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What Killed Myspace

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The cover story for the latest issue of Businessweek is The Rise and Inglorious Fall of Myspace.

There are a lot of reasons, obviously, for the massive decline of Myspace. But here’s something that especially stood out:

“There was lot of pressure to drive revenue. There were things that we knew would be more efficient for the user that we didn’t act on immediately because it would reduce page views, which woul dhave hurt the bottom line.” — Shawn Gold, Myspace’s former senior vice president for marketing and content

In other words, the pursuit of profit was placed ahead of the user.

Deadly. Just deadly.

There’s a lesson here, which I’ve blogged about often: You have to put your user/customer/constituents before revenue.

If your organization places higher priority on money than the people it serves, you are already on your way down.

Sometimes people say “but if we don’t put revenue first, we won’t make enough money to survive.” But this has it backwards. If you do put revenue first, you will likely undercut the very things that actually produce revenue — things like goodwill, generosity, genuine service, and remarkability. The way to ensure that you have enough revenue to survive and thrive is to not put revenue first.

Profit matters, obviously. But the best companies put something other than profit first — and, paradoxically, become more profitable as a result.

Don't be a Squelcher

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Richard Florida is talking about community leaders here, but his point applies to all forms of leadership, including leading and managing in organizations:

Unfortunately, leadership more often than not works in the opposite direction by squashing civic energy. Jane Jacobs once told me that communities everywhere are filled with creative vigor, but that some of them are run by squelchers. Squelchers are control freaks who think they know what’s best for their city or region, even as their leadership (or lack thereof) causes a hemorrhage of bright, talented, and creative people.

Squelchers, he said, are the kind of leaders that use the word “no” a lot. They constantly put roadblocks in the way of community energy and initiatives. I’ve seen firsthand how these squelchers drain the life and energy from their communities. The respond to new ideas with phrases like “That’s not how we do things here”; “That will never fly”; or “Why don’t you just move someplace you’ll be happy?” (From Who’s Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life)

The Virtue of Inefficiency?

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Sometimes, the quest for efficiency is a red herring. Consider the example of the first light bulb, described in The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy:

Thomas Edison’s first light bulb wasn’t at all efficient. One 1905 observer complained that “the incandescent lamp is an extremely poor vehicle for converting electric energy into light energy, since only about 4 percent of the energy supplied to the lamp is converted into light energy, the remaining 96 percent being converted into heat energy.” And the power plant that Edison built to light his bulb didn’t convert even 10 percent of its heat into electricity.

But the end-to-end losses of over 99 percent seemed worthwhile to produce such a wonderfully clean, compact, cool, and safe source of light. Efficiency was beside the point. As Jill Jonnes recounts in Empires of Light, gas and oil lamps didn’t stand a chance against such a superior alternative.

Sometimes a concern for efficiency undercuts what really matters. To have said “96 percent of the energy that goes into the light bulb produces heat, not light, so let’s get rid of this thing” would have missed the most important thing: we have light. And this is way better than oil lamps.

It’s often the same way in organizations. An organization often starts out vibrant and energetic and full life. Things are getting done, and people love what they are doing.

But then someone says “we need to get this organized better.” So they bring in the efficient organizers, and the life and spirit of the organization is efficencized right out of it.

Of course, organizing is a good thing. The problem is in treating it as the main thing. Or, which is the same thing, sacrificing the things that create the life and spirit of the organization to the perceived need to “have control” and be efficient.

Don’t be an efficient organizer  — someone who cares about cost-cutting and efficiency as though they are more important than the mission and goals of the organization. Put the mission first. Be efficient where you can, but don’t let that become the point.

Develop Your Leadership Potential

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Alex Chediak has an excellent article over at Boundless on developing your leadership potential.

His three points are:

  1. A leader must strive for excellence
  2. A leaders must think clearly
  3. A leader must combine humility with boldness and realism with optimism

Here’s an excerpt from his first point:

Remember that God’s timetable may be different from yours, and be faithful with what He’s given you right now, while also striving to be a wise steward of your current growth opportunities. The Bible says that whatever your hand finds to do, you should do with all our might (Ecclesiastes 9:10). And that in everything you do, “work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving” (Colossians 3:23–24). That means that in serving your “human masters” (your bosses or professors) you are actually serving Jesus Christ. So do it with excellence, as best you can.

Paul gives us an example of godly striving — an ambition to accomplish much for Christ. He made plans to go to Rome and then Spain and to continue his church planting among the unreached (Romans 15:20–24). He spoke of being zealous for good works (Titus 2:14) and said this zeal should mark us all. In the Parable of the Talents, the mere preservation of one’s talent brought scorn and reproof. The Master, it turns out, expected an increase, a return on investment (Matthew 25:14–30). To whom much is given, much is expected (Luke 12:48).

So go ahead and aspire to achieve great things for God’s glory. Don’t equate humility with mediocrity. There’s a subtle, yet significant difference between seeking to make a name for yourself and seeking to make a name for Christ. When we’re obedient, diligent and fruitful stewards of the gifts and opportunities God gives us, we honor God. Titus 2:10 talks about our lives adorning the gospel message — making it look beautiful in the eyes of others. Christians are called to excellence in all that they do. Excellence is both attractive to others and inherently valuable. Therefore, those who excel are often placed in positions of authority or influence (so they can motivate others to excel).

Read the whole thing.

Low-Trust Cultures vs. High-Trust Cultures

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Stephen Covey outlines the differences very well in First Things First, which is one of the most helpful books on productivity around. He compares high trust and low trust organizations in the areas of supervision, evaluation, span of control, motivation, and structure and systems. Here are some highlights.

Supervision

In a low-trust culture, supervision is associated with words like control, monitor, hover over, and check up. In a high-trust culture, people supervise themselves according to the agreement. The criteria are clear, the consequences are set. There’s common understanding of what’s expected. A manager, leader, or parent becomes a source of help — a facilitator, helper, cheerleader, adviser, counselor, and coach — someone to remove the oil spills and get out of the way.

Evaluation

In a low-trust culture, you’re into forced ranking, external performance evaluation, and judgment. In a high-trust culture, the judgment goes into the performance agreement before the fact instead of after the fact. People judge themselves. Their evaluation is not just a function of measurement, but also of discernment. “The numbers are looking good, but I feel a concern about this particular area…” People are much more aware of the issues that affect their performance and success. [Note: The “discernment” here should not devolve into subjectivity. It needs to be anchored objectively in the mission and values of the organization.]

Span of Control

In a low-trust culture, the span of control is small. It takes time and energy to hover over, to check up. You can only control so many people. In a high-trust culture, you don’t need to hover over and check up. You aren’t trying to control but to release. Instead of one to eight or ten, you have one to fifty, one to a hundred, one to two hundred.

Motivation

In a low-trust culture, you’re into “the great jackass theory of motivation” — the carrot, out in front, the stick behind. In a high-trust culture, people are internally motivated. They’re fueled by the fire within. They’re driven by a sense of passion about fulfilling a shared vision that’s also a co-mission, a synergy between their own mission and the mission of the family or organization.

Structure and Systems

A low-trust culture is filled with bureaucracy, excessive rules and regulations, restrictive, closed systems. In the fear of some “loose cannon,” people set up procedures that everyone has to accommodate. The level of initiative is low — basically “do what you’re told.” Structures are pyramidal, hierarchical. Information systems are short-term. The quarterly bottom line tends to drive the mentality in the culture. In a high-trust culture, structures and systems are aligned to create empowerment, to liberate people’s energy and creativity toward agreed-upon purposes within the guidelines of shared values. There’s less bureaucracy, fewer rules and regulations, more involvement.

It isn’t my point in posting this — my point is to encourage you to keep building a high-trust rather than low-trust culture in your organization because it is intrinsically right and better for people — but Covey next makes a connection to personal time management. And his connection is this: high trust cultures save a lot of time, because you don’t have to spend so much time controlling, monitoring, checking up, supervising, coming up with hokey motivational programs, creating (and enforcing) pointless rules, and sorting out the communication problems that result from low-trust environments.

He concludes:

We spend an incredibly inordinate amount of time dealing with symptoms of low trust, but learning how to deal with the symptoms faster is not going to make a qualitative difference.

“First things first together” is a function of empowerment. It’s the ultimate way of moving the fulcrum over from the “one to one” ratio to a “one unit of effort to one thousand units of results” ratio. There’s no time management technique that can even begin to approach the results. And that’s why empowerment is at the heart of Quadrant II [that is, true personal effectiveness and effectiveness within organizations].