Archive for Economics
by Paula Thornton
December 10, 2008 at 10:11 pm · Filed under
Economics, Enterprise 2.0
Let me here suggest without any real evidence that Enron was the equivalent of ‘noise’ in a complex system — the squeak that portends a source of friction that is a sign of stress due to shift. Did anyone really consider ‘why’ Enron occurred — why, other than greed, individuals might have done what they did? By focusing on the ‘how’, everyone missed the real ‘why’ — because they could, catalyzed by unrealistic performance expectations, oh — and because business is just too darned complex to manage. The basics of complexity suggest that the ensuing legislative response — Sarbane-Oxley — was worse than a ruse (a complete waste of time and money), it added fuel to an already raging fire that everyone was, and still is, ignoring.
Now let me propose something even more apocalyptic: “because they could”. Don’t let the dimensions of greed and subversiveness cloud your understanding of this reality — each of us has the ability to leverage technology with access to resources that can, will and already is bringing down successful companies.
Here’s me, the individual often seen as the naysayer, extremely encouraged by all of this because of a natural law (well all natural laws really, but this one in particular): self-reference. A relevant fact I’ve had stuffed in my basket since I learned about it from Margaret Wheatley in the mid-90s:
In response to environmental disturbances that signal the need for change, the system changes in a way that remains consistent with itself in that environment.
Leveraging her interpretations of Ilya Prigogine (who ironically penned a book called “The End of Certainty” in August 1997, the same month illegal investments began at Enron) Margaret went on to explain that all natural organisms can only respond in ways that are consistent with current understanding and beliefs. To do otherwise requires the ‘death’ of the current identity (either literally or figuratively). In psychology to ’stuff down’ one’s identity causes mental disorder — is there any doubt that Enron’s downfall was enabled by its own cultural identity disorder?
While it’s hard for us to fathom how entire ancient civilizations fell, Rome is burning. Nero fanned the flames (draw any serendipidous conclusions you want from the date of this post) and the men in white coats are standing by.
by Jon Husband
November 16, 2008 at 12:50 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Artisanal Economy, Change, Community, Culture, Economics, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Trust, User Revolution, Web 2.0
The following notes are an opinion piece, not a rigorously researched and articulated article.
I have just had the opportunity to spend a week in Paris, meeting and talking with the team at blueKiwi, under the leadership of Carlos Diaz and Christophe Rouitheau, two dynamic and intelligent young French entrepreneurs. They and their team, thanks to live-wire Bertrand Duperrin, invited me and Stowe Boyd to speak at the launch of the 2009 version of blueKiwi collaborative platform.
I’ve also had the chance to connect with several young French entrepreneurs who are helping to raise the bar regarding the mass customisation (or personalization) of knowledge work with their application Personall.”.
Additionally, I’ve had the pleasure to meet and discuss with Dr. Miguel Membrado (co-founder of several leading search and collaboration related software applications), David Guillocheau and Patrice Malaurie of Talentys, and Philippe Colin of Itexium, an IT strategy and implementation consulting boutique. There’s even an Enterprise 2.0 Institute at the Grenoble Ecole de Management, headed by Richard Collin
France has a long history and reputation of hierarchical organizations headed by (generally) imperial and autocratic top management (at least, I believe that’s a reasonable way of phrasing their reputations seen from a North American point of view. I am certainly no expert in macro-economics but am aware of the general belief that France needs some economic revitalization (who doesn’t, these days ?) and that some of that has to do with its organizations and their structures and methods. However, France’s companies and economy still produce(s) some very interesting products and services, the country has healthy financial and medical care and educational systems
But .. and I believe this an important “but” … France also has a very well educated work force (compared to the North American workforce), a culture that enjoys examining and discussing issues (they cannot help themselves 
), and workplace cultural habits that encourage and reinforce teamwork. In addition, in no small part due to the maturing of the EU, there are young people from all over western and eastern Europe living and working, and contributing their brainpower and energy, to the workplace in France.
Additionally, the social culture in France is essentially based on discourse, examination of ideas, arguing in friendly (mostly) ways about almost any issue under the sun. I believe that makes fertile ground for the enracination (taking root of) using social computing to build more responsive and effective knowledge workplaces than was possible before. It allows for the best parts of the French mindset and culture to flourish, on purpose.
We bloggers with a strong interest in Enterprise 2.0 and who carry out research and practice consulting, strategizing, theorizing, or coaching tend to believe that social computing in the workplace is inevitably tomorrow’s foundation for knowledge work. According to almost any theory, its use along with the inputs of factual information and decent brainpower should lead to increases in intellectual capital, organizational capability and thus enhanced productivity over time. If this is the case, then it’s my belief that France’s workplaces of the future should be interesting places should the stereotypical dependence on elite autocracy and its orientation towards hierarchy be reduced.
If the traditional reliance on top-down dynamics can be viewed with a critical eye, and if France’s leaders of tomorrow can bring themselves to adapt to th e new leadership style(s) born of listening, sensing and helping interdependent systems respond to the ongoing rapid changes we face today, then France has a lot of potential with which to work with regard to the promise(s) of Enterprise 2.0.
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by Jon Husband
May 24, 2008 at 4:44 pm · Filed under
Artisanal Economy, Blogging, Economics, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, IT Department, Information Management, New Realities, Relationships, Search, Social Computing, Social Networking, Trust, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds
I just discovered, tangibly, something I have thought of before and had imagined might happen. I did not experience it until today.
I have been writing and blogging more over the past six months or so about social computing inside the firewall, and have spoken at several conferences about the issues and dynamics therein.
Today I used Google to search for references to me and my work, and so rediscovered a blog post I wrote four years ago about the use of blogging in organizations to stimulate dialogue, learning and innovation.
Obviously, people looking for references to my past writings on the use of blogging inside the firewall have helped this old and forgotten blog post to surface.
Update for the fact that there are now more collaboration platforms and applications, change the verb tenses and few words to make it pertinent to today’s Enterprise 2.0 context, and I think it’s still relevant.
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Blogging, Dialogue, KM and Learning
by jonh on Thu 03 Jun 2004 12:17 PM PDT | Permanent Link | Cosmos
Over the past couple of years many knowledgeable and committed bloggers have held forth on how blogging can replicate the dynamics of dialogue. They have also offered opinions and examples of how blogs and blogging can (potentially) be extremely useful for what we call "knowledge management".
In addition, there have been various anecdotes and examples of how reading blogs, commenting on blogs, and creating blog posts are activities that accelerate learning.
All this makes good sense. There are core aspects of blogging that facilitate learning in simple and effective ways.
Firstly, individual or group blogs that are focused on a domain of information and expertise chronicle and catalogue the blogger(s)’ knowledge. Over time, this grows to create a recognizable "body of knowledge".
Secondly, by offering the capability of commenting and interacting, the information on offer can be better defined, refined, explored, tested, and built upon.
Thirdly, the information on offer provides a latent platform for action – information that can be acted upon often turns into knowledge that can be shared and used in various ways.
Fourth, by linking to the blog or blogs that offer related information, the knowledge that is built can be shared more and more widely, if desired.
Fifth, the rhythym and cadence of the posting, reading, commenting and linking replicate the dynamics of dialogue in very effective ways. There aren’t the same kinds of interruption and distraction that so often occurs in conversations that only weakly replicate the dynamics of dialogue.
Finally, an ecosystem of knowledge can develop that consists of the aggregated sets of links and content the participants in a blogalogue create. And this "body of knowledge" and understanding remains online, available to anyone who cares to become involved.
I think these dynamics hold great promise – they demonstrate the characteristics that many have suggested are desirable and necessary for learning communities and learning organizations.
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Tags: Enterprise 2.0, blogging, dialogue, accelerated learning
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by Paula Thornton
February 28, 2008 at 1:03 pm · Filed under
Barriers, Change, Control, Economics, Enterprise 2.0, FASTForward '08, Freedom, Social Networking, User Revolution
Marketing Daily released a piece today that sounds remarkably similar to the key messages shared at FASTforward ‘08. It details the actions of Ford of Canada:
FORD MOTOR COMPANY OF CANADA is launching its biggest marketing push in six years with a campaign that focuses on letting Ford customers serve as brand ambassadors.
The ads carry the theme line: “A car is just a car until it’s powered by you.”
The campaign also includes a new Web site, Fordpoweredbyyou.ca. The site is intended as a social-media forum where consumers can air their opinions of the Ford brand, technology and vehicles.
“We don’t own the brand the way we used to; consumers own it. It’s not about claims any more. Consumers don’t want to be preached to. It’s about a dialogue and discovery, giving people the chance to comment,” he says. “We see it as more of a consumer site than our site.
I draw attention to the fact that Ford is an American company with the actions taking place in Canada. I add to that the fact that many of the brightest voices on this blog, are Canadians (I can only claim founder heritage in the 1600s).
I have noted more and more conversations where the opportunities to leverage 2.0 (or the willingness to embrace/adopt, typically in pursuit of innovation) are greater outside the US. The US was founded on the pursuit of freedom to act. With that freedom it became the economic leader of the free world. Are US enterprises typically places where people are free to act?
It would appear that the titans of industry need to take a step back and rethink their positions and their methods of conducting business. As Don Tapscott so powerfully illustrated in his keynote last week, the tsunami is on its way. There are crumbling foundations that will not withstand the force. And there won’t be armies bearing humanitarian aid in the aftermath.
by Joe McKendrick
February 24, 2008 at 7:29 pm · Filed under
Economics, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, FASTForward '08, FASTforward08, Management Theory
John Hagel helped kick off FastForward last week with a discussion of the what is probably the scarcest and most valuable commodity of all in this information and social networking age — attention. Attention has been one of those concepts that has been lurking in the background noise of Web 2.0, but now could ultimately mean the difference between survival and death of a business.
As we know, the commodities that determined value in the olden days (at least up until 1970 or so) were manufactured products or specialized services. As Hagel observed, the key scarce resource was shelf space, be it shelf space in a retail store, or shelf space in the form of a salesperson. That’s what everybody fought over for the last few decades — “there was limited shelfspace in terms of the number of products ands services that were available. Anybody with access to that shelfspace could create a lot of value.”
Now, however, information is the new oil, and with e-business, shelf space has become unlimited. Information about anything is abundant, easily accessible, and everywhere. The scarcest resource is no longer on the producer side, but on the consumer side — our time. After all, we only have 24 hours a day, of which six to eight is engaged in sleep.
“How we chose to allocate that attention over 24 hours increasingly is going to determine who creates value, who destroys value,” Hagel said.
Steve Gillmor famously has been beating the drums loudly and with great persistence in recent years, heralding the arrival of the Attention Economy. Gillmor recently explained the concept of attention in a post analyzing the market positions of major players:
“Attention was first proposed in 2004 by Technorati founder Dave Sifry and me as an XML specification called attention.xml. The notion was that the digital breadcrumbs we emit around the network could be captured and transmitted as a simple signature of behavior: who, what, and for how long. In RSS, this breaks down into the feed, the individual post or item, and the length of time spent on the page. In other words, the attention of the user. A clickstream recorder… or in fact, the recordings left by us as we browse services from Google, Yahoo, and every other site, are aggregated and processed based on the implicit understanding of the value of the service. What permission do you give us in return for the ‘free’ services that we provide?”
So, as Steve points out, there’s an implicit contract that emerges between producers and consumers of information across the Web.
John Hagel picked up on the Attention concept and proposes an internalized enterprise measure of value, calling it “return on attention,” or ROA. The questions that ROA may help organizations address is “in trems of return on attention, is how much effort and resources are needed to gain the attention of participants, and how much value have we generated from that attention over what period of time? What’s the productivity of that attention in terms of value received for effort and time invested?”
These are all questions that increasingly beg for answers. But, alas, answers are not coming anytime soon, Hagel says. Many organizations have terabytes upon terabytes of customer data stored away in data warehouses, but only are touching a small fraction of that information. Most companies understand the profitability of products, but have scant details on the profitability of a customer. Most companies have no idea yet how to capture and measure attention.
To survive and thrive in the Attention Economy, which is here and now, this has to change.
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