Moran - Most Marketers Don't Get It & Why

Mike Moran describes the theme of his most recent book, "Get It Wrong Quickly". A brilliant long time employee of IBM who recently departed to a new venture, Moran shows how markets are indeed conversations. More importantly he explains that most organizations have yet to embrace the changes they must make in how they "sell" and advertise. It isn't about getting it perfect, its about engaging in conversation. First you must attract customers to the message, not push it on them, next you need to listen to what they say, third you need to watch what they do and finally respond. A quick "ok" reply is better than a perfect response delivered too late. The key is learning as you go, which is the essence of this very interesting book. Remember markets are conversations, so to be successful in the future, organizations must adopt this modality of engagement. Its a two way street.

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.

User Created Content and Lessig - How the Law Strangles Creativity

You have got to love Lawrence Lessig. This professor eloquently explains the realities of the clash between the old and new. A great presenter and knowledgeable expert on copyright law and the implications of technological advancements to the law, his talk on TED is worth the 20 minutes of  your time.

Interfacing With Machines - Jeff Han of Perceptive Pixel

This accomplished NYU research scientist demos this fascinating technology - one of several emerging - which will revolutionize how we interface with our machines. Watch the video and be amazed. Think of the implications to data visualization or to the physically challenged and how this type of technology will leverage the power of the tools we have at our disposal today. Conforming to physical devises is one of several paradigm shifts that will increasing accelerate the benefit of our machines.

Academic Publishing - The Revolution at Ground Zero

K.A. Wallace writes an eloquent analysis of the conflict emerging in academia: control of content isn't limited to commercial endeavors. The halls of "learning" are equally inundated with the dogma of control and old world paradigms of content ownership that have nothing to do with education.

Below  is an excerpt and the entire work that Wallace composes is located here.

"The rapidly developing digital publishing world is driven by an underlying tension between economic interests in controling access to digital products and the distributive logic of interlinked digital media. This tension has been playing itself out in well-known ways in the music and entertainment industry, the Writer’s Guild of America strike being one of the most recent incidents. The entertainment industry and, in the academic sector, the hard sciences have gotten the most attention, but humanities and social science scholars need to recognize that though there is less money and less cyberinfrastructure in place, they have professional interests to protect, as do institutions such as universities and scholarly professional organizations. Scholarly and research communities in the humanities and soft social sciences are well behind their peers in the hard sciences on open access and digital publishing in general. Because peer-reviewed scholarship in the humanities and social sciences is as much a public good as is research in the hard sciences, academic institutions and authors, particularly those in the humanities and social sciences who have not been paying attention to the shifts in the digital publishing landscape, need to both take control of how their works are published and distributed and become much more actively involved in setting the terms for the digital publishing world."