Congratulations and good luck …

[he] turns his attention to how Web 2.0 trends are creating new challenges for the publishing industry

by Clay Shirky is an “examination of how the wildfire-like spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form groups and exist within them, with profound long-term economic and social effects-for good and for ill”

It’s about how the tools of the web enable people to organize without formality, but doesn’t stop there but includes ideas about how organizations might use community tools like social software to build stronger customer relations, communities of practice and more

Some take-aways, all highlighting by me:

You can think of group undertaking as a kind of ladder of activities, activities that are enabled or improved by social tools. The rungs on the ladder, in order of difficulty, are sharing, cooperation, and collective action …

Hmm, ladders everywhere – nice metaphor but somehow flawed: We don’t leave the rungs when we step up, we just build upon them.

Anyway, looks interesting. Check out the mp3 of a discussion with Brian Eno and Clay Shirky (there are also some video snippets). Here’s the blurb of this recent evening at ICA:

Everywhere we look, it seems, companies and organisations are trying to harness the alleged wisdom of crowds – the power of groups of people to come together through the internet and share with one another, work together, or take some kind of collective public action. One of the world’s leading experts on social and technological networking, Clay Shirky, Professor in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University and the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising without Organisations, comes to the ICA to talk about how the idea of networks, and particularly online social networks, is changing everything around us.

Experientia has collected more stuff:

- Book site
- Review by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing
- Review by Helen Walters and Matt Vella in Business Week
- Interview with author by The Guardian newspaper

There’s another interview with him, conducted by Jon Lebkowsky at the World Changing site, talking about different media uses and preferences of people:

[Shirky:] Here is my hypothesis: that one of the things that people create some kind of really deep mental model for is modes of communication. People my age and older have a very good sense of when to call someone on the phone, and when to send them a personal letter, and when to go see them. But we don’t have such a good sense of when to email them, or IM them, or Twitter or what have you, because all of that stuff was invented after we had already solidified our sense of the media landscape. All of those things are still new.

And here’s a video of Clay Shirky discussing HCE, found at the Berkman Center, uploaded by Robert to Sevenload for easy embedding:

And there’s also David Weinberger who was live blogging Shirky’s book presentation at Harvard, extracting the key points about group forming, collaboration and the effects of social software:

[...] Now we’re seeing a set of tools that make it easier to create large groups: Ridiculously easy group forming. E.g., email unexpectedly became the dominant service used on the original Internet. That was because of the “reply all” button, a social feature.

But there’s been an enormous social lag. This tech has not transformed society as rapidly as it might. That’s because groups are innately conservative. No one wants a protocol that shuts out group members. It needed to become ubiquitous and boring. That’s when the social effects become interesting.

Well, yes, while we’re not there yet we’ll be there in no time. Now back to Twittering.

Overall I can say that I really liked the “IT Value Stack” and recommend it to you. The subject is advanced, and still it is written in a lively manner, with some candid humour here and there and with interspersed comments by external experts. This is a good read and well-recommended as a way of educating senior managers about the need for better business/IT-alignment.

Of course I am sided as the book’s motivation and goals are dear to me – still the reasoning is sensible: If you want to build nimble and creative organizations, organizations that are engaging places to work in you need to take IT into account. We can’t stop at optimizing repeatable business processes. Yes, that’s where it started – doing things with perfect repeatability, at increasing scale and efficiency, leading to centralized and hierarchical models of IT leadership. Yet, today IT must rather act as facilitator for knowledge work, collaboration and innovative ways of working: Distributing and supplying “tools of creativity” in organizations, installing agile and flexible management processes etc. can help organizations to cope with the need for change and innovation. Information technology is a key enabler in this process, changing the ways people organize, lead, allocate resources, plan, and collaborate. Obviously technology (like the many varieties of social software) is not an answer in itself, they have to be implemented in a productive way (and need apt consulting support, hint hint …).

Now, IT is perfectly placed to help businesses identify and enable opportunities for business innovation: it has both insight into new technologies and into the entire business organization, but it must leave its obsession with operational excellence and keeping things running to perfection. And when we want to create a compelling case for ITs role in business innovation we must talk in the language of business not in technology terms.

Ade calls for a re-thinking of IT management practices, something which is definitely necessary as IT is influencing and changing businesses so much, and is under pressure at the same time, i.e. when the only form of innovation that many CIOs and IT departments are judged on seems to lay in reducing the cost of supporting administrative operations or when Carr says that IT probably doesn’t really matter. So when we need to think about the changes that are occurring, and how IT can play the role of business innovator this book comes handy. It can help us understand IT organization as a service organization that drives value for the business. Yes, Users want service, not technology while the integration and deep entwinement of technology into business must be managed. Here, Ade gives us advice on how to re-align IT management practices and organizational strategy and designs (aka processes, structures, people issues and all). The seven steps in his model (in order of adoption) are:

- Strategy Entwinement
- Process Entwinement
- People Entwinement
- Technology Management
- Service Management
- Circulation Management
- Value Management

While Ade McCormack argues for sequential adoption and implementation, and lays out a neat methodology I somehow doubt this can be followed really in this complex, messy world of IT. Still, this model can serve well as a to-do and check list (see chapter 10 for ten quick actions to take), and as a tactical framework. And that’s quite something.

For a start, Alex Osterwalder has published two more Arvetica podcasts of note (mp3), here he’s talking with Scott Anthony of Innosight, and here he’s talking with John Hagel. How cool is that.

Some notes from the talk with Scott:

a first simple recipe to avoid falling victim to disruptive innovation:
- we must keep looking a the world through our customer’s eyes not by the way our companies are organized internally
- we shouldn’t just focus on our best customers. We must keep looking at the fringes, because it is there that disruptive innovation occurs.
- we have to create the organizational space for innovation. Else, the importance of running the core business will crowed out any innovative activity

And here’s the gist from the talk with John:

The podcast is about three distinct topics John has worked on: first, his approach to strategy, second, a concept he developed called “unbundling the corporation”, and third, “IT as a tool for strategic differentiation”. [...]
IT as a differentiator: John points out that IT is today becoming even more strategically important as a foundation for rapid incremental business innovation than previously. He explains this through new and flexible architectures which allow companies to continuously achieve IT innovation and keep a constant head start. This contrasts with the past, when companies made heavy punctual investments in IT innovations every few years, but were then copied. Finally, John also refers to the innovation potential of newer technologies that help people come together, collaborate and create value rather than just create savings through automation.

Pretty much what I am recommending all the time, especially when consulting.

The same topic is dealt with here (mp3), in a new favourite podcast of mine called Spark, which is published by CBC. It’s an interview with Nicholas Carr who speaks about his new book (“The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google”):

[...] The Big Switch is about the massive changes this move to what’s called ‘cloud computing’ may have. For Carr, its effects go beyond the business of technology. Just as electrification changed North American life profoundly, the ‘big switch’ will change economics, culture, and society, raising questions about security, privacy and more.

Knowledge@ Wharton has excellent stuff too, see e.g. this podcast with Larry Huston, formerly of Procter & Gamble on their Connect + Develop program, and the challenges of making a company into a connected innovation company, i.e. building up the strategic capability to cooperate (here’s themp3). In the same direction here’s a short BBC In Business podcast called “Men In White”, asking if giant corporate research laboratories have outlived their usefulness (mp3):

Peter Day visits Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre in California, where the scientists hope their inventions will lead the next wave of technological innovation.

Then there’s an older interview (mp3) in the Knowledge@Wharton series on business model innovation that’s fueled by communities and social networks (“trying to harness communities to reshape their businesses”). John Spector of the Wharton School talks with Craig Newmark of Craigslist, more here.

I like Craigs approach to business, he disrupts and redesigns this media industry, while valuing corporate ethics and keeping “serving the community” at the center of business. More on him here.

They are also touching on Irving Wladawasky-Berger and his thoughts on the necessity of near-death-experiences for real innovation (aka organizational brain cleansing),which I’ve mentioned here before (“Notes from the Business Innovation Factory (BIF) Summit“).

an entertaining and typically forthright argument in favor of anger and its power to drive innovation

… here in a podcast of IT Conversations with Jeff Bonforte (get the mp3).

[...] Bonforte presents his belief that anger is the most untapped emotion when it comes to start-ups and innovation. Anger doesn’t appear on many business plans and he feels this is a great shame because it’s the most important emotion when looking to create a new product or service. The reason is straightforward: angry people approach a problem with more heightened feelings. They can then equate a solution to the problem with relief. If the answer leads to the end of anger, it’s likely to be a winner in business terms.

This is why most dorks and nerds fail to launch start-ups that last. The technology is good and the applications can be fun but they approach a problem the wrong way: to a nerd, a problem is fun. It just doesn’t make them angry enough.

Product managers worrying about adoption curves for their new application should stop concentrating on features and look to the emotions and the experiences of their customers. Consumers change behaviour through anger. Skype, for instance, tapped into a general feeling in the market of “I’m angry at my telco”.

A bunch of Disney and Pixar Imagineers have a blog called RE Imagineering. [...]
RE imagineering’s site description says it all: “A forum for Pixar and Disney professionals to catalog past imagineering missteps and debate solutions in hopes that a new wave of creative management can restore some of the magic that has been missing from the parks for decades”.

One particularly interesting post on RE Imagineering is this one: “The Nature of the business“. Go and read it, yes, I know it’s long but it’s a worthy and interesting read for anyone in the business of innovation, or organizational culture for that matter …

I can only second David that something along these lines could be written about most organizations, but moreover it’s also an encouraging signal for Disney and Pixar: These employees at least aren’t content with the status quo at WDI and they are thinking about options for change and innovation.

Granted, sounding off on the internet is for sure against company policies (and has a bunch of negative side effects as well). Yet, this sort of whistleblowing by creative, good-willed and engaged people should be valued and understood much more. Trying to spur outside-in and open-innovation is cool, but you must master your internal channels for innovation (and communication channels like e.g. internal blogs or other social software as well, if only to hear the voices of these disgruntled staff members before they turn “public”) …

Jeder darf führen, wenn er etwas weiß

[...] Menschenmengen organisieren sich von selbst, ohne sich abzustimmen.

[...] Das Ganze sei keinesfalls undemokratisch: “Jeder, der Informationen hat, kann zum Führer werden”, sagt der Forscher. “Man kann im Schwarm viel mehr Informationen nutzen, als man als einzelner sammeln könnte.” Genau das mache Schwarmintelligenz aus.

Interessant ist die Effizienz der “schwarmintelligenten” Organisation. Die Förderung von Emergenz in komplexen sozialen Systemen, d.h. die Gestaltung selbstorganisationsfreundlicher Organisationsstrukturen, wird einerseits oft gefordert, andererseits besteht Unklarheit, Uneinigkeit, Unwissen und Unsicherheit über angemessene Vorgehensweisen und Erfolgsfaktoren …

Zunehmend (praxis-)relevant wird das Thema durch die Prinzipien, Methoden und Werkzeuge des Web 2.0: Social Software wie Wikis und Social Networks fördern und nutzen emergente Phänomene (in Unternehmen) …