Open up your mind and say, ahh...

How was the Superbowl this year? As a household without cable, keeping up with sports is not my forte. I’ve heard through the grape vine it wasn’t very entertaining or what one would consider a “good game” besides Beyonce’s ridiculously awesome half time show. Ya, I looked that up on youtube…

I believe this is the first Superbowl where football as a sport didn’t garner as much attention as the half-time performance, technical difficulties or brotherly rivalry. Is this a sign that the athletic aspect of sports are not as important as the entertainment aspect? I know ESPN has started putting microphones on outspoken players, is the game not enough?

But don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy a good football game. I’ve attended literally thousands of sporting events thanks to my dad working in the sports industry, but I truly believe the game is changing. Today’s graphic is about the social media impact of the teams, but if compared to the power outage or Beyonce I’d bet the athletic tweet count would pale in comparison.

Via DailyInfographic: http://dailyinfographic.com/

Pepsi tallied up the numbers and found it got more than 500,000 total views than Coke, according Shiv Singh, global head of digital for Pepsi. The figures are tallied below:

A decisive factor was “Behind the Scenes at #CokeChase,” a video that Pepsi created with Funny Or Die and released Sunday morning before the game. The video, shown below, featured the putative cast of Coke’s Super Bowl spot — actors dressed as cowboys, showgirls and Mad Max types — trying to get Pepsi Nexts out of a broken vending machine. When someone points out that a Coke machine is working, the actors think a second and then decide to keep trying the Pepsi machine.

Coke’s Super Bowl spot, which featured the three teams trying to get a Coke in the desert, got mixed results though the ad itself got more views than Coke’s 2012 “Polar Bears” Super Bowl spot.

Image courtesy of Pepsi, YouTube

Isn’t it time we started telling bigger stories than this?

When Julien Smith and I wrote The Impact Equation, we had a very specific goal in mind: help people get attention, understanding, and eventually a relationship of value. We built the book around the premise that well-defined goals were needed to craft ready-to-understand ideas, and that people could build a platform to spread those ideas to a network of people who cared enough to share those ideas with others. That’s the simplest possible summary of the book.

What people maybe thought they were getting was a book about social media and social networks, about marketing and campaigns. Some people believe that’s what Julien and I do. Social media are a set of tools. They’re not all that interesting to talk about in and of themselves. The “gee whiz” has left the station. We want to talk about action– or if you’ll pardon the self-reference, impact.

There are details and technologies you must master if you want to succeed. But that’s the keyboard-level and tactical part of what you’ll do. We wanted to give you something more encompassing.

The strategies around and behind The Impact Equation boil down to 5 Cs.

Communication

If you can’t convey your ideas in a way that stands out (Contrast), that are simple (Articulation), and that resonate with an audience (Echo), the game is over before you begin. So, The Impact Equation is a book about communication.

Content

If you don’t start building a platform of value around ideas that are easy to share (Reach), those ideas won’t get around and get a lot of attention (Exposure). The Impact Equation is a book that talks about how to tell bigger stories.

Community

Where people have the most ground to make up is in nurturing a network of people who care about what you choose to share. Without relationship-minded effort (Trust and Echo), you won’t likely get beyond capturing people’s attention for a little while. Meaning, people won’t be inclined to share. The Impact Equation is definitely a book about community.

Commerce

We don’t write much about how to make money in this book. Both Julien and I have ben successful in our businesses, and we’ve both helped other companies succeed with a lot of the tactics and strategies covered in this book. But this is a book about business and leadership and value-generation and extraction. Make no mistake, The Impact Equation is a book about commerce.

Customer Service

I believe in the principle of Service Craftsmanship, that service begins before a prospect has even become a customer. We talk a lot about how to nurture relationships (Trust) and how that sets you apart from people who don’t treat every touchpoint as a chance for service excellence (Contrast). There’s also the realization that if we treat people the way we want to be treated (Echo), we will earn more of an opportunity to serve. The Impact Equation is most definitely a book about customer service.

Why Talking About Social Media Got Boring

It’s boring to talk simply about the tools because the tools are just a way to reach people. We can argue the details endlessly (I don’t believe much in Klout, for instance), and we can announce the premature death of Tumblr/Twitter/Facebook and whoever. But it doesn’t matter. When we talk about restaurants (the tools), we mostly talk about the food (the content). When we talk about bands (tools), we talk about whether the music resonates (the content). When we talk about a good book (the content), we never ask what type of computer it was written on (the tools).

Should you put ads on Facebook? If that’s the worry point, you’ve got bigger worries. Is Pinterest worth your time? Who knows? Should you schedule your tweets? (Some of them!) What’s the company comment policy? Well, okay, that last one has some merit, but put it to rest and move on.

How I Apply The Five Cs and The Impact Equation Mindset to My Business

In all I do, I use these five concepts above as guideposts to approach success. When I’m working on a new product, like a course on writing, I think about how to communicate about the course before, during, and after the experience. I consider what kind of content will be involved. I determine how to build a community around each product experience, especially because Human Business Works believes that we need to deliver a vision, a plan, and a community of support for you to be successful. I consider how this product or service I’m creating should be priced and what value is reasonable to extract for the amount of value I’m creating. And I have very strong principles around how we go about customer service for each project.

When approaching business-making, I’d say these are the five aspects I work on the most. I look at marketing, sales, and service as a shared/hybrid role, where everyone has a part to play in the experience. I’d also say that these are the business aspects that we’ve tucked into The Impact Equation underneath it all.

How You Apply That Mindset to Your Business

From figuring out how to better articulate a contrasting idea that encourages trust and echoes the feelings of your prospective buyer to understanding how to get more exposure and reach from the platforms you choose to create or utilize, our premises line up nicely to marketing, sales, and service. Is it easy for people to contact you? Do you make it easy for them to buy from you? What have you missed in the process of shaping your ideas to fit their language and mindset? Do you have a plan for when and what and where to share your information? Whether you’re pinning or tweeting or poking or just putting a chalk sign out on a street corner, the attributes that make up The Impact Equation, are about delivering value.

Oh, and We Believe in Recipes

Both Julien and I set out to write a book full of actionable takeaways. We believe that there are lots of great books that stop right after the ideas and theories come out, but that don’t push you to take some actionable steps. Given Julien’s work on The Flinch, a book dedicated to getting us to take action, we both felt strongly that The Impact Equation should be written with a strong eye towards encouraging you to make something happen.

You can get the book in hardcover and digital formats, and the audiobook is almost ready to come out (really any day now), and I should let you know that the majority of my 2013 plan involves helping professionals from companies of all sizes to get more leads, sales, and satisfied customers via the principles in this book (and a few other concepts that make up the Human Business Way). If you want a head start on your success in the coming year, consider picking up The Impact Equation.

For decades, Steve Jobs extolled the virtues of “building the whole widget”–in other words, designing and manufacturing a computer or a digital media player or smartphone as an organic whole, from the molecular materials of the hardware to the abstract bits and bytes of the software. The resulting products may not always have been as inexpensive or utilitarian as the standardized machines that ruled the PC marketplace, but they did always possess the svelte and winsome quality that Apple’s loyal customers love with a passion.

Earlier this summer, Microsoft tried to make like Apple. The company had never itself built computers, out of deference to its many hardware partners, but on June 18, it revealed the results of a three-year secret project: a sleek and distinctive Windows tablet PC called the Surface. No mere iPad knockoff, the Surface is Microsoft’s effort to build a “whole widget” of its own. It could well be the most beautiful and best engineered Windows device ever made. And it has bells and whistles that won’t be easy for Apple to quickly mimic.

Google too has concluded that it can’t really compete against the iPhone long term without its own end-to-end laptops, handsets, and tablets–hence its $13 billion acquisition of Motorola’s cell-phone design and manufacturing business. The Motorola patent portfolio is valuable, to be sure, but Google wants to find a remedy to the fragmented world its Android architecture has fostered. The immense diversity of Android devices and generations of not-quite-compatible operating systems are beginning to look like liabilities, especially to app developers who don’t want to have to support multiple versions of their own products.

So with Google and Microsoft as emerging widgeteers, might Apple finally be losing one of its historic advantages? Hardly.

At the annual World Wide Developers Conference held June 11 in San Francisco–the first big event since the death of Jobs–Apple demonstrated how its software prowess and skill at building interlocking digital platforms is the real game changer. How? By enlarging the definition of the whole widget. Increasingly, the Mac, iPhone, and iPad do not exist alone. Instead, Apple now offers a multidimensional, integrated ecosystem of devices held together by the centripetal force of iCloud. Apple’s ideal customer, who likely owns at least one of each kind of product, can now share a single user identity, and core personal content and data can be viewed, consumed, used, or manipulated in familiar ways regardless of platform, with any changes or additions from one gadget instantly available on any of his other Apple gear.

In other words, Apple can now boast of providing a complete, coherent, and consistent digital experience at home, at work, in your car, and on the go–without any conscious effort on the part of the user. It’s as if just at the moment when the visiting team finally steps up to the plate, they discover that the home team has moved the fences out, raised the pitcher’s mound, and increased the distance between the bases. This is a different ball game.

Apple didn’t announce some silver-bullet innovation at the WWDC to make all this possible, but instead described literally hundreds of new features and data services borne of software, many of which integrate how all its hardware products create, display, and share digital information. New versions of its Mac OS X and iOS for portable devices, along with much-improved data storage and remote processing services accessible via iCloud, will all come together in the next few months to markedly improve the quality of the entire Apple digital experience. Indeed, in many ways, improvements for the Mac will result in new capabilities for customers’ existing iPhones and iPads with no new hardware required.

That is what you get when you enlarge the widget, and it doesn’t even reflect the inevitable hardware improvements Apple is so famous for delivering like clockwork.

Microsoft and Google clearly understand this strategy. But Apple’s ecosystem is the product of carefully nurturing smaller whole-widget ecosystems in such a way that they could be stitched together. Until recently, Microsoft has always tried to contort Windows to fit just about any class of hardware–using a one-size-fits-all strategy that has never played out well in non-PC devices. Google has tried to turn its browser software into a modest computer operating system, even as it took a completely different approach to Android smartphone software, and now is trying to make coherent architectures that are intrinsically different. Software can paper over just about any incompatibility, but a patchwork is not an ecosystem.

Apple’s Tim Cook knows he has to be very careful not to over-standardize these individually dazzling devices. That’s why it is unlikely that Mac OS X and iOS will ever subsume each other. The masterstroke is in using iCloud to knit them together, which hides the complexity of managing and not duplicating all those trillions of bits that each of us consume or manipulate every day. For today’s digital consumer, syncing data, managing your access to it, and keeping it all straight and secure is the key to a powerful digital experience that we are only now beginning to grasp. Cook, an operations wonk who is a master of taming complexity, might even be better at figuring this out than Jobs was. And since Apple usually improves any screen it focuses on, a new and improved AppleTV platform could become an intriguing fourth species in the ecosystem.

So while it’s certainly a bonus for consumers that Microsoft and Google have joined the game, Apple’s lead could conceivably widen before they can even begin to play. There will be glitches as Apple moves into its post-Jobs era, but Microsoft and Google have so much to learn that the company has plenty of time to figure out how to live without Steve.

After weeks of trying, I’d nearly found the real person behind a Twitter bot. It wasn’t the person who started the bot–chances are, that was just a computer program. Instead, I was hunting for the woman in the profile picture, the person whose identity had been stolen. The Internet is a big place; this isn’t easy to do. But I’d tracked the photo of a short-haired, punkish 20-something–used by @Arnitamj5, a bot calling itself Arnita Barayuga–to an abandoned MySpace profile of a Dallas woman named Elizabeth. She didn’t seem to have any other Internet presence, but I found one of her old MySpace friends on Facebook, figured out that he worked at a Dallas bike shop, and called it.

“So, listen,” I told him. “This will be the weirdest call you’ll get today.”

“Today?” he said.

“Probably all month.”

Then I explained: My goal was to draw a straight line from a Twitter bot to the real, live person whose face the bot had stolen. In the daily bot wars–the one Twitter fights every day, causing constant fluctuations in follower counts even as brands’ followers remain up to 48% bot–these women are the most visible and yet least acknowledged victims. And it’s almost always women, isn’t it? Bots are like a sorority party at 3 a.m.–a massive compilation of young, pretty faces who talk a lot of nonsense. But the women they portray are actual people, somewhere in this world. Who are they? And how were their photos dislodged from their original place?

This is a mostly pointless exercise, I knew: The story behind every photo would be different. And what would one of these women say–that she’s flattered to find her face spamming everyone on Twitter? Clearly, no. But it seemed worth doing, if only to tell one story, to have one answer. So I asked Elizabeth’s old friend: Did he still know her? He did, he said, though she’s since gotten married and changed her name. He promised to pass my message along. After four days of silence, though, I did more sleuthing and found her on Facebook under her married name. Then I emailed my plea: You’ve become a bot, Elizabeth. Can we talk about it?

Silence. Can’t say I blame her.

So I started over.

Bots are cheap. The company Buy Real Marketing will sell you 1,000 of them for $17, or 25,000 for $247–meaning the value of each is about a penny. And who’s buying them? Anyone. A brand’s social media manager will never admit to it, but chances are, gigantic companies have invested in this cheap form of image building. Why wouldn’t they?

Athletes definitely do it. A publicist for some major players–people at the top of their game–told me it’s common in his world. He once tried it himself, just to see what happens. He ordered the $17 package from Buy Real Marketing, via its website buytwitterfollowers.org. “They didn’t come in right away. I thought at first I’d been scammed,” he said. “But sure enough, within three days, they just poured in. It was exactly 1,000. To me, it shook the whole foundation. It made Twitter meaningless.”

The publicist gave me the names of a few people who also bought from Buy Real Marketing, and I dug into their followers. The bots were easy to spot–and these bots, no surprise, follow plenty of other celebrities and big brands. There’s no way to know if these were purchased follows or just pure coincidence, of course, but the list is wide-ranging. One bot from this batch followed Kelly Osbourne, former Formula 1 racer Tiago Monteiro, the Huffington Post, and an “Internet marketing consultant” named Trent Partridge, among 2,000 others.

If you click on a profile photo in Twitter, the photo will open in a tab of its own–and oftentimes will be larger, or more broadly cropped. I’d drag that onto my desktop, then run it through two image search engines: Tin Eye and Google Images. Each one scours the web for visual matches. After dozens of searches, a pattern emerged: Most bot photos had a long digital tail, having been posted on dozens of sketchy porn sites or blogs devoted to the barely legal. Occasionally, I’d be able to track a photo back to what seemed like an original source–like when a bot’s photo showed up alongside many others of the same woman, all posted to the fratboy site Barstool Sports. The site claimed her name is Aurora. But when I reached out, as was always the case, nobody cared to explain where the photos came from.

Then, finally, a reliable source: I tracked two bots back to the 2009 SUNshine Girls calendar, a lingerie showcase produced by the Toronto Sun. (I guess newspapers have to make money somehow.) The calendar only offered the models’ first names, and the paper’s photo editor wouldn’t connect me with them. But after a little Internet stalking–this is how reporting works, people!–I found a connection.

One of the bots, @Karriehga, which went by the name Maralyn Estes, showed a photo of a beautiful blond with dark eyes and hair poofed back like a Kentucky prom queen. This was Amanda the SUNshine Girl. And some clever Googling led me to a blog that included her full name. That allowed me to find her Facebook page, which didn’t list an email address, but did show that she recently clicked “like” on an events planning company. I figured that’s where she now works, so I called. Amanda, it turns out, was on maternity leave. “You can leave a message, and she’ll call you back in a few weeks,” her boss Darlene told me.

I didn’t have time for that, I said. Darlene asked why. So I began to explain.

“Wait, wait, Amanda was a SUNshine Girl?” Darlene yelped, and started laughing. “I didn’t know that!”

Oh, boy. Sorry Amanda.

But after that, Darlene said she’d help me get in touch. I hung up, relieved. Then I looked at my computer screen, which still had @Karriehga up. It had just tweeted something, as these things regularly do. Usually they’re just snippets of text yanked from websites, just something to keep their profiles active.

This time, though, the tweet seemed like a warning: “Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.”

In the meantime, I contacted Buy Real Marketing. I expected this to be equally difficult, given the sketchy nature of what a company like this does. But its work is perfectly legal–in the name of viral marketing, big brands have done far worse–and so all I had to do was call a toll-free number and hit a few buttons. Then I reached a tired-sounding woman named Judy, who spoke to me on a scratchy phone connection. I identified myself as a reporter and asked to interview someone, but she volunteered herself for the task. So I asked her: Judy, who are the faces on your bots?

“These are not bots that we have on Twitter,” she said. “These are real people.”

Me: “So there are no bots?”

Judy: “No bots. Not even spam.”

Me: “I mean, I see a lot of what certainly look and function like bots. But they’re not bots?”

Judy: “They are real people. They just log in, like, once a month so they are considered active.”

Me: “I see. Are the profile faces them?”

Judy: “Yes, exactly.”

Me: “So, the pictures of the people who are on a…”

Judy: “Some of them are. We can’t really control them. These are real people, and they have their choice of freedom on what picture they place there.”

And that’s all she was giving me.

Amanda’s email showed up the next morning: “I heard you contacted my employer Darlene yesterday and would like to talk to me. I’m interested in knowing what this is all about.”

She gave me her number. I called immediately.

Amanda lives in Bowmanville, Ontario, just outside of Toronto. Her husband is a police officer there. The night before, as they puzzled over Darlene’s message to call me, her husband began telling Amanda about all the facial recognition software that’s becoming available to law enforcement. It freaked her out.

Truth be told, she’s been trying to distance herself from the SUNshine Girl thing. (We’re helping out by not publishing her last name. That’s one less Google result to worry about.) It’s not that she’s embarrassed; back in the day, she even did live promotions for the calendar. But these days she has to worry about what employers think. Darlene doesn’t care–thankfully–but Amanda used to work for the government. She figured it was best not to flaunt her past.

And now, this. In the past day, I’d found five other bots using the same photo of her.

“It’s kinda of creepy, to be honest with you. The whole thing,” she says. She’s on Twitter but rarely uses it, and had never heard of bots. “I’d like to find the source and tell them to stop using my photo, you know? Because you never know who’s going to see it, and I don’t have control over what someone’s saying. That could ruin who-knows-what.”

I told Amanda that she could report the bot as spam, and hope for the best. She said she’d do that, but that she likely wouldn’t do any more. After all, what’s there to do–sue? Sue who? She doesn’t even own the photo; it’s the Toronto Sun‘s property. But she appreciated knowing. She thanked me.

Four days later, Amanda’s bot @Karriehga was still live. It tweeted, “Let’s commit the perfect crime… I’ll steal your heart, and you steal mine.”

To say nothing of a face.

We’ve all suffered through a lunch, date, or meeting with a monologist–you know, a person who, oblivious to social cues, dominates the conversation, shows little interest in others around the table, and, when someone tries to shove in one’s oar, raises his voice to drown out the hope of a dialogue.

The question is, how to call out the offender on his obnoxious behavior when you can’t get a word in edgewise? One way is to throw his words back at him. Two Japanese researchers have created a gunlike instrument that does just that. Using the principle of delayed audio feedback, their SpeechJammer records speech and plays it back with a split-second pause, effectively stupefying and silencing the speaker.

Kazutaka Kurihara, a researcher at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, thought up the idea after participating in a demonstration of delayed audio feedback at a local museum. “When I spoke to a microphone, my voice came back to me after a few hundred millisecond delay, then I could not continue to speak anymore,” Kurihara tells Co.Design. “Around that time, my research interest was about developing a system that controls appropriate turn-taking at discussions and was looking for technologies to enforce some discussion rules for participants. Then I came up with the gun type SpeechJammer idea utilizing DAF. That’s the destiny.” He recruited his friend, Koji Tsukada, a “gadget master” at Ochanomizu University, to help him realize the concept, consisting of a direction-sensitive mic and speaker, a distance sensor, a laser pointer, and a microcontroller.

Kurihara stresses that the intent isn’t only to shut up blabbermouths but to allow space for the less vocal to join the conversation. “Fair discussions are essential for resolving conflicts through communication,” he and Tsukada write in their paper. “However, some people tend to lengthen their turns or deliberately interrupt other people when it is their turn in order to establish their presence rather than achieve more fruitful discussions.” SpeechJammer was conceived to correct such abuses and allow all participants to have an equal say in proceedings.

The technology behind the idea might be overkill: Under ordinary circumstances, thrusting a mic-equipped gun into a person’s face should be enough to throw anyone off his game. But in the case of, say, the upcoming presidential debates, we can imagine it being an entirely effective (and somewhat hilarious) way to impose time restrictions.

Image: Everett Collection/Shutterstock

Shortly after his arrival in early 2002, Nick Wilkinson, as managing director of Dixons Retail, one of the largest consumer electronics retailers in Europe, actively tried to combine an already high level of internal competition by adding a team reward. As a consequence, many of his best salespeople left, discouraged by what they felt was a system intent on watering down their individual contributions.

However, to cater to the spirit of competition that is part of the young recruits eager to progress up the career ladder, he designed a plan in which stores were encouraged to compete against other Dixons stores of a similar size but in a different region. He also encouraged recruits to be transparent about their career ambitions via an internal, online application system. Everyone had access to whatever anyone else was planning as a career. Internal competition wasn’t so much eradicated as reoriented: some of it toward other stores, and some of it channeled toward career development rather than competition for the next customer.

As Wilkson’s story shows, getting the balance between competition and collaboration right is one of the most difficult team-leadership challenges.

Greed and Altruism

The tension between greediness and altruism among team members is subtle.

Intuition tells us that selves individuals should be popular; after all, they give a lot to the team yet ask little in return. It is equally obvious that selfish behavior is undesirable: if people were into it solely for themselves, they might free ride if given the chance, leaving some tasks either undone or poorly done. Here, the selfless might pick up the pieces and compensate for others. However, a surprising finding from recent experiments proves intuition wrong. Who would have thought that team members value charitable individuals much less than we (or even they) might expect.

Psychologists Craig Parks and Asako Stone came to this entirely unexpected finding after an experiment designed to study the expected ostracism of cheaters. Early results showed that team members were as likely to select the generous minded for exclusion. Using a computer simulation of a simple game, participants were given ten points per round to keep or place in a “public goods” kitty. Whatever points they put in the shared pool would double, after which participants could withdraw up to 25 percent of the pool (irrespective of their original investment). There was an incentive to withdraw less than 25 percent, namely, a bonus would be paid if the pool exceeded a certain threshold after an unspecified number of rounds. After the game, the psychologists asked the participants which of four players (one of whom was either a Scrooge or a martyr) they would like to play in another round. Unsurprisingly, the selfish person proved unpopular, but so did the selfless. So bewildering was the result that they reran the experiment four times while simultaneously testing alternative explanations.

So why is it that people are as likely to exclude selfless people as those who are greedy? Might it be that people are inherently bad at correctly estimating the contributions of those around them? So, if you take a smaller share, it reflects on you as having given less in the first place. Or, similarly, if you take less than others, this indicates the value you place on your own contribution, meaning that if you don’t value yourself, why should team members? The researchers’ first explanation–that the selfless person was perceived as incompetent or unpredictable, or the kind of person psychologists know will be disliked in this sort of game–proved to be false. When questioned, participants reported that seeing others take less than their fair share made them feel bad, and that the only way to rescue their own reputations (and make themselves feel better by comparison) was to eliminate the martyr. Virtue had become vice.

The Downside of Trust

Trust and vigilance coexist in varying degrees, as trust comes in different guises. For instance, it could signify confidence in team members’ technical competence, in their reliability, or in their benevolence. In much research on trust, the concept remains relatively poorly defined and referring to some combination of these three varieties, making it difficult to pin down. Nevertheless, some researchers exploring the topic of trust in teams have offered interesting suggestions. Penn State professor Kimberly Merriman, for example, thinks that low-trust teams are best rewarded according to individual effort. The fact that an estimated 85 percent of Fortune 1,000 companies use some form of team or group-based pay would thus suggest that they either think their teams have transcended the low-trust barrier or hope that pay might promote trust. If the latter is true, it seems ironic that cooperation is far better fostered by shared perceptions of fairness, of which the allocation of specific roles and individualized rewards are key features.

More trust isn’t necessarily better. One can have too much of a good thing. A recent experiment with teams of executive MBA students given two hundred colored-plastic bricks (from which they were asked to craft nothing more sophisticated than a coat stand) finds that trust can be the death knell to creativity. While trust is associated with creativity–not least because it signifies a psychologically safe space in which people can tinker freely without fear of losing face–this really only applies up to a point. Beyond this, trust becomes a liability. Team members placed a higher premium on harmony than on solving the problem at hand. The creative tension that results from questioning each other’s suggestions gives way to trying to please one another.

Tensions Ignite Outstanding Individual Performance

These seemingly contradictory forces coexist, in a perfectly natural way. Competition weeds out inefficiency in an otherwise collaborative environment. Trust can lower transaction costs but also lead to free riding if not paired with some degree of vigilance. Control can prevent waste, particularly when dealing with less experienced team members, yet autonomy is what allows them to make mistakes and learn from them, or to handle difficulties with clients they know well rather than those more senior but also more detached. Charisma can become manipulative if those who are more analytical do not rein it in. Analysis without charisma can fuel cynicism. Patience is a virtue but, if too widely shared, could cause a team to be indecisive; hence it helps to have someone on board who is more decisive, even if being too decisive can lead to hasty choices. Granting colleagues autonomy provides scope for personal growth and flexibility, yet too much autonomy enables them to build their own empires.

This means that control is required, although too much control can be seen as autocratic, off-putting, and ineffective. Open-mindedness allows for flexibility and creativity, but too much of it can render teams indiscriminate. Loyalty to key ideas, to ground rules, or to those in charge might balance that out, but loyalty that is too strong can cause teams to miss opportunities.

These tensions can quite easily make a team of high performers seem fragile, even if it is perfectly functional. The tensions can make even the most effective teams feel off-balance occasionally, as teammates work to reconcile, or reconcile themselves, to the contrary pulls. The potential for conflict is never far away, not just because those team members often fall prey to their own insecurities, but because they believe things should be done in particular ways.

The point is clear: what feels dysfunctional need not be. Tension may be unpleasant–but not illegitimate.

Image: Flickr user Kai C. Schwarzer

They’re hot now but do mash-up apps have a future? We talk with Brandon Leonardo, cofounder of the Pinterest/ Instagram combo Pinstagram, to find out. We also pitch him a few of our ideas, including “Shazump,” “Spotifurious,” and “Angry Fruit Ninjas.” Let the investment cash flow!

 

Brandon Leonardo is one of the cocreators of Pinstagram, a “mash-up app” that combines features of… you guessed it. In essence, it takes the functionality of Instagram and splashes it in the elegant waterfall layout familiar to Pinterest fans. Pinstagram recently debuted its iPad app (and rose to be the No. 1 new and notable app in the Photo and Video category this week). Fast Company caught up with Leonardo to talk about the future of the mash-up app, and to pitch him a few ideas of our own.

FAST COMPANY: Tell me the origin story of Pinstagram.

BRANDON LEONARDO: Pek Pongpaet, his cofounder and I were having lunch on a Friday, joking around: “Pinterest is a huge company, and so is Instagram. What would happen if we just smashed them together?” We were just laughing about it. But then you could see the wheels starting to turn in Pek’s head. He brought it up a couple more times: “I think Pinstagram would be really cool,” and I kind of chuckled. The next morning at noon Pek called me and said, “You’re never gonna believe what I built. Look at your Dropbox.” By that time he had pretty much gotten the entire site designed. We went into hackathon mode, and by Sunday we were basically done with the initial version we launched with.

Are you in dialogue with Instagram or Pinterest? Aren’t you running afoul of laws here?

Pinterest’s waterfall layout was not invented by Pinterest. It’s a jQuery plug-in someone created a couple years ago and released it open-source. Pinterest gets credit for making it famous, but it’s not necessarily copyrightable. On the Instagram side, we’re using their public API. And it’s kind of a win-win: we’re sending them lots of likes, comments, and actions.

It seems like the sort of thing where either you get a cease-and-desist letter, or you get acquired.

No one has sent us a cease-and-desist letter. In fact we got coffee with a Pinterest engineer last week. The founder of Pinterest has actually used Pinstagram. On the Instagram side, no one’s contacted us.

You built an iPad app before an iPhone app. Why?

Instagram’s already on the iPhone. We’ll never be a better Instagram than Instagram. What we can do is build the best iPad viewer.

Let’s talk more about this idea of the app mash-up. How exactly do you splice the genes, and is there an island where you put your failed experiments?

You take the best pieces of each. The benefit to having a hackathon, is you have a severe focus on only what’s necessary. This is Pek’s and my third project together. The other ones are running, but this is the one that took off like crazy. But having an island sounds like a great idea. The island where source code goes is GitHub.

Do you think there will be more app mash-ups, more “Grey Albums” of the app world?

I think building products, period, is good. Any time you’re creating something and putting it out in to the world, you get a little bit closer to perfect. Nothing anyone has ever built has been perfect. But you keep improving on little things, and you get closer and closer. If you want to do a mash-up, you should do it.

Good. Because I want to pitch some mash-up apps to you.

Okay.

“DoodleJitter.” It’s a mash-up of Doodle Jump and Twitter. You can only play the game for 140 seconds or less.

That’s about how long I play DoodleJump right now.

How about a mixture of Shazam and Bump called “Shazump”? You use it to quickly exchange songs.

Do you want me to rate these?

Yeah, if you were a VC, how much money would you give me?

The music business is the worst business to be in, so I’d say no. Spotify is the only one I’ve really seen be successful.

OK, how about a mash-up of Spotify and Epicurious, called “Spotifurious.” You use it to stream unlimited food.

Could you use that in other parts of the world? I don’t think the U.S. needs more food.

“Angry Fruit Ninjas.” It’s just a much more violent version of Angry Birds.

Oh yeah… Absolutely. That sounds like a winner. That one I would give you the most money for. Throw some zombies in there, and in three years, you’ll be acquiring Zynga.

In his great keynote speech at IMS 2012 in San Francisco, Rick Bakas said, “We have to think mobile first, desktop second.” (I admit that I heard absolutely zero percent of the rest of the speech, because that little seed was enough to plant a forest in my head.) But in case that wasn’t enough, I had an experience a few hours later that fertilized the point and forced the issue.

It turns out that in San Francisco, getting a taxi to actually stop and pick you up is a bit of a chore. I met one cab driver who told me that he’d met several mayors and heads of government, simply because he’s a role model because he picks up more passengers than most drivers. (Now, before some union or other association wants to complain that I’m misrepresenting drivers in SF, I have no idea of the details. This is my experience + what I was told.)

Thank goodness another cab driver told me about Cabulous, this mobile app that lets you notify a driver that you need a pick-up without having to call the dispatcher at all. This saved Jacq and me a bunch of time, and just generally made travel work better for us in SF. Plus, it gave the driver more fares without having to wait for his dispatcher or guess where people were waiting. It worked well (in San Francisco, mind you- a very high tech area).

But this is just the story that leads me to the conversation.

A Mobile First World

I’m planning a new event that takes an even bigger, more innovative swing at how mid-sized to larger businesses will function around this digital channel. In putting it all together, I’m paying more attention to how businesses of all sizes utilize the various tools at their disposal to conduct business. For instance, I’ve been paying a lot more attention to how mobile changes the game.

For instance, this cab driver doesn’t need to have a blog. He doesn’t need a board on Pinterest. Cabulous is a mobile-first solution that gives him more buyers. Because his business is built on a simple transaction, why should he bother with all the frills? He shouldn’t.

But what about you? Are your business interactions as simple? And are you built around a mobile-first mindset? I’m guessing you’re not. I know that I’m not. My sites are all mobile-ready and mobile-enhanced, partly because I use a mobile-friendly theme from Studiopress (affiliate link), and also because I use a mobile-formatting plugin for chrisbrogan.com (called wptouch). We need to think even more about this.

The Mobile-First World and You

Look from your side of the equation first: you sleep with your smartphone right beside the bed, don’t you? You reach for it first thing in the morning. You never leave the house without it. You put it on the table at breakfast like a gunslinger. You’re even starting to do some business functions via your mobile devices.

So, that’s you as the user. What about you as the business owner, as the collaborator, as the face of interactions between others and your company? What do you have to do to prepare? What steps will you take?

Join a Free Webinar to Learn More

My business partners at Citrix Online (makers of GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, GoToSleep, and similar) have sponsored a conversation between myself and Chuck Martin, CEO of the Mobile Future Institute and author of the bestseller, The Third Screen: Marketing to Your Customers in a World Gone Mobile (amazon affiliate link).

We’ll talk about marketing, but also about collaboration, internal business functions, and whatever else I can wring out of Chuck’s brilliant mind. This conversation isn’t one to miss, as I have a lot to ask him, after hearing from Rick Bakas and observing Cabulous in action.

LOS ANGELES, California – The brand once known as the “Standard of the World” has fully embraced the Standard of Geeks for it’s latest play for the hearts, minds and cash of the upwardly mobile. This is the all-new 2013 Cadillac XTS, and while it certainly isn’t your great-great (great) grandfather’s Cadillac, it’s designed to appeal to everyone from octogenarians to their baby-boomer spawn, and maybe – just maybe – even you…

While the XTS’ spate of processors and controllers isn’t running the open-source offspring of Linus Torvalds, the game-changing infotainment intender known as the Cadillac User Experience (CUE) is.

Buried deep within the dash is a three-core, ARM 11 processor, powering two displays: one eight-inch capacitive touch screen – the first non-resistive display to come to a production car – and a second, 12.3-inch fully-configurable instrument cluster mounted behind the steering wheel. Two of those cores adapt on the fly to handle voice commands powered by the same Nuance technology used by many automakers, along with Apple’s personal assistant, Siri. But with CUE, everything is processed on-board.

Because of that trick bit of natural voice recognition technology, and specifically its ability to listen for commands in-line, inputing addresses and performing point-of-interest searches is easily the best we’ve ever experienced in a modern vehicle.

Rather than breaking out each portion of an address into dedicated fields, you simply have to speak an address (say, “123 Main Street, Cupertino, California”) and CUE is smart enough to recognize the entire address in one shot. More impressive is the system’s ability to take local searches – everything from “I need coffee” to navigating to a restaurant – process the voice command within a few seconds and deliver a result.

CUE is one of the most attractive infotainment systems to date

This came in particular handy while trying to make our way to the test-drive lunch stop. Instead of having to look up the address, input it into the navigation system and wait for the routing to begin, we simply said the name of the restaurant and seconds later it was dialed into the nav. And even though we stumbled on our words, pausing momentarily and stuttering in the process, it still recognized where we were trying to go. That’s a first and it’s something we can’t wait to see proliferate throughout other production vehicles.

This same functionality extends to the app and audio integration, allowing the driver to say “Play Rolling Stones Radio” in Pandora or “I want to listen to 88.5″ without ever having to touch the screen, twist a knob or punch a button.

Which is good, since there are few knobs or buttons to speak of.

Aside from the redundant controls on the steering wheel (and there are several), the entire center panel is made up entirely of capacitive, chrome-clad touch controls. The lower panel – which mechanically tilts upward to reveal a hidden compartment for stowing a phone, along with two USB ports for plugging in your mobile, MP3 player or thumb drive – houses controls for volume, climate, seat heating and cooling, plus “home” and “power” controls. Unfortunately, the very nature of capacitive switchgear means there’s a subtle lag between pressing a “button”, registering the input, delivering a haptic pulse, sending said input to the system and then eliciting a change in fan speed or volume level. It’s the same gripe we have with the MyFord Touch system – further proof that good ol’ knobs are still the best way to go, despite their lack of gee-wizardry.

And this same lack of responsiveness can occasionally be felt when navigating the eight-inch central display.

While the overall polish of the system is more than enough to impress, there’s still a perceivable lack of smoothness and immediacy

While the overall polish of the system is more than enough to impress, there’s still a perceivable lack of smoothness and immediacy when switching through menus, navigating pages and swiping between screens. The situation is exacerbated by the occasional misinterpreted press on the screen, a product of small touch points that don’t always register where you expect them.

Equally jarring is CUE’s ability to detect when your hand moves within eight inches of the screen, which then pulls up a series of configurable virtual buttons for everything from radio presets to frequently navigated addresses. When you pull away, the controls fade into the background.

It’s impressive to watch the system recognize your hand’s proximity to the screen and then display a series of controls that would make the display look otherwise cluttered, but having some of these items statically placed seems like a more intelligent user interface choice for frequently selected options. That’s one of the many reasons Cadillac is providing an iPad with every 2013 model to help consumers navigate the new system.

General smoothness aside, CUE is one of the most attractive infotainment systems to date, mixing 3D graphics with color icons and a beautifully rendered mapping display. And while the app selection is limited for now, with only Pandora, Stitcher and a pre-installed OnStar app available at launch, Cadillac tells Wired that an app store is on the way. Java and HTML5 are make up the core frameworks, so once developers are granted access to the SDK, Cadillac expects as many as 30 apps to be available within the next year.

But while we had our issues with CUE (growing pains, we’re sure), the configurable display that takes the place of traditional gauges behind the steering wheel never failed to impress.

Four different designs are available, beginning with a simple, three gauge cluster with engine revs on the left, speed in the center and fuel, coolant and phone/navigation/audio on the right. It’s the most traditional display and what most drivers will feel immediately comfortable with.

The second display nixes all the round gauges for a digital speedo at the top, navigation instructions below and other assorted information flanking the sides, while an even more simple display – obviously aimed at some of Cadillac’s aging drivers – only shows speed, fuel level and a few other must-haves.

Finally, there’s a more enthusiast-friendly option, with an oversized tachometer and speedo, partnered with a 3D rendering of the vehicle along with tire pressures, engine temp, navigation and audio controls, all displayed clearly and vividly for the driver. We stuck with the latter during the majority of our drive.

All this tech is pretty useless if the vehicle surrounding it isn’t up to snuff. And here Cadillac has a winner, even though the XTS won’t send chills down the spines of Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz.

The exterior is an odd blend of bold and bland, while the interior is a beautifully appointed mix of leather, wood and contrast stitching (the purple thread in the Platinum models has to be seen to be appreciated). There’s ample room for four people (five in a pinch), with leg and shoulder room abound, and a thoughtful, conservative approach to luxury that’s been utterly lacking from most American automakers. The XTS’ feels a bit more Japanese than German in execution, but injects a bit of emotion into an otherwise bland segment of upmarket rides.

The overall length is on par with Audi’s range-topping, standard wheelbase A8, but the interior dimensions and general size is more closely competitive with the slightly smaller A6, along with the BMW 5 Series and Mercedes-Benz E-Class.

A 3.6-liter V6 engine putting out 304 horsepower and 264 pound-feet of torque is either sent to the front wheels or all four depending on the trim, and no V8 option is planned, despite most of the XTS’ closest competitors offering some form of big or boosted drivetrains. A six-speed automatic is standard across the range, which nets acceptable fuel economy, despite coming in a few cogs short of other luxury players.

We spent time in both a Platinum all-wheel-drive model and a front-driven “base” version, and found both to be pleasing steers that eschew the wafting heritage of past Caddys thanks to a rigid chassis and the standard fitment of Magnetic Ride Control, the same suspension technology that keeps the Corvette ZR1 and Ferrari 599 stuck to the road. The front-wheel-drive model felt more floaty due to the lack of additional grip and weight in the rear, while the all-wheel-drive version was far more planted and – dare we say it – mildly sporty. The steering and brakes were equally at home while navigating the congested confines of Los Angeles – they might not be as composed as the impressive suspension, but are easily up to the task at hand.

But what exactly is that task?

For Cadillac, the XTS is an attempt to reassert itself as the Standard of the World, and that starts with a competent chassis, a plush interior and a revolutionary in-car entertainment system. But with Cadillac still lacking a proper flagship to go up against the BMW 7 Series and Mercedes S-Class, it’s still a ways away from regaining its former title, even though we’ve been assured numerous times that model is on the way. Cadillac’s head exec confided in us that the XTS is “a bridge” for some of the brand’s existing customers to move out of their aging DTS and STS land yachts, but we’ll call the XTS was it is: a tech-rich stopgap that points the brand forward. And with pricing ranging between the mid-$40,000 range up to near $60k, the XTS is a solid alternative to the segment stalwarts, opting for comfort and convenience over sport and speed.