Winning by Sharing

DestiCorp 2.0 - Insights on crowdsourcing

Pranav Mistry is an Indian engineer with a mission - to completely collapse the boundaries separating the digital and analogue worlds in order to fully augment and enhance our experience of reality. Watch this video - it should blow the lids of your minds. A few months ago I had seen his boss at MIT introduce the concepts of Sixth Sense Technology and, while she did a great job - see here (2.40 mins into video) - was more specific about applications, and concentrated on ones that are the most practical and achievable now,  this presentation really conveys the power of this integration and the ensuing possibilities.  

via desticorp.typepad.com

Insightful observations on crowdsourcing from Anna Pollock. "The future of a company is less about its issues, and more about its capacity to invent social structures able to solve them". Jean Francois Noubel

Is your network black or white?

"Mapped out on the screen, the story became clear: The medical community was actually divided into two sub-networks split apparently by ethnicity, with one sub-network dominated by physicians with mostly Asian names and the other with mostly European names. Connecting the two, like a spider suspended on a thread between two webs, was the dot for Physician No. 184 - a doctor the company's marketing department and salespeople barely knew".  Interesting study on the value of social networks and why Super Connectors are so important.

Change comes from within

Hotel Technology Next Generation (HTNG) is a membership association comprised of companies that provide technology services to hotel groups around the world.  I was invited to speak at their European Members meeting in Lisbon on the wider implications of Social Media.

My biggest frustration with social media commentary is that it’s almost always focused on the latest functionality from Twitter, Facebook, Google and the plethora of other Web 2.0 platforms, gadgets and services.  Very few industry pundits provide an insight into the impact of social media on business and society, and even fewer explore the end game.  So the purpose of this presentation was to provide some thought leadership in these areas backed up with some practical insights drawn from personal experience in deploying social media platforms with British Airways and Mornflake.  The key theme is based on what I describe as the biggest untold story of the 21st Century being played out right under our noses – the increasing irrelevance of command and control organisation as a the default structure for the production of goods and services, and why social media is most transformative inside the company.

Change Comes From Within

View more presentations from Leon Benjamin.

I’ve done a lot of public speaking over the years and I have to say that HTNG is easily the most well organised event I’ve spoken at.  Spanning three days located at the Lisbon Marriott (a hotel of course!) it combined the best aspects of an exhibition, a standalone networking  event, formal presentation and knowledge exchange (by way of break out and workshop sessions). 

HTNG just struck me as being a particularly good example of a Community of Practice, led by CEO, Douglas Rice with a small army of highly competent technicians and administrators.  I was well looked after by Sara Pardo and Merry Marwig before, during and after the event and was really touched by the personally written card pushed under my hotel door the evening I arrived, wishing me luck with my presentation the next day.  This is customer service.  Big thank you to everyone at HTNG.  I enjoyed the experience immensely.

Africa Gathering. Shift Happens!

Big thank you to Marieme Jamme, Ed Scotcher and everyone at Africa Gathering for inviting me to speak there last week.  There were some amazing stories from people making shift happen in Africa.  I was particularly mind blown by the work of Teddy Ruge and Project Diaspora. Truly inspirational work.  Someone I referred to in my talk as an 'Antibody'.  Was also great to meet Bill Liao after so long, another antibody doing some amazing work with Neo.

Shift Happens

View more presentations from Leon Benjamin.

My talk was on how entrepreneurs should look at completely different models of organisation, wealth distribution and ownership in order to avoid the inevitable inequality that arises from Western models of capitalism.  Ironically, it's in America that we're seeing these new models spring up as credible alternatives to command and control organisation.

A very eclectic mix of people with Nick Tadd epitomising the edgy, frontier nature of the atmosphere and ambience at the event.

A summary of fractional work at the Tory party conference

Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to actually speak about the rise of fractional work at the Tory Party conference on the opening day yesterday.  They outsourced the logistics of security passes to Fingerprint events.  Even though they acknowledge receipt of my application, passport and photo id my pass still wasn't ready. After taking two more photos of me at 7am in the morning, the police checking/validating id told me that due to my country of birth, extra checks have to be carried out.  Nice.  It was a Tory MP who invited me to talk there!  I got a text message saying it was ready at 10am, two hours after the speaking slot.  Thanks for that.

Fractional Work

View more presentations from Leon Benjamin.

The good news is that my hosts at JobsGoPublic and Career4Me presented on my behalf.  But here is the point I wanted to make.

The recent announcement by the Conservative Party's plans to cut the benefits of people on incapacity benefits is in some respects laudable because there are no doubt (statistically) some cheats, slackers and chancers on the list of 2.6m claimants.  But why such an emphasis on the supply side of the jobs equation? What's being done on the demand side, you know, to actually create work.  This presentation argues for the economic stimulus of an emerging form of work that has the potential to become the most dominant form of work within a generation.

As an aside, one of things that strikes me with all the political coverage right now on the EU is that politicians never, ever question the validity of their underlying organisational models.  In other words, it isn’t about ‘Broken Britain’ it’s about ‘broken system’.  Companies and governments won’t survive in their present form without decentralising some or all of their decision making.  But we can't go there can we?

From banner ads to banner apps

With the recent historic news that the UK's advertising industry now spends more online than on print and TV comes a reasonably authoritative report from Comscore that 'barely anyone clicks on banner ads anymore'.  The findings are breathtaking;

"The number of people online who click display ads has dropped 50% in less than two years, and only 8% of internet users account for 85% of all clicks, according to the most recent "Natural Born Clickers"

Shock horror.

In 2006 academics reached this conclusion a while back, as far back as 2006 but Techcrunch picked it up earlier this year here.  Their research is based on the analysis of large datasets from Youtube, Flickr and others and concluded that the current model is unlikely to survive, principally due to lack of trust. Forrester predicted this scenario as early as 2002.

Isn't it interesting that banner ads are really broadcasts.  They don't speak with a human voice or meet a specific need.   Despite all the warning signs, brands still broadcast while consumers connect and they continue to 'preach' to people whose attention is focused elsewhere.  So the £1.75 billion size of the online ad market is a total waste of money.

So where's it going?  There's a glimpse of the future of advertising here - Pick 'n' mix business.

What is progress?

A recent article in the London Evening standard reports on French President Sarkozy's new initiative.

You can always rely on the French to ask difficult questions such as: what is progress? And set up an international commission to find out.

It's not what people say.  It's what's *behind* what people say.

France is the first country to at least indirectly open the debate on the case for 'steady state economics'.  That is, an economy with no growth.  Because what politicians aren't really telling us is that the future is about less.  Less of everything. Except for (and with apology) the most uneducated amongst us, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that stuff is going to run out eventually, actually quite soon.

The relentless pursuit of profit, systemic corruption, and rapacious greed is ruining us.  Humanity has to evolve very quickly to a state of cooperation between individuals, companies and nation states where there is a continuous, fair exchange of value, rather than the notion of "I win. You lose", as the default position of business and government.

A steady state economy can only be built and sustained by peer-to-peer, open source styles of organisation and production.

Sorry to burst your bubble but humanity's survival is going to have to be based on 'being' rather than 'having'.

How public companies are killing their own employees

Once again Leslie Thatcher picks out the best writings in the French press on subjects we just can't talk about here in the UK.  Patrick Apel-Muller writes in L'Humanité about the cause of employee suicides at France Telecom.

It was to take 21 employee suicides from February 2008 before the management of France Télécom would agree to assess the full scale of the dramas that play out within its walls. Now management mentions "prevention of psycho-social risks."

I've long argued that command and control organisation is actually killing people.  Research by the UK Work Foundation reached this conclusion several years ago when it found that the biggest contributor to the 2.7m people on incapacity benefits was workplace stress brought about by the oppressive nature of the traditional nature of the firm, which basically doesn't scale without the wholesale destruction of the workforce's self-worth and self-esteem leading to what is now referred to as 'work rage'.

I was working in Bangalore with Tesco a few years ago. I remember having conversations with successful upwardly mobile young Indian technologists about new houses, cars, holidays.  I pointed out that what comes with all this prosperity is the slew of western ailments associated with the export of capitalism’s model of organisation – diabetes, stress, obesity, jealously, distrust, rapacious greed and so on. They just laughed at me. This was published last week;

India outsourcing workers stressed to the limit. From obesity to sleep disorders – a healthcare crisis in the making?

....be careful what you wish for.....Patrick's article goes on to say;

It's the work itself that is sick because aspirations to self-realisation are denied and dignity often manhandled.

Among the messes and the waste capitalism brings about, human sufferings are not the least and they always accompany the destruction of the labor resource. How many broken hopes, wrecked feelings of self-worth are provoked by the precariousness of employment to which a majority of young employees are now compelled! The first steps into adult life become an obstacle course that goes on and on ...

Read the whole thing.

I'll be speaking at Africa Gathering about the dangers of the wholesale adoption of western organisational models.  More on this soon.

Self-funding healthcare emerges

At the risk of boasting, this post on self-funding healthcare opens with;

We propose that it is economically viable for the UK's National Health Service (NHS) to become a self-funding entity by selling patient healthcare data to a wide variety of industry actors.  We also propose that an individual’s healthcare data record itself can eventually becoming an earning asset that can be passed on to future generations. - Idea conceived circa 2004.

....and then this article in the NY Times last week entitled Research Trove: Patients’ Online Data

Western democracies need to go beyond the p roposed current healthcare reforms by fundamentally changing the organisational model adopting open source mechanisms to create Public Interest Enterprises (Ubuntu is one of many good examples) that exhibit the same levels of transparency we see in the open source movement.  Transparency changes behaviour.