Strategy in the media

Citation

Henry, C. (2008), "Strategy in the media", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 36 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/sl.2008.26136faf.001

Strategy in the media

Article Type: CEO advisory From: Strategy & Leadership, Volume 36, Issue 6

Strategy in the media

Craig HenryCraig Henry, Strategy & Leadership’s intrepid media explorer, collected these sightings of strategic management in the news. A marketing and strategy consultant based in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he welcomes your contributions and suggestions (Craighenry@aol.com).

The mind of the creative strategist

Suddenly it hits you. It all comes together in your mind. You connect the dots. It can be one big “Aha!” or a series of smaller ones that together show you the way ahead. The fog clears and you see what to do. It seems so obvious. A moment before you had no idea. Now you do …

I call this new discipline strategic intuition. It is very different from ordinary intuition, like vague hunches or gut instinct. Ordinary intuition is a form of emotion: feeling, not thinking. Strategic intuition is the opposite: it’s thinking, not feeling. A flash of insight cuts through the fog of your mind with a clear, shining thought. You might feel elated right after, but the thought itself is sharp in your mind. That’s why it excites you: at last you see clearly what to do.

Strategic intuition is also different from snap judgments. These are technically expert intuition, a form of rapid thinking where you jump to a conclusion when you recognize something familiar. In Blink (2005), Malcolm Gladwell brought decades of research on expert intuition to the attention of a wide audience. This book attempts something similar for strategic intuition. Expert intuition is always fast, and it only works in familiar situations. Strategic intuition is always slow, and it works for new situations, which is when you need your best ideas.

This difference is crucial, because expert intuition can be the enemy of strategic intuition. As you get better at your job, you recognize patterns that let you solve similar problems faster and faster. That’s expert intuition at work. In new situations your brain takes much longer to make enough new connections to find a good answer. A flash of insight happens in only a moment, but it may take weeks for that moment to come. You can’t rush it. But your expert intuition might see something familiar and make a snap judgment too soon. The discipline of strategic intuition requires you recognize when a situation is new and turn off your expert intuition. You must disconnect the old dots, to let new ones connect on their own.

William Duggan, Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement (Columbia University Press, 2007)

Metrics as a barrier to innovation

The resource allocation process is at the root of the innovator’s dilemma. Without active management, this implicit, often invisible process will direct money and human resources toward efforts that bolster a company’s current business. The process will deflect money and human resources away from the disruptive innovations that power future growth.

Companies have to wrest hold of the resource allocation process, making sure that dollars and bodies flow toward disruptive innovation. Additionally, they need to make sure that they treat different types of innovation opportunities differently. Although managers routinely approach different kinds of problems differently, in my experience companies lump together elements related to growth and manage them by a single set of metrics. This doesn’t make much sense. An incremental improvement in an existing market cannot just be measured, monitored, and managed as if it were a bold new strategy in an emerging market.

Pursuing fundamentally different opportunities the same way guarantees that one of the opportunities will be suboptimized.

Generally speaking, new-growth approaches need to go through a more iterative development process, where the focus is on identifying and addressing the key assumptions and risks. The appropriate metrics that guide a new-growth idea should not be measures such as net present value or return on investment, which provide insights into the performance of the core business; rather, companies need to use qualitative measures that relate to success in the target market.

Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson, Joseph V. Sinfield, and Elizabeth J. Altman, The Innovator’s Guide to Growth (Harvard Business Press, 2008)

Putting life into corporate ecosystems

Ecosystem is an overused term. All companies have one, yet when you strip away the rhetoric, most corporate ecosystems turn out to be conventional supplier or distribution-channel relationships with a few high-profile “strategic partnerships” thrown in for good measure. When they are not simply fodder for PR flacks, these “relationships” are often driven by short-term transactional needs, with distrust, rather than trust, as the foundation.

This is a shame, because these collaborations can become fertile ground for innovation and learning, not just among a few select partners, but across an ever-expanding array of participants. SAP (SAP (www.businessweek.com/ticker/)) has set the standard – certainly within the tech industry – and offers a good example of the potential here.

There are many reasons for SAP’s success, but two in particular stand out. First, SAP generated its ecosystem, which consists of customers, business partners, experts and independent parties by addressing the needs of the participants. Too often, companies launch ecosystem initiatives with a clear view of the benefits for themselves, but with a much less developed understanding of the needs and motivations of prospective participants. Second, SAP went further – it focused on the needs of individuals, not just companies. Even though most of its customers and partners are enterprises, SAP recognized that participation ultimately is by individuals. It designed its various collaboration platforms with the goal of making individuals more successful in their daily roles by helping them connect more effectively with the specialized resources most relevant to them …

Consider some of the stats. More than 9,000 companies participate in SAP’s various partner networks globally, and 1.2 million individuals participate in SAP’s online communities. Roughly 25,000 new participants sign up for the latter each month, and from 2006 to 2007, its number of page views doubled, to more than 150 million. Participants contribute some 6,000 online posts per day and create better than 60,000 wikis to handle ongoing discussions, while at least 1,200 bloggers comment regularly on community topics …

John Hagel and John Seely Brown, “How SAP seeds innovation,” Businessweek, 23 July 2008

Globalization and the primacy of capital

Sometime during the last 25 years, the best-run companies settled into a routine for capital planning. Every year, the top executives would get together to discuss their strategy for generating growth. The discussion would typically start with the identification of market niches that were underserved and undersupplied. It would then move on to an assessment of internal needs and of whether the staff’s talent and resources were sufficient to seize the opportunity. If they weren’t, an acquisition or partnership might be proposed. Finally, those present would talk about funding and set priorities.

Different companies handled this planning in different ways. Some treated it as a two-year planning cycle, others as a five-year; some limited the meeting to top executives, others invited hundreds of managers; some held the meeting in the Caribbean, others at the local Hyatt. But for all, the idea was the same and the sequence identical: Strategy discussion first, capital availability discussion second.

That sequence, it turns out, has become passé … Successful companies, now and in the future, will discuss their sources of funding first, and only turn to strategy afterward. To be sure, there were companies in the past that started their corporate planning sessions by talking about capital availability, but those companies typically were either startups or already facing financial ruin. What’s new is the impatience felt by the C-level executives of many established and fundamentally sound companies during the strategy part of the discussion. They have a sense that the discussion is starting in the wrong place. They should trust this instinct. Ideas are no longer the scarce resource at most companies, the factor on which everything depends. Capital is.

The underlying cause is, of course, related to the crisis that struck capital markets in early 2008. But the fundamental cause isn’t a scarcity of capital. In fact, there is a tremendous amount of capital in the world. That’s clear to anyone who has followed the rise of such sovereign wealth funds as the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (now a big investor in Citigroup Inc.) or the China Investment Corporation (now a big investor in Morgan Stanley and the Blackstone Group). What’s different these days is the behavior of capital: None of it is patient. Today, capital has a short-term nature that borders on the ruthless.

Seamus McMahon and Michael McKeon, “First capital, then strategy”, Strategy + Business, Summer 2008.

The key to change: doing more on less

There are some fantastic examples of companies that have fully engaged their employees in making bold strategic moves that have generated huge returns. Apple was almost being written off as a computer company, and then with the iPod and iTunes, they focused their efforts on a specific set of applications and customer needs. It required a massive refocusing to deliver a fully integrated and seamless product. As a result, they turned their company’s fortunes around and changed the face of not only the commoditized MP3 player market, but also the entire music industry as well.

Nintendo had just about lost the video game platform wars against Microsoft and Sony. Then they set off to create a completely different type of gaming experience and one that moms would love to have in the home (no easy feat). It required radical changes to many parts of the company and a strategy to align and execute a cohesive plan with the game controllers, console design, software, online services, game developer relationships, marketing and manufacturing. The result is the Wii, and it has not only completely turned around their company, it has opened up entirely new segments of markets that didn’t exist before …

Because so many of these [change] programs fail, some executives and managers start to believe the old saying that “people hate change” must be true. That is not true. In fact, employment surveys reveal that the top reason good employees leave companies is over a lack of new opportunities and boredom with stagnant, never-changing, dead-end jobs. People don’t hate change; they hate corporate change programs. How can we fix that?

First, we need to fix the problems created by overuse of one of the most popular and most reviled phrases in business language … doing more with less. People are sick and tired of having budgets and headcount cut with no shift in priorities, new initiatives layered on top of already over-burdened staffs, and then simply told to do “more with less” … That phrase has become a throwaway phrase that is used either as an excuse for not prioritizing work when resources become constrained, or when an already overloaded group of employees are told to overlay a big change program on top of what they are already doing day-today.

It doesn’t work.

I recommend you consider a replacement philosophy when facing tough business situations. That is, doing “more ON less.” That means more resources, more people, more management attention, on just the few most critical initiatives that will have the greatest impact on results. It’s about focus and prioritization.

Mark Hurd at HP has made a bold move recently to reduce his R&D portfolio from 150 projects to just 20 to 30. It is not a cost cutting move. They have decided to maintain resource levels, but focus all of that energy, creativity, and ingenuity on only 20 to 30 projects that have the best chance of success.

Michael T. Kanazawa and Robert H. Miles, BIG Ideas to BIG Results: Remake and Recharge Your Company, Fast, FT Press, 2008.

Where old media thrives (and why)

It may not be much consolation to the hard-pressed hacks of the rich world, but in many developing countries the newspaper business is booming. According to figures released in June by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), an industry body based in Paris, newspaper sales in Brazil increased by some 12% last year. Over the past five years, circulation has gone up by more than 22%. In India, sales rose by 11%, bringing the five-year increase to more than 35%. Pakistan’s newspaper market grew by almost as much in the same period. The trend is similar elsewhere in Asia and Latin America.

The demand for news tends to go up as people enter the workforce, earn more money, invest it and so begin to feel that they have more of a stake in their society. Literacy rates also rise in tandem with wealth. For the newly literate, flipping through a newspaper in public is a potent and satisfying symbol of achievement.

Literacy campaigns by the government and NGOs account for much of the increase in sales of Indian newspapers, according to Ashok Dasgupta of the Hindu, a big Indian daily based in Chennai. Hiring is brisk, he says, and new papers and magazines are “cropping up every day”. Most are small, but the number of big, high-quality national business dailies has risen from four in 2006 to six today. A seventh will appear later this year.

“Not all bad news,” The Economist, 24 July 2008.

Creative destruction goes digital

To better understand when and where IT confers competitive advantage in today’s economy, we studied all publicly traded US companies in all industries from the 1960s through 2005, looking at relevant performance indicators from each (including sales, earnings, profitability, and market capitalization) and found some striking patterns: Since the mid-1990s, a new competitive dynamic has emerged – greater gaps between the leaders and laggards in an industry, more concentrated and winner-take-all markets, and more churn among rivals in a sector. Strikingly, this pattern closely matches the turbulent “creative destruction” mode of capitalism that was first predicted over 60 years ago by economist Joseph Schumpeter. This accelerated competition has coincided with a sharp increase in the quantity and quality of IT investments, as more organizations have moved to bolster (or altogether replace) their existing operating models using the internet and enterprise software. Tellingly, the changes in competitive dynamics are most apparent in precisely those sectors that have spent the most on information technology, even when we controlled for other factors.

This pattern is a familiar one in markets for digitized products like computer software and music. Those industries have long been dominated by both a winner-take-all dynamic and high turbulence, as each group of dominant innovators is threatened by succeeding waves of innovation. Consider how quickly Google supplanted Yahoo, which supplanted AltaVista and others that created the search engine market from nothing. Or the relative speed with which new recording artists can dominate sales in a category.

Most industries have historically been fairly immune from this kind of Schumpeterian competition. However, our findings show that the internet and enterprise IT are now accelerating competition within traditional industries in the broader US economy. Why? Not because more products are becoming digital but because more processes are: Just as a digital photo or a web-search algorithm can be endlessly replicated quickly and accurately by copying the underlying bits, a company’s unique business processes can now be propagated with much higher fidelity across the organization by embedding it in enterprise information technology. As a result, an innovator with a better way of doing things can scale up with unprecedented speed to dominate an industry. In response, a rival can roll out further process innovations throughout its product lines and geographic markets to recapture market share. Winners can win big and fast, but not necessarily for very long.

Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Investing in the IT that makes a competitive difference” Harvard Business Review, July 2008.

Starbucks and the limits of growth

Starbucks’ announcement that it will close 600 stores in the United States is a long-overdue admission that there are limits to growth.

In February 2007, a leaked internal memo written by founder Howard Schultz showed that he recognized the problem that his own growth strategy had created: “Stores no longer have the soul of the past and reflect a chain of stores vs. the warm feeling of a neighborhood store.” Starbucks tried to add value through innovation, offering wi-fi service and creating and selling its own music. More recently, Starbucks attempted to put the focus back on coffee, revitalizing the quality of its standard beverages. But none of these moves addressed the fundamental problem: Starbucks is a mass brand attempting to command a premium price for an experience that is no longer special. Either you have to cut price (and that implies a commensurate cut in the cost structure) or you have to cut distribution to restore the exclusivity of the brand. Expect the 600 store closings to be the first of a series of downsizing announcements. Sometimes, in the world of marketing, less is more.

Schultz sought, admirably, to bring good coffee and the Italian coffeehouse experience to the American mass market. Wall Street bought into the vision of Starbucks as the “third place” after home and work. New store openings and new product launches fueled the stock price. But sooner or later chasing quarterly earnings growth targets undermined the Starbucks brand in three ways.

First, the early adopters who valued the club-like atmosphere of relaxing over a quality cup of coffee found themselves in a minority.

To grow, Starbucks increasingly appealed to grab and go customers for whom service meant speed of order delivery rather than recognition by and conversation with a barista. Starbucks introduced new store formats like Express to try to cater to this second segment without undermining the first. But many Starbucks veterans have now switched to Peet’s, Caribou, and other more exclusive brands.

Second, Starbucks introduced many new products to broaden its appeal.

These new products undercut the integrity of the Starbucks brand for coffee purists. They also challenged the baristas who had to wrestle with an ever-more-complicated menu of drinks. With over half of customers customizing their drinks, baristas, hired for their social skills and passion for coffee, no longer had time to dialogue with customers. The brand experience declined as waiting times increased. Moreover, the price premium for a Starbucks coffee seemed less justifiable for grab and go customers as McDonald’s and Dunkin Donuts improved their coffee offerings at much lower prices.

Third, opening new stores and launching a blizzard of new products create only superficial growth.

Such strategies take top management’s eye off of improving same store sales year-on-year. This is the heavy lifting of retailing, where a local store manager has to earn brand loyalty and increase purchase frequency in his or her neighborhood one customer at a time.

John Quelch, “Starbucks’ lessons for premium brands,” Working Knowledge, 9 July 2008, http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5973.html

Retailers confront inflation

Other strategies for succeeding in an inflationary environment may require some counter-intuitive thinking. While companies typically slash sales and marketing budgets during tough times, some studies have suggested that they would do better to turn up the advertising volume … “Those that do not cut back tend to have much bigger returns for their marketing spend [in economic downturns] than during times of prosperity … And that’s a real surprise, because you would think during prosperity, people have money to spend and you’re more likely to get a return for any of your marketing investment … Most marketing spending has an impact basis – that is, how much you’re spending relative to your competition.” So, if the competition is buying less advertising, the merchants who spend more get a greater share of exposure. “Companies with enough cash to boost spending on marketing can use a bad time as a period in which to focus on gaining more market share.”

“A precarious road: how retailers can navigate inflation’s hazards”, Knowledge@Wharton, 6 August 2008, http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2028#

Credit scoring comes to venture capital

Before the 1950s, lending depended on the wisdom and judgment of loan officers. Then, a company called Fair Isaac developed a way to use four simple variables to develop a credit score that reliably predicted the risk of lending to an individual. Using the approach could allow any individual to meet, if not exceed, the accuracy of a loan officer, whose judgment might be clouded by extraneous factors.

Further refinements to the credit scoring methodology fueled disintegration and disruption in the banking industry, spurring the rise of credit cards and specialist providers of auto loans, home mortgage loans, and small business loans.

Likewise, YouNoodle has developed a database that it claims can predict the valuation of early-stage startup companies. It developed the database by assessing 3,000 startup companies. The model relies on four basic areas: the team, financial factors, the concept, and advisors. A startup company fills in a survey with detailed questions focused on these four areas, and out pops the valuation.

Arrington found that TechCrunch would carry a valuation of about $85 million. Google would carry a valuation of $88 million three years after its founding. While that figure represents an obvious bargain to Google’s ultimate valuation, the figure was a clear sign that Google was well positioned for success from the get-go.

If YouNoodle actually works – and that remains a big if – it could drive substantial change in the venture capital industry. Historically venture capitalists used their wisdom and judgment to inform investment decisions. Investors that demand lower stakes or less control in companies could more confidently invest in startups.

There’s an important lesson in YouNoodle’s algorithm for innovators inside a corporation as well. Most corporate innovators spend a great deal of time thinking about one of YouNoodle’s four variables – the concept. But almost everyone knows that highly innovative concepts will necessarily require numerous iterations before succeeding. Having the right team, the right advisors – inside and outside the company–and the right approach to financing are under-appreciated factors that influence the ability to iterate to success.

Scott Anthony, “YouNoodle: better innovation through algorithms?”, Innovation Insights, 6 August 2008, http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2618

The new logic at P&G

“Design thinking” may seem like just another new buzzword in the lexicon of innovation, but Procter & Gamble (PG) is using the approach to change its culture. Leadership is listening, learning, and deploying; cross-functional teams are cracking vexing problems across its business landscape; and visualization, prototyping, and iteration are facilitating communication internally and with customers like never before. Here’s a look inside one of the most intriguing change management efforts going on in Corporate America today …

“Once business leaders see they can use design thinking to reframe problems, they are transformed,” says Tripp. “The analytical process we typically use to do our work – understand the problem and alternatives; develop several ideas; and do a final external check with the customer – gets flipped. Instead, design thinking methods instruct: There’s an opportunity somewhere in this neighborhood; use a broader consumer context to inform the opportunity; brainstorm a large quantity of fresh ideas; and co-create and iterate using low-resolution prototypes with that consumer.”

In his new book, The Game-changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation, P&G CEO A.G. Lafley explains the difference between the two methods: “Business schools tend to focus on inductive thinking (based on directly observable facts) and deductive thinking (logic and analysis, typically based on past evidence),” he writes. “Design schools emphasize abductive thinking – imagining what could be possible. This new thinking approach helps us challenge assumed constraints and add to ideas, versus discouraging them.”

“P&G changes its game,” Businessweek, 28 July 2008.

Eyes on the prize for innovation

John Davis, a chemist in Bloomington, Ill., knows about concrete. For example, he knows that if you keep concrete vibrating it won’t set up before you can use it. It will still pour like a liquid.

Now he has applied that knowledge to a seemingly unrelated problem thousands of miles away. He figured out that devices that keep concrete vibrating can be adapted to keep oil in Alaskan storage tanks from freezing. The Oil Spill Recovery Institute of Cordova, Alaska, paid him $20,000 for his idea.

The chemist and the institute came together through InnoCentive, a company that links organizations (seekers) with problems (challenges) to people all over the world (solvers) who win cash prizes for resolving them. The company gets a posting fee and, if the problem is solved, a “finders fee” equal to about 40 percent of the prize.

The process, according to John Seely Brown, a theorist of information technology and former director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, reflects “a huge shift in popular culture, from consuming to participating” enabled by the interactivity so characteristic of the Internet. It is sometimes called open-source science, taking the name from open-source software in which the source code, or original programming, is made public to encourage others to work on improving it.

The approach is catching on. Today, would-be innovators can sign up online to compete for prizes for feats as diverse as landing on the Moon and inventing artificial meat. This year, researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Washington began recruiting computer gamers to an online competition, named Foldit, aimed at unraveling one of the knottiest problems of biology – how proteins fold.

“If you have a problem, ask everyone,” New York Times, 22 July 2008.

Boosting knowledge worker productivity

Alan Kay was one of the dozen or so scientists who invented the personal computer. Alan and the other pioneers like Doug Englebart, were not aiming to create a new generic technology with the PC but rather their goal was to create tools to augment human intelligence individually and collectively. By studying the long journey of human progress they came to see that people’s understanding and capability co-evolves with their knowledge and tools. As Alan once said to me: “If every company uses the same commodity information tools, they will have commodity productivity levels.”

That’s precisely the problem companies face today with their IT. Today, few executives spend any money or attention on shaping the tools for their knowledge workers – despite the fact that knowledge workers are an increasing part of the cost and productivity base of all firms. For example, I was talking with the CIO of a multi-billion dollar military contractor, and I asked him how much time engineers at the firm spent looking for information. He reported on a study that showed the typical engineer spent 30% of their time looking for information, and that 30% of their expenses were engineering salaries, which meant that 9% of their entire cost base was spent searching for information. Putting Google in would not help this problem because the firm’s data is not made up of web pages and typical documents. Despite this huge cost, they did not have a single person dedicated to creating customized search tools to drive increased productivity of their engineers.

Managers today have been convinced by the vendors and by their own lack of knowledge that the tools they have are the best they can get. The devices we have today are still based on designs from the late 1960s …

A few leading companies like Amazon are willing to invest in new information devices like the Kindle. Some investment banks are willing to invest in customized information environments for their traders – to give them an edge. And the military is always pushing the envelope in terms of what the inside of the cockpit of a fighter aircraft to enhance the decision making ability of the pilot. Given how important knowledge workers are to our economy, my question is why have so few firms been willing to invest in building new tools to enhance the productivity of their workers? Manufacturing does it all the time, so why is it so hard with information?

John Sviokla, “Commoditized technology and commoditized results,” The Near Futurist, 9 June 2008, http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/sviokla/2008/06/commoditizedtechnologyandco.html

The new face of innovation

For most companies, innovation is a proprietary activity conducted largely inside the organization in a series of closely managed steps. Over the last decade, however, a few consumer product, fashion, and technology businesses have been opening up the product-development process to new ideas hatched outside their walls – from suppliers, independent inventors, and university labs.

Executives in a number of companies are now considering the next step in this trend toward more open innovation. For one thing, they are looking at ways to delegate more of the management of innovation to networks of suppliers and independent specialists that interact with each other to co-create products and services. They also hope to get their customers into the act. If a company could use technology to link these outsiders into its development projects, could it come up with better ideas for new products and develop those ideas more quickly and cheaply than it can today? Suppose that a wireless carrier, say, were to orchestrate the design of a new generation of mobile devices through an open network of interested customers, software engineers, and component suppliers, all working interactively with one another.

This is the model of innovation as a convergence of like-minded parties. Increasing numbers of organizations are now taking that approach: distributed co-creation, to use its technical name. LEGO, for instance, famously invited customers to suggest new models interactively and then financially rewarded the people whose ideas proved marketable. The shirt retailer Threadless sells merchandise online – and now in a physical store, in Chicago – that is designed interactively with the company’s customer base. In the software sector, open-source platforms developed through distributed co-creation, such as the “LAMP” stack (for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python), have become standard components of the IT infrastructure at many corporations. What facilitates this new approach to innovation is the rise of the Web as a participatory platform. What will drive its adoption by an increasing number of companies is the growing competitive need to uncover many more good ideas for products and to make better and faster use of those ideas.

Distributed co-creation is too new for us to draw definitive conclusions about whether and how companies should implement it. But our research into these online communities and our work with a number of open-innovation pioneers show that it isn’t too soon for senior executives to start seriously examining the possibilities for distributed co-creation or to identify the challenges, such as the ownership of intellectual property and increased operational risk, they face in adopting it.

Jacques Bughin, Michael Chui, and Brad Johnson, “The next step in open innovation,” McKinsey Quarterly, June 2008.

The State Department meets Web 2.0

In the past, said Stacie R. Hankins, a special assistant at the United States Embassy in Rome, when the ambassador prepared to meet an Italian political figure, the staff would e-mail a memo about the meeting and attach biographies of those who would be attending to be printed out.

Today, she said, they still produce the memo, but “now they attach a link to the Diplopedia article” – Diplopedia being a wiki, open to the contributions of all who work in the State Department. The ambassador, Ronald P. Spogli, frequently reads the biographies on his BlackBerry on the way to the meeting …

In addition to reference material like the 200 biographies of Italian political and business leaders, the more than 4,400 Diplopedia articles reflect the range of the staff’s concerns – among popular articles are high-minded titles like “Foreign Affairs Professional Reading List” and mundane ones like “Building Pass.”

“It’s grass-roots technology in a top-down organization,” said Eric M. Johnson of the State Department’s Office of eDiplomacy in Washington, who recently gave a talk about Diplopedia at Wikipedia’s annual conference in Alexandria, Egypt …

The advantage of Diplopedia, she said, isn’t necessarily the ease of creating new material, but the ease in finding information. “The political section used to keep biographies on political people, and the economics people kept biographies on economics people,” she said. “It was not always up to date. You didn’t always know what the other had.”

“An internal Wiki that’s not classified,” The New York Times, 4 August 2008.