Who is Man 2.0?

A few months ago I was struggling with "evil minds", the scene and plotting on a level that reminded me of the French court.

Is this where Man has "risen" in 2010, I remember thinking. Then I bumped into the latest Robin Hood with Russell Crowe.

Rise and rise again..until lambs become lions

I opened the trailer (sorry, can't seem to find the one anymore) and completely fell in love with the words. They promised change. I wrote them down so that I would remember.

Empower every man and you'll gain strength.
Are you ready to be who you are?

There's a familiar echo in here. Is Robin Hood getting social in 2010?

Yesterday I had a nice *talk* with Scott Gould. We pondered what was keeping people from sharing and collaboration. Scott is about to blog about that.

We've lived an era of enormous wealth and greed. Wealth rips off man's humanity, claim the humanists, it's every man for himself. Even in this era of social media, they say, the majority of people is just screaming their name. It's all about me, myself and I.

My recent experiences give hope for humanity.

My friend started a fight for her Down sister, as her weaponry she has a blog (F), Twitter and Facebook. It's only her first week, but she's already raised a significant amount of support from her own network. Social media can make a difference.

Her question is, why don't the civil servants care. I have been worrying something quite alike: the civil servants seem to lack courage to be themselves, or think by themselves. In trying to make the Gov 2.0, the good old obedient attitude "Don't do anything unless you're told to" turns out to be the loser's garment.

Fortunately, people want to dive in when they become passionate about something.

Last night I watched Griff Rhys Jones in Sydney. There he heard an astonishing witness to the Sydneysidean concept of mateness. The ladies he met told him that they are ready to give up on materia in order to be able to spend time with their friends.

Then a young woman told what the level of that friendship really is. After her husband had got a cancer, their friends collected a half a million dollars so that he could travel to the States to get treated there. He got cured.

That is Man 2.0.
Caring. Putting others before oneself. Prioritizing the real thing. Life.

Work 2.0 is collaborative

On my last post I used mobile, camera and publishing as "new media user experience". With Web 2.0 the ways we do things are in a constant change.

As the matter of fact, the only constant in our lives seems to be change.

Tonight I took part in HBR chat, under the topic From Corporate Ladder to Lattice. The main idea is that, not only our life, hobbies, targets of interest and how we carry them change - but also and even more so, our work is under a radical change.

The workplace isn't what it used to be--and neither is the workforce. Today's companies have fewer hierarchical layers. The nature of work is also more virtual, collaborative, and transparent than at any previous time. -HBR

In my mind those two have a strong connection. It doesn't matter what you do for a living, in order to proceed in your career, you need the constant change.

Bus driver 2.0

If you're a bus driver, instead of gasoline, your new vehicle might use natural gas or even electronic batteries. And as you drive along, traffic lights favor you: thanks to the new technology allowing the integration of the satellite - GPS - traffic light system(F). Sustainable development in mind: the less you need to wait with your motor running, the less you cause exhaustive fumes and pollute the nature.

If you started your career some 20 years ago, there's been a huge change, at least in your mind!

Knowledge worker 2.0

Even bigger is the distance between the old office worker in comparison with today's knowledge worker. Back in 1997 when I started with the Tax Administration, the departments received their instructions on paper. Bulletins were pinned on a board for every one. - Today everything comes in email, 2-10 times a day, and the highlights for customers are also published on our website.

My boss explained to me at my first week: "Our PC's are all new: last year (or so) we had just one PC in a team of 8-12 workers." -Today I have a laptop and a Nokia E90, and emails reach me through both those devices.

Outsourcing the reason?

But these are not the only changes around. In the name of productivity organizations are cutting back fixed costs. Good bye secretaries, good bye bookkeepers and ladies who used to calculate our salaries or arrange our business trips and so on. All the assisting work is being outsourced. The question is, do we really gain or lose on this track?

Today I need to operate on three separate applications in order to report my working hours, prepare for the development discussions and approve the invoices. (There is no OpenID, no common logic or user experience. People, even bosses make the coffee, since there are no more secretaries..)

On the other hand, I love to update the campaign site myself, instead of giving the text to someone to copy-paste and then do it all over again because I'm not happy with the layout. - Not all agree with my point of view. How do you feel about it?

Social media is Collaboration!

For us knowledge workers this is a golden era. Social media tools enable us to group with like minded people. In "tribes" we can learn more efficiently on the subjects we're all interested in and also share our expertise with other Like Minds.

In essence, it is this bigger picture that tonight's HBRchat was about:

Q1: What are the major trends at play that are changing the traditional career model?

Q2: How can companies transition from this traditional model to flexible, more strategic one?

Q3: How can we as individuals shape our own “career lattices?”

Conversationalists brought up open dialogue, collaboration and transparency. As things become more transparent, strategy and sharing values are an essential part of the new leadership. Finally, stepping stones to the new career are constant learning, pushing the edges and a somewhat entrepreneurial mindset that flourishes with trust.

The motto for the new worker could be, as @bennydu put it:

Always be humble, open-minded, never stop learning! Coach Wooden said: "It's what you learn after you know it all that counts"

If you're interested what else was said, you'll find the hashtagged Tweets in Topsy

On the way to Information Society

A bit over a year ago I blogged about how to plan services (F) For user experience to be pleasant, the service needs to have all bits and pieces in balance.

A good example of nice experience is how you plan your Google front page. Some might say "nonsense", but I love it for showing me news headlines at a glance. I also love beauty; so this is how my iGoogle looks like.

This year's foot ball finals (F) was my first game ever (en spite of the fact that I loved Goal! a lot). Fanny, our cat, got so excited, too, that we took some snapshots to share with our friends.

I'm a Picasa user (over Flickr) for the simple reason of user accounts: I already had an account with Google. Oh, how I'd love OpenID: the less accounts (and passwords), the better!

To my regret, I have a Nokia E90 instead of an iPhone, so sharing photos has been a pain in the neck. Google's Picasa offered a good option to do the trick via email. Fast and easy, and the results you can see here.

Social media opens new horizons also to government officers, those wanting to share experiences, learn from one another and create new innovation. I believe we need to speed up the development: all too few of us use tools enabling bigger productivity or crowd-sourcing type of innovation.

Public sector in Finland (perhaps the whole country, too) is still in the phase of slow adaption with Twitter - and I wouldn't have the time to wait =) LinkedIn is more used but, all too often, poorly so. Facebook is all the more famous but mostly used for private purposes. (Dear reader, a word of warning: the previous estimation is based on my professional public sector networks and may not represent the whole truth)

I am part of a big team SADe (F) that is building information society and eGovernment in Finland. I'm not saying that government offices' first priorities lie with tweets or sharing photos, but my few examples above are definitely worth learning from. Information society should be innovative and easy to use.

What needs to be gained, in my experience of a year as a blogger, is networking, sharing and enriching the experiences. Only thus can we benefit and speed up the learning curve.

That's how innovation is spread. First there was Gutenberg's printing press. Today we blog to spread our thoughts.

My blog at Arjen tietoyhteiskunta (F - unfortunately not translated).

Social media drives green values to business (Vol.4)

Turning environment..

Let's move on from environmental challenges to new business ideas evolving from the need of sustainability.

I believe the only way to weave environment into business is by looking at the entire environment of the business through value chain thinking.

Environmental value chain analysis offers a way to manage the business processes as an entity that takes environment into consideration.

..into new business ideas

Passion drives change. BSAG was born of the relentless passion of Ilkka Herlin. Same passion drives environmental investments in Canada.

Private passions that have driven the environmental movement for decades are now spilling over into mainstream business ventures.

Material efficiency is often the key factor in cutting variable costs. But that efficiency should be looked at as a bigger picture: one must optimize the entity. It is possible to streamline the use of a certain ingredient in the production process and, at the same time, increase the cost of its final waste disposal. There, too, the answer lies in life cycle analysis.

Material efficiency should thus be connected into the management system, as is often done with the energy efficiency. Efficiency thinking should be based on value chain analysis, says professor Juha Kaila, Helsinki University of Technology (InnoSuomi 2009). R&D is facing the challenge of how to get the most out of the raw material in its total life time. The scope is about to change as the life cycle cost must include also the cost of recycling.

A change toward non-tangibles?

How about Slow movement? It offers yet another view in consumption. Slow life allows room for services that do not exploit the environment. Non-tangible services are bound to burden less than producing tangible goods. An excellent example on that are different charity projects: Buy a cow - donate a well - buy a vaccine - or plant a tree are all examples of a non-tangible gift (F) to someone who already has everything.

As you can see, sustainabity makes sense. It also opens new horizons for innovation.

Social media drives green values to business (Vol.3)

If you care about you reputation, you'll know, both intuitively and explicitly, what and how to do - and how not to. This should apply to business, as well.

Brand is definitely one of the most valuable assets to any business. Brand management must bring along risk management covering customer experience. Customers nowadays live more and more constantly in their social networks.

Firms may "own" their brands, but brands really live in the heads of their consumers. Companies must constantly nurture and actively manage their brands at the speed customers form opinions about them. -Real-time Brand Management, Harvard Business Review

Therefore quality of service, the core product itself, must be supported with an excellent array of customer service use.

Managing environmental risks

But the core processes need to be acceptable, too. The business is not allowed to bring harm to people, never to its customers, nor to its employers; but not to the environment. Not any more. Today business processes need to be sustainable.

I believe Nestle was one of the first 'naughty ones' I remember hearing of when I was a kid. Back then there were no computers in every day life, and the most 'social media' there was, was shopping at the same time with your neighbors =) Well, 30 years later, Nestle is in trouble again. This time in Facebook. The topic has changed: this time it is palm oil.

They will not accept unethical behavior. Their opinion might matter to your customers. (Vol.2*link corrected*)

Even the most cautious preparations get caught by surprise. Preserving the environment, let alone the ultimately vulnerable rain forest, must have been a top priority in an multi-million investment of Botnia in Uruguay.

Environmental challenges bring sustainability and new business ideas. To be continued..

Social media drives green values to business (Vol.2)

It is time to dive into the bigger picture. You might have been asking, what on earth connects the dots from green values to hardcore moneymaking.

The answer is customer, the citizen, the Conscious Consumer. He or she is more and more often willing to enlighten also others in his or her no-cost social media networks.

Not hurting the nature means most of all responsibility in all business processes. And this is where we bump into ethics. If the right choice costs more, your bottom line is bound to suffer. Mission impossible? My previous post at Vol.1

China and Finland, cases mentioned in Vol.1, were crimes covered by the traditional press. South-Korean girl not taking care of her dog waste or a blogging mother at the mercy of a multi-national conglomerate are examples of the power of this new media. It offers those long-needed channels through which to participate and do our share for the mutual cause.

That's why nature is also your business!

Social media is a means to build social (environmental) awareness. That's why sustainability is a value that is - and must be - on the rise. As Esko Kilpi put it: There is a shift of paradigm going on.

That paradigm is something big; so big that not one business can afford to neglect it.

As people are testifying odd weathers, reading scary reports and watching terrifying pictures from natural catastrophes they are also searching for information. Web offers them loads of details, also and more and more often misbehavior and neglect of companies, among other things.

Be aware: those who care just won't turn away. They will not accept unethical behavior. Their opinion might matter to your customers.

Gradually this "Mission impossible" type of equation is becoming reality. Winning fast profits at the expense of someone else - and the nature - is turning social media audience against anyone trying it. Dare you try?

To be continued..