Hershey, Pa., Research Center Fulfilling the Value of Web 2.0

Posted on May 15, 2008
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The new Hershey Center for Applied Research (HCAR) in Hershey, Pa., this week launched a brilliantly conceived Web 2.0 tool for global collaboration among its participants. Simon Revell, who developed a similar site at Pfizer Inc. over the past two years, was on hand from England to discuss how it emerged. He’s a hero now; it wasn’t always clear that he would be.

Initially, at least, social media make corporate officials extremely nervous, Revell noted. “It turns things on their head in a big corporation.” Unlike at the Hershey center, the Pfizer network developed without permission. It grew, actually, on the instincts of Revell and like-minded colleagues. “You kind of have to force yourself to do it, to get people to try it themselves and see the benefit,” he said.

The Pfizer network, which now spans the globe, has 200 registered members and many more “lurkers,” and has had a half million “hits,” grew out of a Discussion Group about the World Wide Web (DIGWWW) that Revell started early in 2006. Initial interest – “from the bottom up” – led, finally, to a full-out Web 2.0 social network within the corporate firewall. There’s a Pfizer-wide wiki, “Pfizerpedia,” blogging for internal communication and collaboration, and RSS feeds within the company. Anyone at Pfizer can post a message, anyone can comment on posts, posting does not require anyone’s approval and anonymous comments are possible.

The really good news, Revell said, is that people are using the network responsibly and that it has been of enormous benefit in getting information and insights quickly around Pfizer and its offices in Europe, the U.S. and Asia. “We lowered the barriers to conversation as much as possible,” Revell said, “and there’s been healthy debate and comment.” The site, he added, “has been hughly influential culturally.”

Colleagues can quickly share the kind of information and insights that, over time, made Pfizer “the world’s largest research-based pharmaceutical company”.

The jump-started Hershey network – dubbed HCAR Knowledge Mesh – aims to be equally influential among its associated medical, financial and marketing participants. It’s a bold concept to sponsor officially, but that’s where Web 2.0 is headed. People can be creative, encouraged and supported without ever meeting each other (although they may at times do that as well, and feel as though they’ve been united with old friends).

The power in people communicating well together occurs at keyboards and computer screens, much like the relationships that build at coffee bars and restaurants. Actually, HCAR will also be opening a coffee house in August – but only for Hershey people and visitors. There’s a much wider world out there, and it will included via the Web. The new research center has come up with a wonderful, computer-assisted concept for connecting people for mutual, encouragement, inspiration and benefit. Right on!

China Now Has Its Own Marathon to Survive

Posted on May 13, 2008
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China clearly has a marathon of its own to run in this Olympic year. In addition to the protests in Tibet, the Chinese government is now confronted with a horrendous earthquake death toll. Its response, off to an apparently strong start, will test its response to universal values of family identity, love and honor.

“We can only have one child. How can we live without them?” said a distraught Chinese parent (whose brother’s daughter was killed) in a Wall Street Journal story on the earthquake tragedy. “We put all our hopes on our kids.”

China’s decades-old “one child per family rule,” as well as archaic building codes now being replaced, are part of the backdrop to the earthquake, in which thousands died. Along with the flooding disaster in Myanmar, in which many more thousands died, ensconced regimes in Asia are suddenly a focus of attention for the quality of their response to humanitarian disasters. That focus can be good if the rest of the world enlists in prompting a truly humane response. Something good in relational terms could possibly result from this horrendous devastation – policies and deeds that could indicate awareness, in repressive societies and worldwide, of our common humanity.

Sticking to What’s Known is Refreshing, and Responsible

Posted on April 26, 2008
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Congratulations to Lt. Stephanie Murdoch, a spokesperson for the U.S. Fifth Fleet after an incident in which a U.S. cargo vessel fired warning shots at two unidentified small boats that approached it Thursday in the Persian Gulf.

Rather than contribute to speculation by some U.S. defense officials that the boats were Iranian bent on harassment, Lt. Murdoch said, “We cannot speculate on who they are. We just don’t know. We have no proof of who they were.”

That’s risk communication at it’s best – not going beyond what’s known despite a setting in which others are apparently trying to fan tensions. Sticking to what’s known – and being careful to establish what’s known – should be cardinal principles of international discourse. And other forms of communication as well.

Rev. Wright Heard, and Applauded, ‘In Context’

Posted on April 25, 2008
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I wrote in my last blog item about the importance of context in organizational meetings. Tonight Bill Moyers and the Rev. Jeremiam Wright provided a far more significant example of the importance of context – of being willing to listen as people describe the experience of others, really listen.

Bill Moyers gave Rev. Wright his entire hour, unusual on the Bill Moyers Journal, to explain the context in which he preached the sermons from which seemingly incendiary “sound bites” were taken to hound the presidential candidacy of Senator Barack Obama. It was, as it turned out, an ages-long context of angry and oppressed people seeking justice, a Biblical context. The excerpts seemed abrasive, and in themselves they were, but in the deeper context of a people’s history, a people trying to fathom a God of peace and justice, they fit well. They were in context.

Here’s another sound bite: Nobody’s perfect, not black people, white people, nor the United States of America, which is an assemblage of us all, led sometimes by misguided leaders.

Rev. Wright came across to me as a gentle but keen-eyed man, faithful to the experience of his people and tremendously knowledgeable of the scriptures that have prompted his ministry. His personal context is an admirable one, and he’s been faithful to it. His works have been good, his church has grown and his city, Chicago, and now, hopefully, his nation, after hearing him, is stronger for his ministry.

“The window through which you’re looking is your hermeneutic,” the Rev. Wright said. For a long time, he has been looking and calling people to faithfulness and reform, as the Biblical prophets and Jesus did. An admirable ministry, indeed.

—–

Clearly the Rev. Wright is not being helpful to Barack Obama’s candidacy. He is feisty, even glib and reckless, at some points, as he demonstrated in his appearance at the National Press Club – http://www.visualwebcaster.com/event.asp. But Senator Obama is not being helpful to his own cause in, most recently, seeming surprised at Jeremiah Wright’s feisty style. Too much is being made of a situation in which many Americans are uninformed – the black church and black liberation theology – and therefor open to misunderstanding and distortion. For Barack Obama to fall in with this cacophony is doing him little credit. Rev. Wright says he and his church are basically about reconciliation; that’s what we should all be about.

It may be that in the morass of race and righteousness we are all caught up in, it’s still not possible for somebody like Obama to be politically successful. Sad, truly.

Context Counts (a Lot)

Posted on April 18, 2008
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Instead of being pegged almost entirely to news stories, I’d like this blog to offer some items on general communication principles – organizational communication and public relations principles. That might move me into a community of practice in these two areas, which would be great.

Here’s a starter principle – The Importance of Context. Context became a big deal for me (again) at a meeting this morning at which I was a new member. No effort was made to provide anyone at the meeting with a sense of why we were there or what we wanted to accomplish, beyond a dutiful agenda with a few bullet items (labels). It was assumed we knew. A mistake and a missed opportunity.

What would an initial focus on context have included? Well, the leader should have been mindful of:

• There should be a distinct start to the meeting, not just a lapse in initial conversation around the table. The meeting is the next context.

• What is this place about? What is this meeting about? He should have made some explicit statement of that. (How many others at the meeting were new? I don’t know - none of us were introduced as new.)

• The leader should be mindful of: “What do I want to accomplish at this meeting?” Just get through the agenda and get it over? No. What’s our larger, basic purpose, our vision (indeed)? Worth restating every time. The actual purpose may have been established several meetings ago, at the start-up meeting, in fact, however far back that might have occurred. This is, simply (or maybe not so simply), keeping on track, hewing to the vision and purpose.

• What’s the agenda? Not in terms of bullet items, but of what we want to accomplish (as bullet items maybe)?

• The leader should ask himself/herself: “What do I want to remind folks of?”

• And, “What do I want to hand out? Have them take away?”

• And, “How do I elicit input?” Ask for it and prompt it, if necessary. Find out what’s on peoples’ minds, get a sense of why they came.

• In wrapping up, preserve the context. “What have we decided? What happens next (to advance those items)?”

• Finally, and this should be first, actually - “Who are these people? Have them introduce themselves, their business or department, and their reason/interest for being at the meeting. Don’t assume everyone knows everyone. Don’t assume anything, in fact.

Paying this sort of explicit attention to context might actually get something important accomplished and advance the purpose/vision of the convening organization. Context counts a lot!

Couldn’t American’s Groundings Have Been Avoided? A Question for the FAA and the Airline Together

Posted on April 10, 2008
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Tens of thousands of stranded American Airlines passengers can certainly be pardoned for wondering in the most exasperated terms what caused the airline safety system to crash this week.

The rest of us, whether we fly regularly or only occasionally, are justifiably curious about how government, in the person(s) of the Federal Aviation Administration, and industry, as represented by stumbling American, allowed the inspection situation to get to the point it did. Certainly, here was an opportunity for early and effective communication on behalf of (as it turned out) more than 100,000 passengers who were booked on the temporarily grounded MD-80 jets.

The FAA can say all it wants to that American was given every opportunity on the safety procedure in question, but that doesn’t excuse a government failure to maintain safety without marooning all those folks. It’s another example of the kind of situation that gives government, sadly, a bad name.

American says its mechanics “are absolutely not to blame.” And Americans’ mechanics say the compliance rules kept changing on them. We have no idea how these rules are in fact developed, but couldn’t a systematic procedure for working effectively together on compliance be developed by the FAA and the airlines? Nobody wants planes to crash.

“These airworthiness directives are not black and white,” says Gerard Arpey, American’s chairman and chief executive. “This is 38 pages of airworthiness directive that has been interpreted by our engineering staff and ultimately implemented by our mechanics.” Sounds like another important interpreter, the FAA, wasn’t around – and should have been.

In nuclear power plants, inspectors for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, dialogue with plant operators and technicians. That system may not be foolproof, none perhaps are. But it seems a heck of a lot better than what was being practiced by American and the FAA in determining whether bundled wiring was secured properly in MD-80 wheel wells.

Slowing Down Google (It’s Really Necessary)

Posted on April 6, 2008
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Thoughts that occurred on reading William J. Barrett’s highly stimulating book, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization (1967):

Are we talking about meaning in terms of actions that can be described, or ultimate meaning that can be felt, but not readily talked about? The latter meaning, unspoken but available for distilling, is certainly the higher form.

Forty years after Barrett’s book appeared, we have a greatly extended reach in accessing information (computers, the Internet), but an obligation as well. Now we can go to Google to see if Barrett is still living – he died in 1992 – and, in surfing, be taken to The Philosophers Magazine site, where you find, among many others, articles on Hobbesian America and Theology for Physicists. You have the freedom and the technology to find these sources – a great possiibility for insight. But the technology provides only the opportunity for learning and integration. It delivers these new sources, but doesn’t unfold them. We have to do that.

Fulfilling the technology requires an act of will and intention – slowing down, rather than speeding up, a trenchant timeout. Technology, we find, requires deliberation before integration and advancing. The cycle becomes: Discovery (technology-assisted), Intervening (setting aside), Reading/Annotating/Abstracting, Saving and Mulling. Note-taking becomes a higher form of activity than surfing.

Only after integrating for learning and recall do we have an addition to our personal store of knowledge, not simply an enhanced computer supply (which can be limitness).

No Polity, No Tomatoes

Posted on March 28, 2008
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Kudos to Keith Eckel, the owner of Fred W. Eckel Sons Farms at Clarks Summit, Pa., for holding a press conference to explain why he will no longer be growing tomatoes.

The Eckel farm has been Pennsylvania’s largest tomato grower, producing about 125 truckloads for East Coast markets. But Keith Eckel says he can no longer take the risk of planting tomatoes if he can’t be assured of a labor force to pick them. He attributes his planting qualms – true also for his pumpkin crop – to the failure of Congress to pass immigration reform, including “a viable guest worker program” for agriculture.

Personally, we’d include the Bush Administration and its fervid Republican backers when it comes to assigning blame for the immigration stalemate. But the larger point is that the inability of Washington to come together on key issues – like immigration reform, alternative fuels and global warming – is going to start costing Americans in all sorts of unexpected ways, starting, very possibly, with the price of tomatoes and pumpkins.

Our polity is becoming fractured by raucous partisan debates without much connection to the reality of what goes on in homes, factories or fields. We’re not well-versed on immigration reform, but policies that don’t provide a predictable, fairly treated labor force for work that Americans don’t want to do are bankrupt. Hounding workers and building walls and electronic fences isn’t the answer.

(We also know of a candy maker who’s going out of production because he can’t afford the rising cost of corn syrup due to the diversion of corn to ethanol production. Yet how many of us have yet driven a car powered by ethanol, or are likely to anytime soon? Who can yet say what the new fuel will be, or when it will be widely available? We started talking about this, remember, in the 1970s.)

This political season probably isn’t the time to expect much change. But it’s also the beginning of a planting season, and the consequences of not acting fairly and intelligently there are becoming clear and costly. How much more prompting, how many more heartfelt press conferences, do we need to come together around policies appropriate for our future?

Food Banks Running Low

Posted on March 20, 2008
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We’re in a systemic economic crisis that, so far, is being soft-pedaled by the Bush Administration. The administration likely feels that to maintain confidence, you need to talk confidently. But, as another indicator, look what’s happening at America’s soup kitchens, which depend on food banks for the needy.

The Wall Street Journal, bless it, has a story today deftly headed, “A Run on Banks: Food Charities Feel the Pinch.” It reports that food banks are coming under increasing pressure both from folks who are pinched trying to pay mortgages or survive other personal economic trials and food prices, which have been rising. More people needing soup-kitchen food and less of it available are further indicators of the increasing tightness of these times.

“There is a nascent crisis buidling,” the WSJ quotes Chris Barrett, a professor at Cornell University who studies food-assistance programs. “Demand for food-bank assistance is climbing rapidly when the resources are falling in dramatic terms because the dollars just don’t go as far.”

Here’s another role for government that apparently has been neglected: coordinating elements of the “safety net” so it doesn’t become too frayed. Ironically, but fortunately, some big corporations are stepping up to help. “Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., already a large food donor,” says The Journal, “delivered a tractor trailer of food to a food bank in each state in December. Yet in many cases, food banks say they are forced to buy from brokers.”

Here’s what it looks like up close: Michelle Brunetti-Williford, a middle-class homeowner interviewed by The Journal at the Prodisee Pantry in Spanish Fort, Ala., says her family’s “economic stability slipped when the housing crisis made it impossible to sell their home – even after dropping the price by $100,000 – so they could move into something more affordable. Rising gas and food prices began to sap their income.

“I’ve always been fortunate enough that we always had a beautiful home and a nice car. Now this economy is stripping away even the small things.” The Journal adds, sadly, that Mrs. Brunetti-Williford “and her husband couldn’t afford a $32 school field trip for one of their two young daughters.”

It’s all interconnected. But who has been making the connections on behalf of ordinary Americans as banking and other key financial markets have gone largely unregulated since the 1980s? That’s a rhetorical question, of course, but nonetheless very pertinent. Some food commodities, like corn, The Journal notes, “are being turned into alternative fuels and others are going overseas as the weak dollar makes U.S. exports more palatable to other countries.”

When you denigrate government, who fills government’s rightful and needed role? With coordination lacking, the American polity could be coming apart. Even if it holds together, the lessons of a near-collapse are worth learning and practicing: government really matters.

Government Makes a Mistaken Delivery

Posted on March 2, 2008
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Sometimes (it seems to happen fairly regularly, unfortunately) you get the feeling that government is too important to be left to the people running government. A recent case in point: the $30,000 in tax refunds the Harrisburg, Pa., School District sent to Harrisburg residents that averaged $1.94 each.

The school district acknowledged it made an error in the original billings, as pointed out by the Pennsylvania Department of Education. Yet neither the Education Department nor the School District could come up with a way – if it even occurred to them to try – to avoid the expense of sending out checks that were a pittance to their recipients. How about crediting the overage to the next tax bill? It might have been in a different year, but couldn’t the bookkeeping have been carried forward? Anything to avoid government seeming as inept as it did with the special mailing.

For people to have confidence that government can be relied upon to act in their best interests – not to mention its own – officials need to think relationally and act wisely – not lick stamps that don’t need to be licked to the exasperation of the folks who receive the mailing.

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