My naming genius nephew Benjamin with Giraffey (the giraffe) and Tigey (the tiger).

Take this to it’s extreme and you end up with something like:

TotalLogic™ Cloudweave™

or

Biotron™ Selectronix™ with SignalBoost™ technology

or whatever. I’m sure you’ve seen worse.

I say stop the madness.

The reason this doesn’t work is because getting people to understand the meaning behind one brand takes time, effort, and money. Every brand name that you add dilutes the time, effort, and money you can spend educating people about any one brand.

This is why technology companies end up with lots of sucky, worthless brand names that no one knows, understands, or values. Fortunately, I have a simple tip that can help you focus your branding energy and get you better results:

Call a duck a duck.

Here is what I mean: when it comes to creating brand names, focus your energy on one or two key brands, then choose simple descriptive names rather than creating a new brand every time you create a product or service. In other words:

STOP NAMING EVERYTHING.

(You can check out what I’ve previously written on the subject here and here.)

When I was at Red Hat, this meant keeping naming mind-numbingly simple. In most cases “Red Hat” was the brand. Almost every other brand name was a simple descriptive name (an example: our flagship product, “Red Hat Enterprise Linux” was… you guessed it, a version of Linux made for enterprise customers).

Whenever someone would tell me how boring this naming strategy was, that they wanted a name that was more “fun” or “exciting,” I would tell them we already had one—Red Hat—and, by ensuring we didn’t name every single product we created, we would make that one brand even more fun and exciting (and more valuable in the process).

The thing that inspired me to write this post today was a conversation I had with my sister a few weeks ago. She was telling me how my nephew Benjamin (who is 3 1/2) names his stuffed animals.

He has a tiger. Its name is “Tigey.”

He has a giraffe. Its name is—you guessed it—”Giraffey.”

She tells me he also has “Pandy,” “Lioney,” and several other similarly-named animals.

I knew that boy was a genius.

By naming things exactly what they are, he makes it incredibly simple for us to know which animal he is talking about. We will never confuse “Giraffey” with “Tigey” when he is telling us stories about their adventures.

If a 3 1/2 year old understands the value of keeping a naming strategy simple, why is it so hard for thousands of trained marketing experts in the technology world?

If his mom lets him, I might start bringing Benjamin in on consulting projects around naming.

I’ll just have to make sure they are scheduled to start after his afternoon nap.

In her talk, which has been viewed almost two million times since it was posted last month, Susan makes a compelling case that the open, collaborative world we embrace today is not always set up to harness the best work from introverts.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As we’ve moved toward more open office plans, collaborative processes like design thinking, and into a digital world now dominated by the word “social,” Susan wonders who is looking out for the introverts? Should introverts feel guilty about wanting to do their thinking and working alone? And can introverts do great work in group settings?

I spent more than a decade working in the inherently collaborative world of open source software. I regularly lead brand positioning and strategy projects as open, collaborative, social exercises involving entire communities of people in the process. So Susan’s talk made me ask myself a tough question:

By emphasizing a collaborative, social process am I risking leaving introverts—and their best ideas—behind?

It’s no secret that I am a life-long introvert myself. I am much more comfortable writing or reading a blog post in my living room and discussing it via comments or Twitter than I am sitting and talking about it with someone over coffee or, worse, at a social gathering like a party or a conference.

So I get where Susan is coming from. Deeply.

In her TED Talk, she at one point pleads, “Stop the madness for constant group work.” When she said this, it hit me pretty hard. The first thing that came to my mind was the one gazillion design thinking ideation sessions I’ve either run or participated in over the last 7 or 8 years.

I’ve personally never had much trouble speaking up during ideation/brainstorming sessions. But I also suspect I am a relatively mild introvert compared to others I know. I started to wonder what the hard-core introverts were thinking during these sessions (and if you were one of them, feel free to tell me below in the comments).

Did they feel like they were being talked over by extroverts? Did they feel like they were out of their element, or needed more time to process their thoughts before blurting them out and having them recorded on the wall? Would they have preferred to contemplate on their own instead of thinking socially as part of a group?

Then another thought stuck me: I’ve met a lot of software engineers over the years, and while not all of them are introverts, many of them are. Frankly, I don’t think too many extreme extroverts could stand to sit in their office and stare at a computer screen all day. But for some introverted software developers, this is bliss.

Yet open source software is developed in a collaborative, social process… run in many cases by introverts.

Why does that work?

For me at least, the answer comes down to the difference between virtual and in-person collaboration. Open source software developers do much of their collaborating online. Often this is because they are geographically dispersed around the world. But I’ve also seen developers sitting two feet away from each other communicating via instant messages or email.

Online collaboration has two key advantages over in-person collaboration for introverts:

1) It allows them to avoid stressful in-person social interactions.

2) It allows them to take their time, contemplate, and think deeply before responding.

Over the past two years at New Kind, I’ve personally been doing less and less in-person design thinking ideation sessions, instead hosting more open, collaborative sessions online. Sometimes they are efforts like the hackathons I’ve run for the Management Innovation Exchange that involve hundreds of people collaborating from all around the world. Other times they are client projects where the collaborating happens via Basecamp or another online tool.

I’ve found I enjoy facilitating sessions online much more than in-person sessions, and I think it suits my personality better. Because the collaboration happens asynchronously, I can take my time crafting thoughtful responses and generating ideas. I can wait until I’m in the right frame of mind to participate, and most importantly, I can work with others, yet be alone at the same time.

I suspect some of these same advantages also translate to participants in online group sessions as well. And for this reason, perhaps many introverts are more comfortable in collaborative projects online than in person. Some of the best ideas I’ve seen emerge from online collaborative exercises come from people who usually remain completely silent in meetings.

In many cases, online collaborative projects provide the best of both worlds—you can collaborate and build off the ideas of others, but still take the time to process your thoughts before you add them (and as a special bonus, you don’t have the stress of in-person social interaction).

If you consider yourself an introvert, I’d love to hear about your experiences participating in collaborative projects online vs. in person. Do you agree with Susan Cain’s assessment that collaborative group projects are not designed to get the best out of introverts? Do you find yourself making better contributions and contributing more in online projects? Or are online collaborative groups just as bad for you as in-person sessions, and you’d rather just work completely on your own?

I’d love to hear what you think.

Elizabeth brings a very unique perspective to New Kind.  In high school, she was a spirited debater, sparking her interest in international affairs and economics. While working for a non-profit in Colorado founded by an “entrepreneurial philanthropist” she completed extensive research in corporate self-regulation and the business costs of piracy in Somalia.

While in Latin America, she completed research examining the effects of different economic and political models on the region’s history and people.  In Chile, she worked with a Chilean non-profit on gender issues.  And, she also worked on Capitol Hill as an aide to Congressman Cao from Louisiana during the time while Congress was considering major health care revisions.

The most interesting thing about Elizabeth is not “what she did”, but rather the fact that she did all of these things before she was 22 years old.  She has covered a lot of territory in a short period of time.

So, welcome to New Kind, Elizabeth!  We look forward to your ideas and contributions to the success of our clients and New Kind.

In the New York Times Magazine yesterday, Adam Davidson wrote a great piece about it. I pre-ordered the book and look forward to reading, but in the meantime, the New York Times article hints at some key conclusions the authors reach. From the article:

“…the wealth of a country is most closely correlated with the degree to which the average person shares in the overall growth of its economy… when a nation’s institutions prevent the poor from profiting from their work, no amount of disease eradication, good economic advice or foreign aid seems to help… If national institutions give even their poorest and least educated citizens some shot at improving their own lives — through property rights, a reliable judicial system or access to markets — those citizens will do what it takes to make themselves and their country richer.”

A relatively simple concept: Nations that give citizens opportunities to improve their lives—to create value for themselves—give them the incentive to create value—both for themselves and for the nation collectively.

According to the summary on the authors’ website, the book highlights examples of the theory in action around the world and throughout history, “from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, medieval Venice, the Soviet Union, Latin America, England, Europe, the United States, and Africa.”

So how might this theory apply to the study of how organizations can build passionate and sustainable brand communities? If we think of brands as nations, what might make them fail or see great success?

Michael Porter wrote a now-famous piece in HBR last year entitled Creating Shared Value that to me articulates the business equivalent of the principle. Here is how Wikipedia describes Porter’s concept of creating shared value:

“The central premise behind creating shared value is that the competitiveness of a company and the health of the communities around it are mutually dependent. Recognizing and capitalizing on these connections between societal and economic progress has the power to unleash the next wave of global growth and to redefine capitalism.”

I think there is a strong connection here, and I would frame it as simply as this:

Brands (and nations) that exist only to extract value from their communities are, in the long run, less competitive and less sustainable than brands (and nations) that exist to create and share value with their communities.

Think about the brands you interact with on a daily basis:

- Which of them are clear value extractors (i.e. they unabashedly exist in order to extract as much money as they can)?

- Which of them are extractors in “shared-value clothing” (i.e. they hide their true selves behind a veneer of shared value)?

- Which of them truly create and share value with the communities that care about them?

If you are like me, some specific organizations immediately come to mind when you see the three categories above. Humor me for a second as I remix the quotes I shared from the New York Times article earlier, but putting them in a brand context:

“…the strength of an organization’s brand community is most closely correlated with the degree to which the average community member shares in the overall success of the organization and community… when an organization prevents the average community member from profiting from its work, no amount of PR, advertising, or charitable giving seems to help… If organizations give even their average community members some shot at becoming more successful — through providing innovative products, experiences, and connections to new people or opportunities — those community members will do what it takes to make themselves, the organization, and the overall brand community richer.”

I suspect that organizations interested in building passionate brand communities have a lot to learn from Why Nations Fail.

And I’ll let you know what I personally learn once I’ve had a chance to read it.

Today, I am pleased to announce the first New Kind Board of Advisors.

On this board we are honored to welcome a fantastic group of people who are recognized leaders in business, education, public policy, and technology. These individuals not only bring great wisdom and deep experience, but each has a genuine commitment to making our world a better place in which to live and work.

Here’s a brief introduction to the members of our Board of Advisors (click on a name or picture to access the complete bio).

Josh Becker, Palo Alto, CA

Josh is a venture capitalist, the Co-Founder and General Partner of New Cycle Capital, and a former employee at Netscape, McKinsey, and Agile Software.

Laura Carpenter Bingham, Raleigh, NC

Laura is the former President of Peace College and currently serves on a number of corporate, civic and philanthropic boards.

Paul Jones, Chapel Hill, NC

Paul is the director of ibiblio, a contributor-run, digital library of public domain and creative commons media in the Office of Information Technology Service at UNC-Chapel Hill where he is also Clinical Associate Professor.

Eric Reeves, Dallas, TX

Eric is an attorney and the Founder and Managing Director of High Bar Companies. He is also a former member of the North Carolina Senate.

Mark Webbink, Durham, NC

Mark is the former General Counsel of Red Hat and is a visiting professor of law and executive director of the Center for Patent Innovations at New York Law School.

You may ask, why does New Kind need a Board of Advisors? The short answer is that the board will provide advice, recommendations, and guidance to New Kind related to corporate goals and strategy.

But beyond that, we believe an outside board will make us a better company; better for our own personal growth and better for those organizations and companies that we are fortunate enough to call our clients.

We are humbled that these accomplished individuals are willing to invest their time and expertise in helping us build a great company.  And to our advisors I say, thank you for agreeing to serve.  We will do everything we can to exceed your expectations.

Over the past few months, we’ve been running an effort we call a “management hackathon.” We ran our first hackathon experiment last year, with a small group of about 60 management innovators attempting to uncover how to enable communities of passion in or around organizations (if you’d like to read the report highlighting our findings, go here).

Our newest effort is called the Management 2.0 Hackathon, and for this one we’ve gone much bigger. This hackathon is a collaborative effort to come up with innovative management hacks based on the principles that have made the Web one of the most adaptable, innovative, and inspiring things humans have ever created. Our goal is to take the best lessons from the Web’s success and apply them to reinvent management practices in organizations.

There are now over 750 contributors taking part from six continents. For fun, here’s a map showing where our participants live and work:

Over on the MIX website, I’ve written a few blog posts highlighting some of our recent accomplishments.

Here’s a link to a post about the navigator tool we created, highlighting examples of organizations that are already using the principles of the Web to innovate today.

Here’s a link to a post I just wrote late last week with some of the most innovative hack ideas that have been suggested by contributors.

Sound interesting? If you’d like to participate in the Management 2.0 Hackathon and share and help develop management hacks with us, it’s not too late. In fact, we’ve had almost 50 new participants join in the past week alone.

If you want to start hacking with us, go here to create your account and read the instructions for our current sprint. It’d be great to have you on the team!

The other day I was sitting in the New Kind office, and was inspired to take the picture you see here. I thought it did a nice job capturing what ‘default to open’ looks like at New Kind.

The first thing to notice when you look at this picture is that everyone is sitting in the same room together.

No one at New Kind has an office. We all share a big open space. Now having said that, what you see here—everyone sitting at their desks—is pretty rare. While we are together by default, if someone gets a phone call or has a meeting, they typically get up from their desk and head into one of our dark conference rooms for privacy and to ensure they don’t annoy everyone else.

With the exception of our big collaboration space, all of the conference rooms at New Kind are gloomy rooms with no outside windows, so unless folks are on deadline and trying to escape distractions, they are not places to linger longer than necessary. That’s a good thing because it tends to keep us together. And if we are sitting at our desks and trying to avoid distractions, headphones are our friends (In fact, I’m writing this at my desk while listening to the new Sleigh Bells album).

Not only does everyone—including our Chairman and CEO—sit in the same room together by choice, but as you can see from the picture, everyone also has the same inexpensive IKEA desks and file cabinets. Yes, we have titles at New Kind so that we can interface successfully with the outside world, but they sure don’t get you much inside the office.

The last thing I’d like to point out that really shows what we mean by ‘default to open’ is that there are two people sitting in this picture, Adrienne and Billy, who are not technically New Kind employees, but do work with us regularly. Adrienne is a fantastic designer and the genius behind the amazing food blog AdrienneEats. Billy is a writer and social media expert with a Klout score second only to Nation of the people in this picture (impressive!). Neither of them is in the office every day. In fact, some days you’ll see other people sitting in those seats or elsewhere in the office with us.

When we first formed New Kind, we had a vision of the company as a community. The core concept behind New Kind was very simple:

We wanted to

1) do meaningful work
2) with people we like.

That’s it. So we regularly invite people we like to sit in the office with us, whether they are New Kind employees or not. New Kind is a community, open to those people who share our worldview. Often the folks who work with us in the office are collaborating with us on projects. Sometimes they are working on projects for other clients. We don’t really care, we just like having them around.

Do you have a similar setup and philosophy in your office? Tell me about it!

The Institute for Emerging Issues serves an important role in North Carolina, bringing people together to ensure North Carolina’s competitiveness on the global stage moving forward. Unlike many policy organizations, it does not merely sequester academics in a dusty room and speak in theory.

Every single person I spoke with walked away from the conference feeling optimistic about the future of North Carolina. The fact that 1.5 million North Carolinians are part of a generation that is more tech savvy, globally aware, giving and diverse than any that came before it is a sign that the future is bright.

The other realization for many at the forum was that the new world of interconnectivity and community isn’t a fad, but the direction in which the world is heading.

Robert Safian of Fast Company was the headline speaker on day one.He drove this realization home as he showcased many compelling statistics, case studies, and stories. Safian calls the generation we are living in “Generation Flux” and he made that clear as he showcased how, “chaotic disruption runs rampant, not simply from the likes of Apple, Facebook, and Google.”

The timeline for big, dramatic change is moving much faster than it has ever been. One glaring example is the global smartphone market. Safian noted in his keynote that Nokia, RIM, and Motorola completely dominated the market five years ago, while today Samsung and Apple are the absolute leaders.

No one would have predicted this change.

Nor would anyone have predicted that daily deals (e.g. Groupon) would take the world by storm, Zynga would become a billion dollar business built on social media games, AirBnB would become a credible option for vacationers to locate their next stop, or that Twitter would launch revolutions.

Safian noted that the seeds for this transformation were planted during the dot.com cycle of the late 90’s that went from boom to bubble rapidly. Fast Company was but one of dozens of magazines launched to cover this period in time.

In fact, Fast Company launched with the headline, “Work Is Personal. Computing Is Social. Knowledge Is Power.”

Some wrote off that cover—and sentiment—as a symptom of dot.com hysteria. What is clear today, however, is that they were right… about ten years too soon.

It would be easy to say that we are in just another bubble as social networking startups become large, publicly-traded companies. But, as Safian made clear, unlike last time these companies are producing billions in revenue.

And, as he indicated, the success, or failure, of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, and others is irrelevant to the change that the world is going through.

Generation Flux isn’t going away, regardless of what happens to the companies that drive it. The entire world is being disrupted at a greater rate than ever before and organizations must adapt to thrive in an environment of continuous reinvention and rapid change.

Fortunately the future work force, the one comprised of Generation Z, is prepared to thrive in this environment.

The question that remains is whether or not the rest of us can thrive in it. Safian said that Generation Flux isn’t an age, but an attitude. Those organizations who can rise to the challenge in the midst of chaos, change, and disruption will win the day.

Is your organization one that can win the day in Generation Flux? We would love to hear about it.