, we have as yet no agreed name for the strategic competencies of the future where the ability to straddle strategic modes is distributed at all levels of an organisation or network.