Mike Lehr's Blog

Managing your Twitter account is like using smart bombs. No matter how smart the technology, you can never guarantee a good target unless a human evaluates it. In other words, you have to read tweets to determine who the good tweeters are; you can’t rely upon Twitter or the various Twitter-related applications to do it for you.

Consider that recently, I retweeted this tweet by Justin Harrison:

Cleaning up my twitter clutter for more effective and meaningful communication…been doing that a lot lately

To which I received this from Dr. Mitchell Friedman:

would love to hear your definition of Twitter clutter, and how you clean it up

So, let’s explore this.

Twitter clutter is the group of tweets you endure from followers just so you can increase your following. You follow them so they are encouraged to do likewise. Both benefit because your followers increase. Twitter creates this condition because size matters and because it has no good way of quantifying tweet quality, only tweet quantity.

How do you clean it up? Well, I use my lists. Everyone whom I follow goes on a list based upon tweet quality. I define good tweeters as people who are:

• Causing me to stop and ponder
• Making my life better
• Promoting me or my ideas
• Possessing personalities I want to see flourish
• Being good friends
• Puzzling because I don’t why I like them

Yes, some sites measure clout, but heck Satan has a lot of clout. How do they determine whether it’s good clout, bad clout, confusing clout, disruptive clout, nonsensical clout or any type of clout?

In the end, only a human can clean up Twitter clutter; qualitative assessment is a job for a human.

A person who direct messaged me on Twitter suggested I address cooperation and competition on the business-to-business level (B2B). Which is more profitable?

Generally, cooperation will tend to be a better business relationship than competition on just about any level, business or individual. We are social creatures, so we join groups to cooperate with others for mutual benefit. People will tend toward cooperation.

However, in reality, sometimes people cannot cooperate as they would like. Rules, policies and regulations sometimes make it wrong, illegal or expensive. For instance, governments do not allow businesses to cooperate in fixing prices and setting markets.

Where’s the proof that B2B cooperation is profitable? Look at the free market. The mere fact that governments have to pass laws preventing cooperation among businesses indicates that businesses can find it extremely profitable. If cooperation weren’t profitable, would we have to pass laws to prevent it? Furthermore, just look at the legal forms of cooperation in the forms of trade associations and lobbies. Would such cooperation occur if it weren’t profitable?

When businesses engage in competition, it’s like war: uncertain and expensive. Cooperation provides certainty and cost-containment. However, governments don’t allow this because it’s bad for consumers. This is similar to the Roman Emperor who forced two gladiators into mortal combat so he can entertain the crowd. What would happen if the two cooperated and did not fight? That’s why the Emperor had to say both would die if they didn’t.

The whole point of this analogy is to demonstrate that sometimes it’s very difficult to see the profitability of cooperation because many times we establish rules, rewards and penalties to ensure competition rather than cooperation. It becomes even more difficult when we benefit from the competition of others. The difference is often our perspective.

The power someone has as a leader in an organization is a function of 1) the authority it gives him and 2) his personal influence within the organization. The former is formal organizational power (FOP) and the latter informal organizational power (IOP). Figures 1 and 2 help us visualize their difference.

Figure 1: Formal Organizational Power

The importance of IOP becomes more apparent if we view leadership beyond a management context. For instance, one client expanded its definition from those in management to those who could initiate and develop new services, those who could grow existing services and those who could find and develop new customer channels.

The source of IOP varies by person. It could be his expertise, knowledge, experience, achievements, attractiveness, personality, education, intelligence, relationships, character, talents, skills, abilities, credibility, reliability, judgment, wisdom, seniority plus many other things. I knew one machinist who was a leader because he could run more of the machines in the plant better than anyone could.

Figure 2: Informal Organizational Power

FOP gets people to do things because they must; it’s the rule. IOP encourages people to do things because they want to; they like those with IOP or do so out of respect. Using a body as an analogy, FOP represents the bones and IOP the muscles. The most powerful leaders have a lot of both; organizations give them a lot of authority and people within the organization have a strong desire to help them.

Thus, when we try to understand and appreciate how organizations work, looking at the organization chart shows formal organizational power. Overlaying this chart is the influence of a multitude of relationships that vary by situation and by moments in time. In effect, we don’t really know an organization unless we have a feel for how informal organizational power influences it.

Related Link:

• Leadership vs. Management: The Difference (Part II)

This past month, I conversed with a resident of a Muslim country. He commented on how many of his fellow citizens couldn’t understand why Americans thought they were free. “They have all these laws directing them. They can’t drive as fast as they want and they even need the government’s permission to drive (licenses).”

Coincidentally, the December 16^th 2010 edition of The Economist reported on driving in Iraq. It’s true, at least there, that Iraq has far fewer driving restrictions than the United States has. It doesn’t even require driving licenses. However, driving there is dangerous. In fact, “the health ministry estimates that six times as many people now die in car accidents as fall victim to political violence.”

I also ran across an article about choice in the same issue. “Too much choice, concluded Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University and Mark Lepper of Stanford, is demotivating.” The article went on to suggest that this is from the anxiety people often feel when making decisions; too much freedom of choice increases anxiety.

There are people who seem to prefer less, and almost no, freedom in their work. They prefer clearly defined directions, rules, policies and procedures dictating their thinking and actions. Why? I have come to learn that this produces a different kind of freedom for some: freedom from responsibility. How can we be responsible for decisions we did not make or regulations we did not write? For some it also produces certainty; they know what the “right” decision is.

As the diagram to the right asks, “When does more freedom become chaos and uncertainty to us?” For each of us, that varies. For some of us, it restricts freedom so much that it might not even seem like freedom anymore. So, is freedom for everybody?

Here is a valuable problem-solving question:

How can a business maximize its profit every single minute of the day and still go out of business?

The answer is:

It can because it won’t be making any investments; those require expenditures and would prevent the maximization of profits every single minute.

The question has value as a problem-solving training exercise because it forces our attention on the relationship between profits and time:

If the maximization of profits every single minute causes a business to go out of business, what is the appropriate time frame to consider?

As we know, the financial markets like to scrutinize profits quarterly. However, is this really the best time frame? I once contracted for a private company that was positioning itself to be sold. The owner cut staff to the bone in order to beef up the financials and market value. He took a gamble that revenues could hold with the cutbacks at least for the near-term. If a sale did not materialize in the near term, he might have seen service quality suffer and eventually revenues. What did this bode for the acquirer? The implication here is that what we consider a “profitable company” is arguable depending upon the criteria we want to use. In other words, a profitable company could be as subjective as a work of art. Moreover, a costly investment in the near-term might be beneficial in the long term depending upon how we define the long term. Thus, the final question that all of this begs is this:

Over what time period should a business strive to maximize profits?

The mere fact we can debate the question suggests its arbitrariness and why a single business purchase could work for one person and not for the other.