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• Our eighth anniversary

  February 03, 2012

  Last week, we celebrated FMYI’s eighth anniversary. Let’s take a look back at the beginning of FMYI.

  I started the company on January 28th because in Chinese, eight is good luck. I can still remember that first morning working out of Urban Grind Coffeehouse here in Portland’s Pearl District, which became FMYI HQ for much of the first year. Urban Grind owner Kevin Crawford created a thriving coffee shop for artists, knowledge workers, and the tech community in Portland. The irony is I don’t really drink coffee. I soon became a “social coffee drinker.“

  The goal from day one was to start as a bootstrapped company and focus on revenue, not raising external capital. I’m proud that thanks to the efforts of our team, we became profitably early on, but it wouldn’t have been possible without a little bit of money my grandmother left me when she passed away. Recently, I spoke at the Net Impact conference on a panel called, “Not your Grandma’s CEO.“ I first had to confess to the crowd that I am my grandma’s CEO because her values are integrated into FMYI’s culture (resourcefulness, continuous improvement, helping others, being creative).

  One of the early decisions was a name for the company. The original inspiration for “FMYI” came from all the emails flying around with “FYI” (an abbreviation of “for your information”). Wouldn’t it be easier to just post it in a centralized place instead of emailing it around? Unfortunately, “FYI” was already trademarked. So we came up with FMYI (pronounced “F-MY-I”) which is “for my innovation” because it’s about what all of us can do to spur innovation, not just share information. So now you know the story. And knowing is half the battle!

  Eight years has gone by quickly. Back in 2004, we were one of the first pioneers with the idea of combining a social networking site with tools for collaboration. The vision was to make the software easy to use, offer tools to get things done, host the platform in the cloud so clients didn’t need additional IT help, provide free customer support, and embed the triple bottom line (people, planet, and profit) into our business model. To this day, we are still focused on these things.

  They say it takes a village to raise a child. It definitely takes a community to grow a startup. The team here at FMYI would like to thank our clients, contractors, vendors, community partners, friends, family, and everyone who has helped us along the way. We’re looking forward to celebrating with you as we embark on our eighth year together!

  Onward and upward,
  -Justin

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• Collaboration software: three key moments in 2011 and trends for 2012

  January 10, 2012

  It’s been a banner year here at FMYI [for my innovation] from new feature rollouts, being 14th on the Fastest Growing list, growing list of client testimonials, the launch of our Change Agents Unite campaign with major brands and NGOs, the start of our pilot with the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, and our Sloan Award for Workplace Flexibility.

  But let’s take a step back and survey where we’re at as an industry. I know it’s getting late already for 2011 retrospectives and 2012 predictions, but I still haven’t seen any succinct recaps of last year and a look ahead to this year for the collaboration software industry. So here’s your look at key moments and trends in collaboration from behind the scenes:

  Three key moments for collaboration software in 2011

  1. Jive Software’s IPO is evidence that collaboration software is big business and something Wall Street believes in. Their enterprise sales success is well documented (although losses continue) showing robust interest in purchasing these kind of platforms. The market for collaboration software continues to grow, and Jive going public gives them the cash to try and compete with large players like Microsoft Sharepoint as enterprise IT rolls out more platforms.

  2. Google Wave’s demise came quietly compared with the hype surrounding its unveiling. Google’s official announcement about shutting down their Wave collaboration platform ended a short but wild ride, starting off with much fanfare, followed by eager “Googlers” trying out the software, and culminating with turning off the lights. The cautionary tale? Hype and pedigree can only take you so far - user adoption and revenue is what reigns with collaboration software. Also, if it takes you over an hour to demo a piece of software, it’s probably too complex for mass adoption. There’s a niche open source future for Wave, but for now, Google is content to mimic Microsoft by focusing mainly on their Google Docs service (like Microsoft Office) and traditional Gmail email (like Outlook Exchange). It remains to be seen whether their social (non-work) network Google+ will evolve into social collaboration and workflow productivity tools and get closer to a lofty new vision.

  3. The rise of Dropbox and Evernote is evidence that people are getting very comfortable with storing their information in the cloud, whether they’re files or notes. Why are they so successful? The barrier to entry is low because the user experience is seamless and intuitive, and their freemium model is affordable. As we’ve seen lately with the iPhone, iPad, and social media, enterprise has been following consumer technology because people demand easy and fun ways to work. Although Dropbox and Evernote are primarily ways to store your individual content, they do have basic collaboration features. And their focus on making things easy directly relates to one of the trends I’m predicting for 2012…

  Three trends for collaboration software in 2012

  1. Simplicity for user adoption is going to be the name of the game as collaboration software becomes more a part of our daily work lives. Groups are interested in collaboration software, but there are two main barriers to success: too many steps (from a time and budget perspective) to pilot a platform and struggles with user adoption after the launch of a platform (especially with large enterprise platforms that need a lot of customization, handholding, and gatekeeping from IT). The name of the game isn’t putting out 50 page RFPs and cramming every feature under the sun into a platform. People at work are extremely busy and won’t use anything that requires months (or years) of customization before deployment, and they certainly won’t use anything that can’t be figured out or configured quickly by themselves without IT or training. And being hosted externally in the cloud doesn’t always mean it’s easy to rollout and generate user adoption. Salesforce is a case in point - paid training is needed for greater adoption. Yammer and 37Signals’ Basecamp product are examples of folks doing it right in terms of simplicity. And how will we know if collaboration software has hit higher levels of user adoption through simplicity? As Fred Wilson put it, you know you’re successfully achieved critical mass when you’re “Mocked and Misunderstood.“

  2. Tools for action, not just sharing are going to be demanded this year. People are trying out simple status update software platforms like Yammer and specific tools like Basecamp’s project management service, but to get full value and actually change the game for reaching their goals, platforms are going to need to do more than share info. Solutions need to offer recommendations, such as ways to operationalize ideas, connections with project team members who can help realize a goal, and analyze data posted to the site for productivity adjustments, but in a simple way. There are elements of this in LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman’s Web 3.0 talk at SXSW last year. If ecommerce sites have been doing recommendations for years, it’s high time for collaboration software solutions to do this more.

  3. Creating meaning has always been a tricky subject for the industry. Most lack a commitment to the triple bottom line (people, planet, profit) baked into their DNA. It’s mostly an afterthought, lagging behind the corporate responsibility commitment of other industries. With all of the significant global issues these days around economic growth, the strength of local communities, and the environment, the time is ripe for more collaboration software Benefit Corporations. We don’t want to be lonely. To all our competitors: join us as B Corps and help us provide solutions and business models that walk the talk when helping businesses, government, education, and nonprofits work together to create a more prosperous future for all. There’s enormous opportunities out there to sustainably solve major issues through simplicity, tools for action, and triple bottom line goals. Let’s do this together.

  Onward and upward,
  -Justin

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• Collaborating at the Innovation Forum

  October 18, 2011

  I’m back from San Francisco after a great experience at GreenBiz’s Innovation Forum. My take? The GreenBiz team did a wonderful job intentionally creating an interactive conference full of thought leaders who are defining what’s next. You can watch some of them by viewing the videos posted online of select plenary sessions from Nike’s Hannah Jones, GE’s Mark Vachon, and Steelcase’s Dorothea Seebode.

  From brainstorming at the tables led by Nicole Boyer after insightful remarks from speakers, to interactive workshops that enables attendees to delve deeper into opportunities and challenges, having Krys Freeman on stage behind a laptop stoking the Twitter conversations, plenty of networking breaks, the fun Go Game “green” scavenger hunt through San Francisco (see the photos and videos posted above), the GreenBiz team successfully turned this conference of 250 people into an interactive event. By the way, shout out to “Team Woodstock” (Amanda, Jasper, Jennifer, Joel, and Kelly) — although we finished second to last, we had a blast =)

  My workshop on “Enhancing Collaboration through Digital Tools” which was summarized on GreenBiz.com helped me get a sense of the challenges organizations are experiencing with online collaboration. Despite the onslaught of new features and new players in the industry, there remains the same age-old barriers to adoption at work which include too many emails in the inbox, enterprise platforms that people are required to use that are too difficult to figure out, and lack of clarity with the business case. I enjoyed addressing the barriers based on our seven years of online collaboration experience and painting a picture of what’s next with creating communities for action.

  At the end of the conference, I came away with ideas for how to scale our impact, and with a greater network of change agents to help make it happen. Some of the burning questions about sustainable innovation shared by participants that we’ll try to solve in the coming months and years together:

  • How do you make it intuitive?
  • How do you institutionalize innovation and idea generation?
  • How do you move from process to culture?
  • How do you create focused innovation?
  • How do we connect ideas with people with money?
  • How do we balance short term with long term economic success?
  • How do we approach individuals to create change and keep them engaged?
  • How can we produce more attention for the good disruptive leaders?
  • How do we encourage tapping into real needs?
  • How do we get the accounting right for true costs?
  • How do we allow room for failure?
  • How do we change the business model?
  • How can we create more “spear in the chest” moments?
  • What is the vision for success and what we can do together?
  • How do we get the messaging right?

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  -Justin

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• How to collaborate for sustainability

  October 05, 2011

  Yesterday, I gave an introduction for Hannah Jones’s (Nike VP for Sustainable Business & Innovation) sobering and inspiring keynote at GoGreen Portland 2011. One of the themes during her speech was “Cooperation is the key to sustainability.“ In the face of major global economic challenges, the path to finding solutions and achieving sustainable success in the most resource efficient way is through cooperation and collaboration. But how do we do this? Here are some ideas given our experience in this area:

  1. Connect your change agents

  Ideally, this audience is a group of folks who have worked together already. That way, the social connections are stronger and increases the chances for success. Creating change is hard. Build an online community so they can connect with each other to ask questions, find solutions, develop a working relationship, and support one another along the journey. You can create a closed or open social network on FMYI to bring people closer together, whether they’re in the same town, across the world, on mobile devices, or dial-up Internet connections.

  2. Share information

  Knowledge is power of course. By centralizing links, best practices, documents, events, and more, you’ll give them the tools to take advantage of opportunities. And since finding sustainable solutions requires constant innovation, having a steady flow of new information is critical. Not only can you flexibly tag information on FMYI and set up email alerts, you can also benefit from our “Thought Leader” feature to identify the experts on specific topics within your FMYI site.

  3. Achieve your goals

  Once people connect and share information on the site, they can catalyze new ideas and turn them into projects. This is where you can cooperatively and collaboratively get things done to scale your results. Project teams should be assigned (or can self-organize) around accomplishing the goals your initiative has established. On FMYI, you can easily set up project pages and track tasks to achieve your mission while using the world’s only sustainable collaboration platform provided by a certified B Corporation.

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  -Justin

  My GoGreen 2011 introduction for Hannah Jones, Nike VP for Sustainable Business & Innovation

  Good morning! I’m honored to introduce Hannah Jones, Nike Vice President for Sustainable Business & Innovation.

  We first met ten years ago while we were working for Nike in Europe. What I’ve admired is her ability to collaborate for change and innovation, from Nike senior management to global NGOs and across many other stakeholders.

  As we all know, going green starts with being a change agent. Hannah’s success in integrating sustainability into design, marketing, throughout Nike’s supply chain, and across industries serves as a blueprint for sustainable innovation.

  Her team’s mission is to embed sustainability into the heart of the Nike business model and mobilize employees, consumers, policy makers, civil society and other businesses to power a rapid transition to a sustainable economy.

  Before joining Nike, Hannah served as a consultant to Microsoft and Kimberly-Clark on their community affairs programs. Prior to that she worked for CSV, a European non-governmental organization, where she led media campaigns centering on youth issues. Hannah began her career as a reporter, researcher and producer for the social action unit of BBC Radio One and Radio Five.

  Hannah is a founding member of the business advisory council to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and was named a Global Young Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2007.

  It’s inspiring to have a global sustainability leader right in our backyard. I’m looking forward to learning more about what’s next so we can all collaboratively build a sustainable future together. Please join me in welcoming to the stage Hannah Jones!

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