October 23, 2004

egofriction-meets-branding is dead

2 Comments

zzzbambam11.jpg
Got two very thought-provoking emails from J.D. yes­ter­day (pos­ted with his con­sent):

1.
In gene­ral, peo­ple in com­pa­nies are into ass-covering– it’s the pre­do­mi­nant cor­po­rate cul­ture. Almost all of the crufty bureac­ra­tic non­sense seems to stem from that. Cul­ture change, at least on a cor­po­rate level, is only part of the pro­blem. Really, it’s sys­te­mic. Peo­ple are sca­red. Tech­no­logy just puts a spot­light on some of people’s big­gest fears about them­sel­ves, about work, about life. (Aside: I some­ti­mes won­der if com­pa­nies– like Wal­mart, for ins­tance– aren’t des­tro­ying them­sel­ves in their end­less hun­ger for effi­ciency. Guess we’ll find out…)
I’ve got some ideas as far as usea­bi­lity, too– in par­ti­cu­lar, SAP could learn a les­son or two from Apple. Design, esthe­tics and usea­bi­lity are more impor­tant than most peo­ple seem to believe. The pro­blem is, all of those things are hard/expensive on top of the already hard/expensive pro­blem of just get­ting the sys­tems in. But put­ting a sys­tem in is hard/expensive in large part because com­pa­nies (peo­ple in, and so forth) resist change. So perhaps the solu­tion lies in some recur­sive synthe­sis of the two– if change is sexier/more useable/better, then maybe it’ll meet less resis­tance. Or, rather, ins­tead of ERP imple­men­ta­tions focu­sing on func­tio­na­lity first and peo­ple second, it should be the other way around. A first step could be coming up with human(e) use cases. Or maybe com­pa­nies should just fire every­body and start over from scratch every time. In any case, we have to stop trea­ting each other as a machi­nes that serve machi­nes (for money). Maybe that’s too idea­lis­tic of me–
Any­ways, par­don my ram­blings.
Cheers.
J.D.
2.
Cul­ture change is dif­fi­cult because (all) cor­po­rate cul­ture, at this point, is depen­dent on hie­rarchi­cal com­mand and con­trol (and everything that comes with it– egos, lea­dership cults, rigi­dity, ass-covering, etc). Infor­ma­tion tech­no­logy dis­rupts hie­rarchy (this has been much tal­ked about on the inter­net)- or, rather, it sub­verts hie­rarchy. The ques­tion is, how does one exploit this “fea­ture?”
One poten­tial jum­ping off point is Blitz­krieg
Imple­men­ta­tion in modern busi­ness (beyond metapho­ri­cal Blitz­krieg) is the trick.
Regards,
J.D.

This is all to do with my two current obses­sions: Ego­fric­tion and the logis­tics of making tech­no­lo­gi­cal imple­men­ta­tion less cul­tu­rally dis­rup­tive.
What has all this got to do with “Bran­ding Is Dead”, I hear you ask?
Tons.
: Bonus Link: A Blog-Traffic Pyra­mid Scheme. I tell ya, there’s nothing like the use of stock pho­to­graphy for giving your com­pany that real blogosphere-resonating indi­vi­dua­lis­tic touch. Too funny.

2 Responses to “egofriction-meets-branding is dead”

  1. Boris Johnson's Office says:
    October 23, 2004 at 7:38 am

    Hi Hugh
    Good ideas and I like your ama­zingly ori­gi­nal car­toons!
    Well, we really will have to look up buzz machine as you recom­mend — it is moving at a fast pace this blog­ging busi­ness. It’s great!
    melissa

  2. Anon says:
    October 24, 2004 at 3:01 pm

    SAP — built by Ger­man PHDs with the help of their Israeli* deve­lop­ment part­ners to be a warm cuddly user expe­rience.
    oh wait.…
    *Strictly spea­king it should be Ger­man, Ame­ri­can Israeli in terms of abso­lute deve­lo­per num­bers… But you get the idea.