My Mac is broken. I’m waiting to hear from the insurance company. I think they’re hatching a plan to mitigate their losses. So for now I’m barely managing to keep my head above digital-water. 1 tweet a week! And my last post here dated 11 August! Flickr? Don’t even go there…they have all given up on me.

A curious thing about Flickr though, the thing that provoked this post in fact (from my iPhone!!!). I have a shot in my photostream — Bride and Guests — which has 12 comments and 28,000 views! How does that work? That’s what I call *Silence*.

If old PR was all about shaping the corporate message, speaking to the right people and deliberate timing then digital PR is the opposite. It’s about allowing the corporation to be shaped by audience opinion. Its about listening to audiences and using the wisdom of crowds to inform internal opinion and shape products, services and future messages. And its about capturing discordant, asynchronous communication whichever channel carries it.

Old PR was a discipline in timing, planning and sculpting. It embodied the art of indiscriminate mass messaging. It was one-way communication. A loudhailer!

Digital PR is different. It’s two-way, multi-channel, uncontrolled and it takes skill to measure and monitor. Skillful PR people have adapted to these new challenges, they are familiar with the rules of digital engagement. They understand the loudhailer has been replaced with a telephone. And the telephone call is a very long, infinite in fact. It’s a conference call where on occasions the organisation might be invited to speak but most of the time it’s listening to simultaneous inbound messages and it’s looking for patterns and trends as it converts data to information to wisdom.

Public Relations, has for so long been a one-to-many broadcast discipline that it takes a while to realise: digital PR is more about listening than talking. The relationship is different and it’s dynamic is reversed 180º from that of it’s former self. If you’re in PR, be prepared for a change, get closer to your data analyst colleagues and start broadcasting to the internal corridors of power!

Over the past few years there’s been a gentle shift from top-down to bottom-up power bases. So imperceptible you may not have noticed. The 1980’s ushered a new era of public ownership: British Gas, British Telecom, British Rail, British Steel and a slew of other manufacturers. We the public cherished our slice of BT, for many it was their first taste of owning a publicly traded morsel. And as shares climbed, the new public ownership culture proved popular. It was the new smart money.

The transition from state-owned company to the private sector saw the birth of a new animal: the pin-stripe adorned “fat-cat”. The french say of us Brits: “They love their maker. Britain is full of self-made men!” The fat-cats multiplied; pandemic fat-cat! They had special cars made for themselves with retractable steering wheels to accommodate their newly acquired fat-paunches. The fatter cats dispensed with their cars; in a single evolutionary step; they took to the air in their shiny new bisjets. I worked with a director in the late 90s; he was based in Manhattan but used to visit *England*. He was mildly miffed with his photograph in an annual report. And it had to go to print in the next 3 days. What would he do? He climbed aboard his Falcon, flew to Heathrow, was chauffeured to Hook, had his pic taken then went home; presumably with ego safely in tact. Shortly after, the dot-com bubble burst. Fat-cats were snapped into sobriety as they saw dividends slashed, bonuses cut and promising careers abruptly halted.

By 2002, the recovery was well underway. Banks had created shady businesses which, in hindsight, looked more at home in Vegas than high-street settings. Build societies demutualised, preferring to serve the greed of shareholders than the modest small time investors, they even went a step further by securing funding through markets rather than the more traditional route of good old fashioned savers. Inflation was the number one indicator and it indicated no problems whatsoever.

In early 2009, politicians embarked on public witch hunts, chasing-down errant bankers only to discover they knew nothing about banking at all! By mid 2009 politicians themselves became the target of much finger-wagging as their fiscal excesses were exposed to an angry public. Crowds gathered to demonstrate in London and other major cities and we were introduced to another new phenomena: kettling! A technique used by the Police to coral and trap protestors.

The past 30 years have been interesting. The past 5 years even more so because of two distinct and disconnected things which took place simultaneously and on a global scale.

1. Governments poured billions of public money into banks and big business in an effort to prop them up and secure jobs and homes, and in the process have in all but name nationalised many of these once powerful institutions. The free market will never be the same again.

2. Twitter happened; traditional news channels will give way to new ways of broadcasting breaking news. Iran elections trended for weeks signaling the global take-up of social media. The informed global general public start to pull the levers of government, businesses and public-sector services by means of Twitter. Issues are pounced upon and opinion pronounced with deliberate ease, ultimately power is being transferred to the twitterati with followers.

Fat-cats and free markets are all being chased out of town by pay-caps, pay-freezes and stricter regulation. It’s my speculation that power is sliding from the few to the many. Public ownership by default.

Oh sure, banks, royal colleges, government will all remain but the ground rules are changing. Accountability is the new kid on the block along with corporate social responsibility. How are public and private organisations responding? By means of digital engagement. A new dynamic that will see roles reversed. And one in which ordinary folk tell bosses, banks, manufacturers and governments what they want, how they want it and when they want it by.

This is the entitlement generation, it understands the power of social media and it’s not frightened to use it!

My Twitter @johngoode

This is the QR Code for http://johngoode.com

Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code

How good are you at reading, recognising and remembering fascial features? The brain has limited ability in processing visual data to do with faces when they are presented upside down. Using the image below, slowly alter your view of the image and see how far you have to go before you’re able to *notice* the difference between the 2 faces.

In modern workplaces it is common for employees to have their performance measured and monitored by both managers and colleagues. It’s normal to align performance with pay too. Far less common is the practice of measuring and publishing the performance of senior managers. This is a practice that inspirational leaders like Ricardo Semler would sponsor and its an attitude, a corporate modus operandi, that can prevent poor performance in the top team by surfacing issues resulting from poor management practices and sub-optimal decision making skills.

Why measure the Senior Management Team (SMT)?

Ricardo Semler once stated “Growth and profit are a product of how people work together….” Therefore, highly effective senior managers are the key to successful, profitable businesses. It is the task of the SMT to formulate strategy and to communicate this clearly. Strategy must be converted into action by the SMT so that staff members understand how their work helps their company meet clearly understood targets and goals.

SMT staff must communicate what is needed and by when. Note this doesn’t mean staff should be told how a task must to be achieved! There is no place for switherers, ditherers, muddle-heads and procrastinators in the SMT. Policemen style managers are not helpful either. Have you ever experienced the frustration of working with a manager whose sole purpose in life is to apply corporate rules and to book anyone found transgressing? You know the type: they focus on time, attendance and other minutiae. Of course it’s important to maintain a level of discipline, so let HR take care of that stuff.

Why measure the SMT? Because their performance means the difference between life and death of any company. The SMT must set direction, pace, tone and priorities, it is a collection of leaders not managers! And who better to measure them than their staff.

How to measure the performance of the SMT?

Using the SMT attributes list below, have each member of staff rate each member of the SMT. I’d recommend a scale of 6 to 1, where 6 is excellent and 1 is rubbish. Make the review process anonymous — this is essential. Perhaps use an external service such as survey monkey. Gather the data and publish the results!

SMT attributes

Ambition
Approachable
Assertive
Business acumen
Compassion
Composure
Control skills
Creativity
Customer focus
Decision quality
Dependable
Delegation
Fair
Fun to work with
Good listener
Helpful
Humble
Humor
Imaginative
Interpersonal skills
Keeps up-to-date
Knowledgeable
Listening skills
Managerial courage
Managing diversity
Motivating others
Negotiating
Organising
Patient
Perseverance
Perspective
Planning
Presentation skills
Priority setting
Problem solver
Punctual
Self knowledge
Shares ideas
Ability to size up people
Strategic agility
Supportive
Technical skills
Trusted
Understanding others

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit”. — Aristotle

What does it do? It measures temperature by means of a PT100 probe and transmits the data at user-defined intervals. Transmission is achieved by means of a wireless internet connection and the data is written to an online subscription-based service. This online service provides a common set of data manipulation, graphing and publishing tools. Enabling the subscriber to:

1. Gather data: temperature, water level, tilt angle, light level, daylight hours etc
2. Store data
3. Graph data
4. Mash-up data with Google maps via API
5. Transmit data: RSS, XML, Twitter, Facebook etc

This is so cool. Tilt Shift is a method of shooting stills or in this case video (a series of stills) in such a way as to make things look miniature.

Helpless from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Extracts from

*The Five Temptations of a CEO*

An excellent book by Patrick Lencioni

1/5. Make results the most important measure of personal success, or step down from the job. The future of the company you lead is too important for customers, employees and stakeholders to hold it hostage to your ego.

2/5. Work for the long-term respect of your direct reports, not for their affection. Don’t view them as a support group, but as key employees who must deliver on their commitments if the company is to produce predictable results.
[Read More]

QUESTION: What’s the appeal of solar energy?

JPG: Aside from photography I’m really enthusiastic about renewable energy!

QUESTION: Are you a tree hugger?

JPG: Well I believe the earth should be better looked after and we all need to do our bit to make the best use of earths resources. I’m especially interested in renewable energy; I’d really love a water wheel but I don’t have a stream in my back garden.

QUESTION: So what’s the motivation behind designing and building an alternative energy system?

JPG: In addition to reducing energy bills and mitigating price increases of domestic gas and electricity, I also wanted the reassurance of a hot shower and a hot dinner should energy supplies become intermittent.

QUESTION: Can you outline your design and tell us how effective it’s been?

JPG: Sure. At the heart of the system is a 1000 litre thermal store (TS) — that’s a large hot water tank to you and me. The TS supplies the domestic hot water by means of an efficient heat exchange coil; cold mains-pressure water is fed in and hot mains-pressure water comes out. Great for showers! I like showers! The hot water coming out of the TS is too hot for domestic consumption and so it’s mixed with cold water to prevent scalding.

The radiator system, and there are 13 of them in this 6 bedroom, 3-story house, is also connected to the TS. I have included a diagram to better explain the logical blocks of the system design, the hot water circuit is not shown here but utilises the heat exchange coil located in the top of the TS.

The TS temperatures vary and typically operate as follows:

1. Top third: 60ºC — 75ºC
2. Centre third: 40ºC — 60ºC

A Siemens Logo is used to control the pumps, it monitors temperatures and in situations where the top tank temperature exceeds 83ºC, the radiator circuit is activated to dump excess heat. We don’t tend to run the solid fuel system in the summer so much, and it’s therefore not a problem. In the winter it’s the desired side-effect!

You’ll notice from this diagram that there are 3 heat sources — all feeding into 1 system and all coexist quite happily. Our gas bills have quite frequently been £zero, even in mid-winter. The irony is, we’re more likely to use gas in the summer for cooking as the solid-fuel heat-source is a cooker and oven too and kitchen temperatures could get a little unbearable!

The gas boiler is used as a standby only. Regardless of other heat-sources, the solar-thermal always get busy when the sun shines. Recent refinements have drastically improved the effectiveness of the solar-thermal system:

The solar-thermal pump is activated at mid-TSºC+20ºC. For example, if the mid-tank temperature is 60ºC, the solar-circuit is activated when the solar-array reaches 80ºC. Crucially, the circuit is deactivated at a precise point to prevent TS heat being lost due to over pumping.

The solar array heats at the rate of 0.1ºC/sec on a bright sunny day. So for May, June, July and August I fully expect the solar array to supply most of our hot water, sufficient for 4 adults, 2 washing machines, showers not baths.

QUESTION: Where did you get the design from?

JPG: I made it up! I cannot find any reference to a system like this online.

I will write more about this system at a later date.