Everybody’s talking about social: social networking, social CRM, social-this, social-that. It’s all just noise to me. We’re social. Get over it. It’s redundant. It only has to be called out because the stupid technology wasn’t designed for real people. We get it already.

Heck, I’ve even been blathering about transparency, bladda, bladda. While all of this is still relevant, I now see the value in fine-tuning our focus just a bit. The real potential — the power curve — is in focusing on sharing.

Sharing is something that comes naturally to people — we want to help each other. Indeed sharing is at the top of the list in All I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.

Working with each other ensures the survival of the species. It turns out that survival of the fittest isn’t just about strength, power and the ability to overpower others by competition — everyone for themselves — but that truly sustainable species rely equally on cooperation, or social sharing.

What we see in the wild is not every animal for itself. Cooperation is an incredibly successful survival strategy. Indeed it has been the basis of all the most dramatic steps in the history of life.

Business cultures are ripe with language and actions of competitiveness. Many seek to ‘protect turf’. These behaviors are relevant during times of duress and/or limited resources. But embracing such language and mindsets can actually create duress and serve to unnecessarily limit the potential of existing resources.

A very telling visual representation of the limits imposed by such mindsets is the chart grabbed from a TED presentation by Johanna Blakley who spoke about the real issues that Intellectual Property protection impose on creativity and growth. [Thanks to @jorgebarba for sharing]

On the left are the 2007 Gross Sales in US $BIL of industries with low IP protection, on the right are the high IP. The evidence is staggering. Johanna also created her own chart to lay out a comparison of common items and where they fall into a copyright scheme.

Indeed what most intrigued me was when Johanna made the subtle distinctions between the idea and the expression thereof. We’ll just leave that as a pending topic to explore further, another time.

We’ve talked about IP on this blog before. The topic had high visibility at FASTforward ‘08 with a banner exclaiming (a quote that appears to be attributable to Bill Gates): “Intellectual Property has the shelf-life of a banana.” Heck, I even remember the most significant change I noticed in Bill Gates demeanor toward his competitors (even in close range on panels at Gartner conferences where the analysts relished stirring up trouble), when he exclaimed (paraphrasing):

I learned, this isn’t a zero sum game. When my competitors make money, I make money too.

And in a panel I hosted at FASTforward ‘08, I recall the most significant points brought up, related to IP and the negative implications in our changing environment:

• It’s both expensive and time consuming to actually protect intellectual property
• The rate of turnover of products is increasing at a rate that the window of opportunity to protect them is becoming shorter than the time it takes to do so
• The costs to protect IP are rising at a faster rate than the potential earnings to be gained

[Kudos to @jhagel @jobsworth @jmcgee and @billives for BE-ing the panel, and to @skemsley for covering it. I find it none-too-coincidental that they're all active on Twitter.]

Even the almighty dollar (euro, yen, etc.) is wielding its influence on concerns over publicly-shared infrastructure as companies rethink their opposition to operating in the cloud.

Enterprise 2.0 seeks to shift the balance away from oppressive, limiting cultures by facilitating open, sharing ways of working and ‘being’. Even in cultures where this is not the norm, E2.0 technologies and approaches will allow for the natural working and sharing tendencies of people to emerge and return the critical balance needed not just for sustainable survival but for productive striving (another great s-word).