Davos, Twitterville and Me

They say you can't teach old dogs new tricks. But now that this middle-aged CEO has learned how to stop talking about new media and communications styles and start living them, I'd argue the exact opposite.

For years we've talked about the great democratization of information and power, but for a while it was just the sound and fury of theory. It's quickly becoming reality, however, and last month I found myself living this trend as I participated in the World Economic Forum at Davos. It was the second time I attended, but Davos was a very different experience for me this year, in part because I took not just my Blackberry and Airbook but also my team of 10,000 and my hundreds of contacts, thanks to the wonders of virtual social networks.

I've never felt this connected to the rest of the world. It was a game-changing, moving experience, one that left an indelible mark on how I will lead now.

It all started with my embrace of a funny little thing called Twitter. We'd used it to share creative news from last June's Cannes Advertising Festival with our global staff, but I hadn't engaged in it personally. I'm a big fan of text messaging, and I also favor quick, informative conversation--so it makes sense that once I started sending Tweets, I quickly became addicted. I loved the dialogue and the loops of short discussion: 140 characters is perfect for me.

By day two at Davos, I was Tweeting up a storm. I consumed and then shared presentations and discussions on the state of the world, the challenge of the economic reboot, the need for public and private to work collaboratively for change. I took my team to hear what Vladimir Putin had to say, I gave them the lowdown on how Howard Dean sees the state of American party politics, I shared what WPP's Sir Martin Sorrell (my boss and one of the true wizards of Davos) was blogging about on the Financial Times and Telegraph sites.

I got feedback heretofore unimaginable for anyone in my role and for someone at an event like Davos. And I soon felt less like Nick Carroway in the Great Gatsby and more like a CEO and a broadcaster (make that a narrowcaster). Who knew that in my 50s I'd end up with an audience sharing my real-time experiences in brand-new ways?

BobJeffreyJWT: Al Gore said that in White House meetings Obama is the greenest person in the room.

BobJeffreyJWT: Global response to climate change in 09. Freidman chairs talk with Gore, Van der Veer of Shell etc. Streaming now: http://tinyurl.com/brpncm

DEdwardKarp: @BobJeffreyJWT re: Nuclear Volley...France and Iran. Two intransigent nations when it comes to nuclear issues!

BobJeffreyJWT: End of #Davos day 2 - intense and invigorating. Glad to have my family and friends following.

BobJeffreyJWT: CEO of Nike on design (Mark Parker former designer): good design is simple, strong, intuitive.

BobJeffreyJWT: #Davos "What is Good Design?" Brian Collins' presentation on the MOMA-featured prescription bottle and the stories behind storytelling.

reutersgr8db8: RT @venndiagram8: rt @BobJeffreyJWT #Davos Paypal founder Levchin says "Stop the doom and gloom. Great time to start a company. Steal the best talent."

I'm a lifelong student of Marshall McLuhan, but I never expected to experience so many of his forecasts, from the global village to truly hot media. As I engaged and activated thousands of people in my universe--multiplying my audience as my Tweets flowed onto my Facebook page--one of his famous quotations played over and over in my head: "Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity."

Clearly I was not alone. The World Economic Forum reached several million of the world's news junkies through the power of social networks. "@Davos was one of the top 10 trends on Twitter during the past week," the WEF reported. About 3,500 people followed the Forum on Twitter, placing it in the top 1,300 Twitter accounts worldwide.

What an amazing world we're living in. For all the negative news I heard at Davos and have lately consumed on- and off-line, this has been one of the most empowering experiences I've ever had. And it's made me feel better able to lead in these times of unprecedented uncertainty and angst.

Unlike mass e-mails, which I think this is starting to replace, communicating via virtual social networks is about people opting in and truly engaging with one another. What's changed me the most is recognizing the power I have to broadcast my experiences and reactions to my worlds via multiple channels. And realizing the responsibility I have to engage in quality real-time dialogue with my staff about what we're all hearing, learning and pondering so that we can take advantage of these diverse inputs as they happen.

As PayPal founder Max Levchin said during the Forum: "Stop the doom and gloom. It's a great time to start a company." And as McLuhan queried, "Why is it so easy to acquire the solutions of past problems and so difficult to solve current ones?"

My answer after spending this time in Davos and Twitterville: Let's take a short breath, count to 140 and start looking at novel ways to work together. As I Tweeted toward the end of the Davos week: Embrace the change and lead the revolution, with optimism and a recognition that nothing good comes without sacrifice.

BobJeffreyJWT: #Davos Had lunch today w/reps of mobile, tech, VF, MSFT, Google: everyone agreed all of our businesses are going through revolution.

Comments

[noam4prez]

Nero fiddled while Rome burned.
CEOs twittered while the world economy burned.

[cherwellatl]

at the heart isi his discovery that social media continues to expand and broaden access.

what rendered me speechless is his unabashed enthusiasm commingled with 1776 confidence,” to lead in these times of unprecedented uncertainty and angst.”

'in the middle of difficulty lies opportunity." -- albert einstein

let us, one and all, commence authentic conversations to dispense and counter the incessant chattering of apocalyptic “doom” and his inevitable sidekick, “gloom.” the most salient bit of advice since this economic meltdown commenced, ‘it’s a great time to start a business.”

so true. how many have heard of or "twittered" about a new ecoist business, greenirene.com?

11/04/08 reinforced that "we are the change that we seek. we are the hope of those who have little; who've been told that they cannot have what they dream; that they cannot be what they imagine. we are the change we’ve been waiting for.”

van jones observes in “The Green Collar Job Economy,” that the average person walking around a mall has more technology at their fingertips than the entire USofA had when we put on man on the moon.

social media is but one small step for man, and will lead to our next giant leap for mankind.

"counting to 140 to embrace/lead the change, with optimism/recognition that nothing good comes without sacrifice," is the best nourishment my starved albeit innovative soul has dined upon.

who might I interest in a "byte” or two?

[Halsey]

Is it just me....or...are there others who LIKE language..not shortcuts... I'm not THAT old..and don't get it. I don't text...and have no intention of "learning" how to..instead..I'd like to learn a new word (the whole word)..each day...OR...improve my Spanish..OR...take up Russian again(that's a hard language!!)...

And..frankly...this "Davos" thing...you are all wealthy by most standards...well meaning I'm sure, but frankly..of little use to me other than to make me jealous that you get to go to Switzerland every year (do you fly coach)...sorry..I'm venting..cause you "people"..just don't get it...we don't need cake..

[userw014]

I'm another twitter skeptic, but I'm one of those people who life on the edge of social circles rather than in the middle. Perhaps if I was more social, I'd appreciate twitter more (and be employed.)

My experience with computer based social networking dates back to 1980, when the university I was at had a program on their mainframe that allowed e-mail and online discussions, polling and voting, much like modern web sites do now. This program was called CONFER, and was created by a fellow named Robert Parnes. It inspired another program, picospan, that was run on a local bulletin board system on an early Unix system.

It was glorious. And time consuming. And distracting.

[userw014]

You could make yourself heard. You could (sometimes) become involved in a stimulating conversation with smart, bright people. (And no one dared to use "teh" - condemnation for typographical errors was swift, sure, and painful. Or at least embarrassing.)

Eventually, both the mainframe and CONFER evolved to allow more immediate conversations - like chat rooms. (CONFER demonstrated the utility, and the mainframe was changed to implement the service in a more computer-efficient way.)

Twitter's short-message limitation is very interesting - yes, it encourages brevity, but the convenience of using it from all kinds of different media, from personal computers to cell phones, doesn't seem to encourage any greater thought given to clarity.

I'm sure it's use as a medium for engineers to pass quick, short, recordable notes to each other is wonderful. Chat rooms don't offer a way to keep a record.

As a way to maintain personal contacts - I suppose it's the modern equivalent of a postcard. Short. Cheap (i.e.: quick to read these days.) Easy to send. And, of course, being on the internet means that it's pretty immediate too.

But, how does it scale? How many twitters can a person really follow? I think that 5 active twitterers would be the max, and perhaps 10 semi-active (daily) twitterers. Is it worth following someone who only twitters once a week? Or do those people self-select out of twitter?

[TheHandyman]

Mind boggling! It took humans tens of thousands of years to get beyond painting on the walls of caves, to develop an expressive vocabulary so ideas could be communicated to their fullest extent to the whole world. Then the computer get invented so that ideas can be communicated around the world almost instantly and now humans are devolving into small words and even smaller ideas, or the equivalence of grunts, groans and chest pounding.

If only Thomas Paine had known that, "Pissed off, Revolt, and kill the English!" was enough to cause the American Revolution he wouldn't have had to write all those eloquent but useless from a texting point of view Federalist Papers. And all those poets who distilled the beautiful words of the English language could have just abbreviated a few words and not caused all of us to have to study their excess verbage. Shakespeare's sonnets could be condensed to "Luv, Sigh!" We don't need no stinkin' spellchecker or spelling bees!

Of course with CEOs who communicate like this they will be great fun when we are sitting around the fires in caves roasting the days catch over the tribal fire. Can't hardly wait.!

[CrankyCurmudgeon]

Wow! One comment. Freaking amazing. Twitter is an amazingly useful service. There are numerous ancillary services that have been developed using their API. I use Twitterberry on my mobile device and Power Twitter on my browser. NASA is using Twitter for project management and logistics support for orbiters. Does this paucity of comments mean HuffPo commenters are engaged politically, but haven't a clue as to what's going on in the commercial world? Sorry. I don't actually have an answer, because it could be lots of other things. Nevertheless, I find it disappointing nobody's discussing what this means for our ability to do business. We need to do business well if we're going to avoid a really, really painful economic period. Maybe I should say avoid. Somewhat mitigate might be a better usage.

[flyingmonkey]

Sorry. But I've yet to see a convincing argument on why twitter is so important to doing business and how it will help us succeed in a faltering economy. I think it contributes to more unnecessary, unpersuasive noise and little else. But feel free to keep trying to convince us otherwise.

[CrankyCurmudgeon]

Ned Ludd . . . is that you?

When I first started in aerospace (about 22 years ago - I was nearly 40 and had spent my entire adult life in very small businesses) there were some what were then called micro-computers. We had dot matrix printers and green screen CRTs. I was fortunate to be working on the Space Shuttle Main Engine program. Every advancement in the progress toward today's PCs was met with skepticism by a portion of the workforce; not just at my company but throughout the industry. Color monitors? Color printers? Graphics programs?

I don't have to convince you. As a matter of fact, if you work for a competitor of ours I don't even want to convince you. And, no, I don't think it's a silver bullet. Neither do I think Barack Obama is a saint.

[CrankyCurmudgeon]

Twitter is - at the very least - the precursor of new methods of communication, collaboration, and findability that are going to revolutionize the way we do business in the next decade. The 140 character limitation forces brevity and clarity of thought. The immediacy of info beyond the level of a single device (namely, your mobile one) makes communication immediate and ubiquitous. If it does nothing else, it should obviate the need for more than half of the status meetings corporate America is so damn fond of.

[Citizen54]

You might be right about new methods of communications, but I doubt Twitter is going to reduce the number of status meetings in corporate America.

I was lucky enough 25 years ago to go to work for a (now defunct) magazine staffed by brilliant people who were taking advantage of Internet access (text-only; no Web) and primitive email and remote access networking and all that other great stuff. I was uploading news stories every night, from home (take that, you 20-year-old-bloggers). But it didn't reduce the number of meetings or hours we were required to be in the office. Why? Because a certain type of too-prevalent management attitude insists on keeping a vigilant eye on workers.

Oh, and now that you've got all this technology, you can put in your 8-10 at the office, and then a few more later on at home.