Eric Ries' Lean Startup started on a blog, became a best-selling book, and is now a thriving global movement. (There's a slick overview of the evolution here.) Despite the title, and some of Ries' arguments, its popularity can't be attributed merely to the relentless startup mania and the armies of 20-year-olds burning white-hot with dreams of instant Instagram billions.

In the book, Ries defines a startup as "A human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty."

He allows that anyone leading such an endeavor should be considered an entrepreneur, whether s/he's a product manager working with a team of 100s at GE or in a garage with angel funding. And yet he does attempt to exclude "most businesses -- large and small alike" on the basis that they don't "confront situations of of extreme uncertainty." He continues:

"To open a new business that is an exact clone of an existing business all the way down to the business model, pricing, target customer, and product may be an attractive economic investment, but it is not a startup because its success depends only on execution."

The problems is that Ries' characterization of the execution-centric business applies fully to only one very particular kind of undertaking -- namely, franchises -- and not to "most businesses." (Moreover, even if the success of, say, a new Taco Bell is largely a matter of sticking to plan, I can assure you that the bright men and women at Yum Brands (which owns Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut) are working feverishly (and successfully) to constantly innovate and respond to new challenges across their global consumer touchpoints as well as internal employee experiences.)

A specter is haunting the enterprise -- the specter of email. Where is the knowledge worker who has not felt the oppressive weight of email overload? Where is the business leader who has not complained bitterly of the wastefulness and productivity drain?

Two things result from this situation:

        I.            Email is depicted as a disease that must be eradicated, or a foe to be defeated.

      II.            Vendors and consultants offer fever reducers, defensive tactics, and visions of a utopian future free of email.

Last week the English language news sites were atwitter (in both senses) with the announcement by Atos CEO Thierry Breton that the French technology company intends to ban internal email usage among its 74,000 employees within 18 months. Perhaps thanks to my last blog post on email, The Independent called for an interview on "the death of email." The BBC did a radio debate, but obstinately refused to change their programming to accommodate my schedule.

Next to "Why won't Google allow me on +?" a currently popular question among content and collaboration professionals is, "How do we encourage employees to use social and collaboration tools?" I hear this question frequently in discussions with clients about intranets and the Information Workplace. My colleague and collaboration guru Rob Koplowitz probably answers it in his sleep by now and published a summary of best practices last year.

Last week, the question unsurprisingly popped up on the extremely useful LinkedIn Intranet Professionals forum. There has been a rich set of responses so far, including some healthy scepticism about the fundamental value of enterprise social. I encourage you to see the ongoing exchange in it's entirety. For the sake of the Forrester blog audience, here is a slightly modified version of my LinkedIn response.

Stop me if you've heard this one before . . . but think about Babe (Universal, 1995). Contrary to all tradition and expectation, Babe the pig becomes really good at helping Farmer Hoggett herd sheep. It's fantastic! A huge success!

But there's no inherent value in herding sheep. You don't herd sheep for the sake of having well-herded sheep -- you do it because having the sheep where you want them when you want them there makes it easier and more efficient and more productive to extract value from the sheep. (Such as shearing them, or . . . other ways of extracting value.)

UK-based translation service provider SDL plc has announced it will acquire statistical machine translation (MT) vendor Language Weaver for US $42.5m. Why does SDL want to pay 3.5 times revenue ($12.2m in 2009) for a money-losing ($1.0m in 2009) technology company? According to one active blog-o-tweeter (who coincidentally represents an SDL competitor), it's a cynical ploy to impress the London stock market by demonstrating that SDL is becoming a software company rather than a services provider.

Well, ฉันคิดว่าไม่ได้. (That's Thai for "I think not," according to a free translation powered by Language Weaver.) SDL wants Language Weaver because they correctly realize that there is a huge future opportunity for machine translation. This combination makes sense for SDL because it solidifies their translation value chain (MT plus translation memory databases plus humans plus WCM plugins). And it will impact Content and Collaboration professionals because:

Email sucks, right? It undermines workplace communication and knowledge sharing with its 1-to-1, letter-writing paradigm. Its lame attempt to be open and communal via carbon copies (yes, that’s “cc”) leads only to splintered conversations and further confusion. And then there are attachments, which are modeled on the stuff that used to accompany your letter. 

(“Dear Sirs: Enclosed please find the 1500 page unsolicited manuscript of my first novel, entitled  ‘Email: Threat or Menace? – A Comedy.’ I have also enclosed a testimonial from my 8^th-grade creative writing teacher, Mrs. Cartwright, and a home movie of my visit to Walden Pond. I trust you have a Super-8 movie projector handy?”)

 Attachments mock security policies and the effort to establish a single version of the truth, and they surrender control over the structure and flow of a multiple-part presentation to the random whims of the order in which the receiver opens (or, doesn’t open) the multiple attachments.

Enterprise 2.0 enthusiasts (count me in) have argued for several years that Email’s manifest deficiencies could and would be overcome with open, social, and dynamic 2.0-based communication and collaboration tools. However, there’s also long been the recognition that Email – or rather, Email users – would not go down without a fight.