the ki work blog

So what have gorillas got to do with business process outsourcing?

Image via Wikipedia

So what is ki work "virtual business process outsourcing" (or VBPO for short)? Is ki work "collaborative capitalism"? Is ki work "guerrilla outsourcing"? (That's as distinct from "gorilla outsourcing" which is monkey business.) Or is there a better way to describe ki work?

I know you might say: "It's all just words. What matters is the ki work concept." But words are very important to me, not just because they're how I make my living.

Say I meet somebody in a bar, a cafe or whatever and they ask me what I'm doing. I reply that I'm editing a blog for ki work. They'll ask: "What's that?" I could say: "Oh, it's a platform for virtual business process outsourcing." Maybe it's just the company I keep, but instantly the by-now uninterested party would suddenly remember an urgent appointment, spot somebody they just had to speak to or develop an impossibly weak bladder.

Do you see my difficulty?

The erstwhile CEO and founder of ki work Michael Wolff tells me this isn't really a problem as people in the world of outsourcing talk of nothing but BPO or VBPO (obviously that's "business process outsourcing" or "virtual business process outsourcing). Apart from the way it doesn't make outsourcerers sound as if they're the most exciting people to spend time with, the terms and acronyms are probably as clear as mud to the average ki worker. Hey, until a few months ago my eyes would have glazed over.

Michael and the other top ki workers have come up with a couple of other suggestions, most recently "guerrilla outsourcing". This is actually a very descriptive term for ki work.

Guerrilla warfare involves small groups of lightly armed, highly mobile combatants challenging better-equipped, but less mobile, conventional armies. Ki work enables small organizations of highly-flexible online workers to take on large corporations and win. 

While I can absolutely see the parallels, there's something on an emotional level that I find slightly uncomfortable about the phrase "guerrilla outsourcing". The problem I have is that I don't feel as if I'm some sort of successor to Che Image via WikipediaGuevara as a I sit banging away at my keyboard. 

In the same vein I always laughed behind the backs of people who called themselves "road warriors". A software salesman - not many women want to class themselves as "warriors" - dressed in chinos and a polo shirt is not Mad Max. Ditch the laptop and the mid-range Ford, get a spear and a chariot, then I'll believe you're a "road warrior".

As I said, my reaction is totally emotional and irrational.

This brings me to the other description of ki work as "collaborative capitalism". I've blogged before about how ki work represents part of the future as old-style managerial capitalism falls apart.  

I love the idea of the internet providing new ways to work where we collaborate online, across national borders, to undercut and replace traditional corporations. Certainly big isn't always beautiful any more. 

The benefits of economies of scale are disappearing in the digital world. Who needs a big office building with a sophisticated computer network and thousands of employees when your big business can be undercut by a bunch of homeworkers linked by the internet? 

So again, "collaborative capitalism" offers a good description of ki work, but as a term it comes with baggage. What I mean is, in a strangely contradictory way, some people seem to believe that if you talk about "capitalism " you must be a communist. It's nonsense of course, but it's hard to escape the emotional subconscious impact of words.

So how do we describe ki work: collaborative capitalism, guerrilla outsourcing or virtual business process outsourcing? Perhaps you can offer a better suggestion. I'd certainly be interested to hear what you have to say.

Here is tomorrow's news

Image via Wikipedia

The demise of newspapers will be a sad loss for local communities, democracy and journalists. (Okay I know the last is a little selfish but it has been my profession for too long so I have a vested interest.) But seriously, papers at their best do hold local politicians to account and they provide some sort of social cohesion. Without them it'll be difficult to find out what local sports teams are up to, what's playing at the multiplex and even who has died in the neighborhood.

Although as I said in my last ki work blog posting I believe traditional printed newspapers cannot survive or even reinvent themselves I do think there's room for a new type of local news source which uses traditional skills. To show how it could work I'm going to develop a theoretical model here.

Local news reinvented

We'll start with a journalist called Jack who has been laid off when the newspaper he was working for closed down. Fortunately he's got a bit of cash in the bank from his final pay-off to cover not so much the start-up costs of his new business but to enable him to eat while he develops revenue streams.

As a reporter and a resident he'll have developed good local contacts including with the police, churches, schools, politicians, shopkeepers and all the people who keep a community running. He might not have a printing press, but he does have a PC and an internet connection so putting their stories online is pretty simple.

Using blogging software he creates a local website covering the same things as his old paper. It is a great deal of work as even so-called 'user-generated content' has to be chased and often delicately rewritten. He can't afford to alienate contributors.

One thing he probably won't have to worry about is search engine optimization. As his audience is geographically focused publicizing the site is a combination of word-of-mouth, flyers and ads in stores. In that context Google ranking doesn't matter too much.

Undercutting the corporations

The central point about his whole operation is that it's cheap. He already has a PC and broadband. Hosting his site costs less than $10 a month. His investment isn't cash, but time. It's a sea change from his old newspaper with hundreds of staff, expensive offices, printing and distribution to pay for. Image by ~jjjohn~ via Flickr

But old papers face one challenge in common: finding revenue. The easiest way to monetize a site is through contextual advertising such as Google's AdSense. There are also thousands of affiliate schemes which give website owners a percentage of sales income from the likes of Amazon. These are simple schemes to set up, but they're unlikely to give Jack a living wage.

A more effective way of earning money is to sell ads and sponsorship to specific businesses. This is not an easy task for a journalist. The problem comes in retaining any vestige of independence when speaking to a local business. Is it advertising that he's after or a story? And will an advertiser get editorial preference?

The ki work model

Image via Wikipedia

This is a completely different form of organization from that which controls most newspapers today. Instead of a few companies with a large number of employees it is a network of skilled individual entrepreneurs. In many ways it's a return to the way newspapers used to be locally owned and run.

The solution is to hire somebody to sell advertising. That person does not have to come from the neighborhood. All that's required is for Jack to supply a list of the right contacts and phone numbers. And, hey, we've got the beginnings of a ki work virtual business selling ads for a number of these news microsites. Advertisers can then be offered packages covering several areas. But the whole thing's flexible unlike a newspaper with its fixed staff and other costs.

There are other ways for Jack to develop his virtual business across the internet. Resources can be shared. He could strike a deal with a movie site to provide reviews for the shows at the local multiplex. Both sides will gain traffic. In ki work terms it represents a form of collaborative capitalism where small businesses are able to undercut large corporations. Big may be beautiful, but in the online world it's not always financially viable.

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How collaborative capitalism could reinvent newspapers

I'm convinced that ki work's platform for collaborative capitalism is part of the future. Why? Partly bImage via Wikipediaecause I can see how it could be at the heart of successors to the newspaper industry which has provided me with a living for most of my life.

Believe me,  newspapers today are not a good business to be in, as I'm sure you'd be told by Sam Zell owner of Tribune Co which includes the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun and other dailies. His company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday at the same time as the New York Times was attempting to renegotiate its debts with its bankers.

The credit crunch might seal the fate of these once great institutions, but they were dying anyway. It's a sad time for me. This is the family business which is receiving the last rites. Both my parents were newspàper journalists. Printing ink runs through my veins.

Wishing for a swift demise

Now part of me wishes papers would just hurry up and disappear. Newspapers may be dying but the global appetite for news is alive and well. What remains will be a perfect candidate for virtual organization, for collaborative capitalism, for the ki work model.

To explain this I'm afraid I'll have to look a little at newspaper economics. Don't worry this isn't too complex, but I need to show how this isn't a business which is going to re-emerge from the other side of the recession.

As I've said, demand for news is not in decline. The audience is generally increasing. It's just that in developed countries the growth is online or for rolling TV news channels. Newspaper circulations are falling, but not at a speed that explains the catastrophic state of the industry's finances.

The central problem is lost advertising revenue. And you don't have to look far to see what's gone wrong. In the US it's craigslist that's most clearly wielded the newspaper-killer's knife. It's stolen the biggest newspaper income stream - classified advertising. It might sound as if I'm accusing craigslist-founder Craig Newmark of robbery and murder, but it is really closer to euthanasia.

Where have all the ads gone?

Before the likes of craigslist came along anybody wanting to fill a job vacancy, sell real Image via Wikipediaestate or rent an apartment would almost certainly have turned to their local newspaper. Individually, the classified ads they paid for might not have cost much, but together they represented a very profitable business.

Unfortunately any industry that's too reliant on one source of income is vulnerable. A large proportion of classified advertising has moved online and it won't return to newspapers if and when the recession ends. But ironically the readership for many newspaper titles is larger than it has ever been. It's just the audience is visiting websites rather than buying papers from newsstands.  And nobody has yet figured a way of sufficiently monetizing news websites. In reality they're all losing money.

The only way a newspaper can claim to have a profitable website is through an accounting trick. The cost of news-gathering, administration and real estate has to be stripped out. Newspaper websites are really no different from the leech-like news-related blogs which simply comment on stories that have been tracked down, researched, written or broadcast by 'traditional' media. Running a newspaper is very expensive.

It all sounds hopeless, but I remain optimistic that although newspapers are dying, something different and better can take their place. The future is virtual. Strip out most of the costs of real estate, printing presses, management, computer networks and administrative infrastructure, then you've got the potential for a sustainable news organization.

In my next blog posting I'll outline how I think a virtual news organization would function.

UPDATE: Robert Peston, the BBC's economics editor, has an interesting take on how a different form of capitalism might look. Read his view on New Capitalism here.

What can Ants teach us about Business?

When it comes to organization you might have thought ants were pretty close to perfection. Every member of a colony knows its knows its place and exactly what its role in life is. It's a system that's worked for probably millions of years, but recently one species has found there is room for improvement. And it's having a devastating effect on every other life form that comes into contact with it.

There is a frighteningly detailed report in Science Daily describing the 'new pest'. Well to us it might be a destructive and disruptive pest, but to this fairly unknown group of ants this is success. If they were people they'd be dominating their market.

The 'lasius neglectus' species got its name because it was ignored by science. Not any more. It's now creating 'super-colonies' which are destroying everything in their path as they cut a swathe across Europe. The secret of their success is the presence of multiple queens in a single colony. Other ant organizations fall apart when their single queen is taken out.

Could a similarly loose form of organization have a similar effect on the world of work? As global businesses with fixed goals and structures crumble under the impact of the credit crunch it's a vital question.

At ki work we believe there is an alternative in the form of 'collaborative capitalism'. The development of loose, flexible business organizations able to adapt without cost almost instantly to change poses as much of a threat to 'traditional' companies as the 'lasius neglectus' has had on the ecosystems it's come into contact with.

Until recently the ants didn't pose too much of a threat as they don't fly. But they've also found a new way to travel, hitching rides in flower pots transported across borders. Is this the insect internet?

Have ants found the answer to business growth?

Build a Virtual Outsourcing Business

Michael Wolff, ki work's CEO, gave a webinar on Friday 5th December on how to become financially independent by building a virtual outsourcing business.

In the webinar recording below, find out about how ki work supports people to build virtual outsourcing teams to source high-value sustainable work. With an economic downtown becoming more and more apparent, the attraction of Virtual Outsourcing has never been better!

How to hire a blogger for your business

So you're convinced that a blog would help your company improve its relationship with customers, boost its brand and lift it up the search engine rankings. Great. But where do you go from here? Who will do the work?It's a challenge because blogging is so new and every business has a unique combination of skills that can be applied to it. Maybe everything can be done in-house, but there are powerful arguments for outsourcing at least some of the functions. The question is: what sort of person should you be looking for if, for instance, you were to post a project here on ki work or on some other site?

Maybe what's required is a blog consultant. Together you'll be able to develop a strategy that will optimize the value of the blog for your business. Amongst other things a consultant can help with design recommendations, sourcing content, key word selection and developing a liaison structure with your PR and marketing professionals. In other words they'll enable you to get your blog ball rolling.

Maintaining the momentum is the next challenge. It's easy to lose the initial enthusiasm especially if blogging isn't anybody's specific responsibility. It doesn't look good if a blog attached to your business hasn't been updated for months. That's when you might think of looking for a blog editor.

This isn't necessarily somebody who'll do all the writing for you, but they will make sure that somebody does. This is a vital job. At the start everybody will promise to contribute regularly. It won't be long before they need somebody to pester them with a deadline. Believe me, user-generated content doesn't just appear without effort.

Whatever you do there will be some people who cannot or will not produce words for the blog. Unfortunately some of those non-writers will be the very people that everybody wants to hear. We could be talking about the boss. This is where you might think of employing the services of a ghost blogger.

The idea is to work with the CEO to create blog postings that capture his or her tone, style and ideas. That could be achieved through an exchange of emails, phone conversations or even second-guessing what the boss would have said. It depends on the relationship between the boss and the ghost blogger.

Another variation is the in-house blogger. There are advantages to having somebody who is part of your organization yet able to step back and report what they see. It can be hard to see yourself as others see you. In March 2008 eBay adopted the idea when it employed Richard Brewer-Hay to run its eBay Ink blog following intense criticism of the online auctioneer's lack of transparency.

The point is, a blog will almost certainly help your business, but not if it prevents people doing vital work, especially if they're not that good at expressing themselves in writing. It is then perhaps worth hiring somebody to launch, maintain or write a blog for your business. And ki work could be the starting place.