Actics Blog

There’s a war going on out there. A war between darkness and light, between right and wrong, between what really matters and what doesn’t. Left is shattered individuals and companies, straying in dismay, lost in the wilderness of the modern world with it’s manifold temptations of shortsighted and misguided material objectives. Morally numbed without a natural contact to their feelings of attachment and blinded without a sense of direction they are beyond salvation - unless saved by brave and sincere soldiers fighting their way through the dark waters to save the marooned. Stand up and join the chosen bound for a daring mission to bring home the lost souls. Are you prepared? Ask yourself, can you answer YES SIR! to our code:

I’m not afraid; I will not bend or be let astray. Harnessed with a profound respect for the demonic lures of the capitalist jungle. Together we will silence the songs of the sirens and steer the herd clear of the cliffs of amorality guided by the lighthouse of reflection. Ethical stewardship WILL prevai. The future is ours – the future is ACTICS.

Then ENROLL IN ACTICS – TODAY!

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What I’m trying to say here is that we are looking for skilled developers and designers to help us realize the Actics concept in applications like the web has never seen before. If you’re good, passionate, focused, and fit for the euphoric freedom and tough responsibility in a start up - get in touch. The salary’s right, our coffee always freshly brewed, the team is skilled, mostly nice and always challenging. You will work from either London or Copenhagen. Need I say more?

Get in contact - get enrolled.

Michael Arrington’s review of Dotherightthing.com at Techcrunch a couple of days ago, clearly witness what an interesting market Actics is operating in. Dotherightthing.com is basically a way for people to raise awareness about companies’ social impact both good and bad through user submitted stories. By addressing the social impact of companies, dotherightthing resembles Actics and it is no secret that we will launch a medium to collectively assess the social impact of companies at Actics.com shortly to compliment the more individual service of our widget.

Arrington’s comments on dotherightthing founders being hypocritical by being for-profit AND addressing social awareness, his rants about ’smugs’ fighting easy targets to promote their own self-righteous glory and the 67 comments divided app. 3/4 for dotherightthing is an interesting peek into web-sociology. How easily disagreements degrade into caricatures in online discussions when people are confronted with basic values. Just as much as some people hail the new web as a powerful democratic medium for structuring stakeholder power, the web is also inhabited by alpha-geeks that proudly dismisses corporate social responsibility, sustainability and other ‘lefty’ issues as political correctness. However, most of the commentators not blinded by extreme libetarianism have no problem in telling the difference between genuine social and environmental concern and mere ‘smug‘. All in all the dotherightthing discussion points to a bright future for reasonable civic action brought about by powerful social infrastructures like the web.

Go read the post and not least the comments. And good luck to dotherightthing.com

from the Danish newspaper Information

Everybody goes green. Climate change is really on the agenda, as 2007 seems to be the warmest year since measurements begun in the mid 1800s.. Scandinavina Airline Systems (SAS-along with BA) is the first airline to suggest that passengers pay a voluntary carbon dioxide surcharge, the money will then be invested in ventures that reduce energy consumption or dispose of CO2 in a way that doesn’t impact the atmosphere. Ideally the surcharge payed during a flight from Copenhagen to, say, Bangkok (about DKK 230, €27) would be invested in ventures that reduce CO2 consumption with the same amount as that emitted during the flight (about 2.8 tons).  Here’s the point though: these initiatives require diffuse and comprehensive monitoring. It’s not enough to know that SAS spends its money well, we also need to know wether the benefitting Bangladeshi energy conservation project spends its money wisely. Thus climate thing will give rise to a global ethical economy, where value based performance will be a persistent and comprehensive criteria for a wide range of different activities. Thus, another role for Actics: a peer to peer based rating system that deploys the many eyes (heads?) of the networked multitude to survey the whole chain.

from the Guardian 16/1.

‘Marks & Spencer is to spend £200m over five years on a wide-ranging “eco-plan” which sustainability campaigners yesterday welcomed as the most progressive project of its kind by a mainstream retailer in the UK.
The programme, to be announced today, promises to “change beyond recognition” the way M&S operates. Initiatives within the 100-point plan include transforming the 460-strong chain into a carbon neutral operation; banning group waste from landfill dumps; using unsold out-of-date food as a source of recyclable energy and making polyester clothing from recycled plastic bottles.’

This is probably just one of many coming attempts by supermarkets and other major retailers to face increasingly well-informed and ecologically conscious consumers. The problem of course rests with eh complexity of the task: how to make sure that every step in the long production chain leading from the Chilean farmer to the UK purchased ‘ecologic’ cherry-choclate-chip ice-cream complies to these new rigorous standards, and does not cancel out efforts made at other points in the chain? The solution is to create a public space that involves all stake-holders, form consumer through middle men to farm and transport workers in rating and reporting the compliance performance of the different steps in the chain. You guessed it- another Actics application!

The new report from WWF could hardly be hardly be more congenial to Actics. Although focused on sustainability branding and marketing strategies there’s a very short way from Actics’ ethical TQM like advice to ‘integrate your ethics into all parts of your company for better business performance’ to WWF’s advices to ‘integrate sustainability into all parts of your operation and unlock vast innovative and commercial potentials’.

Here’s a very lightly modified (most of this is quotes!) list of WWF advises we can very much agree to:

1. Observe and understand the values of your present and potential customers
2. Get your own house in order: improve your internal processes, from office management to production and logistics
3. From CSR to CSO: The Corporate Responsibility Function should be a driver of innovation. Focus on opportunities rather than risk
4. Motivate employees: Make part of their performance review depend on how they perform their job, in line with company/brand values
5. Collaborate: Include personnel from all relevant functions
6. Communicate: If you are open, honest and heartfelt then a bit of sniping here and there from your critics will just be grist to your mill. Think about how consumers interact with the new media landscape. Facilitate new channels of dialogue.
7. Engage your consumers in your ethical journey
8. Measure and monitor: Find ways of identifying, measuring, evaluating and reporting various elements of brand value, including those that relate to ethics, so they can be used by managers as indicators of performance.

Go read the report. Good stuff!

I just returned from an exciting trip to our’ London ‘headquarters’ for a number of meetings. After being preoccupied with more myopic product development it was tremendously inspiring and revitalizing to meet with different people, branches and perspectives. We did a strategy workshop with a former MIT manager, had a very promising meeting with Anthony and Diana from ClownFishMarketing, one of the most progressive CSR bureaus globally and met with a couple other potential partners. 2007 is definitely going to be exciting and you’ll be the first to know when things start happening.

Only bad thing was flying. Although I haven’t done it since Actics was founded May 1’st 2005, we all must help reduce flying whatever the excuses.

Update: Thomas was writing about travel ethics and flying just while I was flying to London.

As we are about to launch the widget version of the Actics concept very shortly at Actics.com, we have naturally been discussing the issue of centralized vs. distributed community a lot. A couple of recent blog posts seem to support my intuition about the development toward more distributed services. So, as a kind of ‘trailer’ preceding our launch, allow me to briefly present the case for distributed communities that Actics will also support.

Fred Stutzman recently argued for designers of social networking software (SNS) to adopt OpenID to bypass the problem of achieving critical mass on your SNS to get the social going. There’s a lot of network effects (no wonder) and rich-get-richer in social networks, and you simply cannot push everybody on to new sites however great they might be. So, you should simply connect them between their present ‘homes’. OpenID is a new standard offering cross media authentication and ID management. In this context it means basically providing for socializing across different SNS’ (being friends, sending/leaving messages, logging visiting friends from other SNS’ etc). Stutzman’s compelling analogy is allowing people to mail other recipients than gmail users when using gmail yourself.

Today Steve Poland of Vested Ventures writes on TechCrunch:

MyBlogLog has built the next generation social networking service. If Friendster/MySpace/etc are v1.0 of social networking websites, this is v2.0. The service has created a distributed social networking platform — allowing websites and blogs to enable social networking amongst their community of visitors.

Poland’s argument is very much in line with Stutzman (and he actually already voiced it back in June) and what I havce been arguing in Actics. Why not provide cross media socialization? This should be equally obvious as cross service mailing or cross carrier phone calling. People are more than ‘Studying’ at Facebook, ‘Music’ at MySpace and ‘Ethics’ at Actics.com. There’s something quite old fashioned provincially local about the big social sites refusing things like OpenID. ‘Go ahead and socialize as much as you like - but only in our silo’. People are signed up to all sorts of sites due to chance, timing or personal taste. But that shouldn’t keep them from forming all sorts of communities across their different ‘villages’. This is simple web-globalization.

Naturally, I also agree with Stutzman and Poland’s expectation to see an explosion of services offering cross-media socializing soon. And MySpace, FaceBook and the other major players to support these services in order not to loose members expecting this new natural freedom offered at the next social site. Distributed communities seem such a natural development. And all the talk about widgets the last couple of months is an indicator of this as well.

Back to our coming widget; we simply want to give people the option of engaging their proxies in ethical dialogue in their own meaningful setting, be it a blog, webpage or SNS profile page, rather than dragging all their online and offline friends, families, and readers to Actics.com. For a lot of users, stating and getting feedback on their ethical ideals and activities is simply more interesting in the context of their existing online activities rather than on another new community. Especially as Actics is still new. However, we will still develop a ‘local’ community at Actics.com (launched next year) for those wanting to dig deeper and get more ethical leverage (wait and see!). But if the widget really does support the distributed communities processes we hope for, we’ll roll out a lot support for across the web inter-member engagement via the widget infrastructure. Exciting I think!

A lot of people have asked me about clarifications of this concept. What do we mean by the term ‘Ethical Economy’? Let’s start with what we don’t men. We donät think that contemporary economic processes are somehow nicer or more ethical than their precedents. The term ethical economy does not per se entail any value judgement. Rather, with the term we want to refer to the fact that cooperation, the construction of social relations, community, values in common- is becoming the most important force of production. Think about it. The more complex an economy gets, the more crucial it becomes to produce the often temporary and mobile social forms that can provide cooperation (team works, project teams and the like); the more empowered and networked users get, the more likely they are to produce innovation and creativity that can be appropriated by companies, and the more unstable the social world becomes, the greater the value we attach to more or less stable values, lifestyle and processes. In short it is the production of ethically relevant things- let’s call it an ‘ethical surplus’ that comes to increasingly underpin the generation of values.

Management is by no means blind to this, over the last ten years or so there has been a long discussion about corporate values, corporate culture, brand values and the like. Implicit in this discussion is are cognition that the ethical climate- the ways in which people go about in producing an ethical surplus has a relevance for the performance and value of a company. The problem with these discussions is that they have no way to manage and or even to make visible such crucial ethical variables. That is the problem that Actics will solve. We make visible and allow our clients to manage the increasingly crucial ethical aspect of social action.

For a more detailed discussion of these issues you can consult my ongoing book project, hosted by Michel Bauwens and the P2Pfoundation.

The Danish innovation network Crossroads Copenhagen has just launched their Actics Plugin today (in Danish, sorry to our non-Danish speaking readers). Being an early customer and supporter to Actics, Crossroads Copenhagen have been eager to explore and deploy the Actics methodology and now our latest software to engage their proxies. The Actics plugin captures the core services of the Actics method and intended for use in ‘local’ contexts such as blogs or websites rather than full system deployed on an intranet or as a public social community.

The Crossroads Copenhagen launch marks an important entry point for the future public services of Actics. In fact, we are working hard to make similar public services available to everyone via a simple web interface. Go check out the plugin and get prepared. More Actics plugins will start surfacing soon around the web – perhaps even your own!

I’ve been ‘touring’ Danish universities lately claiming that we are witnessing the rise of an invigorated second generation CSR. Something we call CSR 2.0 in Actics. Both to hint at our own web orientation, to the co-creative nature of next-gen CSR and simply to endow tired old CSR with a much needed edgy flavor. Allow me to offer my view on the intersection of bleeding edge business strategy and ethics from the talks. Unfortunately, I can only offer a Quicktime movie because of the fancy animations that doesn’t translate into PDF or Powerpoint. Besides the slides are without some bonus features only available for the live audience.

However, in order not to bypass those of you who cannot or will not download the file, let me ultra-briefly sum up my view:

CSR 2.0:

• means taking the company to the ethical economy (formal explanation by Adam) by treating stakeholders as assets in the social capital of the company rather than critical inspectors.
• is strategically balanced multi-stakeholder value management with deep impact on innovation, productivity and communication.
• is providing leverage to the 10% truly value creating stakeholders and offering every stakeholder say and sort by merit.
• is NOT manipulating or exploiting the social/cultural. In the words of Isaac Tigrett, founder of the Hard Rock Café: “You can not seek simply to exploit culture, but you must earn the right to represent it.” This translates to: provide meaning to your stakeholders by acting ethically (i.e. following your own values consequently)

Comments are appreciated! (I shouldn’t get away that easy.)