There’s a great interactive experiment on the Mashable site where Steve Rubel has invited collaborators to help complete a mindmap charting the future of blogging. All that’s required is a ID on mindmeister, the online mindmap site. I can see some real uses for this on our b2b sites.
Tag Archives: innovation
Elsevier’s experimental articles
Elsevier has announced an experimental project to design the scientific “article of the future”. There are currently two prototypes which our sister company is inviting comment on from the scientific community here and here and from my standpoint these look like pretty good attempts to update the scientific article formula. I particularly like the way that each of the constituent parts of the article – abstract, text, results, figures, references, authors etc, are given their own tabs and treatment relevant to their particular information needs – the analysis of the references struck me as a particularly useful fusion.
However, not everyone has so far been overly impressed with the efforts. Paul Carville, writing on the Online Journalism Blog, is particularly underwhelmed. He has a detailed critique which looks at things such as design, information architecture and innovation, and he is less that glowing:
I think this area of publishing is indeed long overdue a complete overhaul of its staid online publishing practices, and any move to define a new specification for doing so should be welcomed. Even the otherwise impressive nature.com only goes so far in its presentation of research papers, and there is much room for improvement. But when the result is as underwhelming, cumbersome and shortsighted as this, I despair.
As Paul says the reinvention of the scientific article is long overdue, so I look forward to seeing what else emerges in the coming months.
Palantir
What does a modern start up look like up close? Pretty similar, it turns out, to those that you might have visited in the late 90s. From the games room to the free food and drink, the bean bags and the lava lamps, to the engineers in their shorts a visit to Palantir in Palo Alto might have been a visit to any start up in the valley before the tech bust of 2000. You find the same hothouse environment, the same passionate commitment to their cause (which some might call arrogance), and the same belief that one day they will all be millionaires.
The difference with Palantir, it seems to me, is in the products. I saw two of the most impressive demos I have ever seen of really well-thought-out products which set out to answer some really difficult and significant real-world problems.
I have no doubt the company will be successful (and I’m not being influenced by the fact that Reed Elsevier Ventures has a stake) because first they have some really, really smart people working there but secondly, and more importantly, the products were developed hand in glove with the customers they were going to serve. I can quite believe Alex Karp, the ceo, when he says the prospective customers are blown away by the products. And it is quite clear there are a lot more areas where Palantir’s data mapping and visualisation skills and scaleability could make a real difference – biotech, for instance, or even CRM. The approach is different, too – open platforms, open APIs and highly configurable by the end-users.
It was really invigorating to visit a company run along meritocratic lines, with little in the way of hierarchy, almost no HR function, and a genuine sense of shared purpose. And at just over 100 people the whole thing seems to function. What it will be like when there are 200, for 500 or 1,000 people remains to be seen. Can the same culture be maintained? I don’t know, but I would love to think so.
By the way, if you are reading this Alex, I forgot to ask – where does the name Palantir come from?
What it takes to be a leader
Listening to another HBR Ideacast (the podcast I recently subscribed to from Harvard Business School) I was struck by Marshall Goldsmith’s definition of leadership. (Goldsmith is the author of the Ask The Coach blog and the book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.) He says his research among 200 high performing leaders indicates that there a number of qualities found in the best leaders. Among the old favourites (which he suggests will still be on the list 100 years from now) are:
- Integrity
- Customer focus
- Competitiveness
- Vision
I bet you will find these on the list of leadership competencies in just about every major company – certainly true in Reed Business Information.
But in our rapidly changing world there are six new ones which make it onto the list:
- Thinking globally
- Sensitivity to cross cultural diversity
- Technological savvy (not being an engineer, but understanding how technology impacts the core business and having the ability to hire technologists)
- Alliances and partnerships
- Sharing leadership (managing knowledge workers – definition: people who know more than their boss)
- Learning agility – the ability to keep open to the changing world around us.
It was interesting to write this post so soon after meeting a bunch of start-up CEOs – Chris Michel of Affinity Labs, Kathy Yates of AllBusiness.com, West Shell of Healthline, and Alex Karp of Palantir.
How did they stack up against the “new” list?
- It was too early for most to be far down the global track, but a few of them were already talking of their move to other parts of the world, and internationalisation seems to have been built in at the product level from day one.
- Not addressed specifically, but Alex Karp did make an interesting point about the attitude towards talent in The Valley: he says all companies hire the best they can and discrimination on any other grounds is unthinkable. He was convincing.
- This one was evident is spades. The products we saw were technologically driven by people who really appear to feel technology can change the world.
- For almost all of the CEOs partnerships and alliances came naturally; in a world where things move really, really fast why create something when you can partner with someone who already has it?
- This one is clearly key – talent was on everyone’s mind. In the highly competitive atmosphere of The Valley (and with Google gobbling up vast quantities of the best) there is an obsession with hiring the right people. And these people are, almost by definition, smarter than their bosses.
- Even the 50-somethings had their LinkedIn profiles, and their Facebook pages – they tried to keep experimenting with the new social models even though they were clearly at times uncomfortable with them. This was admirable – and very different from what I have witnessed back home. You can, of course argue that these are tech start-ups so they are different. But Marshall Goldsmith’s point is that all companies are tech companies these days, or at least have technology at their hearts. So the argument doesn’t stand.
San Francisco
Arrived at San Francisco airport in the sunshine – quite a relief after the lousy Easter weather we’ve been having. (View is from the aircraft window as we approached the runway).
Nearly first off the plane and then no queues at passport control – and then a 45 minute wait for the driver who, it turns out, had been told we were flying in on United.
Then into the legendary Californian rush-hour traffic for a crawl down-town.
Enough free time this afternoon for a quick visit to the Apple store on Union Square before the welcome drinks and dinner/kick-off meeting.
More later…