Giraffe Forum

Apple may make beautiful products but it resembles North Korea in how it communicates with the world.

Apple is to many the poster child of the Web 2.0 generation. Yet, there are few companies that are as anti-Web 2.0 as Apple. That is if Web 2.0 and social media and all that is about openness and transparency and not trying to rigidly control the message.

“Apple’s silence on Steve Jobs’ health may have broken federal securities rules,” a Los Angeles Times heading stated on June 25. “A Memphis hospital said Saturday Jobs had never been a patient. Then they changed the story,” Forbes wrote.

“If I have any serious illness, or something coming up of an important nature, an operation or anything like that, I think the thing to do is just tell the Berkshire shareholders about it. I work for them,” Warren Buffett told Bloomberg.

“Speculation over the declining health of Kim Jong Il has intensified after reports that North Korea is trying to buy high-tech medical equipment from abroad,” the London Times wrote on June 20.

In 2007, Joe Wilcox, writing for eWeek, contrasted the styles of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates during a week in which they both gave major speeches. “Gates met with bloggers today, while Jobs traditionally limits accessibility to select press,” Wilcox wrote. “Microsoft is fairly open with analysts, partners and press about its announcements, while Apple keeps everything secret until Jobs’ does the unveiling. Microsoft will stream Gates CES keynote live, while Apple will provide a canned stream hours following the Macworld keynote. Microsoft bloggers will pipe in on the company’s announcements, while Apple will tightly control disclosure through its media department.”

But isn’t Apple the really open, cool company, and isn’t Microsoft the secretive, uncool company? Isn’t Microsoft supposed to be the company we love to hate while Apple is the company we love to love?

Apple makes absolutely beautiful products that are genuinely simple to use. I used Apple computers until I started a company many years ago. We had very little money and we had to buy lots of computers and set up networks and stuff like that. It was a no brainer. We bought PCs.

I’m a big music fan and I love iTunes and the iPod. Apple and Steve Jobs have done more to humanize technology that anyone. They have continuously championed simplicity in an often complexity-crazy world.

What lessons can we take from all this? Some might say that old style command and control communication still works. Apple has proven that by rigidly controlling the message it can shape how people perceive it. Of course, others might say that Apple is a great brand in spite of its paranoid secrecy because it makes great products.

Is there a paradox between simplicity and closedness and complexity and openness? Is the really simple very closed, and the really open very complex? Is Apple proving that secrecy trumps openness even in a Web 2.0 world? We should note, of course, that Microsoft, who has long had a more open, partner-driven strategy, is also much more successful than Apple.

Perhaps the challenge and the opportunity of the modern world is to achieve openness and simplicity.

There is a wonderful future ahead for internal communicators who focus on content as a productive asset.

Giving control of an intranet to a traditional communicator is a bit like giving a pub to an alcoholic. It’s happy days. There’s so much to publish. All the stuff they never read offline can go on the intranet. The homepage can be covered with news because the communicator with a hammer will see nails everywhere that need to be hammered home. And of course the intranet can reach everybody (in theory, at least), not like those magazines, brochures and flyers.

The future of internal communications is about helping employees do things, rather than getting employees to do things. It’s about the word in action. The intranet is not a place to change hearts and minds. It’s a functional utility space where employees come to complete basic day-to-day tasks, like finding people, checking procedures, searching for job vacancies and training opportunities.

News is important to employees but it’s not the be-all and end-all. News is vastly more important to the communicator than it is to the typical employee member. So, what is the traditional communicator to do? Force news down employee throats, whether they want it or not? That approach won’t work. At best they’ll just ignore the news and at worst they’ll think the intranet is a waste of space.

I remember one intranet manager telling me the reason that news stories dominated the homepage, and that employees had to scroll down to get to tasks that were really important to them was that they “would read the news on the way down.” I have heard variants of these statements made by many internal communicators over the years. They are the inebriated thoughts of people drunk on power. They control the intranet, at least at the homepage level, and they’re going to turn it into a newspaper front page whether employees like it or not.

Intranet internal communications is radically different from print internal communications. The intranet internal communicator facilitates rather than dictates. They help people find. They guide rather than lead. They support the completion of a task such as checking up a procedure or a job vacancy. They focus on creating clear menus and links.

In a world of social media where people make their own news or get the news from their peers, where even the traditional news media is being rocked to its foundations, how relevant is the traditional internal communicator anymore? Just because you can publish on the intranet doesn’t mean anyone cares.

In a world where the first step in so much activity on the Web is to search, if employees are not actively searching for your content, how is it going to get found? In a world where the homepage is becoming less and less important, is covering it with news going to work? Did it ever really work?

This is a call to arms. You young ambitious communicators, get involved in making search work better, focus relentlessly on the quality of menus and links, simplify the steps and words used in software applications, make policies easier to understand and forms easier to complete. There is so much to do, so many areas where you can make your organization more productive, efficient and effective.

One of the greatest challenges organizations face is truly understanding the importance of, and managing the completion of, information-based tasks.

I am forever going on about managing the task, not the content or the technology. Once I was speaking at a conference about the importance of managing a website based on task success. A lady put up her hand.
“This task approach sounds interesting but we don’t have any tasks on our website. We just have information.”
“And what sort of website do you have?” I asked.
“A health website,” she replied.
“Let’s say I have a rash on my hand,” I replied. “If I go to a health website, I’m not looking for information. I’m looking to get rid of the rash.”

Many organizations have a strange attitude towards information. Its creation is nearly always disassociated from its use. Information is rarely seen as useful or purposeful. It’s just there because people need it. It doesn’t help you do things. It’s simply there for you to read just in case you need some information.

The fact that you need to read some information has no connection with the fact that you need to do something. Information gets created for information-purposes only. No liability. No accountability. And the job of the people who created the information is finished once they have created it. They are not even responsible for its findability. Saying it’s up on the Web is enough.

This attitude has driven so many government websites to the point of uselessness. The Freedom of Information Act definitely has good intentions. An unintended consequence, however, is that stuff that serves no useful function, is never maintained, never reviewed and never deleted gets published in large quantities. But it’s there, this information, because it’s important to have lots and lots of information.

Organizations have a fabulous capacity to produce massive quantities of low grade, aimless, pointless information. Much of the information that should have a point is useless because it is not useable. People don’t understand it. They can’t act on it. It doesn’t result in someone completing a task.

Why do people come to your website? What are they trying to do? We must reconnect information with its purpose, with its function. Information is supposed to be the communication of intelligence or knowledge.

Telling me how to make a pancake is useless information to me because I don’t want to make a pancake. But if you tell me that, yes, there is a flight from London Heathrow to Dublin at 8.10 pm, then I can use that.

We cannot judge information on the fact that it physically exists in some content form. We must judge it on the results it delivers. To understand what the results should be we must first understand the tasks of the people this information is intended for.

The world we work and live in is becoming more information-based. What that means is that we complete more and more of the tasks of our lives as a result of accessing information. This information is active, driven, purposeful, and measured. How is it measured? By whether it has helped people complete the tasks that they have used this information to help them complete.

The public website or intranet that keeps screaming for attention with useless images and vain content will get little from the impatient and sceptical customer.

The needs of the organization are great, and the larger and older the organization gets, the greater those needs become. The problem is that the internal needs of the organization rarely match the needs of customers.

Organizations grow strong because they’ve done something right. Dell is a good example. It grew as a customer centric organization, but as it got bigger it began to lose that true customer focus.

Around 2001, you had two options on the Dell homepage: navigate by product (laptop, desktop, etc.) or navigate by audience (home, business, etc.). Every test I have done indicates that about 90% of people prefer to navigate by product in buying computer stuff. In fact, audience navigation makes many people cynical. “Do businesses gets better deals than me?;” I just want to buy a laptop, why do I have to select what group I belong to;” “I’m a home business. Which should I select?”

By about 2003, Dell had gotten rid of the product navigation, forcing the customer to choose an audience. I am told Dell did this because the audience types mirror the powerful business units within Dell. These business units could not agree how to share revenue if someone simply selected “Laptop”.

Dell was once young and customer-centric, but like nearly all organizations, it grew old and organization-centric. It began to suffer from organaritis. Similar to arthritis in humans, organaritis afflicts mainly older organizations. A stiffening of the joints makes it hard for the organization to change and move quickly.

There are signs that Dell is trying to recover from organaritis. Recently, I noticed that it is publishing reviews of its products on its website. Yes, it allows negative reviews. That to me is impressive and makes it more likely I will buy a Dell again. (After what Lenovo has done to the ThinkPad, the choices have become more limited.)

Does your organization have organaritis? If you answer yes to one or more of the following questions you probably need to seek medical help:

• Do you have pictures of very important people within your organization (your needy children) on your webpages?
• Do these needy children require messages from them to be published prominently on the site?
• Do you have big pictures of smiling actors pretending to be customers? (Shiny, happy people.)
• Do you have needy departments whose stated objective in life is to get some real estate on the homepage?
• Do you have needy, powerful managers who demand that their latest programs and initiatives get prominence on the homepage?
• Is your culture one that believes that the primary purpose of the website is to get customers to do what you want them to do, rather than help them quickly and easily do what they came to do?
• Does your organization embrace verbosity atrocities? Headings such as: “Start your way to a clear new world”. Sentences such as: “We are delighted to announce that our holistic approach embraces 50,000 ft thinking which is unparalleled in its reach and depth of understanding of the globalization challenges that must be embraced holistically if we are to thrive in ever-changing, shifting, hazy, somewhat unclear, cloudy, and sometimes downright quite difficult to see through clearly into the must be embraced holistic future scenarios.”

In an age when computers can crunch numbers and do analysis on a vast scale, the deep flaws in our intuition and gut instinct are becoming more and more apparent.

Direct Instruction is a rigid, highly structured form of education. The teacher has very little control and must follow a series of scripts and formulas. When I first read about it I thought it must surely be an ineffective teaching tool.

Not so. Direct Instruction seems to have a very positive impact on student achievement in language, reading, mathematics, spelling, health and science. It also leads to better social skills and enhanced self esteem. That just doesn’t make sense to me, but then I have learned that much of what my gut instinct tells me is not to be trusted.

The educational establishment does not like the Direct Instruction method. It is “wedded to its pet theories regardless of what the evidence says,” Ian Ayres writes in his book, Super Crunchers. “We see the struggle of intuition, persona experience, and philosophical inclination waging war against the brute force of numbers.”

“Decision makers don’t choose a plan because they know it works,” Siegried Engelmann, inventor of the Direct Instruction approach states. “They choose it because it’s consistent with their vision of what they think kids should do.” Engelmann goes on to state that “Intuition is perhaps your worst enemy.”

John Henry was a great man with a hammer. He could hammer steel into the ground better than any other. But then the steam drill came along and no matter how strong John Henry was, no matter how hard he hammered down his 30 pound hammer, that steam drill was just bound to win. Paul Bunyan was a great man with an axe but ultimately the chainsaw was better.

Douglas Bowman recently left his position as top visual designer at Google. He believes Google is not very friendly to designers. Google is a company that makes decisions based on data. “Data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions,” Bowman writes.

“We let the math and the data govern how things look and feel,” Google’s Marissa Mayer stated in a recent television interview.

Before the Web, content and graphic design was the domain of gut instinct and the craft-based approach. Borrowing heavily from the art world, people waited for a cool vision to rise from hot inspiration.

This is the age of evidence, of data, of analysis, of continuous improvement based on constant testing. As sure as Henry and Bunyan fell before the inexorable march of technological progress, so too will the writers and graphic designers who live in the old school.

The Web is the great laboratory of human behavior. The super crunching computers are throwing bright and brilliant light on so much that was mysterious about us. We need to develop new skills around data analysis and we need to test, test, test.

Of course, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. And then there is opinion.