Size Matters - When Small is Big

March 31, 2008 at 5:04 am · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Analytics, Artisanal Economy, Brian Hurlburt, Business Model, Change, Enterprise 2.0, Interview, Long Tail, Marketing, MicroBrand, Personal Branding, Social Media, Social Networking, Trusted Space, WalMart, Web 2.0, Web Advertising, Web Services, Wikinomics, barriers, metadata

Sam Walton’s wife’s deal with Sam when they got married was that he could do whatever he wanted - he wanted to be a retailer - but she would never live in a community that had more than 10,000 people. So his constraint was to build an epochal retail system but in the boonies. Look at what he accomplished with this as a restraint! He also found on his path that being in the boonies also gave him a defence against the huge competitors such as Kmart and Sears. No one took someone who worked in the boonies seriously. That is until it was too late!

My point is that, no matter what you think of WalMart now, that we are predjudiced about the boonies. Smart people in all fields - not the least in Social Media - tend to have a big city bias. We too often over look the boonies and those that live and work there - how could they affect us? We all know that you have to be in the big city to know what is really going on. Of course that is why Warren Buffett is the richest man in the world!

My story today is about a man that you likely have never heard of - who lives and works in a small town that you also may never have heard of. We can never know today if he may become the Sam Walton or the Warren Buffett of media, but my bet is that if he does not then someone like him will be.

My bet is that at the heart of the real social media revolution is that if we do indeed move to a networked world then small communities will be able to stand toe to toe with the big cities.

Meet Brian Hurlburt who lives in Yarmouth Nova Scotia a small port on the southern tip of the province where the high speed ferry comes in from Portland. Brian owns a runs a Web “Something” (Yarmouthcounty.com) that tells the aggregated story of everything that happens in Yarmouth. I call it a web “something” because it is more than a web site - it is closer to the old style of really local newspaper that you might see in a western.

Until Brian, everyone had ignored Yarmouth. The fact that the domain was available told Brian that no one cared. The Province did not care - Yarmouth is off the radar in Halifax. Tourists from the US got off the ferry and drive through town and onto other more exotic places that were better known. (Nothing is really exotic in Atlantic Canada but you know what I mean) The B & B’s were all separated and isolated and could not get their message out.  So were all the social groups such as Church groups. Small business struggled to get noticed and worried about maybe a WalMart coming to town. The social capital of Yarmouth was draining away. At some point, it would no longer be a community at all.

So who is Brian Hulrburt? Is he some flash young techhie? No Brian is a regular guy who knew next to nothing about the web. Everything he now knows about how the web works he has learned by trial and error. All the fears that a church or a B & B may have about the web - he has experienced himself.

Fear is the great barrier that we all have of the new. So how Brian learned and how he is - an open and vulnerable man - is an important key to his success in bringing so many parts of his community together online. He can describe what has to be done in language and in a tone that does not judge or appear mysterious.

He also did not try and monetize the site until it was ready. He had faith that if he was able to reach a critical mass that the money would come. So he also did not carry a lot of costs himself. He could not afford to have costs involved that would force him to force the economics before the time was right.

Is this not the Craigslist model?

What he has been able to do is to aggregate the life of Yarmouth online. Aggregation in a safe and trusted place is going to be one of the key value creation processes in a world of infinite content. By not pushing the economics he has built the trust and now “owns” the space.

The underlying metrics are also emerging that will drive an economic model that benefits not just Brian but all those who inhabit the site.

In 2007 the site had 100,000 visits. Not hits, over 1 1/2 million of those, but real visits. Because of the power of aggregation, all those that live on the site have now access to al this traffic that they could never have reached on their own. The local paper reaches about 20-30,000. So Brian is reaching more and at a fraction of the cost of the paper. He also enables a growing interaction between all parties which is not possible in a paper.

This is more than Google Local or Craigslist - this is a personal aggregation that includes a filtering that is part Brian and part the client. It can therefore be trusted more than a simple mechanical aggregation. It will over time therefore have more value than a simple algorithm.

A growing part of what Brian can now offer his family of clients is the kind of measurement that conventional advertising cannot. Brian is becoming expert in analytics.

Here I think is part of the core of the new economic model. Mass Marketing needed a mass market as there was so much leakage. With no precision possible, as in WWII, only area bombing was possible. So what could a small place do like Yarmouth. Their feeble sums of money wouldn’t even be noise in the larger scheme of trying to get noticed. What Brian can offer is precision - the Long Tail in action. A B & B can see exactly who it is reaching online and can adjust to get a better focus and hence result.

This will kill the mass media alternatives. Niche + precision = high return.

For me the lessons that  I have gained from looking at Brian are these:

• Niche is where the energy is - the Value will be on the right hand side of the Long Tail
• Aggregation around niche is where the value is - the more personal the better
• Precision about what happens in the aggregated niche is what drives the economics and the return
• Power will shift from the large and diffused to the small and concentrated

I asked Brian “where is it going?” He replied by saying that “The web is changing the world. It is helping us help each other again. We can take charge of our own lives again. I want to be part of this.”

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Enterprise 2.0 Opportunities are No Fool’s Gold

February 19, 2008 at 3:36 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Artisanal Economy, Change, Collaboration, Economics, Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, FASTforward08, Messy World, Social Networking, Wikinomics

In his keynote at FastForward 08, Don Tapscott asked a question I’ve always wondered about: “Why does the ‘firm’ exist? …Why isn’t everybody an independent contractor at every step of the proecss?”

I’ve always felt that there’s entrepreneurial energy in all of us, and that being relegated to worker bee roles stifles that innovation, locking it into a 9 to 5, two-week-vacation-a-year cage.

Don answered the question with the fact that the cost of transactions has historically been too high for most of us to bear.

Well, the times, they are a changing. Enterprise 2.0 has changed that equation dramatically. Don pointed out that collaboration costs have dropped dramatically, to the point where people are peers, and the can interact beyond the bounds of the traditional corporation.

Don offered an example of Goldcorp, a mining company, which had the challenge of locating new sources of the mineral within its properties.The company’s in-house staff of geologists were unable to identify new sources with the information they had. The CEO decided to open up all the information it had on its properties, including geological data, and offered a reward to anyone out on the net who could help locate new sources. Geologists and non-geologists alike offered information that led to new finds, and the company has grown from $90 million to $10 billion in assets.

Dare I say it? There’s gold out in them thar Enterprise 2.0 hills.

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Another Sighting … User-Led Innovation: A New Framework For Co-Creating Business and Social Value

February 1, 2008 at 2:52 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Artisanal Economy, Business Model, Change, Cloud Computing, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, FASTforward08, New Realities, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Sustainable Development, Trust, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds, mashups, open source

Hot on the heels of the recent post about "The Rise In Collective Intelligence - Decentralizing Co-creation of Value as a New Paradigm of Commerce and Culture" comes the release of a second report or white paper with a remarkably similar title … "User-Led Innovation: A New Framework For Co-Creating Business and Social Value".

There must be something in the water or the air, one would think.

This announcement comes from the P2P Foundation, spearheaded by Michel Bauwens.

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User-Led Innovation: A New Framework For Co-Creating Business and Social Value

This new CRC report reveals the major drivers of user-led innovation and explores how it is affecting organisations’ relationships with key stakeholders.

It investigates how user-led practices generate business and social value through a major case study of the virtual world Second Life. The report canvasses a number of pathways for organisations to leverage the participation of their audiences, customers and citizens in the interest of co-creating new products, services and platforms.

The research draws on extensive interviews with some of the world’s leading thinkers on the social, economic and legal aspects of user-led innovation including: Eric von Hippel (MIT), Yochai Benkler (Harvard), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Siva Vaidhyanathan (Virginia), John Howkins (Adelphi Charter), Michel Bauwens (P2P Alternatives) and Mitch Kapor (Linden Lab).

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The people interviewed, as cited, are certainly amongst those that are seen to carry significant authority in this Internet era.  The same can be said of the Aspen Institute Roundtable participants, who included John Seeley Brown , Joi Ito, John Hagel (featured speaker at the upcoming FASTForward08 conference), Tom Malone of MIT, and other clearly credible folks.

At the risk of being seen to be involved in repeated and shameless self-promotion (I tagged this on to the previous post as well), I’d like to tag onto this emerging activity the working definition of wirearchy from a couple or so years ago.  I promise I’ll stop soon

"a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology"

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Tags: Collective Intelligenece, Co-creation of value, new paradigms, peer-to-peer, business models, wirearchy

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Decentralized Co-Creation of Value … and Meaning

January 30, 2008 at 8:29 am · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Artisanal Economy, Business Model, Change, Chris Anderson, Community, Culture, Economics, Emergent, Facebook, Long Tail, Relationships, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Objects, Trusted Space, Web 2.0, Web Advertising

A few days ago I wrote a post and linked to an Aspen Institute report titled The Rise of Collective Intelligence - Decentralized Co-Creation of Value as a New Paradigm of Commerce and Culture.

Today I’d like to offer readers an example of new tools and web services operating in social networks that in my opinion make the concepts and observations in the report come alive. The example involves people using search, content, collaboration and sharing, which are all central elements of the ecosystems of commerce and culture in which we will all be living, working and consuming.

There’s a small company up here in Vancouver, British Columbia (the warm and beautiful part of the Great White North of North America) that develops social networking platforms and customized elearning solutions. The Donat Group is also creating a social music initiative (Project Opus), a part of which involves Mixxmaker, a web service that helps music lovers build playlists collaboratively. Building playlists collaboratively creates a "Social Object", offering people a means of co-creating value around music they like and want to share with others they know.

We all know that the music industry is in real turmoil, and is searching frantically for new business logic and new business models. The major participants have all been under pressure from free downloads, and the price of music is under pressure as never before. Where will additional value, and eventually revenue, come from ?

David Gratton is the founder of the Donat Group, Project Opus and Mixxmaker. David recently wrote a post about why the digital packaging around music, especially as a social object, can and will be of value. Mainly, being able to search for, locate, aggregate and acquire various elements about a song or an artist that someone likes will help create meaning and in turn value.

He also wrote about ‘who’ is involved in the co-creation of this new form of value … or in other words how the market for value associated with songs is being broken up and then co-created anew.   Doing this around a playlist that is built in collaboration with others also helps mightily in creating connections and trust, and lays a foundation for putting the dynamics of word-of-mouth marketing into dynamic operation.

It’s important to note here that David and his colleagues at Project Opus and Mixxmaker put a lot of work into staying within the bounds of Fair Use, an all-important consideration when exploring new paradigms for creating (or co-creating in this case) potentially new economic value.

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Once people start building today’s equivalent of albums together with their friends, the changes to the ways music is distributed and acquired will continue to diversify away from purchasing CDs, as David has noted.  But people will still want that unusual album cover from the old vinyl days, or the most recent YouTube video clip of a given band’s performance, or a series of photos from Flickr (carrying the appropriate Creative Commons license, to be sure) to add to their own personal collection of digital artefacts about that kind of music, that band, that group of friends .. and so on.

It’s a pity, really, that this fun and easy-to-use capability exists only as a Facebook application at the moment.  I seem to be observing a rapidly-growing trend of people turning down invitations to add another Facebook application to their Facebook profile (I am one of those people).  While supposedly Mark Zuckerberg is aware of the growing dissatisfaction .. and you’d think the Beacon fiasco was notice enough … it’s hard to shake the sense that Facebook and its partner applications are all really just looking for ways to maximize page views and ad impression. 

That, for me, does not fall into the category of decentralized co-creation of value, no matter how you spin it.

But .. I suspect that in the coming months and years we’ll see many more examples of applications and services like Mixxmaker that let and / or help people co-create online things that they care about and enjoy.

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Tags: Aspen Institute, Decentralized Co-creation of Value, Donat Group, Project Opus, Mixxmaker, Facebook

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Debate over the potential role of Web 2.0 in a down economy

January 25, 2008 at 12:23 pm · Filed under Artisanal Economy, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds

Dan Carew responded to my last post on ‘Recession 2.0,‘ in which I predicted that in the event of an economic downturn, people would not be as powerless as they once were, because they will have social networking and other Web 2.0-based tools at their disposal to reach out and grab new opportunities.

Dan is a bit more pessimistic, and said my thinking was based on ‘irrationally exuberant’ boosterism and pollyannishness:

“A stock market crash is going to sink Web 2.0 ships, just as surely as it sinks others. And you gotta be kidding if you think the read/write Web could mitigate, no less reverse it.”

Dan feels that an economic downturn, if severe, may give us more time to blog, or use our iPhones from the soup kitchen, but that’s about it. But Web 2.0 won’t do us much good when the electricity gets cut off.

Perhaps if I’m being too pollyanish, then Dan is being too Eeyorish (remember Eeyore?), and the actual scenario would fall somewhere in the middle.

In a follow-up discussion Dan and I are having, I point out that if and when layoffs hit (and we all know we don’t need a recession for that), people have more options to drive their own fate, versus living on unemployment checks and hoping the company calls them back.

“People can remain well-connected to their professional networks, and leverage tools and potential opportunities that have not been readily available in times gone by. If you want to try to start a new business, the Web offers an abundance of ideas and opportunities — and visibility across the globe. Not a lot of start-up capital is required. The Web is an incredible global tool at our disposal, for very minimal cost.”

But Dan argues that if things got bad, they would get real bad, and nobody will want your Web-based services, period:

“Consumers won’t have extra cash to buy the clever non-essential item you’re selling on eBay or a Web store; companies will be retrenching and won’t be hiring consultants.” And don’t bother casting a net for global buyers, because there won’t be any.

Dan also argues that increased productivity, and the advent of the radio and telephone didn’t help folks back in the 1930s. (Hey, didn’t Franklin Roosevelt’s radio fireside chats at least calm down the runs on the banks?)

My argument is that employees and entrepreneurs don’t have to be victims this time around, in the event of a downturn. We have access to far more knowledge, tools, and networks now than we did in previous times, and this is going to help us not only to manage through tough times, but even identify niches where we can flourish. And if this works for enough people, it could help turn the tide of a downturn.

Readers and fellow posters, it would be good to get your takes on whether Web 2.0 can make a difference if things got rough, or if you agree with Dan that we’re toast, no matter how many social network accounts we have.

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Reflections of a Long, Long, Long Tail

December 7, 2007 at 6:48 pm · Filed under Artisanal Economy, Economics, Enterprise 2.0, User Revolution, videos

A song I heard frequently on the radio over the years — but was clueless about the artists — is “Reflections of My Life,” by a group called The Marmalade.

It turns out the song was big in 1970, after which the group — originally from Scotland — faded from the limelight. (A reconstituted band with one of the original members still tours.)

On YouTube, an incredible live 1970 performance of “Reflections” by the band is available, and at the time of this post, was viewed about 157,000 times. Accounting for multiple viewings, it’s likely that at least 100,000 people across the globe now have seen the performance, which up until a year ago was lost to the ages.

It’s now well established that Web 2.0 technologies now provide long tail of opportunity that can stretch into months and even years past the point a product or service was launched.

But are we seeing the long tail extending across multiple decades as well? It’s entirely possible that YouTube videos, for example, are ginning up new interest in long-lost bands and performances (as well as well-known ones, such as the Rolling Stones, U2, and Led Zeppelin), and perhaps increasing current airplay, CD sales/downloads, and thus, re-energizing revenue streams (and royalties) that went dry 30-plus years ago.

They say that the Internet has sped things up, to the point where opportunities and income can be gained or lost in a matter of seconds. But perhaps the extreme opposite is true as well.

What would you call a long tail that thins out into a long, long, tiny thread, then suddenly expands again? Is Web 2.0 delivering the ultimate time-shifted economy?

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Inside the ‘Facebook Economy’

September 19, 2007 at 4:01 pm · Filed under Artisanal Economy, Business Model, Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Web 2.0

The ‘Facebook Economy‘ — that’s what Business 2.0 brands the opportunities that have sprung up around Facebook, the mother of all social networking sites.

Why the ‘Facebook’ rather than the ‘MySpace’ economy? Because, the article’s authors explain, Facebook has opened up its network for developers to build and sell new applications.

There’s a couple of developers, for example, that posted an application that turns Facebook photos into a slide show, and has generated more than $200,000 in ad sales. Everyone is piling on, in fact. The article notes that in just 10 weeks, hundreds of developers launched more than 2,500 new applications, triggering 139 million downloads. Bay Partners, a prominent venture capital firm in the Valley, reportedly has set aside more than $12 million to bootstrap 50 new Facebook applications

Essentially, Facebook has opened itself as a bazaar or online mall of sorts, in which it , starting in May, granted developers the right to hawk applications to its huge installed base of users. In exchange, Facebook becomes a richer environment.

While the enterprise aspect to this is still very limited (the Facebook economy seems to be mainly consumeristic fun-time apps), the model is something worth watching closely. The growth of this phenomenon will result in an area of opportunity at the enterprise level.

First, eventually, such applications on demand will be increasingly targeted at businesses, giving rise to a new breed of “Micro-ISVs.” And, as these applications — or services — become available on the open market, components, enterprises may come to rely more on functions provided through Software as a Service model, versus developing and maintaining everything themselves in house, or handing everything over, lock, stock, and barrel, to a SaaS provider.

Enterprises can then aggregate services on an on-demand basis to meet their own customer demands, or teams or departments within enterprises can quickly assemble needed functionality on an ad-hoc basis. Many, if not all, of such services may be provided from third parties. It is likely, then, that MicroISVs may be the providers of these service-oriented components, perhaps charging on a per-transaction basis. A MicroISV may be an entrepreneur working from a spare bedroom; or it may be a unit of a larger non-IT enterprise as well. Many of today’s enterprises have already evolved into confederations of entrepreneurs and ad-hoc teams on a process level.

Ultimately, we’ll be seeing loosely coupled businesses, run on loosely coupled services. Just as businesses are evolving into loosely coupled components, so to are the systems that support them. Many industry analysts predict that the concept of an “application” will be obsolete — rather, our businesses will depend on services that are combined, mixed, matched, mashed and reused as needed. Over the years, there has been a great deal of angst about the viability of the “hollow” corporation, which links processes and services to customers, but produces nothing itself. Thanks to new technologies, what was a linear supply chain is now close to being a synchronous network, affording better visibility and control over processes.

In fact, more and more solutions are being built collaboratively, paving the way for the creation of modular, standardized building blocks that can be assembled, on-demand, for specific requirements. Application vendors that play the role of “assemblers” — rather than “creators” — can leverage these components and quickly deliver services or components at reasonable prices will have the upper hand in the market going forward.

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Social Web Bill of Rights: Does It Apply Inside the Firewall?

September 5, 2007 at 3:40 pm · Filed under Artisanal Economy, Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Social Media, SocialText, Web 2.0

A group representing the Digitari of our era — Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington — teamed up to write and post what they’re calling “A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web.”

The document is mercifully short, and lays out these rights in a very succinct way. The document addresses data ownership, control over this information, and freedom to distribute this information in the manner the owner sees fit.

This is great stuff, as it defines the rights of service consumers versus providers. But it does leave an open question: how does it apply to users within corporate settings, using corporate networks? We already know that email and IM messaging is not the “personal property” of the originators, but that of the company from which it originated.

The Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web reads as follows:

“We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

• Ownership of their own personal information, including:
  • their own profile data
  • the list of people they are connected to
  • the activity stream of content they create;
• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

• Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
• Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
• Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
• Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.”

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The Artisanal Economy - Food

September 3, 2007 at 2:40 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Artisanal Economy, Enterprise 2.0, Food Systems, Social Computing, Social Media

It is not news that most farmers cannot make a living anymore. It’s not that they are not efficient. It’s that they are usually restricted to selling only to one or two wholesalers. We in turn buy food that is usually industrially processed where safety and quality are now becoming a concern.

It’s not even about organic or not. Much of the Organic Produce is grown and packaged industrially and sold via a global distribution chain. The small local farmer hasn’t a chance. We buy food that is ever riskier and from a process that harms our world. But there is an alternative - it’s the local Farmer’s market.

Griggstown has added three Philadelphia market days to its schedule this year - Clark Park on Saturdays and Thursdays and Headhouse on Sundays (starting July 1). They will also be at five of the Whole Foods farm markets, and will continue their participation in five New Jersey community markets - Bernardsville, Lawrenceville, Montgomery, Moorestown (starting in June) and West Windsor.

“Farmers markets are a trend that is only going to get bigger,” said Matthew Sytsema, Griggstown’s executive chef and store manager.

“Consumers want to know where their food is coming from and what goes into it. They want to talk to the farmer, to the chef.”

I suspect that this is a huge trend that has the power to transform not only our food system back to being more local and back to offering a farmer a living but to help re-establish our local communities as well.

The Department of Agriculture pegs farmers-market sales at $1 billion of consumer spending annually, a small but, for many, a very significant part of the food business. But farmers markets bring more than economic growth, more than meaningful interaction between farmers and consumers.

They bring a sense of community, reviving a “town square” tradition lost in many urban neighborhoods.

It is evident at Clark Park and markets throughout the region; at mobile “street corner” markets, where single vendors sell produce from the back of a truck; and on Sunday mornings in Washington, D.C., at toney Dupont Circle, where farmers occupy most of a city block, selling fresh local and seasonal foods.

Food markets become community gathering places, not just for farmers and shoppers, but for artisans, neighborhood bake sales, street musicians, and vendors who offer crafts, flea-market finds and miscellany, as is the case at Clark Park.

The importance of farmers markets was nowhere more evident than in New Orleans, where the Crescent City market was one of the first traditions restored, reopening little more than a year after Katrina hit. It provided hope, as well as one of the few fresh-food sources for struggling survivors.

In an article in the current issue of Grit, the rural lifestyle magazine, vendor Lucy Capdebos is quoted:

“The reopening was a wonderful day in New Orleans. Grocery stores didn’t have any fresh produce, and people came from all over,” she said.

“Some people had never been to a farmers market before and experienced how much better- tasting everything is. Now the market is bigger than ever.”

I think that Social Software can offer this movement a lot of help and so make a major contribution to the overall health of our world - for better profitability for farmers means that they can be better stewards of their land.

The farmer’s market is a return to how business was conducted for all time until recently. At its heart is community - local community - the juice is socialization - the transaction is all about the relationship between the buyer and the seller. When I was in Arras in France this spring, we went to the market.

  This market has been going for maybe a thousand years. I bet that if you were local, you would be buying meat or cheese from the same family for generations. No need for external quality control here. No need to find a community here. Even strangers like us were treated as guests and were routinely offered tasters.

I think that the new Artisanal online community will be like this. There will be “Markets” that have a wide range of goods - not just food and not just items. They will be rooted in something - maybe a place. You will go to have a social time as much as to buy things. You will get to know both the sellers and the other buyers well.

As I look backwards over the millenia, it is clear to me that how we get our food drives the nature of human society. Hunter Gatherers gave way to agricultural societies and to hierarchies. Agriculture gave way to Agribusiness and to a dietary and environmental crisis that could be the end of us. Re-establishing viable local food systems could save us and social software could be the technological catalyst that drives this trend.
Sounds like a great spec for a community to build online to add power to the physical reality. What do you think would be a great add on to your local farmer’s market?

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The Rebirth of the Artisanal Economy - Where Work and Life come home

September 1, 2007 at 6:29 am · Filed under Artisanal Economy, Enterprise 2.0, Social Media

Back in my old life, I was an SVP HR for a major bank. Even then, in the 1980’s and early 1990’s we could see that work/life was a huge issue. 65% of our staff were women and most had families. But I regret that nothing that we did back then had much of an impact.

But today technology is allowing more and more of us to work from home legitimately.

But I think that there is more than simply relocating the industrial world of work back home - I wonder if 2.0 is allowing a return to how humans always understood the idea of an “Economy”?

When most things that you want to buy - especially for some one else - seem to cost nothing and are all the same and made in China - what are you going to do? When an object is made with no love or care - what does it mean to own it or to give it? What is the energy invested in an object that is made only with cost saving in mind?

When it seems that all manufacturing is going to China and there are no manufacturing jobs left in the Western World - or much of the developing world either - what do you do? Do we give up? Do we try and make objects in an even more mercenary way?

What some people are doing is that they are going back to a preindustrial manufacturing approach. The web is empowering those who want to use real skills to make things because it can connect them directly to people who want to buy objects that are made with love and care.

The artisan is returning.

Jen Ham is one of these. As my son codes on his computer, so Jen sews on her sewing machine. Jen makes the kind of object that is always a one off, by her own hands and with love. She makes the kind of object that is a joy to give and to receive.

Etsy makes it easy to connect to you.

I can “see” a vast new economy emerging along these lines as we all get more familiar with how to do this and as we get tired of stuff and want to find again objects with meaning.

I can see a return to the real meaning of an economy (Thanks Fred):

ECONOMY: Middle English yconomye, management of a household, from Latin oeconomia, from Greek oikonomia-, from oikonomos, manager of a household : oikos, house + nemein, to allot, manage.

Where more and more work and all of life returns to one place - the home - and our experiment where all work left home winds down.

Oh you say - there will be still lots of work in other places - yes but the trend is in place. Here is some cool data from Joe here at Fast Forward -

At IBM, 42 percent of its workforce of 350,000 employees rarely comes into an IBM office.

Dan Pelino, general manager of IBM’s global health care and life sciences business, made this bursty comment: “We don’t care where and how you get your work done. We care that you get your work done.” IBM says it saves $100 million a year in real estate costs because it doesn’t need the offices…. There’s a direct cost savings attributable to burstyness.

At on-the-go Accenture, mobility rules. The company has no corporate headquarters, and not even the CEO has an office with his name on the door. Workspaces are reserved and used on a day-to-fay basis, like a hotel room. “Having a big desk as a sign of status with lots of family photos and you know, carpeting that’s fluffy and nice, that is a vision of the past,” said Janet Hoffman, executive vice president of Accenture. Well, in a bursty economy, all those nice accouterments can be part of your home office, if you like.

And what about consulting? Accenture is one end but also there is Artisanal Consulting now as well: Don’t we also want a consultant who cares about us deeply as a person rather than sees us simply as another billing block?

More soon on artisanal consulting…

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