image by wolfsavard, flickr artist

elephants are extremely interesting creatures. they can grow up to weigh 15,000 lbs, but still be afraid of a mouse. they’re massive creatures, and anything that large — you’d imagine — can have quite a bit of influence. they’ll shape their surroundings and modify their environment to suit them. if the fruit is too high, they’ll knock over the tree. if the water’s gone, they’ll dig a hole to find some more.

circuses are interesting in their own right. a collection of sights, sounds, and smells that you can’t find any place else. and with so many different performance acts, everything has to be perfectly choreographed — and the ringmaster is in charge of it all.

so what happens when the ringmaster comes in contact with the elephants? certainly one person isn’t going to be able to move a whole troop of 8,000 lb creatures without a couple of peanuts.

leadership is all about getting the elephants to play along. so whether it’s your own team members or if you’re trying to win over clients, every ringmaster should know that you’re going to have to pack a lot of peanuts. give your employees a reason to do exceptional work… give them dozens of reasons, actually. let your clients see and feel the benefits as quickly as you can. sell them a clear vision, and guide them along the way. make it easy for people to follow your direction.

it doesn’t matter how strong-willed the ringmaster may be, or even how great a performance is in store for the audience. one simple fact remains true: if you don’t motivate the elephants, your circus isn’t going anywhere.

image source: treycopeland.com

i have to say this right up front: malcolm gladwell is my boy. i’ve read his books, i’ve watched his talks, and i’ve read his other pieces in the new yorker (his article on concussions in football is a must-read). so, with that being said, it pains me to say this but i think gladwell was wrong in his assumptions about the inability of twitter and facebook to rally people around an idea to promote social change.

in his recent article for the new yorker, gladwell states: “the revolution will not be tweeted”. i say, if the revolution will not be tweeted, ask gap how their new logo redesign efforts went.

now i know that malcolm gladwell is talking specifically about social activism more so than he is about anything else. he even mentions that social media can be used quite well for other situations that don’t really require people to risk much of themselves in order to do it. but if that alone isn’t a revolution, then i don’t know what is. because if there’s one thing that we’ve seen from gap dumping their logo redesign (and from facebook bending to the will of the user community and making changes to their privacy settings on multiple occasions), it’s that the authority is no longer the authority anymore.

organizations are responsible to more than their boardroom now. they’re responsible to their clients; they’re responsible to their people; they’re responsible to just about anyone that owns an internet-connected device. public opinion has always been important, but even more so in such a web-integrated world where one person’s tweet can turn into a meme that instantly spreads across the globe. it’s a lesson that organizations are going to have to learn, and learn quickly, if they’re going to be successful in this new world.

the revolution will not be tweeted? think again, gladwell.

it already has.

image by virtual sugar, flickr artist

i was reading my most recent copy of espn the magazine when i found a brief article about ‘touch’ in sports called “contact high.”

“berkeley social-psych researcher mike kraus, along with psych professor dacher keltner, decided to track the performance of nba teams by the amount of positive physical contact players made during the 08-09 season. their work — to be published in an upcoming edition of the journal emotion — reveals a strong correlation between touching and win totals.” … “kraus explains that fist bumps, for example, serve to improve team chemistry, spatial awareness and cooperation among teammates.”

i found this to be particularly intriguing because of my liberal use of the #fistbump hashtag on twitter and yammer.  i fist bump people all the time — in real life and in virtual space.  i guess i knew all along, on a certain level, that fist bumps had a secondary benefit aside from serving as the actual congratulatory action — but now i’ve got science to back me up!

if fist bumps and high-fives can help the boston celtics and la lakers reach the nba finals, why can’t they help bring together an executive brief or trade show presentation?

image by hugh, flickr artist

when i was team manager and assistant coach with the penn state ice lions, we had a saying that we used often:

“stay out of the @#$!!*” … i.e. — poop.

it was a simpler way of saying, when the game degenerates into a bunch of people trying to hurt each other — don’t get involved.

usually when people act out in aggression, it’s because they’re frustrated.  they’re unhappy with the way things are going, and they usually act out in aggression because they haven’t the skills, abilities, or position of authority to change the situation to favor themselves.  people will act out in aggression because it’s the only thing they can do.

and the only thing that you should do is stay out of it.  if someone is trying to provoke you, how does it benefit you to get involved in a fight?  you already have the upper hand, so why risk giving up your position of strength?  it’s natural to want to defend yourself — to want to chirp back (trade words), reciprocate face-washes, and possibly throw some fists.  you have to resist nature, however.  that poise is what separates normal players from the great players.  it’s the gulf between the good teams and the championship caliber teams.

the reason i share this pearl of wisdom is on my blog about what makes for good business is because of office politics.  no matter where you work, or what the recruiter tells you (*cough*lockheedmartin*cough*), no office environment is ever a true meritocracy.  there are politics that you have to navigate if you’re going to be successful.  sometimes, that could mean taking your fair share of abuse: being assigned tasks that no one else wants to do, listening to a superior ranting about how awful your idea is without listening to what it is exactly that you want to say, watching a group of people edit and re-write your work to the point that it no longer has a piece of you in it, or even being put in a position to be set up as the scapegoat.

but it’s in those situations where you have to ask yourself if you want to be a good player, or if you want to be a championship player.

champions put their head down and skate hard on every shift.  champions take the hit along the boards to get the puck out of the zone.  champions will take a punch to the face after the referee blows the whistle…

but champions also score on the next powerplay, because hard work pays off in the end.

do the right thing.  keep your head.  and stay out of the @#$!!*

the problem with being cool is the risk of becoming too cool. even fonzie (or “da’ fonz” as i like to call him) wasn’t immune to this risk. a cool drink is too cold and you get pain in your teeth. slurpees and icees and slush puppies — whichever of the 900 names you’d like to give those delicious frozen drinks that make your mouth turn colors — will give you brain freeze. and, lately, it appears that facebook and twitter have been spending too much time at the back of a convenient store.

before there was facebook
younger people started joining social networks long before the social networking movement as a means of connecting with similar people, especially with their friends. since before facebook and myspace were around, there were sites like xanga, livejournal, and blogger/blogspot; these sites offered blogs — ways for the internet youth at the time to write what they were feeling and share it with the world. it was hip, and it was cool… then when it got so cool, the professional bloggers moved in and all of a sudden — with the advent of myspace and facebook and friendster — our current notion of “social networking” was born, turning blogging among the youth ice cold.

it’s all just a little bit of history repeating
but now — as often happens — history repeats itself. tweens, teens, and college students found their own little place in the internet world again with sites geared towards them. as mentioned in part 1, you couldn’t sign up for facbeook unless you had an email address from a select few colleges at the start. and then — for a while — only college students or recent grads with an alumni email address were granted admission before zuckerberg saw his chance to cash in on the big bucks and opened the service up to high-schoolers. at that point in time there was a great backlash of college students fearing their coveted system tailor-made for them was being put in jeopardy (and we were right!!). the centigrade began to fall on facebook, making it ever cooler. everyone was then able to join but all wasn’t lost… yet.

the march of the penguins
it has only been recently that facebook has turned ice cold, with large corporations creating facebook ‘fan’ pages and sponsored ads shoving movies and tv shows at you that you neither care about, nor want to see. but even that was tolerable! no — young people didn’t care much that corporations were setting up facebook pages for everything from brands (like apple’s itunes) to television shows, to individual TV personalities… young people care now that — and here’s the key part — their parents joined!

can you think of anything LESS COOL than YOUR PARENTS?!

i admit that when my father first joined facebook i had the same kind of reaction as any other young person: “i don’t want my dad following me on facebook!  i post personal stuff on there.” i didn’t want him knowing about my ongoing poke wars i had with cute girls from college. i didn’t want him to hear the details of my weekend activities with my old roommates. so i started putting that kind of stuff on twitter — but now young folks are feeling encroached on even in the micro-blogging world.

now twitter is filled with the likes of larry king, martha stewart, and — dear god — oprah. there’s really no safe haven for youths anymore. if you’re a tween, or teen, would you want to be sporting the same fashions as martha and oprah? or wearing suspenders like larry king? no — you absolutely wouldn’t… so why would you want to use the same social networks?

there’s been a full on march of the penguins among older folks to these now ice cold social networking services. for youths — just as it was when we were tweens and teens — there’s no overestimating the power of ‘cool.’ all we ever wanted was to be ourselves, and for parents to drop us off a block or two away from school so that our friends didn’t see mom driving us up to the doors each day before first bell. now their most treasured possession — their social circles — are being encroached on from all directions by the worst group of all: old people.

when you look at  all the contributing factors, it’s really no surprise that young people are no longer into services like facebook and twitter. it’s because of the affordances the older population has which now allows them to join these services in record numbers, and that’s what’s bringing about the main crux of the problem: facebook and twitter threaten the very foundation of youth — the social network.

kind of ironic, isn’t it?

photo by Cipi*VT*, flickr artist

my twitter stream in the last 2 weeks or so has been mentioning the change in times for online social networking. more than a few users i follow have pointed out some recent news that popular services of twitter and facebook are becoming very unpopular with younger folks, and more of the worlds’ older generations are starting to join the fold. and while many people seemed to share the same disbelief (“but that makes no sense!”), it  actually seems to be perfectly logical to me.

the reason is that there’s a difference between being cool and being ice cold.

but before i get there, let’s talk about the reasons there are more older folks joining facebook and carving out their own space in the twitterverse.

reason #1: money
no, really! money makes a huge difference. it seems strange since both facebook and twitter are free services; simple economics would say that they both have the same barrier to entry in the marketplace: “free.”  young people (high schoolers, college students) can surely afford free, so there’s a non-issue here, right?

wrong.

having money means you have cool toys. having cool toys like iphones and blackberries means you’re always connected. sure there are ways to link your normal cell phone to facebook and twitter via txt msg — but setting those features up is: (a) unknown to many, (b) difficult to do for many of those who know about it, (c) just a tad redundant. the majority of users, i surmise, don’t realize they can update their facebook status, or even upload a picture from a standard mobile phone let alone add a “note” to their facebook as well. for those who do know about it, many folks see themselves as not being a ‘tech’ person and therefore find it difficult to follow the process of linking their phone to the service. then again, why link at all? if none of your friends have smart phones to check the service, it’s still difficult to connect with them, so why not just send your friends a txt msg directly instead?

iphones and blackberries keep us connected at all times. it’s as simple as downloading an app, inputting your username and password once, and tweeting away. i can see what you post and you can see what i post, all in near real time.

it also makes the service more robust. instead of just sending a txt msg update, i can send links to facebook and twitter. i can post a new article i found on an awesome blog. i can upload links to multimedia files my friends and followers can listen to. all of these things are not possible with a standard mobile phone, but they all enhance the experience.

bottom line: it’s just more fun when you have a smartphone… and they cost money.

reason #2: the viral effect
facebook started in 2004. i, having been enrolled in the right university at the right time, was able to join the service just as it was standing up. now, 5 years later, i’m all grown up — wearing suits and ties, carrying a laptop to and from work every day — doing the whole “real world” thing (not that real world). there are also literally hundreds of thousands who are just like me who have entered the professional world too.  dare i say that in the time since facebook started, millions of infectious agents have been unleashed into offices and cubicles the world over.

using facebook on an every day occasion (before many corporations started banning access to it) meant that even more millions of people who previously had no exposure to the facebook phenomenon began to see what it was really like. then it started to grow. being the next cool thing at that point, demand was so high that facebook opened their service up to — at first — high schoolers and then the entire digital world. now chris in accounting who had graduated 5 years before facebook came about jumped on and started looking for his old college buddies. kathryn connected with girlfriends she hadn’t seen since high school. anyone and everyone could get on facebook now… and they did.

reason #3: the full-time job
twitter and facebook and the like have been branded as “time wasters” (though i whole-heartedly disagree), and what better place to waste time than at your boring, mundane, repetitive, cubicle, office space kind of world you live in from 8 to 6 every day? you’re already in front of a computer screen the whole time, right? so people have taken to twitter — making sure they tell us all just how much they hate work.

sidebar: i don’t hate my job. in fact, i love it. i just find it interesting from a sociological perspective that so many people don’t, and would complain about it in digital space rather than take steps to change their current situation.

so you have this perfect storm which has arisen to captivate the older (non-teen, non-student) generations. they’re people who have money, who have either ‘grown up’ with social networks or have been otherwise influenced, and who have plenty of time in the day.

and they’ve taken to the interwebs in record numbers.

alternatively you can bookmark/subscribe to my RSS feed, or follow me on twitter, and i’ll notify you when it’s posted.

photo by Imapix - Gaëtan Bourque, flickr artist

you might say: “wait, what do you mean?!  i thought this was a blog about good management?  pushing people beyond their limits sounds entirely contradictory.”  and to that i’ll reply: often times people set their limits before they know what those limits are.  by pushing them beyond their limits, you’re actually helping them find out their true capacity for great things.

in sociology, there’s a concept called a “breaching experiment.”  a beaching experiment is when you intentionally do something that may be considered taboo or otherwise go against — or breach — society’s generally accepted definition of what is ‘right’ or ‘proper’ behavior, with the intent to find out just how far someone (or some people) may allow you to push the envelope.  for example, funny hats.  it’s perfectly acceptable to go out in public on a regular basis with a baseball cap, or a beanie in the wintertime, even if that team is the oakland athletics or your beanie is a bright pink.  some may question your choice in team or color, but they won’t question your choice in hat.  if you, however, on a regular basis were to wear a baseball cap with clapping hands, or one of those hardhats with the beer cans on the side, people may begin to question your choice of hat.  that all depends on the company you keep.

in sociological breaching experiments, you see the boundaries and you overstep them intentionally to see what kind of reaction you’ll get.  a good manager will see the boundaries that people set for themselves and intentionally try to push them beyond their limits.

of course, it goes without mentioning that it’s important to keep these miniature experiments in a controlled environment.  you wouldn’t want someone working on an important client deliverable only to become completely flustered and make mistakes.  start off with small, personal tasks at a quickened pace or demand higher quality.  then move to larger yet internal deliverables.  and if your subject passes with flying colors, then you can be confident that when the times comes you can count on that person to perform at their very best because you helped them discover just what that means.

push people beyond their limits, and you might just be surprised with how they respond.