An innovation is simply a great idea that made it out the door.

Of course a clear definition includes the idea that innovation creates new value. However, it is useless if it never ships.

Can it get any clearer in a single short sentence?

My phone is offline. No incoming calls. No incoming text. No incoming email. It’s as good as a flashlight. I need to take time out to sleep (I’ve been up for more than 24 hours) and settle my disturbed spirit.

This has made me realize how little I take time off, how close I am to burn out and how unnecessary it is to work all the time despite the need to pay the bills.

This year, we have restructured Semacraft and Synergia Holdings Ltd and started out by dropping any category of work that isn’t core or enabling for our objectives. It may mean working a little more but it definitely means working a whole lot more smarter going forward. And that goes for church involvement too.

Yep. I said church.

Sometimes we get so involved in projects and helping out we forget to say no when it’s clearly obvious we have no bandwidth to do any more good. So this month marks my retirement from small group ministry at Kileleshwa Covenant Community Church and restricted involvement in the Children’s department.

That’s how 2011 has started for me. Letting things go to make room for where I want to go.

Happy 2011.

Today, we the Muchiri’s celebrate 10 years of marriage. We have friends who’ve been married 36 years. And no, they are not our parents

When we got married, depressing statistics coming out of the US said we were very likely to end up divorced or separated within the first 2 years. Our peers told us the first year was always the hardest. Then they said the first three years were always the hardest. Then we heard that the first five years were touch and go. We’re here ten years later, still married and happy to be together.

Are you married? What horror stories have you been told about marriage and why yours won’t last? What will it take to prove the naysayers wrong? Let go off the fear, latch onto love and step into a brave new world for roses (complete with thorns) and amazing fragrance

This post originally appeared on Semacraft’s ‘This, That & The Other’ Blog.

Listening and engagement. Very common terms in the ‘sociosphere’. We may have gotten listening right for the most part but engagement still has a ways to go. Unlike listening, real engagement seems to mean different things to different people making measurement all that more difficult. And probably futile. I do stand to be corrected on that though.

For some brands, engagement happens when their tweets get re-tweeted. For others it happens when people post on their Facebook wall. I like Jeremiah Owyang’s definition of engagement, it makes it easier to demystify this animal. However, I feel there’s a missing component. But first, @jowyang’s definition from his blog article about three years ago.

We seem to agree that engagement happens when visitors show some interest in the content. I think that’s a great place to start. But what happens after they show their interest? Not all of the interest visitors indicate requires some response from the brand but it is increasingly common for brands to [apparently] ignore direct requests for support/service. Take for instance Esteban Kolksy (@ekolsky). AT&T apparently was not treating him right. He tweeted his dissatisfaction at around 3am UTC on 21st Aug, 2010 and from what I have seen as of 1900hrs UTC on the 22nd, they hadn’t responded.

Because engagement connotes some kind of conversation and relationship, factoring the other side of the engagement is necessary in order to determine how well the brand is doing in the social spaces it’s present. If the content strategy is spot on, and the public is commenting, linking, tweeting and retweeting it, we can assume some engagement is going on. If some of that engagement involves questions, suggestions or opinions which the brand ignores, the level of engagement will be difficult to sustain. Even with new content. Why? Because humans don’t do very well in conversations with inanimate objects. A brand that doesn’t respond to engagement by engaging back is inanimate. Speaking back gives the brand humanity. Life.

So how does this affect social CRM? A successful implementation of CRM involves people, data, culture, process and  technology handled right. People and culture are the biggest parts of the mix. If the culture the internal people have isn’t very social, adoption of social CRM is doomed to fail. An inanimate brand in the ‘sociosphere’ is a sign of an organization with a poor social culture internally.

Would love to hear your opinion. Jump in anytime and interrupt my rantings…

Tight situations mean different things to different people. For the businessman, it’s when all the bills are due (plus taxes) and your total cash plus lines of credit only match up to a fifth of it all. Oh, and they are due today! For the parent with a sick child it could be the operation that has to be done really really soon and the specialist needed can’t be found for another month. For others, it’s looking down the barrel of a gun as a thug stuffs you into the trunk of your own car.

Have you ever been in a tight situation?

Have you ever noticed how frustrated you get when telling your story about the tight situation you are in? The frustration usually comes from the feeling that people just don’t get it. This bank manager just doesn’t get how badly you need the overdraft and how capable you are of settling it in a week. Your friends don’t seem to get how dire the situation with your child really is. You’re in a tight situation and you’re in no company.

Now have you ever been in a tight situation?

Two basic options present themselves in the midst of a tight situation.  Fight or flight. Same two options that faced our hunter-gatherer forefathers when faced by a lion in the wild. I can stay and deal with the situation no matter how it turns out, or I can run, changing my number and moving house in the process so my creditors won’t know where to find me. Stories abound in Kenyan hospitals of terminally ill children whose parents ran. The situation was too tight for them. They felt they can’t fight. They chose flight.

If there ever was a tight situation, King Jehoshaphat’s was definitely it. He chose to fight. The odds were stacked up against him but he disregarded the statistics and the mountain of evidence and obeyed his God.

Are you in a tight situation? What do you really believe deep down? Is there hope? Is there honor in staying the course, fighting the fight? So, will you run or stay on and fight?

In Africa, the image of a group of (usually men) sitting under a tree talking is fairly common.  In fact, many villages had a ‘the tree’ where people met to have informal meetings or just impromptu ones.  If you were new in the village, you made stopping by the tree one of your priorities (unless there was an invitation only meeting happening). When formal [read Western] education was introduced, it also happened under a tree. At least until the classrooms were put up.

We have new trees in Africa now. They are of a genus like none our parents ever did see. They are called Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed….need I go on? We meet under these giant trees to connect with each other, build relationships, learn from each other, rally behind causes and so much more. Much more than the old tree could help us do.

I’m under the Twitter tree as @muchiri, the Facebook tree as facebook.com/muchiri and under the LinkedIn tree as linkedin.com/in/muchiri

Come to the tree. Let’s talk. Let’s connect. Let’s learn.

Originally posted at This, That & The Other a few hours ago.

In an interview with Tom Asacker on his new book Success Made Simple: An Inside Look at Why Amish Businesses Thrive, Eric Wesner makes mention of the dichotomy between efficiency and effectiveness in relation to technology and its impact on relationships.  It brought to mind what we hear so often nowadays, that a company is now ‘doing’ social.  

Have we forgotten that before doing social we were social?Can a business that is not social be effective in the social space? What quality of relationships would such a business have with its clients? While some businesses need less face to face (FTF) time than others, I believe some effort needs to be made to maintain effective relationships, not just efficient ones. Making ‘house calls’ on your customers may not be viable anymore because of the geographical constraints that may exist but a phone call, a Twitter message or even an email just for them would go a long way to building effective relationships.

For instance, my bank is a social one.  I think it is because the staff ask after me, my family, the state of my business and once in a while how a certain current event is affecting our sales.  I feel that they are keen on building a real relationship with me.  My previous bank had no such culture. It was more of the slam-bam-thankYouSir kind.  If my current bank establishes an outpost on one of the social media networks and continues to do what they do offline there, they would be great.  However, if my former (impersonal cold distant) bank, which has even invested in Relationship Managers,  attempted the same thing they would come across as unauthentic and insincere.

In short, the decision to ‘do social’ is a flawed one from the start because social business don’t have to ‘do’ it. They ARE it.

Don’t go out today to ‘do friendly’. Go out and be a friend.

I’ve been me a really long time. I have gotten used to it. In fact, I like it.  A lot.  You see, I have had lots of practice and become really good at it. I can afford to brag about how good I am at being me because I know no matter how hard you try, you could never be a better me than I am.

Sometimes, I feel the world doesn’t get how hard being me can be. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather be me than anyone else, but it doesn’t mean it’s easy.  There are deadlines I miss (and really can’t explain why), there are expectations I don’t live up to (and sometimes have a clue why) and there are messes I create that are so monumental they should be memorialized, somehow.  All this and more contribute to making being me no walk in the park.

And now I want to be a better me.

I’ve read the books, listened to the speakers, Googled, asked, gone to church and done all those things people like me do to become better at being themselves. After all the effort, I don’t think I’m all that better. Maybe just a little bit.

That’s what I think it eventually boils down to. If I can be a little bit better at being me every week, I will be a whole lot better at being me by the end of year.

Are you better this week than you were last week? A little bit maybe?

That’s a pretty long title. It’s also become one of my favorite quotes. I think a friend of mine attributed it to Pastor Muriithi Wanjau.

In this blog post, Seth Godin proposes that we become what we expose ourselves to (or we become what we are inspired to be by what we expose ourselves to). For instance you may just become angry if you expose yourself to anger. You will probably want french fries if you expose yourself to fast food ads. You will want to become a get-rich-quick story if you expose yourself to stories of people who got rich quick. You get the picture.

It’s part of how we become what we ‘eat’.

The end of your story is known by the persistence of your present state. You can disrupt the end of the story by changing what you are becoming today.  I have in the past persistently exposed myself to people who treated me like a third rate citizen and an owner of a 10th rate business. I consumed their sentiments and thought about them all the time. If I continue to persist in exposing myself to these kinds of people there’s a real danger I will begin to think so in my heart. As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.  Therein lies the case for putting your foot down and becoming aggressive in what you expose yourself to.

I am going to be in business a long time. Life is too short to spend precious time doing business with brands/people who make it their business to be condescending.

What are you ‘consuming’? Whose opinions are you spending time seeking out? Who have you allowed to influence how you do business? Which clients have you sought to add to your portfolio?

I am disrupting tomorrow today.

Clay Shirky in his latest post ‘The Collapse of Complex Business Models’ makes a statement I find very important for businesses seeking to keep their audience engaged on the web.

“When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to.”  He describes these ecosystems as complex systems where the system’s principals assume that complexity is an automatic advantage.  It’s a post that’s got me considering how I go about doing business.

Complex systems collapse and when they do, they collapse into simplicity.  Clay speaks of some heavy stuff here so it seems really trivial to bring just one simple thought into this and yet it is the one thing that occurred to me.  How complex are the ecosystems we attempt to build around our client’s brands?  It could be as simple as site navigation or account security or even integration with various social media APIs (ok, maybe that last one isn’t so simple).

Visitors to websites are already inundated with a multitude of options online. Once they arrive at a space prepared for them, they shouldn’t have to continue sifting and figuring stuff out.  If they do, they will eventually disperse, abandoning the brand’s online space (probably off-line too) to try a new thing (read competitor).  Simple is the new black.

Is simplicity top of mind for your business?