Integrity, Trust & Authenticity - Slow Leadership

Excellent content with relevance for addressing the requirments of behavior and values that speak to the age of transendence. Slow leadership - a very well done blog indeed. http://www.slowleadership.org/blog/

If You Are Not Changing How Your Organization Works - You Will Fail

Technology itself will increasingly become less of the challenge for organizations to move to the next level. In reality the biggest struggle will be changing legacy leadership's reliance on old thinking . Unless organizations have the courage to embrace true collaboration and orchestration, as opposed to maintaining command and control tactics in an attempt to impact outcomes, they will not be able to leverage new tools that enable innovation and execution at record speed. Organizations that fail to change how they function by throwing out hierarchy, and an orientation towards control will fail. They will be unable to adopt new more effective ways of functioning and follow in the path of dinosaurs.  Listen to the CEO of CISCO, John Chambers, as he eloquently sets forth the vision of change to come in this brief video. The nature of how we work and the need to work together is at the center of the future. The second video is his complete speech.

Organizing Without Organizations

Clay Shirky may be the finest thinker today on the Revolution. His book Here Comes Everybody is more than just about technology; it's an absorbing guide to the future of society. Anyone interested in the vitality and impact of groups of human beings -from knitting circles, to political movements, to multinational corporations-needs to read and more importantly UNDERSTAND this book.

With accelerating velocity, our age's emerging technologies of networking are evolving into new groups doing new things in new ways, and old and new groups alike doing the old things better and more easily. Times they are a changin'. Hierarchical structures that exist to manage the work of groups are seeing their raisons d'être swiftly eroded by the rising technological tide. Business models are being destroyed, transformed, born at dizzying speeds, and the larger social impact is profound.

One of the culture's wisest observers of the transformational power of the new forms of tech-enabled social interaction is Clay Shirky, and Here Comes Everybody is his marvelous reckoning with the ramifications of all this on what we do and who we are. Like Lawrence Lessig on the effect of new technology on regimes of cultural creation, Shirky's assessment of the impact of new technology on the nature and use of groups is marvelously broad minded, lucid, and penetrating; it integrates the views of a number of other thinkers across a broad range of disciplines with his own pioneering work to provide a holistic framework for understanding the opportunities and the threats to the existing order that these new, spontaneous networks of social interaction represent. Wikinomics, yes, but also wikigovernment, wikiculture, wikievery imaginable interest group, including the far from savory. A revolution in social organization has commenced, and Clay Shirky is its brilliant chronicler.

Adopting Innovation - The Medici Effect

When you step into the intersection of fields, disciplines, and cultures, existing concepts can be combined into a large number of extraordinary new ideas. The name given this phenomenon by author Frans Johansson is the Medici Effect and is based on a remarkable burst of creativity in fifteenth-century Italy.

The Medicis were a banking family in Florence that funded creators from a wide range of disciplines. Thanks to this family and a few others like it, sculptors, scientists, poets, philosophers, financiers, painters, and architects converged upon the city of Florence. There they found each other, learned from one another, and broke down barriers between disciplines. Together they forged a new world based on new ideas—what became known as the Renaissance. As a result, the city became the epicenter of a creative explosion, one of the most innovative eras in history. The effects of the Medici family can be felt even to this day.

Diversity is a key component of innovation. The adoption of technology is largely a social phenominon. Creating a culture that has enough variety to absorb new ideas is as important as the ideas themselves. A key component of the revolution is this diversity as demonstrated in the 15th century in Florence Italy.

Anthropology & Technology

The impact of technological advancements on human anthropology, our behavior, modality and methods of communication, is an interesting topic to ponder. How will the revolution in technology impact human's modes of relating and what are some of the implications to our lives?  In The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (Horst & Miller 2006), the researchers examine how cell phone technology impacts Jamaicans lives and experiences specifically. It is grounded in the reality of everyday Jamaican life, "The Cell Phone" succeeds as "...a study of the changes that document and demonstrate what a cell phone can turn into in the hands of a Jamaican, and what a Jamaican can become when they have their hands on a cell phone.”. This is an important piece of scholarship for anyone interested in the impact of technologies on people, cultures and societies and serves as an interesting point of view in considering the implications of other technologies and their impact on all people, regardless of their wealth or education.

While the Cell Phone certainly has made major impacts on human behavior, culture and life, it is but a slice of a more daunting and radical change which is upon us all. For how life and communication was impacted by the portable phone will pale in comparison to more impactful technologies. See the following video to understand at least one example: that of our behavior, interaction and communication methods among each other through the use of global digital networks and computers: http://www.youtube.com/v/6gmP4nk0EOE&rel=1 .