Serious Simplicity

Last Sunday I headed down to the Sun Microsystems building for another VRM event in London. This time it was called “VRM Hub Open Space” and the objective of the session was to participate and listen to ‘participant-sourced’ conversations about VRM. Lloyd Davis did a splendid job of explaining the Open Space method to newbies like myself and thus the afternoon was both pleasant, argumentative and informative. To a certain extent this was a follow-up to November’s VRM event (Unlocking the See-Saw) primarily because a large number of the attendees had been present at the earlier event so, in a way, certain conversations picked up where they left off last time.

VRM interests me because it is a grass roots movements that is promoting an alternative to what I call the “traditional entrepreneurship model” and provides an approach that enables entrepreneurs to be more ethical in their ventures. But what made the event really interesting was not that it matched my personal ethos. Rather it was the sheer variety of ideas and approaches that a relatively small group of people brought to the table. Topics discussed ranged from public sector to mobile operators, from social media to privacy, identity and retail! My take-away value:

1. VRM Excites People
   Although mostly everyone present had their own interpretation and personal ‘VRM Utopia’ in mind, the level of enthusiasm and engagement was ubiquitous. Moreover, this was not some geek-centric or startup-centric or other niche-centric group of people. There were developers, bloggers, consultants (ahem), academics, entrepreneurs, writers and designers all agreeing about the fact that this is something worthwhile and worth sharing knowledge and ideas about.
2. VRM is Still Young
   Of course, what all these diverse people weren’t agreeing about was about how to go about implementing, promoting or otherwise advancing VRM. And this is not a bad thing. VRM is still young and in my humble and unschooled opinion, were the energies of the VRM community directed solely towards the realisation of one particular project the likelihood of success (define it how you will) would be drastically reduced.

This is the time to “let a thousand flowers blossom” and let VRM take root in a variety of different fields and soils. Sometimes not even necessarily outwardly shown as “VRM”. But the message will be out there, and, hopefully will take root.

At the very least, I hope to be able to contribute to this in some small way.

(Oh, if you’re new to VRM and have no idea of what I’ve been talking about read this.)

Found this running around somewhere. Yours truly fourth from the right looking interested.

I managed to miss attending the VRM monthly event in February due to embarassingly getting lost in the middle of supposedly-familiar London territory.

However, a follow-up event to Unlocking the See-Saw is being organised on the 30th of March in London dubbed VRM Open Space. It should be good fun, interesting and very engaging if it’s anything like the last event. So if you’re interested in VRM get registered. It’s free.

Seth Godin writes about this today.

If this stuff interests you, read about VRM.

…of social media. Mark Zuckerberg said something to this effect yesterday:

“I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before”

Les Bloggers have put forth any number of reasons for dis/agreeing which I won’t repeat. I just wanted to add two little comments.

It’s interesting to see that the ‘dissenters’ are almost exclusively the older crowd who possibly can’t quite envision sharing things that aren’t shareable now! Very much like people said a few years ago that the Internet could never replace newsprint. I’m guessing, kids growing up today in a social media space right from the start, see much more sharing potential than others.

Nick Carr’s comment that “I’m troubled by the implications of this exponential growth in our release of intimate data” is valid though. The problem is that once the data is out there, how do I get it back? Do I still have control over it? What sort of control? If I have comments on a hundreds of blogs, my cell number of tens of social sites and my resume on a couple others how hard is it for me to change all that data? Or evej just search through it? Very hard at the moment.

Anyway, you’ve guessed what I’m getting at: VRM. But that’s what it’s all about isn’t it? I have no control of the myriad bits of data out there about me because up until now its only customers who’ve been “managed” (CRM) and not vendors.

Check out the Mine Project to see a work in progress of exactly this kind of tool.

Following Monday’s London event I’ve been refining my thoughts about the whole VRM concept. It interests me because it is very closely related to a subject I have a strong interest in: Ethical Entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship is one of those topics that polarizes people: some evangelize and others vilify it. Whichever side of the fence you’re on, it is incontrovertible that entrepreneurship is one of those phenomena that have a significant impact on our kind of society. Many entrepreneurs create new ideas, disseminate information, create jobs, tend to be politically influential and often donate substantial sums to educational and charitable institutions. At the same time, many entrepreneurs also tend to be greedy, ruthless and inconsiderate to environmental or social considerations in pursuit of their financial objectives.

VRM, is but another model for entrepreneurship (like Social Entrepreneurship, Permission Marketing and Ricardo Semler’s approach) that is trying to change what I call the “Traditional” Entrepreneurship Model. I put together a small diagram to show what I mean by this:

In the Traditional Entrepreneurship Model there is an exchange of value between customer and entrepreneur. The relationship hinges on the exchange for both parties but the outcome is often wildly different. The customer parts with money in exchange for a perceived set of values that far exceeds the price paid. For instance, in return for the price of an iPod, the customer gets aesthetic beauty, a feeling of importance, a relief from boredom when traveling, a portable hard drive, ownership of a physical object and a sense of belonging to a particular commuinity (friends, Apple fans, etc…). On the other hand, the entrepreneur typically gets only a financial return.

I believe it is this imbalance that drives entrepreneurs to unethical business practices. Practices that range from spamming and deceitful marketing right up to employee/third-world exploitation, misuse of natural resources and environmental disregard. (In short, all the stuff that Naomi Klein has been warning us about.)

VRM and similar entrepreneurship models are, in different ways, attempting to address this imbalance. An “Ethical” Entrepreneurship Model would look something like this:

The core difference is that both entrepreneur and customer obtain more than just a financial return from the value exchange. This is not to say that business ventures should not be profitable. Rather, that profitability should not be measure in purely financial terms.

How to go about doing it, and how some people are already doing it successfully is a topic for another day however…

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I just got back from a VRM event in London: Unlocking the See-Saw. It was a serious pleasure to meet so many people dedicated to building a more ethical consumer-enterprise relationship. The panels and the conversations (and the wine!) were highly stimulating.

For the uninitiated, VRM stands for “Vendor Relationship Management” which, in a nutshell, is the flipside of “Customer Relationship Management” (CRM). The VRM movement aspires to create both technological tools as well as a social context in which customers and users have more control over the data that corporations store about them as well as being able to choose what sort of personal data to make available to which organisations.

Ambitious? Yes. Utopian? No.

My take on the whole VRM thing is that at the core its about “open-source data” and more transparent relationships between individuals and organisations. It’s already happening in some areas. People are experimenting, entrepreneurs are listening, and change is brewing. Check out the VRM Hub and the VRM Labs websites to find out more.

The event itself seemed to me to be a successful exercise in VRM. First off, the agenda and programme were only loosely structured giving space to particpants and panelists to take it in different directions. The emergent discussions were probably miles better than a more stiff Speak+Q&A session could have ever achieved. Secondly the mix of participants themselves was testimony to the fact that “fat cats” and “thin individuals” can find common ground, discuss and come up with mutually beneficial ideas. The forty or so people attending included freelance consultants, marketeers, top execs, academics and entrepreneurs, and, because it was a small group, it was almost inevitable that everybody spoke to everybody.

So, kudos to Adriana Lukas for organising an excellent event. Definitely looking forward to attend the next one!

And now, after all the traveling, I’d better get back to finishing off my unfinished Part II post on the “Travel Bubble”…