Month: July 2010

The Influence Project? Not so fast, Fast Company

A couple of weeks ago, I was contacted by one of the people who run the @FastCompany Twitter account. The message was to let me know that I’d been chosen to be participate in something called The Influence Project. In a follow-up email, the @FastCompany person described The Influence Project as “a visual experiment … that will purely track how influence spreads via digital word-of-mouth.”

“You are one of the first people in the mix.”

Moi? I, who didn’t get a Google Wave invitation until a month after everybody else? I finally get to be among the vanguard?

This must be some joke.

But wait. There’s more. Quoth the silver-tongued FastCompany dude:

You embrace your community and you’ve created a loyal group of people that love to hear what you have to say and that you enjoy engaging with as well. You are an influencer and we want you to be part of this.

Oh, I am so in.

Today, the project went live. A tutorial on the project provides a little more context:

What the Influence Project aims to do is remove some of the mystery behind the inherent passivity of social network numbers. This experiment will show what happens when an individual takes an audience at rest and applies an unbalanced force–through suggestion, advice or direction–that converts it into an army of action. That’s power that can be quantified and lead to an understanding that can be applied to both the largest and smallest of networks. No doubt it’s profound to address a million followers and get 100,000 of them to respond. But what does it mean when you have one hundred friends on Facebook and 97 of them click through to a site on your recommendation?

The clicks and networking and connectivity (out to six degrees!) collected in this experiment will provide a compass for where real influence lies on the Internet. It’s something I’m sure every business is curious to know more about. I also think it’s a powerful bit of awareness for anyone who wants to know who in their network is fully engaged with them.

So, my ego leading the way, I signed on.

Then I read Amber Naslund‘s post this morning, which takes Fast Company to task for confusing the idea of influence with ego. “This isn’t influence,” shewrites. “This is an ego trap and a popularity contest, pure and simple. There’s no goal other than click pandering. Already, Twitter is full of people shouting ‘click on my junk!’ and flooding my stream and countless others with nothing more than clamoring for…well…validation. … Influence is NOT jumping up and down, begging for people to click on stuff so that they, too, can find the gatekey for their own path to feeling important in the online fishbowl.”

Maybe something better than click pandering will come out of this. But I’m afraid, on first glance, that Amber may be right.

Update, July 7: TechCrunch also calls out FastCompany on this project, calling it a creative combination of link baiting and a pyramid scheme and pointing to a 2008 FastCompany article that says influence doesn’t exist.

The value of failure

One of the most important lessons from Charlene Li’s book Open Leadership — and one that I failed (so to speak) to address in last Friday’s post about the book — is the idea that it’s OK to fail. This is one of the most valuable lessons from the book, and one that risk-averse institutions like colleges and universities ought to embrace.

“Success,” Winston Churchill said, “is the ability to go from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” Li quotes Churchill in her chapter on the value of failure (Chapter 9, “The Failure Imperative”), and points out that “by mastering failure, [leaders] create an environment in which risk taking is encouraged and recovery from failure becomes a skill that everyone in the organization possesses.”

Li then poses a question that is key for higher education:

In your organization, how important is it for people to be risk takers, to be innovators? If initiative and innovation are key to your future success, then you need to take a long hard look at how you personally create trust and approach failure, because it will be reflected back in the culture that you create.

Colleges and universities tend to be mainly conservative, cautious institutions. Not many of our leaders got to where they are by taking huge risks in their careers. And so, the culture that rewards a cautious approach is not likely to reward risk takers — especially if they fail.

So where does that leave us who fall in the middle of the org charts and who aspire to be the open leaders Li talks about? I think it leaves us to take risks and give those who report to us as many opportunities to take risks as we can. We should not discourage risk-taking simply because we are in a culture that rewards caution. Moreover, we should learn to practice the art of forgiveness. To those in our organizations who take risks and fail, we should ask: “What did you (we) learn? How can this help us in the future?”

We should also take a cue from Google, which has a motto — “Fail fast, fail smart” — that would be a nice one to adopt in higher ed.

Li writes about one spectacular failure at Google in which one VP’s error cost the company millions of dollars. When the VP told Google co-founder Larry Page about the costly mistake, Li recounts, Page told her: “I’m so glad you made this mistake. Because I want to run a company where we are moving too quickly and doing too much — not being too cautious and doing too little. If we don’t have any of these mistakes, we’re just not taking enough risk.”

When was the last time you heard an administrator in higher ed say something like that? Perhaps soon, we’ll hear more of that kind of talk amid the halls of the academy.

Let’s make it happen. Let’s follow Google’s motto to “Fail fast, fail smart.” That would be a win.