I was again reading and reviewing Lawrence Lessig's work tonight. The man is so very articulate and his observations so compelling. If you haven't become a student of his work, please take my advice and give it a try here.
At the 2002 Open Source Convention Lessig challenged the audience to get involved in the political process. A tireless advocate for open source, Lessig shared some basic concepts that are a solution to most of the barriers preventing our soceity from overcoming the major challenges of the time. A complete transcript of Lawrence's keynote presentation made on July 24, 2002 is available here. In summation his logical findings were as follows.
Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
Ours is less and less a free society.
Watch the video from Big Thinkers wherein Lessig explains his views on freedom our culture and creativity.
Despite all the talk of reform, there is NO significant aspect of pending legislation to change health care that harnesses the benefits of prevention. As Bill George mentioned during his recent Businessweek article, final health-care legislation is severely compromised by a myriad of lobbyists and special interests who advocate protecting their turf but rarely contribute to sound policy. Numerous side deals have been cut with industry groups that make a noncompetitive market even less competitive. As Bill correctly pointed out, "the bills under consideration will only make a broken system worse, resulting in unintended consequences."
So why the lack of policy reform that really takes into account positives that wellness could provide to the problem of too many people being ill from poor lifestyle choices ? Enter my friend Lawrence Lessig. You see our system of government and policy is unduly influenced by money. That is the reason common sense solutions don't receive the attention they deserve. There are truly NO influencers equivalent to the special interests and money of the medical, insurance, and pharmaceutical extant health care system players . As a result there is no proverbial dog in the fight for wellness. Watch Lessig above explain how special interest blocked health policy on the consumption of sugar as a case in point and join the change congress movement if you really want to get our nation healthy.
I had an interesting exchange with a very reputable business associate yesterday, during which the topic of "ownership" came up as central to his business objectives. We all understand the notion, dedicate yourself to a company, build it up for years and then perhaps sell it for a premium value as you sail away into the sunset. As I woke this morning having thought about the prior days chat, another friend, Rasmus Elmann Ingerslev, had recommended a video on socialnomics that I watched, shown below. I am uncertain if most really understand what socialnomics signifies, as I've concluded its only the beginning of a far larger trend with greater implications beyond those of my facebook account. Similarly I am unclear if most business owners understand what the value of something really is and how these trends will impact it. Hence this post.
What socialnomics represents is the first wave in a series of approaching changes brought on by technology, which will deconstruct numerous and long standing economic paradigms including, among others, distribution, value creation and value exchange. How ? Because social technologies decentralize everything by empowering choice through the ubiquity of information. Social media is but the beginning of a series of tools that will provide users complete control over what is authentic, valuable and meaningful to them, thus obfuscating centralization in any and all systems. This is the essence of "socialnomics": economic rules redefined via new "social media", I call it technological, tools.
How economics are redefined by socialnomics is very simple. In the past people created wealth largely through one basic principal - they had information others did not and exploited that information to their benefit at the cost of others. These information disparities could last for extended periods and therefore organizations could be sustained for periods of time wherein an advantage existed. In the new economics this will become increasingly difficult because of the ubiquity of information. In "free markets" margins are driven towards zero. Therefore, value will have to be created in new ways, largely via increasingly short term creations of unique solutions. Thus value will be driven increasingly by what customers choose - not in how they are exploited by sustained information disparities or anomalies: a concept shared by the like of Toffler, Anderson and others.
The implications to organizations are enormous because competitive advantages will be increasingly fleeting. In Fung and Wind's book Competing in a Flat World, the notion of value and network organizations is craft fully set out, particularly how organizations must reengineer to become valuable. I've posted on the matter previously. In the old paradigm you could create something of value, build a fence around it and get someone to covet it enough to purchase it. In the new world, the platform is the value, change is too rapid to maintain an extended advantage and in the end your value is only that which your customers deem you deserve. With increasingly lower barriers to entry and free information too many alternatives are available. Think about it, who "owns" Google ? Truthfully, its customers do. If tomorrow everyone stopped using Google its "value" would be zero. Socialnomics reflects a free market in the purest sense and therefore, I ponder if many in business have grasped that fact when they imagine their sailing away into the sunset as a result of something they've built over years. That, I think, will becoming an increasingly rare occurrence.
The combination of the physical and digital world is occuring before our eyes. Its possibilities are as limitless as ones imagination. Increasingly you will see examples of these applications. Be it the GE smart grid promotion or business cards created by Zehnder Communications; both shown in the videos below. This is just the beginning. If you want to learn more, and you should, Kevin Bonsor shares a great article on the topic here. Discover how the integration of digital and physical will increasingly impact our lives.
Let's face it, email has become an extremely undisciplined form of collaborative communication for organizations. From my own experience I see it every day. It starts with a question or comment, copied among a group, and then spreads, unknowingly, to become a waste of resources and time. What to do ? Well we've all been participating increasingly with social networks and there are a lot of potential there. Its just that organizations using social networks haven't been able to leverage their potential as efficiently as they could be until the advent of tools like salesforce.com's chatter.
Salesforce.com announced at its Dreamforce event in San Francisco this past week something called Chatter, a "collaboration cloud" platform that integrates social network features. Chatter proposed to bring the flexibility and ease of use found in applications such as Facebook to businesses, enabling feeds from business applications, content and users that can be followed, profiled and shared. Salesforce.com plans to begin offering Chatter in 2010. The end of email as the mainstream method of communicative collaboration is approaching.
I was again reading and reviewing Lawrence Lessig's work tonight. The man is so very articulate and his observations so compelling. If you haven't become a student of his work, please take my advice and give it a try here.
