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June 25, 2009about me
Hi, I'm William and I head up the WEB Team (Web Engagement & Banking) at Vancity, Canada's largest credit union.
My opinions and views are just that, and don't reflect the views of my employer (or, perhaps, anyone else).
I can be found on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
my peers
:.BankerVision
:.Banking Kismet
:.Banktastic
:.The Bankwatch
:.Benry
:.The Boardcast
:.Buzz Canuck
:.The Client Side
:.CU Communicator
:.CU Employee
:.CU Hype
:.The CU Loop
:.Currency Marketing
:.Denise Wymore
:.Doug True
:.EverythingCU
:.The Financial Brand
:.Marketing ROI
:.NetBanker
:.Nexus Connection
:.Noise to Signal
:.Open Source CU
:.ShoreBank Voices
:.Social Signal
:.The Story
:.Tinfoiling
:.Trey Reeme
:.Verity's Our Voices
Photos for Vancity employees.
I hear that some of my photos are ending up on our intranet, so here are some more of my colleagues and friends whom I get to work with...
At a social coop focusing on integrating people with disabilities, addictions and prison records back into society.
A print shop focused on helping to integrate those with disabilities.
At a winemaking coop.
Randy Johal at a workers coop focused on property management.
A fun moment at a Zemagni lecture.
At a coop making concrete.
At a transport coop.
Labels: bologna, cooperative, credit union, vancity
posted on Friday, July 03, 2009
What I'm loving.
Just some random notes before I head out today.It is remarkable having so much time with a group of people spread throughout Vancity. It is a treat to not just be in a meeting or have a lunch, but spend so many days, have so many meals and really get to understand each other. So much of what we need to do involves building networks, and the network we are building should prove totally useful back home.
We are here with labour leaders, the head of a not for profit focusing on integrating those with addictions into productive roles in our society and a Vancouver city councillor. Hearing their reactions and getting to discuss our experiences with them is truly a treat and keeps us from getting too in the weeds about Vancity stuff. If we are to be inclusive we gotta keep it high level.
In other news: I bought a nice Italian suit. It's being altered, so I hope I can find the little shop again when the time comes to pick it up.
The food is truly excellent, and is a critical part of our experience.
The city is really lovely. Over the weekend I plan to go to Florence, and perhaps someplace else. We'll see what the trains have in store for me.
My brain is working overtime with thoughts about what this all means and what I can do differently once I'm back home. I feel a tremendous obligation to the rest of the Vancity employeees to find something useful, not a new money making opportunity, not a short term fix, but something meaningful to help Vancity along its mission. I also owe it to future years to discover something tangibly useful about this trip, so others can go too. Any thoughts? How do you prove this isn't a junket, but is relevant to our organization at large?
Labels: bologna, cooperative, credit union, vancity
posted on Thursday, July 02, 2009
Lost in translation.
It should be no surprise that the models of business reflect the models of society. And yet I find myself surprised.The nature of a cooperative is that it lives by the seven cooperative principles. These are:
- Voluntary and open membership
- Democratic member control
- Member economic participation
- Autonomy and independence
- Education, training and information
- Cooperation among cooperatives
- Concern for community
And then it hit me - to them the cooperative model is so expected that they think we're asking a different question. We're asking about the model because it's so novel to meet a big machinery manufacturing company doing business in 75 countries making billions of Euros a year and behaving according to the cooperative principles. To them it's just called business.
The intention with which you create a business affects the nature, culture and values of that business from then on. These businesses started with a social conscience and it is a part of how they operate. So they are free to innovate and expand, while making society stronger. It is social finance in action.
The model of businesses making a lot of money so you can give some of it back as corporate donations doesn't resonate here. Companies doing awful things give back money, and sometimes lots of it. That doesn't stop them from corruption and shady business dealings. When the people who work at the coop are involved with its ownership, governance and profitability the need to give a lot back doesn't make it socially responsible, responsibility is part of the very core of business.
My son asked for a picture of me eating gelato.
My son loves turtles and right near our hotel there is a turtle fountain that always makes me think of him.
Labels: bologna, cooperative, credit union, vancity
posted on Thursday, July 02, 2009
Thoughts on cooperation.
First of all, let me just say that, wow, it's been a long time since I've been in school.We had two half day sessions today. The first was with Cooperative Economics professor Stefano Zamagni, who lectured on economic theory from Adam Smith to today. The second was with Pier Luigi Sacco, from the IUAV University in Venice. Yesterday we heard from Professor Zamagni's wife, Vera, who is also an economics professor here.
Professor Zamagni is a world renowned expert on economics, who discussed the distinction between the political economy, which is composed of the exchange of equivalence of value and redistribution, and the civil economy which layers in reciprocity.
What does that mean? It means that beyond the negotiated cost of a product or service, in the civil economy there is the concept of reciprocity. Families often work this way, in that they will give each other money or their time knowing that they might need to call in a favour at another time, but the deal of that exchange is organic and isn't set out ahead of time. I wouldn't sell my car where the agreement was that I gave over my car but we'd negotiate the price later. With social capital in place, the value of the exchange can be negotiated informally over a longer period.
Lots of interesting concepts here, but what strikes me is that the history of the region created tight communities who cared about individualism. Social capital is extremely strong. People don't care about growing singular large companies, but in creating smaller companies, often as coops, which partner and work together to create the goods or services they wish to produce. Because social capital is so strong, deals are done on a handshake, and contracts are avoided most of the time. Seventy percent of companies in Italy have less than 100 employees, and only 10% are large companies, defined as having more than 500 employees. Companies with 500 employees at home would not even be considered large companies, and here they are in the top 10%.
A lot of what seems to work here is not necessarily directly exportable to North America, which is a less trusting and more litigious society. Having said that, I think the search for partnerships and the building of reciprocity has some lessons for us back home. Imagine if, instead of starting a new division in your company, you partnered with another company to achieve what you wanted. What if these partnerships were tight and based on trust, so not everything had to have an SLA and a legal contract? Would that fly?
Another concept I find interesting is the two models of competition. As an employee of a cooperative, we discuss coopetition when I get together with my credit union peers, and that's what they have here. Traditional companies have positional competition, where companies compete to take the top position, and only one can win. Here they have cooperative competition, where competition helps companies focus and hone their edge to make themselves better, but not to drive their competitors out of business. They need each other to stay lean and innovative. This seems to me like the way credit unions compete back home.
It strikes me that we actually have a lot of cooperative competition at home, but with one key difference. I share lots of ideas with my peers at the banks and credit unions, but only once I meet them and develop some trust. It isn't the default. Because companies here are very small, they are often family run, and the default is to trust because families know each other. The trust is inherent as opposed to built.
Tomorrow we're out of the classroom to visit Imola and meet with a couple of cooperatives. Will write more in the next two days.
Also, my first of three guest columns on ChangeEverything.ca was published today.
Labels: bologna, changeeverything, cooperative, credit union, vancity
posted on Tuesday, June 30, 2009
First impressions of Bologna
It is truly lovely here. The city is dense but seems very livable. Last night three of us went out for a drink after dinner, and the streets were bustling, people were out drinking and socializing. But unlike at home, where at midnight the only people out would be young people, often getting rowdy and obnoxious and drunk, people of all ages were out to enjoy each other's company. It felt more like community, rather than older people in their homes and the night owned by the young and inexperienced.My flight over was uneventful, and I stayed up well past the point of exhaustion to make the leap to Italian time. Last I slept 10 hours and feel great today.
I wandered the streets for a bunch, having slept past the informal meeting time this morning. The agenda today doesn't start until 3pm, when we get a debrief and a walking tour of parts of the city.
I have included some photos below from my first evening and morning.
Labels: bologna, cooperative, credit union, vancity
posted on Sunday, June 28, 2009
Putting the BLOG in BoLOGna.
I'm in one of those odd moments where I'm ready to go but have a few hours before I have to leave for the airport. I can't tell if I'm in a bit of denial, or if I'm good to go, but I feel ready.It's hard leaving my wife and son for two weeks. That's the hardest part. I also feel a sense of obligation and duty to discover something useful and actionable, yet strategic to bring back with me to Vancity. It's a responsibility to my fellow staff and our members that I appreciate and want, but I know that it's critical to deliver something.
As I work on our next three years online with my WEB Team (Web Engagement & Banking), we've been putting our opportunities into three buckets. The Strategic (this aligns with our vision of Redefining Wealth), the Opportunistic (what will be easy to implement based on other work going on at Vancity, especially in IT and at Central1) and the Fixit (what do we just need to get right). I like this sense of planning, because it creates clarity on what is strategic and what we just need to get done.
I feel the same way about this trip. Meeting with cooperatives in Bologna, learning about cooperative economics, seeing different models of how cooperatives operative, innovate and deliver should give me the same three levels of ideas. There will be a strategic layer that aligns with our vision, where every transaction our members make at Vancity has some positive benefit or impact on the greater region and our citizens. Those things won't be quick fixes, they will require some effort and planning and likely several steps to get us there. There will be some things we can do opportunistically, those things that are low hanging fruit or tie into other things we're doing that we can try almost for the sake of trying. And there are those things we just have to do because it would just simply make us better.
I say all that, but I'm not sure what it will look like. Will those ideas come to me? Will it be a lot of philosophy and great discussion that will be a struggle to turn into action? Or can we get some stuff done?
In the meantime, I've said goodbye to Ivan for what will be the longest time by far that I've ever been away from him, and to Amy, whose support is always so appreciated. I've set my out-of-office messaging. I've written and submitted my first of three guest columns to ChangeEverything, which Kate will publish during my time in Italy.
There's nothing to do except open my mind and go experience something.
If you have questions, let me know. If you want to understand something while I'm there, drop me a comment. Part of my obligation is to you, the people who somehow find what I write interesting enough to follow along. I am eager to engage in discussion about what I am discovering.
Assuming I can find wifi...
Labels: bologna, cooperative, credit union, vancity
posted on Friday, June 26, 2009
.eco would be a good domain to have.
A year and a half ago or so, I was introduced to two guys in Vancouver who were trying to start a new top-level domain for companies and organizations doing good environmental work - .eco. Their resumes and backgrounds were impressive, and they seemed to really know what they were doing, but still, I thought, what are the chances that these two guys could actually create a new top-level domain?Cut to last week, and I run into Trevor Bowden, one of .eco founders, and they have made truly remarkable progress.
What? from dot eco on Vimeo.
They just launched their website, doteco.info, which is great blend of useful information and videos about what they are trying to accomplish, ways to participate and help spread the message, and information about their current supporters (some of whom are truly impressive). All in a very nice looking website. Pulling off an informative and good-looking website about a new concept is very difficult.
They are gearing up for a presentation in 2010 to ICANN, or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers . This is the organization responsible for the Internet's naming system.
So what is .eco?
The .eco system will display current, detailed eco-information to anyone with a browser, anytime they need it, anywhere on the planet. It will do this by collecting information from people when they register .eco domain names for their companies, organisations, products, or even themselves and then displaying that information on a standardised, open platform.What they want to do with .eco is very impressive. They would link it to verifiable environmental action, so those using the .eco domain would be showing off a badge that they had made progress on reducing their environmental impact.
Treehugger has a great article about what they are doing.
They have one major competitor, namely Al Gore and a group who are also trying to start a .eco top-level domain. I'm a big fan of Al Gore, but it's kind of fun to watch some guys from Vancouver put together a very different and very compelling alternative to a .eco domain and see if they can give the bigwigs a run for their money.
I think the .eco domain is useful. A company like Toyota could assume that people going to toyota.eco would be at their site for specific reasons, and they could highlight their environmental products and policies and corporate initiatives front and centre. It could be a form of built-in audience segmentation (those who choose to visit a .eco version of the site instead of a .com), and not just a redirect to a main corporate site.
So check out doteco.info and see what it's all about. It may be coming to an Internet near you...
Labels: climate change, corporate responsibility, environment, web
posted on Thursday, June 18, 2009
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