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Communications and Leadership
Jon's comments about PR, and Sheila's about NASA, ring so very true to me. Effective leadership requires both a crisp vision as well as a personal commitment to communicate that vision. A rock may indeed be the best computing device in the universe, but so long as it has lousy I/O, we'll never know. We in the technology industry are particularly challenged in this regard. I experienced it firsthand in attempting to define the category of 'groupware' with Lotus. It's easy and natural for technologists tend to get caught up in a "bottom-up" view of what they're building (e.g. product capabilities), leaving well-intentioned yet challenged marketing groups to reverse-engineer "top-down" messages that quite often don't come together. The only solution is leadership. Centralized leadership around creation of vision and mission, and centralized delivery of that same message (starting even before creation of the product), is key to effective decentralized execution. And today, decentralized execution is what it's all about. Conversely, if a product or service is built from the bottom up as a collection of powerful technologies or features, and if the vision emerges in a decentralized manner (at worst, by individual sales people, by analysts or journalists, by the market), execution is destined to be chronically weak. The product won't be bought; it will need to be sold. This is true in business, politics, defense, etc. And it's fractal: it applies at the "unit" level as well as at the "organization" level. Perhaps ours can indeed be derided as a "bumper sticker culture", but communications leadership, and personal mastery of communication channels and tools, is key. No, Jeff Immelt and Karol Wojtyla and Trent Lott and Tom Ridge as leaders may never have direct personal conversations on the Internet, but they won't have to, and delivery of their messages won't just be outsourced. Their direct staffs and trusted advisors will grow to understand the power of emergent Internet-based communications channels. Publishing and broadcast will be used outward, transactions will be used inward for aggregated/quantitative feedback, and tiers of cellular "circles" of communications will be used to channel qualitative feedback inward. Transformations don't happen prescriptively. They happen disruptively, or they "creep in" at a grassroots level, from the edge. It's only just begun.
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